From Symbol to Icon: The Aesthetic Regime of the Meme in the Post-Discursive Age

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Introduction: From Tweet to Meme

Over the past decade, the landscape of digital communication has undergone a radical transformation. The era of brief, aphoristic tweets—where linguistic wit condensed virality into a few characters—seems to have given way to a new form of writing: the visual meme. Today, internet culture is no longer structured around text but around the image infused with affect. This passage from language to visuality marks a profound mutation in the economy of the sign—one that can be interpreted, following Peirce, Derrida, Baudrillard, and others, as a shift from symbol to icon, and more broadly, from logos to pathos.

Contemporary virality is no longer measured by the argumentative strength of discourse, but by an image’s capacity to circulate, to affect, to provoke reaction. From political memes caricaturing public figures with Mexican hats to endless ironic variations on gestures or phrases, the sign has become instantaneous, plastic, and globally legible—independent of national languages. To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to return to the theory of signs and rethink the relationship between language, aesthetics, and power.

Visual Language: From Symbol to Icon

Charles Sanders Peirce distinguished three types of signs: icons, indices, and symbols. The icon represents its object through resemblance (an image, portrait, or caricature); the index through contiguity or causality (smoke as a sign of fire); and the symbol through convention (language, numbers, cultural codes). In memes, we witness a historical inversion: the linguistic symbol, which dominated modern communication, is being displaced by the digital icon, which communicates through appearance, emotion, and immediate mimesis.

Peirce noted that symbols “grow” and refine themselves as the community interprets them, while icons “communicate themselves” (Collected Papers, 2.302). In meme culture, symbolic growth has halted: there is no prolonged interpretation or conceptual elaboration, but rather an accelerated reproduction of iconic images. What matters is not meaning but the intensity of recognition. An edited face, an exaggerated gesture, a cultural accessory (a hat, a flag, a facial expression) suffices to activate a network of instantaneous associations.

In this sense, memes constitute a new visual lingua franca, where intelligibility depends not on language but on perception. The sign becomes global because it ceases to be discursive: the image does not translate—it propagates.

The Regime of Parody

Aesthetically, memes belong to a regime of generalized parody. Their power lies in repetition with variation—the capacity to deform the sign to the point of absurdity. Roland Barthes observed that every modern mythology consists in “transforming history into nature” (Mythologies, 1957). The meme, however, performs the inverse operation: it turns the apparent naturalness of the image into mutable history, dismantling myths through irony.

A politician caricatured with a Mexican hat does not literally represent a nationality or an isolated joke; it represents the delocalization of meaning. The image no longer refers to a stable referent but to an infinite chain of recontextualizations. Each user who shares or modifies the meme reinscribes it within a new context, erasing all hierarchy between author, parodist, and audience. It is an aesthetics of the rhizome, where circulation replaces creation and montage replaces discourse.

Derrida might have seen in this the radical realization of his idea of “writing without origin.” In Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967), he wrote: “There is nothing outside the text”—not because reality does not exist, but because every reality is already interpretation, already text. The meme, in this sense, is a form of decentered writing: it has no author, no original context; its meaning is its circulation. Each reiteration rewrites it.

The Disappearance of the Referent

Jean Baudrillard, in turn, described the transition from representation to simulacrum: images no longer reflect reality but replace it. In Simulacres et Simulation (1981), he writes: “Simulation is not that which is opposed to the real; it is that which erases the difference between the true and the false, the real and its representation.” Political memes embody this principle: the politician no longer exists as a real subject in public space but as a viral image.

In the digital sphere, political reality becomes an iconic echo chamber, where citizens no longer argue—they react. Laughter replaces judgment. The meme thus becomes a technology of affect, a soft ideological device: whoever laughs consents; whoever shares disseminates a stance without articulating it. Humor replaces explicit ideology.

The Medium as Message

Marshall McLuhan anticipated this mutation when he wrote, “The medium is the message” (Understanding Media, 1964). The content of a meme is not what matters; what matters is the mode of its circulation. Each platform (X, Instagram, TikTok) imposes its own regime of visibility and speed, such that the sign adapts to algorithmic logics of attention.

The meme is therefore the paradigmatic product of the post-discursive age: a sign engineered to survive in the economy of distraction. Within it crystallize two simultaneous transformations: the linguistic (from symbol to icon) and the political (from argument to affect). What was once the field of rational debate has become the stage of collective emotion.

Conclusion: The Return of the Sophist

Meme culture is not merely an aesthetic evolution of digital humor; it is a structural mutation in the way contemporary societies produce and manage meaning. In the passage from symbol to icon, from text to image, from discourse to montage, what is at stake is nothing less than the destiny of political language.

Peirce allows us to see that this shift entails the loss of the interpretive process that defines the symbol; Derrida and Barthes reveal that authorship dissolves in textual circulation; Baudrillard shows that the simulacrum replaces the real; and McLuhan that the medium itself determines what we understand as communication.

The meme is, ultimately, the minimal unit of post-discursive culture: a sign that does not explain but infects; that does not represent but reacts. Where once there was speech, there is now image; where there was thought, there is virality. In this economy of affect that replaces argument, reason yields to the efficacy of impact, and persuasion becomes automated. The sophist has returned—but he no longer speaks in the public square. He operates through the algorithm, seducing with images where once he persuaded with words.

References

• Barthes, R. (1957). Mythologies. Paris: Seuil.
• Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacres et Simulation. Paris: Galilée.
• Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit.
• McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.