A question which keeps bugging me is how memes work on a practical level, before they mean or do anything — how do we encounter them, and what does that encounter tell us about our world? I think it boils down to a question about “authority,” and where aesthetic representation meets power.
1.
Robert Weimann, a Shakespeare scholar, traces the use of the word “authority” in English back to the Renaissance and Late Medieval period. It originally had the sense of relating to the written word, to the legitimacy of a piece of writing — to “textual authority,” whether a book is the right edition, the authentic version. Over time — as writing became the vehicle of power — it started to refer more to control in general, “authority” as in, like, the government.
There’s a Weimann article I love called “Bifold Authority in Shakespeare’s Theatre,” in which — long story short — one point he argues is that Shakespeare plays are political because they prod at ways of representing power through theatrical spectacle at a time when the presentation of real-life power was grounded in forms of theater (the pomp and circumstance of monarchy).
“Authority,” taken more broadly, is the quality in a text that tells you how it fits into the real world and how it might be evaluated in terms of accuracy, prestige, and relevance — authority is why you’re listening, the way the text reaches into the real-world. With written texts, “authority” is primarily tied to “authors,” which is a fairly recent concept. The word “author” was only one of several ways in the 1600s to refer to the people who wrote things—back then, the term “poet” had a broader application than just people who wrote verse, occupying a semantic space similar to what “creator” occupies today.
In a sense, memes have a form of authority that calls back to earlier oral traditions and folklores. Knowing who made the meme generally doesn’t matter much to the audience looking at the meme — just as the identity of the specific bard in front of them might have mattered less to the people hearing an epic poem’s recitation than the sense of an overall folk tradition and its tropes. But for readers of books, knowing the author does really matter.
But I don’t think you can conflate Doge and the Iliad entirely. So, if not the idea of a named author who speaks from a place of knowledge, who is understood to occupy a perch in the same world as we do, what is it that primarily generates authority in a meme? How is it that we know a meme fits with a certain perspective, can be taken as representative of a community or sensibility, has a reason for being here in front of our eyes? Put more concretely — through what mechanisms does a meme inform us how and why we should pay attention to it?
2.
Whether it’s a book or a meme, a text is both a circulating object and a social situation. When reading, you encounter another person’s words and personality — and it is an encounter shaped by the nature of the object in front of you: the way it positions content in space and time (at a distance, both spatially and temporally) the way it positions participants (a book is a one-way road) and the way it fits into social reality (as high-class or low-class, as domestic or foreign, etc.)
The radicality and interest of Weimann’s argument is that these operations are not just aesthetic, but political. Since social power is articulated through texts and performances, the ways texts claim authority mirrors the way people claim authority.
There’s a passage from media historian Roger Chartier’s 1995 book Forms and Meanings: From Codex to Computer which I chanced upon once — I was actually looking for another thing in a library, and I found the thin blue book laid on top of a few others and flipped through because the title fascinated me and then this particular passage hooked me.
Here it is: in the first few pages, Chartier describes something written by Malesherbes, a minister of Louis XVI. Seeing the dire state of the French monarchy in 1775, Malesherbes wrote a series of proposed reforms called the Remonstrances. These reforms focused largely on fiscal matters, but they also touched on broader questions of state and society.
Nobody listened to Malesherbes. Twelve years later, the king ran out of money, called the Estates General to raise some cash, and the entire regime collapsed in the Revolution that followed. The reasons for this have been debated ever since. But in the part of the 1775 Remonstrances which Chartier discusses, Malesherbes talks about how changes in media technology are impacting the monarchy.
Malesherbes says the “primitive constitution of the monarchy", back in old days (Charlemagne vibes, I imagine) was all about “verbal conventions.” Legal authority rested in the spoken word. The law was whatever the king (or nobles in their own domains) said out loud in front of the assembled people in a ritualized setting. Public discourse was defined by an appreciation for personal charisma, and authority was authoritative because you saw and heard it right in front of you. The law was based upon vibes, it was theater. And it had a lot to do with the body.
This is one of the ways that historical people feel like aliens to me. A fun fact I learned from an archivist I once met was that when medieval nobles signed documents with wax seals, they would pluck out one of their beard hairs and embed it in the wax — because how could you trust something that did not have somebody’s physical form and presence in it? Especially when you consider how kings were understood to be chosen by God, how could you respect any order that did not come directly from the royal body? How could you trust written words?
