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Semiotics
Studies of how meaning is created and disseminated between people, animals and plants, also called semiology. See, by way of comparison, 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.
Semiotics deals with the investigation and interpretation of signs within all sorts of communication: firstly, the relationship of signs to what they are intended to represent (semantics); secondly the relationship of signs to each other (syntactics) and thirdly the relationship of signs to their users (pragmatics). The American pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure are usually regarded as the two philosophical giants of semiotics. From the mid-19th century up until the early 20th century, quite independently of each other, they both constructed extensive systems that were later used as platforms for all subsequent forms of working with semiotics. Peirce launches the idea of a triad of signs and, as early as a century before Dawkins, is inspired by Charles Darwin into describing the signs as replicators, while de Saussure – who for the sake of clarity calls his theory semiology rather than semiotics – focuses primarily on the binary relationship between the word in itself and the concept behind the word within language.
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.
Eternalism distinguishes itself from totalism inasmuch as it does not adduce any kind of ontological status or pretend to be primary and external in relation to mobilist reality. Instead it is strictly phenomenological. The father of pragmatism Peirce emphasises mobilism’s primary ontological status precisely by calling it firstness; consequently he confers a status on eternalism denoted as secondness and in closing refers to the dialectic between them (that is, when phenomenology returns to mobilism after a digression via eternalism) as thirdness. Thus as secondness, eternalism has no Platonist ambitions at all. It instead apprehends itself as a brilliant, perceptive response to the massive semiotic flow from an immanent and contingent universe (Peirce is not very surprisingly also the father of semiotics). Eternalism is thereby very much in fact a transcendence as an activity, exactly what Heidegger would like to see, and as such it manages all of totalism’s hobbyhorses excellently without totalism being able to sneak in the back door and once again try to attack mobilist ontology.
Last modified 7. August 2016 at 00:05:58