Previously theorised as vehicles for expressing progressive dissent, this article considers how political memes have become entangled in the recent reactionary turn of web subcultures. Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s work on political affect, this article examines how online anonymous communities use memetic literacy, memetic abstraction, and memetic antagonism to constitute themselves as political collectives. Specifically, it focuses on how the subcultural and highly reactionary milieu of 4chan’s /pol/ board does so through an anti-Semitic meme called triple parentheses. In aggregating the contents of this peculiar meme from a large dataset of /pol/ comments, the article finds that /pol/ users, or anons, tend to use the meme to formulate a nebulous out-group resonant with populist demagoguery.

Introduction In February 2017, a post on the Facebook page of conservative US TV pundit Sean Hannity ranted about the influx of ‘(((ILLEGAL MEXICANS)))’ (Figure 1). While xenophobic and racist vitriol had become normalised during the candidacy and eventual presidency of Donald J. Trump, what was notable here was the odd use of three parentheses: an Internet meme with an anti-Semitic connotation. It began in 2014 as an ‘echo’ audio effect used on an anti-Semitic podcast whenever a Jewish-sounding surname was mentioned. In 2016, the same concept was employed by anti-Semites and ‘alt-right trolls’ on Twitter, seeking to draw attention to the apparently Jewish ancestry of journalists by placing their surnames within triple parentheses (Weisman, 2018).1 Considered by historians of American conservatism as a ‘genuinely new’ movement (Hawley, 2017), the alt-right became notorious during the 2016 US presidential election period for its strategic promotion of slang expressions, such as the term ‘cuckservative’, as a means to promote an anti-liberal and ‘white nationalist’ agenda (Heikkilä, 2017). While many of the alt-right’s ideas were not necessarily new, what was novel was the way in which their ideas became entangled with the abstract dynamics of Internet memes and subcultural practices of Internet ‘trolls’, both of which arguably find their home in the notorious anonymous imageboard: 4chan. Download Open in new tab Download in PowerPoint While Internet memes may have different meanings and uses in different online contexts, they frequently originate on subcultural or fringe corners of the Web (Zannettou et al., 2018). 4chan is exemplary of the latter; a simple image-based forum dedicated to the discussion of various topics, ranging from video games to politics. It is argued that 4chan’s ephemeral design – in which posts are deleted after a certain amount of user engagement – functions as a ‘powerful selection machine’ for the production of attention-grabbing Internet memes (Bernstein et al., 2011: 56). Moreover, in the absence of the persistent markers of identity and reputation common to social media platforms like Facebook, 4chan’s anonymous users continually demonstrate their subcultural status and reformulate the boundaries of their community (Nissenbaum and Shifman, 2017). As a result of these affordances, 4chan has been viewed as a source of subcultural innovation on broader mainstream Web culture (De Zeeuw and Tuters, 2020; Douglas, 2014; Phillips, 2015). While this alleged influence was of relatively narrow significance so long as it pertained to LOLcats memes, this changed with the recent rise in popularity of 4chan’s /pol/ ‘Politically Incorrect’ board, which has been described as the source of ‘the real creative energy behind the new right-wing sensibility online today’ (Nagle, 2017).2 Acknowledging how such memes can often provide ‘cloaks for covering racism’, in line with emerging scholarship on the topic, our approach may be described as a ‘critical tracing’ of ‘politically incorrect participatory media’ (Topinka, 2018), in this case of the dynamics of the subcultural milieu of 4chan from which new expressions frequently tend to emerge. This article does not directly concern the alleged diffusion of the vernacular style associated with 4chan/pol/ from the fringe into the mainstream, nor does it directly tackle the important question of why it is that anti-Semitic speech is so ubiquitous in these online spaces at this particular historical juncture. Rather, we consider how memes can function as ‘floating signifiers’ that bring together a cross-section of actors who may not necessarily share a common political agenda, but who are nevertheless temporarily united through affective bonds. In particular, we explore how anonymous 4chan posters, or ‘anons’, use the triple parentheses meme in order to create a sense of community based around the construction of a shared yet vaguely defined nebulous ‘other’. We discuss this nebulous othering as a specific instance of what we call memetic antagonism. In order to distinguish our framework, we begin the article by looking at how it is that ‘political memes’ had previously been theorised within the field of new media studies as a means of expressing progressive dissent aligned with the work of political theorist, Chantal Mouffe. Although Mouffe herself has written little on new media, her thought has been influential in theorising the process within activist politics, by which floating signifiers can catalyse political alliances, in specific through negotiation a shared out-group, or ‘them’. While Mouffe’s theory has been influential in theorising political memes (see Milner, 2016), her theory depends on the maintenance of a moral distinction between desirable adversaries and unacceptable enemies (Mouffe, 2013). However, as we will see with the case of triple parentheses on /pol/, this threshold of decency seems to be fundamentally at odds with the transgressive attitude of anonymous imageboard subculture. To answer to this theoretical gap, this article builds on Mouffe to theorise processes of collective political identification within anonymous online communities unbound by civility with a specific attention to the role of political memes in ritualised form of antagonism. In the section ‘Memes as political dissent’, we present a brief historical account of how political Internet memes were initially optimistically received as lowering the barrier for progressive dissent, which we relate to Mouffe’s framework of ‘post-politics’. In the section ‘4chan’s Reactionary Turn’, we introduce 4chan as the site of a particularly ‘memetic’ style of political activism and its recent rightward shift. In trying to make sense of this, the section ‘Collectivisation through Abstraction’ considers the affective dimension of memes in processes of collective identification, both politically and otherwise. Using the notorious example of Pepe the Frog to illustrate how political memes create ‘chains of equivalence’, we return to Mouffe in order to argue that floating signifiers and adversarial language games are vital to the construction of an in-group ‘us’ within anonymous Web communities. Having done so, the section ‘(((They))) as Memetic Antagonism and Nebulous Othering’ offers an exploratory data analysis of how /pol/ anons use the aforementioned triple parentheses meme to construct an out-group ‘them’. To that end, we analyse the aggregate contents of the triple parentheses meme in all /pol/ posts over time, in an effort to explore the meme’s dominant meaning within this community, finding it to function above all as a marker of nebulous othering.

