Digital Icons

Memes, Martyrs and Avatars

Yasmin Ibrahim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000178487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Cultura popular

This book offers critical perspectives on the digital 'iconic', exploring how the notion of the iconic is re-appropriated and re-made online, and the consequences for humanity and society. Examining cross-cultural case studies of iconic images in digital spaces, the author offers original and critical analyses, theories and perspectives on the notion of the 'iconic', and on its movement, re-appropriation and meaning making on digital platforms.

A carefully curated selection of case studies illustrates topics such as phantom memory; martyrdom; denigration and pornographic recoding; digital games as simulacra; and memes as 'artification'. Situating the notion of the iconic firmly within contemporary cultures, the author takes a thematic approach to investigate the iconic as an unstable and unfinished phenomenon online as it travels through platforms temporally and spatially.

The book will be an important resource for academics and students in the areas of media and communications, digital culture, cultural studies, visual communication, visual culture, journalism studies and digital humanities.

1 An Introduction Digital Icons

Avatars, Memes and Martyrs

Introduction

The case studies that unfold in this book are not the result of chance. In fact, they reveal our fascination with entities which multiply with force. Or perhaps acquire a magnitude of greatness and power through a combined recognition by the masses as a cultural influence entering a celestial realm forged through collective memory. The iconic is not definable, possessing a quality that is in excess of its materiality, signifying meanings and values through its travel through time. Iconic is desire, fantasy and mutability unaffected through its bodily mortality. Many entities acquire power as social entities and the book traverses these dynamics, illuminating the power of social or collective ownership of cultural icons on the unstable sphere of the digital, enacting new ritualistic dimensions afforded through the code in a libidinal economy. The travel of the iconic online is about transcendence and transgressions of the sacred, the invocation of the sublime, the seduction of the grotesque and our psychic binds with the uncanny. In a libidinal economy, human psyche and its inner instinctual forces and energies interact and maintain relations with the outer world (see Cameron, Nesvetailova, & Palan 2011). In his book Libidinal Economy, Lyotard (1993: 108–121) asserts not only that every political economy is libidinal but that it is not enough to deconstruct these from rationalist paradigms or the ideational, discursive or representational but also through the desires and feelings which circulate and are transformed in them. Tracing the transcendence of icons in the digital architecture is also about illuminating this libidinal economy revealing our creative energies juxtaposed against the Thanatos, or the death instincts.

My fascination with the iconic is about its transcendental journeys online in the digital realms, platforms which are saturated with cultural interventions and norms but yet underpinned through capital’s endeavour to organize us as data entities, as content and relays which push messages and align these through our desires with the market marking them through our rituals of consumption. What then happens to the iconic in such a configuration is that it performs through an interface with users yet is ordered through its machinic logic. If the digital celebrates the ocular accumulating image archives which destabilize and reiterate other archives then the iconic is bound with historic and popular machinations. Defined by turbulence as an immanent feature combining ephemerality with the ineradicable online. Further destabilized through the ferocious speed of viral circulation denoting what captures and conceives our communal imagination, as not all matter can achieve a virality of the popular, thrusting and leaking content through a networked architecture of social relations. Here form, format and speed recombine to mutate into entities in their own right in the digital realm. If time immortalizes cultural icons, the digital world imposes its own moral sensibilities onto them, releasing the iconic into a mass spectacular of image archives where they can be remade, curated and re-appropriated to be imbued with multitudes of meanings, drawing on their collective resonance with the masses. Intertextuality, decontextualization, irreverence and subversion recode the iconic online.

There is a sense that nothing can stay still on the digital sphere, particularly not the iconic transmuted through our communal lust and desire and the internet’s avarice in possessing content as its own and the machinic play of distributing images en masse through content archives as simulacra. The notion of iconic images being replicated or their simulacra as a form which threatens the very notion of authenticity is a recurrent theme in visual studies and art history. The deficit of visual representation or its limits is not the concern of this collection of case studies. In fact, the case studies leverage on the difference and differentiation from the model, the original or the real. The thrust is this. Replication produces new political paradigms in which the iconic is harboured whether as a re-invented avatar, the martyr of collective suffering or the subversive meme which draws visceral reactions in subverting the real. Replication in the digital economy underpins a whole human affectivity and sensorium which has been understudied, perhaps overlooked. The creative enterprise of the internet, its ocular centrism and our fascination to transmogrify through the fecund possibilities of the internet’s architecture become an arena of renewed scrutiny in this collection. The redistribution of the ‘replicated’ through a viral economy of human engagement and affective communication as well as curation is to restyle the iconic in its symbolic signification. Icons are propelled through a new speed of travel in the digital architecture; in the process they not only acquire new meanings and renewed symbolism but also encounter the iconoclastic. Effacement and re-rendering of format and form is a resonant aspect of the internet and it is played out in multitudinous forms, imbuing a richness to deconstruction for scholars and researchers. The instability and incessant mutation of the iconic invigorates our engagements while thwarting a sense of stability to understanding the iconic online.

