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Memetics
The study of how ideas or memes are formed, disseminated, stored and changed between people and media. Memes in these studies are regarded as replicators, as mental equivalents of a kind to the biological genes, and the parallels between memetics and genetics are therefore extensive. See, by way of comparison, semiotics.
Barad dismantles and disposes of Kant’s noumenon, and thereby she also extremely effectively puts an end to the correlationist paradigm. Her Bohrian phenomenology, based on relations on top of relations and probabilities on top of probabilities, with varying intensities rather than essences at the centre and without fixed physical boundaries, has no need whatsoever of any Kantian noumenon. Barad comes from the world of quantum physics, which of course is governed by concepts such as complementarity, entanglement, chance and non-locality. The principle of precedence disposes of all ideas of eternally valid laws that precede physical reality. Barad’s phenomenon is therefore instead the phenomenon per se described based on physics’ own conditions, rather than from Kant’s blind faith in rationality’s conception of reality being sufficiently exhaustive. And it is precisely therefore that her universocentric rather than anthropocentric ontology is a realism. Every Baradian phenomenon, every assemblage of intensities, has its own genetics and its own memetics as her predecessor Gilles Deleuze would express the matter. It is the current set of genes and memes that we familiarise ourselves with when we get to know the phenomenon. The world cannot be more real than it is with Barad.
This in turn means that we need a new, informationalist explanatory model for how words, thoughts and ideas arise and are formed, and above all for how they are interpreted and altered over time; how communication between bodies and media occur and above all what consequences this process has for our new, dividual identity. Precisely such a de-personified explanatory model has also emerged in parallel with digital technology, which is the foundation of the ongoing paradigm shift, and it is called memetics. We have already written extensively about this research field numerous times from many different angles (see The Futurica Trilogy). Memetic theory – which explains how words, thoughts, ideas and cultural components of various kinds multiply and are modified according to the same Darwinian selection principles that also regulate how genes multiply and are modified within biological systems – was launched in an essay by Ted Cloak in 1975 and popularised in exhaustive detail by Richard Dawkins in the book The Selfish Gene one year later. It was also Dawkins who coined the term meme for this replicator which is active within the sociocultural biotope and which is selfish in the same sense that the selfish gene is selfish, that is, its primary interest, if we allow ourselves to reason with the aid of an anthropomorphic image, is to multiply itself through dissemination to the greatest possible extent. It wants to infect the world.
Memetics simply strives to construct an evolutionary model not just for natural but also for cultural information transfer. A meme is quite simply the cultural gene, a package of information, a kind of cultural unit – for example an idea, a technology, a belief or a pattern of behaviour – which is lodged in a mind or a medium and which cannot reproduce itself through producing copies of itself and transferring itself between different minds and media. The meme’s reproductive success is conditional upon people’s ability and desire to imitate each other and thus pick up new thoughts and behaviour. This means that we no longer regard communication as primarily something that concerns an individual who is trying to influence another individual in a certain direction, but instead as a flow of selfish memes that reproduce themselves to the best of their abilities by travelling from mind to mind via various accessible media and making themselves at home the moment they find a receptive environment in the form of a brain furnished with various sets of compatible meme clusters, called memeplexes.
An interesting aspect in this context is that memetics pays no heed to whether any particular meme proves to be true or false, useful or useless, from some arbitrarily chosen perspective. What is decisive is that the memes which are best suited to the prevailing conditions will survive and be disseminated. Meme X either fits with the patterns formed by the dominant memeplexes in an environment, which might just as well be a dividual brain as a collective community, or else it doesn’t – an environment that this meme then contributes to modifying by adding to the existing patterns, even if only the tiniest little bit. The decisive factor for a meme’s success is thus how it matches already existing memeplexes in the host body in question and whether it appears useful or in any other way appealing in the life situation in which this body finds itself. This means that the more effectively the meme offers infotainment to the intended host organism, the greater the chance that this host will spread the meme further by inspiring imitation in other potential hosts.
The American philosopher Daniel Dennett connects memetics to a more extensive theory of mind in his book Consciousness Explained from 1991. According to Dennett, the majority of our memes are undisturbed and inactive in our brain, and only when the brain experiences a concrete change in its lifeworld does it react by accepting new or modifying old memes, in order to then spread them further. The mind, according to Dennett, consists of memes and only memes that have taken control of the brain and that think the thoughts of the host, and it can also be described in precisely this way. Thus, there is no longer any need for an individual in the Cartesian sense. Even the I-experience as such is a meme in itself and nothing else, albeit unprecedented in its success. It constitutes a phenomenon that we, with a clear reference to the father of individualism, call the Cartesian meme.
The British psychologist Susan Blackmore, author of the influential and controversial book The Meme Machine, defines memes as all things that allow themselves to be copied from one human being to another: habits, fashion trends, knowledge, songs, jokes and all other forms of packaged information. Memes are disseminated horizontally through imitation, learning and other methods. The point is that the copies are never one hundred per cent identical to the original; in the same way as genes, memes are also copied with extensive variation. Most mutations are completely unviable, while some exceptions constitute a competitive improvement in the interplay with the conditions that happen to prevail. Since the memes are often spread considerably faster than genes – mutations occur at every interaction, so too within the brains and media where the memes are located – the speed of mutation within memetics is extremely high in comparison with biological systems, where the spread occurs exclusively vertically. And just like genes, memes can be said to compete for a limited space where they are located, and thereby also fight for the chance to survive, be copied and spread further. The critical factor here is people’s attention – a very strictly limited resource.
