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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Hells Bells

Every time a person uses the word "meme" a human mind loses her wings.

More Futurological Brickbats here.

3 comments:

Esebian said...

Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?

jimf said...

> the word "meme". . .

Not to be confused with
http://www.whimsicalarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mimi.jpg


Dale Carrico said...

Wouldn't you say today's state of the concept "meme" is like that of the "gene" in the 1890s; there's hints that there is a mechanism of information transfer, we just can't figure out any specifics?

Memetics isn't some promising fledgling discipline. It's a futurological neologism -- with the usual wannabe guru huckster PR in play -- through which ignoramuses have been pretending to re-invent the wheel of rhetoric for a generation. Rhetoric has always been the analysis of discourse, and much contemporary critical and cultural theory is best understood as its ongoing elaboration. I do not include much if any "memetic" nonsense to that body of criticism, since memetics brings nothing actually new or useful to the table, it is a far clumsier analytic vocabulary for historically situating discourse or specifying its stakeholders or dynamisms than philology of over a century ago -- indeed apart from the pep of its initial neologism memetics adds idiocy of a reductive mis-analogization of signification to a biology itself already idiotically reductively mis-analogized to computer programming. There are plenty of ugly ideological reasons that digi-utopians and market fundamentalists would consider this a feature and not a bug of the meme qua cult-bug -- after all, most of them disdain and fear the insights arising from proper rhetoric in any case.