From: Wade T. Smith (wade.t.smith@verizon.net)
Date: Sat 24 May 2003 - 03:57:23 GMT
On Friday, May 23, 2003, at 08:50 PM, Ray wrote:
> Actually Wade has openly admitted that he
> does not actually believe in any model of memetics and has adopted a
> behavior (now performance) based model as a posture to stir debate.
> It's
> not fraud on Wade's part because he told us he doesn't believe what he
> is
> advocating. It's not fraud when I do it at work either. I pick from a
> range of possible legal theories and advocate the one that suits my
> client's interests best.
As I recall my own progress, pilgrim as I were, I did start this debate
from that position, firmly held in check by skepticism upon the fence.
I have always found that not believing in something makes one a better
defender of it, as Ray says, allowing the disinterested disputer to
pick from a range of possible theories. After all, memetics is little
more than a debate at this point, and if the central proposition, that
culture is enjoined by darwinian processes, is true, then the actual
location of the meme, the quantum unit of replication, needs to be
determined.
However, I'm pretty sure I declared, not so long ago, that I had
abandoned the fence, and was now striding with some assurance along the
path on the performance model's side, mostly because I had such a range
of possible theories to deal with- behavioral cognition, socio-biology,
mind-viruses, pleasure principles, aleatory performance, dramatic
criticism, artists' descriptions of creativity, propaganda, psychiatric
and clinical perception studies, subliminal research, skeptical
approaches to religion and belief, genetic determinacy- the list seemed
endless.
And, eventually, as I recall sometime about a year ago, unhappily
during the period of my grief at the passing of an artist and most
close and dear friend, I grew weary of holding up any pretense for any
model that demanded the quantum unit of cultural evolution was solely
in a brain, because I understood as never before what had been lost to
culture in her inability to perform within it. There was nothing as
valid or vital as her presentation of herself and her art. And there
was still the nagging feeling that watching those Tlingit elders had
produced in me. And all the need to love Aristotle's Poetics. And
Finnegan's Wake. And Mahler. And bicycling to work every day. And my
children. And, spiders' webs. And, how birds were chained to the
skyway. Beauty. Science. Performer, observer, and venue. This was the
indivisible triad upon which culture depended. Life could take care of
itself, but culture needed its own nature. At first, I called
performance 'behavior' but that was sloppy wording, something I'm
constantly aware I'm guilty of. But, with enough misinterpretations of
that as 'behavioralism', I relented, and adopted 'performance'. I've
been explaining that ever since, even though it was always fully
obvious to me that performance is a totality, not just a behavior.
Cage. 4'33".
At any rate, I am finding more to believe in on the performance side,
for what that's worth. I think my client is innocent, in a phrase. I
would like the performance model to get a fair hearing, as I do
believe, yes, that the memeinthemind model is specious as concerns
cultural evolution, where 'specious' is best expressed as "spurious
inferences from obsolescent notions of causality."
- Wade
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