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?
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.
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?
ReplyDelete> the word "meme". . .
ReplyDeleteNot to be confused with
http://www.whimsicalarchives.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/mimi.jpg
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?
ReplyDeleteMemetics 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.