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Abstract
Memetics, the emerging and contested “science” of the meme, has much to offer critical communication studies. The meme, a replicator that functions as the basic unit of cultural change, is a valuable practical tool for rhetorical critics, and it is particularly useful for critical/cultural analysts interested in the seemingly superficial and trivial elements of popular culture. In addition to its functional utility, memetics issues a productive theoretical challenge to that trajectory of communication scholarship that seeks to further the materialist rhetorical project by developing and deploying the ideograph, the only significant methodological tool developed for the purposes of materialist criticism. Through a contrast between the “geographical” meme and the “historical” ideograph, I explore the utility of the meme as a productive concept for the analysis of contemporary culture.
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2005 National Communication Association Convention in Boston.
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2005 National Communication Association Convention in Boston.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the editor and reviewers at CCCS for their helpful insights and recommendations throughout the development of this project. The author would also like to thank Kevin DeLuca for his comments on earlier drafts of the manuscript
Notes
A previous version of this project was presented at the 2005 National Communication Association Convention in Boston.
1. McGee writes:
If we are to describe the trick-of-the-mind which deludes us into believing that we ‘think’ with/through/for a “society” to which we “belong,” we need a theoretical model which accounts for both “ideology” and “myth,” a model which neither denies human capacity to control “power” through the manipulation of symbols nor begs Marx's essential questions regarding the influence of “power” on creating and maintaining political consciousness.
Michael McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, ed. J.L. Lucaites, C.M. Condit, and S. Caudill, 425–40 (New York: Guilford, 1999), 427.
2. Nietzsche says that the “small terse fact” that “a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes, not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘think.’” The result of “grammatical habit” leads individuals to posit agents for every activity; see Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good & Evil, Trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1966), 24.
3. As will become clear in later sections of this essay, I adopt a distinction between “history” and “geography” suggested by Deleuze, and developed by communication scholars interested in spatial vocabularies. I hope to use this distinction to highlight broad patterns that characterize different schools of thought and alternative approaches to rhetorical criticism. I do not mean to argue that all “historical” projects are necessarily complicit with the theoretical and critical habits that I question. In short, historical work can be, and often is, consistent with a materialist orientation. I am using the notion of history here in a very specific sense, as shorthand for broader intellectual traditions and patterns of thought.
4. Whether such a framework of “ontological materialism” is ultimately desirable or true is not at stake here. I have argued elsewhere that a strictly materialist metaphysics, particularly that version of scientific naturalism advanced by Richard Dawkins, author of the meme, suffers from substantial philosophical and rhetorical difficulties. As I will emphasize, I offer this essay as a theoretical “thought experiment:” If one experimentally or provisionally adopts a framework ontological materialism, how is it possible to make sense of discourse? What are the possibilities for modeling material discourse? In this fashion, memetics is a very beneficial way to unearth and reconsider taken-for-granted assumptions in our current models of discourse.
5. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University, 1989).
6. See, for instance, Robert Aunger, The Electric Meme: A New Theory of How We Think (New York: The Free Press, 2002); Richard Brodie, Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme (Seattle, WA: Integral Press, 1996); Kate Distin, The Selfish Meme (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005); and Aaron Lynch, Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society (New York: Basic Books, 1996).
7. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1991). For another characterization of contemporary culture as superficial and defined above all else by speed, see Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
8. Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994); Fredric Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988); Michael Keith and Steve Pile, “The Politics of Place,” in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Keith and Pile (New York: Routledge, 1993); Kathleen Kirby, Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity (New York: Guilford, 1996); Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (New York: Verso, 1989).
9. Michael McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Explorations in Rhetoric: Studies in Honor of Douglas Ehninger, ed. Ray E. McKerrow, 23–48 (Glennview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1982). See also Ronald W. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15 (1998); Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004).
10. Keith and Pile, Place and the Politics of Identity, 2.
11. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, Trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University, 2002), 2.
12. Brian Massumi, The User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 4.
13. See Plato's Gorgias (462–64), Trans. W.D. Woodhead, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 229–307 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
14. Ronald Walter Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 15 (1998): 22. Michel Foucault offers an excellent discussion of interpretation as a hermeneutics of suspicion that constructs history as a process that seeks a more authentic interior dimension of language. His alternative view of “depth” is to see depth as exteriority, an “absolutely superficial secret” that implies a recognition of depth as “a surface fold.” See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Freud Marx,” in Michel Foucault: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 269–278, 237.
15. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 5. Original published in 1966.
16. Michael McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 67.
17. Greene contrasts the “logic of influence” and a “logic of articulation,” following Biesecker. See Barbara Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation From Within the Thematic of Differance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 22 (1989): 110–130.
