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memes
Whatever else the meme might be, to Dawkins or anybody else, including artists,
one thing is certain: it's a metaphor. There are good memes and bad memes but no
one can deny that the whiff of rotting memes pervades this debate. The fumes
of decaying ideology still linger from some of the initial statements, the odour
of 'ressentiment' and 'bad conscience' of the nay sayers. Those who can see in
the future only the dreary wrangles and prejudice of the past can be of little
help in this discussion. Much of the debate so far seems to have proceeded on
the basis that there can be, or should be, Truth in Metaphor. We know that
in making sense of things Metaphor is useful (it had better be, it's all we've
got) and that some metaphors are more useful than others. But any suggestion
that 'The Truth' is to be found therein is simply childish. I make be mistaken
but I find that the claims of some of the first ideologues seem to be based on
this kind of nursery illusion ( and Francis Heylighen did a good job in telling
the children to put their toys away). I suspect that dissing "utopianism"
betrays a deep-seated fear of what lies beyond the nursery door.
A much more pragmatic approach is needed. Is the metaphor of meme useful to
artists? The answer is yes. Is the idea of a meme space, understood as a kind of
collective intelligence, a community of mind, useful to artists? Yes it is. The
whole collaborative enterprise in art is based on the idea of shared
consciousness. It is the field of consciousness which artists now wish to
explore. It is telematic consciousness which presents the opportunity and
challenge to art as it moves beyond its lumpen concern with the surface
appearance of the world. Can we speak yet of a memetic aesthetics replacing the
old mimetic art? It depends. The meme metaphor falls flat considered in
relation to the old biological processes of cognition. But in its
post-biological context - assimilated, transposed, transmitted and transformed
by the processes of human cyberception, the meme metaphor acquires considerable
potency.
Art is no longer a matter of framing and asserting ideas and images but of their
emergence, of their coming-into-being.. Creative singularities emerge from
dynamic complexity. The meme, seen as a basic element of cognitive complexity,
with its powers of attraction and repulsion, self-division and multiplication,
replication, seeding, and what could be called 'semantic pollination', is some
mean meme.
Roy Ascott
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