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Can The Left Meme?

According to a popular right-wing meme: no; according to the thousand some accounts I follow on Twitter: yes; and according to my degenerate brain’s limited grasp of dialectical Marxist theory? Yes, but also no, but maybe we should–unless . . . we shouldn’t? Who to believe? Let’s investigate.

Anatomy of a Meme

Be advised: it’s time to take things that are fun and make them no fun. We’ll be following the lead of canonical no-fun-havers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their work Dialectic of Enlightenment, which takes something that you probably knew was bad but enjoyed anyways—Hollywood—and reassures you: this is bad. They do this in the fourth essay, “The Culture Industry,” but the spicier stuff happens in the first essay, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” where they take something you might actually think is good—the Enlightenment—and show you that it’s fascism.

Before we start calling things fascist, it might help to know what a meme is. I think most people understand a meme as a thing that gets spread between a lot of people, sometimes with tweaks. We’ll be talking about Internet memes, specifically, which are usually jokes that get repeated a bunch of times online, sometimes with tweaks. Maybe we should look at some examples.

Here’s one. Take a look at Figure 1, which has a group of what meme encyclopedia Know Your Meme calls the “Expanding Brain,” or “Galaxy Brain,” meme.

Figure 1: Examples of the galaxy brain meme.

Here’s how the joke works: ideas are arranged in a hierarchy from worst to best—the better the idea, the more galactic the brain. Usually the hierarchy is ironic, and the ideas actually go best to worst, but the idea is basically the same. So here’s the start of a galaxy brain idea: what if instead of seeing this meme as a visual artifact, like a piece of art, we saw it as an externalized thought process, like a mathematical formula? Normally when you assess ideas, you have to do the hard work of comparing A to B, B to C, A to C, etc. etc. until you can line them all up yourself. But here, you, the viewer, think through the meme; as in a mathematical expression, the relationship between the values is pre-determined, you simply substitute the relevant content in. All the thinking has been done for you. As it turns out, this is true enough that once you’re sufficiently Online, you can bypass the visuals altogether and just tweet something like “galaxy brain take: the Enlightenment is fascist” and other sufficiently Online people will know to read your take a certain way.

A tricky thing about the word meme is that both the images in Figure 1 and the general class of images they’re a part of are referred to as “a meme.” But they’re not the same thing, so it’d be nice if we had a way of distinguishing the two. Should we try an obtuse exegesis of the meme form? Let’s.

Figure 2 has a (100% organic, homemade) example of what is sometimes called a “Label Meme.”

Figure 2: An example of a label meme

It’s a joke about Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Concept of Enlightenment.” The Enlightenment was supposed to free us from myths but instead it reproduced them, just like this man is supposed to be looking at his girlfriend but instead is looking at the girl in red—ha, ha. This meme is functioning as a visual analogy, or maybe . . . visual metaphor? Who can say—the point is it that it’s equating two things: labels and image.

Simple enough. Except maybe jokes about Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Concept of Enlightenment” aren’t really your thing. But you see that this image has great comedic potential. So you create a new meme, Figure 3.

Figure 3: Another example of a label meme.

Excellent, you think, a joke about Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry.” Now someone else sees my meme and your meme and thinks, well, jokes about essays 1 and 4 of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment aren’t really my thing, but I can think of a few other things that might make this image realize its great comedic potential. So they make a few memes, other people see those memes, make some more, so on and so forth.

Now we have a bunch of Distracted Boyfriend memes, so many that now the template itself has taken on a life of its own and become a meme (as evidenced by its capitalization and concurrent Know Your Meme page). Here’s a big question: is there an equality relationship between the content of your meme, my meme, and all the rest of the Distracted Boyfriend memes? Remember we said that one meme was equating two things, A (the labels) to B (the image). And if the next meme is equating C (new labels) to B (same image), and the one after that D (new new labels) to B (same same image), then A, C, and D should all share something in common: namely, that they can be expressed through B, the Distracted Boyfriend meme. This means we can abstract them all into the same organizing structure (the same “meme”). Here, that structure is: something, the thing it should X, the thing it’s actually X-ing. Like with the Galaxy Brain, let’s think about this like a mathematical expression we can use to relate content; the relationship between the variables doesn’t change, although the values of the variables might. In fact, we can have two contradicting versions of the meme. Try this at home: make the distracted boyfriend say “the youth,” one girl say “communism,” and the other girl say “capitalism;” then reverse them. Uh oh. Are we being deceived by top-down thinking?

Let’s get retro and find out. So far we’ve been looking at memes (expressions?) that relate multiple things; would you believe they can modify singular things too? Figure 4 has a collection of four “Advice Animal” memes. Each animal has its own distinct character: there’s Foul Bachelor Frog, whose “captions often depict lazy, disgusting and hedonistic behaviors associated with single men;” Foul Bachelorette Frog, the female equivalent, whose “overlaid text typically frames her as being unhygienic, lazy, and jobless;” Actual Advice Mallard, a duck “accompanied by captions containing life hacks and other useful information;” and Insanity Wolf, who “encourages people to overcome life’s obstacles” via “acts of insanity.” Like with the Galaxy Brain and Distracted Boyfriend, each of these memes gives us a formula, or conceptual frame, through which to read the meme’s content: whether it’s gross and male, gross and female, sound advice, or just insane, here we’re forced to read the same action—using soap instead of shampoo—through four distinct formulas, resulting in four distinct perceptions.

