1
Master’s Thesis Artistic Research (RMA)
Unlikely Fellows: Memetics and Actor-Network Theory
Jesse Brinkerhof
11785721
University of Amsterdam
Thesis supervisor: Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen
Second reader: Dr. Paula Andrade Da Silva Albuquerque
August 28, 2019
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements 3 Introduction 5 Memetics 9 Actor-Network Theory 16The Science Wars 23
Unlikely Fellows 28
Conclusion 34
3
Acknowledgements
I smile at the thought of imagining my mother reading this and thinking that I have made things unnecessarily complicated once again; that I have been thinking too much, and anyone else would have just gotten to the point and said their thank-you’s in a manner that all the people who have helped along the way could understand.
––Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway
The writing of this thesis on memetics and actor-network theory was haunted by many obstacles. Consequently, I am all the more grateful for all the support that was bestowed upon me. In writing these acknowledgements I am reminded by those of Karen Barad in Meeting
the Universe Halfway (2007), in which she remarks:
So this acknowledgement does not follow (and does not not follow) the tradition of an author reminiscing about the long process of writing a book and naming supporters along the way that made the journey possible. There is no singular point in time that marks the beginning of this book, nor is there an ‘I’ who saw the project through from the beginning to end, nor is writing a process that any individual ‘I’ or even group of ‘I’s’ can claim credit for. In an important sense, it is not so much that I have written this book, as that it has written me. Or rather, ‘we’ have ‘intra-actively’ written each other (‘intra-actively’ rather than the usual ‘interactively’ since writing is not a unidirectional practice of creation that flows from author to page, but rather the practice of writing is an iterative and mutually constitutive working out, and reworking, of ‘book’ and ‘author’).1
Memetics and actor-network theory, too, complicate the common notions of ‘text’ and ‘author’, and ‘beginning’ and ‘end’, for they implicate, as I will argue, that non-humans have agency too, that ‘authors’ are decentralized networks of shared agency, and that things emerge via a constant process of becoming without any demarcations. Writing some ordinary acknowledgements would, therefore, be a disregard of memetics and actor-network theory and, thus, of what I have been thankful to learn with. So please allow me to do things a bit differently, with the danger of sounding somehow both too pompous and too banal, to truly give credit where credit is due.
Let me start, fittingly in the context of a thesis on memetics and actor-network theory, by mentioning the things many an author tends to omit. Indeed, many of them are often thought of as mere things. If I reflect on what has brought me to, and thus helped me with that which we can for simplicity encapsulate in the envelope ‘writing the thesis’,2 I have to
1 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and
Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix-x.
2 This phrasing refers to: Bruno Latour et al., “The Whole is Always Smaller Than Its Parts: A Digital Test
4 give gratitude to the many pop-culture phenomena that instilled in me, as a child, the wonder of evolution. I am grateful, for instance, for the Gameboy game and animated tv-series
Pokémon, in which wonderful creatures evolved into even more wondrous ones. More credit
is due to ‘big beat’ producer Norman Cook (also known as Fatboy Slim), his song Right Here,
Right Now (1999), its music video, created by Hammer & Tongs, and the wonderful scenery of
the Algarve, Portugal, in which I first heard the track and saw its music video. Somehow, it is one of my earliest and most cherished memories, giving me the most pleasant and snug sense of nostalgia. The video showing an inaccurate, though visually spectacular, account of how we humans might have evolved, gave me, a 5-year old at the time, a dim insight into something so thrilling, so big, so sublime, that only my viewing at 18 years old of Charles and Ray Eames’
Powers of Ten (1977) can be compared to it. I will, for sake of brevity, halt my dwelling on
childhood pasts, however present they may be, but I am truly indebted to this memetic powerhouse.
Reflecting on the more mundane intra-acting that also constitutes the writing of my thesis, I want to thank Dell for making nice laptops, such as my trusty XPS 15. I am thankful for the cool basement in which work could be done during a scorching heatwave. Many thanks also to the fly swatter which helped my get rid of those buzzing disturbances – which in itself provided welcome distraction of a different kind. And let me thank the beautiful views of Eefde, the music of many (anonymous) composers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the farm cats who occasionally came by for lap-sit sessions, and the comforting beers with which I ended many a days of work. All of you have helped me in countless ways.
Although I wanted to, by thanking these things, give a sense of their sociality, agency, care, and influence, it would be truly asocial and careless not to thank, with the utmost gratitude, the many loving people who have helped me in the course of writing this thesis. I want to express gratitude to Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Bruno Latour for their inspiring bodies of work. I want to thank Dr. Jeroen Boomgaard and Dr. Paula Andrade Da Silva Albuquerque for their hard work for the Artistic Research master’s program, their support and trust, and the insightful feedback they provided for the texts that led to this thesis. I want to express the utmost gratitude to my ever-patient supervisor Dr. Miriam van Rijsingen for her unwavering support and pointed feedback, the humorous conversations, and for sharing her broad and deep knowledge. I also want to thank my parents for their perpetual generosity and care, and for the splendid trip we made during the summer which provided not only rest, but also forged new connections. And you, Sarah, for everything – you presumably have helped me in more ways than I could ever know. Thank you.
Alas, we cannot do it alone, but the point is – and this may be of some solace – that, as implicated by my thesis, we never truly are.
5
Introduction
If it isn’t worth doing, it isn’t worth doing well.
––Donald Hebb, quoted in Daniel Dennett, Higher-Order Truths About Chmess
Other dogs bite their enemies, but I my friends in order to save them.
––Diogenes, quoted in George Converse Fiske, Lucilius and Horace
Though I am hesitant to share too much of a biographical illumination on the formation of my research topic – too much to be perceived scholarly, or worse, just enough for the critic to deduce via a psychoanalysis of sorts my every misstep – I feel that it is necessary, for it grounds the scholarly endeavour in a broader, day-to-day reality. In the humanities we come all too often across cases of (PhD) students who devote a sizable chunk of their time and life to the solving of highly specialized puzzles in some academic game Daniel Dennett would call ‘chmess’, as opposed to the familiar game of chess which matters to understanding the complexities and tackling the hardships of daily life.3 Alas, I cannot proclaim with a straight
face that my topic is not specific or remote. But detached and pointless it is not.