18. The sense in which rhetoric is taken to be “material” shows some variation. In one sense, the project of “materialist rhetoric” indicates its emergence in the Marxist tradition. McGee's introduction of the ideograph, for instance, is designed in part to reconcile the Marxist interest in the distribution of economic (and social) resources and studies of language. Dana Cloud is interested in this trajectory of materialist inquiry: what is the relationship between language, and other forms of representation, and material circumstances? In another sense, however, “materialist” rhetoric indicates an interest in the literal materiality of rhetoric itself—for instance, the biological nature of communication and the “objectness” of discourse (Condit's “The Materiality of Coding” is an excellent example). The memetic approach is useful because, while it is more heavily informed by the latter understanding of “material,” like McGee's discussion of the ideograph it addresses both connotations of “material” discourse. The meme offers an approach to language as a thing, an object as material as water or air, yet it also implicates discussions of social power and material circumstance.
19. See John Lyne, who argues that in this type of materialism, “ideas [are] the surface gloss on a reality determined by other forces.” John Lyne, “Idealism as Rhetorical Stance,” in Rhetoric and Philosophy, ed. Richard Cherwitz, 149–86 (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1990), 150, emphasis added.
20. Jeffrey Bineham, “The Cartesian Anxiety in Epistemic Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 23 (1990): 43–62. See also Jeffrey Bineham, “The Hermeneutic Medium,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 28 (1995): 1–16.
21. Richard A. Rogers, “Overcoming the Objectification of Nature in Constitutive Theories: Toward a Transhuman, Materialist Theory of Communication,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 244–272; Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 257–284.
22. Stormer, “Articulation,” 274.
23. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985).
24. Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric,” 35.
25. Lawrence Grossberg, “The Space of Culture, The Power of Space,” in The Post-Colonial Question, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996). See also Stephen B. Crofts Wiley, “Spatial Materialism: Grossberg's Delezean Cultural Studies,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 63–99.
26. Manual DeLanda, “Immanence and Transcendence in the Genesis of Form,” South Atlantic Quarterly 96 (1997): 499. For a very similar argument by a rhetorician, see Celeste Condit, “The Materiality of Coding: Rhetoric, Genetics and the Matter of Life,” in Rhetorical Bodies, ed. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley, 326–56 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999).
27. Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rudiger Bittner, Trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 154–5.
28. The categories and meaning and identity are not necessarily abandoned in the geographical, or articulatory, paradigm: they are possible effects of discursive interactions, but they do not precede, authorize, or in any way serve as foundation for these interactions. In short, the Deleuzean distinction between meaning and effects does not demand a wholesale renunciation of “meaning,” but it does entail deserting models that make meaning the primary and essential motivator of discursive movements.
29. Massumi, A User's Guide, 7.
30. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 23.
31. Bruno Latour, The Politics of Nature, Trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 87.
32. Michael McGee, “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology,” in Contemporary Rhetorical Theory, ed. John Luis Lucaites, Celeste Condit, and Sally Caudill (New York: Guilford, 1999), 431. Original published in 1980.
33. Kevin DeLuca, Image Politics (New York: Guilford, 1999), 37.
34. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 428.
35. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,” 428.
36. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 431.
37. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 431.
38. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 431.
39. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 431.
40. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 431.
41. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 430.
42. Dilip Gaonkar, “Close Readings of the Third Kind: Reply to My Critics,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan Gross and William Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press), 352.
43. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 436.
44. McGee, “The ‘Ideograph,’” 434, emphasis added.
45. DeLuca cites Celeste Condit and John Lucaites, Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Maurice Charland and John Lucaites, “The Legacy of <Liberty>: Rhetoric, Ideology and Aesthetics in the Postmodern Condition,” Canadian Journal of Social and Political Theory 13 (1989): 31–48; and Michael McGee, “The Origins of Liberty: A Feminization of Power,” Communication Monographs 47 (1980): 128–138. See DeLuca, Image Politics, 37.
46. Dana Cloud, “‘To Veil the Threat of Terror’: Afghan Women and the <Clash of Civilizations> in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 287.
47. Cloud, “To Veil the Threat of Terrior,” 291.
48. Mark P. Moore, “The Cigarette as Representational Ideograph in the Debate Over Environmental Tobacco Smoke,” Communication Monographs 64 (1997): 47–64.
49. Mark P. Moore, “Constructing Irreconcilable Conflict: The Function of Synecdoche in the Spotted Owl Controversy,” Communication Monographs 60 (1993): 272.
50. Other scholarship on the ideograph is consistent with these trends. Ideographs have been operationally defined as one-term summations of a political orientation, as god-terms that contain an implicit, historically conditioned authority, as “forceful signifiers of political ideologies” that force political communities, and a “special type of symbolic form that represents an essence of cultural beliefs at a very high level of abstraction.” Fernando Delgado, “Chicano Movement Rhetoric: An Ideographic Interpretation,” Communication Quarterly 42 (1995): 47 (emphasis added); Janis L. Edwards and Carol K. Winkler, “Representative Form and the Visual Ideograph: The Iwo Jima Image in Editorial Cartoons,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 290 (emphasis added). Dana Cloud also foregrounds the representation and historical functions of ideographs in her earlier piece, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 387–419.
