I looked up meme and, sure enough, etymologically the word itself is independent of the 'theme' and 'rheme' I know from linguistics. Memes can have something to do with language, though. According to Wikipedia a meme is:
"A meme consists of any unit of cultural information, such as a practice or idea, that gets transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. Examples include thoughts, ideas, theories, practices, habits, songs, dances and moods and terms such as race, culture, and ethnicity. Memes propagate themselves and can move through a "culture" in a manner similar to the behavior of a virus."
I find memes interesting for at least two reasons. First, the idea goes against what I believe is true. I believe that facts and ideas are representations created through interaction (interpersonal interaction and interaction with the physical environment). The seminal book on this is called 'Laboratory Life: the construction of scientific facts" by Latour and Woolgar. It is the first anthropological study of a science lab.
The second reason I find memes intriguing is that the idea of memes downplays the interactions that go into expressing an idea. Memes treat ideas and such as things in themselves and liken the spread of memes to the behaviours of a virus. In other circumstances this would have ruffled my feathers for sure, but in the context of this class, it is food for thought.
One part of the analogy that I can completely accept is that memes (or words in general), like viruses, can affect one's physical body in complex ways. I think 'virus' gives a negative connotation, though. Can the behaviours of a virus benefit the host? If not, then I think I have problems with the analogy, but maybe I am missing something. In the same vein I would want to know if the behaviours of any viruses are integral to being human.
In any case, I agree that talking in particular ways (i.e. propagating memes) can shape the state of one's body and the motions of one's body--as the subject of religion and say, birth control, well demonstrate.
I think memes have a strong potential to be a dangerous idea, though. Not that memes as a subject should not be talked about. On the contrary, I think it is a provocative subject. But the subject of memes encourage the speakers to talk about ideas independently of the people that propagate, create, and modify them. I think this creates the conditions for a potentially dangerous habit. Memes ARE created by, propagated by, and modified by people (or more generally, by beings) as part of their lives. Memes are interesting, but the backdrop of discussion of memes should respect and acknowledge the complexity of the movements involved in propagating them. It is a complexity involved in what it means to be human (or alive), to be seen as an individual but also as a member of a group. We know very little about this complexity, though we believe it is possible to study it and know more.
The interface of memes and the body would be interesting. I will have to look up more about this. But that is all for now.
Theresa
2 comments:
More on memes, and whether they are by definition bad for you in this podcast:
Keith Stanovich - Robot’s Rebellion: Finding Meaning in the Age of Darwin
http://tinyurl.com/68kyq3
Thanks for the point to the pod-cast, Erik! Especially well chosen from my point of view in that Keith Stanovich is an OISEite.
I found the whole thing provocative. Stanovich moves away from the whole virus metaphor for memes--though many times he returns to the analogy of being a 'host' to self-replicating genes and memes. I found a lot in this podcast I could agree with.
In the spirit of intellectual diversity, since my own theoretical orientations (to the best of my knowledge) were not inspired by Darwin, I thought I would post a few quotes from my three main theorists--Pierre Bourdieu, M.M.Bakhtin, and M.A.K Halliday and draw some parallels with Stanovich's version of meme theory.
Bakhtin's notion of words share a lot of similarities with memes. Bakhtin was a literary theorist in the USSR. The following quote comes from Discourse in the Novel (1935):
All words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life; all words and forms are populated by intentions.
Memes and 'words' (as Bakhtin describes them) are both objects that exist independently of the speakers themselves. Both are propagated by speakers. Unlike meme theory, Bakhtin does not imagine the word replicating itself, but he does imagine forces (inward pointing forces) which work in particular contexts to replicate the word with a meaning which is suitable to the social context. He also imagines that in any given utterance another force is present (in greater or lesser degree) which points the word away from recognizable meaning in that context.
I have to say that I am interested in memes, but my heart is still in the interworkings of utterance, speaker, and social context.
I see two similarities between Bourdieu's (and Foucault's) work and memes. Bourdieu and Foucault both point to the arbitrariness of the words we utter. In an analogy with genes, the genes each of us have are historical, but they are arbitrary. The possibilities for whatever differences we as a species have with any other species were created by chance--thus they are arbitrary. Since memes are symbolic they are even more arbitrary.
Bourdieu's book I find most inspiring is "Outline of a Theory of Practice," (1972) especially Chapter 4: Structures, habitus, power--basis for a theory of symbolic power. He draws on his data created during his fieldwork in postwar Algeria. In the following quote (p. 164), I see in Bourdieu's sense of limits a mechanism for how memes propagate when people shape their own aspirations via the established social order:
Every established order tends to produce (to very different degrees and with very different means) the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. Of all the mechanisms tending to produce this effect, the most important and the best concealed is undoubtedly the dialectic of the objective chances and the agents' aspirations, out of which arises the sense of limits, commonly called the sense of reality, i.e. the correspondence between the objective classes and the internalized classes, social structures and mental structures, which is the basis for the most ineradicable adherence to the established order.
I don't have a singular quote handy for Halliday, but Halliday argues that human beings are made to "make meaning" with (recognize, interpret, and respond to) their physical and social environments. Language, he argues, is inherently functional in that it allows people to create meanings with eachother and the world around them.
From my understanding of Halliday's work, I would say we create our reality through our ongoing interactions with others and with our physical environment.
and I MIGHT say that memes give us a raw material through which we create our reality.
I am thinking that the parasitic analogy might work. My present thought is that the interaction would be symbiotic because it gives the host a means through which to live, even if it ends up being deleterious to the same host. It is symbiotic up until any moment when the host kills themselves (but killing one's self might be a bid to become a meme!)
I have another thought stemming from Stanovich's arguement which returns to my notion that talking about language independently of the speakers that utter it is a dangerous idea, but I will save that for another day.
-Theresa
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