Figure 4: Examples of various Advice Animal memes.

The same basic thing is happening in these examples: we have some concept (e.g. our bachelor frog) and some particular (e.g. using soap instead of shampoo), and we read the particular through the concept.

Things are starting to look clear, so let’s throw some Hegel into the mix. He’s got an essay called “Who Thinks Abstractly?” in which he gives this example of abstract thinking: a woman selling eggs has just been told by a maid that her eggs are rotten; furious, the market woman proceeds to roast the ever-living shit out of the maid, picking her apart one trait at a time—in Hegel’s words: “She thinks abstractly and subsumes the other woman — scarf, hat, shirt, etc., as well as her fingers and other parts of her, and her father and whole family, too — solely under the crime that she has found the eggs rotten. Everything about her is colored through and through by these rotten eggs.” Put a little more succinctly: to think abstractly is to look at someone you know to be a murderer and “to see nothing in the murderer except the abstract fact that he is a murderer, and to annul all other human essence in him with this simple quality.”

When you think with memes, you think abstractly. Would you like to see an example of a meme subsuming particulars and annulling human essence into a simple quality? Here’s one: the “starter pack” (Figure 5). This meme takes a specific category of person, behavior, experience, etc. and represents it as the sum of a group of particular images. It’s abstraction, basically: the assortment of particulars we see in the images is subsumed into a single idea which we can easily manipulate by folding it into whatever value system we hold. DSA bros have a human essence, and now you can annul it when you see someone wearing certain clothes and vaping, and think “there’s a DSA bro.” This is just stereotyping, but stereotyping is just abstract thought. I’m sure you can think of more than a few -isms and -phobias that involve annulling the human essence of a person into some simple quality about them, perhaps of the demographic variety. Maybe there’s a deeper reason that The Right and memes make such a match.

Figure 5: A starter pack.

But we can’t go calling things fascist quite yet. First we need to show that we read books.

Memetics of Enlightenment

So memes work by abstraction, maybe. And abstraction, say Adorno and Horkheimer, is the “instrument of Enlightenment.” What does Enlightenment use this instrument for? Well according to A and H, “Enlightenment’s program was the disenchantment of the world. It wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.” But it wants more than just knowledge. The Enlightenment dream is “the world as a gigantic analytical judgement,” its “ideal is the system from which everything and anything follows.” It wants a big system of formulas, basically, that we could look back to whenever we run into a problem and already know the solution; but the thing about formulas is that they need abstractions to work in more than one place. So to achieve its dreams, Enlightenment thought had to make “dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities,” and thus “nature, stripped of qualities, became[] the chaotic stuff of mere classification.”

We saw that starter packs make people the chaotic stuff of mere classification. And with our breakdown of the Distracted Boyfriend meme, we saw that memes make dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities. Remember how each instance of the Distracted Boyfriend meme was unified insofar as it was an instance of the Distracted Boyfriend meme, expressed by the same overriding structure? Check this out: in the Enlightenment system, “whatever might be different is made the same. That is the verdict which critically sets the boundaries to possible experience. The identity of everything with everything is bought at the cost that nothing can at the same time be identical to itself.” When you turn something into a meme, all of a sudden, it loses its complete identity with itself, and gains an identity with every other version of that meme—sort of like when you assign a monetary value to a commodity, and it becomes comparable to every other commodity because its essence is annulled into the simple quantity of price. Remember that a meme’s only a meme if it’s viral, so maybe we should just think about it like a virus: infecting the host, hijacking its identity, and turning it into an instantiation of itself—abstraction for abstraction’s sake.

But there are consequences. What does endless abstraction mean for the boundaries of possible experience? We can make memes out of novel content, but all we’re really saying is that the content isn’t so novel. We’re exposing something new (novel content) as something old (meme structure). Surprise! This is myth, what Enlightenment set out to destroy:

“The principle of immanence, the explanation of every event as repetition which enlightenment upholds against mythical imagination, is that of myth itself. The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played out, all the great thoughts have been thought, all possible discoveries can be construed in advance, and human beings are defined by self-preservation through adaptation—this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was.”

A meme is, almost by definition, saying that every event it represents is repetition—a repetition of the general organizing structure, a repetition of the meme. Now think about the starter pack and what it says about the individuality of the people it represents. Same idea. This is bad, because according to our friends, “the regression of the masses today lies in their inability to hear with their own ears what has not already been heard, to touch with their hands what has not previously been grasped; it is the new form of blindness which supersedes that of vanquished myth.”

