Whenever the concept of memes comes up it seems that people get really incensed. I’m baffled by this reaction. What is it about this concept that gets folks so worked up? I certainly understand the point that meme theory is underdeveloped, but this is a call for theoretical elaboration and development, not outright rejection. I get the sense that memes get some worked up for one of two reasons. On the one hand, I sometimes sense that hostility to the concept of memes is really driven by disciplinary territory disputes. Here you have the upstarts like Dawkins and Dennett come along, spout the word “memes”, and suddenly everyone yahoo that knows nothing about social theory or the broad and deep discipline of semiotics gets all excited. I wonder whether there isn’t a little of resentment and envy at work here. On the other hand, I get the sense that some associate memes with socio- and psychobiology (more on this in a moment).
From the standpoint of object-oriented ontology, I find meme theory extremely attractive precisely because meme theory treats memes as real objects or actors in the world. Here, more specifically, are the reasons that I find memes attractive:
1) Far from falling into vulgar socio- and psychobiology, meme theory allows us to tell a far more complex story about human beings and behavior. The central thesis of meme theory is that at some point in human biological history a new type of replicator emerged in contrast to gene replicators. Genes are replicators in the sense that they are units of some sort that get copied or replicated through reproduction. Under Dawkin’s formulation, at least, the “aim” of genes is not the advantage of the organism, but to get themselves copied through reproduction. In this respect, genes construct vehicles (bodies, organisms) as strategies for getting themselves replicated.
Just as we do not act primarily for the welfare of our cars but use cars for our own aims, genes aren’t primarily “interested” in the welfare of bodies or organisms. This comes out with special clarity in the case of the preying mantis, but also my favorite animal, the octopus. In the case of the preying mantis, of course, the female devours the male preying mantis’s head after mating with him. In contributing half his genes the male has done his work. His sole value after mating consists in contributing nutrients to the impregnated preying mantis. Moreover, were the male to go his happy way after mating he might mate with other females, generating dangerous competitors to the offspring of his first mate. Cruel world. The case is similar with the octopus. After the female octopus is impregnated she finds a well protected cave or pipe and lays her eggs around the mouth of the cave opening. For the next few weeks after laying her eggs she never again leaves the cave, but rather spends all of her time jetting water over the egg sacks hanging from the cave opening and cleaning the eggs with her tentacles. Once the eggs hatch the female octopus is free to leave the cave, but at this point she is so weakened from lack of food (she hasn’t hunted during this whole time) and is very quickly, and somewhat ironically, devoured by the fish and crabs that she previously feasted upon. Once again, the genes of the female octopus were not acting on her behalf, but rather she was a vehicle or strategy for getting her genes replicated. When that replication is complete her job is done. Cruel world.
read on!
With the emergence of memes a new replicator enters the world, very different from genes. Memes or cultural ideas, symbols, and practices, are like genes in that they aim to get themselves replicated, however as unique replicators they do not act at the behest of genes. In other words, we now get what could be called a “conflict of the replicators”. Genes can struggle with memes. Memes can struggle with genes. Memes and genes can collaborate with one another. However, like all alliances, a collaboration of memes and genes is a temporary strategy to advance the replication of genes and the replication of the memes that can be dissolved when this relationship no longer advances one or the other. It is even feasible that memes, at some point, could dispense with genes altogether if they find new and more effective ways to replicate themselves, no longer requiring organic bodies like brains to be passed along. This, for example, is what is depicted in films like Terminator or The Matrix where the machines (and machines are memes) have been liberated from human bodies and strive to replicate themselves apart from humans.
The key point is that with memes new relationships to the world and biology emerge. Thus when a soldier dies in battle while storming the beach at Normandy, this soldier has died so that certain memes might be replicated, not for the sake of his genes. When someone practices abstinence before marriage, they are acting on behalf of memes, not genes. These new objects or actors, memes, fundamentally change how we relate to ourselves, our biology, and memes. Indeed, in a theorization worthy of Lacan or Freud, Dennett compares memes to foreign and alien entities that come to infest our brains, creating persons, where persons are what emerge as a sort of conflict between our biology or genes and these units of culture. It is not difficult to discern something akin to Lacan’s parasitic and alien signifiers that so transform our relation to our bodies and the world in this concept of memes.
