Working through Darwin’s Dangerous Idea with my students, I naturally have memes on my mind these days. Although there is a tendency for the concept of “memes” to be looked down upon in the world of theory, Dennett puts forward a number of striking ideas that are well worth consideration when thinking about the nature of language and culture. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett argues that memes, much like organisms, often form their own immunological system so as to help insure their replication. A meme, of course, is simply a cultural unit. Memes can be anything from hairstyles, to clothing, to techniques for preparing food, to songs, to particular ways of organizing society. The disturbing thesis of memetics– quite close in many respects to structural linguistics –is that the aim of memes is not to communicate or provide any advantage to those who use them, but simply to replicate themselves. Of course, one way in which memes can effectively replicate themselves lies in being useful in some way to the other replicants, humans, in which they commonly lodge themselves.
One way in which memes help to replicate themselves is by acquiring something resembling an “immune system”. Through the acquisition of an immune system, a memetic complex helps to insure its persistence and diminish drift or memetic change as it is replicated or passed from host to host. An obvious example of such an immunological system belonging to a mimetic complex would be certain concepts of faith as it operates in religion. Indeed, faith often functions like an anti-body within meme-complexes of religious belief. On the one hand, despite its very public, political, and social nature, it is not unusual to hear it said that faith is a private matter. In presenting itself as a private matter faith paradoxically enhances its likelihood of social or public replication by creating a defense against critique and criticism. The person who criticizes faith becomes the jerk who is not respecting another person’s privacy. Thus the person of faith is free to discuss and assert their faith as publicly as they like, but criticism is treated as a violation of the faithful person’s privacy and is said to ignore their rights or indicate a lack of respect.
read on!
Faith also enhances its chances of replication by portraying itself as a virtue. Treated as a form of belief in the absence of evidence, proof, or demonstration, to have faith despite this absence is treated as a sign of devotion and is therefore a virtue. Given that religious belief often requires us to believe in extraordinary things that are at odds with much of what we know about the world around us, this conception of faith as a virtue helps to immunize religious belief by encouraging the believer not to entertain criticism towards their belief. In this way, faith helps to maximize its own replication.
Another way of immunizing memes through the formation of memetic antibodies lies in acquiring a self-referential loop. If you can organize your memes around self-referential loops that cannot be escaped, then it becomes that much more difficult for the meme to be destroyed. This sort of strategy can often be found in philosophy. Thus, for example, solipsism is a highly effective self-referential loop, immune from all external criticism. The solipsist claims either that it is impossible to know anything other than his own mind or that only his own mind exists. This position is, for all intents and purposes, unassailable. For any criticism you might level against the solipsist, the solipsist will respond by saying nonetheless it is in his mind. “But you don’t know what I’m thinking!” “My mind made you say that!” Berkeley’s brand of idealism is similar. Strictly speaking, Berkeley’s thesis esse est percipi is irrefutable. For any example you might give, the Berkeleyian can respond by pointing out that you perceived it and therefore made it be.
Finally it could be said that anti-realisms have similar immune systems. For any claim you might make against the anti-realist they can respond either by saying you have to think it to talk about it, or that you had to have access to it to discuss it. Operating at the root of these positions is thus the axioms “no being without being thought” and “no being without access to being”. Part of the success of anti-realism lies in the fact that it gives the advocate an all purpose rejoinder that can always be evoked in discussion to trump the other person, much like certain moves in chess become standardized and common because of their effectiveness. In this way any position a person might put forward can always be traced back to issues of thought or access, and we can always reject other claims that don’t treat mind as “ground” as being dogmatic. The interesting thing is that despite the admirable immune systems of solipsism and Berkeleyianism, these memes generally do a very poor job replicating themselves, whereas anti-realism does. This is especially surprising given that no one outside of philosophy and the social sciences advocates anti-realism, and, indeed, anti-realists themselves do not behave as anti-realists when not engaging in philosophy. To my knowledge, no one has ever managed to refute solipsism or Berkeley. Further, I cannot say that I have ever come across a true solipsist or Berkeleyian among the ranks of professional or serious philosophers. Despite the inability to refute solipsism or Berkeley, few take these positions seriously or even see the need to refute them. Rather, they lie fallow as curiosities that no one adopts. On the other hand, these positions have found a way to replicate themselves precisely as positions not to be adopted. At any rate, the fact that no one adopts these positions despite being unable to refute them suggests that generally our reasons for adopting a philosophical position are not a matter of argument.
Given that anti-realisms have a self-referential structure similar to that of solipsism or Berkeleyianism, we can thus ask why these positions have been so successful in replicating themselves whereas the former have not. When we look at how anti-realisms actually function in philosophy, the suspicion arises that the success of this particular memetic complex has less to do with the problems it solves– its solutions and arguments aren’t that convincing –than the way this form of thought functions as an antibody against other memes. Consider the historical context in which anti-realism emerged. Freud famously said that since the beginning of modernity humanity had suffered three wounds to its narcissism: Copernicus’ heliocentric hypothesis, Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and Freud’s unconscious. In each case humanity was cast from its point of centrality and importance in the order of creation. However, significantly, philosophy already appeared to be ousted from its position as a gatekeeper of all knowledge.
