Campbell and Jamieson should be credited with recognizing that genre is, like modes, all about

relation. For them, it is not specific features that demarcate genres but rather an internal dynamic,
a shared relation between features. They thus describe genres as “constellations.” Nonetheless
their focus is directed to relations within texts rather than to the virtual capacities structuring the
coming together of text and audience. Such a focus means that genre criticism cannot account for
a genre’s emergence, that is, what makes icons or Fail/Win recognizable as genre. Campbell and
Jamieson duly note that genres are held together by an internal dynamic, yet by focusing solely
on the internal elements of actual texts, they miss the broader, virtual dynamic--the relation of
engagement. Since such approaches help clarify the defining elements of groups of texts, they
can assist ethologists interested in tracing the affective capacities of those texts. Yet by
remaining focused on actualization, genre criticism often misses the virtual structure shaping
those elements in the first place. Indeed, as we saw earlier, the modal analysis of Fail/Win
focused as much on what one does not see as what one does. As such, genre criticism cannot
answer the question of how a genre comes into being, what makes it recognizable and
circulatable. The same applies to Hariman and Lucaites’s conceptualization of icons as
photographic representations of historical events that are widely recognized, activate strong
emotional response, and are repeatedly reproduced. Their definition begs a question: how are
such images recognized as icons? This recognition depends upon an iconic mode that circulates
between people, becoming a shared manner of perception. The authors acknowledge that when
queried about icons, most people reply with a “typical response: three or four of the set would be
listed immediately.” Furthermore, Iwo Jima was immediately recognized as an icon, before its
widespread circulation. The first editor to see the photo exclaimed, “Here’s one for all time,” and
within days the photo was “reproduced in virtually every local newspaper.” Yet according to
Hariman and Lucaites, icons are images that are repeatedly reproduced. Their genre focus
freezes image-movement to look back upon the images, retrospectively classifying them. As
DeLuca argues, “[Tjhere is no way under this definition to look at a photograph in its initial
present and discern it to be iconic. Iconic is a retrospective historical designation. Indeed this
definition has a circular feel--a photo is iconic because it is iconic.” Supplementing the genre
focus, then, demands analyzing the mode responsible for the recognizability of iconicity. A
photograph can only become an icon through a mode, by actualizing a manner circulating
throughout public culture. Of course, contingencies of culture, situation, and history determine
which images become most widely circulated, that is, which images become the recognizable
apexes of photojournalism that Hariman and Lucaites’ study. Yet an iconic mode emerges from
and then proceeds to structure the actualizations, bestowing the potential for certain images to
become recognizable icons. The consistency of aesthetic features across the recognized icons,
especially their candid transparency, emotional depth and capture of collective experience, also
attests to the existence of an iconic mode. Tracing icons to Orthodox art, I have described the
iconic mode as symbolic realism, whereby realistic images serve as embodiments of
transcendent events or values. The iconic mode presents concrete images (“hypostatizations”) of
abstract values (egalitarianism) or events (World War II). Thus all icons present candid images,
rather than staged portraits. The staged photo of soldiers in front of the flag, also taken by
Rosenthal that same day at Iwo Jima, did not provoke much reaction because widespread
circulation demanded the photo first be recognized as an icon, engaged through a particular
mode. Staged photos do not activate iconicity since their constructed-ness dampens the prospects
of seeing a hypostatization of events or values. Such features and techniques are repeatedly
employed because they are necessary to trigger certain affective capacities, but they do not by
themselves define the mode. In short, the iconic mode drives image circulation by orienting
audiences to see and photojournalists to look for images hypostatizing events or values.