When I entered the masters programme Artistic Research of the University of Amsterdam I already had developed, in art school, a theoretical framework which I used and still use in my artistic practice: memetics, the evolutionary study of culture. Although my vision of a memetics-informed practice was sometimes encouraged by my supervisors and fellow students at art school, my sources of inspiration were sometimes bemoaned. Richard Dawkins
and Daniel Dennett? You mean those scientistic reductionists? Their criticism sounded
astonishing to me. What’s wrong with grounding your arguments in scientifically established
facts? Facts over feelings, right? Not in the arts.
In many of my fellow students I recognized sentiments that I had left behind earlier. Admittedly, the road from being a rather edgy, idealistic teen who carries resentment for the people and processes – the status quo – and its underlying ideologies that in your eyes – how to put it eloquently? – fucked up the world, to being invested in all sorts of fringe theories is rather short. When I thought to be ‘woke’ and ‘spiritual’ myself, my resentment for religious institutions for duping, as I thought, generation after generation in a stranglehold of power and ignorance led me to – surprise, surprise – Dawkins and Dennett. Both have been heralded by the popular new atheist and sceptic community and have become very prominent figures as such. After some proper cognitive dissonance I heralded them likewise and shared (in) their sceptic, atheist, and pro-science memes. Given the harm that pseudoscience and fringe theories had done to me, I became quite a radical advocate. I distinctly remember a fellow student getting a really high mark for a presentation in which the central claim was that transplanted organs carry memories or some ‘soul snippet’, causing the recipient to relive
3 See: Daniel C. Dennett, “Higher-order Truths About Chmess,” Topoi 25, no. 1-2 (2006): 39-41,
6 moments of the donor’s life. Dismayed at the then apparent fact that spewing pseudoscientific claims from fringe websites without any critical assessment could result in getting a high mark I turned to my fellow students to discuss the incident. At this instance and many others alike I encountered the extreme relativist stance Dawkins and Dennett warn for: ‘the quaint notion that there are many truths all equally deserving of respect, even if they contradict each other’.4 If that were the case, why study anything at all?
However, via Dawkins and Dennett I was also introduced to meme theory and the study of memes, memetics. Dawkins criticized in his The Selfish Gene of 1976 the evolutionary explanations his fellow evolutionists had postulated for culture. Culture, he argues, is not for our good per se, but for its own. In the memetic view, culture consists of memes and we are the hosts who spread them via imitation. Memes that make us repeat them spread. Who are we to think we can rob memes of their agency? Memes do not simply describe things out there, they are things themselves, acting both out there and in here, in fact, they even make us question this distinction. Memetics troubled my vision of science as a truth discovering process, one which was handed down to me by the very same proponents of this troubling and exhilarating view of culture. Science, however, cannot escape the memetic implications, for although it is said to give us natural facts, these facts partly come about through memetic construction and are themselves memes. As Dennett remarks, somehow unaware of some of the implications: ‘If there is one proposition that would-be memeticists agree on, it is that the flourishing of an idea – its success at replicating through a population of minds – and the value of an idea – its truth, its scientific or political or ethical excellence – are only contingently and imperfectly related.’5
When I came to the University of Amsterdam to study artistic research my mindset was basically ‘bring it on’. I knew beforehand that much of the curriculum would comprise authors who my darlings would deem ‘relativists’ and ‘postmodern frauds’ whose ‘livelihood is to be misunderstood’.6 But, despite some occasional opaqueness, I found many of the
others to be exhilarating, especially in the context of expanding my memetic perspective and
its arguments against an idealized simplification of science. Where I expected to find myself, mentally, getting shell-shocked on the battlefield of the ‘science wars’, I was instead finding myself in a Weihnachtsfrieden-like situation, a companionable state of sameness between
others. The aim became to further foster discussion between the seemingly disparate worlds,
and not to kill my darlings, but to, amicably, beat them up – like only best friends could do. A criticizing that springs out of love for the thing you criticize is always aimed at strengthening the subject in question. Dawkins and Dennett have nothing to fear from me.
However, in light of their own memetic view, their elementary defence of science and truth needs to go, for the stakes are too high to present this simplified cardboard cut-out campaign material. We cannot have advocates who remark that our current scientific theories are simply true, and, in the same breath, stress that science is a special form of knowledge because it is constantly revised – talk about ‘conflicting truths’. Alas, one of the two needs to go, and I know which one I’m betting on. Instead, we should take people by the hand and
4 See Richard Dawkins discussing ‘relativism’ in: The Genius of Charles Darwin, “God Strikes Back.”
Episode 3. Directed by Russell Barnes and Dan Hillman. Written by Richard Dawkins. Channel 4, August 18, 2008.
5 Daniel C. Dennett, foreword to Darwinizing Culture: The Status of Memetics as a Science (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), vii.
6 See for instance: Richard Dawkins, reply to Gabriel Stolzenberg, Nature 396, no. 510 (1998),
7 show them the memetic process of science in situ – in, for instance, laboratories, datacentres, textbooks, and minds, affected and created by countless human and non-human actors, and affecting and creating countless human and non-human actors too.
