- 1 Backrooms are a scary urban legend (a creepypasta) which developed on the Internet from a photo sho (...)
- 2 The localisation of the place, which had been thought to be a 3D model, mobilised the archival skil (...)
- 3 See: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/doge.
1Two important developments have recently marked the world of memes. First, we now know that backrooms,1 those creepy office hallways supposedly haunted by all sorts of bloodthirsty monsters, are not from some kind of back-world parallel to ours, but are located on 807 Oregon Street in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.2 Second, Kabosu, the Shiba Inu dog whose puzzled expression gave birth to Doge, one of the most popular memes in recent history, died from leukaemia (an anarchical non-genetic proliferation of cancerous cells occurred in her body).3
2The biological death of the dog who gave life to Doge and to its progeniture (and its “promemiture”) and the clearing up of the mystery which fanned the virality of backrooms may not imply the death of these two memes, but these events are already affecting the life of the memes. While many Internet users declared them finished, the two memes have actually entered a new phase, a digital bardo, a post-mortem life. Is it not even more ominous to know that backrooms are not a 3D model but the actual vestiges of an office space yellowed by water damage? And following Kabosu’s death, does the idiotic or malignant expression (interpretations vary) of Doge not acquire the grandiose air of a historic portrait, the melancholic sheen of a (memetic) family album? We note that reality, of which memes may be considered a symbolic emanation, is not less real that its reflection. Memes are not simple images, they maintain in bizarre and sometimes literal ways vital links with the physical reality which surrounds us. They can be located, die or disappear; they have private and social lives; and what’s more, they affect our own lives.
3The Doge is in fact a dog. An exemplary dog, an example of a dog who also became the symbolic expression of human character: an element of language, the bearer of words, or at the very least, of a mode of expression. Kabosu was in all regards a model-dog (very famous in Japan). Doge became a model of a dog, capable of founding the first meme crypto-currency, of sponsoring innumerable (and often questionable) advertising campaigns, as well as of spearheading guerrilla opposition to Russian propaganda during the invasion of Ukraine, becoming one of the faces of NAFO digital brigades.4 Kabosu’s death, viewed from the prism of the production chain of value and of collective values which come to life in the symbolic inflation of meme processes, invites us to think of her parallel lives, of her (relative) immortality.
- 5 The creepypasta warned us: “If you’re not careful and you noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, (...)
- 6 Lore, a contraction of the word folklore, designates legends, myths and the body of knowledge of a (...)
4Similarly, the discovery of the “banal” geographic location of backrooms places us in front of evidence that our nightmares and fears are not situated in an esoteric elsewhere, but rather haunt our daily lives in much more insidious and unavowable ways than we think. In the end, is the gloomy prisonlike architecture of the decaying functionalist labyrinth not simply that of our own offices (and universities) which are rotting away in the bad dream of cadaverous capitalism? The creepypasta from which the meme originated postulated that if we were not careful we constantly risked slipping outside of reality and remaining forever trapped in such liminal spaces.5 The localisation of backrooms within our physical world, and not in a digital world generated by a computer, can be considered like an alarming geo-localisation of Hell, or at least of a version of Hell. This image, which has become a sort of memetic scenography for the accumulation of the lore6 of contemporary horror, tells us that an elsewhere to cross over into does not really exist, that our world and that of our (fan)fictions are one and the same, and that if we look carefully, perhaps we are already caught in the trap.
5A double movement: it is by paying attention collectively that we are able to retrace the genealogies of these images which emerge from the raw ore of the Internet to embody our fears, and yet, it is through inattention that our reality (biological, psychological, cultural) degrades, engendering monsters.
6These examples are just two necrologies (one biological, the other geographic) among the many that on a daily basis configure our ways of living with and through memes. In the end, the examples tell us about the reorganisation of the ties which constitute the modes of existence of our cultural characters. Their death or their end etch out a link in the cycle of possible reincarnations, for which one can write up a CV (as has been done by the site knowyourmemes), whose biographies can be narrated, in the style of Giorgio Vasari’s Vite ([1568] 2007) or of strange biocultural martyrologies. Whether dead, alive, living-dead or dead-living, these viral objects propagate a particular form of vitality through the world.
7The question of the “life” of memes is the topic of this twelfth issue of Hybrid titled Lives and vitalities of memes (vol. 1): Birth and rebirth of memes, as well as of the thirteenth issue, forthcoming in April 2025. The two issues are part of an ongoing collective reflection that started with the study day “Our memes, ourselves” [No(u)s mèmes] that was held on 14 October 2022 at CNAM Paris.7 In these two issues, we intend to interrogate the “multiple lives” of memes, with a particular interest in the creative and unexpected ways in which memes come to life in our daily spaces.