Now look at how anti-realism functions. When we look closely at what anti-realisms do we note that they function to treat humans as ex-ceptional within the order of creation, place them at the center, and render them immune to being dethroned from being at the center. Kant’s third antinomy, for example, defends humans from neurology by refusing the gesture of identification of the mind with the body. Similarly, Husserl’s phenomenology defends consciousness from the ravages of evolutionary theory and neurology by arguing that nature cannot be a condition of consciousness because consciousness is the condition of nature. Likewise, the so-called “critical stance” allows us to dismiss those features of the world we do not like in relation to us by charging them with being dogmatic.
However, if it is the case that anti-realism is based on a self-referential loop rather than an actual argument, perhaps the move shouldn’t be to refute it, but simply abandon it. Just as little as we can refute the self-referential loop “the following sentence is a lie. the previous sentence is true.” can we refute any self-referential loop. However, in the case of self-referential loops such as this we do not seem to trouble ourselves too much. Similarly, when it comes to solipsism or Berkeleyianism, no one seems particularly troubled simply ignoring these positions rather than refuting them. Perhaps the criteria by which a philosophy should be judged is not by whether or not we are able to rigorously ground it, but rather by whether it enables us to ask interesting and revealing questions about the nature of the world. If anti-realism has been a strongly replicating memetic complex, then this is not only because it has a strong immunological system to defend it from criticism, but because it has enabled us to ask a number of very interesting questions about the world. However, this particular self-referential loop also seems to have exhausted its possibilities and to actively prevent the posing of other types of questions because they can’t readily be formulated within the framework of the human, consciousness, or the role that language play in granting evidence. Granting that these other questions are questions that vitally need to be addressed, perhaps the time has come to adopt a different self-referential loop that doesn’t require relating everything to the human or access.
UPDATE [5:48PM]: Over at Dead Voles Carl weighs in this post, writing:
The target exemplar of memetic self-defense in Levi’s post is ‘anti-realism’, roughly, the philosophical tradition holding that things only become real (to us) through our access to them in thought. His analysis of its characteristic defense strategies and their contextual elaboration through the work of trial and error is terrific. I’ve pulled Levi’s leg in the comments by turning the analysis back on his own ‘realist’, ‘object-oriented’ philosophy, reversal being another classic defense strategy that only works in this case if he has correctly identified a universal dynamic. As you know, Bob, claims made about geese apply to both gooses and ganders, which is also a good way to test them.
In the event that I was not entirely clear– I mentioned in comments that I’m very fuzzy today as a storm woke me up around four –the point of this post is not that anti-realism should be abandoned because it is self-referential. I have a very difficult time thinking of any mimetic complex that is not self-referential. This includes my own onticology. Attentive readers will have noted that I often make fun of my “ontic principle”, describing it as trite, vulgar, and silly. After all, what could fail to meet the criteria of being a difference that makes a difference? Nothing. This is precisely what makes onticology a deflationary move where epistemology is concerned. By adopting this jester-like criteria of the real, it undercuts the entire question. Like the anti-realist who can endlessly ape variants of the self-referential axiom “no being without being-thought”, always moving dialogue back on to his chosen terrain of access, the onticologist can endless spout the self-referential axiom “if it makes a difference then it is real.”
What I hoped to draw attention to in this post, then was not that anti-realism is to be rejected because it is self-referential, but rather that our reasons for adopting a position are independent of the grounds of that position. In evoking Berkeley and solipsism and pointing out that while these positions are unassailable or irrefutable, I hoped to draw attention to this. Nobody can refute these positions, yet no one advocates them. Why? After all, none of us have arguments against these positions, we simply abandon them. You’ll never win an argument against a true metaphysical or epistemological solipsist, because they will always bring it back to the fact that you’re only talking about your own mind.
If solipsism and Berkeleyianism are nonetheless not adopted, this has to do with reasons independent of argument. My proposal was that they don’t allow us to ask interesting questions about the world. Once you throw in with solipsism or Berkeleyianism, you very quickly find that you’re faced with exactly the same set of questions as before. Nothing changes. The world remains exactly as it was with the caveat that now it’s only mind or perception. The hypothesis that everything in the universe doubles in size is an interesting thought experiment and is impossible to refute, but ultimately sheds no light on the world. Anti-realism differs from solipsism and Berkeleyianism by allowing us to ask interesting questions about the world and also by immunizing us against certain things we have learned about the world. We’ve learned all sorts of very interesting things from Foucault, the linguistic idealists, Heidegger, etc., as a result of questions of access. However, the self-referential loop upon which philosophies of access are based also prevents all sorts of other interesting questions because it perpetually requires us to think the correlate. My point then– and it’s a pragmatic point –is that onticology allows us to ask these other interesting questions by abandoning the primacy of the correlate as the ground of all questioning.
I’m glad Carl enjoyed the post.
Larval Subjects . 
July 30, 2009 at 7:32 pm
Awesome post! The money quote, for me, is:
If normativity is going to come into it prior to whatever you try to do, then why not go all out in your normative judgement?
Also, if you think about it, your statement is highly pragmatic, which is a way underrated normative POV, in my opinion.
July 30, 2009 at 7:51 pm
With all the rhetorical subtlety of an axe-murderer, you draw a parallel between religion and anti-realism. I think I see what you’re getting at!