Let’s go one step further. When we make things into memes, we classify them into predetermined abstractions; and once something is a familiar abstraction, we already know how to think about it. In the Enlightenment world, when you’ve identified something as “an object falling through the air” you have a suite of predetermined formulas that tell you how to think about that object. This is why “enlightenment is totalitarian as only a system can be. Its untruth does not lie in the analytical method, the reduction to elements, the decomposition through reflection, as its Romantic enemies had maintained from the first, but in its assumption that the trial is pre-judged.” This is myth again. It’s also what allows for that Enlightenment dream, the giant analytical system that, once fully discovered, would require no real thinking—in other words, the automation of thought: “Thought is reified as an autonomous, automatic process, aping the machine it has itself produced, so that it can finally be replaced by the machine.” And so “the concept is replaced by the formula, the cause by rules and probability” and at last, we enter “the absurdity of a state of affairs in which the power of the system over human beings increases with every step they take away from the power of nature,” which “denounces the reason of the reasonable society as obsolete.”

So,



Galaxy Brain Take #1: memetic thought is automatic thought is Enlightenment thought, exploded.

I hope it’s clear so far how the kind of thinking embodied by memes is the same automatic thinking that Adorno and Horkheimer are criticizing. You think abstractly using formulas that have predetermined results—but you don’t really think, since there’s no real thinking in running formulas. Likewise, a meme does well if you can use it in many different situations; and by using it in many different situations, you’re affirming that they’re all actually the same situation—and that’s myth, baby! Taken together, it seems like memes embody some key features of the Enlightenment. But what’s not clear, to me anyways, is that memes form a system in the same way Enlightenment does, hence the explosion. Memes are like little Enlightenment shards, presumably the shrapnel that came when the evil postmodern cultural Marxists blew Enlightenment sky high (or whatever it is The Right thinks happened).

Why does this matter, you might be thinking, and also: where’s the fascism? Well let’s go back to where we were a paragraph ago. We had just given up power to the Enlightenment system. Giving up power to the Enlightenment system isn’t such a big deal when you’re just thinking about things falling through the air. But it turns out humans don’t just contemplate, sometimes they also do things; and sometimes they even do things based on their contemplating. Do you agree with the claim that “what human beings seek to learn from nature is how to use it to dominate wholly both it and human beings”? I know a few scientists who wouldn’t, but I also know of a few human beings who have dominated nature and other human beings using science. So let’s run with it for now, and wonder: what happens with the “the expulsion of thought from logic”?

“By sacrificing thought,” say Adorno and Horkheimer, “which in its reified form as mathematics, machinery, organization, avenges itself on a humanity forgetful of it, enlightenment forfeited its own realization.” Instead of liberation, we got fascism. Of course, before fascism we had chattel slavery and settler colonialism, so I think Enlightenment had forfeited its own realization long before then, but Adorno and Horkheimer, two Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany writing in the early 40s, were focused on their present: “What we had set out to do was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism,” they write in the preface. And what they found was “that the very concept of [Enlightenment thinking], no less than the concrete historical forms, the institutions of society with which it is intertwined, already contains the germ of the regression which is taking place everywhere today.”

Here’s a big quote:

“Enlightenment dissolves away the injustice of the old inequality of unmediated mastery, but at the same time perpetuates it in universal mediation, by relating every existing thing to every other…Not merely are qualities dissolved in thought, but human beings are forced into real conformity. The blessing that the market does not ask about birth is paid for in the exchange society by the fact that the possibilities conferred by birth are molded to fit the production of goods that can be bought on the market. Each human being has been endowed with a self of his or her own, different from all others, so that it could all the more surely be made the same. But because that self never quite fitted the mold, enlightenment throughout the liberalistic period has always sympathized with social coercion. The unity of the manipulated collective consists in the negation of each individual and in the scorn poured on the type of society which could make people into individuals. The horde, a term which doubtless is to be found in the Hitler Youth organization, is not a relapse into the old barbarism but the triumph of repressive égalité, the degeneration of the equality of rights into the wrong inflicted by equals. The fake myth of fascism reveals itself as the genuine myth of prehistory, in that the genuine myth beheld retribution while the false one wreaks it blindly on its victims. Any attempt to break the compulsion of nature by breaking nature only succumbs more deeply to that compulsion. That has been the trajectory of European civilization. Abstraction, the instrument of enlightenment, stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate, whose concept it eradicates: as liquidation. Under the leveling rule of abstraction, which makes everything in nature repeatable, and of industry, for which abstraction prepared the way, the liberated finally themselves become the “herd” (Trupp), which Hegel identified as the outcome of Enlightenment.”

So what’s a girl to think? Abstraction contains the germ of repression? Memes are founded on abstraction? Thus memes negate the individual? Memes scorn the individual? Memes liquidate their objects? What if their objects are people? Do memes liquidate those people? Is the leveling rule of memes making us into the Hegelian herd? What’s this herd, anyways? Is that code for fascists? Are memes making us fascists? So memes are bad? Does this mean . . . no 😱more 😱memes?

