Edit: I have realized this is still a disorganized shambles and I am failing to make my point clearly. Look out for edits tomorrow, its too late for that shit here and now.
Still catching up on my reading, I noticed this interesting post* over at Chaos Marxism on marketing and memes. All good stuff, as you would expect. However, the mention of the problems of memes and marketing, in particular the notion of artifice and being a product of late capitalism reminded me of a few phrases in a book on Foucault I have been reading and discussing recently.
In the context of Foucault’s ontological conception of freedom, Pozorov mentions that
this notion of freedom is entirely divorced from any assumption of originary authenticity and the correlate projects of self-discovery or self-actualisation that are central to the epistemic regime of liberal government. As a number of studies have demonstrated, liberal governmental rationality synthesises the mobilisation of human desire for freedom with the specification of its content, so that one is incited to discover and liberate one’s ‘inner self’ through following an externally devised model of e.g. an ‘active citizen’, an ‘enterprising employee’ or a ‘caring mother’
I’ve someone who has often been suspicious of both the ‘lifestyle transgressivism’ of certain artistic and subcultural groups and New Age self-empowerment style programs, but for some reason (probably the fact that I am not especially smart) I never put the two together in this sort of framework. But both have bothered me, the former being pretty much an excuse to channel some contemporary form of discontent into safe consumerism and the second for promoting the sort of mushy headed, obscurantist personalities that have been well discussed by people like Slavoj Žižek.
The question for me is that can identity be overcome, even temporarily, or do we only ever shift between varying memetic networks that always promote one sort of identity or another? While Foucault and Pozorov seem to think that it possible to undertake transitory acts of ‘concrete freedom’ aimed against diagrammatic government I’m not so certain. Its an attractive viewpoint, that much is true. And in the Art of Memetics, for example, Unruh and Wilson mention the concept of phages, a sort of poison meme designed to undermine other memes.
But that seems a very abstract concept and I’m not sure a phage so powerful as to undermine the concept of identity, even temporarily, would either be feasible, nor could it ever spread very far as I’m sure such a phage would have negative effects, at least in the context of our current political culture. At the AoM authors point out, any meme which reduces your chances for survival is going to have problems to spread. Common sense really, but worth pointing out.
But aside from this transgressive act, Foucault mentions another way in which this ‘concrete freedom’ could be approached. By approaching freedom from the definition of the potential to change, from this particular point of view of:
active self-fashioning, ‘those intentional and voluntary actions by which men […] seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria’.
can we work that into a memetic framework, ignoring the problems of aesthetic values for now? I think it is possible. I am of course familiar with the concept of paradigm piracy, and think perhaps the systematic version of this may play a role.
To extend the virological metaphor, we can think of ideas and memes like viruses. In fact, it seems that the spread of information and diseases share certain characteristics, so perhaps this isn’t such a large metaphorical leap at all. And how do you gain immunity to diseases? Through vaccination, most frequently weak exposure or exposure to a similar disease which stimulates the immunological system. In terms of memes, I would suggest this does not mean one is less likely to pick up a certain meme (the only method I can envisage for that is locking oneself tightly within a memeplex which distrusts all other memes and also controls what communications one is permitted to be exposed to – such as certain versions of fundamentalist Christianity) but that this memeplex would be easier to’ switch out of’, that one could change identities and outlook.
This isn’t the same as discarding the meme, per se, only relegating or repressing it for a while, as another group of memes take over. Sorry, my head is fuzzy right now, but I think I’m making my point clear.
This fits in with the description of freedom in the AoM as well. To recap, for those who haven’t read the book, Unruh and Wilson discuss the idea of agency. Since humans are a bunch of competing drives, what freedom means, in their worldview, is the ability to move oneself within a network or system. If we consider the world information network as a single system, the ability to move within that, to expose oneself to various memes and be able to repress and switch between an even greater series of memes may well be a conception of freedom that fits into this model.
I don’t know, truth be told. I think I lost the thread of what I was trying to get across a while ago, and went off on some meandering point. But that has always been my style. I suck at giving answers, or even frameworks for potential answers. I am good at raising questions though, and throwing various ideas together to see where they align.
*Quite frankly, when you compare the slipshod, lackadaisical method by which this blog is thrown together compared with something like the Chaos Marxist site, which shows systemic and planned out posts, it is almost shameful by comparison. Posts there are almost always going to be thought provoking, whereas here you suffer under a pot luck approach, depending on many various factors.
CM looks “systematic and planned out”? Then the illusion is complete!
Seriously, to continue your “vaccination” metaphor – how would we go about generalising this? The idea that every single person has to find Their Own Special Snowflake Way To Freedom and Enlightenment has the reeking taint of that subsection of memes whose only purpose is to make sure that nothing ever fundamentally changes.
A good question, and one of the nagging issues that made me draw back from this until I had re-thought some aspects of it.
As I understand it, we “choose” which memes we respond to through repetition and feedback loops. The quicker the feedback loop, the more positive the feedback, the more ingrained the meme becomes. Equally, the more negative feedback to the meme in question, the less ingrained this meme is. Stress is also an important factor, adding psychological significance to a certain meme.
Without wanting to sound like a technological fetishist, it could be that the internet in particular allows for the former much more effectively (positive ingraining) whereas other forms of media (for instance reading a book on your own) doesn’t necessarily allow for that feedback. The internet is not so good for the stress aspect, flame wars aside, but as crossovers from internet to meatspace interaction, such as with political action coordinated via social networking sites, increase in number and tactics, it has the potential for it.
Something else that occured to me as I was throwing boxes around the house a few moments ago was that meta-ideological criticism could be one method of vaccination. By introducing the meme in the context of critical examination, its the difference between taking apart a virus in lab conditions and allowing oneself to be exposed to it in the wild.
But equally, while one can examine a logical chain of cause and event stemming from critical examination, its not the same as seeing the effects of the meme (or countering he meme) in action. It doesn’t add stress to the event. To that end, perhaps a degree of tactical innovation in dissecting the meme is necessary?
Is that the kind of generalization you were after? I have to apologize, my head hasn’t really been in a philosophical frame of mind lately, which is why I have mostly left this alone until I have another streak of “inspiration”, or whatever it is which gets me thinking and writing about stuff like this.