Memes as political dissent The meme was initially theorised by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (1976) to refer to cultural units, akin to genes, that ‘propagate themselves [. . .] by leaping from brain to brain’ (p. 192). While objecting to this initial scientistic framing, new media scholars adopted the term, long used in vernacular discussions online, in order to discuss artefacts of participatory online culture created and circulated in awareness of common and ever-changing genres (Shifman, 2013) – a notion of memes we also follow in this text. In this literature, it is argued that these once-subcultural online memes only started to go truly ‘mainstream’ at around the same moment political events started to become ‘memetic’, notably during the 2012 US election during which iconographic moments were avidly transformed, repurposed and diffused online (Phillips and Milner, 2017; Shifman, 2013). As such, it was at this point that a new category of political memes emerged, though they would only receive widespread international recognition in subsequent 2016 election with the notoriety of Pepe the Frog – to which we will return. In the context of movements and events from Anonymous and Wikileaks to Occupy Wall Street and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, political memes were initially interpreted in progressive terms as lowering the threshold for engaging in online activism. Following a framing established by media scholar Ethan Zuckerman’s (2007) so-called ‘Cute Cat Theory’ of digital activism, which prophesied a new golden era for media activism in the era of visual social media, political memes were discussed in terms of a new kind of subaltern discourse. Within this dominant framing, political memes were theorised as instances of symbolic ‘meme speech acts’ (Graeff, 2015) that both demarcated in-group status within the new category of a ‘networked public’ (boyd, 2010), while at the same time serving to expand the broader spectrum of political debate to include otherwise marginalised viewpoints (Shifman, 2013). It was in this spirit of progressive activism, inaugurated by Zuckerman, that the influential Dutch media design collective Metahaven published a manifesto in 2014 titled ‘Can jokes bring down governments?’, in which they celebrated the emergence of the political meme as ‘an open-source weapon of the public’ capable of disrupting what they referred to as ‘reality-management’. In this sense, political memes were theorised as offering ‘configurations of experience [that] create new modes of sense perception’ and which thereby ‘induce novel forms of political subjectivity’ (Rancière, 2004: 9). According to this view, which sees politics and aesthetics as fundamentally intertwined, political memes were theorised in terms of a radical (and radically progressive) ‘dissensus’ against the dominant political order. This framing conceptualised political memes in terms of a protest against ‘consensus politics’, where consensus is seen as ‘the crystallisation of relations of power’ (Mouffe, 2000: 49). If consensus functions as a mask for domination, from Zuckerman’s initial framing it would follow that political memes represented a form of ‘impure dissent’ exposing us to otherwise unspoken political opinions and thereby expanding the scope of progressive political debate (Graeff, 2015). In this framing, authors have championed memes as an ‘enjoyable route for expressing political opinions’ (Shifman, 2013: 123) in which ‘democracy benefits’ since ‘more people [. . .] engage in political discussion from more perspectives’ (Milner, 2013: 2361). In terms of contemporary debates in political theory, this framework may be identified with Chantal Mouffe’s concept of ‘agonistic pluralism’. Of crucial importance in understanding the significance of Mouffe in relation to theorising contemporary progressive political protest is her broader thesis concerning the relative absence of real political alternatives in the post-Cold War period of neoliberal hegemony – or what has been referred to as the ‘post-politics’ critique of liberalism (Dean, 2009). In the post-political critique, ‘real’ politics takes place outside of the sphere of phoney liberal consensus. From this perspective, it is on the ground and in the margins of activism that the important ideological struggles take place. Mouffe may be understood as contributing a foundational theory of political activism capable of challenging this dominant liberal hegemony, premised on the idea of grassroots collectives uniting in opposition to a clear adversary. Her theory of agonism, which is resonant with the aforementioned theory of memes as tools of democratic dissent, is based on the simple idea that democratic politics are reducible to an existential struggle between the polis (us) and its adversaries (them), a concept whose essence she borrows from the political theorist