51. In her recent essay, Catherine Palczewski extends Cloud's and Moore's discussion in her analysis of the relationship between ideographs, visual argument and icons in anti-woman suffrage postcards. Although Palczewski occasionally speaks of “visual ideographs,” it is not clear if visual forms are themselves ideographs or if they only function as icons to “index” verbal ideographs. Catherine Palzewski, “The Male Madonna and the Feminine Uncle Sam: Visual Argument, Icons, and Ideographs in 1909 Anti-Woman Suffrage Postcards,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (2005): 365–94.
52. Dana Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>: Scapegoating, Utopia, and the Privatization of Social Responsibility,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998), 392.
53. Cloud, “The Rhetoric of <Family Values>,” 392, 411.
54. If the ideograph is merely the container of a more fundamental ideological content, then it is not accidental that the ideograph is often critically deployed in “dominant ideology” readings that view the analysis of discourse as a means for assessing, and ultimately judging, human motivations. Catherine Palczewski's recent analysis of anti-suffrage postcards, for example, follows this model in describing the ideograph as “an agency of social control” that enforces “disciplinary norms.” Images function alongside verbal ideographs “to maintain the social control power,” fixing and stabilizing the ideographs <man> and <woman>. Fernando Delgado's earlier work on ideographs departs somewhat from this model, as he argues that ideographs can be employed in the service of oppositional, as well as dominant, interests. Delgado retains a theory of ideographs, however, as containers of an apparently determinant and normative ideological meaning. Delgado expands the range of active interests to include marginal groups, but the ideograph is defined in such a way that the movement of discourse is still traced back to extra-discursive motives. See Palczewski, “The Male Madonna,” 373.
55. Condit and Lucaites present a more nuanced application of the ideograph, explicitly distinguishing their own approach from “dominant ideology” readings. In their work on <equality>, they trace the divergent meanings of <equality> throughout American history to illustrate that <equality> has no essential or necessary meaning. Furthermore, the changes in meaning that the ideograph undergoes are not the product of a powerful agent but results from negotiations that include a range of “dominant” and “oppositional” activities. In other words, the history of <equality> cannot be reduced to the revelation of some “ultimate motive.” Even in this work accused of having an “optimistic tenor,” the function of the ideograph still depends on the perceived universality of its content. The ideograph is, for Condit and Lucaites, something that represents the “normative collective commitment” of a public. It is a “rhetoric of control” that is “taken for granted,” a “primary purpose term in most social narratives” that is necessarily “culturally established and sanctioned.” Creative rhetors can alter the meaning of the ideograph through careful usage, but they must pay heed to the “rhetorical limits” established by its history. The history of usages congeals in a normative content that the public (or “audience”) takes for granted as universal and self-evident. In this sense, the ideograph is still essentially the container of an ideological commitment, although each rhetorical alchemist might add their own concoction into the mix that it holds.
56. Richard Dawkins, “Universal Darwinism,” in Evolution from Molecules to Men, ed. D.S. Bendall (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983), 403–25.
57. Daniel Dennett, “The Evolution of Culture,” Monist 84 (2001). See also Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea (New York: Touchstone, 1995) and Daniel Dennett, “Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48 (1990): 127–35.
58. Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 197.
59. Michael Bronski, “Straight Men the Future of Gay Rights?” Z Magazine Online 17 (2004), http://zmagsite.zmag.org (accessed 8 January 2006).
60. Mark Simpson, “Here Come the Mirror Men,” The Independent (London), 15 November 1994, 22.
61. Bronski. “Straight Men on the Future of Gay Rights.”
62. Bronski, “Straight Men on the Future of Gay Rights.”
63. Kim Campbell, “‘Manly’ Gets a Makeover,” Christian Science Monitor (7 April 2004), 12.
64. Mark Simpson, “Meet the Metrosexual,” salon.com (22 July 2002), http://www.marksimpson.com/pages/journalism/metrosexual_beckham.html (accessed 8 January 2006).
65. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy premiered in July of 2003, and was for the most part received favorably by the mainstream press. Its popularity amongst both gay and straight viewers contributed to its winning an Emmy Award in 2004. Comedy Central introduced a spoof of Queer Eye called Straight Plan for the Gay Man, and another called Hick Eye for the Queer Guy. The show has been spoofed on South Park, and the Bravo network also introduced Queer Eye for the Straight Girl. See http://www.bravotv.com/Queer_Eye_for_the_Straight_Guy/ (accessed 8 January 2006.
66. Alan Liu, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). See also Thomas Frank, “Why Johnny Can't Dissent,” in Commodify Your Dissent: Salvos from the Baffler, ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
67. Bronski, “Straight Men on the Future of Gay Rights.”
68. Bill Powers, “Summer of Gays,” Interview with Brooke Gladstone, 22 August 2003, http://www.onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_082203_gay.html (accessed 8 January 2006).
69. Powers, “Summer of Gays.”
70. Campbell, “‘Manly’ Gets a Makeover,” 22.
71. Sterling Houston, “Influence of Homosexuals Explored,” San Antonio Express-News (3 October 2004), 7J.
72. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 137.
73. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II 137.
74. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II 137.
75. Massumi, A User's Guide, 5.
76. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).