When navigating media theory or its adjacent fields, especially the discourse around internet memes, one is confronted with a pervasive trend towards biological metaphors. On the macro-scale, media have been described as existing within ecologies,¹ pictures have been likened to organisms that are alive and wanting² something, media are said to circulate³ within metaphorical bodies, while certain forms of media content are compared to viruses.⁴ The same is true for the meme, which occupies the lowest order of magnitude in this canon of metaphors, as it was initially posited as a cultural analogue to the gene by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976.

In Dawkins’ neo-Darwinian conception, the meme is the smallest possible unit of culture, striving for reproduction against the antagonistic forces of natural selection.⁵ After attempts to find working examples of these ‘units’ failed,⁶ the term still persisted, shifted its meaning and found a new ecological niche within the humanities, before being appropriated (or, rather, domesticated) by internet users. This shift in meaning has been described as the term becoming its own embodiment: the meme itself has become a meme.⁷ In the contemporary sense, the term is usually used to describe groups of digital objects distributed online which were created in reference to one another while sharing identifiable memetic features, i.e. content, form, and stance.⁸

Regardless of whether this particular metaphor or any of the other metaphors mentioned above are accurate, useful, or even mutually compatible, the question remains what lies at the root of their shared biological provenance. What follows is an exploration of what is at stake when one speaks of media as being, in one way or another, alive. As a guide along this journey I intend to implore yet another (outdated) biological metaphor that, starting in antiquity, notably influenced medieval occidental thinkers such as Augustinus, Thomas Aquinus and early biologists of modernity like Carl von Linné⁹: The Great Chain of Being.

Omne Bonum Est Diffusivum Sui

The Great Chain (also known as the scala naturae) is a cosmological concept dating back to early Western philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, or Proclus, and was notably described by Arthur Lovejoy in his eponymous monograph, which has proven a seminal work within the American strand of the history of ideas. The Great Chain delineates a fixed order of the entire universe and every being in it, positioning them in a continuum between Nothingness and God, the latter of which is imagined at the highest point in this hierarchy. Following God, the chain links angels, humans, animals, plants, and minerals, ranking them by their powers and abilities.¹⁰ Each type of being constitutes a link within this chain, sharing all its attributes with the lower orders while simultaneously embodying superior traits that elevate it.

In his description, Lovejoy starts out by tracing the concept of ‘Goodness’ as a quality of God. While it was first understood as the self-contained perfection of an omnipotent and omniscient demiurge, this conception could not explain why a self-sufficient being would create a world of creatures inferior to the perfection of its maker. This made it necessary to reimagine God’s ‘Goodness’ as a “self-transcending fecundity”, making the act of creation an ontological necessity.¹¹ This principle is exemplified in the scholastic axiom “Omne bonum est diffusivum sui”¹² (The Good is diffusive of itself), which, as I propose, could also be read as the founding axiom of memetics. As Lovejoy describes with reference to Plotinus: “Each hypostasis will ‘produce something lower than itself’”.¹³ For reasons that will become apparent later, a cosmology of media cannot follow the top-down concept of the Great Chain, but instead has to be inverted and thought bottom-up. Where Lovejoy described the Godly as that which brings forth, within memetics the ‘Godly’ has to be understood as that which is brought forth.¹⁴ Each hypostasis will produce something higher than itself.

The ordering principle of the Great Chain, which serves as a basis for a universal classification system for all beings within the universe, is what Lovejoy calls the ‘power of the soul’.¹⁵ Taking up this metaphor, I would like to sketch out a similar cosmology of media phenomena, a Great Chain of Memeing,¹⁶ ordering them according to the powers that are attributed to them, most importantly mobility and agency, to see which type of media are imbued with the greatest liveliness to understand what is concealed behind the metaphor of vitality.