Two quick points related to memes, though:
1. You write: “The disturbing thesis of memetics– quite close in many respects to structural linguistics –is that the aim of memes is not to communicate or provide any advantage to those who use them, but simply to replicate themselves. Of course, one way in which memes can effectively replicate themselves lies in being useful in someway to the other replicants, humans, in which they commonly lodge themselves.”
Wouldn’t this require postulating the existence of a special category of memes that determine the usefulness of other memes? In that case, how do you distinguish between a meme whose goal is to simply replicate and a meme that operates at a “meta” level by determining whether the replication of other memes are useful or not useful? This is more of a general problems with memetics as a whole than with this post in particular, though, since memetics seems to exhibit a lot of the same problems endemic to logical positivism and utilitarianism.
2. By conceiving culture, thought, and all of the rest of the human world as a direct metaphor for the biological (genes to memes), don’t you run the risk of basically reduplicating the same hegemonic fallacy inherent to anti-realism? In other words, whereas anti-realism tends to privilege the human-object relationship, doesn’t memetics do the same by elevating the “meme” quality of an object to a difference that makes all the difference? I think you’ve made similar arguments against Bernard Stiegler’s use of “technics,” so I don’t understand how it doesn’t apply equally to memetics.
July 30, 2009 at 7:53 pm
* Not the same as in the human-object relationship, but memetics deploys the same logic by privileging the “meme”-like quality of an object over all other qualities. In other words, it is reductive in the same way that anti-realism tends to be reductive (all things boil down to human mediation, the gap between our knowledge of X and X as it actually is.)
July 30, 2009 at 9:05 pm
This is very nicely observed. I think you’ve got it right. As another example of interest, I can see how object-oriented philosophy has made great progress in fully memeticizing itself, being well along with the demonization of critics and the establishment of a closed-loop faith community that makes virtues of what outsiders see as weaknesses, such as belief in extraordinary things (e.g. inherently inaccessible shrink-wrapped objects) that are at odds with much of what we know about the world around us. As you say, this is quite normal.
I’m not sure I see yet what the decisive self-referential defense move for this meme will be, the ‘you perceived it’ or ‘you’re projecting’ for object-orientation. Any thoughts? It’s an urgent task, because it’s always an anxious time with barbarians about and the walls not fully fortified.
July 30, 2009 at 10:16 pm
[…] by Carl on July 30, 2009 At Larval Subjects Levi Bryant has just posted a ripping analysis of how memes (cultural units like hairstyles, songs and theories) work, starting with their basic […]
July 30, 2009 at 10:41 pm
Hi Bryan,
Thanks for the comments.
I can see why this might be cause for alarm if you haven’t been following other discussions taking place in the comments. However, in comment discussion Gary Williams had claimed that my ontic principle is a tautology. I agreed and said “yes! that’s the whole point.” In other words, the ontic principle falls into the same self-referential immunology that I analyze in anti-realism here. I say this, I believe, towards the end of the post. So it’s not a point of saying “anti-realism is like religion and realism is not.”
Sorry if my responses seem a bit “wooden” today, I was awoken by a storm at four AM so I’m not entirely here. The aim of any replicant is simply to replicate itself or get itself copied. However, there are a variety of strategies for getting replicated or copied. The point I was making, probably unclearly, was that some memes get themselves copied by virtue of being useful to their hosts. In order to fully understand this point, it’s first necessary to understand that human organic bodies and memes are two distinct replication systems. The aim of a biological replication system is to get its genes copied or passed on. The aim of a memetic replication system is to get its memes copied. Memes need humans or some other organism in order to get themselves copied (in this respect they resemble viruses rather than replication systems), but they do not necessarily share organic aims. Here’s a good example from Dennett: there are very successful cultural memes (i.e., memes that have successfully replicated themselves many times) enjoining a certain segment of the population to practice celibacy. Here you have memes that are at odds with biological replicators and which often win out over biological replicators! Note the close proximity to Lacanian thought on this point. It’s quite striking in my view. Lacan always stress the manner in which language puts us out of kilter with the world and our nature as a biological organism. Van Haute even has a wonderful book on Lacan in these terms entitled Against Adaptation. Dennett shares this view. His thesis is that this is because memes are a distinct replication system at odds with biological replication systems (genes).
Now occasionally we get meme replication strategies that aren’t particularly adept at getting themselves replicated. Thus, for example, every so many years there will be a series of suicides at a high school, but generally these epidemics of suicides are short lived. Suicide, in this context, is a meme in that it is a cultural unit that replicates itself throughout the high school (the other students begin to imitate the first student that committed suicide), but it is not a very successful replicant because it destroys its own medium of transmission insuring its own end to replication. Finally we can get other memes that get themselves replicated by being useful to their hosts. Thus, for example, washing your hands is a meme that has proven highly successful in getting itself replicated throughout the world. Part of the reason this meme is successful is because it is also very useful (or so it is alleged) to the hosts infected by this meme. I’m not sure I see the point you’re making about logical positivism or utilitarianism. The claim is not that all memes are useful. The point was that some memes replicate themselves by being useful. An annoying song in your mind, however, is a meme that is highly successful in getting itself replicated but that has no use nor really any detrimental effect.
