On Friday I spent the afternoon surfing the web for articles on memes. Dawkins was the originator of the term in his seminal text the Selfish Gene in 1976. Since then, a variety of researchers, theorists, and pop-culturalists ahve latched onto the term. Some theorists have tried (in my opinion) too hard to define memes as entities onto themselves. by sticking hard and fast to the analogy with genes, memes risk becoming trapped inside a metaphor. This is a meme, it is just like this, it will always be like this unless something from the outside changes it. in these articles, memes take on a structure like Evolution. I think it's more like chaos theory. I think memes function more like rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari). Although external forces can work on them to transform them, sometimes they just take on a life of their own....So how should we analyze our memes????
Hayles, N. Katherine
Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari
SubStance - Issue 94/95 (Volume 30, Number 1&2), 2001, pp. 144-159
University of Wisconsin Press
SubStance 30.1&2 (2001) 144-159 _________________________________________________________________ [Access article in PDF] Desiring Agency: Limiting Metaphors and Enabling Constraints in Dawkins and Deleuze/Guattari N. Katherine Hayles _________________________________________________________________ Recent work in the cultural studies of science has shown the importance of metaphoric networks for scientific inquiry. Sometimes these networks have functioned to lead scientists in the wrong direction. For example, metaphoric equations developed in nineteenth-century physiology mapped Africans, women, and animals onto one another to the detriment of all three categories, as Nancy Leys Stepan has shown. But more often, metaphors have opened up fruitful lines of inquiry, as when Norbert Weiner saw metaphoric correspondences between prosthetic devices and cybernetic machines ("Sound Communication"). It is not easy to determine where the limits of metaphor should be drawn. In some sense almost all language can be considered metaphoric, as Michael Arbib and Mary Hesse argue in discussing metaphoric resonance in measurement. Indeed, even mathematics can be considered metaphorical, as Norbert Weiner pointed out when he observed that mathematics was "the most colossal metaphor imaginable" (Human Use, 95). So can sense perception, as Walter Freeman and Gregory Bateson among others have argued, for perceptual experiences are metaphors for reality rather than representations of reality. In Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson give this idea a linguistic turn when they argue that metaphor connects abstract thought with embodied experience, providing a grounding we often fail to see precisely because it is so pervasive and fundamental. These diverse...
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hi Debbie and james,
I think that we are sharing one mind, either because of intextual connections in what we are reading, or just because we are similarly kookie. but the reservation about being too precise about what a meme is really struck home. in general, I agree that it is not so important to pin down the definition of meme so percisely. In fact, it may be counterproductive to do so. it makes me think of yet another metphor: the notion that light can be understood as particles and as waves. the little packets are referred to as quanta, hence quantum mechanics. But light, in the more traditional sense, can be understood as waves within an electromagnetic spectrum. The way one chooses to discuss the phenomenon of "light" (particle or wave) in many ways determines how you can discuss. So it might be with memes. I remember a theoretical talk in the round table room where we were talking about possible intersects in rhyzomatic theory and meme analysis. One insight that was particularly meaningful to me was in conceptualizing a meme as an intertection of vectors, or rhyzomes. Where they meet, the notion of a tap root might occur, and therefore, there would be a substantive, meaningful event or a meme. However, that same meme can itself become a directional language/meaning event, or a rhyzome. This would account for the Lankshear and Knoble theorizing about the attention collecting capabilities as well as their viral and contagion metaphor. Can we, in our analysis simultaneously treat meme analysis as a process and and a thing?
There is actually some support for this in the Hjelmslev text Prologeman to a theory of glossematics:
In the general sense, language process is a "text" That is processes within language result in text, using the most generic sense of the word text. Whereas the system of language is simply called "language."
When text is produced within a given language, and viewed within that language system, it must have a function. All of this is Hjelmslev. From my interpretation, behind the function is the user's intent. Whcih makes a direct link with the sociosemiotics of Halliday, Kress and vanLeeuwan, and Rose. One can theoretically have a virtual language system that works as algebra without realizing the system as text. However, it is not possible to have a text without an accompanying language system. this is important to us because it establishes the necessity of a language system that governs the use of texts that are generated in making movies. there must be an overriding "language" that guides the auteurs as they create their texts. So, we are on to something very big here.
p. 45: even with atomistic analysis meaning of signs and memes is contextually based. there is not innate meaning in signs. "In absolute isolation, no sign has any meaning; any sign meaning arises in context, by which we mean a situational context, explicit context..."
Later on, just because a particular sign-meaning may be expressed by a letter or a phoneme ( -s as a plural marker), it does not follow that the letter or the phoneme is the sign-expression as base level. Think, rather, that the sign itself is "pluralness" (in the case of the -s) and that its sign expression is variable ( -s, -es, etc).
Figurae are the various elements that can be used to represent a sign. the s, singularly, at the end of the word is a figurae that can be used to represent plural. alternatively, s is also a figurae in the construction of the word sell, where e and l are also figurae. It would be misreprentation to equate figurae with letters and phonemes.
p. 47 "the constuction of the sign from a limited number of figurae" In film making, the strategic deployment of shot types, positions of actors and objects within a frame, angles, dissolves are figurae. They contribute to the bulding of a signin the film. A clock dissolve may be seen a s a sign represented by single figura. But a fuzzy dissolve used as a transition might be accompanied with additional figurae of disorienting music, and/or voiceover to create the sign of a "dream sequence."
p. 47 the sign is an entity created by the connexion between an expression and a content.
Finally, a really accessible book on Lakoff and Johnson's approach to language and metaphor is Metaphors we live by. I own a copy. It should be on a shelf on the left side of my office as you enter. It is on the right hand shelf of that side, about half way up. 6 inch paperback, 1/2 inch thick.
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