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"On Memes: A Very Short Introduction to Memetica...."
Talk by Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter @ the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy of Science, Arts< & Letters. 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEnqC3usT60 Abstract: As is widely known, memes are commonly understood as catchy items on social media – often an image with text – that “goes viral” and gets shared/spread among many people online. However, this talk discusses the older, original, and more expansive sense of “meme”, introduced and elaborated upon by Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett, among others, that initially means something like a “unit of cultural information.” One way rhetorically and philosophically these days to conceive of “it all” is as a massive ecology of memes. What I call “memetica” is another way of exploring a rhetoric and conception of a totalizing ecology of information. The term “information” may cover a massive amount of multi- and cross-disciplinary conceptual territory involving “bits” in physics, “genes” in biology, and “signs” in arts/humanities. This talk very briefly introduces the origins, rhetoric, and concept of memes as an initial way in to the topic of information – arguably one of the most powerful, dynamic concepts in contemporary existence. Videography credit: Gracey Bennett-Carpenter, 2023 [Correction: The reference in the talk and slides to Bateman should, instead, be Bateson (1979).] "Developing Relationships & Emotional Closeness"
Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKGXn8BsCmA "An important shift from noun to verb (and back again) takes place with ‘meme.’
As Dennett has put it, a meme is 'a way.' A meme is a differential process within a context. That’s where ‘value arises’ (cf. Bateman). A noun is a calcification or a snapshot in time of a verb. The verb is where the action is. A noun is a useful placeholder in the middle of the overall action whether that action is very fast or very, very slow. A noun is documentation, a record of what has happened, an artifact of past actions: e.g., a chair Ben happiness Tuesday" -Fragments of Memetica, No. 10. [20200926] "Problem Solving, Anxiety, Fear, & Growth"
Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter https://youtu.be/BaKTKlD1OEY Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast: "What is Transformation and Transcendence?"
Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter https://youtu.be/ovnu_7gonWI Out now: "Emotional Storms" & "Speak of Galaxies" by Ben Bennett-Carpenter
in Franklin Sollars, Food for Thought, Psyche, Spirit, and Soul (2023), pp. 133-137, 140-141 (Printed in Monlee, Illinois: Independently published by Dr. Franklin Sollars, PhD). https://www.amazon.com/Food-Thought-Psyche-Spirit-Soul/dp/B0BW31G6G2/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1677801452&sr=8-1 Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast, Episode 1
Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-RFQ2voPsI "Signs operate in different ways on multiple levels. A sign is anything that stands for something to somebody. Signs can be literal. They can play off each other. They can stand for things they aren’t. And they can take on a life of their own. Sometimes the term ‘meme’ is synonymous with ‘sign’. So
Memetica Ecologica is a kind of Empire of Signs." -Fragments of Memetica, No. 9 [20200926] "Sound Experience, Feeling Sound: Alan Nakagawa and the Point Of Turn Project"
by Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter "What’s happened with people and religion in America (and elsewhere)? What’s going on these days? What’s essential within the midst of things? What’s the future look like for living communities? In Point of Turn, Nakagawa offers listeners a portal into a powerful, encompassing soundscape that incorporates simple reportage of individual testimonies within a complex, multilayered sound experience that accumulates, circles around, and persistently lingers on in mind." https://www.prospectart.org/2023-one-work/blog-post-title-one-dk7ww "Memetica as a phenomenon or set of phenomena is not only an idea (or set of ideas) but also is a practice and an organization (or set of practices and organizations).
It may be observed on a natural level or the level of nature but also on a social level on the level of human interaction. All the usual labels for people, their ideas, structures, and actions still have value and usefulness but at least momentarily need to be ‘forgotten’ to get a fresh look, a new understanding of what’s going on on the world scene, including the large world stage and also the individual, particular worlds of a person’s daily life. Hit the re-set button of conception and begin with something like a ‘meme,’ not simply the viral silly photo of social media sort of meme but, much more expansively, the ‘unit of information’ sort of meme – what some academics and intellectuals (and a few scientists) have discussed in terms of a ‘sign.’" -Fragments of Memetica, No. 8 [20201004] "‘Memetica,’ or ‘memetica ecologica’, is my way of describing where we live now. By where, I don’t mean America or China or any particular place, although it includes places. By ‘where we live’ I mean a composite of the material and social worlds along with the ‘world’ of our minds, individually and collectively."