The replication of images through machines that duplicate or dilute the aura of art in the age of industrial and digital reproduction is both about the horror of art’s effacement and its democratization, perhaps its machinic re-imagination and re-articulation. But what modes does this democratization take and how does it play out in platform capitalism? How do these monetized platforms deplete icons as our cultural resources or their standing as symbols of collective memory? This is a fertile and at times troubling space of perusal. Simulacra as a watered-down version of the real or as something diminishing the real may be a prevalent argument. But I want to view simulacra as a reproduction of the real or its mutability as memes or digital avatars online not as a loss of authenticity but through Deleuze’s notion of simulacra as inducing ‘difference through its difference’. This is particularly important in the digital sphere. Unlike a static canvas where artistic images can reside, the visual sphere is a canvas like no other. Projected on screen yet powered through ‘ghosts in the machines’ (Ibrahim 2018) within the internet architecture, digital images are malleable categories in their own right, ripe for multiple re-renderings and counter-gaze, as resting sites of depravity and reverence. As WJT Mitchell (2013) asserts, a lot of contemporary political conflicts live and develop as a war of images. As these transcend onto the digital sphere, they encounter modes of turbulence and modes of regeneration. As Arthur C Clarke (1964) famously asserted, technology may be seen as magic. But magic and myth foreground through a social dynamics and interplay with technologies, networked social relations and agentic play of capital through its backhand operations to mediate our cognate senses. The online becomes accessed through and associated with the supernatural, mystical and, at times, spiritual. For the lonely, the celebrity-hungry masses, the iconic as fetishism acquires a proximity through screen cultures to be possessed within a ‘personalized realm’.

But invocation of this spectral visuality of the digital space is also about the ‘affective turn’, to not reduce body and mind through a Cartesian dichotomy. In fact, to enrich our senses and scholarship to renegotiate the divide ‘between the mind and body, and between actions and passions’ (Hardt 2007: xi). For Patricia Clough (2010: 224), ‘affect is the very indication of bodies forming in the transmission of force or intensity’ and hence the intimate connectivity of affect with subjectivity, sociality and technology. Within the transcendental aesthetics of the internet is the immanence of affect. What Deleuze and Guattari (1988a) might term a bloc of sensations reactivated through the spectator, moving away from representation and deconstruction to the molecular or the intensive quality parallel to signification which you experience or as Derrida (1987) might inflect as the ‘present experience’. Or what Henri Bergson (1991) might describe as ‘attention’ which enables other ‘planes’ to be perceivable in suspending normal motor activity. Bergson’s stance is that in switching our spatio-temporal registers which (technology enables) one can alter our experience. New media technologies take on an aesthetic function through their deterritorializing qualities (O’Sullivan 2001: 127). Derrida (2005), in locating affectivity as intrinsic to the political, argues that common bonds cannot be established between subjects without it. Additionally, the

political subject cannot experience affectivity without the structural mediation of technics (i.e. a concept intersecting with technology though not reducible to it) but referencing which enable a subject to bind themselves with an external world, which in has affective consequences.

(Earlie 2017: 382)

The external textural world also being through the technological is not only its unique somatic experience for the individual subject but also dimensions to replication. Derrida’s re-articulation of the notion ‘punctum’, which he draws from Roland Barthes, to describe a minor detail which cuts through the photograph’s objective quality abstracting that single referential particularity to create a metonymy is also about its recurrence. ‘As soon as it drawn into an assemblage of substitution, it works itself into objects and affect, irradiating a generalizability’ (Earlie 2017: 382). As such, affect can be structured through representation and is bound up with signification as techne.

