Part 3

What then are the theoretical assumptions that underlie a project, such as this site?  Some of the theories have been outline or nodded at in the first part of this text, and given my own suspicions at the limitations the medium brings to reading, this doesn't seem to be the place to explore such issues exclusively with writing.  Semiotics might offer more in far less time.  However, even within semiotics, language plays the role of the central translator, no matter what the post-structuralists have to say on the matter otherwise.  And since I wrote earlier "it seems appropriate somehow to write about this site in terms mostly acceptable to the methodology of the English Studies discipline," I implicitly implied that I'd transgress also (the term here is a privileged sound-unit marker in some circles), and now seems the time.

Memes and memetic theory.  There, it's been reveled.  A revelation and revolution.  Biology (an identified construct, with insidious ideological agendas) is bypassed, but the evolutionary model is brought into the fray.  The best of the polemic approach.  Memetic theory suggests that ideas, although inseparable from language or other means of knowing, exist both at once inside of us and outside of us.  Memes (smallest memetic unit) need language and human beings as copying and transmission units, so they can replicate and evolve.  This also suggests something out of the realm of the material, which could prove to be a reconciliatory force when brought to bear on traditional Marxist thought.  Cultural production becomes a both/and situation in that ideas take on a 'life' of their own.  And why shouldn't spirit and matter exist in a cooperative rather than oppositional binary?  We might understand this current dominant perspective in connection with Buckminster Fuller's statement that conceptually a society must be advanced enough for a technology to be embraced.  Social change never starts off as a popular movement.  Here, we should turn our attention back to language and notions of internalized literacy.  The master reactionary and generally infamous Aleister Crowley once wrote something like, "do something a hundred times and it's difficult.  Do it a thousand times and it becomes second nature.  Do it a thousand thousand times and it's no longer you doing the work, but the work doing itself through you."  If he didn't write that then I apologize for misparaphrasing him, nevertheless, it serves to raise some questions about the effect of unexamined literacy in our society.  It also serves as a bridge for beginning to understand the implications of memetic theory on cultural studies.  Because we've frozen our written language ("knight" has to do with prescriptive spelling and not on pronunciation) perhaps we tend to confuse the dynamic nature of cultural production with fixing expression in similarly static ways.

But in what why is any of this overly theoretical exploration useful, either in terms of literary criticism, or in ways promoting social change?  Check back for the next installment.