Just a quick note before I get down to grading. In response to my post on the game of life, Carl writes:
I’m not sure I’m on board with this:
[O]ne of the reasons I find the ideas so attractive is precisely that meme theory treats signs as objects. Rather than treating signs as mere representations of something else, meme theory treats signs themselves as objective reality. So unlike common views of language where you have one thing, the world of objects, and another things, the world of signs representing objects, in meme theory you have one flat plane where there are physical objects and signs as well.
Well, other than getting to call things ‘objects’ rather than calling things things, what’s the advantage here? I see that we clean out the mediating discourse of ‘representation’, but if the ’signifier’ kind of object doesn’t occur without the ’sign’ kind, and neither occurs without the ’signified’ kind, isn’t there an important and realistic claim about the nature of those objectivities embedded in the idea of representation that is simply obscured by flattening the ontology?
I’m still working out how far I’m willing to go with the whole treatment of signs as objects move as things get complicated very quickly. This was a move that Dan recently proposed in comments, and which I’ve been pushing for quite some time under the mantra that language is not simply about something, but also is something. This move could be called, in honor of Freud, the “psychotic move”, for as Freud observed in his essay “The Unconscious”, schizophrenics treat words as things. Under this model, signs would not be representations of things, but rather would enter into relations with or assemblages with things. This might nicely account for the fluidity of reference in a number of respects. Part of this move follows from a self-reflexive demand of my own philosophy. Insofar as I’m trying to break down the whole distinction between nature and mind that’s vexed philosophy since the 17th century, this leads to the conclusion that any philosophy (or other cultural artifacts) is itself an assemblage of objects. The question then becomes that of determining what sorts of peculiar objects signs are and how these function.
I suspect that anthropologists– and I feel very bad about my recent exchange with Jerry –are critical of memes for the same reason that I was critical of memes when I first encountered the theory about five years ago: Here we have these undereducated cowboys claiming to have discovered a whole new realm of investigation– memes –when we have had semiotics and linguistics for decades now. When you read Dawkins and Dennett on memes you get the sense that they are reinventing the wheel, and in a number of instances poorly. Dawkins baldly admits somewhere or other that he doesn’t know enough about the social sciences, linguistics, and cultural theory to know how well his theory resonates with their findings. In a number of respects, I think the meme theorist stands to learn far more from the semiotician (and cultural theorists like the anthropologist) than the semiotician has to learn from the meme theorist.
read on!
Nonetheless, I do think that the concept of memes draws our attention to three very important features of signs that are often overlooked. First, I very much appreciate the manner in which meme theorists treat signs as material realities. This is already something that was implied by structural linguistics, where the signifier had a certain materiality to it. It is underlined even more in Derrida’s deconstruction of the opposition between speech and writing, and truly brought home in Lacan’s later account of the letter and writing as opposed to the signifier. Nonetheless, I believe this materiality really gets brought into relief in meme theory. Although the meme theorist is agreed with the semiotician in claiming that memes are ideal entities, memes/signs are ideal entities in the sense that DNA is an ideal entity. DNA is an ideal entity in the sense that it is a pattern that can be copied or replicated so there’s a very real sense in which it persists regardless of what it’s copied into. However, while it is an ideal entity it must nonetheless be embodied in some form of material. In this respect, the materiality of the signifier, DNA, and memes is thoroughly Aristotlean rather than Platonic. That is, it is ideal but in such a way that it must always be embodied in a primary substance. Similarly in the case of memes. Memes are ideal patterns but are nonetheless always embodied in some material medium whether this be brains, sound-waves, paper, clay, the wood of my desk, electronic pulses, zeros and ones, etc. Although this point seems slight, I believe it is filled with all sorts of profound consequences. For example, just as the bricoleur must contend with the singularities embodied in the material with which she works, patterns are modified and transformed depending on the media in which they are embodied. This is what McLuhan investigated to such brilliant effect. At the very least it entails that signs are constrained by the rate at which information can be transferred or replicated, the upper limit being the speed of light, but there also being all sorts of speeds in between from the slowest to the fastest depending on the form of social organization in which the signs are being replicated, the concrete living arrangements (city, rural, informatic, etc), and so on.