The mimetics of the internet

The salient terms in this book, namely icon, meme, martyr and avatar, are intensely implicated in mimetics or imitation constituted through performance and to a large measure representation through cultural artefacts and artistic endeavours, and equally the interplay of social relations with other humans as well as capital. They invoke human participation and subjectivity as well as affectivity. They entail collective meaning-making and symbolic interactions with material objects of cultural fascination, fetishism and obsession, objects of desire and suffering which arrest our attention. But another layer is added to this array of mutable terms through the architecture of the internet. When these entities leap onto digital platforms, strange and uncertain things happen – diverse phenomena and audiences interlock while infusing meaning through the intertextual. The mutability and the instability of the internet form a perverse relationship online without quite dispelling the offline relations and social attachments with the iconic. An idea which underpins these salient notions is the concept of mimetics. Beyond signifying imitation, it captures the resonance and re-representations to veer into illusions, fantasies and the ephemeral, and in so doing it evokes deep human emotions or engages our senses beyond the logical or cerebral.

There is a primordial role of imitation in human life and our propensity to imitate has become more profound and revolutionary (Garrels 2005: 47). Taylor (2002) argues that for both Richard Dawkins and René Girard imitation differentiated the human from the rest of the animal kingdom, envisaging the brain as an organ fundamentally structured by and for imitation. Pegging this imitation as a ‘viral’ mechanism over which there is no control and, as such, underpinning culture through an evolutionary genetics. While Dawkins (2016) propounds his ideas through the notion of memes as replicating ideas or ‘units of imitation’, Girard views it through human relations where ‘memesis’ is our imitation of the desire of others. Considered as a school of thought within socio-biology and evolutionary psychology, it signifies an endeavour to apply evolutionary models to the human sciences and has been popularly appropriated in internet and computer studies, in addition to being prominent in science fiction (Taylor 2002). The human brain, co-evolving with memes and possessing enhanced memetic capabilities, has the ability to select ideas which may be instrumental or beneficial in human terms without foreclosing and co-existing with dangerous or violent ideas and belief systems. If mimetics is about the cultural evolution in the transmission of ideas, the development of a technological ecology which permeates and saturates human life in postmodernity has the capacity to enable new modes of transmission which surpass the human ability to transmit ideas. Artificial intelligence and robotics which simulate human behaviour become integrated into cultural evolution through intelligent machines which colonize human environments while mimicking and studying our thought processes to cue us through our own modalities of actions and reaction. Mimetics then underpins the evolution of intelligent machines as these not only imitate ideas but improve them while downloading them directly into their progeny (Taylor 2002). In studying the human and ‘becoming human’, machines are the simulacra of human vulnerabilities. This will be a recurrent theme of human extractions in late modernity, centring human cultural production while infusing culture as raw materials produced through technical architectures reconfigured through capital. What equally foregrounds the importance in studying mimetics is how the human capacity to imitate can be the basis in forming sustainable communities through the transmission of cultural ideas and ideologies. Girard’s (1965, 1979) mimetic theory propounds that there is an underlying mechanism at work in human relationships and they operate socially through mimetic principles though not quite realized at a conscious level but existing at a subconscious intuitive level (Garrels 2005).

Icons share some common traits, as signifiers of meaning and in encapsulating the symbolic. According to Gregor Goethals (1978), when we designate certain images or objects as icons we are in fact ascribing them extraordinary traits such that they embody salient values which can encompass residues of the sacred. In studying national icons, Albert Boime (1997) discerns the sacred inherent in Christian traditions and national monuments through consecration such as dedicated ceremonies and their status as sites of pilgrimage, reinforcing and enacting shared values in material terms. The residue of the sacred which icons are imbued with recodes even secular material...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 An Introduction Digital Icons: avatars, memes and martyrs
• 2 The shoe and the American president: ludic resistance and ‘gaming’ the iconic
• 3 Martyrdom and the mobile phone: from bystander to martyr
• 4 Tank man as the unknown icon: revitalizing Tiananmen through steganography
• 5 The ‘Jihadi Bride’ as a media icon: the ‘Other within the Other’
• 6 The iconic migrant body: necro-aesthetics, mimetics and the dead
• 7 The Napalm girl and platform capital: facebook governance of the iconic
• 8 Digital icons – recombined with speed in the digital age: concluding remarks
• Index