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Larry Morgan
Dr. Verhulsdonck
Multimodal Composition
April 29, 2017
Capitalist Running Dogs and Rogue Memes

Abstract

Multimodal Scholars such as Jeff Rice, Seven Fraiberg, and others have shared a concern for opening up

the field of composition to new forms of literay and knowledge practice. They have particularly

concerned themselves with New Media scholarship and the emerging forms of writing that take place in

digital culture. This paper seeks to explore how the semiotic resources of memes, as a form of writing, are

deployed to create arguments and practice critique within the leftist subcultures of the social media

platform Tumblr. Starting with a geneaology of the memes to be discussed, the paper will then move

into traditional text to provide an historic trace and context for the creation of the anti-capitalist John C.

Miller meme. It will then go on to examine this meme through the work of Fraiberg, Rice, the New

London Group, and the semiotician George Rossolatos. The aim of this paper is to explore the ways in

which memes offer a vital and underexplored territory of cultural argumentation and writing.
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First, a Brief Genealogy of Memes

Antecedent Memes:

Sweet Jesus, Pooh!

Sweet Jesus, Pooh! is an exploitable comic series featuring the character Tigger from Winnie the Pooh

panicking over the character Pooh accidentally eating his fathers ashes. Variations of the comic typically

depict Pooh ingesting a variety of substances (Sweet Jesus Pooh, Thats Not Honey! par. 1).
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Expanding Brain

Expanding Brain is a meme in which a series of images compare the brain size of a person

relative to a certain factor. Though the expanding brain is usually implied to showcase intellectual

superiority over various objects, it is more often used in an ironic sense to imply the opposite, where

objects of derision are implied to be of higher standard than objects that are usually highly regarded

(Expanding Brain par. 1)

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Me, an Intellectual

Me, An Intellectual is a popular dialogue snowclone 1on Tumblr in which the character me, an

intellectual uses needlessly formal language to correct well-known colloquial phrases (i.e. calling a

Slim Jim a Slender James (Me, an Intellectual, par. 1).

1 From KnowYourMemes article on snowclones: Snowclones are a type of phrasal

templates in which certain words may be replaced with another to produce new
variations with altered meanings, similar to the fill-in-the-blank game of Mad
Libs. (par. 1).
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Bone Hurting Juice

Bone Hurting Juice is an anti-meme image macro series and photoshop meme based around a

type of juice that causes pain in the drinkers bones after consumption, often causing them say oww oof

my bones. (Bone Hurting Juice par. 1).

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Setup
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Reaction: The John C. Miller Meme

Phase 1: Capitalist Running Dog

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Dennys Responds:
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Reaction and Commentaries:

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Phase 2: Dennys is Racist

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Memes, critique, and multimodal literacies

Steven Fraiberg, in his article The Dynamic Nature of Literacy and Multimodal Composers,

argues for a reimagining of writing studies to encompass already extant practices of multilingual-

multimodal composing in spaces mediated by an array of texts, tools, actors, and spaces (499). The end

goal of this reimagining is to increase the bandwidth of semiotic resources for communication in order to

make available all means of persuasion (Fraiberg 499). Fraibergs call echoes the broader concern of

multimodal and composition scholarship with moving beyond an understanding of alphabetic and

linguistically homogenous texts to develop a pedagogy respondent to human knowledge/literacies that are

situated in diverse social, cultural, and material contexts (New London Group, 202). In the era of digital

communication, these knowledge practices/literacies are constantly emerging and developing at a rate that

outpaces scholarly production, embedded as they are in in constantly shifting social and material contexts.

Fraiberg desires a model that attends to the strategies which writers use to mesh their own native

languages with dominant discourses (498). In a related fashion, Jeff Rice turns our attention to the way

that electronic visual media are always emerging in a way that has an ability to generate involvement at

greater rates than print (93). Taken together, these calls for a more expansive approach to

multimodal/multilingual literacies mean examining the knowledge practices that develop in digital

communities. The question that arises, is what represents a vital area of knowledge practice in digital

communities today?

Memes represent one such area of digital literacy practice. Memes are a decentralized form of

multimodal communication, of which visuality plays a significant, but not exclusive role. They act as

messages in a networked economy with the ability to foster bonds among members of ephemeral

networks (Rossolatos 135). For the purpose of this paper, the definition of memes will bypass Richard

Dawkins initial framing as a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation (133). It will instead

move directly to George Rossalatos definition of memes as cultural signs which act as structural gestalts

that allow for their recognizability by virtue of semiotic constraints in the form of an invariable inventory
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of expressive elements (135). Further distinguishing memes from Dawkins genetic model, they should

be seen as rhetorical, rather than positivist constructions, neologisms which instantiate the formal

structure of a pun (135).

