Steve And The Crack Of Spirit Analysis

Steve and the Cracking of Spirit
While Steve provides a variety of resources for the articulation of potentially resistive politics within spaces of control, in recognizing memes as pharmakon, any modal analysis would be remiss without acknowledging the potentially negative side effects. Specifically, the Old Economy Steve meme promotes generational conflict that can reify the dissociative logics that embolden the proletarianizing force of control. Specifically, while the criticism offered by participants of Old Economy Steve does help to denaturalize neoliberalism, their scapegoating of the baby boomers undermines the political potential of the created collective individual. Much of the affective power, as well as political agency, within …show more content…
A strong initial reaction to a meme that tapped into the disaffection of a generation left behind in economic tumult is hardly surprising. However, the criticism offered by the Old Economy Steve meme has continued to circulate – continuing to invite participants to reconsider their relationship to contemporary capitalism. However, while memes such as Steve have this potential, this is by no means a guarantee of political success. The ruptures created by Steve – or any other meme – are momentary at best. Dominant forces often react to critical theorization either with political responses – placating small victories or active suppression – or more frequently through social regulation via competing forms of controlling affect. Therefore, unless controlled populations capitalize on a particular rupture, they remain but momentary curiosities. Despite, this fleeting, and often-unrealized potential, such ruptures merit critical attention, as they represent one of the few resistive opportunities in the face of ubiquitous control. Consequently, I conclude by considering the potential memes have as a potential source of emancipatory criticism under the conditions of control …show more content…
Meme’s participatory mode enables a productive orientation that ruptures otherwise proletarianized existence. Their demand for circulation and imitatio transforms traditionally consumptive acts – the perusing of information on the internet – into productive ones. In this capacity, the form of the meme form demands individuation, particularly as the enthymematic narratives that exist across a particular modal assemblage demand productive work on the part of all participants. Participants cannot passively consume a meme and understand its context, they must engage in the positive production of social affective theorization. The vernacular nature of this theorization adds credence to memetically generated social criticism. Specifically, because it is generated from the lived experiences of a collective, memetic criticism has the potential to be particularly impactful. Gramsci argues that any theorization of oppressive forces that does not originate from the lived experience of the oppressed ought to be suspect, as it is likely originates in hegemonic ideologies. However, memetic criticism evolves organically, apart from traditional structures of criticism; if it were not representative of mass experience, participants would not propagate the meme. Because it is rooted in aggregated vernacular experience, the narrative constructed around memes provides an alternative to the dominant narratives