Such a view is surprisingly similar to one realized by Bruno Latour – the enfant terrible of science – and his actor-network theory. Latour, often reviled as a relativist and postmodernist, is actually quite hard to pin down. As Jay Foster notes: ‘His way of thinking is reminiscent of Michel Serres’ “troubadour of knowledge” or Mario Biagoli’s “bricoleur” for its eclecticism, syncretism and disregard for disciplinary presuppositions.’7 It took my a while to
get used to his thinking and style myself. I remember watching an old Dutch tv-episode of
Noorderlicht in which Latour is interviewed. It was the first time I was properly introduced to
Latour and it was a very ambiguous experience. He fascinated me by talking about all the different entities and their interactions that make up scientific processes – memetically this made sense, in fact, it was exhilarating. But he also made me angry. A bit smug and jesterly he dismisses the interviewer’s questions – the very questions that popped into my head in this state of cognitive dissonance. The interviewer, for instance, insists that, although the freezing of water at 0ºC is a fact that is established through the interactions of instruments, practices, technicians, and institutions, the freezing of water at 0ºC still happens all around the universe regardless of what we humans think of it. ‘And then you try it outside the laboratory and it will never work’, Latour says. The interviewer responds: ‘Why not? Water freezes at 0ºC, whether at the laboratory or outside.’ With an energetic voice and slightly mocking tone Latour challenges the interviewer: ‘Well, do it outside: you have to bring a thermometer, you have to bring something which is coming from the laboratory in order to proof it!’8
At that time, this sounded to me like the extreme relativism and nominalism Dennett and Dawkins (and the like) had warned me for. It may seem as if Latour disregards the natural and ‘[turns] the world into a matter of human perspective.’9 But after reading more of and on
his work I realized that Latour is not the bogeyman he is made out to be by popular pro-science communities. In fact, here was someone who ingeniously formulated my own burgeoning memetics-based view on the world and science. In actor-network theory supposedly natural things, such as ‘microbes, neutrinos of DNA are at the same time natural, social and discourse. They are real, human and semiotic entities in the same breath.’10 Yes, water is real, it exists,
we interact with it. But through our interacting it always becomes more than just natural, it becomes cultural and social; it becomes memetic.
I was struck by the similarities, but, moreover, by the perceived distance that is taken for granted between these intellectuals and their views. I started to wonder why people with views like Dennett and Dawkins disliked or weren’t open to people with views like Latour, and vice versa, despite the many similarities? Why are scholars involved with memetics not talking to scholars involved with actor-network theory, and vice versa? It seems that these scholars and their ideas remained to entrenched in the networks of trenches that were dug in the so-called ‘science wars’. But if a conversation would be established, wouldn’t it be a fruitful one?
7 Jay Foster, review of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, by Bruno
Latour, trans. Catherine Porter, Science & Technology Studies 27, no. 1 (2014): 109.
8 “Bekijk de Noorderlicht-aflevering ‘Wat is wetenschap?’,” YouTube video, 44:10, uploaded by “vpro
noorderlicht,” May 16, 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNrNZqtTdvA.
9 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press 2009), 22. 10 Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory. A Few Clarifications Plus More Than a Few
Complications,” Bruno-latour.fr, accessed May 2, 2019, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/P-67%20ACTOR-NETWORK.pdf.
8 – not in the least to bring an end to the bickering atmosphere that is the legacy of the ‘science wars’?
In my thesis I want to research the similarities between memetics and actor-network theory, and to see if, in their differences, they have things to add to each other. This thesis is, thus, also aimed at fostering dialogue between scholars of memetics and those involved with actor-network theory. To achieve this aim much of what I have written is rather introductory, so that both sides can follow along. Firstly, I will introduce memetics and secondly, actor-network theory. I do not, however, strive to give complete introductions, but, instead, try to implicitly highlight some of the similarities and peculiarities on which I build me later arguments. Thirdly, it will be necessary, before we let memetics and actor-network theory intermingle and jangle, to examine and remove the sting that is the ‘science wars’. After the air is cleared it is time the delve into the main question I want to answer in my thesis: what are the similarities and differences between memetics and actor-network theory, and how might they be able to add to each other?
9
Memetics
Every thought is a dream, rushing by in a stream, Bringing life to the kingdom of doing
––Earth, Wind & Fire, Fantasy
You know what they say, ‘Human see, human do’.
––Julius, from The Planet of the Apes (1968)
Right from to get go, when evolutionary theory permeated into academe and popular thought, there have been many theories and disciplines which put forward an evolutionary approach to understanding culture. Indeed, Darwin himself started it all, not merely by providing his theory of evolution by means of natural selection, but, moreover, by publicly postulating analogies between cultural change and biological evolution and possible effects of the interaction between culture and the biological evolutionary processes he so famously described. Here we also witness the birth of the two major strands of approach which still divide much of the thinking concerning the question of the connection between evolution and culture.11 The first approach holds that there is (at least) a compelling resemblance between
cultural change or, when conceived linearly, development and biological evolution. Darwin himself noted: ‘The formation of different languages and of the distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.’12 The
second approach holds that biological evolution affects culture and, for some authors – like Darwin –, vice versa. Darwin, contrary to what some believe, states that natural selection is not the only driver of evolution and that ‘great weight must be attributed to the inherited effects of use and disuse, with respect both to the body and the mind.’13 This Lamarckian
mechanic of inherited habits opens the door for culture’s agency in the course of evolution,
11 It must be said, though, that this is put rather anachronistically, for Darwin did not make a clear
technical distinction between what we now might call genetic and cultural (in our case memetic) evolution. I still think putting it in our contemporary way is valid, for as Richerson and Boyd note about Darwin’s views: ‘Believing in the inheritance of acquired variation and of habits, as a special case of it, the modern distinction between genetic and cultural evolution was foreign to him. Yet, he distinguished more conservative traits that had evolved in “primordial times” from those that had influenced more recent evolution of civilizations. For the latter, Darwin often evoked cultural explanations, though he seldom used that word in its modern technical sense.’ See: Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, “The Darwinian Theory of Human Cultural Evolution and Gene-Culture Coevolution,”in Evolution Since Darwin: The First 150 Years, eds. M.A. Bell, D.J. Futuyma, W.F. Eanes, and J.S. Levinton (Sunderland: Sinauer, 2010), 1-2.
12 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871),
59.
10 and, recently, has gained merit from new research into epigenetic inheritance.14 But often,
culture is, via the second approach, thought of as being on the leash of biology/genes. That is, cultural traits that favour our survival and reproduction get favoured by selection. In other words, culture is for our good.