No, I don’t think so. First off, I don’t reduce the whole cultural world to memes. Memes would play a role, but the cultural world involves many other things besides memes. For example, it involves biological organisms known as humans, resources, formed matters, and so on. Second, memes themselves are heterogeneous or refer to a variety of different types of things: language, techniques, music, recipes, clothing styles, etc., etc., etc. On of the problems with the anti-realisms is that they’ve tended to be rather reductive in their privileged cultural medium. For example they often attempt to do it all with language or signifiers alone, ignoring all the other replicators or subordinating them to language.
July 30, 2009 at 10:45 pm
Nice analogy. I suppose immunology applies more to organisms than to genes/memes, but that’s splitting hairs; the metaphor stands. There’s something that gene as metaphor doesn’t give you, though, which meme does: an account of boredom.
July 30, 2009 at 11:44 pm
Thanks for the update, Levi. I think I agree with everything you say, but these two theses strike me as an odd juxtaposition:
a) “[O]ur reasons for adopting a position are independent of the grounds of that position.”
b) “[O]nticology allows us to ask these other interesting questions by abandoning the primacy of the correlate as the ground of all questioning.”
I happen to have just wandered up to the part of Prince of Networks where Harman quotes Latour to the effect that focus on grounds (foundations) is reductive and superficial because they do not contain their conclusions. In fact, what counts as ground and what counts as conclusion is only worked out in the specifics of any particular event.
This seems to be your a) point. But then b) does not follow – both because it can’t, according to your own argument, and because it doesn’t logically. We are not bound by our grounds, so why struggle so against them?
July 30, 2009 at 11:49 pm
[…] 30, 2009 In case you haven’t seen it, Levi has posted A FANTASTIC ANALYSIS OF HOW CERTAIN PHILOSOPHICAL MEMES IMMUNIZE THEMSELVES. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment […]
July 31, 2009 at 12:16 am
Carl – If the SR/OOO meme has a “defense move”, it will probably end up being inclusiveness.
July 31, 2009 at 12:43 am
Hi Carl,
I’m not sure I understand your criticism here. On the one hand, I entirely agree with your point that grounds and conclusions are only worked out as results and are not prior to inquiry. This is one of the major problems I have with philosophical epistemology, as it wants grounds in advance, not as results. I outline this in my post “Circulating Reference” (I’m beginning to feel silly in constantly referencing this post, but I think it gets at the root of a lot of these issues). On the other hand, it seems to me that proposition a) and b) are talking about two different things. Proposition a) is a claim about grounds in the epistemic sense of what authorizes or establishes a claim. By contrast, proposition b) is a claim about motives or why one might be interested in advocating a particular position. A motive, of course, is a psychological ground for finding one thing or another worth endorsing (I appeal to the normative criteria of “being interesting”) but is not a ground in the sense of establishing the truth of a position. Returning to the issue of religious belief, there are all sorts of psychological grounds for supporting religion (it provides comfort and hope, perhaps fosters morality, lends intelligibility to a confusing and often frightening world, etc), but all of these motives are independent of the epistemic question of whether there’s sound warrant for religious belief.
I don’t know that I am. What I am providing is a critique of the call to ground one’s position. Rhetorically the call to ground one’s position functions as a way of immunizing against the emergence of any other positions or strategies of investigation. “On what grounds are you authorized to make this claim? What is your access to such and such?” You can see an instance of this sort of discussion unfolding in the most recent comments to my post “Design Ontology”. What I tried to do in this post was to show that this question itself is every bit as self-referential and tautologous as the claims it purports to be ungrounded. In other words, the sort of self-referential loops that underlie these questions are based on a sort of rhetorical trick that allows the questioner to always situate the person they’re questioning within their framework. It’s like a move in chess that allows you to win every time. Now if I were impolite, rather than trying to respond to the person who uses the Socratic “but how do you know?” rhetorical strategy, I could instead ask “how do you avoid the problem of solipsism?” They would give me all sorts of reasons as to how they might avoid solipsism and each time I would point out about how they’re only talking about their own minds and have not really established access to the external world or other minds. Like a Lacanian analyst, I might then, by mimicking their own trick, reveal the nature of their own self-referential operation. Hopefully the virtuous result would be that such tricks are abandoned altogether and we proceed philosophically in a way that does not attempt to straight-jacket others within a particular way of posing questions, but instead respects the manner in which self-referential loops allow for the unfolding of a particular strategy of inquiry that might yield valuable and unforeseen insights as it proceeds. You might thus say that the strategy of this post is therapeutic.
July 31, 2009 at 2:12 am
Asher, that would be nice but seems unlikely given persistent interest in defining SR/OOP’s difference-making-difference by exclusion of Kant’s epistemological turn (‘correlationism’). This may well be a temporary artifact of the latter’s defensive struggles against the former’s claim to scarce philosophical attention, of course.
Levi, thanks, that’s helpful. I had not taken b) to be about motives. If it’s about epistemology as the grounds of all legitimate inquiry, according to a) we can safely ignore that as a smoke screen or localize it as work being done within a particular event. Of course when we do so we won’t be grounded, by that standard, and will be told so by people for whom that meme is still working; but that’s just how memes work, as you said. Abandon away.
You may recall a conversation we had a long time ago about the tyranny of difficult texts. There was a nice meme floating around at the time about ‘intellectual Stockholm syndrome’. Like difficult texts correlationism has no guns or getaway cars; to explain a thrall that requires continuing attention to it when it stops being useful (if that’s actually true) might require something more like a look at the psychology of lapsed Catholics, so I agree about therapy.
