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Quarterly Journal of Speech

ISSN: 0033-5630 (Print) 1479-5779 (Online) Journal homepage: http://nca.tandfonline.com/loi/rqjs20

The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memesas Expressions

Eric S. Jenkins

To cite this article: Eric S. Jenkins (2014) The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: Circulating Memes asExpressions, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 100:4, 442-466, DOI: 10.1080/00335630.2014.989258

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2014.989258

Published online: 15 Dec 2014.

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The Modes of Visual Rhetoric: CirculatingMemes as ExpressionsEric S. Jenkins

The speed, scale, and shape of digital circulation pose numerous challenges forrhetorical analysis that seeks to analyze image-texts in context. This paper develops aframework for the rhetorical analysis of Internet memes through the concept of modes.Analyzing memes requires a shift in focus from the actual (texts and contexts) to thevirtual (the capacities for affect and affection structuring an encounter). What makessuch memes recognizable and, hence, circulable is a shared, virtual mode structuring allsubsequent actualizations. The examination of Fail/Win demonstrates that the analysisof modes can be assisted by a number of rhetorical concepts as long as modes areunderstood as collective, emergent expressions. It also shows that the Fail/Win mode isbetter understood not as the representation of specific rhetors but, instead, as anexpression of control society that advances both a dystopian view of humans reduced toperforming rote operations and a utopian, ideological gesture promising that successremains possible nevertheless.

Keywords: Visual Rhetoric; Modes; Affect; Control Society; Meme

The idea for this paper began with a single event: the appearance of the Iwo Jimaphotograph on Failblog, captioned with “Epic Win.” Failblog is one of numerouswebsites—including EpicFail.com, as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit—thatfeature the popular Internet meme known as Fail/Win.1 Although the Iwo Jima iconis part of an emerging canon of well-studied images, this instance of circulation posesmany questions for visual rhetorical study, which typically analyzes image-texts incontext. Specifically, what of the entire Fail/Win meme, which is not a specific textand whose context repeatedly varies? Fail/Win is one of the first and most widespreadInternet memes.2 Fail/Win images circulate across multiple media and contexts, and,as the Iwo Jima example illustrates, Fail/Win also drives the re-circulation of image-

Eric S. Jenkins is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Cincinnati. Correspondence to: EricS. Jenkins, Department of Communication, University of Cincinnati, 137 Chicken Hall, Cincinnati, OH 45221,USA. Email: eric.jenkins@uc.edu

Quarterly Journal of SpeechVol. 100, No. 4, November 2014, pp. 442–466

ISSN 0033-5630 (print)/ISSN 1479-5779 (online) © 2014 National Communication Associationhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2014.989258

objects. Dedicated Fail/Win websites, like Failblog, host a number of new submissionsand accrue thousands of views daily. One day’s submissions can illustrate this meme’schanging flow of images: Failblog displays a student sleeping as President Obamadelivers her commencement address (FAIL!), a man with a back harness squashing ababy against a subway seat (Parenting FAIL), a car crashed with a bumper sticker thatreads, “Women are great leaders: You’re following one now” (Driving FAIL), and ameteorologist donning a Storm Trooper costume (Weather WIN).3

In this essay, I argue that the rhetorical analysis of such phenomena obliges a shiftfrom the actual—particular texts in specific contexts—to the virtual, or what I call themode. Modes are collective, emergent phenomena that express the circulatingenergies of contemporary existence rather than re-presenting the interests ofparticular rhetors. As collective and emergent phenomena, modes are virtual ratherthan actual; they are the manners of engagement or interfacing that structure thespecific actualizations. A focus on modes, then, begins not with a preconstituted textor audience but with the interfacing between text and audience. Modes exist prior totheir actualization in specific images with particular viewers, making them, like theirtheoretical counterparts affects, pre-subjective and pre-objective, structuring anyimage-object or viewer within its field. Modes circulate across media platforms,producing a recognizable structure that enables the emergence of an open set ofimages subject to continual remaking. The set remains open to further adaptation andaddition because the virtual mode constitutes a manner of engagement or interfacingwith images shared by rhetor and audience, a seeing as that circulates and therebyshapes both image production and reception. In brief, modes will be defined asmanners or ways of engaging (image-)texts or, alternatively, as relational assemblages,such as the assemblage of image, medium, and viewer constituted in the processes ofconstructing and perceiving.Modal analysis, therefore, requires a shift in focus from specific rhetors and

audiences to collective phenomena, from representation to expression, and from theactual to virtual. Any Fail/Win image constitutes an actualization of the broadervirtual Fail/Win mode. What makes Fail/Win recognizable as a phenomenon cannotbe identified with any single actualization (i.e., image or viewing) since it is a mode—a shared, virtual orientation towards images. Hence, whereas typical rhetoricalinquiry focuses on actualizations (particular images and contexts), a modal focusdirects attention to the virtual relations established between rhetor, texts, andaudiences as they interface with memes. This shift in focus, I suggest, helps scholarsgrapple with contemporary image circulation’s speed and scale.This essay proceeds in four sections. The first illustrates how visual rhetorical

criticism has typically focused on bounded texts and contexts before teasing out thedilemmas digital circulation poses for such study. The second develops the concept ofmodes through the example of Fail/Win. The third section argues that a number ofrhetorical concepts can aid in modal analysis, especially genre, techné, and form. Thissection reuses Hariman and Lucaites’ analysis of icons in order to demonstrate howan iconic mode ties together the images they designate as icons and yet remainsimplicitly rather than explicitly theorized. The final section establishes the political

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import of modes by returning to the analysis of Fail/Win which, not incidentally,emerges from and expresses the conditions of control society. As an expression, Fail/Win adopts both a dystopic and utopic stance: it dystopically envisions the subject ofcontrol society as performing rote, programmed behaviors similar to a computer butalso advances an imaginary relationship to existence that suggests humans are morethan machines, thereby offering ideological reassurance.

Circulation and Visual Study

In 1994, W. J. T. Mitchell made the case for a “pictorial turn,” necessitated by the factthat “we live in a culture of images. … We are surrounded by pictures.”4 CitingMitchell as “a common starting point for rhetorical scholars,” Cara Finnegan alsostresses the significance of circulation.5 In the conclusion of Picturing Poverty,Finnegan states, “the study of images must remain grounded in the materiality oftheir rhetorical circulation.”6 The circulation of images necessarily makes thempolysemous, evoking many different meanings or identifications depending uponcontext. Thus Finnegan concludes that it remains “vital … to explore how and why”images circulate.7 Likewise, Hariman and Lucaites’ erudite exploration of icons tracesthe photos’ polysemy across their circulations. In circulation, “The representationalmeaning … has not remained stable or unified.” To the contrary, appropriations ofimages motivate (re)circulation of images to new situations.Rhetorical scholars have addressed this polysemic character of images by

grounding them in a specific context. A survey of the collection edited by LesterOlson, Finnegan, and Diane Hope confirms the near ubiquity of this approach. Thechapters examine photographs, movies, memorials, advertising, posters by theGuerilla Girls, commemorative stamps, cartoon parodies, drawings by BenjaminFranklin, and Chicano murals, locating these images in contexts of varying butdeterminate scope. Some chapters conceive the context as a specific rhetoricalsituation, others a historical period, and still others a cultural formation or epochalregime of power/knowledge. The editors commend this dialectical approach,recommending that scholars continue attending to both image-texts and contexts.As they state, “Viewers and spectators … co-create meaning along with the artifactsthemselves.”8

This approach of selecting specific images and grounding them in boundedcontexts extends throughout visual rhetorical criticism, despite the variances inconceptualizing context. In fact, the conceptualization of context often guides thechoice of image-texts, with those concerned with a situational or historical contextfocusing more on specific images and those concerned with a cultural or epochalcontext typically focusing on image genres or types. Scholars select specific imagessuch as the Emmett Till photograph and the Elián Gonzalez news footage to analyzethe historical and situational response to these images.9 Others focus on image classesthrough a broader cultural lens, analyzing how images of Afghanistan women,immigrants, and queer kissing contribute to and inform us about the culturalcontext.10 Still others define contexts as regimes of discourse and power, following a