Memes in this paper will be taken as a vital area of literacy practice, but the need here is to

present a specific way in which that writing is operationalized- directed toward a specific end. Memes are

not a homogenous practice, they exist to different ends and to different communities. One increasingly

relevant practice in this form of writing is the use of memes as a vehicle of critique. This paper will

examine the emergence of the John C. Miller meme on Tumblr, a direct act of critique against the

Dennys corporation. It will first provide a trace of the emergence of this meme, and then a discussion

anchoring it in multimodal theory.

A Brief Trace

The John C. Miller meme is an example of forced memes, or self-consciously constructed

meme templates which are applied into available meme designs. They both have their origin in the Bone

Hurting Juice meme which was popular on Tumblr in the early spring of 2017. KnowYourMemes.com

defines the meme as an image macro series and photoshop meme based around a type of juice that

causes pain in the drinkers bones after consumption, often causing them say oww oof my bones

(Bone Hurting Juice par. 1). This is a kind of anti-meme, or a meme-ified anti-joke which

KnowYourMemes defines as a a type of indirect humor that involves the joke-teller delivering

something which is intentionally not funny, or lacking in meaning (Anti-Jokes par. 1). Bone Hurting

Juice first appeared on Facebook in summer 2016 as a variant of the Sweet Jesus, Pooh! meme , and

from there spread through social media sites, reaching popularity on tumblr around late March, early

April 2017.

Concurrent to this memes rising popularity,, corporate tumblrs run by companies like Dennys

and Totinos2 have been very active in expropriating the ironic or anti-humor edges of contemporary
2 The people who provide that bulwark of American cuisine, the Pizza Roll.
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memeography as a means of advertising their brand. Dennys received particular push-back for this

discourse as it is a corporation with a history of racial discrimination lawsuits (Labaton par. 1). As a

tumblr user, I have noticed that you cannot scroll through the app without seeing ads for either company

awash in the same kind of ironic nonsense humor. Concurrent to that corporate engagement in meme

discourses, an ongoing debate in lefist subcultures on tumblr (composed of communist, anarchist, left-

liberal, and other tendencies) concerned itself with what it means to establish discursive spaces/practices

which are resistant to commodification by corporate entities, discussions which often referenced the

commodification of counter-cultures such as the Punk, Grunge, or Hippy movements of previous decades.

These debates configured corporate social-media meme expropriation as an invasion of space, and for a

time discussion in these circles rested easy on the assumption that this kind of nonsense, irony driven

humor was resistant to commodification in that it scrambled the codes of coherence which advertising

depends upon. This is best exemplified in a post by user captainsnoop on 21 April, 2017, stating that

Bone Hurting Juice is proof positive that all a meme needs to be successful is for it to be so weird that

corporate PR accounts cant immediately try to monetize it (meme documentation par. 8).

Inevitably, that very thing happened. Dennys made a version of the Bone Hurting Juice meme

and set off a chain of reactions. According to the tumblr Meme Documentation, Dennys posted its own

version of the meme on 23 April, 2017 (Explained: bone hurting juice meme par. 8). In response, the

user leviathan-supersystem posted on the same day and called for a new meme: John C. Miller ,CEO and

President of the Dennys Corporation, is a capitalist running dog and his wealth must be seized and

redistributed to the people (Explained: John C. Miller meme par. 4). The phrase running dog is a

callback to the language of Mao Tse-tung, which was itself pulling from a much older Chinese pejorative

describing a subservient goon or lackey (Mao par. 18). This was the birth of the John C. Miller meme,

which spread across a variety of designs at a rapid pace, with the text of leviathan-supersystems post

imposed into all available formats. In short order, it appeared as a quickly deleted sabotage edit on

Millers Wikipedia page, in various kinds of image macros, in the format of the Expanding Brain
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meme (a meme where sequences of brain-related images are shown expanding in relation to a default

starting point- see geneology), and so on. After some time, Dennys tumblr responded on 26 April 2017

by making a chat post, a format of post on tumblr which itself has been used to make alphabetic memes

