Notes on magic&media+memes+music+art: Part 1
Part 1 on boring media and memes (boo!), later on music and art with guest appearances of dean kissick's drain gang interview+lana+cool art so stay tuned(& maybe share with your friends if you'd like)
I was listening back to an old episode of True Anon, ep. 89 The Permanent Uncle and His Colony of Righteousness1. The ep is part of a series on Colonia Dignidad, but beyond the actual content, I was particularly intrigued by an observation made by their guest Michael Judge, around min 9:00 on what happens when magic looses its currency in communities previously engaged with it. He observes that when magic is just part of a community, it is not something esoteric or weird, it is simply “a set of techniques and crafts for producing changes in human consciousness” changing what one thinks about and how one thinks about that. He continues that at a certain point, through forces such as rationalism, capitalism, secularism, we have, as a society, abandoned magic. For Michael, that form of magic had two children, one good and one insane. These two children are art and media. Both art and media understand the same things as magic has understood. Art, functioning as a way to expand the mind and imagination, but operating without the “net” that magic once had, without the common shared understanding at the symbolic level. Art has to reconstruct a new language and symbolic order any time it presents itself to the public, as that communally understood language once underpinning magic has been lost. Art then can’t presume all of the signs and symbols to be the same for everybody, the context is lost and it tries to create a new one. He doesn’t exactly explain why and how media functions in the same way, as he returns to the political use of media of the nazi regime, and how such use will always be engrained in any “post-nazi” politics (in this way, he argues, there’s no post-nazi politics or non-nazi politics at all). But media, I would continue, follows in the footsteps of magic by providing a new set of tools for the production of changes in human consciousness, or knowledge, constructing much more stable net of shared understanding than art ever can. The baseline of a common symbolic order is so sturdy and influential, that “control” or maybe better said mastery of media means everything. If one can understand how the “net” underpinning media works, if one can manipulate that net, then one can except enormous amount of power.
There is much more to be said about media and magic, and also art and magic, and also in-between art and media magic aka meme and magic. And I can imagine non media-theory-sleaze readers might be getting lost and bored so I’m gonna try to break this down a little further to really bring to light how media is a form of magic.
Imagine you are a primitive being, existing in a world with no language. You encounter another primitive being. The act of communication might be possible, but limited because of a lack of shared understanding. You could make a sound, but for the other being 1) that sound itself has no meaning attached to it 2) the idea of sound as form of communication of ideas does not exist. Not only you lack a common vocabulary, you lack the social agreement that a certain act (in this case making noise) symbolises a form of communication. That’s the problem that media solves. Now I’m not a fully fledged media theory expert, so I my thinking might not be perfectly in line with actual old guy big book kinda logic. But basically language is perhaps one of these first forms of media which allowed for the creation of a shared understanding of mode of communication, and for the creation of a shared vocabulary.
In our 2022 world we have progressed many steps from this imaginary primitive world. Skipping quite a few historical steps, I want to move towards the shiny new world of new media. The forms of 1) shared symbolic vocabulary/archive/repository 2) commonly agreed upon mode of communications have multiplied exponentially. I’m always fascinated by some of the observations people around me make about others social media behaviours, especially the type of observations like “he always looks at my stories right away, he double texted me and I waited 30 mins to reply but then he took four days to text me again but I saw him on her story, she tagged her on her story but she did not repost it and I think she even deleted some of her tagged photos with her” and so on2. I’m fascinated because we the insanely cancerous/rhizomatic development of (new)media has come to a point for which the shared symbolic vocabulary and commonly agreed forms of communications have developed just as insanely. At its most simple, communication occurs within new media in the form of affordances (what does a like mean? how have we developed the shared understanding of what a like means), at its most complex, communication occurs through the creation of shared communal histories, such as in the case of lore (which I have written extensively about in my thesis based on my fav digital cultural series by Tiger Dingsun and Libby Mars). Ultimately, layers and layers of common understandings are continuously assumed by intermediaries, which produces local, generational, subcultural, platform based differences in what online behaviour can/should look like. I must look quite insane to my Italian provincial elementary school friends who still follow me when I post. So the magic is still happening. The net has now just become manifold, and tangled, and layered to the point of complete engulfment.
I now turn to memes and magic. There’s a concept in meme studies : ) that I do not want this to be mixed up with, “meme magic”, which refers to how some memes transcend the online world and assume magical like powers irl. Prime example is the “memeing of trump into office” trope. But this is not what I mean nor what I want to talk about. What I mean with memes as magic is more something like this. The quality of a meme is not exactly “subjective”, but it is definitely not “objective”. The quality of it is subculturally/communally subjective. For a meme to be good it needs to make sense to a group of people (if a meme is only good to its creator I have trouble calling it a meme). This is because a meme is inherently a form of communal communication. It is a medium that connects the single to a wider group. Memes are funny not merely because of the punchline (or the lack thereof in more ““““meta/ ironic”””” ones), they are funny because you get it, you’re in on the joke, and there is probably someone out there who is not, and there are others out there who do get it and with whom you now share something3. Memes depend on an unevenly distributed shared “language”, which is not only visual or based on aesthetics (deep fried memes, impact bold text, etc.) but is also composed of practices of creation and dissemination of the meme (difference between TikTok memes, reddit memes, Facebook memes, discord memes, etc. but also lore, non visual memes e.g. -cellectuals penomenon, etc. the list of meme practices goes on and on). In the funny little discipline of meme studies, memes have been established as a form of subcultural capital for this very reason. They hinge of a complex knowledge system of symbols and visual styles, behaviours and platforms, contested histories and embracing of incomprehensibility. Yet they appear as mere funny online things. But behind them there is a form of encoding and decoding, visual creation and communication forms which is magical indeed. And in a way I struggle to identify memes as purely belonging to the “media” child of magic (following Michael’s genealogy). Rather, memes are the illegitimate bastard child of art and media. This opinion is definitely somewhat derived from Brad’s Replacement Theory, for which memes have come to replace commercial art/render commercial art obsolete.
Beyond memes and media though, I feel like the frame of magic also explains a lot of our relation to art and to music. In the next post I’ll move to more specific examples of how artists deal with our magic-less world and still manage to be magic.
On Spotify there is only the teaser of the ep. if you’re not a patron and would like to still listen follow this link.
not saying I don’t sometimes fall victim to this gossip. but I do feel some people place much more meaning on those behaviours (invented by platform developers to have a new data point to sell) than I do.