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Foucaultian approach that focuses more on visual practices like the wearing of veilsor state surveillance.11

This contextual grounding remains essential because of the polysemic nature ofimages. As images circulate, their meaning changes, prompting different identifica-tions and affections. Notably, though, doing so freezes circulation in order to performrhetorical analysis of an image or image classes in context. Such approaches producemany insights into situational, historical, cultural, and epochal contexts, yet thesuspension of image-movement elides the broader media ecology marked by meteoriccirculation. Circulation continually alters situations and contexts by varying therhetors, audiences, exigencies, and constraints. Thus Jenny Edbauer warns, “Althoughthe standard models of rhetorical situation can tell us much about the elements thatare involved in a particular situation, these same models can also mask the fluidity ofrhetoric.”12 Owing to this fluidity, Catherine Chaput proposes replacing the rhetoricalsituation with rhetorical circulation:

Situatedness … enables many elements of late capitalism to go underinterrogatedbecause they do not exist in a location but in the connective tissues of affectivitypassing through locations. … [R]hetoric circulates through our everyday, situatedactivities and does not exist in any one place; it is always passing through, but it isnever located.13

Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green concur, depicting the mediaenvironment as one of “spreadable media” and outlining how dissemination shapesthe rhetoric of consumers, producers, marketers, and political campaigns. Anenvironment dominated by spreadable media affects texts and contexts in a fewways. First, image-objects become constantly remade and remixed, making it difficultto isolate “an” object.14 Second, contexts also become unstable or difficult todetermine, since remaking blurs the roles of rhetor-audience: “In a spreadable model,there is not only an increased collaboration across these roles, but, in some cases, ablurring of the distinction between these roles.”15 Finally, this blurring of roles andcontinual remaking makes it difficult to isolate origins and intentions. Circulationmultiplies rhetors and objects to the point where origin and motivation becomeuncertain:

Mysteries about the origins of media texts have proliferated in the age of spreadablemedia, in part because content moves so fluidly from context to context. … As newaudiences encounter such texts, they are often unsure what their rhetorical goalswere intended to be or even who produced the material.16

Fail/Win evidences all of the above conditions. Fail/Win circulates across manydifferent situations, repeatedly altering the images as they actualize in differentcontexts. As any image circulates through Fail/Win, the mode often alters or redirectsthe image’s meaning. For instance, image-objects like Iwo Jima get remade as theycirculate through Fail/Win, transformed into an “EPIC WIN.” While scholars mightisolate and analyze a particular image on Failblog, justifying this single instance’simport is sure to prove difficult. Even more, attention to specific images deflectsattention from the mode and, thus, the significance of this phenomenon.

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Second, Fail/Win is an emergent phenomenon that only comes into being viacirculation among varied audiences and situations. Only through the contributions ofnumerous viewers and rhetors, spread across space and time, can something like Fail/Win emerge as a recognizable meme. Furthermore, the complications for contextualanalysis only grow since different people maintain different ways of seeing successand failure. In fact, viewers frequently dispute what counts as success and failure inthe comments, drawing on different personal or cultural understandings. Therefore,asking what Fail/Win tells us about how a culture views success and failure wouldlikely return an uncertain, contradictory answer and likewise deflect attention fromthe entirety of the mode.Finally, because they often emerge in numerous places simultaneously and

frequently spread like wildfire, memes pose fundamental methodological challengesto rhetorical inquiry. Kevin DeLuca, for instance, describes how the speed of imagestroubles so many of our taken for granteds: “In the ceaseless circulation of images,speed annihilates contemplation, surface flattens depth, flow drowns moments,distraction disrupts attention, affect eclipses meaning, the glance replaces the gaze,reiteration erases originals, and the public screen displaces the public sphere.”17 As aresult, visual scholars face the daunting challenge of keeping up, the pace ofcirculation potentially rendering their work “archaic” in advance.18 Since contextchanges so rapidly in circulation, a shift “to reading contexts rather than seeingphotographs” is unsatisfactory as well. “Because of the absolute heterogeneity ofaudiences, context is always utterly undecidable.”19

Ethology, Affect, and the Study of Modes

So the question remains: what is this phenomenon, Fail/Win? Surely it exists—itcirculates, gets imitated, reappropriated. What makes Fail/Win recognizable andhence iterable? These phenomena are commonly referred to as Internet memes,borrowing Richard Dawkins’ term for a cultural replicator that gets passed fromhuman to human via imitation.20 Limor Shifman maintains that Internet memes areindeed an instance of Dawkins’ concept, since they are pieces of “culturalinformation” that are reproduced “by various means of repackaging or imitation.”21

The memetic approach is somewhat consonant, then, with the analysis above. Why,then, call Fail/Win a mode and not a meme?In short, the memetic approach leaves unexplained what is replicated and how the

replication occurs. If a meme is a fragment, what is replicated? Furthermore, howdoes the replication take place? These questions must be asked specifically for eachmeme. They are also questions that point to modes. What is replicated is anorientation, a manner of engagement. People repeat the act of making and viewingFail/Win artifacts. How that engagement takes place, how viewers and imagesinterface, is by seeing life as a game that can be Failed or Won. Analysis of Internetmemes, then, demands an examination of the modes that make them recognizable,the manners of engagement that structure their actualization. Modes are mannersthat orient the interfacing between viewer and image, that provide implicit

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instructions in how to view. Such shared manners form a virtual field from whichnew actualizations of Fail/Win draw.Although virtual rather than actual, Fail/Win mode is real, existent. It has

circulated to the point where it has become a recognized meme. Yet Fail/Win mode isvirtual because it is neither located in image-objects nor in viewing subjects but in therelation between them. The actual designates substances, things like images andviewers. The virtual designates the reality of the relation between substances, a realitythat exists only in process, in time. This conceptualization of the virtual is indebted toHenri Bergson, who insists, “Besides, things, there are relations.”22 In other words,besides images and viewers there exists their relatability, their manner of comingtogether. These relations coexist with every actualization. Since every actual onlyexists in time, the virtual accompanies every actualization and, thus, is empiricallyreal, even if never material or present. In Deleuze’s words, “The virtual is fully real inso far as it is virtual. … The reality of the virtual consists of the differential elementsand relations along with the singular points that correspond to them. The reality ofthe virtual is structure.”23

The Fail/Win mode illustrates this virtual reality, being a structure of relation thatextends through circulation across media, images, and viewers. Although images,contexts, and viewers differ in each actualization, the mode crosses them all, that is,viewers see snapshots of life as a game and the images articulate to this virtualstructure, having a capacity for life-likeness and game-likeness. Viewers can disputewhether they see a fail or win, whether it is truly epic or banal, how funny orauthentic is it, but all this occurs within the modal frame. Different viewers seedifferent images as extreme, unique, or interesting, yet these images are measured assuch against the modal criteria; the mode structures an experience in which viewersask whether these images are interesting emblems of success and failure. Likewise,regardless of which images appear, the new offerings all fall within the mode. Indeed,submitters can be conceived as playing within the mode to produce actualizations ofthis virtual structure.Being virtual, modes lead scholars to consider bodies relationally and in duration.

