[CAT] "Elements for a Sociology of Lolcats"

[rfmcdonald]

Over at Une heure de peine, Denis Colombi has a fantastic post up: "Eléments pour une sociologie du lolcat", or in English translation, "Elements for a sociology of Lolcats". Lolcats civilize us.

We have long known this: the Internet has not affected the students nearly so much as it has cats. Whether in photos and in videos, having stuff on their heads or looking like Hitler, being taken seriously or ironically, no other species has taken such advantage of the digital world. The understanding this phenomenon of this strange elective affinity between cats and the Internet has not yet been given the attention it deserves from the social sciences: more than ever before, interdisciplinary work is needed to shed light on this major transformation of our societies. Without claiming in any way the full clarification of these questions, let me outline a few possibilities here.

[. . .]

The history of cats has been an eventful history, to say the least. It is tempting to draw parallels between the status they have acquired today with that they once possessed in the Egypt of the Pharaohs: treated like gods, revered, admired, the lolcats could be interpreted as a continuation of mummification, a way to treat the cat as an equal with his owner in giving him a place and a life on the web, the equivalent of the afterlife. [. . .]

However, this interpretation could be wrong. A reading of Norbert Elias can give another, less pleasant but deeper interpretation. Here is what he wrote in The Civilization of Manners:

In the sixteenth century, one of the popular festivities of St. John consisted of burning live one or two dozen cats. [...]

This is a show that is certainly not more than the execution of heretics by fire or torture and killing of all kinds. What makes it particularly distasteful is that it embodies in a direct and unadulterated way the pleasure that some people experience in tormenting living beings without any rational excuses. [...] Many things that once aroused feelings of pleasure reflexes have become the subject of displeasure. In both cases, we are not dealing exclusively with individual sensations. Burn cats on St. John was a social institution in the same way that today's boxing matches or horse races. In both cases, organized by the pleasures of society are the epitome of emotional standards [...]. Today we treat as "abnormal" a person who would seek to satisfy his tendencies fun by burning alive of cats, because the normal human conditioning of our stage of civilization has replaced pleasure of the sight of such acts with a fear instilled in the form of self-restraint. (Norbert Elias, The civilizing process, 1939)

The suffering of the cat was used, once upon a time, in popular festivities: the pleasure it yielded was not, as indicated by Elias, proof of a certain psychological deviance, but rather a collective phenomenon, in the same way that watching people joyfully punch each other in the face in a ring or a movie screen is a shared experience and "normal" in our societies.

"The pleasures organized by the company are the epitome of emotional standards": this is the lesson can be learned from Elias. Laughing at lolcats is not an individual experience but a taught experience: this tells us something of the degree of civilization to which we have arrived.
[. . .]

And our cats in? Lolcat reflects a new stage in the progress of civilization, a new form of habitus. There is a total submission of it to the cute, the kawaii. Our habit that no longer supports even the suggestion of hurting something cute.

Funny, but I think he has a point. And you?