The problem with so much socio- and psychobiology is that it is greedily reductive. Not only do these explanations all too often seek a biological explanation of every and any human behavior, but these sorts of explanations also often make an illicit move from the “is” to the “ought”, jumping from the observation that because our genes promote a certain behavior we ought to engage in that sort of behavior. The silliness of this argument can be discerned when we talk about things like poor eyesight. Does anyone dispute that because some people are near-sighted they ought not correct their vision through a memetic technology like eyeglasses, contacts, or corrective surgery? Because memes are autonomous replicators, they introduce all sorts of things into human behavior that cannot be reduced to biology or given a biological explanation. In short, the concept of memes curbs the worst excesses of socio- and psychobiology while nonetheless allowing us to think the intersection of biology and these units of cultural meaning without rejecting one or the other as so often happens in positions driven by the nature/culture divide (i.e., where we’re required to choose either nature or culture, rather than thinking the complex relations between these terms in a collective).
2. Memes, by adding the mechanism of natural selection to the mix, give us the means to think cultural evolution or the invention of new memes. For a number of years I was obsessed with semiotics and semiology, as well as structural linguistics. One thing I always had difficulty understanding– and it’s a tremendously important issue for me –is how change takes place in systems of signs or in structures of signifiers. I simply never encountered what I took to be a plausible account of why change takes place in culture or language. Meme theory provides a nice working hypothesis for the genesis of change by introducing the concept of natural selection. It’s worth remembering that natural selection is a relational concept involving a relation between random variations, units, heredity, and an environment. You need these four elements for the algorithms of natural selection to get off the ground. Thus, for example, random variation produces certain differences. Some of these differences are advantageous and enhance the possibilities of surviving long enough to get reproduced, while others are not. The advantage is determined by a relation to an environment. Thus, having white hair is an advantage for a bear in an arctic environment with lots of snow, but probably isn’t much of an advantage in a Brazilian rain forest. It is less likely that the gene for white hair would be passed on in the rain forest because prey would more easily see the bear, would be more likely to run away, the bear would thus get less food and would therefore be less healthy and likely to mate. Just the reverse in an arctic environment. The point is that what counts as an advantageous difference is relational or a function of the relation between the organism and its environment.
The problem with structuralist linguistics, for example, is that it brackets anything outside of language when analyzing language and therefore is denied any sort of mechanism that could explain either 1) where random variations in language come from, and 2) how different variations are selected for. Meme theory does not have this problem. Recall that for memes, like genes, the “aim” is not the welfare of the person using or thinking the meme, but rather the replication of itself. Some memes are downright detrimental to us, but get replicated nonetheless for whatever reason. Other memes are irritating and don’t really have any use, but are very good at getting replicated. Here I think of Bobby McFerrin’s song Don’t Worry, Be Happy:
Back when this song was first released I remember that my first reaction was a sense of euphoric pleasure that was then accompanied by a sort of horror or profound irritation. Why? Despite being “catchy” (note the word “catchy”), once you heard the song a couple of times you just couldn’t get the damned thing out of your head. You were infected with it and found it running through your mind over and over again, trapping you in its grip. McFerrin’s song was an exceptionally good replicator, highly adept at getting itself copied and passed on. But why?
There are more or less four relevant environments that play a role in the selective processes of memes. First, so far, of course, the primary environment of memes is the brain. To date, the successful reproduction of a meme requires that the meme be consistent with the “architecture” of the brain. If certain memes are particularly “catchy”, then this is because they have evolved in such a way that they are congenial to the structure of the brain. Something about the rhythm of McFerrin’s song stimulates pleasure and memory aspects of the brain. Beer brands and cars often use sex to sell their product, stimulating the hypothalamus and whatnot. Nationalism is a pernicious meme that uses narcissism, resentment, and our desire for superiority to get itself replicated. My three year old daughter has entire Dr. Seuss stories like Green Eggs and Ham memorized. No doubt the reason these memes or stories have lodged themselves so deeply in her mind has to do with their rhythmic, poetic quality and their plot structure. It is easier to remember something with a rhythm than a complex geometrical proof, and it is easier to remember something with a plot and characters than all the details of Husserl’s Logical Investigation. In this respect, we can think of memes as strategies for seducing brains. Some memes get themselves replicated by being useful for the organisms that host them. Others get themselves replicated by playing on the architecture of our brains in rhythmic and imagistic terms. Yet others get themselves replicated by playing on our worst characteristics such as envy, hatred, narcissism, and so on.