In other words, viewers and images are not examined independently but only as theyare related in process, through embodied manners of engagement. The Fail/Winmode designates a relation between image-objects and viewers, a manner of orientingimages to viewers and viewers to images. As such, the concept of modes dovetailswith Edbauer’s call to think rhetorical situations ecologically. Deleuze illustrates theaffinity of the concept with ecological thinking in one of his most extendeddescriptions of modes:

[T]hese relations and capacities … select … that which corresponds to the thing;that is, they select what affects or is affected by the thing, what moves it or is movedby it. For example, given an animal, what is this animal unaffected by in the infiniteworld?. … What does it “take” in its world? Every point has its counterpoints: theplant and the rain, the spider and the fly. So an animal, a thing, is never separablefrom its relations with the world. … [E]thology studies the compositions ofrelations or capacities between different things … How can a being take another

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being into its world, but while preserving or respecting the other’s own relationsand world?24

Here, Deleuze begins to outline how one can trace modes through the practice ofethology. An ethology studies modes, that is, bodies in relational assemblages, inengagement with one another. Indeed, Deleuze argues that modes are bodies andbodies “can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; itcan be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity.”25

Yet how does ethology outline the manner of those relations? To do so, theethologist maps how the parties are related via their capacities to affect and beaffected. The ethologist details the affectabilities or affordances of the participatingbodies. An affect is a capacity to touch, impact, or otherwise influence something else,and an affection “designate[s] that which happens to the mode, the modifications ofthe mode, the effects of other modes on it.”26 The ethologist studies modes bymapping the affectabilities or capacities of parties to an encounter. This focus onaffect is necessary since engagement only occurs via different and differing capacities,through the parties’ potential to affect and be affected (affectability). To use a favoriteexample of Deleuze, wasps have the potential to sense pollen and orchids have thepotential to emit it, enabling their relatability. Each selects from the other only whatinterests it, so the wasp is unconcerned with the orchid’s visual beauty, for instance,whereas this might be the primary affectability soliciting human attention. Henceethology entails quite a different approach than studying substances or subjects,images, or viewers. In ethology, “you will define an animal, or a human being, not byits form, its organs, and its functions, and not as a subject either; you will define it bythe affects of which it is capable.”27

Like the mode itself, these capacities for affect remain virtual, but it is theiractualization that motivates the wider circulation of phenomena like Fail/win. Modesare a relation of capacities for affect and affection, and in encounters, those capacitiesbecome activated and feelings become energized. Again in Deleuze’s words, “Anexisting mode is defined by a certain capacity for being affected. When it encountersanother mode, it can happen that this … feeling affect (joy or sadness) follows … Inthis way the different series of affections and affects continually fulfill … the capacityfor being affected.”28 In other words, the felt affections like happiness or sadnessresult from actualizations of the virtual mode, from the embodied experience oforienting according to the mode. In Fail/Win mode, perceiving life as a game caninnervate the affections of interest or amusement. As more such affections areactualized, the virtual mode further spreads, typically with the click of a camera ormouse. As such, the virtual and actual exist in a cycle or feedback loop. The virtualFail/Win mode emerges from actualizations of its form, only to eventually constitutea recognizable, virtual mode that subsequently structures future actualizations.How can we describe this relational structure of Fail/Win? What are the

affectabilities that enter into relation in Fail/Win mode? In Fail/Win, there are threeprimary capacities that enter into relation. First, the image has the capacity forindexability, for capturing moments of time. The photograph has the capacity to be

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affected by light, capturing the light in front of its lens. Via this capacity, thephotograph has also accrued the capacity to affect viewers by cueing them to seephotographs as documents of reality. That is, viewers have come to see photographsas documentary evidence.Additional viewer capacities activated via the Fail/Win mode are the capacity for

metaphor and to judge as spectators. First, viewers see life as a game. This metaphoriccapacity is, in part, enabled by the distancing capacities of cameras and the Internet.In his famous analysis of play, Johan Huizinga argues that games occur in a speciallydemarcated space, like a “magic circle” or “play-ground marked off beforehand eithermaterially or ideally.”29 That is, games require a distinction with ordinary life, adistinction often effected by the creation of temporary worlds or realms. Althoughthere have been numerous critiques of Huizinga’s magic circle, especially related tothe permeability of boundaries between games and the “real” world, the concept isuseful for understanding Fail/Win. Typically, acts of everyday life commonly madevisible in Fail/Win mode—things like parenting, driving, repairing, and shopping—are a part of ordinary worlds and thus not considered games. The distancing capacityof cameras and the Internet, however, helps constitute something like a magic circle,enabling a space apart in which the viewer can pretend to be witnessing a game.Walter Benjamin was one of the first to outline these distancing capacities,

contending that the film camera creates a separation between those shown andspectators that lends to spectators the capacity to judge. The camera distances thespectator from the actor, divorcing them from presence to one another. This distancepermits the audience to take the critic’s perspective; they can engage in a mode ofperception that Benjamin calls “testing.” Spectators, distanced by the camera, can testthe images, passing judgment on its qualities as might any critic.30 Such a stancecreates a space apart for the spectator from which they can test or judge, similar tothe magic circle. Indeed, Benjamin makes the comparison between this mode ofspectating and games explicit, saying

An action performed in the film studio therefore differs from the correspondingreal action the way the competitive throwing of a discus in a sports arena woulddiffer from the throwing of the same discus … in order to kill someone. The first isa test performance, while the second is not.31

In Fail/Win, it is not only the camera but also the Internet and mobile computingthat enable such distancing, and hence a mode envisioning these acts as games.Because Fail/Win circulates on open networks, the viewer typically looks from a placesomewhere far removed from the action. The viewer is distanced from particularindividuals via the Internet and cameras, enabling their position as a judgingspectator. In the early twentieth century, Benjamin noted how politicians areincreasingly subject to these spectating modes, required to undergo a series of testperformances judged by camera-positioned audiences.32 Fail/Win moves these testsbeyond politics and into everyday lives, dictating ways of maintaining houses andyards, of dressing, of driving, of child-rearing. It is precisely the capacity ofsmartphones and digital cameras, which make the everyday increasingly subject to

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photographic capture, that enables the expansion of this mode of spectatorship.Viewers see life as a game, engaging in their capacity for metaphor, a capacityafforded by the distancing of the camera and Internet, and then pass judgment onthose moments, either Fail or Win.As a virtual structure, modes create fields of potential with poles that limit what is

and is not selected. As Massumi describes, “The virtual as a whole is the future-pastof all actuality, the pool of potential from which universal history draws its choicesand to which it returns the states it renounces.”33 To explicate, Massumi uses themetaphor of a soccer game. In soccer, the poles are the two goals; the goals constitutea field in which all of the objects (the ball) and subjects (players) circulate, towardswhich their efforts are focused, and beyond which the game ceases to exist. In otherwords, the goals constitute poles that both limit the action within the field and orientthose actions.In a mode, the poles are constituted by the affective capacities, capacities that, in

relation, create a field of potential energizing the movements of subjects and objects.In the Fail/Win mode the poles are life and games. These poles constitute the limits towhich images gravitate but never cross; they structure the emergence of anyactualization. These poles can be found more in the images that do not appear thanin those that do. Images that are obviously fictional, such as the Three Stooges beingclumsy, never circulate via Fail/Win because these are not snapshots of life, eventhough countless numbers of bumbling, stumbling people make the websites daily.The poles also exclude images that are not indexable in its terms, with site operatorsdisqualifying the vast majority of staged or faked images before ever appearing.Although a few such images occasionally surface, they are not obviously manipulatedand viewers often point out their artifice. For instance, an image of a pregnantwoman spinning on her belly passed onto Failblog, but viewers pointed out the imagewas taken from a movie and it received very few “likes.”34 Such disputes frequentlyoccur and they illustrate the force of the life pole, since fakery or fiction blunts thecomedy. In Fail mode, reality is funnier than fiction, so the images must be perceivedas indexes of actual occurrences for comedic force. To be funny the viewer mustperceive it as an undoctored re-presentation of an event. This expectation discouragesthe uploading of fictional or obviously manipulated images. As a result, most uploadscontain cues of indexicality.The second pole, games, constitutes more limitations for Fail/Win imagery and

perception. Basically, images that are not game-like enough, that strain the capacityfor this metaphor, rarely if ever appear. Images that are too serious, too tragic, or toosacred are filtered out. For instance, images in which people die or are seriouslywounded do not appear, despite the fact that crashes are a frequent type of Failimages. In addition, images featuring topics that are too serious become disqualified,such as a photo of a starving person spilling food or sick people stumbling. Althoughit appeared on Failblog, the Iwo Jima photo too closely approaches these limits ofsacredness and seriousness to make the image evoke the expected affection ofamusement, as its zero comments and “likes” attests.35 Topics such as war and thevalues of egalitarianism and nationalism are too serious to innervate the expected