Most people couldn’t even read anyways and books cost a bunch of money because you’d have to kill 30-50 domestic lambs and hire monks to write it all out by hand. So the source of the important narratives and rules about society had to come from a body, and the social setting of authority was the in-person assembly. This, at least, is the picture Malesherbes and Chartier paint retrospectively of the medieval monarchy.
3.
The sources of authority, for Chartier in 1995 or for me in 2024, are not strictly real in the way the people they govern are. There are symbols representing authority (monuments, currency, songs) but they are stand-ins for a thing that fundamentally is immaterial, and which we understand to be immaterial. People serve the state, but can anyone say what it is exactly? The king, on the other hand, can be pointed out in a crowd. Authority literally passed through his biology — whether it was in the production of heirs, the vocal announcement of decrees, or the touch of his hand (which people back then believed could heal physical maladies). Vesting authority in the written word gave power to abstractions, because the written word and the social situation of reading is defined by a distance. It’s also defined by introspection, interpreting within your own skull rather than taking part in a simultaneous collective experience like a royal procession.
This is the problem Malesherbes identifies. After the printing press, authority shifted into the written word — into laws. Instead of emanating from a divinely-chosen body, the rules now arose out of a diffused process of interpreting a set of fixed documents. Malesherbes is bothered by this because it introduces a kind of secrecy: the forces making the rules no longer stand in front of the assembled people as physical bodies; instead, the forces move through the sealed brains of a new class of lawyers, bureaucrats, and writers. The duty of giving the narrative of what’s happening in the world and interpreting its meaning shifts from the mouth of the king or the priest and into the hazy territory of the “Public.” Newspapers, correspondence societies, books, schools, and courts become the venues where the nation argues, narrates, and judges. With printed writing, authority can be present as an idea written in words and not as a person using them—so why would anyone still need a king?
4.
Our guy Roger Chartier is a historian focusing on Early Modern Europe, but he does venture into talking about the computer. It is, however, 1995 for him. Weimann was writing around the same time. I see both of them in dialogue with the early internet.
The age of the printing press is so compelling to think about now because the internet brings us into another transformation of authority. Like the shift to printing, it transforms the social situation of authority and the agents involved.
It’s hard to imagine the mindset of 1700s people, and it feels sketchy to do so — it’s the intellectual equivalent of running a red light, but this is a blog about memes, so who cares! The way Malesherbes feels about lawyers is the way I feel about algorithms. Who are these greedy, inscrutable, obnoxious forces in the shadows? They are deciding how the world appears to me, the types of things I hear about, the types of information fed to the society around me, and the process is startlingly opaque. Where do they get the nerve? Their way of establishing authority, trust, credibility, is foreign to the traditions I have been raised in and feels hostile to what I believe in.
Which is part of why memes interest me, as a way to study the emotional and communal ramifications of algorithmic authority. A meme’s authority is the authority of the platform/algorithm — just as the book’s authority is the authority of the author, and — if you zoom out far enough — the Canon, the Tradition of Books. These are the reasons we are given for why this stuff is worth our attention, the causes for how this content has landed in front of us, and the justification for why it exists and why it matters. The meme is there because it has appeared on a personalized scroll, which an audience understands as tailored to them, and its authority is attested to by the recorded, quantified interactions of others (the likes, comments, shares, etc.) who lend their own presence, inform the machine, and illuminate the meme.
Media do not determine everything. But power is as much in performance as it is in fact. It may be socially constructed, but constructed things do become real: if you punch a brick wall it hurts as much as if you punch a rock. And if you win a poker game by bluffing, you still win.
A form of media, claiming authority, gives power a way to perform. And it casts particular actors in particular roles. One thing that feels fresh about the internet to me is the role given to essentially non-human intelligences and processes. It has not shifted totally — it never does, bodies still matter, authors might be seen as some version of kings reigning over their books, people online forge parasocial relationships with creators — but the structure has been morphed.
What’s especially odd is how widely-known this is: we speak of the algo, the content moderation, all this stuff as if it were features of geography, people in a room. What is available to know and what is legitimately real are increasingly a function of how these algorithms understand us and how we understand them. The place of authority has shifted from the king’s body to the lawyer’s book, and from there to the computer’s dataset.