In The Selfish Gene (1976), a book that made famous the ‘gene’s-eye view’, Richard Dawkins, somewhat surprisingly nearing the conclusion of the book, imagines a different viewpoint for the evolution of culture. Dawkins explains:
As an enthusiastic Darwinian, I have been dissatisfied with explanations that my fellow-enthusiasts have offered for human behaviour. They have tried to look for ‘biological advantages’ in various attributes of human civilization. For instance, tribal religion has been seen as a mechanism for solidifying group identity, valuable for a pack-hunting species whose individuals rely on cooperation to catch large and fast prey. [….] These ideas are plausible as far as they go, but I find that they do not begin to square up to the formidable challenge of explaining culture, cultural evolution, and the immense differences between human cultures around the world […]. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the previous chapters, is that, for the understanding of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. I am an enthusiastic Darwinian, but I think Darwinism is too big a theory to be confined to the narrow context of the gene.15
Dawkins’ gene selectionism was already a step away from the idea that the organism is what counts in the selection process, or, in the case of our own evolution, us. Of course, the organism gets in a classic Darwinian sense selected (Darwin himself had no idea about the workings of heredity, other than the fact that it simply took place), but Dawkins urges us it makes more sense to think of the genes as the object of selection, for it are the genes that make, in the right conditions, the repeated production of such an organism with such and such traits – heredity – possible. The information that is copied is genetic information.
Although Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene is sadly often read by title only, and expeditiously interpreted to be a reductionistic work that revels in bleak contemporaneous Thatcherian competition narratives and appeals to a presumed selfish nature that is supposed to get us – or rather, some – to the top of a linear progression. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, one of the major points of the book is that the evolution of altruistic behaviours only makes sense through the selection of selfish genes. A gene that makes an individual organism produce warning cries brings the individual in danger, but it benefits the passing on of this very gene that may be carried in the kin of said individual. Not only can a gene benefit the chances of the individual organism to survive and reproduce, genes may also opt to benefit other copies of themselves in other individuals. This is what Dawkins tried to bring home with the title, namely that genes act in such a way to benefit their own replication and not that of the organism.
But if we throw out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution, in particular human evolution, which other viewpoint can we then adapt? Via which actors gets culture
14 For a concise overview of recent research into epigenetics and epigenetic inheritance see: Martin I.
Lind and Foteini Spagopoulou, “Evolutionary consequences of epigenetic inheritance,” Heredity 121, no.3 (2018): 205-209.
11 replicated and selected? To forge such a viewpoint it is necessary to, once more, reconsider the gene, before turning our eyes elsewhere. Dawkins argues that, when seen broadly, the gene is a replicator, that is: a unit of information that is copied.16 Such a description
deliberately leaves out an implication of medium and opens up the search for a non-genetic replicator that can operate within the substrate-neutral evolutionary algorithm of replication, variation, and selection, the search for universal Darwinism. This may sound rather adventurous and cosmic, and indeed it also is, ‘but’, Dawkins asks rhetorically:
do we have to go to distant worlds to find other kinds of replicator and other, consequent, kinds of evolution? I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet. It is staring us in the face. It is still in its infancy, still drifting clumsily about in its primeval soup, but already it is achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind. The new soup is the soup of human culture.17
Dawkins is thus suggesting that culture consists of replicators too, cultural replicators that is. If we mirror a classic passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species, the argument is quite easy to understand, though robust, namely that if culture varies (which is certainly the case), and if these variations must at times compete for limited resources and attention (which is the case), then it would be highly improbable if there were not some cultural variants with characteristics that would be beneficial to the gathering of said resources and attention. Variants with such particular beneficial characteristics will thus get replicated more and be preserved. Dawkins provides us with a fitting name for cultural replicators, namely memes, or single meme. The term is an abbreviation of the Greek mimeme (that which is imitated), shortened to sound like genes/gene – though Dawkins also mused its connotations with ‘memory’ and the French même.18 Its etymology hints to the way in which these replicators
go about their replication: ‘Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene poll by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.’19
Lists of examples of memes are often bewildering, but I think they should be, so please allow me. One may think of tunes, styles of beer, religious scriptures, phones, ideas, clothes, words, works of art, poems, recipes, gestures, pieces of furniture, rituals, operas, newspaper articles, cars, types of buildings, hairstyles, pet food, ringtones, scientific theories, ways of farming, etc., etc. The significance of such an absurd list – likening the Borges passage of a Chinese encyclopaedia, famously quoted by Michel Foucault20 – is twofold.
Firstly, it is to fully bring about the confusion of the interweaved, even fractal, character of memetic material, to subsequently and hopefully never be confused about it again. When dealing with memetic entities we need to abandon thinking in levels, and, instead, view them in a networked sense. Take the example of an opera – a rather rich and bombastic meme. The meme of an opera consists of words, lines, tunes, ways of singing, instruments, scores, acts, ways of acting, props, stage design, and ways of lighting. Whenever
16 Ibid., 191. 17 Ibid., 192. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid.
20 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge,
12 it is cultural and makes sense as a unit, that is to say, whenever it makes sense to be copied, it can be called a meme. We can imagine that one could copy the whole opera, whether precisely or liberally, or one could copy merely a single striking line, or a catchy melodic phrase, or a dramatic way of lighting, etc., etc. The meme is that which is imitated.
And secondly it points to the dynamic coevolutionary complex that is the memetic landscape. Let’s stick to the example of the opera. Not only does the opera consists of various interweaved and interacting memes, common operatic practice also depends upon a certain memetic landscape. This landscape usually consists of specialized buildings (theatres and opera houses) with a stage on which the action can take place, an orchestra pit for the musicians and their equipment, a backstage with wings for props, sets, scenery, and waiting/panting performers, a prompt corner and control booth for the stage management team, a fly system for hanging and moving parts of the scenery and lighting, various dressing rooms, a front with signage and a box office, a lobby with ticket counters, a cloakroom, café areas and restrooms, from which the audience can enter the auditorium, a sloped seating area with (preferably) wonderful acoustics and a fine view onto the action. A proper audience will have learned from past experiences, or from the present, to turn off their phone (after making and sharing the occasional selfie), to speak quietly if at all, to not munch on crisps and popcorn or slurp down sodas (how different this is from the eating and drinking behaviour one displays at and is consciously marketed for the auditorium of the cinema), and to clap only at specific moments and not mid-performance after every display of virtuosity, or at every moment of silence and pause. One can go further still and point out the online ticket sales which pay for much of the production and accommodation, which depends on the social construction of and trust in money, on the availability and use of personal computers and their connection to the internet, on online ads shown to the right audience via Google Ads – say, screened before a YouTube video on Die Zauberflöte to a user who had heretofore occasionally searched Google for Wagner MIDI files, local vintners, and vintage lorgnettes –, and, of course, it depends on a biologically and memetically evolved audience – humans – in the first place, who in their turn depend on an oxygen rich atmosphere created by the photosynthesis of global flora, etc., etc.
