“We have plenty reason to see this coming. We know what happens to idioms that reach critical mass; more important, how the process of popularity in fact necessitates a kind of ironic reduction of the object.”
“The unique, inventive aspects that make us want to pass it on must be shorn off for maximum circulation and accessibility.”
“The examples are endless: Consider the relatively recent fates of “basic,” “Netflix and chill,” and “squad,” words sourced and repurposed from Black vernacular for, it seems, the sole purpose of later writing a jaded testimonial about them.”
“Linguists identify the processes that make up this phenomenon as entextualization, transduction, and—as many nonlinguists know—appropriation. Entextualization describes the making moveable of an idiom; induction is its actual relocation; and appropriation, taking on that which has been displaced as one’s own.”
“Animatedness is an ugly feeling. So identifies Stanford professor Sianne Ngai in her study of the aesthetic phenomenon in a monograph called Ugly Feelings. Animatedness, or excess liveliness, is compulsory: It involves not only the expectation that a body be agitated at will but requires “an unusual immediacy between emotional experience and bodily movement.” It’s quite literally the “state of ‘being moved’” like a puppet by a puppeteer desperate to prove the humanness of their object. And sometimes that object is an objectified subject who, too, aspires to a humanness at odds with the jerky movements of their manipulated body.”
“What must be attended to in a conversation about animatedness and the internet is the fact of animatedness as disproportionately distributed, specifically as produced at the site of racialization. On one hand, one’s humanity is conditional on the capacity to be animated—for bodies to whom humanity is not a given. On the other literal hand, a body animated looks utterly unnatural, puppet-like, revealing the desperation and labor underlying the humanizing project as well as turning “the racial body … into comic spectacle,” to quote again from Ngai.”