Memes, Metaphors, and Performances

From millenary ritual songs to deep fried Wojaks, memes have always been an integral part of how we transfer cultural information. Since their mainstream widespread in 2008, memes have shifted from being mere online entertainment to a tool for disseminating worldviews and modes of understanding. In recent years, memes have shown to have the capacity to affect political elections. Understanding these cultural objects has become a pressing task, allowing the development of the research field of memetics. By outsourcing their reproducibility to the user, memes provide us with an opportunity to question our own social structures. In this course we’ll take a deep dive into the liminal world of memes, using metaphor and performance theory. We’ll explore their conceptual origins, discuss cultural memetic examples throughout history, and apply that understanding to our current political landscape. Since current memes are designed to take advantage of the different social media algorithms, new formats emerge all the time. In each class we’ll discuss a text or a movie alongside a meme format, and use the assigned theoretical framework to close-read memes and their cultural consequences. How can we use them as an effective tool in today’s realist capitalism? How does our role as users affect the social media algorithm and its tightly controlled echo chambers? Each participant will engage with these questions via weekly discussions and writing explorations. By the end of the semester, everybody will develop a personal project, exploring the ideas we’ve seen.