Although Dawkins made a seminal contribution to and still supports the field, his chapter in The Selfish Gene devoted to the meme was never intended as a serious hypothesis or the launch of a new cultural theory/science.21 Luckily for the meme ‘meme’ it got noticed
and spread at a slow pace through the memepool. The term memetics, although alluded to by Dawkins’ mention of the ‘memeticist’,22 was soon coined by Arel Lucas.23 In the 1990s,
however, its fecundity surged, as well as its academic recognition. The most notable developments in this regard were the publications by American philosopher (of mind) Daniel Dennett and British psychologist Susan Blackmore, and the launch of the Journal of Memetics.
21 Richard Dawkins, foreword to The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), xvi. I do
want to stress, though, that in his initial thoughts on the evolutionary nature of culture Dawkins’ was not merely metaphorical. As Daniel Dennett notes: ‘In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins urges us to take the idea of meme evolution literally. Meme evolution is not just analogous to biological or genetic evolution, not just a process that can be metaphorically described in these evolutionary idioms, but a phenomenon that obeys the laws of natural selection exactly.’ See: Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Back Bay Books, 1991), 202.
22 Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 194.
23 Douglas Hofstadter, Metamagical Themas: Questioning for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (New
13 Since the publication of Consciousness Explained (1991), Dennett appears to have become the ‘resident philosopher-mascot’24 and, if I may add, much needed ‘philosophical
mentor of all meme theorists’.25 In Consciousness Explained Dennett uses memetics to forge
an account of human consciousness as ‘a huge complex of memes (or more exactly, meme-effects in brains) that can best be understood as the operation of a “von Neumannesque” virtual machine implemented in the parallel architecture of a brain.’26 Dennett tries to show
here ‘how memes could transform the operating system or computational architecture of a human brain.’27
In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995), a work on the extend of Darwinian thinking and the disputes therein, Dennett takes a broader look at memetics and it’s features, quirks, and prospects. Many meme theorists and sceptics wondered what memes really are and whether memes could be found somewhere – presumably in the brain (just like genes can be found in the structure of DNA). And if we can’t find them, do they even exist? Dennett, and here I fully agree with him, dissuades people to cling to this endeavour and to draw conclusions too quickly. He instead argues that, fundamentally, a meme is an informational entity, and is thus ‘primarily a semantic classification, not a syntactic classification that might be directly observable in “brain language” or natural language.’28 When one talks of a meme as a unit of
cultural information, one should not be mistaken to think that a word might equal a byte and a book a terabyte of memetic information. As a semantic unit, that which makes sense as a unit, and which, thus, can be copied perceptually as a unit with any reliability, is a meme. Dennett makes the semantic nature of memes eminently clear when he notes that ‘we identify a set of syntactic text-variants as all falling into the Moby Dick [category] by virtue of what they tell us about, not their syntactic similarity.’29Even if a memetic syntax is to be found in
the brain, which Dennett holds to be ‘hardly likely and certainly not necessary’, a ‘reductionistic triumph’ is ‘almost certainly ruled out in any science of culture, notwithstanding the prophecies of a golden age of mind-reading one sometimes hears these days from the ideologues of neuroscience.’30 Instead there are bigger philosophical prospects
for memetics.
Susan Blackmore’s The Meme Machine (1999) – one of the most popular books on memes – is particularly noteworthy for the notion of memetic drive in gene-meme coevolution. Blackmore suggests, for instance, ‘that the human brain is an example of memes forcing genes to build ever better and better meme-spreading devices.’31 The (in)famous
question of our rapid, anomalous brain growth, can be restated through the perspective of the meme. Instead of asking: ‘For what do we need such big brains?’, the question now becomes: ‘For what do memes need such big brains?’ The answer to the latter question is
24 Kelby Mason, “Thoughts as Tools: The Meme in Daniel Dennett’s Work” (paper presented at the
Symposium on Memetics: Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission, as part of the 15th International
Congress on Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, August 24-28, 1998).
25 Dawkins, foreword to Meme Machine, xvi.
26 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 210. It goes beyond the scope of this text to fully unpack this
jargon heavy passage. In more everyday terms one could say that human consciousness can be seen as a software program in the brain.
27 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995), 343.
28 Ibid., 354. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid.
14 much more obvious: they needed better meme machines to thrive. Blackmore argues boldly, but convincingly: ‘The brain was forced to grow bigger far faster and at much a greater cost than would be predicted on the grounds of biological advantage alone, and this is why it stands out so obviously in any comparisons of encephalisation. Theories based on biological advantage cannot explain why the genes were forced to pay such a high price in terms of energy consumption and the dangers of birth. Theories based on memetic advantage can.’32
However, I agree with Dennett that Blackmore is mistaken about what memetics entails for our free will and consciousness. In Blackmore’s view free will cannot exist because ‘all human actions, whether conscious or not, come from complex interactions between memes, genes and all their products, in complicated environments.’33 I fully agree with the
picture Blackmore portrays, but not with what it supposedly implicates. Although memetics tarnishes the classic heroic picture of the in control human being, with absolute free will, I would argue, with Dennett, that memes do not to rob us of our agency, but, instead, provide us this very agency. Yes, memes move us, make us act, for we ought to be ‘moved by reasons’.34 If our brains were not capable of processing memes and making sense of/with
them, letting them affect us, of sharing in their agency, and putting them to use, we would in fact be considerably less free. As Graham Harman notes in the context of actor-network theory: ‘To declare oneself untainted by strife between conflicting forces is to deny that one is an actant.’35 Memetics may, indeed, prove to be the evolutionary theory the idiosyncratic
art historian and father of iconology, Aby Warburg, dimly envisioned when he remarked: ‘By adopting an either unduly materialistic or an unduly mystical stance, our young discipline blocks its own panoramic view of history. It gropes toward an evolutionary theory of its own, somewhere between the schematisms of political history and the dogmatic faith in genius.’36
I bemoan memetics’ current unpopularity within the humanities – except for, maybe, media studies. It might be because of many different reasons, but I hope to take away many a reader’s repulsion based on associations with scientism, naturalization, and previous applications of evolutionary thinking to the cultural and the social. I think Dennett is partly right when he suggests ‘that the meme’s-eye view of what happened to the meme meme is quite obvious: “humanist” minds have set up a particularly aggressive set of filters against memes coming from “sociobiology,” and once Dawkins was identified as a sociobiologist, this almost guaranteed rejection of whatever this interloper had to say about culture – not for good reasons, but just in a sort of immunological rejection.’37 It is certainly the case that many
humanities scholars usually dismiss purely naturalistic explanations of complex (cultural) phenomena, and they do so on good grounds. All too often things get ‘explained away’ by appeals to nature. Depression? That’s just the diminished activity of serotonin pathways!