Commendably, Hariman and Lucaites go some way towards explicating an iconic mode without
making modes their central focus. This is because modes constitute the virtual accompaniment to
actualizations of genres. Hariman and Lucaites seem to agree, warning, “Our approach has put
great emphasis on the content of the individual photograph. We should caution against too much
of this.” To heed this warning, they call for attention to modes, describing public culture as “a
mode of seeing” reproduced through photojournalism. Likewise, Finnegan discovers
documentary and artistic modes in the reappropriations of FSA photos. In Survey Graphic, based
in a documentary mode that sees the photo as a document of social reality, Migrant Mother
provides evidence of poverty. In contrast, the U.S. Camera audience expects to perceive the
photos as art, with the magazine asking “its readers to view ... the photographs aesthetically, as
models of visual virtuosity.” Thus the magazine alters image features to cue attention to
aesthetics, transforming the photo into a representation of motherhood. However, what remains
implicit in Finnegan’s and Hariman and Lucaites’s analyses stands much to gain from being
made explicit. An explicit modal focus can help scholars understand both how images become
recognizable as genres and why they circulate. As argued above, photographs become
recognizable as icons via an iconic mode orienting viewer perceptions and motivating further
circulation. Icons emerge through an established procedure of producing and recognizing them, a
practice of endowing iconicity, of seeing a photo as an icon, shared by photojournalists and
audiences and circulating in specific spheres, especially the news media. Images like icons
circulate because they find uptake in different outlets for the mode or because they pass through
different modes. In other words, the resultant photographic icons circulate into and through other
modes besides the iconic. In contradistinction with this modal understanding, Hariman and
Lucaites envision circulation as the movement of images rather than modes. They thus try to
trace the icon across all its different manifestations and, doing so, find a wide variety of
meanings ascribed to Iwo Jima, with “attitudes” ranging from civic piety to nostalgia, irony to
cynicism. A modal focus, in contrast, envisions these reappropriations not as circulations of the
same image but instead as the image’s re-modulation, generating different affections
(“attitudes”). In other words, the photographic icons that emerge from an iconic mode may
circulate into other modes. By circulating through different modes, “the” image becomes remade
and contexts dramatically change. For instance, in Homer Simpson’s hands, the photo is remade
into potato chip likeness, which Homer briefly acknowledges before eating. “The image, which
began as a sacred emblem ..., is profaned in potato paste as a symbol of the nation’s love affair
with commercial consumption.” Here, the icon has entered into a different mode, one based in
irony, which remakes the form rather than presenting a photographic hypostatization. The image
is no longer a sacred icon but a symbol of the icon and its recognized reverence. The icon’s
likeness in potato chip form cues an ironic mode, and, when Homer eats it anyway, the affection
of surprise potentially flows forth, perhaps producing laughter. No longer an icon, the image
becomes a sign of iconicity in another mode; Homer expresses an ironic, even cynical, attitude
towards iconic reverence. Likewise as the icon enters other modes, it becomes a symbol
referencing the icon in order to express different meanings and evoke different attitudes. In a
cynical mode, for instance, the icon becomes a symbol that expresses disparagement towards
reverence. In a nostalgic mode, the icon becomes a symbol of the past evoking yearning for
yesteryear. In short, rather than the variable meaning of one circulating icon, a modal perspective
envisions these images as different actualizations of circulating modes and affects. These
circulating modes motivate the reappropriation of icons; the icons are actualized through a
manner for generating the affections accompanying nostalgia, cynicism, irony, and piety.
Although scholars can learn much about the “range of cultural attitudes” by tracing image
circulation, such scholarship does not explicitly focus on those attitudes and does not trace which
affections and manners circulate most because the focus on specific images excludes too many
affections and manners to offer an adequate account. In other words, Hariman and Lucaites can
never prove cynical modes are on the rise by examining icons alone, as they seem to conclude. In
contrast, with a focus on the various affects and modes in circulation, scholars are able to
account for how images become recognizable (modes) and why they circulate (affections). In
sum, modes remain distinct from, yet interconnected with, many rhetorical concepts--including
genre, techne, metaphor, and form. However, rather than detailing the actual, the aim is to
examine the actual for evidence of the virtual capacities activated in the mode. The key is not to
identify the forms, techne, and metaphors but, rather, to account for how those actual elements
enable virtual relations, constituting a mode. However, since modes are not the acts of particular
rhetors but collective and emergent, the rhetorical criticism of modes requires one more shift--
from representation to expression. Because the Fail/Win phenomenon is virtual, collective, and
emergent, it should not be treated as a representation of actual subjects’ interests or ideologies.
