viz. - meme

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 2

Laura Thain — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:58:53 +0000

Image Credit: Deeras23

In my previous post, I outlined DeCordova’s arguments about the emergence of a discourse on acting in the early 20^th century, and the contributions that discourse made to modern conceptions of celebrity, beginning in silent film. In this post, I’d like to translate those arguments into a discussion of 21^st century media and attempt to outline a discourse on “gifing,” and what that can tell us about the intersections of gifs and celebrity in the 21^st century public sphere.

I ended my post with the suggestion that the embedded “meme” or mimetic function of gifing was the essential element of gifing as a medium that allows for a conception of gif celebrity. Here, I’d like to explore the early stages of that celebrity in the predecessor to the gif: the “meme” itself.

Early this year, Business Insider published a puff piece of “What 6 Viral Internet Meme Stars Look Like in Real Life.” Most of this content was pulled from the popular internet archive Know Your Meme, which more fully documents who ascertained the true identities of these “meme stars,” and how. (A large portion of the investigative activity took place on the message boards of the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit, which has been much discussed as a source of controversial tactical media.)

Image Source: Know Your Meme

Image Credit: Know Your Meme

The public’s interest in the real identity behind these “meme stars” has two important implications in the rhetoric of the meme. First, it privileges the “real” or “authentic” person behind the meme as the ultimate site of authenticity by identifying it as the meme’s point of origin. (This is the implicit reason archives like “Know Your Meme” seem interested in the “real” image of the speaker in the meme—it is the point of origin from which all “memeing” springs.) This particular privileging of the authentic persona of the meme star as the site of authenticity signals a shift from meme “fame” to meme “celebrity”—much as DeCordova describes in early 20^th century film.

Second, this interest in attaching the meme to an “original” speaker gives us a way to tie the discourse on “memeing” to linguistic and rhetorical conceptions of the “utterance” as a basic linguistic unit. As I’ve previously discussed, the meme is a unit of cultural transference, usually in the form of a compressed emotion or attitude. We can understand this in terms of “utterance” as a theoretical term beginning with Saussure, who defined the utterance as the most basic unit of signifying, and thus, the most basic unit of language.

But Saussure’s conception of the utterance gives us a very particular way to consider context, and therefore intertextuality, as a network of social convention in which the identification of a point of origin, no matter how artificial, is of no use. By Saussure’s structuralist approach, the signified is an abstract, intangible object; we can approach, but never reach it, by examining its signifiers. Because the utterance is the most basic form of communication, to break it down further would be to enter the realm of pure language, which only exists in abstracts. (In short, it’s just turtles all the way down.)

Bahktin, however, considers the utterance to have a dialogic quality—utterances are by nature responses to previous utterances. An utterance, then, can be broken down and linked to a previous utterance. As Bahktin argues, utterances cannot be “self-sufficient,” and they rely on intertextuality (what Baktin calls “the dialogic”) in order to render meaning. In “Speech Genres,” he affirms

The very boundaries of the utterance are determined by a change of speech subjects… Every utterance must be regarded as primarily a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere (we understand the word ‘response’ here in the broadest sense). Each utterance refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies upon the others, presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account.

If we consider a meme a type of utterance, Bakhtin’s account of the function of the utterance helps us to understand why the discourse on memeing is so invested in identifying a point of origin of a meme’s unit of speech. Audiences are compelled to attach the utterance to a speaker when faced when an intertextual network of constantly shifting meaning attached to a single object (the meme); by identifying the original “speaker,” each variation of the meme attempts to counter the uncertainty of speech and assert the power over their own reading of the significance of the utterance vis a vis the “first” utterance. By this means, meme “stars” become meme “celebrities.”

But gifs function as memes too, although they draw from pre-established sites of celebrity as often as they create celebrity by means of repetition. And while the meme offers meaning by swapping out a distinctive white block text, the gif either appears without text at all, allowing gestures to function as utterances (as is the case of the archive RealityTVgifs) or is attached to a text related to personal experience (in tumblrs like OfficeHoursAreOver, WhatShouldWeCallMe, AllMyFriendsAreMarried, etc.).

Perhaps the reason gifs tend to rely on pre-established celebrity more often than they create fame from scratch is because the lack of text and the emphasis on gesture makes assigning the utterance to a speaker all the more crucial to the gif’s memetic function. However, as any gif proliferates, its intertextual dialogue creates a space that is distinct from, and often nearly independent of, the gif’s original context (usually, a scene in a television show or movie). The origin of the utterance becomes as inconsequential to the gif’s meaning as the meme’s “actual” identity—it becomes a site of authenticity only as much speakers recall it to establish their own ethos. However, as I’ve pointed out earlier, knowledge of the meme’s origin is often inconsequential to understanding or proliferating it.

Ultimately, the “origin” of the gif—its original context—becomes the site of authenticity in gif celebrity much as the personal, private life of a movie star is the site of authenticity in film celebrity. It stands in as legitimate, original context that presents itself as objective or “real,” but is just as available for response and reinvention as the gif itself (that is, that the gifs context is still a subjective category). This layering is ultimately a result of gif’s reinvention of older media forms and its marriage with a distinctly new media characteristic. Thus, examining the relationship between gif celebrity and early film celebrity demonstrates productive points of intersection, but the divergence of these intersections is crucial to understanding the gif as a mechanism of new media and Web 2.0.