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amusement. Indeed, the topic areas categorized on Failblog—parties, dating,parenting, fashion, tattoos, repair jobs, work, and music—are all everyday activitiesthat lack the kind of seriousness that would denude the humor. Even politics—apotentially serious topic—features images of misspelled protest signs or speakinggaffes (Rick Perry forgetting the agency he would dismantle).Two other limitations are closely tied to the game pole. Images that are either too

common or too literal (that are already a game) do not circulate. One cannot findimages of someone winning or losing in sports unless the success or failure isextreme, out of the ordinary course of play. Missing a game-winning shot is not aFail, nor is making one a Win because both are too literal; they do not activate thecapacity for metaphor. In Fail/Win mode, the viewer engages a metaphor depictinglife as a game, disqualifying things that are already games. Similarly, common actionsdo not constitute Fails or Wins because they do not activate the capacity to judge.People eating successfully, doing their jobs or misspelling commonly misspelledwords are too common to attract spectators seeking to pass out praise or blame. Ofcourse, sometimes what people judge as common can vary, allowing some images topass. However, these images are regularly disputed, again illustrating the existence ofthe game pole. A video of a baby swimming is illustrative. The video received many“likes” for being a win, yet other commenters argued that this is not a win becausemany children learn to swim at this age. One commenter provided insight into thislimitation:

No offense, the kid is cute and all, but all I see is a kid swimming across a pool. Isfailblog.org now being used by superficial parents to show off their kids makingmediocre life accomplishments? Where is the thing that makes this stand out?Where is the fail, or the funny, or the wow factor? What shall we see next? …videos of kids getting home from school safely? Videos of kids walking withoutfalling? … {yawn} … yes it might be worthy accomplishments for any parent but isit unique and worthy enough to be posted to failblog.org?36

As this commenter’s account of “wow” or “funny” factors attest, the Fail/Win mode isexpected to generate interest or amusement. By engaging the mode, by seeingsnapshots of life as a game, the experience of encountering these images can innervateinterest and amusement. Such intended affects are no surprise, since modes are thecounterparts of affect, the virtual manners necessary for actual affections to flowforth.Of course, people find different Fails and Wins funny, offensive, or too serious to

joke about. This occurred with the video of the KTVU news anchor reading thefalsely reported names of the crashed Asiana flight pilots, including Captain SumTing Wong.37 Many celebrated the prank as a hilarious Win, while others thoughtthem racist or argued that tragedy is no laughing matter. Such disputes alsofrequently occur with Parenting Fails, apparently because many find bad parentingtoo serious a subject. But even those who take exception to the humor recognize themode and its expected affections. The mode may fail to innervate the affections, yetthe virtual structure remains nevertheless.

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This virtual structure enables the meme to circulate because the mode therebybecomes recognizable and shareable. Indeed, the spread of Fail/Win meme, applied toall sorts of objects by all sorts of subjects, demonstrates that modes do circulate. Thus,ethology can help scholars address the significance of circulation itself, particularly byhelping account for how and why image-objects and modes circulate. How image-objects circulate, that is, what image-objects enter into Fail/Win mode, is shaped bythe poles of the virtual field. The mode serves to filter and limit the circulation ofimage-objects. Certain image-objects fit comfortably within these poles, making themlikely candidates for re-circulation, whereas others are too serious, common, literal, orfake to become re-circulated. Why such image-objects and modes circulate haseverything to do with affection. When modes prove capable of innervatingpleasurable affections, they tend to circulate. Likewise, when an image-object provesan apt actualization, innervating affections, they circulate more widely thanks to anaffected viewer-become-rhetor. A modal focus can thus assist scholars in analyzingdigital circulation. Such analysis, while shifting the typical focus of the visualrhetorical critic, can nevertheless be greatly aided by previous rhetorical scholarship.

Modes and Rhetorical Inquiry

Perhaps sensing the dilemmas digital circulation poses for rhetorical inquiry, manyrhetorical scholars have recently advanced the concept of modes. Celeste Condit callsfor a modal materialism, and Nancy Streuver argues that the modality of possibilityunderwrites rhetorical inquiry and designates a “primary quality of civil experi-ence.”38 Daniel Brouwer and Robert Asen’s collection Public Modalities offers modesas a productive metaphor for publics, and Helene Shugart contends that understand-ing parody and pastiche as modalities would enhance understandings of contempor-ary media.39 In visual study, Barbie Zelizer stresses the “as if” modality of About toDie images, Finnegan has described documentary modes as “rhetorically productive,”and DeLuca insists that scholars begin analyzing images as “Deleuzian bodies—modes that introduce relations of speed and slowness into the social and produceaffects.”40

Although these scholars use the concept to mean different things, modes seem tobe in the air for rhetorical scholars, producing a resounding call for attention to them.This essay answers that call, outlining how rhetorical scholarship can productivelyshift its focus in order to account for phenomena like Fail/Win. Primarily, a modalanalysis requires a shift in emphasis away from the examination of distinct texts andcontexts to a focus on the manners of engagement, away from a focus on the actual tothe virtual. Such a focus acknowledges that rhetorical images are not texts but bodiesendowed with affective capacities; that audiences don’t merely “read” texts butinterface with them, via their own affective capacities, in a variety of ways. Rhetoricalscholars performing modal analysis thus will not read texts for meanings but insteadmap their affective capacities. Nonetheless, a number of concepts and insights thathave emerged out of close textual analysis can assist in the analysis of the capacities of“textual” bodies.

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For instance, we have seen how Fail/Win solicits the viewer’s capacity to engage inmetaphor by seeing life as a game. Many scholars of metaphor stress, as does a modalapproach, that metaphor is not merely a textual feature but a way of thinking.Metaphors initiate a conceptual experience in which two distinct parts producemeaning through interactivity, tension or a comparative gestalt.41 Metaphor activelyentices thinking by refracting one idea or concept (the focus, tenor) through another(the frame, vehicle). Paul Ricoeur’s explanation comes closest to describing themetaphoric capacities enacted in Fail/Win mode by stressing how metaphor producesan experience of “seeing as.” For Ricoeur, this “seeing as” constitutes the crucialgesture of metaphor:

The “seeing as” is the positive link between vehicle and tenor. In poetic metaphor,the metaphorical vehicle is as the tenor—from one point of view, not from allpoints of view. To explicate a metaphor is to enumerate all the appropriate sensesin which the vehicle is “seen as” the tenor. The “seeing as” is the intuitiverelationship that makes the sense and image hold together.42

Like a mode, metaphor designates a formal process of interpretation, a relation orcoming together of subject (interpreter) and object (text). Metaphor works like aframe that affects how audiences can see or interpret. Because some modes such asFail/Win rely upon activating the capacity for metaphor, theories of metaphor canhelp assist in outlining the affective capacities of rhetorical artifacts. However, ratherthan asking what are the meanings accrued via this process—what are the variousways in which viewers take life to be a game—a modal approach asks what potentialis contained within this capacity to metaphorize, what experience this enables. In thecontext of Fail/Win, the capacity to engage in metaphor makes possible anothercapacity of the viewer: the ability to judge the game. The capacity to metaphorize lifeenables their engagement as a judge.Likewise, there is an affinity between the rhetorical analysis of techné and the

concept of modes. As with Fail/Win, a particular know-how and technique is necessaryto produce actualizations, and these techniques help cue the mode. For instance,Finnegan has analyzed how techniques of cropping and framing help constitute,variously, artistic or documentary photographs. Similarly, the icons analyzed byHariman and Lucaites are actualized through photojournalistic techniques and know-how, such as capturing events in candid photos. Such techniques may help cue themode, triggering certain affective capacities. Yet these techniques and know-how do notalone constitute the mode. The mode is a manner of seeing, shared by photojournalistsand viewers, not just the techné of image-makers or viewers alone. Scholarship ontechné, then, can be useful for directing ethologists to the capacities of the mode.However, techné is not constitutive of the mode, which is a relation of capacities foraffect and affection. Indeed, various techné can circulate across modes, as when candidshots are used in various modes without necessarily producing a civic icon. Likewise,the Fail/Win mode at first relied on the technique of appending captions “FAIL” or“WIN” but has since evolved, now featuring images without captions that allow viewers