This is not to say that specific submitters do not make representations via Fail/Win mode, but
that the virtual mode is not reducible to any act of representation. Instead, Fail/Win mode is an
event, a collective emergence, an expression rather than a representation. An expression, in the
Deleuzian understanding, is distinct from a representation because expression, as Massumi
states, “is always fundamentally of a relation, not a subject.” Deleuze consistently critiques the
view of rhetoric as representation precisely because such accounts presuppose actual subjects
who do the representing. Such a viewpoint necessarily erases change by seeing rhetoric as
always conforming or corresponding to some pre-given actuality, as re-presenting a prior
formation. This perspective, as we saw in the previous section, leaves unanswered the question
of how formations like Fail/Win come to be in the first place. Conceptualizing such formations
as expressions makes this question primary. As Massumi explains, “The task for a theory of
expression is how to account for the stability of form, given event.... If the world exhibits
conformities or correspondences they are, precisely, produced.” All of the conforming and
corresponding instances of Fail/Win are produced only as the outcome of the emergence of the
mode. In Massumi’s words, “(T)he actual content of expression--what effectively comes to be
signified, manifested, designated; it’s ‘object’--emerges from expressive potential through a
process of the capture of that potential.” An expression like Fail/Win is a collective event whose
emergence is primary in relation to the actualizations that follow. As an expression, Fail/Win
does not exist in an individual body, mind, or speaking subject, who externalizes their prior
internal state. Fail/Win is not owned by any subject but instead emerges from outside; it is
“abroad in the world ... non-local, scattered across a myriad struggles,” which is why mysteries
of origin and purpose are so common with Internet memes. Whence does an expression like
Fail/Win emerge? The answer is from a field of potential, which must be distinguished from
conditions of possibility. Massumi uses the example of a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt is an
expression, an event that emerges from an atmosphere charged with the potential energy
necessary for electricity. An expression (lighting) expresses or explicates the energy circulating
in fields of potential (the charged atmosphere). These fields of potential are real and influence
the actual even if never actualized, which distinguishes them from conditions of possibility.
Conditions of possibility are necessary for something to emerge, but which may not necessarily
affect the actualization. For instance, the emergence of Fail/Win depended on computer-based
media and open networks. Fail/ Win began from a videogame, its contents frequently are the
product of mobile, digital devices, and its spread depended on networks that fuel its continued
circulation. These conditions are Fail/Win’s conditions of possibility, without which the meme
could never become real. In contrast, an expression actualizes the potential energy--the affects,
feelings, intensities or tendencies--already circulating in the social field. An expression like
Fail/Win explicates these potential energies, actualizing them in an emergent form. What
relations, then, does Fail/Win express? From what field of potential does it emerge? Primarily, it
expresses a relation between two energies, forces, or tendencies defining control society--the
force of continual surveillance and self-discipline and the anxieties that such forces evoke.
Control society is Deleuze’s name for the regime of power emergent in the shift from the
disciplinary societies elucidated by Foucault. In disciplinary society, power operated by shaping
individuals according to specific behavioral molds (the worker, prisoner). Such disciplining took
place in enclosures such as the prison or factory, since the mass concentration of individuals
enabled their disciplining into the predetermined molds. Thus disciplinary society operated
according to two poles--of the individual and mass. Individuals were massified in institutional
enclosures as means of disciplining individuals. As Deleuze surmises about disciplinary society,
“power both amasses and individuates, that is, it fashions those over whom it’s exerted into a
body of people and molds the individuality of each member of that body.” In control society,
these poles have shifted. Although not completely displacing disciplinary institutions, power has
begun to operate in different locations and in different ways. Power operates across dispersed,
diffuse networks that exist, today, in nearly any physical space, moving from what Deleuze calls
the enclosures of disciplinary society to the “open sites” of control society. With the advent of
the Internet along with wireless and mobile computing, the boundaries between work and leisure
broke down; work could potentially take place in any locale, and consumption was available
anytime and anywhere. Concomitantly, as Terranova, Jonathan Crary, Mark Andrejevic, and
many others note and Failblog illustrates, leisure increasingly became a form of exploitable,
often free labor that produces revenue, further blurring the lines between consumer and producer,
work and leisure. Besides shifting the spaces of power, control society also changes the means
through which power operates. Rather than massifying individuals for their disciplining, power
today often operates by tracking “dividuals” and organizing them according to markets or banks.
Dividuals are not particular people defined by their functions (worker, prisoner) but are data
profiles defined by online actions that mark users and thereby divide them into markets (hence
dividual, not individual) according to their preferences. Such information becomes aggregated
into markets and then sold to businesses in order to target and manipulate markets. These are not
individuals because their specific names and bodies are no longer the site of the exercise of
power. In fact, controlling such dividuals only requires knowledge of market preferences and
tendencies rather than the individual’s specificities. As another of the primary theorists of control
society, Alexander Galloway, remarks: Demographics and user statistics are more important than
real names and identities. On the Internet there is no reason to know the name of a particular
user, only to know what that user likes, where they shop, where they live, and so on. The
clustering of descriptive information around a specific user becomes sufficient to explain the
identity of that user. The emergence of dividual subjects and collective markets occurs through
the datamining that many scholars like Andrejevic and Crary outline. As Crary notes, “
[Individual acts of vision are unendingly solicited for conversion into information that will both
enhance technologies of control and be a form of surplus value in a marketplace based on the
accumulation of data on user behavior.” In short, acts of seeing become inscribed in regimes that
translate those visual acts into nonvisual information useful for control and marketing. As such,
power in digital society does not operate so much at the rhetorical level, the level of significance
and aesthetic properties, but at the levels of access and feedback, whose regulation and tracking
are enabled by computer technologies. For example, corporations like Failblog and Facebook
make profit not by producing particular rhetorical acts (as did broadcast media) but by
controlling access to those acts. In the open spaces of control society, as Deleuze remarks, access
becomes the name of the game, that is, control is exercised by managing access. As a result, life
under control society leads to a lot of energy spent in repeated acts of surveillance and self-
discipline. Control society is marked by an unbounded, continual self-disciplining exercised
through communication networks extending throughout all space-times, including leisure
activities. As Crary states, mechanisms “of command and effects of normalization penetrated
everywhere and at all times.” As a result, the everyday ceases being a space outside
institutionalized power to become occupied by “consumption, organized leisure, and spectacle ...