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.
The transition from semiotics to memetics – that is, the transition from the sign to the meme as the smallest component of information and communication – is partly about a broadening of what it actually is that is transferred between minds and media when information is communicated to one or more recipients – a broadening that semiotics itself deals a lot with after Peirce and de Saussure (when the semiotics of the 21st century uses the term sign, this is more or less synonymous with the term meme in memetics) – but above all it is about a deeper understanding of how mobile and mutable information is, and how this influences our philosophical understanding of subjectivity and social identity.
Semiotics is primarily pragmatic rather than syntactic, not least since Peirce is a relativist and not yet a relationalist. Thus it is still in the individualist paradigm. Semiotics is namely focused on what the sign is presumed to represent – according to Peirce the sign would not be a sign if it did not correspond to and translate some external object into language – while memetics chooses to act regardless of typically Kantian concerns, such as whether external, objective or intersubjective truths really exist, and if so in what way. This means that semiotics presumes that the interpretation of signs in a prevailing society – the discipline that is called hermeneutics within philosophy and exegesis within theology – can be carried out by an independent, external observer: the hermeneuticist. But nothing could be further from the truth. The hermeneuticist is of course also steeped in the prevailing paradigm, and therefore must be primarily regarded as a technological as well as ideological by-product of the same, and not, in some exceedingly diffuse and mysterious way, as its neutral and distanced interpreter. There are indeed no neutral and distanced interpreters, either within physics or sociology; such a position is quite simply both physically and socially impossible.
A meme survives and multiplies by making copies of itself, and thanks to its ability to blend in and appear useful or entertaining for a certain subject in a given situation at a certain point in time. Once again: it has nothing to do with what is true or false. This distinguishes the meme from the sign as a concept. Memetics quite simply constitutes a relationalist radicalisation of semiotics in the same way that Whitehead’s philosophy.html">process philosophy is a relationalist radicalisation of Peirce’s and William James’ relativist pragmatism. Through memetics – in particular through the introduction of emergent memeplexes – we shift towards a network-dynamics understanding of culture’s relationship to nature. The individual is no longer needed and has no function in this analysis. The dividual of network dynamics (see The Netocrats) takes over, and as a result of this paradigm shift, Man is taken from the centre of science to a peripheral seat in the grandstand, where he must be content with acting as the passive spectator and at the same time being seized as a storage and transportation vessel subservient to the extremely dynamic evolution of memes. All the work is done by the memes. The anthropocentric impulse and Man’s pride thus gets yet another flick on the nose, which in turn opens the way for universocentric interdependence, which is attendant on network dynamics.
This does not have to mean that the role of semiotics as a scientific discipline is passé – quite the contrary. The focus of modern semiotics is in fact no longer on producing a theory of signs, and not of memes either, nor how these relate to each other – it is nowadays memetics rather than semiotics that is fulfilling Locke’s original vision of a science of signs – but on a theory of how the signs are interpreted by, and both mentally and physiologically de facto influence, their hosts: a pragmatic phenomenon that is called semiosis. What is really interesting arises and shows itself when we remove ourselves from the mental to the physiological, since we can then just as easily study the spread of signs between animals and plants as between humans, not to mention the communication across the boundaries between the various categories of biology. Accordingly, semiotics comes down to the study of biological signalling systems, while memetics pursues the construction of explanatory models for the genesis and the disintegration of cultural paradigms.
This explains why biosemiotics (the study of the relations between signs and the biology of the senders, receivers and users of the signs) is a rapidly growing area, while an equivalent area does not exist within memetics. Consequently it is a biosemioticist, Thomas Seboek who, in his book A Semiotic Perspective on The Sciences from 1984, independently of Dawkins and Dennett claims that not only can we exchange metaphors to advantage between nature and culture, but also that the very division between the natural and the social sciences, from a biosemiotic perspective, must be regarded as both fundamentally arbitrary and extremely unfortunate. But while Seboek’s ideas get a very limited spread among semioticians, the ideas of Dawkins and Dennett successfully spread across a considerably broader philosophical and scientific field. Ironically, memetically speaking memetics becomes more successful than its predecessor semiotics.
If we conceive of a relationalist version of semiotics and memetics, in the same way as a relationalist version of the natural sciences, it must be based on a deep understanding of the largest unit and then build downwards towards the smallest, instead of the classical reductionist obsession of semiotics and memetics with the little sign or the little meme, which is presumed to explain everything that goes on higher up in the hierarchy. According to the writing of the history from the point of view of information technology, the necessary point of departure is that Man is the constant and technology is the variable. For Man, this means that technology drives a paradigm (see The Futurica Trilogy), a plane that sooner or later has its structure studied and explained by a metaphysics that is already initially logically built-in but tacit, and is only formulated and engineered after the fact. Metaphysics then shapes the conditions for the ideology that is tied to the paradigm, the sign-interpreting narrative that prepares you for choosing, the narrative about why things necessarily are the way they are. The ideology in turn consists of large, sluggish blocks called fictions – consciously created narratives about current people and their relationships to the world around them, in contrast to the necessarily subconscious ideology – where the nimble and smallest components of fictions are called fictives (see The Global Empire), a kind of network-dynamics cousin to the signs of semiotics and the memes of memetics, and accordingly also the fundamental component in the paradigm hierarchy.
