Can we call Bad Luck Brian an epic figure?
For sure, memes, or at least the personas they possess, present something of a gestic form that performs a social function beyond their cultural place... a frivolous, amateur image generation and sharing. At some level they represent far more serious epic value, one that reflects on alienation as a form of cultural capital. In fact, it could be said that memes, and especially memes that present personas, perform as a set of social relations rather than stand-alone images.

This ambiguity seems crucial to the valence of image macros in particular.

The simultaneity plays into what we are here calling the epic. Indeed, as a form of alienation capital, any given image macro does not, cannot stand alone. There is no stand alone image in this context, as there is no definable original; rather, memes, as memes rather than any single image macro are a form of currency where the object is only a token of a value, or valuation.

In this regard, we could say they are tokens for social relations but it would perhaps be a mistake to look purely at the object rather than how it circulates. We could say that the image macro is an object but the meme, represented through the image macro has no object.

Bad Luck Brian seems a good place to start in this regard. Let’s consider who Bad Luck Brian is… The goofy grin, the braces, the sweater vest, the bad haircut together make up a definable, recognizable social character — Bad Luck Brian is the suffering (yet oblivious to his own suffering) butt of the joke, social outcast, high school nerd, etc. Bad Luck Brian is not a person, not even a character, really; but, something of a two-dimensional, flattened (and thus epic) archetype. As such, BLB plays a role within social relations that is based on the value alienation-from. When practitioner of meme culture uses BLB it is not based as a form of reflection-of, but in the statement I-am-not. Though juvenile in its form of insult -- something like I know you are but what am I? -- it carries a potent, gestic formula with it.

We can consider the captions reinforcement for the gestic values of goofy grin, braces, sweater vest, bad haircut. They add discourse to the tableau. And, as such they are flexible but remain tied to the archetype that BLB presents.
This model could be applied to any number of memes — Overly Attached Girlfriend, Condescending Wonka, Scumbag Steve, etc.

The user of these memes is not making an overt self-reflexive statement through their use; rather, they are distancing themselves from the archetype presented. That said, we cannot deny that the user is making value judgements through their use, and by way of this making philosophical, social, if not ideological statements. Their value is increased through a concise, or coherent application of the archetype — which is to say they are more valuable when they successfully marginalize. This is alienation capital.

Can we distinguish what the meme says from what the meme user says — the gestic matrix of medium & individual meme from the rhetorical gesture of the practitioner?
Also, do we have a convenient terminological way to distinguish meme-as-medium from meme-as-instance? "Meme user" does help clarify the notion that the medium is the meme, but once we understand that, we might better be able to consider a particular example (& so might want distinct terms).

Meme as a repeated, iterative performance in a network since its cultural currency is dependent on a user’s successful recognition of the meme’s established codes and its differences from similar, previous manifestations.

In this sense maybe also the user takes part in a larger formal structure — if Brian is an epic figure, the user steps into that role for a moment as s/he types the header and footer text (or thinks through Brian while composing). But no user believes s/he is Brian (which is consistent with Brechtian epic theater), so the not-Brian-ness of the user is there even if s/he does not marginalize — and instead empathizes with — the archetype. In any case the user passes through the epic as s/he speaks (or gestures) through the macro. And here I’m not only referring to a self-reflective critical position as encouraged by Brechtian theater. I’m also using epic to suggest scale — the difference in/and relation between a) the individual user experience of reiterating and inflecting the image macro and b) the sum iterations of the macro. Here’s where we need to extend the Brecht reference to account for the difference between the theater context and the meme context. We don’t just witness drama that asks us to move beyond identification with characters to self-reflection and critical awareness. For an elusive moment we act in the play by writing into the macro. And when we do so, we find ourselves plugged into the circuit, or at least we pass through its energy field. To the extent that we speak of or as Brian for a moment, we speak of or as or into the current of every Brian, or The Brian. And it’s every bit as alienating and disorienting as it could be (but isn’t) spiritually transcendent (in the sense of achieving Oneness with all that is and are Brian—too much static, too much distance, too many versions, too much surface). Nor am I pining for such transcendence, which would be the absence of difference and relation. So this is maybe the Memetic Epic.

To loop back around and lace these two clusters: It seems like on the one hand there’s the meme-as-medium that operates through but also beyond any particular iteration, but this prompt also suggests that there is user-driven content, or a subject position related to the user—his or her attitude toward the BLB archetype. Maybe this is another type of alienation. Not only does the BLB image macro present a constitutive outside (the user is not-Brian), but the meme operates outside that relation: it doesn’t need to be expressive of a particular subjectivity, even while that generic subjectivity is negatively defined.
By the way, “the user” here is also a term of alienation, in that the meme-user relation might describe the attitude (and/or gesture) of the person who generated a particular iteration of a meme, but it simultaneously describes (other) consumers of the meme.

Who is the user of the meme in this?

They are using/performing them in a very different sense/way (the normal use of use, applying them to an end, this one being to get youtube hits and promote BLB’s new channel and performing by acting out a little mini movie) than the term is being used in this discussion, but their kind of use (direct, individual goal focused) only could happen because of other’s use (collective, social) of themselves (or at least their images).

