TOWARD A BLACK CIRCULATIONISM
ARIA DEAN
Black people love social media, and social media love Black people. According to a 2015 Pew survey,1 nearly half of Black Internet users use Instagram, as opposed to less than a quarter of White users. Twitter is more evenly distributed but still mostly minority-driven. Alongside the rise of the meme in Internet culture, we have witnessed Black-user-produced content2 drift toward center stage. Not only is Blackness broadly attracted to the Internet, technology, and the future at large—exemplified by the rich traditions of Afrofuturist literature, house music, hip-hop videos, and more—but the Internet is a prime condition for Black culture to thrive.
Historically, our collective being has always been scattered, stretched across continents and bodies of water. But given how formations like Black Twitter now foster connections and offer opportunities for intense moments of identification, we might say that, at this point in time, the most concrete location we can find for this collective being of Blackness is the digital, on social media platforms in the form of viral content—perhaps most important, memes.
While I want to argue for an entwinement of Blackness and memes, I would be remiss—irresponsible, even—to go any further without noting another way that Blackness continues to circulate, with perhaps less frequency but with just as much, if not more, reach: through the aggressive circulation of videos that document Black death or violence in general against Black people. These videos proliferate alongside memes, brushing up against each other on the same platforms. Further, Black death and Black joy are pinned to each other by the White gaze, and if we see their intersection anywhere, it’s in the neo-mandingo fights of WorldstarHipHop. While these forms overlap in their mode of transmission and their involvement of Black bodies, such violent clips are no longer thought of as “memes.” The term has evolved: Once used to describe ideas or behaviors that are passed from person to person, “meme” now refers metonymically to Internet memes, which are as trope-filled and easy-made as stock imagery, but are unprofessional and intentionally funny, with often absurdist text floating on or above a low-res image.
Beyond the obvious, “meme” has taken on a more difficult and speculative connotation: that of #relatability, an ability to provoke a feeling of identification in the viewer. It is conceptually linked to the French même, which can be used to mean “same.” Recent meme history keeps the concept alive through the ongoing presence of such formats and language tropes such as “it me” and “that feeling when” (TFW). Relatability helps memes sustain a kind of cohesion in “collective being,” a collective memory that can never be fully encompassed; one can never zoom out enough to see it in its entirety.
One of the greatest tasks of Blackness as collective being has been to hold itself together in something like cohesion, to exhibit some legible character. This cohesion only becomes necessary, perhaps, as the collective being is made visible to non-Black society. When considered on its own, in what to some are the shadows, this collective being is allowed to expand and contract at will. But when society shines a light on it, what is atomized and multiplicitous hardens into the Black.
In these shadows, in the underground, Blackness has worked its magic. Think of the back rooms and basements where turntables were repurposed to birth hip-hop. Now, if as Laur M. Jackson contends,3 “Blackness is the living tissue of memes,” then memes, so Black in so many ways, Black as hell, constitute something similar to what Cedric Robinson describes in Black Marxism as an “ontological totality,” a Black collective being.
On the contemporary Internet, things have been turned inside out. Exchanges that have historically taken place in the underground of Black social spaces are now vulnerable to exposure, if not already exposed. The call-and-response creativity of Black Twitter is overheard and echoed by White Twitter, and viral dance phenomena like the whip4 are seized on by the likes of Hillary Clinton and Ellen DeGeneres. Together these objects—and the countless others in circulation, literally countless—create widespread visibility for Blackness online. Blackness once again takes up its longstanding role as the engine of American popular culture, so that we find ourselves where we were in the 1920s with jazz, in the 1950s with rock ‘n’ roll, in the ‘80s with both house and hip-hop—in a time loop wherein Black people innovate only to see their forms snaked away, value siphoned off by White hands.
All the creative labor of the Black collective being aside, there is a palpable Blackness to much of this viral content—especially memes—that circulates independently from actual Black people. This depersonalized Blackness is shifty and hard to pin down—as is the Blackness of any object or subject, really. It makes itself known through language, through an aggressive use of maneuvers associated with Black vernacular speech, explicated in manuel arturo abreu’s “Online Imagined Black English.”5 One finds captions littered with “bruh,” “fam,” “lit,” and, of course, “nigga.”