Minerals

Drawing on genealogies like the one described in Walter Benjamin’s famous Work of Art essay, one could understand the cultural history of images as the history of their increasing mobility: Cave paintings, religious statues and frescoes are less mobile than panel paintings, which are harder to distribute than lithographs and, crucially for Benjamin, photography or film.¹⁷ Following Benjamin’s line of thought, the digital image and the rise of the internet constitute a next step in this trajectory, embodying a new order of quasi-instantaneous global mobility.¹⁸ However, not all images are circulated equally, as our memetic axiom states. The abundance of visual material that is not shared or accessed could thus be understood as sediments, minerals, or perhaps a humus layer from which more mobile forms of digital images emerge. These sediments consist of images that predate the digital era and have been digitized, snapshot photography, artworks, materials from pop culture, just to name a few. In the same geological stratum, there also exist the fossils of “Ur-memes”¹⁹ from the Internet’s pre-historic era (the 1990s and early 2000s), like the Philosoraptor or other Advice Animals. Patiently, they are waiting to be put back into circulation as part of their nostalgia-fueled revival, like the other images, they linger for what Wolfgang Ullrich has described as a “vivification”.²⁰

Virals

In the same text, Ullrich connects this metaphor of vitality with a linguistic metaphor, likening the use of digital images to that of language: “For the first time in cultural history, a generation is growing up where the exchange of images is just as unhindered and just as natural as the exchange of words.”²¹ This shift towards images, which has been identified as a pictorial or iconic turn by W. J. T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehme respectively, is not merely an intellectual one, but hinges on a material and historical moment, which is why Jacques Rancière argues that the pictorial turn cannot be thought independently of digitization.²²

In the same text, Rancière describes the image as a “proliferating virus”²³ that needs our attention and engagement to reproduce itself. According to him, it is (this need for) our attention that animates the image to begin with: “the image is living because it lacks life.”²⁴

And although the viral and the meme share many similarities, there is a difference that proves fruitful for our endeavor: According to Limor Shifman, the viral must always be thought in the singular, while the meme ought to be thought in the plural.²⁵ This is related to the forms of user engagement each type of content evokes: While users engage with viral content by simply sharing and passing it on, the meme encourages interactivity, prompting users to adapt and appropriate it to new contexts.²⁶ In this distinction also lies the reason for the viral’s comparatively short lifespan: Once everyone has been exposed to a viral piece of content, the urge to share it drastically drops, as though one had developed antibodies to its infectious appeal. If images indeed need our attention to reproduce and survive, the meme could be understood as a strategy for an image to survive the viral phase and continue to occupy our minds by continually evolving and adapting. If images are indeed animated by our interaction with them, it has to be the images that not only capture our attention, but our active engagement, that proliferate and ascend to a higher tier.

As Lovejoy writes with reference to Charles Bonnet, this step from the minerals to the lower life forms is the most enigmatic. Media artists Eva and Franco Mattes encountered a similar problem when developing a series of artworks which they hoped would serve as future meme templates. The duo developed a number of objects in an aesthetic that aimed to appeal to the weird and irreverent style of internet memes. In exhibiting these works back in 2008, they intended for photographs of them to circulate online and eventually find their way into the memesphere. However, seemingly as an illustration of the myriad contingencies involved in meme-making, only one of these artworks resurfaced many years later, in 2020, spawning a handful of meme instances, which Eva and Franco Mattes collected under the title that users frequently used as a caption, Mickey Mouse is Died.²⁷

Animals

One of the first meme formats to gain mainstream attention were the aforementioned Advice Animals.²⁸ The (now extinct) format was an early example of the classic image macro top-text-bottom-text-layout in impact font that is typically associated with the 2000s period of internet memes. Each derivative features an animal with a fixed set of characteristics, attributes and, oftentimes, a specific joke format.²⁹ The animals thus take on stereotypical personalities much like the anthropomorphic animals of fairy tales in folk culture.³⁰ This example is particularly instructive, on the one hand because it is one of the first instances where the memetic process appropriates—and thus vivifies—previously private photos,³¹ elevating them to a higher position within the Great Chain of Memeing. On the other hand, as far as the ‘power of the soul’ is concerned, the advice animal does prove somewhat limited, as the formulaic character and clear rules of each animal limit its potential for appropriation, thus shortening the potential lifespan of the meme.

As has been shown elsewhere, the popularization of the meme as an image genre goes hand in hand with the availability and democratization of graphics editing software like Photoshop and later, meme generator applications³²—a co-evolution, as it were. This availability of the means of image production precipitates into a purposefully amateurish aesthetic that has been described by Nick Douglas as internet ugly.³³ This visual style can take the shape of poorly rendered stick figures hand-drawn in MS Paint, crude Photoshop edits or intentionally kitsch fonts reminiscent of early MS Office WordArt.

