Keynote Lecture: Degenerative Aesthetics: Far-Right Memes and the Politics of Satire

This keynote takes the general aesthetics of memes as a critical lens to better understand the satiric function of far-right humor online. Across digital cultures, meme creators rely on what I term degenerative aesthetics: the deliberate use of pixelation, clashing fonts, absurd juxtapositions, and faux-amateurish visuals. These elements signal a kind of digital folk Dadaism—anti-art for the algorithmic age—designed not simply to amuse but also to provoke, recruit, and destabilize. While scholars across media studies and the social sciences have examined far-right memes for their political effects—particularly their circulation in misinformation campaigns and their catalytic role in real-world violence—very little attention has been paid to their formal qualities or rhetorical structures. My talk centers precisely on those neglected dimensions. Such an analysis permits two important observations. The first extends from broader debates about how we talk about satire in the twenty-first century. The second is more particular: If far-right memes are a type of satire—and they are, I argue—then we also need to ask what, exactly, the far-right’s Meme Lords are hoping to accomplish with these, the dankest of their satiric memes? Who are they for? And what, exactly, are they supposed to be doing? Most importantly, if we were to treat far-right memes as satire, then we might also come to a more precise understanding of such humorous objects. As Nicholas Holm has argued, humor’s aesthetic dimensions are intrinsically political, and we ought to pay attention to how humor shapes our world and the way we perceive it: “the aesthetic aspect of a text—its form, style, palette, rhythm, narrative, [and] structure —can do political work [and] can intercede in the negotiation, contestation and distribution of power” (Humour as Politics [2017, p. 12). That is precisely what I will attend to in my talk, by studying far-right memes as a type of satire that generally employs specific formal, visual, and rhetorical strategies to a variety of political and affective ends, whether it is the recruitment of sympathetic onlookers or the politically susceptible, on the one hand, or the alienation or “triggering” of “snowflakes” on the left, on the other. As I argue in closing, such a formal analysis of far-right memes as satiric objects might have important consequences for understanding how such memes work—why, in short, they have been so effective—and why they have proven both theoretically unwieldy and socially dangerous.