Description
From the froggy and cheeky face of ‘Pepe’ as the ambivalent icon of reactionary digital iconology, to the melancholic facial expressions of the increasingly popular ‘Wojak memes’, to the angular, bearded, masculine face of ‘the Chad’ figure, memetic faces and facial expressions are fundamental aesthetic forms of contemporary culture wars on social media (and beyond). Faces and aesthetics of the face have long been essential sites for political inscriptions: depicting affective states, marking community and communal bonds, and structuring racial and gendered divisions (Edkins, 2015; Deleuze & Guattari, 2013). In this paper, we ask how the global politics of the face have been changing with the emergence of these simplified, iconified memetic faces and how the culture wars are being accentuated through them? We argue that this digital politics “flattens” the face by transforming the complex affective states of the embodied face into instantly recognisable, easy to circulate, replicable, relatable, and malleable genres of expression. The circulation of these memetic faces thereby offers an effective script through which the debates at stake in the culture wars can be made legible and weaponisable. In particular, using Sianne Ngai’s notion of “low affect” (2005), we look at how the seemingly inconsequential and trivial “feels” of the Wojaks, Pepes and Chads become micro-political articulations that weave into and (re)produce the wider political sensibilities and subjectivities of contemporary culture wars.