Notice that the principle of parity or reversibility works here as well. It is not simply that memes must adapt to the brain as an environment, but it is highly likely that in the 200,000 years or so that homo sapiens have been around our biology has, in fact, been modified as a result of memes. Insofar as memes are selective pressures in the environment of genes, it is likely that some genes are better fitted to life with memes than others. Here a word about “adaptation” is in order. When Van Haute, in his study of Lacan’s “Subversion of the Subject” and 5th and 6th seminar entitles his book Against Adaptation, he seems to be working on the premise that adaptation means “well fitted to an environment”. This ignores the fact that 1) environments are ever shifting, and 2) that organisms are strategies (wagers) for navigating a particular environment premised on the stability of how time is structured. The point here is that no organism is entirely fitted to its environment and that every relationship between an organism and its environment is fraught. This is especially the case with the relationship between genes and memes. This relationship is hardly peaceful or congenial, is riven by conflict and competition, and is always an uneasy alliance. In emphasizing that memes are autonomous replicators in their own right, in undermining the socio- and psychobiological thesis that everything we do is at the behest of our genes or biology, meme theory sheds light on this fraught relationship in a way, I believe, that any Lacanian can wholeheartedly endorse. It really doesn’t take much work to port Lacanian psychoanalysis into meme theory or meme theory into Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Brains also play a significant role in the random variations undergone by memes. Where genes tend to more or less maintain their structure across time, brains have the curious ability to combine memes in a sort of alchemy or chemism that produces changes very quickly. Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake or Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland combines units of language in all sorts of surprising ways that create entirely new terms or memes. Upon encountering spray perfume bottles the inventor of the fuel injected engine gets the bright idea of using a mechanism similar to the perfume spray bottle to spray gasoline in a controlled manner, and so on. Consequently, like the game of telephone, the meme undergoes greater or lesser variations with each exchange.
But brains alone are not the sole environment of memes. Technology, which is itself a meme, plays a crucial role in which memes have an advantage and which memes do not. It is difficult, for example, for memes like physics, chemistry, philosophy, high order mathematics, and so on to get a foothold in a culture that lacks writing. Here we get at what McLuhan might have had in mind when he declared that “the medium is the message”. The medium– in this case the technology through which memes are transmitted –plays an important role in what memes have a real chance of getting passed on and what memes have a highly diminished chance of getting passed on. It is very difficult to keep a dialogue like Plato’s Sophist or a series of lectures like Aristotle’s Metaphysics in ones mind, but not at all daunting to memorize all of the Illiad. For most of us the idea of memorizing all the details of Euclid’s Elements or Newton’s Principia is unthinkable. Consequently, the technology by which memes are transmitted is not simply a passive tool or vehicle but actually changes selection pressures on memes or units of culture meaning. Not only can technologies intensify the rate at which memes are transmitted in the case of having good highways allowing people to travel and therefore exchange memes or in the case of the internet, but the medium itself contributes to the sorts of memes that are possible or not possible. For example, contemporary computers are today rendering forms of mathematics possible that were unthinkable prior to the advent of the computer.
Third, the natural environment is also a selective mechanism. Thus if a group of people live in an extremely remote area of the world such as Southwest Alaska, it is likely that “memetic drift” or change will be very slow. In a large city with lots of ports, memetic drift is highly accelerated.
Finally fourth, just as organisms are selective pressures for other organisms, other memes are selective pressures for new memes. Memes belong to the environment of other memes. Thus memes can form vast symbiotic webs of interdependency like natural ecosystems where memes rely on one another in systems or networks to persist. This is the case with interdependencies of various technologies, or the manner in which our current world is largely structured by the dynamics of capital which reaches into every aspect of our lives, structuring it in a variety of highly durable ways. Similarly, the memes of one semiotic ecosystem or semiosphere can create a highly inhospitable place for other memes just as the Brazilian rain forest isn’t particularly hospitable for the polar bear. This would be the case with the memes for socialism in the United States. And indeed, among the various symbiots that inhabit the semiosphere, there are all sorts of forms of “meme warfare” where certain networks of memes strive to neutralize other networks of memes.
3. Meme theory renders memes “geographical”. In its emphasis on replication, copying, or iteration meme theory draws attention to the epidemiology of memes through a population of brains. Just as you can’t run Word for Windows on your Atari, people need to be hosts for memes in order to have certain ideas, engage in certain practices, and so on. Let us call the error of ignoring memetic epidemiology “The Bush Administration Fallacy”. The Bush administration had the idea that everyone innately and naturally has certain ideas and that it is sufficient simply to remove certain obstacles to actualize these ideas in a population. But like the Atari that can’t run Word for Windows, it is very difficult for populations of people to enact certain practices if they don’t have certain memes.
Generally when we think of meaning we think of it as something that doesn’t have a geography or that isn’t located in time and space. No doubt this error emerges as a result of certain confusions surrounding the iterability of memes giving the illusion that memes aren’t localized in space and time. But insofar as memes must spread, insofar as they must be copied, memes have a geography or a geographical distribution which is, in principle, mappable. Indeed, this is part of what the ethnographer does implicitly when she does field work, investigating the unique practices, technologies, laws, morals, cosmologies, economies, etc., of a particular group of people.