These dynamics make it tempting to enter conversations about cultural appropriation and property, about positive and negative representation, inheriting some of the constrictions of early Black cinematic theory. We can make it about who owns an image: Does a White meme admin have any business posting an image of a Black person? Are they laughing with or at us? Are they capable of laughing with us? Has my Explore feed been gentrified?
But in the online attention economy, this imbalance is more complicated than the familiar, semi-linear relationship between Black production and non-Black appropriation. The labor of online content production is done with hopes of an audience in mind; memes are created for the very purpose of virality and, by extension, appropriation. Memes move in cycles of production, appropriation, consumption, and reappropriation that render any idea of a preexisting authentic collective being hard to pin down. “Rather than capital ‘incorporating’ from the outside the authentic fruits of the collective imagination,” Tiziana Terranova argues in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” “it seems more reasonable to think of cultural flows as originating within a field that is always and already capitalism.”6 Likewise, memes—even when produced by Black users—cannot be viewed as objects that once authentically circulated in Black circles for the enjoyment of the Black collective but instead are always already compromised by the looming presence of the corporate, the capitalist.
As such, the meme will probably never manifest Blackness in a traceable form such that it might be fully claimed by the Black cultural body. The Internet, which was advertised as a way to free us from our bodies, has merely confused our limits and identifications, providing just enough flexibility to, in artist Keith Townsend Obadike’s words,7 “make the same old burnt cork blackface routine easier.” Admittedly, it is difficult by contrast to mobilize the Blackness of memes toward any sort of liberatory politics—to take it past essays like this one that just tease out these relationships. The meme’s structure is at once its potential energy, its possibility, and its limit. That is, the very properties that make the meme Black make it seemingly impossible for Black people to protect it, let alone benefit from it.
I wonder if memes can guide us toward post-representational, post-identity politics, answering Fred Moten’s call in “Black Optimism/Black Operation” for an analytic that moves in and out of the shadows, “that moves through the opposition of voluntary secrecy and forced exposure.” What we need, he writes, “is some way to understand how the underground operates out in the open.”8 The meme moves so quickly and unpredictably as to establish a state(lessness?), a lack of fixity that might be able to confront our simultaneous desire for visibility and awareness of the violence it brings. It sustains an appearance of individuality (“it me”) while being wholly deindividuated (“same“).
The meme’s success is just this: its reach and its rarity; its ability to snake through the underground only to reemerge and mutate; its continued operations of hiding, incubating, and exposing Black cultural elements. As an object lesson, the meme teaches a queer body politic, an Afro-pessimistic, Black accelerationist approach to rendering oneself and rendering and rendering and rendering and rendering and rendering. (I use the word “accelerationist” with caution.) We have long been digital, “compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed” across time and space. For Blackness, the meme could be a way of further figuring an existence that spills over the bounds of the body, a homecoming into our homelessness.
1. Duggan, Maeve. “The Demographics of Social Media Users,” Pew Research Center, August 19, 2015. pewinternet.org/2015/08/19/the-demographics-of-social-media-users/.
2. St. Félix, Doreen. “Black Teens Are Breaking the Internet and Seeing None of the Profits,” The Fader, December 3, 2015. thefader.com/2015/12/03/on-fleek-peaches-monroee-meechie-viral-vines.
3. Jackson, Laur M. “The Blackness of Meme Movement,” Model View Culture, March 28, 2016. modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-blackness-of-meme-movement.
4. Silentó. “Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) (Official Music Video),” YouTube, uploaded by SilentoVEVO, June 25, 2015. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjW8wmF5VWc.
5. abreu, manuel arturo. “Online Imagined Black English,” Arachne, fall 2015. arachne.cc/issues/01/online-imagined_manuel-arturo-abreu.html. (See also page 318, where this piece is excerpted.)
6. Terranova, Tiziana. “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text, summer 2000. muse.jhu.edu/article/31873.
7. Fusco, Coco and Keith Obadike. “All Too Real The Tale of an On-Line Black Sale,” Black Net Art, September 24, 2001. blacknetart.com/coco.html.
8. Moten, Fred. “Black Optimism/Black Operation,” unpublished paper on file with the author, October 19, 2007. doubleoperative.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/moten-black-optimism_black-operation.pdf.
DEAN