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.
Not surprisingly, the memeplexes of the powers that be and religion throughout history tend to be entangled and therefore also mutually reinforcing. Religion legitimises power, which protects and enriches religion. In many cases, over time the collaboration became so intimate that it was no longer possible to distinguish the one from the other. But this in itself does not constitute a particularly elucidating answer to the question of why these winners in the cultural evolutionary process in particular have developed the way they have done, and why these memeplexes in particular have been as tenacious as they actually have been and have wiped out all the losers. Why God in particular? Why the Bible in particular (for example)? There has hardly been a lack of alternatives, to put it mildly. But the great majority of these were weeded out, ruthlessly. This is, of course, a topic that has not given memetics any peace; it is close to being a whole science in itself.
This functionalised and utility-centred view of religion stems to a large extent from the theories of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Interestingly enough, it is self-evident for Durkheim that capitalist ideologies such as nationalism and individualism must be regarded as religion’s latest forms of revelation. Ironically enough, two of memetics’ prominent figures – Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins – who are also two of militant, scientific atheism’s pioneering mouthpieces, speak for a diametrically opposed point of view. If the atheist Freud regards religion as an illusion determined by existential anxiety and feelings of defencelessness vis-à-vis the overwhelming and inexplicable forces of Nature, Dennett and Dawkins argue that the memeplexes of religion should be regarded as a dangerous virus that, without invitation and without offering any advantages whatsoever, penetrates people’s brains and devastates their cognitive abilities. Accordingly, religion’s role vis-à-vis mankind would be purely parasitical and not symbiotic in any respect.
If we stay with Christianity, it is of course indisputable that it must be regarded as an unprecedented success from a crassly Darwinian perspective. The Catholic Church’s brand has held up remarkably well through the centuries in spite of considerable difficulties connected with doctrinal oddities and clerical misbehaviour of various kinds. At the same time, the Bible must arguably be the most successful text in history if one looks at the number of copies that are spread across the world. It exists in countless variants everywhere, in more than 2,000 languages and in many of these languages in several translations. As the theologian Hugh S. Pyper writes in his essay The Selfish Text: The Bible and Memetics, the Bible must be a strong candidate for the title of best-suited of all texts ever if the concept survival of the fittest has any plausibility whatsoever. It colours Western culture to an extent that is impossible to overestimate; regardless of how much the Reformation, to take just one example, damaged the Church, it involved a powerful push out into the world for the Bible, whose text preaches explicity and repeatedly that it wants to be copied and spread. In this way it builds “survival machines” in the form of brains that pay attention to and relay its message. Pyper points out the ironic aspect of the energetic Bible opponent Dawkins himself having allowed his own presentation to become heavily influenced by the Bible in fact, to which he constantly refers, which makes even Dawkins himself one of many survival machines of the Bible that is so harshly criticised.
With the advent of syntheism, we witness the death of the Cartesian theatre – and thereby also the individual. The wide acceptance of memetics gives us a superior alternative to faith in the atomised individual as the centre of existence. We are talking here of a syntheist agent which, in contrast to a Cartesian subject, never imagines that she is a little isolated figure, a sort of tenant who temporarily resides in the body; a passive observer behind the eyes who sometimes reluctantly, sometimes neutrally ontologically speaking, anticipates the surrounding world with which it then communicates via the lips and hands. An agent is instead an actor in various combinations and situations; partly an arbitrarily and temporarily delimited dividual, partly an arbitrarily delimited body, but also a body in collaboration with other bodies and phenomena in her environment. And it is as such an actor, mobile at all levels, in the midst of, and not in any mysterious way preceding the intra-acting – which in every moment is eternalised – that syntheist agentiality can arise as a self-experience.
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.
In the same way that cosmologists and quantum physicists strive for agreement on a theory of everything in physics, syntheologists are working towards constructing a social theory of everything for informationalism. What is striking about the syntheist utopia is that it cannot be formulated beforehand – since it is located in a contingent and indeterministic universe – which means that instead it must be practised before it is articulated. Therefore it is of central importance for both syntheist ethics and creative development that the ideas in a society are not kept locked away behind virtual firewalls or towers of legal papers, but that they can be exchanged in complete freedom between the active dividuals on the Internet. The syntheist utopia is thus first and foremost a society where ideas are free and are not owned by anybody, where the memes form memeplexes that wander freely from human to human, from network to network, and are transformed during these movements without being met with any resistance whatsoever anywhere, apart from the lack of attention that sifts out all memetic losers. Therefore, the digital integrity movement receives the syntheist movement’s full support as the necessary path to this state, which we consequently call utopian memetics.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58