But moooooooooooooooooooooooom, you think, I like memes! There are good memes! Leftist memes! Memes that tell you not to be a fascist. And also: how are we going to have any sort of thought that doesn’t use abstraction, I mean the whole idea of “human essence” you/Hegel used to define abstraction is abstraction. Also, um, hello??? Marxism uses abstraction? Class struggle? That’s an abstraction. The means of production? That’s an abstraction too. Proletariat and bourgeoisie? That’s two abstractions. And besides abstraction is good because it gave us science. And science is good, it gave us computers. And computers gave us memes. Anyways, this is dumb, critical theory is dumb, I just re-read the intro to Dialectic of Enlightenment and realized that you’re dumb, because if you could read you’d see that right before Adorno and Horkheimer say that Enlightenment contains the germ of repression, they also say that Enlightenment is good, actually? just not this Enlightenment: “We have no doubt—and therein lies our petitio principii—that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking. We believe we have perceived with equal clarity, however, that [it contains the germ of repression].” So obviously not only CAN The Left use the Enlightenment (and thus memes), The Left SHOULD use the Enlightenment (and thus memes) because Adorkheimer says “the instruments of power—language, weapons, and finally machines—which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone,” which means we have to seize the memes and make them our own, you imbecile, you fucking moron.

Ok ok good points. Let’s get weird.

Negative Dialectics and Galaxy Brain Formalism

We’ve seen some compelling arguments that abstraction is bad. But then we remembered that sometimes abstraction is good. One thing we haven’t actually seen yet is the form of thought Adorno and Horkheimer suggest in place of automatic, Enlightenment thinking.

Let’s do that now. “Knowledge,” they tell us, “does not consist in mere perception, classification, and calculation but precisely in the determining negation of whatever is at hand.” Determinate negation is something Hegel came up with; I don’t really understand Hegel, but I think the idea is that when we negate something determinately, we don’t just say no and banish it from our sight, but instead suggest something new through our negation of its specific features. In fancier Adorno and Horkheimer speak:

“Unlike rigorism, determinate negation does not simply reject imperfect representations of the absolute, idols, by confronting them with the idea that they are unable to match. Rather, dialectic discloses each image as script. It teaches us to read from its features the admission of falseness which cancels its power and hands it over to truth. Language thereby becomes more than a mere system of signs. With the concept of determinate negation Hegel gave prominence to an element which distinguishes enlightenment from the positivist decay to which he consigned it. However, by finally postulating the known result of the whole process of negation, totality in the system and in history, as the absolute, he violated the prohibition and himself succumbed to mythology.”

The positivist decay they’re talking about is that pre-destined, mythic quality of Enlightenment we saw earlier, the assumption that the trial is always pre-judged. A real dialectic, it turns out, doesn’t suggest a pre-destined endgame, but proceeds through a series of endless, determinate negations. Here’s my favorite quote from Dialectic of Enlightenment: “Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.” A good way to do violence to yourself is through a series of endless, determinate negations—i.e., through dialectics.

In fact, this kind of dialectics has a name. It’s called negative dialectics, and you can read about in Adorno’s book Negative Dialectics (1966). There, you’ll learn that “the name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder…It indicates the untruth of identity, the fact that the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived.”

An easy way to see this is with the starter pack. Remember our DSA bro (Figure 5)? If we were to run into one of these people in public, do we think the idea of a “DSA bro” would exhaust them? Could we so easily erase the depths of their humanity, the complexities of their soul, the multitudes they contain, and the contradictions they hold all beneath one aggressively decorated jean jacket? It’s true that this identity is untrue, but it’s also true that “the appearance of identity is inherent in thought itself, in its pure form. To think is to identify.” We might choose an abstraction slightly more robust than DSA bro, but even at a base level, to identify this person as anything other than the specific collection of individual atoms that comprise them—that is, to see them at the concept level—we need to abstract them. The idea of a human is an abstraction. So’s the idea of an atom. But remember, in this house we negate determinately. We can’t just banish the idea of a concept from our sight and reject abstraction wholesale; we have to accept the seemingly contradicting truths that concepts will never exhaust the things they’re conceiving and that we still have to use them: “Dialectics,” says Adorno, “is the consistent sense of nonidentity.”

So far we’ve got two types of thought. There’s the mechanical/positivist Enlightenment thought, in which knowledge consists in mere perception, classification, and calculation, and dialectical Enlightenment thought, in which knowledge consists of determinate negation and a consistent sense of non-identity. There are other ways to think, too. To keep the comparisons simple, we’ll stick with these two for now, but if you’re well-versed in other types of thought, and in the mood, I’d love to read a critique of the ideas here (send to: theuniversityreview at gmail dot com). Anyways, I think it’s pretty clear that memes are the first type of thought, and if you know anything about Marxist thought, it’s probably pretty clear it’s the second. But we’re dialecticians now, and I think that means that everything that is is also what it isn’t, and everything that isn’t is also what it is . . . something like that? So maybe Marxism can be mechanical, and memes can be dialectical. Wouldn’t it be simpler, though, if everything was really the same thing?

Galaxy Brain Take #2: All concepts and modes of thought are forms.

