Gifs are photography’s revenge on cinema

Image: Detail of Flashlight Filmstrip Projections (2016) by Jennifer West. Photo by Keith Hunter. Courtesy the artist.

“Myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle. Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited: what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated? But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realize that they have taken on a life of their own.” —Roberto Calasso

Like all units of language, there’s something chemical — and chemically finite — about memes. Their structure follows the basic formula for how we’ve expressed ourselves for thousands of years: an image combined with a caption. And like a science fair volcano’s vinegar and baking soda, it first fizzes, then fizzles, its energy soon spent in circulation. It’s a reaction anyone can begin and no one can undo.

In the chemistry of language itself, words are metaphors that similarly lose their spark. The fundamental Proto-Indo-European units of language — tokens for irreducible concepts like sun or cut or burn or die — once gave breath to the ancient gods they inspired. Now etymologists trace these particles back to their elemental origins, while the rest of us are left handling spent fuel.

Not only can we see millennia of metaphor “fossilized” (as Emerson once wrote) in our modern linguistic compounds but also the traces of social struggle. “History does not merely touch on language,” Theodor Adorno observed in Minima Moralia, “but takes place in it.” One of humanity’s great Borgesian projects would be a lexical map of this history — the borders of metaphors, languages, technology, culture — and how time has shifted and traversed these borders, shaping and reshaping them. More within our reach would be a mapping not of every extant moment in history but of the cardinality that relates one moment to another, a cartographic grammar of light and line, of demarcation, conjugation, and juxtaposition. To see this history take place, one has to understand how it is that different ways of telling, of showing — and different ways of reading, of seeing — abrade one another, even reject one another.

Gifs are photography’s revenge on cinema

Image: Detail of Flashlight Filmstrip Projections (2016) by Jennifer West. Photo by Keith Hunter. Courtesy the artist.

“Myth escapes from ritual like a genie from a bottle. Ritual is tied to gesture, and gestures are limited: what else can you do once you’ve burned your offerings, poured your libations, bowed, greased yourself, competed in races, eaten, copulated? But if the stories start to become independent, to develop names and relationships, then one day you realize that they have taken on a life of their own.” —Roberto Calasso

Like all units of language, there’s something chemical — and chemically finite — about memes. Their structure follows the basic formula for how we’ve expressed ourselves for thousands of years: an image combined with a caption. And like a science fair volcano’s vinegar and baking soda, it first fizzes, then fizzles, its energy soon spent in circulation. It’s a reaction anyone can begin and no one can undo.

In the chemistry of language itself, words are metaphors that similarly lose their spark. The fundamental Proto-Indo-European units of language — tokens for irreducible concepts like sun or cut or burn or die — once gave breath to the ancient gods they inspired. Now etymologists trace these particles back to their elemental origins, while the rest of us are left handling spent fuel.

Not only can we see millennia of metaphor “fossilized” (as Emerson once wrote) in our modern linguistic compounds but also the traces of social struggle. “History does not merely touch on language,” Theodor Adorno observed in Minima Moralia, “but takes place in it.” One of humanity’s great Borgesian projects would be a lexical map of this history — the borders of metaphors, languages, technology, culture — and how time has shifted and traversed these borders, shaping and reshaping them. More within our reach would be a mapping not of every extant moment in history but of the cardinality that relates one moment to another, a cartographic grammar of light and line, of demarcation, conjugation, and juxtaposition. To see this history take place, one has to understand how it is that different ways of telling, of showing — and different ways of reading, of seeing — abrade one another, even reject one another.