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Memeplex
A cluster of memes that can be spread to great effect in the form of an experienced, cohesive unit. A memeplex can therefore be regarded as emergent in relation to dividual memes, as something greater and more complex than the constituent memes separately, which enables an anti-reductionist memetics.
But while Dawkins has a markedly reductionist attitude towards memetics – all human expressions can be broken down into their smallest components, individual memes – Blackmore is the first proponent of a relationalist memetics. She points out that a cluster of memes often undergoes an emergence and together these memes form in fact a memeplex, a phenomenon that de facto constitutes something more than just its smallest constituent parts (the various memes). Thereby Blackmore succeeds in doing something which Dawkins and Dennett failed to do: namely, to explain how a society, a culture, a civilisation – the outermost forms of memeplexes – arise, survive and even propagate, based on a strictly memetic explanatory model. Thus, as a memeplex of its own, memetics must be regarded as a memetic replication of semiotics, a discipline in the borderland between philosophy and science whose roots go back to John Locke’s vision of a science of signs which he formulates in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding as early as the end of the 17th century.
Note how the relationships between each step, just like when it comes to all forms of relationalist hierarchies, must be understood of course as emergent rather than reductionist. The fiction is not built into the fictives beforehand; it seems to always deliver something extra over and above the fictives in themselves. In the same way, the ideology is not built into the fictions in advance; it always appears as something more and extremely attractive over and above the fictions. And it is precisely these emergent qualities that keep us adamantly embedded in the ideological memeplex in question – every new level adds yet another layer of a kind of compact mysticism to the growing metanarrative, not least in the big step from the seemingly open and therefore creative fictions to the obviously concealed ideology, which brings us to a standstill – which explains why our relationship to the outermost framework of memeplexes, the metaphysical, can never be anything but humbly subservient. Even our relationship to a created syntheist god – a deliberately named projection surface vis-à-vis an indisputably real phenomenon in the surrounding world that we must relate to, that is, fiction par excellence – must subordinate itself to this premise. This is precisely because no memes exist outside memetics, just as no signs exist outside semiotics. Nor are there any fictives – and in turn fictions constructed from these, and in turn ideologies constructed from these – nor are there in turn any credible metaphysical systems deduced from these ideologies that stand outside the current information technology paradigm.
The problem could be presented in this way: If religion happens to be the answer, which it apparently has been in every type of society that we know of throughout all of human history up until today – what then is the question? What is it that makes the religious memeplex in particular so attractive and successful in the cultural evolutionary process?
And so the question is: At the deepest level, is this about symbiosis or parasitism? Does the memeplex of religion mean that the odds of the host organism surviving are bettered or worsened? In his book Breaking the Spell, Dennett recounts the story of the little ant in the meadow that laboriously climbs up a straw of grass, only to fall to the ground and then immediately resume its climb, over and over again. The reason for this behaviour is not that the ant is striving to survey its surroundings in order to improve its chances of finding food, but that its little brain has been taken over by a microscopically small parasite which is called the lancet liver fluke (dicrocoelium dendriticum) and which necessarily must get to a sheep or cow stomach in order to procreate. Therefore, the parasite manipulates the ant to position itself in a way that favours its own survival but which grossly disadvantages the ant’s survival. This is Dennett’s graphic image of how religion manipulates human beings, who, he claims, have died in great numbers in their misdirected eagerness to defend and conquer holy sites or texts. That religion might be able to be of some reproductive use to us is not a theory that is closely examined by Dennett.
Dawkins emphasises the memeplex of religion’s kinship with the computer virus: its success is partly dependent on it being difficult for the victim to discover the infection, at least until it is too late. The person who is actually a victim of such a virus probably does not know it and would anyway energetically deny the infection. How does one then ascertain that the evil parasite has taken hold of a brain? The first indication that Dawkins mentions is that the patient usually is inspired by a deep, inner conviction that the one thing or the other actually is true; a conviction that in no way is related to any proof or any reasonable argumentation, but that nevertheless feels entirely convincing to the infected person. And here it gets interesting in a way that Dawkins probably has not intended. In his aggressive attacks on religious faith, in fact he makes an extremely accurate diagnosis of himself.
From this insight concerning the logical terms and creative possibilities of the metalevel, we can formulate syntheism’s revolutionary ambition – its sabre thrust straight into the solar plexus of the old individualism – with the battle cry that is devastating for capitalism: Ideas want to be free, ideas cannot be owned! In fact, ideas do not belong to any of us; it is we who belong to them, and we cannot do anything other than obey them. Without owning one’s ideas, which never even belonged to the individual except in her own imagination – which was not either the individual’s own to command, in accordance with the free will that she has never owned either – the individual is completely castrated. And it is precisely in this manner that the netocratic dividual wants to regard the bourgeois individual. Therefore the question of who owns the ideas – not to mention the question of who, practically speaking, can own them – is the greatest, most important and controversial question of the current, burgeoning paradigm shift. Power’s memeplex has been set in motion and the world is trembling. Welcome to the informationalist class struggle!
There is an infinite number of agents at an infinite number of levels. According to the mobilist Spinoza, the consequence is that it is the prime task of ethics to maximise potentia agendi, every current agent’s potential. Here memetics comes into the picture and provides us with an excellent, non-linear alternative to Cartesianism’s linear world view. Instead of a subject that is manifested as an individual through giving full expression to its ideas, we get a memeplex that materialises as an agent by invading and occupying a body. It is and has always been our thoughts that control us, instead of the other way around. There is no subject beyond or behind the mental activity that is driven by memes. What is amazing is not that there is a little subject somewhere inside the brain – in the form of a man or woman staring at his or her own cinema screen, on which the incoming stimuli from his or her perception apparatuses are projected, and who then makes and executes decisions based upon the received information (which thus is a fiction manufactured by himself or herself) – but that the brain is so clever that it produces the illusion of a subject which the body harbours for its own survival’s sake.
Outside the temporary utopia, however, we live in an age where the collective world view is crumbling due to the sheer infirmity of old age. History is beyond our control. The only thing that remains when plurarchy becomes widely accepted is the virtual subculture’s fractionalised planet. Human life on the planet can only be saved by an initial, and subsequently gradually increasing, physical monastisation. Therefore a specific subculture is required that sees saving the planet as a whole for human life as its mission, and which realises that this work, in order to have a chance of succeeding, must start with a radical distancing from the individualist paradigm and its programmatic atomism, capitalism and expansionism. Out of this necessary negation rises the utopian idea of theological anarchism: the dream of a sustainable society beyond the nation state and capitalist expansionism. However, in the same way that Karl Marx defines socialism as the necessary path to communism, we must assume that there is an experimental practice, oriented towards utopia on the road to theological anarchism. As a spontaneously arisen movement from spontaneously arisen needs in the shadow of spontaneously arisen technological complexes, syntheism is precisely such a practice. Suddenly the movement is simply there: as the emergent answer to the new era’s strongest human needs it is realised through an innovative use of new, disruptive technologies. All that is needed is that the syntheist memeplex, in as refined a form as possible, drops into the new communication-technology reality and spreads itself.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58