(memedocumentation, par. 8).3 Quoting the same source, in this chat post, tumblr says, we are a

capitalist running dog and, to which dennys replies, your memes must be seized and redistributed to

the people? on it. (par. 8). In a round of

critique that followed on 26 April, the user blackblocberniebros posted that the obvious shortcoming of

the Dennys capitalist running dog meme is that it wasnt actually offensive to DennysA meme that

will actually damage them needs to reference their racial discrimination lawsuits (par. 1). The proposed

solution was to shift the John C. Miller meme to the text Dennys is racist and no amount of dank memes

will change that (see genealogy). This new text spread across the available design formats of tumblr

memes in much the same fashion as the original iteration, and as yet has been met with silence by the

Dennys tumblr.

Discussion

The John C. Miller meme, in both its forms, is a direct site of conversation and pushback, an act

of critique responding to the presence of corporate commodification as it is perceived by leftist

subcultures on Tumblr. In the first place, this can be seen as an operationalization of Jeff Rices concept of

cool. The cool writer is an individual who mixes and is mixed, who composes with media by

commutating, appropriating, visualizing, and chorally structuring knowledge (Rice 108). The cool writer

plays on the iconography and aesthetics of a time and place to compose images and to image composing,

through the rhetorical strategies available to them. In the case of the John C. Miller meme, composers act

as cool writers, as rhetors who recognize the rhetorical force of meme iconography and use it to contest

commodification and spread knowledge. The iconography, in this case, is the same ground of

3 They often take the format of You: [does/says] x, Me: [does/says] y, most
popular in the form of Me, an intellectual see genealogy
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expropriation by corporate entities, is the ironic, the anti-humorous, the distorting and replicating imagery

of memes in the tumblr subculture. As a practice of Cool, the use of these rhetorical strategies (image

macros, 4 panel comics, chat post formats, etc) is employed by leftist subcultures to frame memes as

more than just humor, but as a knowledge practice, a site of meaning, counter-culture, and finally class

struggle. They take this cool milieu of digital aesthetics as a means of making argument and composing

group identity, to generate involvement (93).

The John C. Miller meme is not just a process of visual argumentation, emerging as it did from a

variety of alphabetic dialogues and meme formats (such as the chat post). It is a production emerging

from a variety of actors and interests in a web of interlocking social, material, and semiotic

relationships, or knots (Fraiberg 501). It takes place in a complex weave of genre ecologies, where

separate genres of memes (the expanding brain, Sweet Jesus, Pooh!, Twin Peaks text) co-exist with the

series of blogs, reblogs, shortform essays, question-answer posts, and so on that Tumblrs format allows

for. It is a practice coordinated by actors (social media firms responsible for Dennys, left and left-leaning

users, users in general) and the materials at hand (photoshop, the text box), meet with discourses on

hipness and the discourses of leftist thought, the climate of racial and economic politics and so on. The

critical text post of tumblr users, such as the one which started this meme, is tied into a knot with the

extant genres of meme, passed into new connections, and then at the moment Dennys responded, it was

remediated into a new format Dennys is racist- which untied the specific Marxist edge and tied in

racial politics to Dennys corporate image. Users employed the tools at hand (the meme formats) from

their outset, but the use of these tools in turn changed them their use as humor transitioned into a

perspective on memes which saw them as a viable site of rhetorical argumentation. The development of

the John C. Miller meme, through this process, became an act of crossover, where the dominant

discourse of memes, the ironic and the absurd, was melded with native codes of political critique to form

an assault on corporate social media presence (498). The circulation of this text is a collision of

corporations, ideologies, platforms, and genres which continually produces new discourse.
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The rhetorical efficacy of the John C. Miller meme is accomplished through its play on the orders

of discourse that take place in the semiotic activity of meme production (New London Group 194). The

styles imparted in genres such as Expanding Brain or Sweet Jesus, Pooh!, act as available designs

which are reformed in the insertion of the phrase attacking Dennys. The impact of this phrasing, its

specific impact, is accomplished in the nominalization of the text the phrase capitalist running dog

immediately compacts information and expresses a malign characterization of John C. Miller, and by

extension Dennys, while evoking Marxist polemics and placing the reader of the text into an oppositional

relationship to the corporation (199). For Rossolatos, the available design are composed of the invariant

elements of the meme, which open a space for a multimodal language game of cultural reproduction

where surface elements are modified while the invariant structure (the format of the joke) remains in

place (143). In this case, the surface elements of the memes, the joke being told, are shifted to an act of

critique which interrupts the normal enjoyment of a simple joke it is an act of confrontation not just to

Dennys but to the audience. Acting as cultural mediators, the propagators of this meme engage in a

structure of play through which serious exchange is brought about and propagated (150).