Second, I think meme theory draws attention to the replication of signs throughout the world in a way that sometimes gets ignored by more interpretively driven approaches to signs. As a historian and a Gramscian to boot, I’m sure Carl can appreciate this. As we move from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, we have the emergence of certain memes, but this emergence has a frequency that can be described in terms of populations. Just as we can describe a particular species as rare and bordering on extinction, we can talk about how signs pass from the rare to the ubiquitous and examine the manner in which this takes place. Because memes or signs must be replicated and embodied in a physical medium, we get all sorts of questions about how this replication takes place and what enabled it. In many respects, I think this is precisely the sort of issue Badiou is working on with his account of truth-procedures. The subject in the grips of a truth-procedure is a subject that is seeding the social world in which he is embedded with a new set of memes, gradually transforming the organization of that field of signs.
Third, I think mimetic theory has made a significant contribution to semiotics by situating signs in terms of questions about fitness-landscapes. I am perpetually fascinated by questions of why certain signs come to resonate or replicate at a particular point in history and why at other times they do not. This, I think, can be tracked according to two axes. On the one hand, coming from the perspective of media and technology studies, we can explore the manner in which media functions to constrain and enable the replication of particular types of signs. When I refer to “media” I am referring to the medium in which signs are embodied. Thus, for example, in oral cultures you get very real constraints as a result of the medium of speech. If, in transmitting signs, oral cultures tend towards narrative or stories and rhythmic, song-like modes of composition, then this is because cognitively these sorts of patterns are more susceptible to being remembered. This can be witnessed among very young children that can memorize an entire Dr. Seuss story precisely because its narrative structure and rhyme scheme. Here the medium defines, in part, a fitness-landscape that is not very congenial to, for example, a thought or meme like Hegel’s Science of Logic. On the other hand, we get fitness landscapes defined by relations among memes themselves. What is it, for example, that makes the current fitness-landscape of memes in the United States particularly inhospitable to memes pertaining to socialism and Marxist thought? Where are the reigning assemblages that make it so difficult for these memes to replicate and spread throughout the social world? What sorts of strategies can be devised to change this? And so on?
At any rate, all of these are points about materiality. Treating signs as objects helps draw attention to the material embodiment of signs and the role this plays in proliferating signs.
Larval Subjects . 
August 5, 2009 at 2:27 am
Levi, this burst of writing in the last little while has been fantastic. I’m having trouble even keeping up with all the reading, but it’s been consistently interesting.
I just wanted to pass along two websites that, serendipitously, I literally just came across a few minutes ago. Both are aimed at tracking memes as the emerge, grow, fade away, and pass through the media. And on a level unrelated to your post, I think they both point to the increasing importance of data visualization – the way in which computers let us crunch massive amounts of data, but the patterns have to be presented through a useful and productive user interface.
http://memetracker.org/
http://www.mediacloud.org/
August 5, 2009 at 8:00 pm
“Under this model, signs would not be representations of things, but rather would enter into relations with or assemblages with things. This might nicely account for the fluidity of reference in a number of respects.”
It seems to me this depends on where you slice the latourian analysis. If we cut off the whole process he’s interested in where you go through a series of translations to get from the signified to the sign (e.g. the world to the word), then the sign can appear as a free-floating objective interactant. But isn’t it the nature of signs as a class of objects to be the products of just such translations? (There’s not an object that isn’t, which is his further point, but let’s stay focused here for a second.) So again, I think there’s a theory of objectifying process in the notion of representation that may be worth translating rather than flatly jettisoning. We need to be able to understand the dynamics that produce objects that are enabled and disabled for further action in particular ways.