However, the feature that makes memes as a type of media content so successfully—its accessibility—is also its greatest weakness. The death of any meme is engendered not by censorship, but instead by overexposure. Within the internet community and especially in those subcultures considering themselves as the purveyors of meme culture, there is an understanding that a meme becoming too popular and thus commercialized necessarily leads to its demise.³⁴ 

This tendency is made explicit by meme makers themselves in various iterations of—at times quite vulgar—Meme Life Cycle Charts. All of these memes follow the claim that new meme trends emerge primarily on the image board 4chan, which—as should be noted—has been described in academic literature not only as an important site for meme production, but also as a breeding ground for the alt-right, both of which likely hinge on the anonymity of users on the site itself.³⁵ The ‘original content’ posted on 4chan is then supposedly reposted to less ‘edgy’ platforms like Reddit or Facebook as well as various sites dedicated to comedic content, being re-digested (note the biological analogy) until it is commercialized and inevitably dies.³⁶ Recurring to the level of the metaphor, this can be taken to mean that an image being alive necessarily entails the possibility of its death.

Humans

One meme which up until now seems to have passed the test of time is the so called Wojak meme (originally also known as ‘feels guy’), a crude rendering of a human created in MS Paint embodying the melancholy of terminally online 4chan users.³⁷ The exact origin of the first Wojak image is unknown, but it was popularized by a meme format that underwent an evolution of its own, the ‘I Wish I Was At Home’ meme, depicting a person visibly not enjoying the party they are attending.³⁸ Since, Wojak has been adapted to so many formats that users have attempted to delineate the different paths the meme’s offspring has taken, despite the abundance of instantiations making such efforts futile.

Referencing Benjamin’s aforementioned essay, John Berger writes that “[f]or the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us.”³⁹ The simile of the language is particularly interesting in this passage when keeping in mind that Berger uses it to describe the distribution of images on television. However, since television as a medium does not allow for reciprocity or interaction, this is merely akin to understanding a language without being able to speak it yourself. Digitization, the Internet, Web 2.0 platform structures, and the availability of graphics editing software thus provide users the ability to speak the visual language that surround them, simultaneously making images as vibrant and flexible as ever. This condition is described by Ullrich as pictorial orality: ​​“While images were previously as stable and fixed as language in the form of writing, they are now increasingly analogues to forms of orality.”⁴⁰

According to Ullrich, the vivification this shift entails accompanies a shift away from images that have the character of a work of art towards an ephemeral character of communication.⁴¹ This observation of veering away from traditional authorship is echoed by Carolin Wiedemann, who defines memes as necessarily emerging from a collective, or a swarm.⁴² 

Returning to the question at the outset of this text, one can now draw the conclusion that the metaphor of the living image is a stand-in for the ways in which we collectively engage with media, how we make sense of them and, like the meme as the culmination of this form of engagement, shows, how we co-create them in atmospheres of collective authorship. The ‘power of the soul’ that images possess is thus their potential for memetic appropriation, their fecundity, or their polyvocality.

Gods

The success of a meme crucially depends on precisely this polyvocality, its openness, its ability to be applicable to numerous disparate situations. However, despite the connection of collective authorship to traditionally leftist avant-garde movements and despite the democratic appeal of widely available means of image production, the participatory appeal of meme culture is not progressive per se. It is precisely this openness that also lends memes to appropriation into ideological narratives. The prime example—next to the already problematic iterations apparent in the Wojak meme canon—in this case has to be Pepe the Frog, an anthropomorphic stoner cartoon frog created by Matt Furie, which was appropriated into the memesphere alongside its caption “Feels good, man”.⁴³ Just as it was approaching its peak in popularity when ‘normies’ outside of niche internet subcultures started using it, Pepe was appropriated by far right extremists and imbued with new layers of meaning:⁴⁴ After first becoming a totem of the alt-right in the so called ‘Great Meme War’ accompanying the 2016 US presidential elections, Pepe was embraced by this community to the point that they thought of their real-life political successes as being manifestations of ‘meme magic’, subscribing to the power of images to alter the world.⁴⁵ Through eclectic references to mythology and MMORPG lore, Pepe was declared the avatar of the ancient Egyptian god Kek, with the cartoon frog experiencing nothing short of an apotheosis and becoming an object of worship of the ‘Cult of Kek’.⁴⁶ As the artist collective Clusterduck have also noted, memes-turned-divine-figures are not exception in the visual culture of the internet.⁴⁷ Utilizing the power of post-irony, far right actors exhibit what has been called a ‘double consciousness’ towards images, simultaneously affirming their power to alter reality without indulging in naïve idolatry.⁴⁸

