A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes by Kyle Parry (review)

Reviewed by: A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes by Kyle Parry Ranjodh Singh Dhaliwal (bio) A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes by Kyle Parry. University of Minnesota Press. 2022. 344 pages. $120.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper; also available in e-book. Consider a meme, any meme. Chances are you are thinking of at least two distinct forms: one that somehow disturbs the other, producing humor (or anger or perhaps some secret third thing) in the process. Allow me to take a fairly dated meme from 2017 as an example. In a series of images that were circulated all over social media right after then-president Donald Trump announced the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, photos from the White House—with Trump and his mostly male entourage all grinning and thumbing up to the camera for a photo-op—were set next to an image of a giant polar ice shelf cracking into two. These two images accompanied the text "cracking open a cold one with the boys," a "copypasta"—a combination of text that gets circulated in different contexts online—that notes the obsession (and pleasures) of masculine bonding over chilled, canned beers.1 Together, the three pieces of content—Trump's photograph, a depiction of polar climate change, and the internet slang about men drinking beer—produce, for someone aware of all three objects independently, a mildly humorous (and morbidly terrifying) expression signifying several things at [End Page 198] once: (1) the unfortunate gender imbalance in Trump's group of advisers and supporters; (2) the implicit association of this group with participation in homosocial activities; (3) the shared cracking sound made by a beer can being opened and the glacial ice shelves disintegrating; and, finally, (4) the horror that these group of men, as a part of their homosocial bonding and its political preservation, might have just cracked open a different cold one at the global scale, sending us all to our climate doom. Whenever I have taught this meme in my classroom, I have noted to my students that juxtaposition is integral to how and why it works. Memes bring together wildly different objects from different contexts; the copypasta, after all, was not initially created to talk about ice shelves breaking, nor was the Trump photo taken as an indication of homosocial pleasures. By selecting, arranging, and configuring—all functions that form an integral part of Kyle Parry's theoretical apparatus in A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes—memes present a stark distinctive juxtaposition that makes you chuckle.2 This production of (morbid) humor through unexpected juxtaposition might be understood as part of an even larger phenomenon; think of how puns work or why sitcoms feature the unexpected stomping on the familiar.3 And though it doesn't explicitly touch on the question of humor, Parry's book ably illustrates why the problem of distinct juxtapositions, as I have understood it until now, may explain something more fundamental in contemporary media cultures than just one memetic artifact several years old. Reading A Theory of Assembly offered me a new terminology and made me ask myself if I should, instead of juxtaposition, focus on assembly as the ur-memetic operation in my classes going forward. In his well-written study, Parry quite convincingly makes the case that we need to consider assembly as an expressive strategy that has already been in widespread use across several different media ecologies from art galleries to popular and social media. The book ultimately sets out to intervene in theories of human expression itself, positioning assembly alongside narrative, representation, abstraction, performance, parody, mapping, allegory, database, and visualization as a fundamental aspect of how we communicate. These "expressive strategies" or "cultural forms" comprise the pantheon of things we do.4 Assembly, Parry argues, "has [in our world today saturated with digital and social media] come to equal narrative, representation, and other dominant cultural forms in its capacity to move audiences and mobilize publics, and just as crucially, to do harm."5 Put simply, an assembly is constituted by almost any set of materials and the positions those materials can occupy, and one assembles by acts of...