Time itself became monetized, and the individual redefined as a full-time economic agent.” The
Fail/Win phenomenon thus constitutes a prime expression of control society. In Fail/Win mode,
everyday activities--parties, home repairs, parenting, fashion-- become subject to surveillance
and organized into spectacle. Importantly, the topics of Fail/Win are primarily consumerist--
ways of maintaining houses and clothes, of partying and dating. Fail/Win mode tells us that such
consumerist practices are “life” and puts the onus on individuals to manage that life in ways that
avoid “failure.” The everyday becomes reduced to consumption and consumption practices
become a new form of spectacle, with the time attending to this spectacle monetized by sites like
Failblog and captured in databanks cataloging preferences. Looking becomes valuable labor in
such an economy, and the Fail/Win viewer becomes an economic agent engaging in surveillance
and discipline. In sum, Fail/Win expresses control society by capitalizing on viewers’ tendencies
to participate in practices of surveillance and selfdiscipline based in consumerist subjectivity,
practices not confined to institutional locations but circulating throughout the everyday.
Although emergent from control society, Deleuze repeatedly insists that expressions do not
resemble the fields from which they emerge. Just as the lightning strike does not reflect the
charged atmosphere but actualizes it, Fail/Win is not simply the mirrored re-presentation of
control society. In other words, the Fail/Win meme “looks” different than control society.
Specifically, Fail and Win are not the two options available to subjects in control society, which
forces everyone to continually self-discipline in ways that make it exceedingly difficult to win,
nor is judging livesas- games the behavior most common in control society. Instead of
resembling control society, Fail/Win expresses its conditions in different rhetorical garb, just as
the expression of a lightning strike may be interpreted as signs of Zeus’ anger. Fail/Win “makes
sense” of control society, it expresses its conditions in the different and differing form of visual
rhetoric. As such, Fail/Win has something to say about control society, even if not strictly
reflecting it, and this is precisely why the skills of the rhetorical scholar remain crucial. What
does Fail/Win express about control society? How does it make sense of this field of potential?
Here, the form of Fail/Win is illuminating. Fail/Win asks viewers to participate in a binary
evaluation, similar to the binary processing of the computer. Indeed, Fail is a common response
of computers, which, at times, report that the operation it tried to execute has failed. Fail/Win
applies this binary processing to life under control society, expressing how human behavior can
increasingly be compared to computers. In control society, behaviors are carefully managed and
directed; people must perform many predetermined operations to maintain their lives. When
people do not perform those operations “correctly,” Fail/Win compares their behaviors to the
operations of a malfunctioning computer, which can similarly Fail. In this sense, Fail/Win
expresses how life under control society has become programmed, how it proceeds according to
pre-scripted codes, and, thus, how humans have become increasingly comparable to computers.
The comparison between humans and computers in Fail/Win mode is intended to be funny, and it
is this humor that reveals how Fail/Win also expresses the anxieties induced by control society.