By de-emphasizing– but by no means dismissing or ignoring –the content of memes and drawing attention to the geographical distribution of memes, memetic theory suggests an ethics of repetition. You might think that you have no new ideas, that you are simply repeating what others are saying, and perhaps you are. But in refusing to repeat because you have nothing new to say you are forgetting the dimension of epidemiology or the spread of memes throughout a population. While you might have nothing new to say you can nonetheless play a role in the spread of ideas and practices worth fighting for and sharing. Moreover, as I have already suggested, memes have a strange alchemy that leads them to combine in surprising ways with other memes when they enter your brain and the brains of other people. So repeat a little. Value repetition a bit more. Transmit.
Larval Subjects . 
November 11, 2009 at 4:10 am
I guess my major gripe with memes is that even Dawkins gene replicator units are rather memes and not biologically identifiable entities. At least protein encoding DNA strands are not competing replicators and they are by no means actors.
If we want to be positive about it, the replicator unit can be considered as an abstract idea. If we are less so it is just pseudo-science.
November 11, 2009 at 4:15 am
Kay,
Yes, I’ve heard that criticism but I have a difficult time understanding how the situation is any different in linguistics or semiotics. Moreover, I take it that meme theory doesn’t claim to be a science. Respectfully I would suggest that your line of argument here is an example of what is known as the line drawing fallacy. In the event that you don’t know, the line drawing fallacy consists in claiming that something doesn’t exist because the distinction between it and something else cannot be clearly drawn. A good example of this would be the difference between the colors blue and green. We cannot define the precise moment where blue becomes green but certainly there is a difference between blue and green. Now suppose we adopted your criteria for evolutionary theory itself. We cannot precisely define the point at which one species becomes another species because there are countless intermediaries between the two extremes. Are you willing to reject evolutionary theory because we can’t provide clear and distinct criteria for species such that we can define the precise point at which dinosaurs become birds? In short, I basically think this is a bad argument.
November 11, 2009 at 4:20 am
Additionally I would suggest that this argument commits what Bhaskar calls the “epistemic fallacy”. Basically you seem to be arriving at the conclusion that because we have a hard time clearly and distinctly defining memes (an epistemic requirement for us) memes therefore do not exist and are not worth speculating and talking about. Here the problem lies in subordinating ontological questions to epistemological questions. I also find it curious to see continental philosophers (and I don’t know if you’re in that camp) advancing such a criticism when they’re up to their necks in signifiers, signs, and hermeneutics.
November 11, 2009 at 4:28 am
I take it that this is an instance of a fallacy Anodyne Lite recently drew attention to (and I’d never heard of it, so I’m grateful that she brought it up) called the “special pleading fallacy”:
https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/realism-epistemology-science-and-scientism/#comment-20819
As Anodyne describes it:
I find that this particular fallacy is endemic to a lot of continental thought. Thus, for example, the continental thinker might critique a scientific claim on the grounds that it ignores the role played by the social, historical, the linguistic, and power or force. What’s interesting here is that this critique doesn’t practice parity or the principle of reversibility. Categories like mind, our access to our minds, language, force, power, signs, etc., go uncritiqued while categories like objects and causality are submitted to a vigorous critique. These positions fail to apply their own critique to their own critical concepts, treating them like Moliere’s famous “dormative powers” that somehow exercise a mysterious ability to overdetermine everything else without that power itself being given an account or explanation.
November 11, 2009 at 6:22 am
I don’t have a problem with the claim that pattern replicate in some sense and that there are fuzzy boundaries. We observe replication after it happened and there is certainly objectivity to it: pattern can be matched and matches can be counted. In computing a pattern matcher is just a finite state machine and there isn’t anything subjective or arbitrary about it. In the real world we have to match with errors but it shall still be possible.
It is an entirely different claim though to assume the existence of active replicators or units of replication everywhere in nature and culture that act like DNA strands, wrapped into a protein hulls aka viruses, which are parasites of some sort. I’ve never seen more than a funny diatribe against religion and certain ideologies in this idea. So it is marked as SciFi to me and unlike some authors in an Artificial Life journal I read in the 1990s I found little evidence that someone tried to make sense of it.
A usual criterion is that individuals of two different species are not able to mate. This is restricted to sexual reproduction though.