Homosexuality? Oh, that’s caused by sex-atypical activation of the hypothalamus! Race? Objective genetic differences! Such explanations wield and yield formidable political power.
What these explanations omit – among other things – are their own histories and their socio-political and cultural contexts. Instead, humanities scholars often would argue that things like
32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 237.
34 See for instance: Daniel C. Dennett, “Lecture by philosopher Daniel Dennett | Radboud Reflects,”
YouTube video, 1:26:28, uploaded by “Radboud Reflects,” August 9, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8DQfYV49gI.
35 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press 2009), 21. 36 Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European
Renaissance, trans. D. Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Trust Publications, 1999), 585.
15 depression, homosexuality, and race are not mere natural realities, but constructed ones. When applying memetics to such cases one can argue that depression, homosexuality, and race are constructed memetic entities that were and are formed through countless environmental interactions, forces, and constraints, which shape the ways we think, act, see, and are. As Dennett likes to say: Yes, they exist, but they are not what you think they are.38 If
anything, ‘it is the shaping of our minds by memes that give us the autonomy to transcend our
selfish genes.’39
38 See for instance: Dennett, “Lecture by philosopher.” 39 Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 369.
16
Actor-network theory
My brain also harbors the meme for fasting or dieting, and I wish to get it more often into the driver’s seat (so that I could more wholeheartedly diet), but, for some reason or another, the coalitions of memes that would incorporate the meme for dieting into my whole “heart” seldom form a government with long-term stability.
––Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea
The world is not made of stable, rock-solid forms, but only of frontlines in a battle or love story between actants. Stable states are the result of numerous forces, just as the apparently timeless shapes of ducks or butterflies actually reflect a history of ancestral struggles.
––Graham Harman, Prince of Networks
Just as memetics sprang from a lack in evolutionary theory – an adequate explanation of culture within the evolutionary framework –, so actor-network theory sprang from a lack in sociology – an adequate explanation of social stability in a world of ‘soft humans and weak moralities’.40 And just as Richard Dawkins argued that a different viewpoint, away from the
exclusive focus on genes, would be needed to better our understanding of culture, so Bruno Latour claimed that ‘to balance our accounts of society, we simply have to turn our exclusive attention away from humans and look also at nonhumans.’41 This move might not come as a
surprise to anyone who knows only little about Latour’s character. Latour, known as some ‘troubadour of knowledge’, ‘bricoleur’,42 and overall troublemaker, is not someone who
happily stays within the confines of any discipline. For Latour, as Gerard de Vries notes, ‘the world does not present itself in pre-packaged items that nicely fit into the pigeonholes of the established scientific disciplines.’43 Browsing through his many publications, one can
consequently get the sense of losing oneself inside ‘a truly bewildering Wunderkammer.’44
Although I will refrain from giving a total overview of Latour’s academic life and interactions, a small, selective history might prove illuminating to one’s understanding of actor-network theory and what it tries to achieve.
Bruno Latour, formally trained as a philosopher and anthropologist, came to work in Ivory Coast (1972), ‘engaging in “cooperation”, a sort of French Peace Corps, an alternative
40 Bruno Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses?: The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artefacts,” in
Shaping Technology / Building Society, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law (Cambridge: MIT Press 1992), 152.
41 Ibid., 152-153.
42 Jay Foster, review of An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, by Bruno
Latour, trans. Catherine Porter, Science & Technology Studies 27, no. 1 (2014): 109.
43 Gerard de Vries, Bruno Latour (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 2. 44 Ibid., 1.
17 available at the time for military service’.45 Latour was asked to ‘contribute to a study on the
problems encountered when replacing white executives with local, black Ivory Coast managers’.46 One can see this research as the starting point of his distinctly empirical
approach, a practice he himself has called ‘experimental metaphysics’.47 First, Latour
researched the discourses surrounding the problem. He found that many white people offered ‘accounts of the “African mind” to explain why the black population was still not up to managing modern industrial enterprises.’48 Unimpressed by this natural, racist explanation –
the data, too, did not support it49 – Latour sought elsewhere. When he interviewed black
pupils of the Lycée Technique in Abidjan and scrutinized the practices of the school, Latour found the far more mundane explanation he was looking for. De Vries notes:
The school system (an exact copy of the French system) introduced engineering before students had done any practical work on engines. Since most of the pupils had never seen or handled an engine before, it was not surprising that the interpretation of technical drawings presented them with quite a puzzle. The cause of the problems the students had with technical drawings was not their “African mind” but the lack of appropriate connections required to interpret such drawings. Exporting the French school system to Africa without exporting the many links to engines that French pupils have established even before entering school, mad boys in Abidjan “incompetent”.50
The explanation Latour found was, in a broad sense, a social one.