8As Wagener (2022) has pointed out, memes have a post-digital dimension, they create short-circuits between reality and fiction, between lives lived “for real” and imaginary lives. Memes, like in the case of Doge and backrooms, can live a life independent of the characters or the situations that generate them. By occupying our attention and our daily spaces, online and offline, memes end up “haunting” us, and it is thus that we are subjected not only to their charm, but also potentially to their negative side effects (such as the capture of our attention or the spread of hateful and politically problematic content). Interrogating memes from the point of view of their lives thus offers a wide array of theoretical perspectives to info-communicational reflection on memes, going beyond an immanentist approach that would consider them solely a combination of text(s) and image(s).
9Memes “come alive,” first, by moving out of screens to incarnate themselves in living matter and bodies. The use of memes printed on signs during political demonstrations, their use in parodies and live painting (Jost, 2022, p. 29-86), as well as the replication of celebrations of iconic goals (Boullier, 2023, p. 26) are many examples of ways in which memes come to life in our extradigital existences. Life, in this case, is understood as a transition towards an externalisation of the mediatic object, as the bursting out of an intermediatic vitality from the confines of the screen. Alive, memes shape our acts, our horizons of action and thought, and lead us to be interested in meme dynamics and logics now found outside of the screen. Memes, then, become part of our daily lives and invade the sphere of life understood as subjective and interpersonal intimacy. They reveal “something of what I am, of what you are, of what we are” (Girard, 2021, p. 30). Pragmatist approaches (Peirce, Dewey) or heirs of French reception theory (de Certeau) help us situate the meme within ordinary practices of intimate territories for which memes produce mediation. Lastly, memes because of the specificity of dynamics which animate them, engender a slide from myself to ourselves. They allow us to produce sharing, to enact “us,” unfurling their vitality in the form of a mechanism that creates community (of interest, of knowledge) and is culturally performative.
- 8 In 1976 Dawkins wrote: “We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a un (...)
10A pragmatic understanding of the creation of content based on a logic of modifying a template (Nova & Kaplan, 2016) implies challenging the restricted dimension of Richard Dawkins’ definition of memes.8 For him then the question becomes one of analysing cultural change through the prism of the biological theory of evolution, and this with a focus on three aspects: the existence of a biological code of ideas (a cultural genotype), the self-replication of cultural forms, and the natural selection of these forms. Thus, his work consists in part, in addressing the recurrences of human cultural life (certain behavioural traits such as egotism) through the prism of concepts taken from life sciences, and in establishing biology as a science capable of explaining the life of not only living beings, but also of cultural forms. These concepts, inspired by the field of biology, have contributed to the emergence of certain metaphors, such as “virality” which evokes an idea of individuals or communities infected by digital entities without subjectivities or collectives of enunciation being involved.
11Conversely, analysts of digital culture have focused more on the remixability of practices (Manovich, 2005; Allard, 2009), by highlighting the role of users and fan communities in the creation of memes (Jenkins et al., 2013). This social creativity of memetic culture is once again at work in the latest socio-digital applications, such as TikTok, which has the specificities of putting in movement bodies with choreographies to be repeated like choruses (Allard, 2021) and videos remixing animated excerpts of series and TV programs in the form of short edits (modified versions) which popularise, for the better or the worse, faces or slogans.
12This organic dimension, present in performances replayed in continuation in the application, can be heuristically analysed through the concept of “vibration” as has been done by Dominique Boullier (2015, 2023). Boullier, in his work updating the critique of the memetic theories of Gabriel Tarde ([1890] 1993), emphasises the way in which ideas, in their movement between invention and opposition, affect us and make us act. According to Boullier, the theory of socio-digital facts, in addition to traditional sociological concepts such as “representations,” “individuals,” “collectives,” must now consider “circulating entities such as vibrations” in order to be able to spot the emerging of replication processes, particularly evident in the intensive circulation of memes.
13In a surprising, but logical way, reflecting on this issue of Hybrid led us to confer renewed vitality to Dawkins’ approach. The etymology of the word “meme” is often recalled in the introductions of academic papers and literature on memes, but few studies have addressed what is left of the biologist metaphor in our contemporary memetic practices: that is, how discourses in life sciences and the imaginaries linked to living beings inform our ways of representing ourselves and of using the Internet, of representing the body of users of digital devices, the functioning of their organs, the reach of their faculties. What filiations link memes from before the Internet age to memes that we share online? What are the links between the biologisation of culture and the ecology of the digital images from whence memes are born and spread (Szendy, 2021)? What can the contemporary appropriation of memes teach us about the articulations between thinking about living beings and thinking about technique and culture?