and one-time Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, whom she claims ‘highlights the fact that democracy always entails relations of inclusion/exclusion [. . .] a vital insight that democrats would be ill-advised to dismiss because they dislike its author’ (Mouffe, 1998: 164). While she follows Schmitt’s anti-liberalism to a point, Mouffe (1998) rejects what she correctly diagnoses as his essentially atavistic and essentialist view of ‘political and social identities as empirically given’, arguing instead that they ‘must be seen as the result of the political process of hegemonic articulation’, a process of homogeneity that paradoxically must remain open to ‘certain forms of pluralism’ (pp. 171–172). Citing Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous communitarian theory of language use, Mouffe (2018) argues that it is through an ‘inscription in “language games” [. . .] that social agents form specific beliefs and desires and acquire their subjectivity’ (p. 75). It is thus not always rational argumentation, but rather the libidinal engagement in an ‘ensemble of language games that construct democratic forms of individuality’ (Mouffe, 2018: 75–76). Moreover, Mouffe (2018) emphasises ‘the decisive role-played by affective libidinal bonds in processes of collective identification’ (p. 73), a dimension which she argues is completely overlooked in the public sphere theory of communicative rationality. Needless to say, the corollary to Mouffe’s hegemonic, discursive and affective articulations of an ‘us’ is the construction of a ‘them’. For theorists of post-politics, the problem thus becomes one of how to expand the scope of ‘the political’ so as to include a much broader range of otherwise excluded and marginalised actors while avoiding a fatal descent into a state of unalloyed antagonism that Schmitt (2004) referred to as ‘the abyss of total devaluation’ (p. 67). Post-politics theorists put forth the normative argument that symbolic dissent should exhibit a sense of propriety – what has been referred to as a ‘reasonable hostility’ (Tracy, 2008) – that should ‘remain sensitive to the socially rooted contextual standards of judgement’, limiting their forms of symbolic dissent exclusively to responding to existing injustices as opposed to initiating any type of active attacks (Phillips and Milner, 2017: 172). As a particularly influential voice in these debates, Mouffe has developed her anti-essentialist political theory through an analysis of on-the-ground organisation by social movements. Although, Mouffe (2018) has recently raised the alarm about right-wing populisms potentially leading to ‘nationalistic authoritarian forms of neoliberalism’ (p. 24), nowhere does she appear to seriously consider the problem of how political subjectivity is constructed in online environments – spaces with their own history of various idiosyncratic types of antagonisms, including flame wars, bullying, doxing, trolling and so forth (see Reagle, 2015). While earlier new media literature, informed directly or not by Mouffe’s framework, advocated the confrontational use of political memes to create us/them agonism, its progressive assumptions are in need of revision in the light of the tremendously successful reactionary use of what we call memetic antagonism. As exemplified on 4chan/pol/, political memes can be extremely effective in the formulation of an organic and classless ‘us’ bound together by existential antagonisms against a nebulous ‘them’, a process which is also considered as a key element in the overall ‘anatomy of fascism’ (Paxton, 2004). Overtly, antagonistic and toxic forms of speech are no strangers to the online sphere. As detailed below, however, as a meme develops and finds new audiences, initially overt antagonism can become nebulous, in the process becoming a floating signifier – the semiotic term for a sign whose ultimate meaning is changing and open-ended (Buchanan, 2010: 173). By this process, the capacity to distinguish between agonism and antagonism, so essential to Mouffe’s normative political theory, is lost. It is this very blurriness that makes the subcultural milieu of political discussion on 4chan/pol/ a kind of petri dish for concocting extreme and extremely virulent forms of right-wing populist antagonism. When 4chan memes spread from the fringe to the mainstream, it is often the case their floating quality is simplified, stabilised and closed-down. As in the case of the opening example from the Fox News pundit’s Facebook page, this paradoxically works at once to normalise memetic antagonism as well as to efface its more extreme origins. While the tone of political discussion on 4chan has become unambiguously extreme in recent years, looking more closely at its peculiar cultural and technical affordances helps to account for why the site has been and continues to be so productive of subcultural innovation.