I’m not sure what to make of “intermediaries” but I admit I’m not quite up to date about box genes, the epigenetic code and higher order regulation mechanisms and switches. I always thought that the “Intelligent Design” crowd had some point – the designer is just not out there as an awesome, great, loving creator, making his hands dirty to adapt bugs, jellyfishes, apes and crabs to their environment but a cybernetic organization inside of each single cell, responding to changes in chemical equilibriums.
So yes, I’m willing to reject the mainstream evolutionary theory if there is enough evidence for another big picture. Some would say, it is not a rejection but an enrichment which is fine for me as well.
November 11, 2009 at 6:48 am
Kay,
Hopefully this post is an example of something more than a diatribe against religion. More to the point, however, there are a number of disanalogies between genes and memes and the meme theorists are upfront about this. Memes behave in very different ways than genes (the example of the alchemy of the brain I give in the post where memes can be combined fluidly underlines this) and are much fuzzier replicators than genes. Who know, perhaps at some point they’ll become more organized and fixed in their structure, but not so far.
The criteria you give for distinguishing species doesn’t actually work biologically, though it’s a good rule of thumb. First there are a number of instances where inter-species mating is possible. Good examples of this would be mules and ligers. Recently scientists even found a cross between grizzly bears and polar bears that appears to have reproductive capacities (unusual for inter-species cross-breeding). One of the more horrifying examples is a cross between a human and a chimpanzee around which all sorts of controversies are swirling as to whether it really is an inter-species offspring or whether it is just a highly mutated chimpanzee. Secondly, there are all sorts of instances where members of the same species are unable to mate despite neither individual suffering from reproductive problems. Here there is enough genetic difference between these individuals to prevent them from producing offspring. Species are thus fuzzy boundaries, not categories like triangles and circles. Put more forcefully we could say that species are useful fictions defining similarities among a population of individuals, not real things that exist out there in the world.
I agree that the design crowd has a point. Even when you look at something as humble as a cell or the krebs cycle it is difficult not to be filled with amazement and to find credulity strained at the thought of this sort of incredible complexity and interdependency arising accidentally. Unfortunately design theories have no evidence on their side so while there’s all sorts of compelling intuitions to support them, there’s no reason to endorse them or entertain them.
November 11, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Ah, but we don’t need contained, discrete selfish memes to get at cultural evolution!
See Henrich, Boyd & Richerson 2008 (free access pdf).
Do read the whole paper – very good stuff and not too technical.
November 11, 2009 at 1:57 pm
As genes and genotypes give rise to particular fenotypes across the globe, so do memes in cultures, according to Girards theory of mimetic desire. The more developed a civilization is, the more it is able to procrastinate aggression, but will finally (as in Judeo-Christian society) produce a scapegoat. The parallel in gene pools seems to be the ability to (still) produce offspring.
November 11, 2009 at 6:06 pm
I just put this in an email. I hope you don’t mind if I post it here to.
“The key point is that with memes new relationships to the world and biology emerge. Thus when a soldier dies in battle while storming the beach at Normandy, this soldier has died so that certain memes might be replicated, not for the sake of his genes”
I see your point about fighting and dying for the nationalism meme. But here’s a couple of possible other hypotheses: Maybe the soldier is acting to protect the genes carried by his by children, and/or maybe he is protecting the genes of his buddy fighting beside him? It’s tough the tease apart the motivations of the memes and genes, and it’s probably a mistake to try to separate them, as in trying to separate nature and culture. There is probably some kind of temporary collaboration going on here, as you mention.
With regard to the preying mantis and octopus, a major difference with humans is that we need to try to live long enough to raise our children into adulthood or until they can replicate our genes and take care of themselves. So our work isn’t done yet even at the genetic level.
“No doubt the reason these memes or stories have lodged themselves so deeply in her mind has to do with their rhythmic, poetic quality and their plot structure. It is easier to remember something with a rhythm than a complex geometrical proof . . .”
Another word for this, as you of course know, is pattern. The brain loves figuring out patterns and predicting what’s coming next.
“The Bush administration had the idea that everyone innately and naturally has certain ideas and that it is sufficient simply to remove certain obstacles to actualize these ideas in a population”
Can you give an example here?
“The medium– in this case the technology through which memes are transmitted –plays an important role in what memes have a real chance of getting passed on and what memes have a highly diminished chance of getting passed”
Exactly. A well-known example is how the television spread civil rights memes, and how Greyhound buses spread “outside notions” to southern Blacks in the same years. Also the way TV brought the Vietnam War into living rooms.
I like the final paragraph very much—the value of repetition.
December 16, 2009 at 2:42 am
I’m going to have to absorb these for a while. I’ve been wanting to blend Lacan and memes for some time and you’ve lain the groundwork. Thanks.