The “Because Science” meme as virtual commonplace

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship in virtual rhetorics has demonstrated that we must abandon static notions of place if we wish to account for the rhetorical effects of internet memes and other forms of virtual argumentation. However, displacing virtual rhetorics entirely effaces grounds for collective political action, particularly political resistance organized in virtual environments such as internet forums. We can restore this crucial grounding, without sacrificing an orientation to circulation, by treating memes as commonplaces in a topological framework. A commonplace approach to virtual rhetorics further revivifies for us the essential virtuality of Aristotle’s original topical doctrine. This interanimation of current and classical rhetorics is dramatized via a case study of the ironic reversal of political polarity in the “Because Science” meme.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtual rhetoric
• memes
• commonplaces
• topology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Tom Porter, “Under pressure after the Capitol riot, self-styled militias are regrouping around anti-vaxx conspiracy theories,” Business Insider, 2021, July 14, https://www.businessinsider.com/far-right-regroups-antivaxx-theories-after-capitol-riot-flop-2021-6; “The Religious Right’s Hostility to Science Is Crippling Our Coronavirus Response,” 2020, March 27, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/27/opinion/coronavirus-trump-evangelicals.html.

2 I take this term from Laurie E. Gries, “Iconographic Tracking: A Digital Research Method for Visual Rhetoric and Circulation Studies,” Computers and Composition 30, no. 4 (2013): 333. Gries counts new-materialist rhetoricians such as Jeff Rice, Jenny Edbauer Rice, Collin Brooke, Jim Ridolfo, and Greg Ulmer in this group; relevant works will be cited when they are discussed in the essay.

3 See for a focused version of this critique Kevin DeLuca and Joe Wilferth, “Foreword: Theorizing Visual Rhetoric Via the Image Event,” Enculturation 6, no. 2 (2009): https://www.enculturation.net/6.2/foreword. Scholars who have made related points include Tiara Na’Puti, Christa J. Olson, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites, Hunter Stephenson, and Joshua Prenosil; relevant works are cited as discussed.

4 Richard Dawkins, “Selfish genes and selfish memes,” The mind’s I-Fantasies and Reflections of Self and Soul, D. R. Hofstadter & D. C. Dannett eds. (New York, Penguin Books, 1981).

5 A. Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society: The New Science Of Memes (Basic Books, 1998): https://books.google.com/books?id=Hdg3lwEACAAJ.

6 Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2014), 54.

7 The most-cited of these works include Ryan M. Milner, “Pop Polyvocality: Internet Memes, Public Participation, and the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” International Journal of Communication 7 (2013): 34; Andrew S. Ross and Damian J. Rivers, “Internet Memes as Polyvocal Political Participation,” in The Presidency and Social Media (Routledge, 2017); Andrew S. Ross and Damian J. Rivers, “Internet Memes, Media Frames, and the Conflicting Logics of Climate Change Discourse,” Environmental communication 13, no. 7 (2019): 975–94; Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture.

8 Olson, Lester C. “Intellectual and Conceptual Resources for Visual Rhetoric: A Re-Examination of Scholarship since 1950.” The Review of Communication 7, no. 1 (2007): 3.

9 Lauer, Claire. “Contending with Terms: ‘Multimodal’ and ‘Multimedia’ in the Academic and Public Spheres.” Computers and Composition 26, no. 4 (2009): 225–39.

10 Angela M. Haas, “Toward a Digital Cultural Rhetoric,” In The Routledge Handbook of Digital Writing and Rhetoric, eds. Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes (New York: Routledge, 2018), 412–22.

11 I am talking about image macro memes here, the dominant genre. Of course there are GIF-based memes, which would technically be multimodal.

12 Laurie Gries favors the term “event” over “situation,” but she makes a very similar point about the importance of anchoring circulatory studies to actual times and places in “Iconographic Tracking,” 334–5. The distinction here is one of degree and not of kind. Many circulatory studies consider specific rhetorical situations and texts; many situated analyses of non-verbal rhetorics work across multiple situations. Notwithstanding, the choice to emphasize either circulation or situation generates analytic tendencies that have been noted and critiqued in previous scholarship.

13 Eric S Jenkins, “The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 100, no. 4 (2014): 443.

14 Jenkins, “The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions,” 443.

15 Jenkins, “The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes as Expressions,” 447–50. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1992).

16 Brian Massumi, “Envisioning the Virtual,” in Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, ed. M. Grimshaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 55–56.

17 Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), 55. https://books.google.com/books?id=2tu-NAEACAAJ.

18 Jeff Rice, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 108.

19 Rice, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, 109.

20 Collin Gifford Brooke, “Forgetting to Be (Post) Human: Media and Memory in a Kairotic Age,” JAC (2000): 790.

21 Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 6.

22 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy”; Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 5–24.

23 Rice, Digital Detroit, 164.

24 Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism,” 7.

25 Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric, 55.