July 31, 2009 at 2:41 am
And, of course, the strong reactiveness whenever Kant is criticized by allegedly non-Kantians is indicative of a certain antibody system at work at the heart of philosophy. No one today is a Kantian, yet Kant is nonetheless the origin of nearly all contemporary philosophical thought. The issue with correlationism isn’t that it is a difficult text– it’s all too easy, like the undergraduate’s move of saying “it’s all relative” or “everything is perception”, though it dresses itself up in more sophisticated terms as an all purpose chess move allowing academics to preserve their crypto-humanism and piety –but rather with the ease with which this particular immunological moves allows for defense against anything vaguely other than the human.
July 31, 2009 at 12:10 pm
If you are looking for a decent notion of cultural selection, may I suggest Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. I know of no reputable anthropologist who takes this idea of memes seriously.
July 31, 2009 at 1:55 pm
Thanks for the reference, Jerry. This post isn’t about memes but about the philosophical issues I discuss throughout it. That said, I really don’t get the hostility to the meme thesis. If anthropologists simply reject the idea out of hand, I’m inclined to say so much the worse for anthropology. It strikes me as no different than talking about, for example, signifiers. I think there are certain advantages to the concept that are absent in the sort of structuralism that I was trained in. Like the structuralism in which I was trained, it posits replicators that are independent of biological replicators and that follow their own internal logic. Unlike that structuralism it is not based on a holism, but allows for discrete units that can enter into relations without taking their meaning from their place in that whole. Unlike the structuralism in which I was trained, it does not subordinate all replicators to the signifier, but recognizes very different kinds of replicators. Finally, it allows for a variety of different mechanisms through which selection can take place, rather than the highly nebulous “diachronic development guided by synchronic systematicity.” It’s a fruitful and promising idea that has a lot of potential. All I can figure is that the hostility arises from some sort of residual precious humanism in the humanities and the social sciences that still wishes to treat the human and human phenomena as something outside of nature and natural processes and that mistakenly thinks that the meme idea is a sociobiology thesis. Of course, one of the more interesting features of meme theory is that it levels a devastating critique against sociobiology. There’s something very disturbing in the structuralist/memeticist idea that we’re infected by certain signifiers or memes that have no human function save to unfold their logic in a structure in the former case or simply to replicate themselves in the latter case.
July 31, 2009 at 2:21 pm
The problem with memes (or mimis as some call them) is that they are like Jungian archetypes…not much good for ethnographic work. In fact too disjointed to be good for ethnographic work. The big proponants of using memes have been evolutionary psychologists. So another problem, largely psuedo-science in that folks too often just postulate evolution and make up shaggy dog stories; doing real work on evolution, especially human eveolution and the evolution of human appreception is difficult. On the other hand, we’ve lots of very good ethnography deriving from structuralist approaches, not all of which derive structuralism from language, and not all of which insists on various sorts of overdetermination. So our sense is that the notion of the meme is really rather reductive, prone to a variety of misuses, more an analogy than useful.
July 31, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Everyone knows Anthropology as a discipline is in near fatal crisis having been bought lock, stock and barrel by the Pentagon (half a billion appropriated was it?). Memes would totally undermine the “experts'” ability to advise the U.S. military and get paid. Nothing personal, Jerry but Anthropology is defiling in lockstep behind the SERE psychologists with their pockets full and their moral compasses haywire like roosters atop weather vanes dancing the tarantalla. Take it with a huge grain of very un-Kosher salt, Levi.
P.S. Love the image illustrating this post. Looks like the output of a deliriously happy Madame DeFarge doing piece work for Chantelle. Such a colorful character, that Madame DeF.
July 31, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Frances, yes some folks have been bought, and in a lot of discip-lines. Otherwise, I find your comment irrelevant, in no small measure because not everybody knows what you are saying to be so.
July 31, 2009 at 3:32 pm
I think the big problem with structuralism is its holism and tendency to work entirely in the domain of meaning. To the same degree that memes might not be of good use for ethnographic work– the memeticist would just say that ethnographers are studying memes without realizing it insofar as they are investigating cultural organizations –the sorts of tools employed by ethnography are of almost zero value. Within a “hot culture” those tools become more a detriment than a useful tool, because in that context the issue becomes one of understanding how certain practices and ideas proliferate and why others persist. Meme theorists are actually among the harshest critics of evolutionary psychology. Any basic understanding of what a meme is reveals why this would be the case. If it is true that memes are an autonomous replication system, then the sorts of reductive explanations used by evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists just won’t work. Finally, and I say this with great respect, but why would we defer to anthropologists in matters of theory? Like any other discipline, anthropologists are busy investigating their object, not reflecting on the tools or concepts that they are using. As is the case in many disciplines, researchers are already using particular ideas and concepts without even realizing that they are doing so. With the exception of anthropologists that were both master-theorists and great researchers like Levi-Strauss, I cannot say that I find a profound meditation on theories or concepts among the ethnographies that I’ve read. Rather, I instead encounter a more or less pragmatic approach, often narrative driven, that reminds me a lot of certain forms of literary criticism. The situation is analogous to that I encountered among psychoanalysts when I was still in Chicago. I belonged to a group of psychoanalysts known as the “Lacan Circle”. These were first rate bigwig analysts that had been practicing for years and who had swanky offices in the city. For me one of the most fascinating things about this experience was just how underdetermined their grasp of theory was. This, I suspect, is one of the reasons they liked having me around despite my comparative lack of experience as an analyst. These were practical men and women who spent their days with patients and who did not spend hour upon hour pouring over theory. I was their cliff-notes. They were exceedingly good at what they did, but not so much for the reason of having rigorously defined theories but because of their deep and long experience working with patients. In many instances they were doing all sorts of things that either they had no names for or that fell well outside of Lacanian orthodoxy. And, of course, among practioners of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and so on, there is often a sort of deep distrust of “theory” for precisely this sort of reason.