“Second, I think meme theory draws attention to the replication of signs throughout the world in a way that sometimes gets ignored by more interpretively driven approaches to signs. As a historian and a Gramscian to boot, I’m sure Carl can appreciate this.”
Very much so. You go, boy.
“DNA is an ideal entity in the sense that it is a pattern that can be copied or replicated so there’s a very real sense in which it persists regardless of what it’s copied into. However, while it is an ideal entity it must nonetheless be embodied in some form of material.”
I see what you’re getting at here, but I think we’d be better off without the baggage of idealism and embodiment. Again, looking at Latour we might say that the gene or meme are composed largely of information that is emergently organized and self-replicating, but this does not make them ‘ideal’ in any platonic sense that requires independent embodiment. Information only exists as a maker of difference if it is always already embodied. You start with a couple of amino acids and go from there.
I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t know here. The danger of bricolage, as you and I both well know, is that the parts of the assemblage don’t always communicate real fluidly with each other.
August 6, 2009 at 12:33 am
Yes, your right, really close to what is happening.
August 6, 2009 at 2:52 pm
[…] of tea at Larval Subjects recently, our host gracefully steered the conversation from emergence to memes. Recapping the basic premise, a typical meme is an idea or song or joke floating around in the […]
August 7, 2009 at 4:47 am
“…language is not simply about something, but also is something. This move could be called, in honor of Freud, the “psychotic move”, for as Freud observed in his essay “The Unconscious”, schizophrenics treat words as things. Under this model, signs would not be representations of things, but rather would enter into relations with or assemblages with things.”
As you may know, this is also the same basic shift taken by Minimalism or ABC art. Images are not just representations, they are also objects. The manifesto here is Donald Judd’s “Specific Objects”:
homepage.newschool.edu/~quigleyt/vcs/judd-so.pdf
“On the other hand, we get fitness landscapes defined by relations among memes themselves. What is it, for example, that makes the current fitness-landscape of memes in the United States particularly inhospitable to memes pertaining to socialism and Marxist thought? Where are the reigning assemblages that make it so difficult for these memes to replicate and spread throughout the social world? What sorts of strategies can be devised to change this? And so on?”
It seems pretty clear that the US has entered into a similar relationship to the co-dependent buttons you described in an above post:
“Thus ten draws on nine to maintain its identity or pattern across time and nine draws on ten in order to maintain its pattern or identity across time.”
The US maintains its identity in part by depending on socialism as an example of what it is not. One way to create a shift in the US then would be to create a shift on the side of socialism. Of course, it was a particular generation that came to age prior to 1989 that defines its self in this way. The kids today are mainly doing the same thing pivoting off of Bush and are thus more likely to think of socialism in a positive way. Especially if all those right wing radio hosts keep calling (falsely) what Obama is doing socialism. One effect will be the more positive identification with socialism.
August 10, 2009 at 6:45 am
I can’t help thinking from your description that memes have as much relation to objects as financial speculation has to GDP. (Although I now imagine memes bringing language to a crisis and the collapse of morality bringing about a Nietzschean uber-mensch).
Is not a problem with memes that as viral analogies they too are parasitical on their hosts?
Thus a negative view of language as befits the whole Dawkins-Dennett-Pinker triumviratal nu-hegemonic view of human nature? – We are little more than rational self-interested genetic reproduction machines, language too is genetic (rather than stemming through linguistic co-operation amongst a species which would suggest there is more to being than the binary) thus justifying all liberal thought from Hobbes on.
August 10, 2009 at 10:17 pm
Schizo Stroller,
I’m not sure I follow. One of Dennett’s central points is that the emergence of memes allows us to act contrary to our self-interest and the imperatives of our genes. For example, you can die for a cause. In dying for a cause the thesis would be that we die so that certain memes might replicate themselves. Given that both Marxist thought and liberal thought are memes, how is it that meme theory becomes an apology for liberal thought alone?