Conclusion Political memes have been theorised as modes of post-political dissent in which a collective project arises through a ‘political process of hegemonic articulation’ (Mouffe, 1998: 172), which relies above all on the identification of a common opponent. This article has related this process to use of memes online and observed such a dynamic at work in the case of the triple parentheses meme on 4chan/pol/, which, at least from a macro perspective, seems to have developed into a technique for nebulous othering resonant with the vague antagonisms of populist xenophobic rhetoric. By juxtaposing an anecdotal instance of triple parentheses from Facebook as opposed to the meme’s overt anti-Semitic origin, this article’s opening speculated on the normalisation of anti-Semitic discourse. In conclusion, we may thus ask how symptomatic this particular anecdote is of the mainstreaming of anti-Semitic rhetoric online in the current American context. As we have just seen, our analysis of the use of triple parentheses on 4chan/pol/ revealed its most common use as a marker for a conspiratorial ‘them’ – a discursively constructed enemy so vague it could have easily been misread, or rather, repurposed by the Facebook user in the introduction. In spite of its supposedly humorous valence in 4chan’s discourse, the nebulous othering of triple parentheses marks-off an existential enemy opposed to a political adversary. This extreme form of memetic antagonism may be said to violate an implicit rule set that underpins the theory of agonistic pluralism – that there are particular lines that should not be crossed and rules that should not be broken in the expression of political dissent. Observing the dynamics of memetic antagonism may however bring us to legitimately question the extent to which Mouffe’s nuanced distinctions remain useful in a digitised era where national populist politicians like Donald Trump adopt a no-holds-barred style of anti-liberalism that arguably flirts with anti-Semitic sentiment (Lipstadt, 2019: 49), and whose campaign messaging has been observed to incorporate elements of memetic antagonism as developed on message boards (Lagorio-Chafkin, 2018: 381–394). What we hope to have made clear is that, while marginal, subcultural and vernacular Web culture may nevertheless be considered as a site of innovation for new and extreme modes of political speech. These types of speech may furthermore resonate in the current anti-liberal nationalist populist climate. While it should be axiomatic in the study of Internet memes that there is no transport without translation (Latour, 2005), the greatest concern here involves the normalisation of 4chan’s memetic antagonism beyond its relatively circumscribed boundaries. Our argument has thus been that political memes as protest against the apparent hegemony of liberalism take on a different valence when used in this style of memetic antagonism; that is, the use of memes as vehicles for antagonistically articulating an out-group, unbound by civility. These articulations can explicitly name and shame, but we highlighted how memetic antagonism can collectivise online strangers through floating signifiers that allow formats for nebulous othering. While an assessment as to whether or not the collective identity of /pol/ is ‘dangerously’ right-wing because of these dynamics has not been our objective here. However, in the aftermath of the Christchurch and El Paso shootings in 2019, whose perpetrators were both connected to 4chan’s sibling forum 8chan (Knaus, 2019), such an assessment would not appear to be in question. Concerning the pressing need to understand the relationship between these fringe Internet communities and extremist ideologies, our contribution has thus sought to show the dynamics by which memes can be used to express forms of antagonism that are abstracted and thereby rendered nebulous.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received funding from the ODYCCEUS Horizon 2020 project, grant agreement number 732942. ORCID iD