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to vote Fail or Win. Thus rather than describing the techné of rhetors, modal analysisfocuses on how the actual techné cue and enable virtual capacities.The study of form also can assist rhetorical scholars in performing ethology, since

form directs attention to textual capacities. Yet here the focus must also shift from theactual form to the virtual affectabilities. Kenneth Burke has suggested such an alteredperspective on form. Burke contends that form should be conceived as experiencerather than as a textual structure. He states, “A form is a way of experiencing; andsuch a form is made available … when, by the use of specific subject-matter, itenables us to experience in this way.”43 Burke’s definition of form resonates withmodal analysis, since it emphasizes engagement, affection, and potential. For Burke,form relates directly to affect by triggering certain responses in viewers: “[F]orm isthe creation of an appetite in the mind of the auditor, and the adequate satisfying ofthat appetite.”44

Conceiving form this way is consonant with a modal analysis by directing attentionto movement, the experiential, and text-audience engagement. But since the term“form” often indicates textual properties, it remains necessary to distinguish betweenmodes and form to prevent confusion. Such confusion is doubled since form is alsonot wholly reducible to mode. Texts have structures, rhythms, and other formalelements that can vary within the mode, as evidenced by the different images thatactualize Fail/Win. Modes are forms, yet they operate at the virtual level, as meta-form, framing the image-objects and ways of seeing alike, limiting and enabling both.Thus a distinction between form and mode will help distinguish between modes’meta-form and images’ internal forms. Modes are not equivalent to form in thetextual sense, but only to the capacities such forms afford.Joshua Gunn has productively connected Burke’s notion of form to affect and

genre, another rhetorical concept that can aid modal analysis. According to Gunn,“form refers to the affective experience of the subject” and genre designates thesedimentation of form into signification, the discursive fixing of repeated forms.45

Genre, in other words, is form delivered to language, form succumbing to theinsistence of languaging.”46 In the terms of this essay, genre refers to the retrospectiveclassification of actualized forms. Unlike Gunn’s unique take, most genre criticismfocuses on actual texts rather than the affective capacities enabled thereby. Forinstance, Campbell and Jamieson, the scholars who pioneered genre criticism, definegenre as groups of discourse that share substantive, stylistic, and situationalcharacteristics.47 They thus outline genres by tracing the actual—the substances,styles, and situations that can be found in genres. Campbell and Jamieson should becredited with recognizing that genre is, like modes, all about relation. For them, it isnot specific features that demarcate genres but rather an internal dynamic, a sharedrelation between features. They thus describe genres as “constellations.”48 None-theless their focus is directed to relations within texts rather than to the virtualcapacities structuring the coming together of text and audience. Such a focus meansthat genre criticism cannot account for a genre’s emergence, that is, what makes iconsor Fail/Win recognizable as genre. Campbell and Jamieson duly note that genres areheld together by an internal dynamic, yet by focusing solely on the internal elements

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of actual texts, they miss the broader, virtual dynamic—the relation of engagement.49

Since such approaches help clarify the defining elements of groups of texts, they canassist ethologists interested in tracing the affective capacities of those texts. Yet byremaining focused on actualization, genre criticism often misses the virtual structureshaping those elements in the first place. Indeed, as we saw earlier, the modal analysisof Fail/Win focused as much on what one does not see as what one does. As such,genre criticism cannot answer the question of how a genre comes into being, whatmakes it recognizable and circulatable.The same applies to Hariman and Lucaites’s conceptualization of icons as

photographic representations of historical events that are widely recognized, activatestrong emotional response, and are repeatedly reproduced.50 Their definition begs aquestion: how are such images recognized as icons? This recognition depends uponan iconic mode that circulates between people, becoming a shared manner ofperception. The authors acknowledge that when queried about icons, most peoplereply with a “typical response: three or four of the set would be listed immediately.”51

Furthermore, Iwo Jima was immediately recognized as an icon, before its widespreadcirculation. The first editor to see the photo exclaimed, “Here’s one for all time,” andwithin days the photo was “reproduced in virtually every local newspaper.”52 Yetaccording to Hariman and Lucaites, icons are images that are repeatedly reproduced.Their genre focus freezes image-movement to look back upon the images, retro-spectively classifying them. As DeLuca argues, “[T]here is no way under thisdefinition to look at a photograph in its initial present and discern it to be iconic.Iconic is a retrospective historical designation. Indeed this definition has a circularfeel—a photo is iconic because it is iconic.”53

Supplementing the genre focus, then, demands analyzing the mode responsible forthe recognizability of iconicity. A photograph can only become an icon through amode, by actualizing a manner circulating throughout public culture. Of course,contingencies of culture, situation, and history determine which images become mostwidely circulated, that is, which images become the recognizable apexes ofphotojournalism that Hariman and Lucaites’ study. Yet an iconic mode emergesfrom and then proceeds to structure the actualizations, bestowing the potential forcertain images to become recognizable icons. 54

The consistency of aesthetic features across the recognized icons, especially theircandid transparency, emotional depth and capture of collective experience, alsoattests to the existence of an iconic mode. Tracing icons to Orthodox art, I havedescribed the iconic mode as symbolic realism, whereby realistic images serve asembodiments of transcendent events or values.55 The iconic mode presents concreteimages (“hypostatizations”) of abstract values (egalitarianism) or events (World War II).Thus all icons present candid images, rather than staged portraits. The staged photoof soldiers in front of the flag, also taken by Rosenthal that same day at Iwo Jima, didnot provoke much reaction because widespread circulation demanded the photo firstbe recognized as an icon, engaged through a particular mode. Staged photos do notactivate iconicity since their constructed-ness dampens the prospects of seeing ahypostatization of events or values. Such features and techniques are repeatedly

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employed because they are necessary to trigger certain affective capacities, but they donot by themselves define the mode.In short, the iconic mode drives image circulation by orienting audiences to see

and photojournalists to look for images hypostatizing events or values. Commend-ably, Hariman and Lucaites go some way towards explicating an iconic mode withoutmaking modes their central focus. This is because modes constitute the virtualaccompaniment to actualizations of genres. Hariman and Lucaites seem to agree,warning, “Our approach has put great emphasis on the content of the individualphotograph. We should caution against too much of this.”56 To heed this warning,they call for attention to modes, describing public culture as “a mode of seeing”reproduced through photojournalism.57 Likewise, Finnegan discovers documentaryand artistic modes in the reappropriations of FSA photos.58 In Survey Graphic, basedin a documentary mode that sees the photo as a document of social reality, MigrantMother provides evidence of poverty. In contrast, the U.S. Camera audience expectsto perceive the photos as art, with the magazine asking “its readers to view … thephotographs aesthetically, as models of visual virtuosity.”59 Thus the magazine altersimage features to cue attention to aesthetics, transforming the photo into arepresentation of motherhood.However, what remains implicit in Finnegan’s and Hariman and Lucaites’s

analyses stands much to gain from being made explicit. An explicit modal focuscan help scholars understand both how images become recognizable as genres andwhy they circulate. As argued above, photographs become recognizable as icons viaan iconic mode orienting viewer perceptions and motivating further circulation. Iconsemerge through an established procedure of producing and recognizing them, apractice of endowing iconicity, of seeing a photo as an icon, shared by photo-journalists and audiences and circulating in specific spheres, especially the newsmedia. Images like icons circulate because they find uptake in different outlets for themode or because they pass through different modes. In other words, the resultantphotographic icons circulate into and through other modes besides the iconic.In contradistinction with this modal understanding, Hariman and Lucaites

envision circulation as the movement of images rather than modes. They thus tryto trace the icon across all its different manifestations and, doing so, find a widevariety of meanings ascribed to Iwo Jima, with “attitudes” ranging from civic piety tonostalgia, irony to cynicism. A modal focus, in contrast, envisions these reappropria-tions not as circulations of the same image but instead as the image’s re-modulation,generating different affections (“attitudes”). In other words, the photographic iconsthat emerge from an iconic mode may circulate into other modes. By circulatingthrough different modes, “the” image becomes remade and contexts dramaticallychange. For instance, in Homer Simpson’s hands, the photo is remade into potatochip likeness, which Homer briefly acknowledges before eating. “The image, whichbegan as a sacred emblem …, is profaned in potato paste as a symbol of the nation’slove affair with commercial consumption.”60 Here, the icon has entered into adifferent mode, one based in irony, which remakes the form rather than presenting aphotographic hypostatization. The image is no longer a sacred icon but a symbol of

