Description
From the subversive memes of #OccupyWallStreet (Milner, 2012) calling people to action against global finance, to the reactionary internationalism of Alt-Right trolling subcultures (Michelsen & de Orellana, 2019), to the often cringe-worthy attempts by governments and international corporations to incorporate memes into their public relations strategies, it is increasingly clear that internet memes – popular sets of humorous images that circulate online through viral repetition and mutation - and wider memetic cultures that saturate online spaces are playing an expanding role in the shaping of contemporary global politics and its knowledge-production processes. However, theoretical and critical engagements with internet memes as emergent artefacts in the mediation and practice of everyday global political knowledge-production remain scarce.
This paper questions how internet memes as low cultural artefacts circulate “internationally” and how their circulation produce a disruptive and/or (re)productive impact on the bordered notion of the “international”. It engages with critical conceptions of political space in international relations and argues that we should conceptualise and theoretically engage with what it calls “the memescape” as an emergent political spatiality in which political, cultural and social meaning is contested, maintained, disrupted and/or (re)produced through low political (Weldes, 2006) interventions, circulations and provocations. Deploying Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (2013) oppositional concepts of the “smooth space” and “striated space”, the paper argues that the international memescape is a smooth, nomadic and heterogeneous space of “horizontal artistry”, “playful meaning” and “affective circulation” that stands in a relation of tension – but also potential recuperation- to the striated, bordered and serious site of the international. It argues that understanding the impact of the memescape through the metaphor of the smooth space allows us to think about potentials of resistance and pitfalls of reaction in the digital era saturated by an increasing “memeification of (world) politics” (Dean, 2019)