Latour himself, however, would most likely object to the above phrasing, not – I hope – because of my characterization of the problem as a social one, but because he would object to a characterization of research results as ‘findings’. For his research at the Salk Institute (1975-1977), he wanted to apply the same fieldwork practice he used in Ivory Coast, but this time on scientists. Although scientists can often – with slight heroic tone – say they try to ‘find’/‘discover’ the ‘truth’/‘facts’, Latour wanted to study what it is they actually, practically, and mundanely do. Latour identified two sections in the laboratory, based on the differing, contrasting work that was done in each section. One section of the laboratory was dominated by technicians and analysts who were engaged in ‘mixing chemicals, shaking Erlenmeyer flasks, setting up assays, handling electronic equipment, and preparing animals for experiments’, and ‘writing numbers on the sides of tubes or on the fur of rats, filling in large books with long lists of figures to record what they had just done, or drawing up tables and graphs.’51 The other section was mostly accommodated scientific staff members, whose
offices where dominated by ‘texts of various sorts: graphs, tables, computer printouts, handbooks, scientific journals, preprints of articles, conference reports and so on.’52 In light of
what Latour saw, the denotation of ‘natural scientists’ bordered the absurd. Hence Latour sought to observe how this shift from highly artificial and cultural material, environments, and processes to ‘natural facts’ gets worked out.
45 Ibid., 11. 46 Ibid., 12.
47 Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 123.
48 De Vries, Latour, 12. 49 Ibid.
50 Ibid., 12-13. 51 Ibid., 32. 52 Ibid.
18 The section of the laboratory I described first housed several important machines such as ‘a rotary evaporator, a centrifuge, a shaker, and a grinder’ which ‘transform matter between one state and another.’53 But to make a shift towards shareable information and,
thus, agreed upon facts, a shift towards the second, more office-like section of the laboratory is required. To achieve this the Laboratory also housed many machines which can be characterised differently, as ‘inscription devices’ which ‘transform pieces of matter into written documents.’54 ‘More exactly,’ Latour adds, ‘an inscription device is any item of
apparatus or particular configuration of such items which can transform a material substance into a figure or diagram which is directly usable by one of the members of the office space’ and which inscription is ‘regarded as having a direct relationship to “the original substance.”55
For Latour ‘then, the laboratory began to take on the appearance of a system of literary inscription.’56 De Vries accurately summarizes better than I am able to – and almost in total –
this ‘system of literary inscription’ in the following passage, so please allow me to quote it in full. He states:
So, on the desk of the scientists, there are only piles of texts: journal articles. Handbooks, data sheets, graphs, tables, and computer printouts. Some of these texts have been delivered by mail, some have been produced automatically by machines, others have been brought by lab technicians. Before this heterogenous set of texts has arrived on his desk, a scientist will have read books and journals, made notes of his own, discussed issues with his colleagues, and written instructions for the technicians to follow when setting up an experiment, the results of which are now waiting on his desk. On the basis of these texts, by weaving the various elements into a dense argumentative network, the scientist will compose a new text. In the new document that is prepared, the inscriptions, figures and texts that are used will get a new meaning. For example, what a predecessor has reported as a final conclusion, may now function as a cornerstone for a new argument, or may be reported as being inconsistent with the results of the experiments performed by lab technicians. In the document the scientist produces, the texts that are used to write the new document are translated again in both senses of the word: they are moved from one place to another and in this process they get a new meaning.57
However, we still have not arrived at the constructed facts in the hitherto description of the processes that make the ‘system of literary inscription’. For mere statements to become statements of facts they have to purify themselves from the ‘modalities’ that they, as of yet, might include.58 These modalities are ‘statements about other statements.’59 For instance: ‘to
state, “The structure of GH.RH was reported to be X” is not the same as saying, “The structure of GH.RH is X.”’60 Thereby, any reference to authorship and a process of construction is
abolished. This happens, according to Latour, ‘in situations where a statement is quickly
53 Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986), 51.
54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 52.
57 De Vries, Latour, 33-34.
58 Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life, 77-78. 59 Ibid., 77.
19 borrowed, used and reused, [when] there quickly comes a stage where it is no longer contested.’61 He concludes that
amidst the general Brownian agitation, a fact has then been constituted. This is a comparatively rare event, but when it occurs, a statement becomes incorporated in the stock of taken-for-granted features which have silently disappeared from the conscious concerns of daily scientific activity. The fact becomes incorporated in graduate text books or perhaps forms the material basis for an item of equipment. Such facts are often thought of in terms of the conditioned reflexes of “good” scientists or as part and parcel of the “logic” of reasoning.62
This project and the subsequent book publication, co-authored with sociologist Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (1979), is widely regarded as one of the exemplars of the ‘social turn’. This, however, also caused wide misinterpretation of what Latour and Woolgar argued. Again, the use of the term ‘social’ should be interpreted broader than many sociologists (and critics) do. I, thus, agree with Graham Harman that ‘even [Laboratory Life] escapes the strict form of social constructionism, since real inanimate objects are responsible for constructing facts no less than are power-hungry humans.’63 Latour and
Woolgar argue that facts are constructed by many heterogenous things and the ways by which they translate each other and form alliances. If we remember the case of the struggling students of the Lycée Technique, what are the causes of their hardships? Sure, the dismissive and misinterpreting white teachers attributed to the overall failure and struggle of the students, but so did the technical drawings and the utter lack of interactions with engines. For Latour, the social consists of nonhuman objects too. About them he remarks:
Here they are, the hidden and despised social masses who make up our morality. They knock at the door of sociology, requesting a place in the accounts of society as stubbornly as the human masses did in the nineteenth century. What our ancestors, the founders of sociology, did a century ago to house the human masses in the fabric of social theory, we should do now to find a place in a new social theory for the nonhuman masses that beg us for understanding.64
Much of Latour’s earlier work culminates in actor-network theory. To understand the metaphysics of actor-network theory, it might be helpful to highlight, with Harman, four fundamental ideas – fundamental to all of Latour’s philosophy – described by Latour in
Irreductions (1993).65
61 Ibid., 87. 62 Ibid.
63 Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Melbourne: re.press 2009),
11-12.
