Thinking Novels vs. the Memebots

I was looking through the archives at The Valve and came across an old book event, the one Lawrence LaRiviere White organized around Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think. Though I was ‘on staff’ at the time, I didn’t participate in that event. Now that I’m a fellow traveler on the Object-Oriented Ontology train, the title alone intrigues me, as apparently it intrigued White.

OOO sees the universe as comprised of irreducible objects, and ascribes agency to all objects. Therefore, under OOO, novels too must have agency. And they exercise that agency through, what else? thinking. Perhaps feeling and desiring as well, but thinking is sufficient for this post.

It turns out, alas, that White was disappointed in what Armstrong had to say about just how it was that novels DO IN FACT think. And he had so wanted her to come through on that point. Dan Green finds her wanting on that score as well, though he likes her readings of various novels and her overall account of the rise of the novel. (I’ve not read through the other contributions to the event.)

What interests me is simply the fact that the issue has been broached: literary texts think. By way of comparison, here we have Eileen Joy (via Tim Morton):

. . . following the thought of Jane Bennett, I want to say something like . . . texts are objects that possess vibrant materiality; they are “quasi forces” that possess something like “tendencies of their own.” They possess thing-power, and as much as they are able, they strive, in the words of Spinoza, to “persist in existing.” Texts are, in some sense, alive, while at the same time they are, even while produced by humans, utterly inhuman.

Alive, and so, perhaps, they can think, while at the same time they are “utterly inhuman.”

So there we are, living texts and thinking novels.

To which I contrast the homomuncular memebots loosed on the world by Richard Dawkins. As Dawkins tells the story (in The Selfish Gene) he was looking for ‘replicators’ other than the gene and hit upon the idea that culture too is an evolutionary process, one ‘driven’ by memes, the cultural replicator. In time the term went viral and now we have it, all over the place, memes memes memes and more memes.

The term is a rapacious one. Novels could easily be memes, as is the idea of god and the gods, as is the four-note V-is-for-victory opening motif of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: dut dut dut daaaaa. It is common, perhaps also required, to think of memes living agents. They do things, namely they propagate themselves by flitting about from mind to mind, leaving copies behind wherever they flit.

Are memes thus objects in the OOO sense? That’s a very tricky question. Let me begin by nothing that I find this notion of the homuncular meme, the autonomous memebot going from mind to mind, to be conceptually useless—though I’m friendly toward the notion of a thinking novel. What’s the difference? you ask. The difference, I say, is in the conceptual context.

Dawkins is thinking within a reductionist framework, as is Dan Dennett, his main epigone within philosophy. He wants to reduce the living human to some kind of elaborate contraption of non-living parts. The memebot is paradoxically, one of those parts. I say ‘paradoxically’ because, of course, he talks of memes as agents even while insisting that they are inanimate things—he has, for example, developed the concept of the meme within that of a computer virus (I don’t, alas, have a citation immediately at hand). Computer viruses are clearly inanimate.

So, if and when anyone calls his conceptual bluff on the animate meme, he can always point to the computer virus and say: not animate. The animacy talk is just a convenient way of talking. A way of talking, yes, but not JUST that. If it were just that, just a metaphor, the idea would never have caught on. People, most certainly including Dawkins himself, WANT TO BELIEVE in memetic agency. It’s a very attractive idea.

So how do you have it both ways, animate and inanimate? You waffle. Waffling, thy name is Dawkins.

Further, what Dawkins wants of the meme is to deprive humans of agency. Specifically, he uses memes to explain the prevalence of the ARCH IRRATIONALITY, that horror of horrors, RELIGION. In Dawkins’ world rationality is the highest mental good; human beings, properly, reductionistically, are rational. Religious beliefs are irrational. How come rational reductionist beings harbor irrational religious beliefs, and hold on and hold on and hold on? It’s the memes. The memes have taken over their minds. To do that, memes have to have agency, even as they are, like the minds they’re taking-over, elaborate contraptions of mechanical parts.

The Dawkinsian worldview is a mess. I suppose I could follow Dawkins himself and blame it on the memes of reductionism and mechanism. But I won’t. I’m just going to back off.

I note, in parting, that compared to THAT, the thinking novel is looking pretty good. And I rather suspect that a proper OOO context will recoup the thought without the reductionist mess that attends the Dawkinsian meme. For, even as OOO permits agency to texts, it does not at all deny agency of humans, nor of the networked cultural systems in which humans are embedded. Rather, it seeks to understand how these various agencies negotiate their ways among one another.