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the icon and its recognized reverence. The icon’s likeness in potato chip form cues anironic mode, and, when Homer eats it anyway, the affection of surprise potentiallyflows forth, perhaps producing laughter. No longer an icon, the image becomes a signof iconicity in another mode; Homer expresses an ironic, even cynical, attitudetowards iconic reverence. Likewise as the icon enters other modes, it becomes asymbol referencing the icon in order to express different meanings and evokedifferent attitudes. In a cynical mode, for instance, the icon becomes a symbol thatexpresses disparagement towards reverence. In a nostalgic mode, the icon becomes asymbol of the past evoking yearning for yesteryear.In short, rather than the variable meaning of one circulating icon, a modal

perspective envisions these images as different actualizations of circulating modes andaffects. These circulating modes motivate the reappropriation of icons; the icons areactualized through a manner for generating the affections accompanying nostalgia,cynicism, irony, and piety. Although scholars can learn much about the “range ofcultural attitudes” by tracing image circulation, such scholarship does not explicitlyfocus on those attitudes and does not trace which affections and manners circulatemost because the focus on specific images excludes too many affections and mannersto offer an adequate account. In other words, Hariman and Lucaites can never provecynical modes are on the rise by examining icons alone, as they seem to conclude. Incontrast, with a focus on the various affects and modes in circulation, scholars areable to account for how images become recognizable (modes) and why they circulate(affections).In sum, modes remain distinct from, yet interconnected with, many rhetorical

concepts—including genre, techné, metaphor, and form. However, rather thandetailing the actual, the aim is to examine the actual for evidence of the virtualcapacities activated in the mode. The key is not to identify the forms, techné, andmetaphors but, rather, to account for how those actual elements enable virtualrelations, constituting a mode. However, since modes are not the acts of particularrhetors but collective and emergent, the rhetorical criticism of modes requires onemore shift—from representation to expression.

Fail/Win as Expression of Control Society

Because the Fail/Win phenomenon is virtual, collective, and emergent, it should notbe treated as a representation of actual subjects’ interests or ideologies. This is not tosay that specific submitters do not make representations via Fail/Win mode, but thatthe virtual mode is not reducible to any act of representation. Instead, Fail/Win modeis an event, a collective emergence, an expression rather than a representation. Anexpression, in the Deleuzian understanding, is distinct from a representation becauseexpression, as Massumi states, “is always fundamentally of a relation, not a subject.”61

Deleuze consistently critiques the view of rhetoric as representation precisely becausesuch accounts presuppose actual subjects who do the representing. Such a viewpointnecessarily erases change by seeing rhetoric as always conforming or correspondingto some pre-given actuality, as re-presenting a prior formation. This perspective, as

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we saw in the previous section, leaves unanswered the question of how formationslike Fail/Win come to be in the first place.Conceptualizing such formations as expressions makes this question primary. As

Massumi explains, “The task for a theory of expression is how to account for thestability of form, given event…. If the world exhibits conformities or correspondencesthey are, precisely, produced.”62 All of the conforming and corresponding instances ofFail/Win are produced only as the outcome of the emergence of the mode. InMassumi’s words, “(T)he actual content of expression—what effectively comes to besignified, manifested, designated; it’s ‘object’—emerges from expressive potentialthrough a process of the capture of that potential.”63 An expression like Fail/Win is acollective event whose emergence is primary in relation to the actualizations thatfollow. As an expression, Fail/Win does not exist in an individual body, mind, orspeaking subject, who externalizes their prior internal state. Fail/Win is not owned byany subject but instead emerges from outside; it is “abroad in the world … non-local,scattered across a myriad struggles,” which is why mysteries of origin and purpose areso common with Internet memes.64

Whence does an expression like Fail/Win emerge? The answer is from a field ofpotential, which must be distinguished from conditions of possibility. Massumi usesthe example of a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt is an expression, an event thatemerges from an atmosphere charged with the potential energy necessary forelectricity. An expression (lighting) expresses or explicates the energy circulating infields of potential (the charged atmosphere). These fields of potential are real andinfluence the actual even if never actualized, which distinguishes them fromconditions of possibility. Conditions of possibility are necessary for something toemerge, but which may not necessarily affect the actualization. For instance, theemergence of Fail/Win depended on computer-based media and open networks. Fail/Win began from a videogame, its contents frequently are the product of mobile,digital devices, and its spread depended on networks that fuel its continuedcirculation. These conditions are Fail/Win’s conditions of possibility, without whichthe meme could never become real. In contrast, an expression actualizes the potentialenergy—the affects, feelings, intensities or tendencies—already circulating in thesocial field. An expression like Fail/Win explicates these potential energies,actualizing them in an emergent form.What relations, then, does Fail/Win express? From what field of potential does it

emerge? Primarily, it expresses a relation between two energies, forces, or tendenciesdefining control society—the force of continual surveillance and self-discipline andthe anxieties that such forces evoke. Control society is Deleuze’s name for the regimeof power emergent in the shift from the disciplinary societies elucidated byFoucault.65 In disciplinary society, power operated by shaping individuals accordingto specific behavioral molds (the worker, prisoner). Such disciplining took place inenclosures such as the prison or factory, since the mass concentration of individualsenabled their disciplining into the predetermined molds. Thus disciplinary societyoperated according to two poles—of the individual and mass. Individuals weremassified in institutional enclosures as means of disciplining individuals. As Deleuze

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surmises about disciplinary society, “power both amasses and individuates, that is, itfashions those over whom it’s exerted into a body of people and molds theindividuality of each member of that body.”66

In control society, these poles have shifted. Although not completely displacingdisciplinary institutions, power has begun to operate in different locations and indifferent ways. Power operates across dispersed, diffuse networks that exist, today, innearly any physical space, moving from what Deleuze calls the enclosures ofdisciplinary society to the “open sites” of control society.67 With the advent of theInternet along with wireless and mobile computing, the boundaries between workand leisure broke down; work could potentially take place in any locale, andconsumption was available anytime and anywhere. Concomitantly, as Terranova,Jonathan Crary, Mark Andrejevic, and many others note and Failblog illustrates,leisure increasingly became a form of exploitable, often free labor that producesrevenue, further blurring the lines between consumer and producer, work andleisure.68

Besides shifting the spaces of power, control society also changes the meansthrough which power operates. Rather than massifying individuals for theirdisciplining, power today often operates by tracking “dividuals” and organizingthem according to markets or banks.69 Dividuals are not particular people defined bytheir functions (worker, prisoner) but are data profiles defined by online actions thatmark users and thereby divide them into markets (hence dividual, not individual)according to their preferences. Such information becomes aggregated into marketsand then sold to businesses in order to target and manipulate markets. These are notindividuals because their specific names and bodies are no longer the site of theexercise of power. In fact, controlling such dividuals only requires knowledge ofmarket preferences and tendencies rather than the individual’s specificities. Asanother of the primary theorists of control society, Alexander Galloway, remarks:

Demographics and user statistics are more important than real names andidentities. On the Internet there is no reason to know the name of a particularuser, only to know what that user likes, where they shop, where they live, and so on.The clustering of descriptive information around a specific user becomes sufficientto explain the identity of that user.70

The emergence of dividual subjects and collective markets occurs through the data-mining that many scholars like Andrejevic and Crary outline. As Crary notes,“[I]ndividual acts of vision are unendingly solicited for conversion into informationthat will both enhance technologies of control and be a form of surplus value in amarketplace based on the accumulation of data on user behavior.”71 In short, acts ofseeing become inscribed in regimes that translate those visual acts into nonvisualinformation useful for control and marketing. As such, power in digital society doesnot operate so much at the rhetorical level, the level of significance and aestheticproperties, but at the levels of access and feedback, whose regulation and tracking areenabled by computer technologies. For example, corporations like Failblog andFacebook make profit not by producing particular rhetorical acts (as did broadcast

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media) but by controlling access to those acts.72 In the open spaces of control society,as Deleuze remarks, access becomes the name of the game, that is, control is exercisedby managing access.73

As a result, life under control society leads to a lot of energy spent in repeated actsof surveillance and self-discipline. Control society is marked by an unbounded,continual self-disciplining exercised through communication networks extendingthroughout all space-times, including leisure activities. As Crary states, mechanisms“of command and effects of normalization penetrated everywhere and at all times.”74

