This chapter expands the discussion of memetic quotation to cases, including cases of what we call ‘dialogue labelling’, which do not feature explicit reporting verbs, but rely on depiction of interlocutors, interpretation of embodied behaviour, and sometimes quotation marks to signal the embedded Discourse Spaces, and viewpoints exchanged, in them. We include both one-off dialogue labelling examples and Image Macro memes (such as Anakin and Padmé) in our analysis. We also analyse a range of discourse patterns building on the basic Me/Also Me pattern, and round off with the Repeat after Me meme.

This chapter turns to labelling memes, where some images may develop into full-blown Image Macros, while others remain non-entrenched. Here, the textual component is different from both when-memes and from the typical Image Macro memes. In typical labelling memes, parts of a depicted scene are labelled with words or phrases which do not describe anything in the image, but instead collectively call up a different frame. Well-known examples discussed include the Is This a Pigeon? meme, and the Distracted Boyfriend meme (DBM), showing a man turning over to admire an attractive passing woman (dressed in red), while the woman (in blue) whose hand he’s holding looks on indignantly. This scene of a change in attention and preference – a choice for a new and attractive opportunity – gets to be applied to unrelated choices and new preferences. Labelling itself can sometimes be visual again. Overall, we stress the constructional properties of DBM – with strong argument structure-like properties – alongside the role of embodied features (emotions and attentions expressed in facial expressions and posture) and the figurative, similative meaning often arrived at compositionally.

Chapter 6 focusses primarily on Synge’s interest in the productive potential of the counterfactual. By embracing what modernity regards as failure ‒ social outcasts, for instance ‒ or as illogical ‒ a community welcoming a man who says he killed his father ‒ Synge’s plays challenge the dominant ideas of rationality that underpin modernity’s overarching frame. By ending on the exclusion of the characters that stand for other, non-rational, non-productive modes of being and knowing and by presenting the death of the cultural formation they represent as impending, the narratives of plays such as The Well of the Saints and The Shadow of the Glen highlight the depleting effects of the suppression or annihilation of these alternate epistemologies. Contrary to such narratives, however, the performance practices that are embedded within the plays advocate for the coexistence of a diversity of modes of vision and of knowledge. Embodied behaviour, which is at the heart of the theatrical performance, functions itself as an alternative epistemology. Through the shift of epistemology which they encourage, Synge’s plays celebrate the wonderful, utopian possibilities and alternatives to a capitalist modernity that performance opens up.