26 DeLuca & Wilferth, “Forward,” para. 17.

27 Gries, “Iconographic Tracking,” 335.

28 Boyle, Casey. “The Shape of Labor to Come.” In Topologies as Techniques for a Post-Critical Rhetoric, edited by Lynda Walsh and Casey Boyle, (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 51–73.

29 Tiara R. Na’puti, “Archipelagic Rhetoric: Remapping the Marianas and Challenging Militarization from ‘A Stirring Place’,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 16, no. 1 (2019): 4–25.

30 Christa J. Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015).

31 Danielle Endres, “The Rhetoric of Nuclear Colonialism: Rhetorical Exclusion of American Indian Arguments in the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Siting Decision,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2009): 39–60.

32 Rosemary Clark-Parsons, “Building a Digital Girl Army: The Cultivation of Feminist Safe Spaces Online,” New Media & Society 20, no. 6 (2018): 2125–44.

33 Hunter Stephenson, “(Re)Claiming the Ground: Image Events, Kairos, and Discourse,” Enculturation 6, no. 2 (2009): https://www.enculturation.net/6.2/stephenson.

34 See for a critique of tropic analyses in terms of their inability to cope with circulation: Jens E. Kjeldsen, “What the Metaphor Could Not Tell Us About the Prime Minister’s Bicycle Helmet,” Nordicom Review 21, no. 2 (2000): 305–27. Two studies have considered the master tropes structuring memes: synecdoche, Heidi E. Huntington, “Pepper Spray Cop and the American Dream: Using Synecdoche and Metaphor to Unlock Internet Memes’ Visual Political Rhetoric,” Communication Studies 67, no. 1 (2016)77–93; and, irony, Corey B. Davis, Mark Glantz, and David R. Novak, “‘You Can’t Run Your SUV on Cute. Let’s Go!’: Internet Memes as Delegitimizing Discourse,” Environmental Communication 10, no. 1 (2016).

35 See Edward Meredith Cope, An Introduction to Aristotle’s Rhetoric (London: Macmillan, 1897, 1970), 124. Cope appears to be making a friendly amendment to Aristotle in combining the general or common topics under one heading: the topoi and the koina. However, his claim that these “appear” as koinoi topoi in Aristotle is technically erroneous.

36 Boukala, Salomi. “Rethinking Topos in the Discourse Historical Approach: Endoxon Seeking and Argumentation in Greek Media Discourses on ‘Islamist Terrorism’.” Discourse Studies 18, no. 3 (2016): 249–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461445616634550; Braet, A. C. “The Common Topic in Aristotle’s Rhetoric: Precursor of the Argumentation Scheme.” Argumentation 19, no. 1 (2005/03/01 2005): 65–83.

37 Leff, Michael. “Up from Theory: Or I Fought the Topoi and the Topoi Won.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 36, no. 2 (2014/05/15 2006): 203–11.

38 Good historical reviews of the voluminous literature on verbal commonplaces can be located in Leff, “Up from Theory,” and Richard McKeon, “Creativity and the Commonplace,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 6, no. 4 (1973): 199–210. On physical spaces/places as rhetorical commonplaces, see Joshua Reeves, “Suspended Identification: Atopos and the Work of Public Memory,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 46, no. 3 (2013): 306–27; Zhaozhe Wang, “The Switched-Off Circulation: A Rhetoric of Disconnect,” Rhetoric Review 40, no. 4 (2021): 395–411. The key texts on commonplaces as/in images are Cara Finnegan, “The Naturalistic Enthymeme and Visual Argument: Photographic Representation in the ‘Skull Controversy’,” Argumentation & Advocacy 37, no. Winter (2001): 133–49; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 60, 116–117, 156, 161; and, Edwards, Janis L, and Carol K Winkler. “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83, no. 3 (1997): 289–310. On ideographs as commonplaces see Dana L. Cloud, “The Rhetoric Of Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62, no. 4 (1998): 387–419. On the commonplaces of dynamic/multimodal arguments see Chanon Adsanatham, Bre Garrett, and Aurora Matzke, “Re-Inventing Digital Delivery for Multimodal Composing: A Theory and Heuristic for Composition Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition 30, no. 4 (2013): 315–31; Casey Andrew Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2018); and, David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J Michel. “The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric.” JAC (2005): 803–44.

39 Marshall, David L. “Warburgian Maxims for Visual Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48, no. 4 (2018): 352–79.

40 The term “snowclone” was invented in 2004 by economist Glen Whitman as name for a cliché such as “Eskimos have X words for snow,” a myth in the first place that journalists continue to perpetuate with various numbers inserted for X; see “SNOWCLONES: LEXICOGRAPHICAL DATING TO THE SECOND,” 2004, January 16, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000350.html. Snowclones frequently appear on visual memes, with some current examples being “One does not simply X” (from “One does not simply walk into Mordor,” uttered by the character Boromir [as played by Sean Bean] in the movie The Fellowship of the Ring); and “When you realize X” with an image that expresses the author’s mood at the realization.