It’s time to leave our boys behind and say hello to a new critic, Caroline Levine, who’s going to tell us what a form is: a “form always indicates an arrangement of elements—an ordering, patterning, or shaping.” For her, this means “all shapes and configurations, all ordering principles, all patterns of repetition and difference.” It “is the work of form to make order,” she says. This broad definition is nice because now literary critics don’t just have to write about sonnets, they can also write about jails, because jails have forms that make order (like cells and schedules). Generally, it opens up social institutions to formal, literary analysis.

But why stop ourselves there? I don’t see much reason why this kind of formal analysis shouldn’t also extend into the world of cognitive institutions. After all, what is anything metaphysical but an attempt at ordering, patterning, and shaping this messy thing called reality? For Levine, the five features of forms are that they “constrain,” “differ,” “overlap and intersect,” “travel,” and “do political work in particular contexts.” A concept (abstraction) does all of these things, too. Abstraction isn’t that much more than mental organization; and abstracting something into its essence, and disregarding the rest, isn’t that much more than isolating something’s form, and disregarding the rest.

This is an even broader definition. And if basically everything ever can be a form, you might be wondering: why does it matter that something is or isn’t a form? One answer is it doesn’t really, what matters is what a form affords, a term Levine lifts from design theory that’s “used to describe the potential uses or actions latent in materials and designs.” Just as a material or design allows you to do certain things (chair → sit, rubber → bend), so does a form.

Here’s why I think affordances is a good way to think about thoughts. One conclusion we can draw from the whole objects-don’t-go-into-concepts-without-leaving-remainders thing Adorno was talking about is that we probably aren’t ever going to have a system of thought that’s complete. In other words, that Enlightenment dream of the world as a gigantic analytical judgement is probably not going to pan out. I’ve heard there’s a math proof by Gödel that says something similar about math, and I’ve also heard that I shouldn’t misappropriate math proofs for humanities/social science points, but humans and the societies they build are a lot messier than numbers, and if the mathematicians are struggling to figure out a complete axiomatic system, chances are, we will too.

Now obviously the fact that a system can’t be completely right doesn’t mean that some can’t be more right than others. But how do we measure whether or not a system is right? Here’s an idea that’s sure to upset some people: what if instead of just thinking about what our systems of thought said, we also thought about what they did? In other words, what if instead of just thinking about the abstract truth of our systems based on our intuitions about what seems right and wrong (fake), we also thought about their politics and the realities they create (real)? In other other words, what if we thought about what systems of thought afford?

Let’s meet our next critic. His name is Karl Marx, and he wants us to know that theory “is only realized in a people as it fulfills the needs of the people.” Do people need more than a vague sense of truth? I took a quick look at all of human history and it would seem so. Then I looked at Karl Marx’s grave and it told me that “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” Neat! A whole school of thought that lines up with what I’ve been saying. I wonder what it can tell us about the meme.

Memetic Metaphysics vs. Marxist Dialectics

We’re about to talk about Marxism so Very Important Disclaimer: I haven’t read every Marxist text ever. I haven’t even finished The Marx Engels Reader. So these aren’t the pronouncements of an expert, they’re the speculations of a student. Sorry in advance if I’m saying things that have already been said—feel free to write me and let me know if and where I’m being derivative, an imbecile, a fucking moron, etc.

Anywho, Marxism! Adorno and Horkheimer were Marxists. Specifically, they were what are sometimes called Western Marixists. There are a few kinds of Marxism and they don’t always get along. From what I can tell, Marxists in The (American) Academy tend to like Western Marxists, and not like Marxist-Leninists; Marxist-Leninists tend not to like Marxists in The Academy, and have mixed-to-negative feelings about Western Marxists. Marxist-Leninist-Maoists don’t seem to like anybody, least of all, other Marxist-Leninist-Maoists. The list goes on. I don’t really understand any of this (same team!), but if you’ve figured it all out, send me a note. I would love some help. In the meantime, let’s proceed somewhat eclectically and see if we can’t get all our Marxist friends to play nice.

Quick recap: we’ve seen two ways of thinking, memetic and dialectical. It turns out we’re not the first people on Earth to figure this out. Some Marxists call this first way of thinking metaphysics, and this second way of thinking Marxism. Are you ready for some more block quotes? Are you ready for them to come from Mao? I hope so, but ready or not, here’s Mao in his essay “On Contradiction,” breaking down the metaphysical world view:

“The metaphysical or vulgar evolutionist world outlook sees things as isolated, static and one-sided. It regards all things in the universe, their forms and their species, as eternally isolated from one another and immutable. Such change as there is can only be an increase or decrease in quantity or a change of place. Moreover, the cause of such an increase or decrease or change of place is not inside things but outside them, that is, the motive force is external. Metaphysicians hold that all the different kinds of things in the universe and all their characteristics have been the same ever since they first came into being. All subsequent changes have simply been increases or decreases in quantity. They contend that a thing can only keep on repeating itself as the same kind of thing and cannot change into anything different. In their opinion, capitalist exploitation, capitalist competition, the individualist ideology of capitalist society, and so on, can all be found in ancient slave society, or even in primitive society, and will exist for ever unchanged.