14This issue thus proposes to go beyond metaphors which turn images shared online into a digital “ecosystem,” or organic life into a sort of disorganised substitute of the digital world, and to articulate the kinships and ties which link life and memes, through a plurality of gestures of production and reproduction. In attempting to consider memes and lives together, to move away from the binarity between images = non-life, and organic body = life (or the reverse), this issue’s authors are invited to reconstitute the “partial and multispecies” stories (Haraway, 2020) which lead to the birth of memes, their circulation, their combination and their death, and to identity the role of bodies, of living beings and their mortality in the life-cycle of memes.
15In light of today’s ecological challenges, the authors in this issue follow in the steps of Donna Haraway (2020) inviting us to stay with this trouble which is making the lines between humans and non-humans, the living and non-living, biological bodies and cultural images wobble:
In the face of unrelenting historically specific surplus suffering in companion species knottings, I am not interested in reconciliation or restoration, but I am deeply committed to the more modest possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble. And so I look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations and speculative realisms. These are stories in which multispecies players, who are enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference, redo ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation. (Haraway, 2016, p. 25)
16“Make memes not babies!” could be the rallying call of this issue, echoing Haraway’s slogan from her book Staying with the Trouble (2016): “Making Kin not babies!” These memetic entities, both creatures and creations, hybrid and active entities, generative and persistent, which populate our digital lives and link us to so many other companionships, are to be reconsidered under the perspective of new sociodigital kinships. This issue thus ideally presents a new memetic cosmo-ontology, cyborgian and relational, between organicity and sociality, from the vibrational to the sympoietic.
17The three parts of this issue each deal with a sequence in the chronological life of memes: their creation or their generation, their reinvention or their reincarnation, and their replication or their transmission. In approaching the different steps of this temporal sequence, the issue’s authors all endeavour to articulate the multispecies and partial knottings between memes and their forms of live. The articles, in different ways, speak about the replication of image-sounds and the development of memetic vitality within techno-cultural configurations outside of the fable of natural selection and which go beyond the separation between technique and culture.
18The first part of the issue is dedicated to the generation of memes. Transformation being one of the prerequisites for the existence of a meme, we can try, as much previous work has already done, to identify those precise moments when a specific meme figure emerges in the international arena. This effort to reconstitute the stages that lead from a meme being created to it becoming popular not only helps build a dynamic meme encyclopaedia, but also enables us to understand from whence come the characters that populate our imaginaries. This first part therefore interrogates the birth of some meme figures who now have their own cultural biographies (Kopytoff, 2006), retracing their itineraries in diverse intermediatic spaces. Michel Marcoccia recounts the origins of the El Risitas meme, demonstrating well the complex back-and-forths that memes effect between online and offline spaces. The itinerary of El Risitas represents an interesting example of “memification” of the real and the living: today, any public figure, whether famous or not, can become a “living” meme whether they want to or not. This process also has effects on the lives of the persons thus memified. Marcoccia interrogates the reasons for the success of the El Risitas personality, as well as the consequences this had on his life (and his death). Kévin Zanin and Thibault le Page offer us a French translation of the first issue of the fanzine Digital Drifting which they co-wrote in English. Their article presents the genealogy of the Wojak meme, retracing its origins and exploring the diversity of its evolutions and reappropriations, without claiming to be exhaustive. Their work of research-creation undertaken through their online meanders takes the form of a visual essay illustrating through the Wojak meme the antagonistic and divisive perceptions of contemporary consumer society.
- 9 A word play on cute kittens/singing.