41 Hill, “Memes, Munitions, and Collective Copia: The Durability of the Perpetual Peace Weapons Snowclone.”

42 In addition to sources listed in the text and in note 37 above, see the review section of Lynda Walsh and Andrew B. Ross, “The Visual Invention Practices of Stem Researchers: An Exploratory Topology,” Science Communication 37, no. 1 (2015): 118–39.

43 Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador, 93–127.

44 Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador, 14–15.

45 Ibid.

46 Motif is one of the terms that Lester C. Olson lists in his visual-rhetorical lexicon in “Intellectual and Conceptual Resources”; it is borrowed from the Warburgian school of historical art criticism. Marshall considers motifs visual topoi, as do I: they are virtually identical concepts, and it makes sense to give the older disciplinary term priority in that case.

47 Marshall, “Warburgian Maxims,” 374–5.

48 Olson, Constitutive Visions: Indigeneity and Commonplaces of National Identity in Republican Ecuador, 15.

49 Laurie Gries, Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2015), 18.

50 See especially Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, 45–75. but also Rice, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, 12–13.

51 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 129.

52 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 126–30.

53 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 143.

54 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 77–78, 130–31. Metastability expresses a similar concept to the structuring of copia but with more degrees of freedom, as it relies on affectual processes of recognition rather than grammatical/rhetorical substitution.

55 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 87.

56 I have good reasons to believe Boyle would accept this amendment because he leans on Aristotle’s definition of the enthymeme as “the body [soma] of persuasion” (Rhetoric I.1.3) to treat Internet memes as “resolv[ing] a body from a wider ecology of practice” that “activates the already present connective tissues of a community” (Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 82–85). Also, elsewhere he adopts Christa Olson’s definition of the commonplace as “embodiable topos” (“Shape of Labor to Come,” 65).

57 Jeffrey Walker, “The Body of Persuasion: A Theory of the Enthymeme,” College English 56, no. 1 (1994): 46–65.

58 James Fredal, “Is the Enthymeme a Syllogism?,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 51, no. 1 (2018): 34.

59 Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice, 84.

60 Joshua D Prenosil, “The Embodied Enthymeme: A Hybrid Theory of Protest,” JAC (2012): 298.

61 Prenosil, “The Embodied Enthymeme: A Hybrid Theory of Protest,” 296.

62 Gries, “Iconographic Tracking,” 337.

63 To begin my topological analysis of the “Because science” meme, I did a Google Image search for “’because science’ meme” and saved the first 250 images. I sorted these results first by valence—whether they were disposed positively or negatively toward “science” as a social institution. Then, within positive and negative categories, I sorted memes by the science-related commonplaces energizing them. Armed with these commonplaces, I searched Google Trends using the same search term. The spikes in trends directed me toward particular political kairoi covered in U.S. mass media. I then investigated the mass-media debates around the kairoi and the actors imaged in the memes at those times (e.g., Bill Nye, creation v. evolution). I finished my analysis by repeating my Google Images search targeted to the each kairos to see which commonplaces dominated and to note any changes in that topology from kairos to kairos.

64 Thomas M Lessl, Rhetorical Darwinism: Religion, Evolution, and the Scientific Identity (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 1–30.

65 I am indebted for this trenchant insight to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this essay. For toxic masculinity as a dominant topology within meme culture, see Drakett, Jessica, Bridgette Rickett, Katy Day, and Kate Milnes. “Old Jokes, New Media–Online Sexism and Constructions of Gender in Internet Memes.” Feminism & Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 109–27.

66 Rice, Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, 114.

67 Fredal, “Is the Enthymeme a Syllogism?,” 28.

68 For these revisionary efforts, see in particular Casey Andrew Boyle, Rhetoric as a Posthuman Practice; Thomas Rickert, Ambient Rhetoric; Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

69 Sara Rubinelli, Ars Topica: The Classical Technique of Constructing Arguments from Aristotle to Cicero (Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 2009), 12–16; Phillip Sipiora, “The Rhetoric of Time and Timing in the New Testament,” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory, and Praxis (2002), 114–27.

70 Debra Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), 22, 35, 135.

71 Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece, 113.

72 Hawhee, Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece, 22.

73 Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 45.

74 “Regretful Anti-Vaxxer Rioters Sentenced to Home Detention,” Yahoo News, 2021, August 4, https://news.yahoo.com/regretful-anti-vaxxer-rioters-sentenced-171903327.html.

75 Porter, “Under Pressure After the Capitol Riot, Self-Styled Militias are Regrouping Around Anti-Vaxx Conspiracy Theories.”

76 Gregory L Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention, 57.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lynda C. Olman

Lynda C. Olman is a Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno, where she studies the rhetoric of science, particularly as it relates to climate change visualization and the decolonization of global sciences.