Conclusion 

As Scott Wark has noted with regards the circulation of media, a certain set of metaphors brings with it a set of epistemologies that obscure our view of what is actually at stake.⁴⁹ Carelessly accepting the metaphor of living images—even if the metaphorical connotation is continually affirmed⁵⁰—naturalizes the trajectories that they take as quasi-Darwinian determinism. Granting images the status of autonomous agents simultaneously downgrades us into the role of passive hosts, entirely powerless to the infectious power of the memes on our phones, mindlessly sharing fascist propaganda.⁵¹ Instead, we need to remind ourselves that there are human actors behind all of these forces, attempting to exercise political influence by ways of the neo-Gramscian doctrine that “politics is downstream from culture”.⁵² The metaphorical life of memes is in fact the result of innumerable, but nevertheless human micro-interactions with the folk culture of the internet, making the liveliness of memes seem more like a collectively animated sock puppet. Just as Rancière writes, images are only animated by our attention and engagement.

As the pictorial / iconic turn comes into full effect with rising digital literacy and ‘the next billion users’ just around the corner, using images to express one’s opinions and view of the world will become more and more common.⁵³ Hence, useful concepts and ways of analyzing complex social interactions, communal sense making and acts of collective authorship online are needed for a critical theory of media to proliferate.

Footnotes

1. Cf. Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Leonardo (Cambridge, (MA): MIT Press, 2005). ↑

2. Cf. William John Thomas Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, London: University of Chicago press, 1994). ↑

3. Cf. Scott Wark, “Meme Theory” (University of Warwick, 2019). ↑

4. Cf. Tony D. Sampson, Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). ↑

5. See Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press Essential Knowledge (Cambridge (MA): The MIT Press, 2014), 10–15. ↑

6. See Sampson, Virality, 61. ↑

7. See Bradley E. Wiggins, The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality, Routledge Studies in New Media and Cyberculture 45 (New York, London: Routledge, 2019), 3. ↑

8. Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 39–40. ↑

9. See Arthur Oncken Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, The William James Lectures 1933 (Cambridge (MA), London: Harvard University Press, 1964), 67, 73–74, 235. ↑

10. See ibid., 58–59. ↑

11. Ibid., 49. ↑

12. Ibid., 49. ↑

13. See ibid., 62. ↑

14. See ibid., 67–68. ↑

15. See ibid., 58–59. ↑

16. The trend of more or less original play-on-words in the titles of publication on memes is, at least in my mind, so prevalent, that it has itself become a meme, which I would like to embrace and spread. See for example Robby Hardesty, Jess Linz, and Anna J. Secor, “Walter Benja-Memes,” GeoHumanities 5, no. 2 (July 3, 2019): 496–513, https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566X.2019.1624188; Alfred Bown and Daniel Bristow, eds., Post Memes: Seizing the Memes of Production, 1st ed (Santa Barbara: Punctum Books, 2019); Andy King, “Weapons of Mass Distraction: Far-Right Culture-Jamming Tactics in Memetic Warfare,” in Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image, ed. Chloë Arkenbout, Jack Wilson, and Daniel de Zeeuw, INC Reader 15 (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2021), 217–35. ↑

17. See Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 218–19. ↑

18. See Wolfgang Ullrich, “From Works to Living Means of Communication – The Digital Image and the ‘Iconic Turn,’” in Digital Ethics, ed. Thomas Dreier and Tiziana Andina (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG, 2022), 127, https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748934011-127. ↑

19. Nick Douglas, “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic,” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (December 2014): 317, https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412914544516. ↑

20. Ullrich, “From Works to Living Means of Communication – The Digital Image and the ‘Iconic Turn,’” 132. ↑

21. Ibid., 128. ↑

22. See Jacques Rancière, “Do Pictures Really Want to Live?,” in The Pictorial Turn, ed. Neal Curtis, (London: Routledge, 2013), 29–30, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315875873. ↑