Not only cultural capital, but REAL capital… especially in regards to the two memes in question here - BLB and OAG

Is Laina Morris OAG, or is she conflating herself with OAG in the video based on the fact that her face is the image in the image macro?

This is very specific though, which makes it not a meme in the creative sense… though, the video may go viral (which might make it a meme), and it does comment on the memes by using the actual people used as figures in the memes, the people here, as actors of the characters they have had applied to them by others, are not memes.

These quasi-examples: meme-oids, demi-gestic, epi-epic, etc are helpful to my own process of figuring out what is and isn’t a trace of the gestic/epic in memes, identifying not hard edges finding where the murky grey areas are.Hopefully not muddling the issue unnecessarily for others.

Perhaps there is no meme itself. It cannot seemingly divest from expressive intent because the intentionality is outside of any given writer. And, this in and of itself is part of the gestic formula.

Typing in parallel to OAG so they may answer this before I finish asking it, but with IW the mere choice of going for IW instead of Courage Wolf already puts you into a frame reacting to CW,baby CW, etc so is IW the shadow of CW who is still the shadow of the internet’s shadow? Also since we’re being all Brechtian here is this shadow adolescent shenanigans and toilet humor a form of Spass?

I think this social relation between various memes and families and sub-species of them (image macro in general < advice animal < one of the *-wolves < Insanity Wolf) that most strongly (at least to my limited understanding of) Brecht’s idea of Gestus and thus could allow any meme character such as Bad Luck Brian, to be considered Epic in a Brechtian sense. Just as the person who happened to get their image used isn’t the meme, the image itself isn’t the meme either. And possibly not even the use that the image is put to makes it a meme but its relation to other memes (which are all just relations to other memes, and it’s “I LIKE TURTLES!” all the way down from there.)? Or I guess actually, it’s not that Bad Luck Brian is an Epic figure but he is used Epically in ways that just some random unfortunate yearbook photo couldn’t be without the uses, reuses, misuses, recuperations, subversions, etc that created/transformed BLB into BLB.
This use of uses is what I think separates the meme from the “viral image”.

An example would be Grumpy Cat (which despite massive amounts of straightforward use to sell books and such still gets used in this hard to pin down gestic/epic sense) vs Lil Bub/Maru/other famous internet cats. It’s not the duplication of their image on the internet. Or even that they can come to stand for some symbolic meaning (Example: Lil’ Bub’s appearance in this music video has symbolic meaning that draws on the cat’s internet fame for being adored for being adorably deformed. But I don’t think she counts as a meme in the same way Grumpy Cat does.)

but this use in relation to other uses, not just of the individual image macro, but of all the possible image macros’ uses. For something to be gestic it has to be part of a set of relations. (still not 100% convinced that ‘to be a meme is to be gestic’ but definitely can see cases where memes can be gestic in ways that many other products of “internet culture”, whatever that means, tend not to be.)

Just yesterday, I finished a first-reading of Gregory Ulmer’s article, “Flash Reason,” in which he begins to work out form of reasoning directly applicable to this discussion. In the final section of the article, Ulmer discusses the Duchamp-ian readymade as a response to the industrial revolution (of which memes might be considered a contemporary consequence) that presents “an act of pure [and reflective] judgment” putting “the maker in the position of spectator, whose reception produces art. This act is the operator of electrate hypotyposis [the turning of a narration or description into an image, a tableau, or even a living scene]. That most readymades are commodities, commercial objects, is an important part of the invention, demonstrating that electrate authoring shifts to a meta-level, taking as the material of its discourse the commodity-information sphere” (16). Ulmer’s focus is to develop a manner (or Tautegorical mode) of engaging in the decision-making scope of deliberative rhetoric in the moment of “Now” - considered a “hinge” between that has been and what will be; for Ulmer, the experimental avant-garde arts provide the best model for developing this mode.