As a joke, the form of Fail/Win closely aligns with Bergson’s theory of humor, which he defines
as “the mechanical encrusted upon the living.” For Bergson, humor results from an incongruity
between human intelligence and habitual or mechanical behavior. When a supposedly intelligent
human engages in mechanical behavior, humor becomes possible. Therefore anything that can
reduce a human to an object can potentially evoke laughter. Although Bergson excludes many
other forms of humor, Fail/Win updates his account for the digital age by comparing human
behavior to computer-like operations, illustrating that such reductions are still potentially
humorous. For Bergson, such humor also expresses anxiety, performing the role of a corrective
by pointing out behaviors incompatible with or inhospitable to human intelligence. Fail/Win
likewise expresses anxieties about control society and digital media. Sheri Turkle argues that the
emergence of computer intelligence raised many anxieties for humans, who previously took
themselves to be superior to animals owing to their intelligence but were challenged by
increasingly smart machines. As she states, “Behind their anxiety was distress at the idea that
their own minds might be similar to a computer’s ‘mind.’” The Fail designation compares human
behavior to computer behavior in order to mock it, thereby expressing and alleviating some of
this anxiety by turning it into a joke. Yet Fail/Win does more than turn these anxieties into a
joke. It also offers an ideological palliative as response. According to Turkle, people originally
responded to the anxiety over computer intelligence by turning to romanticism. Humans were
esteemed as different from computers owing to emotional and psychological responses
unavailable to mere machines. Fail/Win also distinguishes between human and computer
operations through the Win designation. Although humans and computers might fail in
performing rote operations, only humans can win. The opposite of a failed operation for a
computer is not a win but a success; the operation occurs or does not occur correctly. According
to Fail/Win mode, humans can fail, but they can also do something that a computer cannot--win,
or, at least, enjoy a victory. This explains the strange opposition between Fail and Win. Rather
than win/lose or fail/succeed, this meme sets failing against winning, pitting rote operations
against victorious endeavors. Winning is an act reserved for humans, whereas failing is
something either a computer or a comically computer-like human can do. The Win designation
thus responds to the anxieties over computer intelligence and the reduction of human behavior to
programmed operations, holding out some positive difference between human and computer.
This expression does not mirror control society and remains closer to an ideological palliative
precisely because Fail/Win are not the two options available under control society. The mode
suggests that one can win at this perpetual management of consumerist self. Such a message is
ideological, since it represents an imaginary relationship to existence. No one really wins under
control society-- consumerist self-management results in dramatic harms measured by massive
species extinction and human oppression--yet the mode provides a brief moment of pleasurable
reassurance that perhaps one can win. In this regard, Fail/Win mode expresses an impossible
relationship to control society rather than representing it. By suggesting one can win in this
social field, Fail/Win constitutes a palliative, an assurance that despite the fact that some people
increasingly perform rote operations like computers, others can escape this fate and emerge
victorious. Understanding Fail/Win mode as an expression of control society provides some
insight, then, into why it would become one of the first and most popular memes. Not only does
the Fail/Win mode tickle funny bones by expressing how similar behaviors have become to
computers, but also it eases those anxieties by reserving the prospect for victory for the skilled
and/or lucky few. Fail/Win emerged in the early days of the social Internet, and expresses, by
adopting the binary processing structure of a computer, how computers are dramatically
changing our lives. In short, the Fail/ Win mode emerges from the field of control society, only
to make sense of its circulating energies and affections in ways that do and do not quite reflect
the realities of lives in it. Rhetorical scholars who envision phenomena such as Internet memes
as expressions engage texts, like the actualizations of Fail/Win, by seeking out their virtual
structures. The focus shifts from the actual to the virtual, exploring how various modes constitute
a relational field that structures subsequent actualizations. A modal focus need not supplant the
focus on images and contexts, yet the paradoxes digital circulation introduces into visual study
suggest the need for supplementation. Fail/ Win mode is not a specific text and includes a rapidly
changing and highly variable context. Furthermore, in today’s media environment, many
different modes of visual perception circulate; digital media have made a plethora of modes more
apparent and have fueled their spread, many with significant rhetorical consequence. Such a
media environment means rhetorical scholars cannot afford to ignore such visual practices.
Understanding such phenomena requires an ethology as outlined in this paper, mapping the
affective capacities engaged in the encounter between viewers/rhetors and images. Performing an
ethology can advance understanding of digital circulation, helping outline both how and why
images circulate. Likewise, an ethology directs attention to the ways in which these circulating
modes express the energies, anxieties, and affections influencing and shaping the rhetorical. As
such, the skills of the rhetorical scholar remain essential, both for the concepts such as metaphor,
form, techne, and genre that aid the ethological mapping and for their ability to decipher what
these modes express. As the example of Fail/Win illustrates, these expressions can tell scholars
much about what makes sense to different publics and which energies, tendencies, desires, and
affections speak to the perceived social field, and thereby move people, tickling their funny
bones and encapsulating their anxieties. Seen as an expression, Fail/Win was one of the earliest
and most popular memes to emerge because it expressed the anxieties and energies felt by so
many in control society. For the rhetorical scholar, then, Fail/Win operates as much more than an
ideological palliative. As an expression, it also indexes various social attitudes and affections.
Studying other such modal expressions can, then, help uncover other such indices, greatly
assisting the ongoing criticism, and perhaps generation, of visual rhetoric in a digital media
environment marked by the rapid circulation of emergent, collective, virtual modes.