Description
This paper analyses the multiple politics of ‘eat the rich’ as a memetic aesthetic refusal of contemporary capitalist formations that mainly circulate digital spaces of cultural production and interrogates the modes through which it resonates and establishes the desire for a futural point of abolition and ‘consumption’. Centering Nancy Fraser’s recent book ‘Cannibal Capitalism’, the paper explores the intimate histories between capitalism, colonialism, cannibalism, and corporeal aesthetics of eating, carving, gore, and cutting which animate refusals of exploitation and accumulation as consumption-machines. What does the meme tell us about how capitalism and desires for the refusal of capitalism ‘feel’ today? In particular, the paper looks at how the refusal aesthetics of the memetic expression “Eat the Rich” becomes captured by and differentially mobilised in two instances: “Eat The Rich” popsicles that were sold by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as a viral moment of ‘substitute-refusal’ and Senator Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s infamous ‘Tax the Rich’ dress at the 2021 Met Gala. In doing so, the paper questions limits of memetic refusal and asks how refusal aesthetics become integrated into structures that it purportedly seeks to overcome.