This should sound familiar. These are the basic principles behind memes. You have some unchanging, static form—your meme—and everything you fit into the meme is just an instance of it. Insofar as memes want anything, it’s a change of quantity and a change of place—to be used in as many different situations as possible. Note: memes are also forms. Remember way back when, when we abstracted the Distracted Boyfriend meme into a shared organizing structure? That was a form, one that kept repeating itself; and a meme can only repeat itself as the same kind of meme; it doesn’t change.

But things change. This is the fundamental premise of the dialectical worldview. Here’s Engels, sounding pretty: “everything is and is not, for everything is fluid, is constantly changing, constantly coming into being and passing away.” This is one of the reasons that an object can never fit into a concept/abstraction/form without leaving a remainder; objects are continually changing, whereas concepts/abstractions/forms are static. That sounds like a contradiction, which as Mao’s about to tell us, are very important to dialecticians:

“As opposed to the metaphysical world outlook, the world outlook of materialist dialectics holds that in order to understand the development of a thing we should study it internally and in its relations with other things; in other words, the development of things should be seen as their internal and necessary self-movement, while each thing in its movement is interrelated with and interacts on the things around it. The fundamental cause of the development of a thing is not external but internal; it lies in the contradictoriness within the thing. There is internal contradiction in every single thing, hence its motion and development…Thus materialist dialectics effectively combats the theory of external causes, or of an external motive force, advanced by metaphysical mechanical materialism and vulgar evolutionism.”

Note this doesn’t exclude the possibility that external things influence motion:

“Does materialist dialectics exclude external causes? Not at all. It holds that external causes are the condition of change and internal causes are the basis of change, and that external causes become operative through internal causes. In a suitable temperature an egg changes into a chicken, but no temperature can change a stone into a chicken, because each has a different basis.”

Things have internal contradictions. In capitalism, for example, there’s a contradiction between the intense organization of the workplace and the intense anarchy of the market. We might resolve this contradiction by using teamwork and planning parts/all of our economy, so everyone gets what they need, and gives what they can—socialism!—and then we’d have more contradictions to find and resolve. Once you start looking for them, you’ll see them everywhere.

But focus. We have one in front of us: the contradiction between a dynamic world and a static abstraction. Is negative dialectics saying anything more than that a concept is always in contradiction with its object? As a system, or anti-system, Adorno’s dialectics seem to begin with this central contradiction between a concept and its object—between a form and its content. How do we even begin to go about resolving this one?

Mao Learns Us Some Things About Learning

To answer that question, we’re going to be quoting from Mao’s essay “On Practice,” which pretty lucidly outlines a theory of Marxist epistemology. We’ll start with a big claim: “In all class societies, the members of the different social classes also enter, in different ways, into definite relations of production and engage in production to meet their material needs. This is the primary source from which human knowledge develops.” You probably know Marxists are all about that class analysis. Did you know there’s a two word term for this? It’s historical materialism, which Engels defines as the “view of the course of history, which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.”

But what about school? Culture? Science? Mao thought about this too:

“Man’s social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms–class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man’s knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”

So a pretty obvious claim so far: we live in a society, and that society determines what we know. Here’s where things start to get spicy: “Marxists hold that man’s social practice alone is the criterion of the truth of his knowledge of the external world. What actually happens is that man’s knowledge is verified only when he achieves the anticipated results in the process of social practice (material production, class struggle or scientific experiment).” In science, this is straightforward enough: you look at reality, you come up with a theory, and you run some experiments to see that it’s true. If your experiment works, great! If not, “correct[] [your] ideas to make them correspond to the laws of the external world, and…turn failure into success.” Humanities folks: did you know that we can be scientists too? We can look at reality, come up with a theory, and then, um . . . fuck, run experiments? But what is a social theory experiment? Put our criticisms into action? Don’t we need, like, a massive state apparatus that listens to us to do that? Does that mean revolution? Are we going to have to go outside and do things? Can’t we stay in here with our books?

Doubtful. But why don’t we put a pin in that whole “doing things” thing for now and hear Mao out—we’ll come back later, I promise. So we come up with theories and run experiments and then adjust our theories and then run experiments and then adjust our theories and so on and so forth. Interesting thing: this lines up nicely with caring about what a form of thought affords. If the criteria of truth is practice, then a form of thought is only as good as its affordance. This makes sense. A social theory should only be as good as the society it produces.

A closer look at this look, theorize, test, look, theorize, test, etc. process reveals a few stages of knowledge: “the first step in the process of cognition is contact with the objects of the external world; this belongs to the stage of perception. The second step is to synthesize the data of perception by arranging and reconstructing them; this belongs to the stage of conception, judgement and inference.” In this second stage, you’re synthesizing, arranging and reconstructing—that is, organizing—the first stage’s sense data into a concept, or form, or abstraction. Earlier, you helpfully pointed out that Marxists use abstractions all the time. Ready for something trippy? Lenin actually says “the abstraction of matter, of a law of nature, the abstraction of value, etc., in short, all scientific (correct, serious, not absurd) abstractions reflect nature more deeply, truly and completely.”

