Abstract
This thesis offers a critical interrogation of how internet memes, as novel media phenomena, are transforming the contours of global politics and wider processes of political subjectivity. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical traditions (e.g., critical geography, media theory, affect theory), it conceptualises the term “the memescape” as the relational space where memes as popular-cultural media are produced, circulated, and consumed. It argues that this spatial arrangement, in how it enables various movements between the various elements that it brings into relation, conditions a peculiar and novel site of politics. The memescape makes politics in movement. This movement is threefold: 1) in how this space allows the collective, mutative, and indeterminate circulation of aesthetic, discursive, and technical media, 2) in how playfulness and humour as principal modes of articulation in this space allow the continuous movement of political signs and aesthetics, and 3) in how this space moves political subjects through relations of affective resonance – especially enjoyment.Through a set of case studies that follow and map how this space encounters various global political structures – capital, race, and the state – the thesis uncovers the multiple and ambivalent political possibilities – resistance, reaction, capture, and excess – that the memescape enables in movement. The case studies that follow, interacting with these various possibilities, offer interventions into how a global politics populated with this new medium can be navigated. They include: “Eat the Rich” as a popular meme that oscillates between anti-capitalist resistance and spectacular commodification, the “Cuck” as a popular reactionary meme through which racial and gendered anxieties around enjoyment are mediated, the Gamestop events of 2021 in which a meme-community nearly bankrupted a million-dollar hedge fund through an almost masochistic enjoyment of financial capitalism, and the cynical memes of Turkish youth that deal with the overwhelming carceral politics of an authoritarian state. Engaging with these cases to produce various interventions on the intersecting politics of social media, enjoyment, humour, and power, the thesis contributes a useful set of analytical resources to move in a world increasingly populated with memetic media.
| Date of Award | 10 Dec 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Jutta Weldes (Supervisor) & Chris Rossdale (Supervisor) |