Precarity, nihilism, and grace

Silvestri, Lisa

doi:10.1177/1367877920942867

Cited by 2 publications

References 33 publications

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Memes, History and Emotional Life

Barclay

Downing

2023

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Internet memes are recognised for their role in creating community through shared humour or in-group cultural knowledge. One category of meme uses historical art pieces, coupled with short texts or dialogue, as a form of social commentary on both past and present. These memes often rely on a (mis)reading of the emotions of those represented in such artwork for humorous purposes. As such, they provide an important example of transhistorical engagement between contemporary society and past artifacts centred on the nature of emotion. This Element explores the historical art meme as a key cultural form that offers insight into contemporary online emotional cultures and the ways that historical emotions enable and inform the practices of such culture. It particularly attends to humour as a mode which helps to mediate the disjuncture between past and present emotion and which enables historical emotion to 'do' political and community-building work amongst meme users.

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Memes, History and Emotional Life

Barclay

Downing

2023

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Dangerous Play in an Age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree

Haiven¹,

Kingmsith²,

Komporozos-Athanasiou³

2022

TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

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In this paper we explore one dimension of the contemporary cultural politics that gives rise to reactionary formations and movements: the desire for a kind of dangerous play within a financialized world where most people feel trapped in a game they can’t win. We take up three interwoven phenomena from the recent past in the United States, though with implications beyond that context: (a) the GameStop stock-buying frenzy of early 202l, (b) the storming of the US Capitol building on January 6 of that year, and (c) the dramatic rise in popularity of the QAnon conspiracy fantasy that appeared in 2017 and gained significant influence since. By locating these complex participatory phenomena in the context of digitized financialization characterized by gamification, alienation and profound inequalities, we supplement efforts to understand today’s reactionary imagination. We argue that all three might be seen as, in part, forms of dangerous play that both emerge from, rebel against and also, contradictorily, help to reproduce or entrench dominant inequalities. Hence those who wish to counter these reactionary tendencies or propose more radical responses cannot limit themselves to critique; they must also contend with what animates these forms of alienated play.

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Precarity, nihilism, and grace

Cited by 2 publications

References 33 publications

Memes, History and Emotional Life

Memes, History and Emotional Life

Dangerous Play in an Age of Technofinance: From the GameStop Hunger Games to the Capitol Hill Jamboree

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