Affect and memes: Ambiguity abounds

Abstract

On the one hand, affect drives people to post, like, share, and engage on social media so that affect is key to the circuits of monetisation. On the other hand, affect does not necessarily map onto clearly identifiable emotions, being rather an issue of immediately felt, and possibly conflicting intensities. For their part, memes involve a fair share of ambiguity in how they are shared and interpreted and the shapes that their variations take. Zooming in on this unpredictability, this text addresses ambiguity as less of a problem than as an analytically productive lens into studies of memetic circulation across platforms.

The head of a Finnish spitz, its mouth open to a characteristic sharp bark, is glumsily pasted onto a rectangularly cropped national blue and white flag. ‘HOME, RELIGION, FATHERLAND’ (‘koti, uskonto isänmaa’) reads the overlaid text in all caps in reference to a credo attributed to the supreme commander of the Finnish army at the start of the Winter War in 1939 summing up the values fought for. Inserted into the mouth of a persistently barking dog, the credo is framed ironically as something repeated on end, without a change in tempo, be there an audience or not. In another interpretation, the spitz is merely making a firm point, as when used as profile picture for the nationalistic Facebook group, ‘For the Finns’ ('Suomalaisten puolesta’).

The spitz meme, known both as ‘Suomi-koira’ (‘Finland Dog’) and ‘Persukoira’ (‘Finns Party Dog’ in reference to a major far-right party), had its brief hayday in the early 2010s, only to since disappear into the sediments of internet ephemera. A collection of 50 Suomi-koira memes assembled to the entertainment and meme sites Riemurasia 2011 is virtually all that remains of its cross-platform circulation. These document a diversity of messages, uses, and potential meanings as the spitz now mocks the inconsistencies of xenophobia (‘multiculturalism sucks ass – get a kebab’), now attends to national cliches ('Saturday. Time to have a sauna and beat up the wife’), and now scorns the liberal left (‘Admire democracy and freedom of speech – threaten to move out when The Finns Party succeed’). It barks all over the place.

This is a banal example of the unavoidable ambiguity of memes. Not only does a macro meme say whatever it is made to speak, but the instability and plurality of meanings are part and parcel of meaning-making where the relations between signs and referents are forever sliding (Empson, 1949; Derrida, 1981). It is also something of an established premise that affect drives people to post, like, share, and engage online (e.g. Dean, 2010; Paasonen et al., 2015; Papacharissi, 2015), so that meanings come entangled with an ephemera of intensities. As an immediate felt intensity, affect does not necessarily map onto clearly identifiable emotions but can rather be a thrill or a shiver of a more opaque or conflicting sort.

How any meme connects to affect is, in sum, unpredictable. On the one hand, there is the issue of memes’ elusiveness in terms of signification – their contextual uses, endless variations, and diverse interpretations. On the other hand, there is the issue of affect's elusiveness as an object of study and the default hardness of methodologically tackling it: now it is here, and now it is gone, leaving us to peruse any traces that remain. We can, after all, register intensities as memes trend and as online exchanges peak, but it is another thing to grasp what kinds of intensities these are, or were, for whom, where, and when.

As Suomi-koira illustrates, a meme can very well communicate mutually opposing things. Its circulation can have similarly contradictory effects as it affectively grabs users in this direction or that, or slides pass barely unnoticed. Engagement and recommendation algorithms also weigh visual content differently, and the organisation of meme threads on platforms such as X, Instagram, or Reddit craft different encounters with memes than those afforded by the imageboards that ‘Suomi-koira’ first appeared on. Launched in 2003 and retaining much of the ‘Web 2.0’ feel of the time, Riemurasia remains the home of many a macro meme. Meanwhile, meme tools are increasingly integrated into short-form video platforms like TikTok to add engagement and aid brand communications. The memetic flotsam of years past can enter this attention ecology as retro accents, yet it also communicates a gelled kind of affective stickiness not boosting further variation or recirculation.

Someone sharing a meme is no guarantee of how it is used or interpreted, nor can one extrapolate much of this on the basis of reaction buttons such as likes which, while feeding into the metrics used for measuring and demonstrating user engagement, by necessity flatten out the ambiguities that these are steeped in. The methodological issue grows no easier when studying social media data at larger scales. This makes it possible to see and visualise how memes spread, circulate, repeat, morph, and fade away, as well as how they become attached to events and discussion threads across platforms – and, in doing so, to conceptualise affect as non-personal intensities. But, again, what kinds of intensities would these be? Does this matter?

It is no novelty to point out that considerations of affect as impersonal forces building on the work of Gilles Deleuze are in conflict with an interest in how specific bodies register things in historical and social contexts (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Hemmings, 2005; Wetherell, 2012). Such different ontological starting points do not, however, mean that scholarship could not address both the circulation of affect and its specific articulations or traces – to remain on the move across scales. Working across and between different scales, as well as methodologically combining contextual attention with analyses of large datasets, makes it possible to trace affect's circulation and amplification, even as the limitations of potential knowledge remain. This openness in what can be known, and how, is key to understanding meme cultures – both platform-specific and more promiscuous ones – as involving not merely the communication of meaning but crucially that of feeling, intensity, mood, and vibe resistant to quantification. This, again, lands us squarely at the ambiguity of affect.

Affect is resistant to coding (Tomkins, 2008: 647) and its intensities can be at the same time both enlivening and flattening, delightful and frustrating, fascinating and discomforting – or plain puzzling. Rather than seeing this as an analytical limitation to overcome, ambiguity can operate as a point of entrance into untangling the complexities of meme cultures. Working through the lens of ambiguity, I suggest, allows for exploring multiple perspectives, analytical techniques, and conceptual frameworks in tandem so that there is no necessity to either identify with this or that theoretical ‘camp’ (be it new-materialist, cultural studies, or social psychological one) or to close down interdisciplinary methodological perspectives for the sake of seeming clarity. If something is happening, it does not, after all, mean that something else is not also going on, or that what we see is all that there is to see. This calls for the logic of both/and capable of accommodating the messiness of cultural practices.