From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Fri 16 May 2003 - 11:41:58 GMT
On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 12:57 AM, Reed wrote:
> 1) What performance or performances allowed the game of baseball to
> replicate?
> 2) Where was the baseball meme when no one was playing baseball?
1- An artifact is a special case of performance, wherein the
performance is the act of creating the artifact. A book about baseball
is an artifact of the performance of explaining baseball. The
performances in the example that led baseball to being played was the
performance of the making the artifact, the performance of reading the
artifact and explaining it to an audience, and the subsequent
performances of the teacher and her students.
2- There is no 'baseball meme'. At best, in the performance model,
baseball would be a cultural venue. (Call it a memeplex, if you like,
but to the performance model, a venue is a place controlled for the
expectation of certain performances. A stadium is a venue controlled to
expect organized sports.)
Where was it? It was held within the culture, and the memory of that
culture. But it could disappear, even if an artifact were discovered,
if that artifact were unintelligible to the population that found it.
Such are cargo cults, and such was the experience of the Tlingits, upon
being presented an artifact from their own cultural past, a past,
however, faded into unintelligibility for even them, the descendants of
the performers.
> Is the book, itself, performing?
No. The book is an artifact from a performance, and if the performance
was skilled enough, and intelligible to a group, the cultural venue it
described could be formed, and once a cultural venue is formed, a
memeplex can also be, through the memetic actions of performances, held
to the parameters of the venue.
- Wade
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