July 31, 2009 at 3:41 pm
So much the worse for theory then.
July 31, 2009 at 3:54 pm
Carl,
I think there’s a dialectic between theory and practice. I just find it odd for someone to dismiss something based on an argument from authority (“reputable anthropologists”), responding to nothing the actual post has to say… Especially when the concepts employed in the particular field from whence the criticism is coming are every bit as nebulous. At any rate, would you go to an accountant to find out what numbers are? Moreover, I’m every bit as critical of “just so” stories as anyone else, which is why I tend to be so hostile to sociobiology and evolutionary psychology. These approaches tend to take culturally contingent practices and naturalize them. However, you don’t throw out a good idea– memes –simply because others have abused it. How many abuses of structuralism have we witnessed? Similarly, the thesis that something is “undetermined”– and I’m not convinced the alternatives are any better just more familiar –doesn’t entail that you reject it but is a call for more work. The concept of meme is valuable because it gives us a unit based model of cultural elements, thereby giving us a tool helpful in our contemporary social context, allowing us to think the evolution and development of social formations in a world that is constantly changing. Moreover, its analogy to genes– though problematic, e.g., no RNA processes, memes can easily combine with other ideas and so on –nonetheless is useful in helping us to track why some memes get picked up and proliferate, why others persist so well, and so on. Finally, as any good ethnographer knows, you don’t go into the culture you’re examining dismissing their ideas but let them have their language and ideas and try to find a framework within which to communicate with them.
July 31, 2009 at 4:03 pm
That’s right, Levi. It’s an empty suit with bulging pockets. Jerry, if folks don’t know, here’s your chance to tell them about the scope and the scale of the buyout. Nothing could possibly be more relevant to your comments. And all the more reason I hope Dr. Bogost will get cracking on his videogame before Secretary Gates comes a calling at Philosophy’s cave door. It’s a slippery slope and, unfortunately, the slide is already well underway. However, no reason, none at all, that what has gone down can’t come up again.
July 31, 2009 at 5:32 pm
“that would be nice but seems unlikely given persistent interest in defining SR/OOP’s difference-making-difference by exclusion of Kant’s epistemological turn (’correlationism’).”
For what it’s worth, I don’t think that the long-term strategy of an OOO “movement” (if there is one) will be a pitched battle with “anti-realism” or “correlationism” or whatever. Especially not with Kant.
The thing is, the primary reason why Kant’s philosophy has been so successful is that his essential, “revolutionary” insight was correct: We don’t have direct access to the noumenal, world, and the mind actively structures the phenomenological one.
Some of what Kant talks about (his notions about faculties would be an example) no longer match what we know about the world — or, more precisely, they are no longer our best metaphors for how the world works. These don’t really affect the central insight, and I’m personally all for cutting Kant some slack, just like we would for any other non-modern philosopher.
Obviously there are many different OOOs, and many of these are in direct opposition to one another. But at a basic level, Kant is only really “wrong” about a few things. These are:
1. The mind is not separate from the world – it is embedded in it. To me, this is one of the non-negotiable aspects of a flat ontology. But I think it is possible to argue that Kant actually saw this — he just didn’t have the metaphors to express it.
2. There is no knowledge prior to experience. I personally believe that what Kant meant by “experience” is not the same thing as what I would mean if I used the word in a philosophical context. The border between sensory perception and cognition is now so blurry as to be effectively non-existent. Even things like mathematics are deeply metaphorical. Etc. Once again, it’s an area where I think we should be inclined to cut Kant some slack.
The upshot is that the epistemological bubble into which Kant places us is not only real, but is something that merits a philosophical sticky-note on the front of everything we try to think about.
That’s the brief version of why I think that OOO (the “movement”) will eventually try to make friends with the “correlationists”. Obviously it’s just my personal view, but I think that people who consider Kant to be important will eventually see in OOO a way to extend him.
July 31, 2009 at 5:55 pm
I am fond of the meme theory in some respects, but the biggest problem I have with meme theory is that it is such an abstract explanation of how religion first developed (I’m thinking of something Dawkins or Dennett might say). While, yes, one could possibly explain some aspects of religion in terms of cultural units that replicate autonomously, I fail to see how this would explain the primary religious experience itself e.g. hearing the hallucinated voice of ancestors, gods, angels, and demons; ritualistic shamanism and schizophrenic delusion/hallucination. This is the meat and potatoes of what religion “was” when it first developed alongside civilization and to me, a neuropsychological theory seems more needed than a cultural one. Cultural units replicating just seems far removed from what I think most essential to early religion, and to an extent, modern cult phenomena.