Don’t freak out! Abstractions are still bad on their own. They’re only good when they’re a part of this dialectical knowledge process: all the pieces matter. “Anyone who thinks that rational knowledge need not be derived from perceptual knowledge is an idealist,” Mao tells us, “In the history of philosophy there is the “rationalist” school that admits the reality only of reason and not of experience, believing that reason alone is reliable while perceptual experience is not; this school errs by turning things upside down.” On the flip side, “to think that knowledge can stop at the lower, perceptual stage and that perceptual knowledge alone is reliable while rational knowledge is not, would be to repeat the historical error of “empiricism”. This theory errs in failing to understand that, although the data of perception reflect certain realities in the objective world…they are merely one-sided and superficial, reflecting things incompletely and not reflecting their essence.” In short, we have to dialectically oppose sense knowledge on the one hand, and abstract knowledge on the other: “Rational knowledge depends upon perceptual knowledge and perceptual knowledge remains to be developed into rational knowledge—this is the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge.”

But it doesn’t stop there:

“If the dialectical-materialist movement of knowledge were to stop at rational knowledge, only half the problem would be dealt with. And as far as Marxist philosophy is concerned, only the less important half at that. Marxist philosophy holds that the most important problem does not lie in understanding the laws of the objective world and thus being able to explain it, but in applying the knowledge of these laws actively to change the world.”

We’re back at doing things again. But this seems like a good solution to the contradiction we laid out right before this section. Instead of being afraid of the fact that things are always changing, and thus our theories will always be going hopelessly out of date, what if we oriented our theories to embrace this fact? Historical materialism does this. Like Marx says, “mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the task itself always arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.” As the material conditions change, so do the problems—and the solutions. So if you embrace the contingency inherent in historical materialism, the dynamism of dialectics, and Marx/Mao’s insistence that you solve problems, rather than just understand them, then you come to realize that solving your problems will always create new ones and thus outdate your theory.

In other words, if the goal of our theory is to change the thing it’s theorizing, and the thing it’s theorizing ultimately determines the theory, then our theory is necessarily sowing the seeds of its own destruction. And what better way to realize that beautiful Adorkheimer quote: “Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myths.”

Of course, things don’t always shake out perfectly. As Mao tells us, “generally speaking, whether in the practice of changing nature or of changing society, men’s original ideas, theories, plans or programmes are seldom realized without any alteration. This is because people engaged in changing reality are usually subject to numerous limitations,” whether they be political, technological, or even conceptual. But that’s fine. We just keep negating determinately:

“Discover the truth through practice, and again through practice verify and develop the truth. Start from perceptual knowledge and actively develop it into rational knowledge; then start from rational knowledge and actively guide revolutionary practice to change both the subjective and the objective world. Practice, knowledge, again practice, and again knowledge. This form repeats itself in endless cycles, and with each cycle the content of practice and knowledge rises to a higher level. Such is the whole of the dialectical-materialist theory of knowledge, and such is the dialectical-materialist theory of the unity of knowing and doing.”

So now we’ve sketched out some basic tenets of some kind of Marxism. Now the question is: can it meme?

Myths, Memes, Marxist Dogmatism

We’re back where we started: Can the Left Meme? Theoretically speaking, I think we’ve seen enough to guess that The Left—here, narrowly defined as Marxists—can’t meme. (Obviously the Left is bigger than Marxism, but I wanted to be cute and mirror The Right’s “The Left Can’t Meme” meme, so sorry to all the non-Marxist comrades.) At any rate, it seems like the mode of thought embodied by the meme, and the mode of thought treasured by Marxists, are fundamentally incompatible. But as you pointed out earlier, obviously Marxists do meme. Go on Twitter. Or Facebook. Google around. You’ll see what I mean. The problem with these Marxist memes is that they only represent one stage of the knowledge process outlined above. They present conclusions. But they do so in a way that’s in fundamental contradiction with the kind of analysis that produced them. If we’re being crude: memes work top-down, Marxism works bottom-up (and then top-down, and then bottom-up, and then…).

So what happens when you try to meme Marxism? Let’s try to answer this with a simple observation: forms (like memes) invite formal analysis. Think back to your high school English class. You might’ve learned that there’s this form called a sonnet. You also probably learned that it has certain rules; you then learned to see those rules, and how following or breaking them creates meaning. Maybe you had to write your own, which might look something along the lines of: here are some rules I have to follow, let me fit whatever content I have into them.