Marc Tuters https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1815-9226

Notes 1.

At the time, a number of public figures sought to defiantly reclaim the meme, as for example in the case of one democratic congress member (Nadler, 2016), whose official Twitter handle still continued to feature the triple parentheses at the time of writing. 2.

In terms of number of users, 4chan/pol/ is roughly twice the size of the influential web forum r/The_Donald (see OILab, 2019), the latter which has played a significant role in galvanising Trump support online (see: Koebler, 2016). 3.

This number is as reported by 4chan itself at the time of writing (see 4chan.org/advertise). 4.

See 4stats.io for live activity metrics. At the time of writing, /pol/ receives 115,560 posts per day, above /v/ (114,586), /vg/ (98,593) and /b/ (84,217). 5.

As many scholars of Internet memes have noted, meme subcultures have a history of acting with hostility to the recuperation of their artefacts by mainstream culture, especially when they are commodified by parties with monetary interests (Douglas, 2014; Milner, 2016; Phillips, 2015). 6.

‘Normies’ is a popular Internet term to denote ‘regular’ people, that is, those not up to speed with current Internet culture. 7.

See archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/105649057/#105649189. 8.

While there is evidence of violent neo-Nazis frequenting /pol/ (Thompson, 2018), the meme’s open-ended quality allows for other plausible explanations for Nazi Pepe, for example, that it is a case of an incongruous juxtaposition of evil and innocence; that it can be read as a subculture’s attempt to inoculate itself against commodification; or that it is simply an instance of the trolling tactic of ‘triggering normies’. 9.

For the extraction, we used the following regular expression: [\(]{3,}(.*?)[\)]{3,}. Regular expressions are common pattern-matching techniques to identify certain text. We chose a regular expression that also captures text within more than three parentheses since this occurs as a ‘variation’ of the meme to add even more emphasis. 10.

Exemplary of this pattern was a trend, as of late 2017, in identifying Trump as a ‘Jewish puppet’ (Hagen, 2018b). 11.

Also note the reference here to the ‘red pill’, another slang expression for esoteric awakening, which also developed on /pol/ before it trended in the mainstream (Wendling, 2018). 12.

In spite of this, the meme’s very nebulous use by /pol/ anons is in fact totally consistent with a history anti-Semitic canards, which has long identified jews as the ultimate referent at the core of global conspiracy to control the world (Renton and Gidley, 2017). 13.

Rosenblum and Muirhead (2019) argue that this distinction between ‘believe in’ and ‘assent to’ is a feature that differentiates the logic of the classical conspiracy theorist from the new conspiracism, which seeks above all the delegitimation of established forms of institutional authority without necessarily proposing any coherent ideological project in its stead.