I think the meme theory is useful in many respects – having the explanatory power to illuminate many modern phenomena – but it seems to be rather abstracted from the concrete phenomenological experiences associated with what I consider to be more religiously “primordial”(auditory hallucination, etc).
July 31, 2009 at 6:14 pm
“Like any other discipline, anthropologists are busy investigating their object, not reflecting on the tools or concepts that they are using.”
Where did you get this idea?? Some ethnographers are, of course, barefoot empiricists, some aren’t. Our general reaction to the pomos, after a while at least, was to go back to the field, or in my case, the archives.
I’d remind Levi that the structuralism I was raised with was more fluid than anything you’ve described, in no small part because so much of it had to do with kinship in which real people stand in real relations towards one another as they interact with one another (even when they don’t know anything about one another), because it was heavily engaged with the processes of bricolage or with what Sahlins calls the structure of the conjuncture and so on. L-S took up linguistics because of the formality linguistics had acquired, but others (the Dutch, most of the Americans) didn’t really. Equally, most anthropological structuralism came in the wake of 18-20th century cultural devastation, and was therefore influenced extensively by the variety of attempts, some more and some less successful, of local folks here or there to bring about some sense of coherence; you can call this meaning if you want, but much of that work was closer in spirit to what Hodder in The Leopard’s Tale calls entanglement; Hodder is an archaeologist and thus has a lot of material but not just material processes in mind. Finally, anthropological structuralism emerged out of the morass that was trait analysis, where what you’re calling memes were what folks used to call traits. We can talk about how the world is getting faster and faster and larger and larger thereby, if you’d like, but I doubt that a notion of meme as you’ve got it set up is going help much with how folks get entangled with the world; they don’t do that one trait at a time or on a trait by trait basis.
As Frances seems to insist, some anthropologists have worked with the Pentagon in Afghanistan and probably elsewhere in recent years; other anthropologists have been extremely critical of this sort of activity. Its not the first time nor, I expect, will it be the last time that members of a single discipline have deep ethical disagreements with one another. Anthropology is hardly alone in this. Physicists build weapons; biochemists weaponize viruses (including small pox); there are probably philosophers, even continental philosophers, working as CIA analysts; doctors have taken part in torture. I don’t know whether they still do it, but the CIA used to fund a good deal of language study in this country through FLAS grants; I studied Indonesian for two summers thanks to FLAS money, but for reasons having to do with my personal history and the way in which the US, the UK and the PRC funneled arms to the Khmer Rouge after 1979, thats as close as I’ve been willing to get. Otherwise, Frances’ attack is ad hominem, a plain case of guilt by association, deeply reductive and hence the sort of intellectually lazy and repellant stuff of conspiracy theorists.
July 31, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Yes, the structuralism you’ve always described is unrecognizable to me and it is not as if I have merely a passing or casual acquaintance with the movement. That is fine as we all recognize that terms are used in different way. I find little in your version of structuralism that resembles L-S’s structuralism, seeing your position as much closer to what came out of Bateson and the systems theorists than the structuralists. That’s a point in its favor in my book. However, in this exchange you have already made a number of claims that indicate a very thin understanding of meme theory. The first among those claims was the treatment of memes as a variant of evolutionary psychology. In your most recent post you write:
Who ever suggested such an absurd thing? I mean really, follow through on the analogy to genes: have you ever heard of a gene being passed on or things being built up by genes one by one? No, they always occur in networks or assemblages. Nonetheless, while it is certainly true that things don’t get built up in a trait by trait basis– they belong to assemblages or networks –it is also the case that traits are separable, undergo transformations, enter into other assemblages and networks and so on. The important philosophical point here is whether we work from the premise that units are their relations or enter into and can pass out of relations. This apparently minor issue has profound research consequences depending on where one sides. Clearly I side with the latter position. Presumably one thing in need of explanation are the dynamics of how this take place. Holism tends to be a hindrance to this type of analysis as it tends to treat units as a function of the wholes to which they belong. This is why, for example, structural linguistics has such a problem analyzing linguistic drift in overlapping speech communities. This is close to the issue you are describing as entanglement. However, if entanglement is to be possible then it’s necessary to reject the thesis that elements are nothing but their relations. Honestly I just thought your initial post and subsequent remarks were rather obnoxious and entirely unnecessary where productive dialogue is concerned. Especially egregious was the framing in terms of what counts as reputable insofar as this carried the implicit charge of the post being unreputable without even addressing a single substantive point in it. Even more laughable was the evocation of Ruth Benedict as some sort of model of rigor and scientificity– yes I’ve read the book. I mean yes, it’s a great book, but how is using Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysius as a frame any more rigorous than look at how cultural units conspire together, replicate themselves, form networks, change, and so on? We could talk about problems in Meade and Bateson as well, especially the former, but some of us are polite and recognize that it’s the theoretical references and influences that are important in discussion and that little is to be gained from proceeding in that way where the issue isn’t directly a matter of those references.
July 31, 2009 at 7:30 pm
Gary,
You don’t think words and rituals can have a profound psychological effect? Ever cry while watching a film? The ability for something to produce such effects would be one way in which replication gets enhanced. Do not forget, however, that social formations survive the individuals that participate in them so you cannot reduce these formations to the psychological experiences of the people that participate in them. Moreover, while these experiences often accompany these formations, they are by no means a necessary condition for these formations. One can participate in a ritual with none of the ecstatic experiences you describe and it is no less a ritual for all that.