Ulmer’s work on electracy recognizes the struggle in this “apparatus shift” that he sees as analogous to the difficulty of “a religious worldview” has “in knowing what to do with science.” The meme - in this case gestic and epic - is the Y-switching mechanism in this shift; in this case, and as we noted above, this type of meme depends on stereotypes to function, but instead of functioning to reinforce stereotypes, they employ them as part of the switching mechanism in which memers resemble avant-garde artists working with specific constraints.
We wonder if the “meme,” whether a thing in itself or not, functions as a readymade, not to offer an “intended meaning,” but a performative critique in the way that Duchamp performed a critique of the fine arts with The Fountain. Or, by example >>>>> Could we consider Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q as a prototype for critically thinking about memes as a form of alienation capital and gestic play in the pursuit of a deliberative rhetoric for networked cultures, and even the rhetorical ecologies (cf. Jenny Edbauer Rice, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situations to Rhetorical Ecologies”) of their distribution, and the writerly additions that transform those memes through their circulation?
In terms of a gestic formula, might we apply Duchamp’s “bachelor machine,” which “ consists of two distinct realms,” the one above and the one below, “both desiring and imagining one another without any possibility of mutual comprehension” (“bachelor machine”)? In his reading of Lyotard’s reading of Duchamp’s work, Ulmer finds that “figural rhetoric abandons the ratios of proportion and slams (mashes) or imposes (superimposes) incommensurable states. The figural names the polysemy (plural) of arts practices, to compress several tracks into one, the propositional and the expressive. In the case of dreamwork, text, image, and form are guided not by mimesis but by the libidinal energy of desire and denial” (12). To approach memes critically, the gestic formula might be guided by the image as proposition with the text as expressive superimposed to indicate a specific inner mood (the writer’s intention). Ulmer continues, this time on Thierry de Duve’s reading of Duchamp: “Duchamp’s invention of the readymade establishes its importance as a relay for the new prudence [time-wisdom, a capacity to make an appropriate decision in an instant of time by taking the measure of a particular situation in its temporal context] - as an electrate deliberative rhetoric. What becomes clear in de Duve’s account is that the readymade is not an ‘object’ but an action, a statement in discourse, modeling how to ‘write’ in electracy” (14). Applying the same (bachelor) logic to memes, we might say that the significance of meme cultures has little to do with the meme itself (if it exists at all) and more with the action that it suggest--a cobbling together of a historical image with a contemporary understanding of that image to suggest a future course of action in the deliberative back-and-forth (dissoi-logoi) of sophistic rhetorical techniques. Memes as gestic dialogue? Embodying attitudes in deliberations? Perhaps, the readymade joins with Bertolt Brecht’s theatrical technique of gestus, carrying “at least two distinct meanings[...:] first, the uncovering or revealing of the motivations and transactions that underpin a dramatic exchange between the characters [the image, the writer, and the superimposed text]; and second, the ‘epic’ narration [the textual re-framing] of that character [the image] by the actor [the writer]” (“Gestus”).

I would argue that memes are about timeliness at a rhetorical level. This plays into their use value as gestic performances. They are perhaps utterances rather than objects, and form sets of idioms. I think it would be difficult to argue that memes appear timeless. As device they may be consistent, but as utterance they are ephemeral.

I was just thinking about the iterative as internal to any given meme, that it perpetuates itself, and a sort of Grand Iterativity in which any given (or every) meme participates. If we still want to think of MEME as an object, such as a specific image macro, or a specific iteration of captions, or a specific documentation of a specific action, then we exclude the Grand Iterativity of the method -- which is in no way exclusively of the Internet, and in no way tied to digital objects… This is one reason I insist upon looking at memes as a set of social relations, a collection or rhetorical conditions (perhaps) that we can examine through the “meme” as object. I supposed it is a micro-macro thing, but if we step away from the artifacts, and look at the narratives in which they participate we might see that memes, as a construct, as phenomena are as old as human language. In this case we could start to consider how, in a more general sense “the phenomena” is gestic and the “narratives” are epic.

Yesterday’s (forgotten) meme can become today’s web phenom if it gets recirculated, like the debunked internet rumor coming back to haunt us through the people who didn’t catch (on to) it the first time (or last time].

More of a coming back around—when bellbottoms come back, they aren’t made new (though more are made), even though lots of people who wear them weren’t hip to them last time around.

This issue of ‘re-circulation’ sounds a like Jenny Edbauer’s (Rice) description of exigence as “a shorthand way of describing a series of events” (“Unframing” 8), which she uses to argue for “a framework of affective ecologies” that theorizes “a circulating ecology of effects, enactments, and events by shifting lines of focus from rhetorical situation to rhetorical ecologies” (9). The three primary elements of understanding rhetorical ecologies, in this framework, looks at the (1) distribution, (2) circulation, and (3) additions to a given artifact.

The meme, as continuous performance in the web-network, is an ecology (or ecologies) that exist(s) in relation to other memes. While we might treat BLB as an event, we might also consider the meme’s relation other memes in the meta-ecologies of memes (see the Google search image below, “bad luck brain and overly attached girlfriend”).

The first BLB post to reddit got less than 5 upvotes, so our topic of discussion is a particularly good example of the lag in uptake mentioned above. I would add that this spin-off aspect is vital and often borrows from multiple sources, gene pools need mutations and out breeding to not stagnate, same for memes. Longcat shares ancestry with ‘Hang In there baby’, but isn’t just an instance of it.

Laina Morris and Kyle Craven have nothing to do with their becoming memes, other than the appropriation of their likenesses. So, more likely, and there is evidence to this -- since they have both made substantial amounts of money of their likenesses being behind the figure present in the given memes -- this is a move toward true capital rather than the perpetuation of alienation capital. To a certain extent, one could say this move is neither gestic nor epic, but desperate.

Which I would say are memes.

I had to look up hunkering. “A respite from a world of turmoil. The main purpose of hunkerin' is to get down and hunker together. It's a friendship thing: get your friends to hunker with you. The man you don't know is the man you haven't hunkered with”--this quote alone suggests to me that hunkering was simultaneously epic and gestic. A meme of Man against The Man in the vein of ‘Hang in there baby,’ mentioned above.

I might have accidentally gotten closer to something I've been trying to say: There's a depth of surface to image macros that is anything but superficial.

Forgot to bring my pencil to the pencil fight: EPIC FAIL!


There’s always next time, Brian.