In Rossolatos eyes, this exchange takes the form of colonization, a meme is a dead

form awaiting to be hosted by agents of cultural reproduction in a potentially infinite chain of

signification, where each node consists of a replica of the Same as dominant or mass culture, or the

imperial cultural space of the Symbolic Order (145). Multimodal memes work by propagating a

dominant paradigm through the bypassing of critical faculties in the recognition and endorsement by a

receiver (146). This recognition and endorsement takes place through enjoyment of the memetic content.

What Rossolatos sees as exclusively a colonizing practice whereby the dominant order asserts itself is in

fact much more complicated when the John C. Miller meme is taken into account. Here, the mechanism

of recognition and endorsement, which is supposedly alienated from critical apprehension, is itself a

participation in critical practice. The format of the meme to be passively received, however it is stylized,

is loaded with a message which imparts a critical understanding, and perhaps a moment of discomfort in

its explicit political content. For the unfamiliar entering into the memes chain of reproduction, the
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content of John C. Miller works to destabilize their tacit acceptance of Dennys and other corporate

social media in dominant discourse. While Dennys exemplifies the colonizing use, as its employment of

memes fits that discourse into the domain of advertising, consumption, and commodity, the John C.

Miller meme acts as a critical pushback.

Conclusion

Jeff Rice argues that the task of composition studies today is to reimagine our status quo, to

reconceptualize writing so that it incorporates the notion of cool (111). The task Rice sets is resonant with

the broader thrust of multimodal scholarship to incorporate not only the notion of cool, but also the many

forms of writing and knowledge which abound in the complex and dynamic world of New Media. Memes

present a constantly shifting and evolving form of writing deeply ingrained in ever-changing social and

political environments. The John C. Miller meme along emerged over a matter of days, and in that time

reconfigured drastically in conjunction with movements of critique and interaction with users and

corporate firms. The purpose of this paper is to argue that the John C. Miller meme itself represents a

larger trend in which memes act as a vehicle of group-identity and political critique in conversation with a

host of semiotic resources. There remains much that could be said about this meme and memes like it. It

could be studied as an act of signal jamming, as an act of Situationist detournement, and in many other

fashions. What is demonstrated in the study of this meme, most of all, is that this is an icredibly vibrant

mode of social communication that takes place across a variety of fronts. Any reconceptualization of

writing studies that fits the goals of Rice, the New London Group, or Fraiberg, must attune itself to the

practices of writing which are always already ongoing outside of the classroom, and memes are one of the

most omnipresent forms of writing which composers engage with today.

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Works Cited

Anti-jokes. KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/anti-jokes

Bone Hurting Juice. KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bone-hurting-juice

Expanding Brain. KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/expanding-brain

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Fraiberg, Steven. Composition 2.0: Toward a Mltilingual and Multimodal Framework. Multimodal

Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Claire Lutkewitte, Bedford, 2014, pp. 497-516.

Labaton, Stephen. Dennys Restaurants to pay $54 million in race bias suits. The New York Times, 25

May, 1994, http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/25/us/denny-s-restaurants-to-pay-54-million-in-

race-bias-suits.html?pagewanted=all

Mao Tse-Tung. Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung. Marxists.org,

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm

Me, an Intellecual. KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/me-an-intellectual

Memedocumentation. Explained: John C. Miller Meme. 24 April, 2017,

https://memedocumentation.tumblr.com/post/159962064735/explained-john-c-miller-meme

New London Group. From a Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Multimodal

Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Claire Lutkewitte, Bedford, 2014, pp.193-210.

Rice, Jeff. Imagery. Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, edited by Claire Lutkewitte,

Bedford, 2014, pp. 89-112

Rossolatos, George. The Ice-Bucket Challenge: The Legitimacy of heMemetic Mode of Cultural

Reproduction is the Message. Signs and Society, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015.

http://jstor.org/stable/10.1086/679520. Accessed 10 April, 2017.

Snowclone. KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/snowclone

Sweet Jesus, Pooh! Thats Not Honey! KnowYourMeme, http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sweet-

jesus-pooh-thats-not-honey
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