19The second part of this issue analyses reincarnations of memes by trying to reconstitute the mosaic of fortuitous expressions which impart sense to memes. Using the metaphor of living beings, this part explores the various ways in which memes circulate across space and through digital lifespans. The different avatars of memes give birth to a contemporary bestiary of digital creations and creatures, of rhetorical processes and trivial (Jeanneret, 2014) or cybernetic hybridisations, of mediatic transitions between online and offline spaces. The spread of memes here results from practices of reenactment or remixing capable of transforming the mediatic spaces and realities that they assimilate. Martine Créac’h and Béatrice Mazoyer follow a challenge launched by the Instagram account “Tussen Kunst & Quarantaine” which invited its followers to embody a famous work art of their choice during the Covid-19 pandemic. The authors retrace the creative dynamics at play in the corpus of 80,000 posts in which users became protagonists of living paintings. By analysing the logics of virality which characterised the challenge, they show how inventive DIY creates online ties, as well as in what ways such improvisation can confer a certain vitality to creations from the past—in this case paintings—and to museums. Justine Simon, for her part, interrogates the relevance of musical paradigms for understanding the dynamics which animate the life of memes in sociodigital networks. Simon places these dynamics in a tradition where chats—ubiquitous creatures of the Internet—inspire musical universes. In particular, she situates the vitality of meme avatars from #ChatonsMignons9 at an intersection of several issues specific to contemporary digital culture and the culture of remixes. In her analysis of sound-writing practices, remixes thus emerge as a participatory creative experience which converges playing with digital activism. Valentin Goujon and Donato Ricci retrace the history of the Shoggoth with Smiley Face meme which presents analogies between monstrous creatures from the fictional universes of the writer H.P. Lovecraft and generative artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT. The article delves into what is the origin of this analogy: the monstrous aspect of creations by the first image generation models. It then presents the evolutions of the meme, thanks to rapid technological advances (it is the AI system that becomes monstrous), its appropriation by certain AI players, as well the technical possibilities offered by image generation models. This work on the domestication of the analogy leads us to consider the situation of “dead” metaphors that have exhausted their power of meaning (Ricœur, 1975).
- 10 The Middle Ages are a source of inspiration for meme creation and have already given life to severa (...)
20How can we speak about memes without anthropomorphism, without ventriloquism, without turning them into simple instruments of an explicitisation of “our” modes of communication? What metamorphoses of discourse and gestures of transmission does the collective voice around memes engender? The third part of the issue deals with the way in which memes subvert ecosystems of knowledge transmission, as well as their systems of writing. It delves into what happens to meme vibrations when they circulate through the prism of human social structures, as well as what happens to the non-human and non-living bodies, animals and viruses that memes bring to communities of interpretation. The transmission of memes (or “promemiture”) touches on the issue of practices of the collective construction of “epidemic” communities which develop around memes, notably through alternative pedagogical experiences which transform mechanisms of subversive knowledge transmission. Marina Gazzini shows us how memes can become pedagogical tools enabling us to address historically complex subjects through images. In her article she presents her experience of teaching medieval history10 in an academic context of disruptions from the pandemic during which novel teaching challenges emerged. The use of memes in the teaching environment revealed to students the difficulties in describing the contradictions of the Middle Ages, while at the same time making possible a re-actualisation of the past. Gazzini’s teaching experience thus also becomes an opportunity to understand what can be “memed” and what cannot according to contemporary social codes. Nataly Botero proposes an analysis of the results of meme creation and editing workshops organised with students. These workshops have a pedagogical dimension focused on transmitting methods for analysing ecological discourses (human-to-human transmission), but they are also an opportunity to identify the place of memes and participatory culture in the construction of a viewpoint on living beings, and to test the capacity of memes to articulate different bonds between humans and non-humans by escaping from an overly anthropocentric vision.
- 11 In English: Pop Politics Online. Memes and Political Communication Challenges.
21These three parts, which can be read in the order proposed or according to criteria of each individual reader, are followed by a translated article and a book review. In the essay “Bodies on the Screen” written originally in English by Valentina Tanni (and translated into French by Anne Getzler), the important issue of performative memes emerges. The essay explores a series of viral practices based on the online execution, documentation and sharing of acts that at first may appear absurd, and shows us how memes act on non-verbal communication by incarnating themselves in bodily repertories. As an art historian, Tanni situates these gestural protocols in the lineage of conceptual art and its participatory prescriptions, proposing to observe the often-unconscious similarities between artistic performance and performative memes. Lastly, Stefano Vicari proposes a review of the book La Politica Pop Online. I meme e le sfide della comunicazione politica11 written by Gianpietro Mazzoleni and Roberta Bracciale, and published in Italy in 2019. Following the analysis offered by the book’s authors, Vicari underscores how memes have the power to enable collective participation in political life: their relative lightness potentially allows discourse critical of authority to emerge in ways accessible to wider audiences.
22The book review and Tanni’s essay both introduce an important topic, that of the performativity of memes themselves, which will be further developed upon in issue 13 of Hybrid. That issue will explore in greater detail the question of the reception of memes and how they are used by Internet users, or instrumentalised for commercial or political ends by institutions. The perlocutory dimension of memes, or even their weaponization, will be analysed in greater detail.
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