As a result, the everyday ceases being a space outside institutionalized power tobecome occupied by “consumption, organized leisure, and spectacle … Time itselfbecame monetized, and the individual redefined as a full-time economic agent.”75

The Fail/Win phenomenon thus constitutes a prime expression of control society. InFail/Win mode, everyday activities—parties, home repairs, parenting, fashion—become subject to surveillance and organized into spectacle. Importantly, the topicsof Fail/Win are primarily consumerist—ways of maintaining houses and clothes, ofpartying and dating. Fail/Win mode tells us that such consumerist practices are “life”and puts the onus on individuals to manage that life in ways that avoid “failure.” Theeveryday becomes reduced to consumption and consumption practices become a newform of spectacle, with the time attending to this spectacle monetized by sites likeFailblog and captured in databanks cataloging preferences. Looking becomes valuablelabor in such an economy, and the Fail/Win viewer becomes an economic agentengaging in surveillance and discipline. In sum, Fail/Win expresses control society bycapitalizing on viewers’ tendencies to participate in practices of surveillance and self-discipline based in consumerist subjectivity, practices not confined to institutionallocations but circulating throughout the everyday.Although emergent from control society, Deleuze repeatedly insists that expres-

sions do not resemble the fields from which they emerge. Just as the lightning strikedoes not reflect the charged atmosphere but actualizes it, Fail/Win is not simply themirrored re-presentation of control society. In other words, the Fail/Win meme“looks” different than control society. Specifically, Fail and Win are not the twooptions available to subjects in control society, which forces everyone to continuallyself-discipline in ways that make it exceedingly difficult to win, nor is judging lives-as-games the behavior most common in control society. Instead of resembling controlsociety, Fail/Win expresses its conditions in different rhetorical garb, just as theexpression of a lightning strike may be interpreted as signs of Zeus’ anger. Fail/Win“makes sense” of control society, it expresses its conditions in the different anddiffering form of visual rhetoric.76 As such, Fail/Win has something to say aboutcontrol society, even if not strictly reflecting it, and this is precisely why the skills ofthe rhetorical scholar remain crucial.What does Fail/Win express about control society? How does it make sense of this

field of potential? Here, the form of Fail/Win is illuminating. Fail/Win asks viewers toparticipate in a binary evaluation, similar to the binary processing of the computer.Indeed, Fail is a common response of computers, which, at times, report that theoperation it tried to execute has failed. Fail/Win applies this binary processing to life

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under control society, expressing how human behavior can increasingly be comparedto computers. In control society, behaviors are carefully managed and directed;people must perform many predetermined operations to maintain their lives. Whenpeople do not perform those operations “correctly,” Fail/Win compares theirbehaviors to the operations of a malfunctioning computer, which can similarly Fail.In this sense, Fail/Win expresses how life under control society has becomeprogrammed, how it proceeds according to pre-scripted codes, and, thus, howhumans have become increasingly comparable to computers.The comparison between humans and computers in Fail/Win mode is intended to

be funny, and it is this humor that reveals how Fail/Win also expresses the anxietiesinduced by control society. As a joke, the form of Fail/Win closely aligns withBergson’s theory of humor, which he defines as “the mechanical encrusted upon theliving.”77 For Bergson, humor results from an incongruity between human intelli-gence and habitual or mechanical behavior. When a supposedly intelligent humanengages in mechanical behavior, humor becomes possible. Therefore anything thatcan reduce a human to an object can potentially evoke laughter. Although Bergsonexcludes many other forms of humor, Fail/Win updates his account for the digital ageby comparing human behavior to computer-like operations, illustrating that suchreductions are still potentially humorous.For Bergson, such humor also expresses anxiety, performing the role of a corrective

by pointing out behaviors incompatible with or inhospitable to human intelligence.Fail/Win likewise expresses anxieties about control society and digital media. SheriTurkle argues that the emergence of computer intelligence raised many anxieties forhumans, who previously took themselves to be superior to animals owing to theirintelligence but were challenged by increasingly smart machines. As she states,“Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that their own minds might be similarto a computer’s ‘mind.’”78 The Fail designation compares human behavior tocomputer behavior in order to mock it, thereby expressing and alleviating some ofthis anxiety by turning it into a joke.Yet Fail/Win does more than turn these anxieties into a joke. It also offers an

ideological palliative as response. According to Turkle, people originally responded tothe anxiety over computer intelligence by turning to romanticism. Humans wereesteemed as different from computers owing to emotional and psychologicalresponses unavailable to mere machines. Fail/Win also distinguishes between humanand computer operations through the Win designation. Although humans andcomputers might fail in performing rote operations, only humans can win. Theopposite of a failed operation for a computer is not a win but a success; the operationoccurs or does not occur correctly. According to Fail/Win mode, humans can fail, butthey can also do something that a computer cannot—win, or, at least, enjoy a victory.This explains the strange opposition between Fail and Win. Rather than win/lose orfail/succeed, this meme sets failing against winning, pitting rote operations againstvictorious endeavors. Winning is an act reserved for humans, whereas failing issomething either a computer or a comically computer-like human can do. The Windesignation thus responds to the anxieties over computer intelligence and the

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reduction of human behavior to programmed operations, holding out some positivedifference between human and computer.This expression does not mirror control society and remains closer to an

ideological palliative precisely because Fail/Win are not the two options availableunder control society. The mode suggests that one can win at this perpetualmanagement of consumerist self. Such a message is ideological, since it represents animaginary relationship to existence. No one really wins under control society—consumerist self-management results in dramatic harms measured by massive speciesextinction and human oppression—yet the mode provides a brief moment ofpleasurable reassurance that perhaps one can win. In this regard, Fail/Win modeexpresses an impossible relationship to control society rather than representing it. Bysuggesting one can win in this social field, Fail/Win constitutes a palliative, anassurance that despite the fact that some people increasingly perform rote operationslike computers, others can escape this fate and emerge victorious.Understanding Fail/Win mode as an expression of control society provides some

insight, then, into why it would become one of the first and most popular memes.Not only does the Fail/Win mode tickle funny bones by expressing how similarbehaviors have become to computers, but also it eases those anxieties by reserving theprospect for victory for the skilled and/or lucky few. Fail/Win emerged in the earlydays of the social Internet, and expresses, by adopting the binary processing structureof a computer, how computers are dramatically changing our lives. In short, the Fail/Win mode emerges from the field of control society, only to make sense of itscirculating energies and affections in ways that do and do not quite reflect therealities of lives in it.

Conclusion

Rhetorical scholars who envision phenomena such as Internet memes as expressionsengage texts, like the actualizations of Fail/Win, by seeking out their virtualstructures. The focus shifts from the actual to the virtual, exploring how variousmodes constitute a relational field that structures subsequent actualizations. A modalfocus need not supplant the focus on images and contexts, yet the paradoxes digitalcirculation introduces into visual study suggest the need for supplementation. Fail/Win mode is not a specific text and includes a rapidly changing and highly variablecontext. Furthermore, in today’s media environment, many different modes of visualperception circulate; digital media have made a plethora of modes more apparent andhave fueled their spread, many with significant rhetorical consequence. Such a mediaenvironment means rhetorical scholars cannot afford to ignore such visual practices.Understanding such phenomena requires an ethology as outlined in this paper,

mapping the affective capacities engaged in the encounter between viewers/rhetorsand images. Performing an ethology can advance understanding of digital circulation,helping outline both how and why images circulate. Likewise, an ethology directsattention to the ways in which these circulating modes express the energies, anxieties,and affections influencing and shaping the rhetorical. As such, the skills of the

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rhetorical scholar remain essential, both for the concepts such as metaphor, form,techné, and genre that aid the ethological mapping and for their ability to decipherwhat these modes express. As the example of Fail/Win illustrates, these expressionscan tell scholars much about what makes sense to different publics and whichenergies, tendencies, desires, and affections speak to the perceived social field, andthereby move people, tickling their funny bones and encapsulating their anxieties.Seen as an expression, Fail/Win was one of the earliest and most popular memes toemerge because it expressed the anxieties and energies felt by so many in controlsociety. For the rhetorical scholar, then, Fail/Win operates as much more than anideological palliative. As an expression, it also indexes various social attitudes andaffections. Studying other such modal expressions can, then, help uncover other suchindices, greatly assisting the ongoing criticism, and perhaps generation, of visualrhetoric in a digital media environment marked by the rapid circulation of emergent,collective, virtual modes.

