Type Time: Memes, Emblems, History, and Liberation
Date
2024-11-01
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Representations
Abstract
In academic fields of premodern history over the last ten years or more, scholars have often expressed their dismay at an increasing presentism, especially but not only in the context of engaging with college students and the public at large. For many people, including these latter groups, immersion in digital media has conditioned both intellectual formation and relation to the past, or pastness. This essay was born in part from the opportunity to critically discuss memes, a cultural format I have long enjoyed as someone who works on and teaches words and images. But it was also born from my conviction that dismay or even horror in response to younger generations’ differences from older ones is often misguided. What have my academic colleagues been missing in their anxieties about what appears to be pervasive presentism? How can they, or even we who read academic journals in the humanities, think about that apparent presentism differently? Can we relate more productively to the phenomenon?
In meditating on these questions, I thought about memes and reaction images as modes of expression that orient communities toward a collective well of past cultural production. I also thought about a meme-like format closer to my scholarly training, the Renaissance emblem. Like memes, emblems arose as a distributed means of cultural expression as access to new media technologies (in this case print rather than digital) increased. In comparing these two formats that construct collective pasts in their different socioeconomic and cultural contexts, I found in memery a way to reinvigorate pastness as a field of opportunity.
Description
This article was originally published in Representations. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2024.168.4.55.
© 2024 The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533-855X, pages 55–87. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2024.168.4.55.
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Jennifer Nelson; Type Time: Memes, Emblems, History, and Liberation. Representations 1 November 2024; 168 (1): 55–87. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2024.168.4.55