my sign IS your sign
I now want to talk about memes; you know, Richard Dawkins informational construct of replication introduced into popular culture in his book The Selfish Gene in 1976. His introduction of the term (ironically enough) started a memetic wildfire of new thinking about cultural transmission, transformation, and evolution, and conceptualizing about informational viruses, idea replicators and the spread parasitic codes, and semiotic immune systems. In 1991, Dawkins even speculates on “Viruses of the Mind” and scatters a whole host of disease metaphors to make some points about the differences in faith and science.
Although Dawkins casts his very attractive (again ironically enough) notion in the form of genetic Darwinian evolution to play the skeptic’s card, this sense of good and bad signs is not a new idea. Plato’s Phaedrus speaks of good-, bad-, and non-lovers : “Now in what way is the lover to be distinguished from the non-lover? Let us note that in every one of us there are two guiding and ruling principles which lead us whither they will; one is the natural desire of pleasure, the other is an acquired opinion which aspires after the best; and these two are sometimes in harmony and then again at war, and sometimes the one, sometimes the other conquers.” Or any number of earlier medieval theologians discuss what is it the relationship of interpretation to revelation with great pyres of heresy cleansing or reformation in which the Father of Lies was to silenced or at least to have his processes of seduction be controlled. Even in our more modern times, the logical positivists tried to remove the stain of the non-referential form language use, and certainly the political spinners of the last elections have used this notion (edging on conspiracy theory) of sign contamination as fuel for all sorts of spins, ads, and campaigns.
But here I really wish to eschew the rather heavy moral tone that lies in these distinctions; they are, to my lights, too much like Spencerian readings of Darwinian evolutionary change. Always there creeps in the notion of progress (meaning, of course, that speaking perspective is the proper pinnacle of the evolutionary tree) rather than the more complex one of competition, change, and adaptation. Certainly semiosis has an effect, and some of those effects have to discussed, critiqued, and judged, but any rush to judgment is really very anti-change, and ultimately anti-life! I am not so concerned that there may be good or bad memes; I am not so interested in the fact that information exchange can be parasitic or symbiotic, and I am not so worried whether the process is one of seduction, conquest, or simply the exchange of replicators. What I am interested in, what I am concerned about, what I do worry about is how that process takes place and how one can developed tools, perspectives, or devices that will allow us to critically discuss how we use signs and to continue with the business of living.
Now I don’t pretend to scientific neutrality here. There is something very ethical and moral in all this discussion and activity. I think the ethical problem is something like the discussion of computer viruses – when you examine them you make the information, and the possibility, for creating them and using them that much more prevalent. Like with biological weaponry, this can be very dangerous, but learning how to deal with such things is a part of modern life. One needs some understanding of the semiotic immune system, some understanding of how signs are generated or transformed, how centristic signs can be torqued out to the margins or extremities of a semiotic field, or of how signs can be revalued for new and different purposes by one group another. The only way to do that is to be a un-invested as possible and then bring the discoveries to the Community of Inquirers, where they can be discussed and critiqued in a public fashion and something of their use to the direction of the Final Interpretant is possible with playing games of semiotic extinction.
So line up your T-cells, and put on your doublespeak hat,
Trickster is Walking