Notes

[1] Knowyourmeme.com, “Fail,” Knowyourmeme.com, accessed September 29, 2014, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fail.

[2] Knowyourmeme.com traces the Fail meme back to 1998. See Knowyourmeme.com, “Fail,”Knowyourmeme.com, accessed September 29, 2014, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/fail.Christopher Beam notes that Fail has lasted over a decade and “is here to stay” unlike mostmemes which “have the lifespan of fruit flies.” Christopher Beam, “Epic Win: Goodbye,Schadenfreude; Hello, Fail,” Slate, October 25, 2008, accessed September 29, 2014, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2008/10/epic_win.html.

[3] Failbog, “Funny Fail Pictures and Videos,” accessed June 12, 2010, http://failblog.cheezburger.com.

[4] William J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago,IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1994), 5.

[5] Cara A. Finnegan, “Visual Rhetoric and Visual Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 2(2004): 235.

[6] Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs, illustrated ed.(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2003), 224.

[7] Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, 223.[8] Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S. Hope, “Visual Rhetoric in Communication:

Continuing Questions and Contemporary Issues,” in Visual Rhetoric: A Reader inCommunication and Visual Culture, ed. Lester C. Olson, Cara A. Finnegan, and Diane S.Hope (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2008), 5.

[9] Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca, “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images and theCase of Emmett Till,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 263–86; Anne Demo, “TheAfterimage: Immigration Policy After Elián,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 10, no. 1 (2007):27–50.

[10] Dana L. Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash ofCivilizations> in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90,no. 3 (August 2004): 285–306; J. David Cisneros, “Contaminated Communities: TheMetaphor of ‘Immigrant as Pollutant’ in Media Representations of Immigration,” Rhetoric& Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008): 569–602; Charles E. Morris III and John M. Sloop, “‘What

Modes of Visual Rhetoric 463

These Lips Have Kissed’: Refiguring the Politics of Queer Public Kissing,” Communication &Critical/Cultural Studies 3, no. 1 (March 2006): 1–26.

[11] Bradford Vivian, “The Veil and the Visible,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 2(1999): 115–39; Reginald Twigg, “The Performative Dimension of Surveillance: Jacob Riis’How the Other Half Lives,” Text and Performance Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1992): 305–28.

[12] Jenny Edbauer, “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation toRhetorical Ecologies,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2005): 20.

[13] Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and theOverdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43, no. 1 (2010): 19–20.

[14] Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaningin a Networked Culture (New York, NY: NYU Press, 2013), 27.

[15] Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 7.[16] Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 7, 211.[17] Kevin Michael DeLuca, “The Speed of Immanent Images,” in Visual Communication:

Perception, Rhetoric, and Technology, ed. Diane S. Hope (New York, NY: Hampton Press,2006), 87.

[18] DeLuca, “Speed,” 87.[19] DeLuca, “Speed,” 85.[20] Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1989).[21] Limor Shifman, Memes in Digital Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014), 18–19.

Emphasis in original.[22] Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications,

1998), 147.[23] Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York, NY: Columbia

University Press, 1994), 208–09. Emphasis in original[24] Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, CA: City

Light Books, 1988), 125–26.[25] Deleuze, Spinoza, 127.[26] Deleuze, Spinoza, 48.[27] Deleuze, Spinoza, 124.[28] Deleuze, Spinoza, 49–50.[29] Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston, MA: The

Beacon Press, 1955), 10.[30] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second

Version,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935–1938, eds. Howard Eilandand Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,2006), 114.

[31] Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 111.[32] Benjamin, “Work of Art,” 128.[33] Brian Massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze

and Guattari (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), 66.[34] Failblog, “New Reason to Get Pregnant,” Cheezburger.com, accessed July 26, 2013, http://

cheezburger.com/7642865920[35] Pundit Kitchen, “Epic Win,” Cheezburger.com, accessed March 30, 2013, http://roflrazzi.

cheezburger.com/news/tag/Historical/page/2[36] Failblog, “Her Dad Calls Her His Little Water Baby,” Cheezburger.com, accessed July 26,

2013, http://cheezburger.com/51739905[37] Memebase, “KTVU News Anchor Reads the Ridiculous, Made-Up Names of Asiana Airlines

Flight 214 Pilots on the Teleprompter,” Cheezburger.com, accessed July 26, 2013, http://cheezburger.com/52394241

464 E. S. Jenkins

[38] Celeste M. Condit, “Race and Genetics from a Modal Materialist Perspective,” QuarterlyJournal of Speech 94, no. 4 (2008): 383–406; Nancy S. Struever, Rhetoric, Modality, Modernity(Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press, 2009), 1.

[39] Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen, eds., Public Modalities, 1st ed. (University AlabamaPress, 2010). Helene A. Shugart, “Mediating Modalities: Practicing Popular Politics,” inPublic Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life, eds. Daniel C.Brouwer and Robert Asen (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 173–94.

[40] Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public (New York, NY: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010); Cara A. Finnegan, “Documentary as Art in U.S. Camera,” RhetoricSociety Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2001): 63; DeLuca, “Speed,” 88.

[41] Max Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press, 1962); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago,IL: University Of Chicago Press, 1980).

[42] Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning inLanguage, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello, S. J. (Toronto:University of Toronto Press, 1975), 212.

[43] Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,1968), 143.

[44] Burke, Counter-Statement, 31.[45] Joshua Gunn, “Maranatha,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98, no. 4 (2012): 369.[46] Gunn, “Maranatha,” 369.[47] Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “Form and Genre in Rhetorical

Criticism: An Introduction,” in Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, eds. KarlynKohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Falls Church, VA: The Speech Communica-tion Association, 1978), 20.

[48] Campbell and Jamieson, “Form and Genre,” 21.[49] Campbell and Jamieson, “Form and Genre,” 21.[50] Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, No Caption Needed: Iconic Photographs, Public

Culture, and Liberal Democracy, annotated ed. (Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press,2007), 27.

[51] Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 6.[52] Quoted in Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 93. From “Photographer Gets Praise

for War Job,” New York Times, February 25, 1945, 1:10.[53] DeLuca, “Speed,” 85.[54] Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 291.[55] Eric S. Jenkins, “My iPod, My Icon: How and Why Do Images Become Icons?,” Critical

Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 5 (2008): 466–89.[56] Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 300.[57] Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 303.[58] Finnegan, “Documentary as Art in U.S. Camera,” 63.[59] Finnegan, Picturing Poverty, 121.[60] Hariman and Lucaites, No Caption Needed, 122.[61] Brian Massumi, “Introduction: Like a Thought,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression after

Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (New York, NY: Routledge, 2002), xxiv. Emphasisin original.

[62] Massumi, “Introduction,” xvii–xviii.[63] Massumi, “Introduction,” xx.[64] Massumi, “Introduction,” xxi.[65] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York, NY:

Vintage Books, 1995).

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[66] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990, trans. MartinJoughin (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1995), 179–80.

[67] Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York, NY:Columbia University Press, 1995), 175.

[68] Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18,no. 2 (2000): 33–58; Mark Andrejevic, iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007).

[69] Deleuze, “Postscript,” 180.[70] Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (Cambridge, MA:

The MIT Press, 2004), 69.[71] Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London, UK: Verso, 2013),

47–48. Emphasis in original.[72] Jaron Lanier describes Facebook’s business model as “taking free contributions from people

and regurgitating them as bait for advertisers.” Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (NewYork, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 20.

[73] Deleuze, “Postscript,” 180.[74] Crary, 24/7, 71.[75] Crary, 24/7, 70–71.[76] This idea of expressions “making sense” of the affects and affections circulating in the social

is one further developed in my book. Eric S. Jenkins, Special Affects: Cinema, Animation andthe Translation of Consumer Culture (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

[77] Henri Bergson, “Laughter,” in Comedy, ed. Wylie Sypher (Baltimore, MD: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1980), 84.

[78] Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York, NY: Simon &Schuster, 1995), 24.

466 E. S. Jenkins