July 31, 2009 at 8:51 pm
Oh please….I was not being obnoxious, at least I did not think so. My point about anthropologists was descriptive and only descriptive.
You say, “Especially egregious was the framing in terms of what counts as reputable insofar as this carried the implicit charge of the post being unreputable without even addressing a single substantive point in it.” So how does the description I provided do that? As to whether an implicit charge is in the post or not…how do you know that? (This being a perfectly good ethnographic question).
The point about Benedict is not so much the Apolonian, Dynionesian etc that so many folks remember, its the idea of cultural selection which a lot of folks don’t even notice. This of course requires networks, agents, intentions, failures etc; the word/idea of meme adds little, even the analogy to sets of genes, networks of genes, adds little.
I was raised in the center of American structuralism, studying under JC Crocker who worked on the Bororo and read ESK every year once a year from 1960 until he died about 2003 as well as Roy Wagner, Susie McKinnon and RS Khare. Its a fine structuralist pedigree which also has room for Bateson, Mead and others, and which is more flexible than what you describe.
So why are you acting like the police??
July 31, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Asher @23, thank you very much. Couldn’t agree more.
July 31, 2009 at 11:46 pm
I wasn’t trying to impugn your structuralist bona fides, only pointing out that there are lots of structuralisms. There’s very little resemblance between Chomsky’s structuralism and Todorov’s, just as there’s very little overlap between Lacan’s structuralism and Piaget’s. I think it’s important to keep that in mind in these discussions. Within the Althusserian-Levi-Straussian-Lacanian-Saussurean structuralism that is my point of reference you don’t have anything like networks, agents, intentions, or failures because it is the structures that are doing all the work. In your previous post talking anthropologists going back into the history of anthropology you write:
Right, this is why I wonder why it’s still referred to as structuralism at all. A similar debate took place in France. Thus, with Levi-Strauss all you had was this inexorable logic of the structure organizing human relations and thought and any reference to real people as deemed “ideological” and “unscientific”. Then along came figures like Bourdieu with works like The Logic of Practice, pointing to the role of precisely these sorts of things in kinship relations and how we couldn’t make sense of real behaviors unless we included these sorts of things.
I think the word “meme” makes a very significant contribution, drawing attention to a common oversight among cultural theorists. The tendency has been to focus on the interpretation of “signs” or simply interpretation more broadly construed. The concept of meme is valuable in that it deflects attention a bit from interpretation and understanding to issues of replication or transmission which tend to get short shrift in cultural analysis. Within the scope of social and political theory this is incredibly important. Just as you can’t run a television in a place where there are no electrical lines, certain social relations are not possible among populations where particular sign-complexes are absent. The concept of meme draws attention to infrastructure or the presence or absence of social formations among a particular population. That, in and of itself, is a major accomplishment. But we can agree to disagree as this exchange hasn’t been about the post and has thus been a rather trollish hijacking of the thread.
I’m not acting like police, I just don’t abide rudeness very well. I suppose that if you simply were making a “descriptive point” you’re only guilty of having a tin ear.
August 1, 2009 at 12:11 am
Jerry,
Here’s a link to a panel discussion held at the Philocetes Center in NYC 2/19/09 in which R. Brian Ferguson, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at Rutgers talks about the crisis in Anthropology vis a vis its relationship with the Pentagon (around the 1:15 mark. Big money, unprecedented amounts. It’s an emergency for your discipline. Perhaps you are unaware. I’m sorry if I offended you personally.
http://www.philoctetes.org/Past_Programs/On_Aggression_The_Politics_and_Psychobiology_of_War
August 1, 2009 at 1:49 am
Frances, some of my best friends are anthropologists, so I know they’re not all alike.
You’re correct that the Pentagon is purchasing some direct relationships within Anthropology and that this raises ethical issues. One Chicken Little declaring that the sky is falling does not make this a crisis for the entire discipline, however. The anthropologists involved are mostly peripheral players, and there’s a very substantial pushback at official (AAA) and semi-official (Savage Minds, anthro blogosphere) levels. In particular it’s important to notice that a significant fraction of professional anthropologists consider it their ethical obligation to represent the interests of native populations and resist any kind of recolonization.
It’s also important to remember that from a larger perspective the legitimating function of the academy as a symbol of the open society depends on supporting academics to think our critical thoughts as we see fit – safely sealed off in our little disciplinary harems, of course. We are not paid off to shill directly for The Man because we are part of a system that shills much more subtly and effectively if our critical voices are both enabled and marginalized.
It’s not that simple either, but we’re just not going to get anywhere with X-Files conspiracy theories.
August 1, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Carl,
Thank you for your thoughtful and nuanced tweak. I hadn’t thought of Dr. Ferguson as any kind of chicken. Silly tie aside, I basked in his brilliance. Well, anyway, I’ve already apologized. How many Sorries can I say? And, of course, my day is greatly brightened to learn of the push up.
August 3, 2009 at 2:59 pm
My apologies to my friend Jerry. A few of my remarks in our most recent discussion were themselves very obnoxious. I certainly was in a “mood” over the weekend. All I can plead is that right now I am under a tremendous amount of stress and he got in the cross-hairs.
September 16, 2009 at 3:49 pm
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