"Elaborations on ‘memetica ecologica’ could be said to be a folk psychology.  It’s a discourse of the people, by the people, and for the people, in certain senses, and the ‘posi-psychology’ of their, of our, existence – with its flip-side being its ‘soul’."

-Fragments of Memetica, No. 16.  [20201025]

"On Memes: A Brief Introduction to Memetica,
or a Contemporary Rhetoric of Information"
 
Forthcoming in Cosmos and History: A Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy
  
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 article 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” generally is ambiguous and may cover a massive amount of multi- and cross-disciplinary conceptual territory involving, for example, “bits” in physics, “genes” in biology, and “signs” in human sciences, humanities, and arts.  This article 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

ancient 'navel of the world' (Delphi)

"There becomes the sense, then, of at least two directions:  one is the limited horizon of what we know of as ‘it all’ and the beyond – in both quantitative and qualitative senses – a massive ‘beyond’ of all that is o/Other, along with a ‘negative’ flip-side to all that is ‘positive’ or ‘posited’ – and a differential slippage that is always there in our experiences, an elusive quality that is always just out of reach or slips away at every grasp."

-Fragments of Memetica, No. 15, pt. 3  [20201018]

Areopagus Hill: the site where Paul (in Acts of the Apostles) equated what he proclaimed with the unknown.

"We have the ability to identify ‘everything’ as a whole (or a ‘One’), which, once we’ve done that, makes it a part rather than the whole.  If I can put ‘it all’ into words like ‘it all’ or ‘everything’, I’ve distinguished it as, in a sense, other than me.  ‘It all’ is now scratchy marks on a page like e = energy.  We could give ‘it all’ any label or symbol we want to.  But then this is the 'strange distinction' between part and whole...."

-Fragments of Memetica, No. 15, pt. 2, adapted  [20201018]

This is the site where the term "gene" was coined.

Credited to Wilhelm Johannsen in a lecture here at the University of Copenhagen in 1909.

Now it is the social sciences library and psychology department.  And site of Gatherings in Biosemiotics 2023.

Technically the Johannsen lecture was in the conjoined building just behind this frontside building.

Source:  D. Favareau; K. Kull

​Photo:  B. Bennett-Carpenter, 2023

"Away and Off" and "The Mill"

@ Impspired
​
https://impspired.com/2023/08/01/benjamin-bennett-carpenter/

https://impspired.com/impspired-issue-24/

"Now They Could" / "Moving Around" / "What's Love Got"

@ the final issue of Otoliths

https://the-otolith.blogspot.com/2023/05/benjamin-bennett-carpenter.html?fbclid=IwAR1v3rkIZqQSJkcWDorgc7zL4jBJ2ctd9-UEsfapyLYZvc5zUvZhLQ8bbXI

with Glen Armstrong / Cruel Garters  (in Hudson, New York)

"Every Day" / "Equality of Day" / "They Jump"

3 poems now up at Lothlorien Poetry Journal blog:

https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/2023/07/three-poems-by-benjamin-bennett.html

"Memetica as a philosophy is a philosophy of ‘it all.’  To talk about it is to engage with a rhetoric, a concept, and a practice of ‘everything’ – and that everything is ‘right now’.  We never have anything but the everything that is now.  Of course here-and-now is informed and constituted by the past and results in the future.  But we are not back there in the past.  And we are not yonder in the (imagined or what will end up being real) future.  Our power resides in this moment, realizing this doesn’t condemn us to a radical immanentism or know-nothing-of-the-past, do-nothing-for-the-future stance.  If there are simple facts (I think there are), this is one of them.  Everything is here and now."

Fragments of Memetica, No. 15., pt 1  [20201018]

"Memetica is an ‘ecology’ extending out from evolutionary biology in all its manifold diversity toward the limits of our scientific knowledge in both astro- and quantum physics.  Among humans, this ‘ecology’ includes symbolic exchanges of value we find between individuals (even within an individual), in local human communities, and through global financial and trade markets.  Calling what’s ‘out there’ and ‘what’s happening’ an ‘ecology’ points to a diverse, complex system – really systems of systems – that involves virtually infinite relationships and interactions that are what we call a ‘cause’ as we end up with an ‘effect.’"

-Fragments of Memetica, No. ​14.  [20201018]

A while back at Poets' Espresso Review (Summer/Fall 2022):

"Tip the Mug" and "With A Friend"

Appearance & Being / "Fundamental Value Orientations"

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast

Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter

Available "everywhere", including: YouTube, Spotify, Amazon, Audible, iHeart radio, and other audio venues

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-transformation-transcenden-109428706/episode/fundamental-value-orientations-117125487/
​

"...Capacity for Greatness" / Evaluative / Non-evaluative Spaces

Transformation & Transcendence Roundtable Podcast

Franklin Sollars, with Farid Alsabeh, Lea Dickinson, Joshua Morrow, and Ben Bennett-Carpenter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvJwH4vKVVc
​
Also available on: Spotify, Amazon, Audible, iHeart radio, and other audio venues

Video/audio excerpts from interdisciplinary sound artist Alan Nakagawa's "Point of Turn" premier at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (Los Angeles, 13 May 2023.

Commissioned and documented by Prospect Art.

Part of KCHUNG Radio’s KCHUNG PUBLIC programming at MOCA Geffen LA​

https://vimeo.com/828857187?embedded=true&source=vimeo_logo&owner=137756989

"Memetica is a romantic spirituality in an age of globalization.  The globalization is capitalist, but it isn’t only that; it is also religious and socialist.  It gets right to how people are able to transmit their feelings and thoughts to each other in both immediated and mediated forms and transactions / interactions.
 
Memetica is a romantic spirituality in an age of indigenous renewal.  Wherever there are distinct people groups, there has been, is, or may be opportunity for self-identification as ‘a people.’ 
 
As a people distinct from other people, there comes identity and self-organizational powers for living, growing, competing, cooperating, and thriving in and of themselves and in relation to global systems."

-Fragments of Memetica, No. 14  [20201009]