23. Ibid., 30. ↑

24. Ibid., 30. ↑

25. See Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 56. ↑

26. See Ibid., 59. ↑

27. “Mickey Mouse Is Died (2008-20) < Eva & Franco Mattes,” accessed March 26, 2024, https://0100101110101101.org/mickey-mouse-is-died/. ↑

28. See Tommaso Cappelletti et al., eds., The Detective Wall Guide: A Meme Manifesto Project, First edition (Ljubljana: Aksioma, Institute for Contemporary Art, 2021), 47. ↑

29. See Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 112–13. ↑

30. See Linda K. Börzsei, “Makes a Meme Instead: A Concise History of Internet Memes.​ New Media Studies Magazine​, 7,” Pozyskano z: Http://Works. Bepress. Com/Linda_borzsei/2/(Data Dostępu: 10.10. 2015), 2013, 17. ↑

31. See ibid., 15. ↑

32. See ibid., 10–11. ↑

33. See Douglas, “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit,” 329–30. ↑

34. “Meme Elitism,” Know Your Meme, April 17, 2012, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cultures/meme-elitism. ↑

35. Cf. Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: The Online Culture Wars from Tumblr and 4chan to the Alt-Right and Trump (Winchester (UK,; Washington:: Zero Books, 2017); Maik Fielitz and Nick Thurston, eds., Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right: Online Actions and Offline Consequences in Europe and the US, Political Science 71 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2019). ↑

36. See “Meme Diagram | Meme Life Cycle Charts,” Know Your Meme, accessed March 14, 2024, https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1755230-meme-life-cycle-charts. ↑

37. See “Wojak,” Know Your Meme, July 9, 2015, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wojak. ↑

38. See “I Wish I Was At Home / They Don’t Know,” Know Your Meme, August 7, 2014, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-wish-i-was-at-home-they-dont-know. ↑

39. John Berger, Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger; a Book Made, 37. pr., 1. publ. 1972 by British Broadcasting Corp. and 1977 by Penguin Books (London: British Broadcasting Corp, 1997), 32. ↑

40. Ullrich, “From Works to Living Means of Communication – The Digital Image and the ‘Iconic Turn,’” 129. ↑

41. See ibid., 132–33. ↑

42. See Carolin Wiedemann, Kritische Kollektivität Im Netz: Anonymous, Facebook Und Die Kraft Der Affizierung in Der Kontrollgesellschaft (transcript Verlag, 2016), 181, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783839434031. ↑

43. “Pepe the Frog,” Know Your Meme, March 26, 2015, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/pepe-the-frog. ↑

44. See King, “Weapons of Mass Distraction: Far-Right Culture-Jamming Tactics in Memetic Warfare,” 221; Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters, “Memes and the Reactionary Totemism of the Theft of Joy,” Institue of Network Cultures (blog), August 21, 2018, 2–3, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2018/08/21/memes-and-the-reactionary-totemism-of-the-theft-of-joy-geert-lovink-marc-tuters/. ↑

45. “Meme Magic,” Know Your Meme, February 8, 2016, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/meme-magic. ↑

46. “Cult of Kek,” Know Your Meme, September 16, 2016, https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cult-of-kek. ↑

47. See Cappelletti et al., The Detective Wall Guide, 77. ↑

48. See Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters, “Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images,” Institue of Network Cultures (blog), April 3, 2018, 3, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2018/04/03/rude-awakening-memes-as-dialectical-images-by-geert-lovink-marc-tuters/; See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 7. ↑

49. See Wark, “Meme Theory,” 131. ↑

50. See Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 7. ↑

51. See Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture, 11–12. ↑

52. Geert Lovink and Marc Tuters, “They Say We Can’t Meme: Politics of Idea Compression,” Institue of Network Cultures (blog), February 11, 2018, 5–6, https://networkcultures.org/geert/2018/02/11/they-say-we-cant-meme-politics-of-idea-compression-geert-lovink-marc-tuters/; Cf. Nagle, Kill All Normies. ↑

53. See Ullrich, “From Works to Living Means of Communication – The Digital Image and the ‘Iconic Turn,’” 128. ↑