MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

We argue that a psychoanalytic notion of “wit” explains how white nationalist memes render anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, misogyny, and other forms of violent discourse enjoyable via practices of recombination. Recent scholarship at the intersection of communication and psychoanalysis has centered on Jacques Lacan’s dyadic relationship between speech and language for regulating and sustaining desire. On one side is the grammar of the unconscious, and on the other side is the inventiveness of rhetoric. We turn to Lacan’s “structure of wit” to detail how white nationalist desire is sustained through a dynamic relationship between unconscious white supremacist discourses of racial capitalism on one hand, and white nationalist meme culture on the other. For Lacan, “successful” witticisms are enjoyable because playing with signifiers via recombination crafts metonymic linkages between the “scraps” and “detritus” that make up socio-symbolic networks of meaning. White nationalist memes involve recombining modes of mainstream cultural enjoyment within the logic of white supremacist racial capitalism. These new metonymic connections habituate users to using racist tropes as an interface for interpreting the world. The forms of memes allow creators to forge new connections in modes that are easily recognized by other white supremacists, sustaining desire in the production of meaning. We use “/pol/ humor” threads on 4chan’s /pol/itically incorrect board, the central hub for the creation of white nationalist memes for the past decade. We take a Lacanian perspective to push against two common narratives about white nationalist meme production: first, that the spread of white nationalist memes is due to a desire to transgress against excessive “political correctness,” and second, that such memes are a form of extremist propaganda that preys on the insecurities of alienated young white men. Although both narratives are partially true, we hope to use psychoanalysis to better understand how and why memes function persuasively.