From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Fri 16 May 2003 - 16:06:33 GMT
On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 09:55 AM, memetics-digest wrote:
> I'm trying to understand the difference between memes being recorded
> in an
> object (like a book or mind) and in a performance.
The first step to understanding it is to realize that _there are no
memes_ being recorded in the book. The book is the _artifactual result_
of the performance/meme (like the trail of a snail), which makes it a
special case of performance, but _not a meme_- _nor_ does it _contain_
memes.
The performance model is very strict about things being in two places
at once, in that it denies such supernatural positions.
Chris's video of a World Series game is yet another special case of an
explanatory performance about baseball, and one that could introduce
the venue for playing a game even among non-speakers of the language of
the first book about baseball. If only the Tlingit had recorded such a
book about that artifact they were faced with that was extinct.... It
would no longer be extinct. What determines the extinction of a
performance is the availability to construct the venue, not any amount
of 'information' about the artifact itself. In the case of the Tlingit,
we have a complete set of information about the object itself, as _we
have the object itself_. But needed parameters of the cultural venue
are gone, and they will not return. Not only can a meme not be in two
places at once (the single damning error of the memeinthemind model,
regardless of the endless equivocating that says - "with whatever
arbitrary level of fidelity"- after all, why don't you just say it's a
different thing entirely and get over it?), but, it can't be in two
cultural venues at once, either, and this is often seen as time, but
this is slippery, since time is expanded with the introduction of
artifacts and written language. The cultural venue, however, is an
evolving entity composed of self-conscious performers, self-conscious
observers, and the conditions that involve their participation. And the
meme, as the unit of cultural evolution, is the performance so
controlled and taken part in.
- Wade
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