Virality and the new ostensive : Ai Weiwei's leg-gun meme

Digital communication has amplified the rate and efficacy of the transference of cultural information, and has participated in the generation of a mode of symbolic exchange that demonstrates novel features. This modality"”and the novelty associated with amplified transference"”is often referred to as "virality," which is a label that resonates with Eric Gans's Generative Anthropology, and his articulation of the originary singularity that marks the successful emergence of human language. For the symbolic sign to emerge, it must have carried a viral quality, able to be shared with contagious effect because of its intersubjective condition: such a pattern need not have unfolded at any particular speed, but by contrast with the evolutionary (biological) changes that language appears to supervene upon, the sharing happened suddenly. This is a circular argument"”that language succeeded because it was successfully shared"”but any engagement with the paradoxical emergence of the originary something of language from no-thing requires such a presentation. Every act of representation captures the mood of this inexplicable originary success, and thematises the knowledge that language is because it is shared. The paradoxical originary circumstances of language show us that while communities of language users may have risen and disappeared many times over without sharing their invention, the originary group of protohumans will have shared its invention within the group, and then contacted other groups of protohumans and "infected" them, and so forth, as part of a genealogy that demonstrates the generative impulse that has motivated the sequence of such scenes"”the sum of which constitutes human history.