Lolcats and cheezburger?
A colleague mentioned to me a comment from Badiouian on "The Monkey Watches" thread that used the expression "retreat to the inner lolcat." I confessed to having no idea what this meant (and no recollection of the comment either). She read it as a gesture to an inner process reliant on shared, communal grammar. And she sent me here and here. I don't really get it (although some the images made me laugh out loud). Maybe because I don't have cats (and on this note I was pretty unhappy the other night as I searched flickr for sleeping monkeys and came across cat photo after cat photo--damn cats are taking over the monkeys). But, I love the wikipedia entry:
These images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically formatted in an uppercase sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black.[8] The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax,[8] featuring "strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar."[9] These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin[8]baby talk.[10] The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to Internet slang. Frequently, lolcat captions take the form of snowclones in which nouns and verbs are replaced in a phrase.[10] Some phrases have a known source[11] while others seem to be specific to the lolcat form. Common themes include jokes of the form "Im in ur noun, verb-ing ur related noun."[5]. "I haz a noun" pictures show a cat in possession of an object while "Invisible noun" show pictures of cats interacting with said invisible object.[5] "My noun, let me show you it/them" pictures are accompanied by cats apparently presenting or offering an object. Another common lolcat displays a cat with a specific look, which is described by X, and the text, "Xcat is not amused"[citation needed] or "Your offering pleases Xcat." A version of this is also stated as "X cat is X," where X is an adjective.
I love this entry because it so precisely describes a form while giving no hint to its meaning or purpose. It also helpfully explains why such an odd grammar might appear: the presumption that cats could speak should not be taken to mean that cats would speak grammatically correct English.
There is an amazing purity in the wikipedia entry that keeps a secret: something is going on, we can describe it, but that's all. Only those who are already in the know really know. Perhaps the description suggests a limit to surveillance, perhaps even a limit to self-exposure: try as we might to reveal everything, we can't, something--we aren't sure what--evades and eludes the writer, the reader, the searcher, the search engines. Or, maybe mine is the overstatement of the newbie: the grammar is actually really simple so becoming part of the community built through sharing the joke doesn't take very long.
For good measure the wikipedia entry links to a list of other internet phenomena. But, it overstates its case when it gestures to wider recognition and mainstream media, that is, it loses the sense of archipelagos, blogopelagos, diasporas, tribes, communities and continents produced in and through networked media. The entry proceeds as if there were one space and culture rather than multiple spaces and cultures. This matters because it is the fact of multiplicity that makes traveling memes noteworthy.
And maybe here, with multiplicity and traveling memes, we get back to the inner lolcat--maybe there is a limit to surveillance, to the knowing gaze, as an alternative grammar creates possibilities for different interiorities that can out run it. But, are such running, changing grammars even able to sustain anything like an interiority? Or are these different sorts of tools for different subjectivities?
You should try LOL Theorists: http://community.livejournal.com/loltheorists
Posted by: pdxstudent | October 16, 2007 at 09:57 PM
I find the cats funny and occasionally find myself speaking "lolcat" when the cats - especially Igge - are doing something strange. This seems quite normal to me. But then I like animals. I draw the line at "loltheorists," though:
http://community.livejournal.com/loltheorists
Posted by: Craig | October 16, 2007 at 09:58 PM
I am so pathetic--the "you iz postin no macroz coz you iz scared of semioticz" is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I have been in academia way, way too long. I think the lol theorists are much funnier than the cats.
Posted by: Jodi | October 16, 2007 at 10:05 PM
oh, I should add--I had seen these before, likely the Irigaray one, but I didn't get it. Now I realize that it's because I didn't know about the cats (and hadn't read the account of the grammar, which is somewhat disturbing insofar as it suggests and inability to grasp a joke without having had its underlying structure articulated in advance).
Posted by: Jodi | October 16, 2007 at 10:08 PM
Oh noes! Do not want overintellectual lolcats!
Posted by: WendyB | October 17, 2007 at 02:02 AM
"Not really getting" the Lolcats is more a sign that the joke's not very good. Funny images make their own hilarity, which is mostly why the Lolcats work, but great jokes aren't so reliant on context or being "in the know."
The opening bit on Patton Oswalt's new stand-up CD is a riff on how insulting & gut-churning the "KFC Famous Bowl" meals are. Not having set foot in a KFC in the past decade, I was totally unaware such things even existed - but the joke was delivered with such acerbic wit & eloquence, that didn't matter. I was out of breath laughing. THAT's a good joke.
Posted by: Seb | October 17, 2007 at 07:31 AM
http://www.lolcatbible.com/index.php?title=Main_Page
LOLcat Bible...
Need I say more?
Posted by: Yanina the Snowflake | October 17, 2007 at 05:16 PM