“Memeing” Silence—the Gif and Silent Film, Part 1

Laura Thain — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 04:30:10 +0000

Image Source: Gorgonetta

As gifs begin to occupy more and more space in internet discourse, I’ve been contemplating the various ways they reinvent older media forms. New media theory tells us this is an inevitable historical trajectory; it is not just a characteristic of post-broadcast media but embedded in mediation as an ideological concept. What I find particularly interesting about gifs is not just how they remediate the television shows, films, Youtube videos, and memes from which they derive meaning, but also how they relate to a much older form of media: silent film. And in such a reading, the overlap between the production of fame and celebrity in the silent film tradition and in current gif discourse is remarkable—and worth discussing.

In order to describe such a relationship, we might first turn to scholarship on the production of celebrity in the realm of silent film. A problem we must account for in exploring this topic is that, while mass-produced and marketed motion pictures begin at the turn of the 20^th century, no form of cinema stardom existed in mass media until at least 1910, if not later. One common historical narrative argues that celebrity resulted from the battle between actors/actresses and film production companies. Although audiences wanted to know the names of performers, production companies resisted billing their actors and actresses in order to maximize their profit margins. It was not until the breakup of Edison’s Patents Trust by anti-trust legislation and the victory of independent film studios that the “star system” emerged as the direct result of specific shifts in production.

Clippings of Florence Lawrence, Biograph Picture's first leading lady, "obituaries" after her death was faked as a pubicity stunt by her agent, Carl Laemmle. Note the anonymous poem referring to her as the actress "whose name we've never known"--before her fake death, Lawrence was known only as "Biograph Girl." Image Source: 11e14thstreet

Richard DeCordova’s Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Illinois, 2001) provides a productive counter-narrative. De Cordova argues that celebrity cannot be accounted for by examining shifts in production alone—we must understand its development as a discursive category. “The star system,” he argues compellingly, “is not simply the creation of one person or even one company; nor is the desire for movie stars something that arose unsolicited [among audiences].”

Instead of focusing solely on the development of film production, DeCordova describes a larger phenomenon: the emergence of a “discourse on acting.” A precondition of this discourse was the separation of the actor from the film itself. As the public began to understand moving pictures as a remediation of theatre, conceptions of the actor in the filmic space developed to account for the role of the actor and the actor him or herself. A difference between on-screen and off-screen presence was established. The result of such a distinction is what DeCordova calls a “picture personality.” Audiences traced these “personalities” across films, producing a discursive space in which actors and actresses were recognized intertextually and the role of an actor in one film was associated with the character he played in others. (In this sense, all actors and actresses of early film became recognizable to the public as “character” actors and brought with them from film to film assumptions about the dramatic space they inhabited. Mary Pickford was the ingénue, Douglas Fairbanks the swashbuckling hero, Charlie Chaplin the tramp, etc.) Still, picture personalities were associated with the films in which they appeared, not their private lives.

Mary Pickford in a 1920 publicity still. Image Source: Library of Congress

DeCordova concludes by arguing that the term “star” (a true film celebrity) can only be applied when an actor’s personal life is available for public consumption. The personal (“off-screen”) life of the actor becomes the new center of truth and authenticity. Only then can we consider actors in films true “celebrities.”

What does any of this have to do with gifs as a medium? Like early film, gif fame depends on intertextuality. The discursive space occupied by the gif strongly resembles the discursive space DeCordova gives to the “picture personality.” Gif fame is not located in an interest in the personal lives of the characters it adopts, but rather in the proliferation and reproduction of images that continue to reinvent meaning. Like silent film, gifs have an embedded “meme” function. If we read memes as “an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation” (OED) we can see the meme in silent film—how it communicates cultural concepts through characterized gesture and intertextual association, through the actor, in some sense, “miming” him or herself. The gif accomplishes this function by reproducing the same gesture to respond to different contexts. In this way, gifs divorce themselves from the realm of celebrity created after the “picture personalities” of early silent film, even as they rely on that celebrity to creative enough traction to hedge out their own ideological space. One need not, for instance, be familiar with the TV show or film from which a gif is extracted if one is familiar with other intertextual applications of the gif as an ideological concept (its embedded function as “meme”). For example:

Audiences need not watch The Real Housewives of Atlanta to interpret the signature gesture of Nene Leakes here.

Image Sources: RealityTVGifs

This Harry Potter-inspired gif can be coupled with a variety of captions--it captures an emotion, rather than a specific narrative.

Image Source: WhatShouldWeCallMe

This happens in terms of both a gifs adherence to and defiance of its own “meme” function. In part 2 of this post, I’ll explore the “meme” function of both silent film and gif culture, drawing parallels between the two in order to further demonstrate how gifs reinvent old media not only in terms of discursive space, but in the formal characteristics of the medium itself.

For Part 2 of this post, click here.