This is a basic formal analysis. And it’s a pretty top-down, abstract kind of thinking, the exact kind of thinking Adorno and Horkheimer were criticizing. But it’s popular for a reason. Think about what that type of thinking affords. Like Adorno and Horkheimer were saying, this type of thinking, the high school English sort of formalism, is just a reflection of the mechanical logic of mass production. You have a portable schematic (i.e. form) and a factory (i.e. student) that can easily output the same product regardless of context. Mass production enables social/economic organization on a massive scale. Top-down, abstract analysis gives the critic a way to handle the (critic’s) problem of literary overproduction: too many books! In other words, it affords mass criticism. The AP English teacher wants you to be able to analyze any sonnet the AP English exam might throw at you, and having a universally applicable, top down critical approach is going to serve you far better than a narrow specialization. Contrast this with specialized critics (like academics), who can produce individualized, and almost necessarily “better” analyses, rooted in the specifics of their subject matter.

But here’s a problem. These same academics have warned me that if you want criticism as reductive, simplistic, and mechanical as the high-school sonnet approach, you can simply take the principles of some more advanced theoretical framework and read their predetermined conclusions in a work or situation: Marx says X, Y, and Z; here A, B, and C happen; and A, B, and C are really X, Y, and Z, so therefore Marx is right (Q.E.D.). Now, I personally think there’s a place for substantiating claims with empirical evidence, but I see what they’re saying. By our exceedingly broad definition, this is still a formal analysis: you’re simply identifying the form of Marxist ideas in some work or situation, and using that as confirmation that the form is real—a fundamentally metaphysical approach.

This sort of metaphysical, memetic Marxism does sound a lot like a tendency alive and well in the Marxist tradition. Turns out there’s Bad Marxism? It’s a not very persuasive and very theoretically bankrupt type called dogmatic Marxism, and it works like this: Marxist conclusions are applied top-down, on the basis of faith in the concluder, and counter-arguments are upended using the time-honored tradition of Marx-said-so-ism: you present an argument, the dogmatic Marxist responds with a contextless quote from some recently unearthed letter Marx wrote, and you’re expected to abandon your claim on the basis that Marx said something different. A lot of American online Marxist discourse works this way, and it’s backwards from what we saw earlier: here situations are expected to conform to Marxism, as opposed to the more scientific approach, where we conform Marxism to situations.

The problem with dogmatic Marxism is that it mainly affords proving Marx (or whoever) right. And there’s not much use in proving that Marx, and those that came after him, were prophets—they weren’t. Where a prophet offers eternal truths, a Marxist offers contingent ones. Remember, a Marxist analysis is rooted in, and validated by, the historical conditions that create it. One set of historical conditions may’ve produced conclusions which hold in a seperate one, but that says more about the link between the two sets of conditions than it does the eternal truth of Marx’s thoughts. As far as I understand it, Marxism is less about what Marx thought, and more about the results you get when you think how he thought it. Thinking how Marx thought gives you a diverse body of thought that’s always changing and updating itself because the historical conditions of the various Marxist thinkers are diverse, changing, and updating. We’re free to make our own Marxist theory, but we’re definitely not free to make it as we please.

And Marxists Karl Marx, Fredrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong, Georg Lukacs, and the members of the Movement for a Revolutionary Left have all said stuff like this, to say nothing of the millions of Marxists across the world who’ve shared an antipathy for mechanical Marxism. Being anti-dogmatic doesn’t mean we can’t use Marxist conclusions, just that we have to be critical when we do, attentive and accepting of the fact that any attempt to impose a conclusion drawn from the experience, or analysis, of one set of historical conditions into a different set of historical conditions will always create contradictions. In fact, the contradictions it creates might be so great that they render Marx’s (or whoever’s) original claims irrelevant. But even if modern findings had disproved all of Marx’s theses, “every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist,” Lukacs argues, “would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservation and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto – without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.” Pretty good, as far as myth shattering goes.

The thing about memes and the thinking they inspire is that they obscure, rather than highlight, these contradictions. They turn Marxism into a set of static, repeatable forms—into metaphysics. Dogmatists did this long before the online meme, and will probably do it after. Both are ways of thinking that are fundamentally at odds with Marxism. Here’s a secret: I’m not sure anyone actually thinks that memes can replace books. But I do think that some people might think the reason they can’t is simply a matter of quantity: that books say more than memes do. What I hope I’ve made clear so far is that the difference is actually epistemic; it has to do with the way we learn and think about things.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t good memes. There are. There are Leftist memes, and memes that tell you not to be a fascist. But while memes may be a great vehicle for anti-capitalist affect, for all the reasons listed above, they’re a horrible vehicle for anti-capitalist thinking. Memes are good propaganda, and bad pedagogy.

Memes excel at showing you what you already know—and I do genuinely think that most people in the United States, whether they realize it or not, are prepared to accept that capitalism is bad. In fact, a slight majority of young Americans already believe this; which is to say nothing of the other obvious signs that people are unhappy with the present political system (take a look at the congressional approval rating if you have any doubts). But as we’ve seen, Marxism isn’t reducible to thinking that capitalism is bad—or, for that matter, that socialism is good. Again, I’m not an expert, but I don’t think building class consciousness is just a matter of flipping people’s value judgements around. It’s also about giving them the intellectual tools they need to be able to come up with the same conclusions you did—and, hopefully, better ones. (I’ve tried to do that here, but send me an email if it didn’t work!)