-Fragments of Memetica, No. 7 [20200926] "Let them eat pancakes. We shall have pancakes. Pancakes are the order of the day."
"Let Them Eat", Kitchen Table Quarterly out now: https://www.kitchentablequarterly.org/ "On Memes: A Very Brief Introduction to Memetica, Or a Contemporary Rhetoric of Information"
Coming soon for the annual meeting of the Michigan Academy (MASAL, forthcoming March 2023). Abstract As is widely known, memes are commonly understood as catchy items on social media – often an image with text – that “goes viral” and gets shared/spread among many people online. However, this presentation discusses the older, original, and more expansive sense of “meme”, introduced and elaborated upon by Dawkins, Blackmore, and Dennett, among others, that initially means something like a “unit of cultural information.” One way rhetorically and philosophically these days to conceive of “it all” is as a massive ecology of memes. What I call “memetica” is another way of exploring a rhetoric and conception of a totalizing ecology of information. The term “information” may cover a massive amount of multi- and cross-disciplinary conceptual territory involving “bits” in physics, “genes” in biology, and “signs” in arts/humanities. This presentation very briefly introduces the origins, rhetoric, and concept of memes as an initial way in to the topic of information – arguably one of the most powerful, dynamic concepts in contemporary existence. -Benjamin Bennett-Carpenter "We live in Memetica now.
Memetica is the Big Drama we’re all acting within, against, or alongside." -Fragments of Memetica, No. 6 [20200926] "So go rumblings in the bellies of the fast."
in Superpresent Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter 2023), p. 100 https://superpresentmag.com (Current issue downloadable for free.) 'I report and observe what I see going on. What I experience and what I see others experiencing. It’s a strange place, it’s a wonderful place, it’s a normal place, it’s a terrible place, and it’s not a place. It’s a state.
I’m ‘reporting the universe’ You can do it, too. I mean, someone has to do it. “The writer…believes all that can be thought can be written…. In their eyes a human being is the faculty of reporting, and the universe is the possibility of being reported.” -Emerson, cited in Doctorow, Reporting the Universe (Harvard, 2003, p. 1, edited)' -Fragments of Memetica, No. 5. [20200925] "Talk about memetica is a rhetorical historiography of the present – a historiography that is contemporaneous, a form of journalism or field research reporting.
We have investigative reporting on the ground but also in the sky – helicoptering over the scene, except that the view from the sky goes much further than that – to a space station or satellite. And the view goes the other way too: we’re on a fantastic voyage through our veins, digging into atoms, etc. But this historiography is rhetorical. It’s both descriptive and constructive. It instructs and informs. It also seeks to stimulate and provoke. I’m ultimately seeking here to get you to see things partly how I see them, if only for the time you’re reading this. These are notes and observations from memetica – los estados unidos de memetica." -Fragments of Memetica, No. 4. [20200925] "Dystopias are just as seductive as utopias. These -topias are totalizing, fantastic places in our heads and may reflect our reality or become our reality – heads which are connected to our bodies (which in fact are our bodies). Topias that don’t adequately map the territory of our experiences of human experience, let alone observation and experimentation."
-Fragments of Memetica, No. 3. [20200925] "I observe that the language of ‘information’ runs across all domains and often is the core or grounding language or concept no matter what domain, field, or discipline.
‘Memes’ are simply one of the latest and most popular versions of this. But annoying internet memes are like an annoying pimple – it gets all the attention but there’s still a whole body, a whole organism, a whole person that goes with it. Maybe we have to pop a social media meme in order to get relieved of it and get back to the larger dynamics, the larger realities of the construction, flows, and interactions of information." -Fragments of Memetica, no. 1 [20200925] |
AuthorBenjamin Bennett-Carpenter teaches at a public university in North America and consults/coaches at Sollars & Associates and independently. Archives
March 2023
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