64 Latour, Missing Masses, 153.
65 Irreductions is a philosophical treatise in metaphysics and forms the second part of The
Pasteurization of France. See: Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
20 ‘First,’ Harman notes, ‘the world is made up of actors or actants […].66 An actor or
actant67 is something that can affect things and can be affected by things. The list of actors
one might imagine can thus be even longer and more heterogenous than any list of memes. Horses and stars are actors, and so are guitars, autographs, Mondriaan paintings, dragons toddlers, killer bees, motorbikes, Neapolitan pizza’s, sunsets, Latour’s publications, colours, Donald Trump impersonators, atoms, municipalities, and unicorns. Surprising as at may be to some, dragons and unicorns are, when denoted as actors, just as real as atoms and stars, for ‘all entities are on exactly the same ontological footing.’68 Indeed, even Dennett notes that
although the Loch Ness Monster probably does not literally swim about in Loch Ness, it still has a reality,69 it still affects/affected many people, the lake, brought together research
equipment on boats, and spawned countless TV programmes, documentaries, films, cartoons, drawings, faked photographs, books, papers, articles, internet memes, toys, and figurines, all of which, in turn, affect/affected the Loch Ness Monster itself.
‘Second,’ Harman notes, ‘there is the principle of irreduction itself. No object is inherently reducible or irreducible to any other.’70 We can never fully know something by
reducing it to something else, something we – that includes Latour – inevitably always have to do when making a explanation that is coherent for humans. Harman explains: ‘In one sense we can never explain religion as the result of social factors, World War I as the result of rail timetables, or the complex motion of bodies as pure examples of Newtonian physics. Yet in another sense we can always attempt such explanations, and sometimes they are fairly convincing.’71 Thus, we should not despair or simply give up, for ‘it is always possible to explain
anything in terms of anything else – as long as we do the work of showing how one can be
transformed into the other, through a chain of equivalences that always has a price and always risks failure.’ [emphasis added]72
‘Third,’ Harman continues, ‘the means of linking one thing with another is
translation.’73 He explains: ‘When Stalin and Zhukov order the encircling movement at
Stalingrad, this is not a pure dictate trumpeted through space and transparently obeyed by the participant actors. Instead, a massive work of mediation [emphasis added] occurs.’74
Because actors will, inevitably, always affect each other, we need to rethink our notion of the medium, which supposedly passively mediates the message. Yes, you can convey an ‘I love you message’ in countless ways, but giving someone an ‘I love you’ mug does not convey the same message as a plane flying over your lover with a banner saying ‘I love you’, and a text message saying ‘i <3 u’, does not have the same gravitas as saying ‘I love you’ when you say it to your partner when together holding your baby for the first time. Harman states vividly:
66 Harman, Prince of Networks, 14.
67 I mostly use actor because its meaning is more commonly known. I do not share the fear of some
scholars that the term ‘actor’ grants nonhuman things too much agency and that one should, hence, use the term ‘actant’ – but this might be the case because I lack the philosophical and sociological background many of these scholars do have.
68 Ibid.
69 Daniel C. Dennett, “Professor Daniel C Dennett: ‘Ontology, science, and the evolution of the
manifest image’,” YouTube video, 1:00:54, uploaded by “Alpha Omega,” January 11, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKn-AntVJXg.
70 Harman, Prince of Networks, 14. 71 Ibid., 14-15.
72 Ibid., 15. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid.
21 No layer of the world is a transparent intermediary, since each is a medium: or in Latour’s preferred term, a mediator. A mediator is not some sycophantic eunuch fanning its masters with palm-leaves, but always does new work of its own to shape the translation of forces from on point of reality to the next. Here as elsewhere, Latour’s guiding maxim is to grant dignity even to the least grain of reality. Nothing is mere rubble to be used up or trampled by mightier actors. Nothing is a mere intermediary. Mediators speak, and other mediators resist.75
‘Fourth,’ Harman finishes, ‘actants are not stronger or weaker by virtue of some inherent strength or weakness harbored all along in their private essence. Instead, actants gain in strength only through their alliances.76 For instance, when some animal species or meme
thrives, this is not because of some successful essence or inherent fitness, but because of how it is connected to the environment. Indeed, to express fitness is to be fitted to other things. Harman elaborates: ‘As long as no one reads Mendel’s papers, his breakthroughs in genetics remain weak. An airplane crashes if a few hydraulic lines malfunction, but the resistance of these lines is weakened in turn if they are discovered and exiled to a garbage dump. For Latour, an object is neither a substance nor an essence, but an actor trying to adjust or inflict its forces […].’77
Actor-network theory can be seen as the putting into practice of the above metaphysics. As one might have noticed by the convergence between Latour’s metaphysics and the two earlier projects I have highlighted, in a sense Latour has always practiced some form of actor-network theory. However, actor-network theory got formally developed during the late 80s and early 90s of the last century, in the academic context of the sociology of science and science and technology studies, by Michel Callon, John Law, and , of course, Latour, and was used to ‘“open the black box” of science and technology by tracing the complex relationships that exist between governments, technologies, knowledge, texts, money and people.’78 Of course, actor-network theory is not only of use when dealing with a
scientific and technological actor-network, but can be used to trace any actor-network. To some the term ‘actor-network theory’ might be puzzling. Why, for instance is it called a ‘theory’, when it more accurately refers to a practice? And how are we to join an actor and a network together in something that is somehow an actor and a network at the same time, when we usually think of an actor as a single and a network as a plural thing? Indeed, Latour once remarked jesterly ‘that there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! Four nails in the coffin.’79 Alas, other names didn’t stick around in the actor-network that is actor-network
theory itself. The question about the oxymoronic term ‘actor-network’ is similar to the ‘problem’ we found in memetics when considering an opera. The opera is a meme, but so are its costumes, instruments, tunes, and lines, and without a stage, ticket sales, rows of seats, and an appropriately behaving audience their would be no opera as we know it. The opera is both an actor and a network. Indeed, Darryl Cressman notes with Callon that ‘it is simply a
75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid.
78 Darryl Cressman, A Brief Overview of Actor-Network Theory: Punctualization, Heterogenous
Engineering & Translation, Burnaby: Simon Fraser University, 2009, 3, https://summit.sfu.ca/item/13593.
79 Bruno Latour, “On recalling ANT,” in Actor Network Theory and After, eds. John Law and John
22 matter of perspective. Everything, then, is an actor-network, “reducible neither to an actor alone nor to a network […]. An actor-network is simultaneously an actor whose activity is networking heterogenous elements and a network that is able to redefine and transform what it is made of”.’80
23
The science wars
Bachelers wives, and maides children be well tought.
––Anonymous81
Show me a cultural relativist at thirty thousand feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.
––Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden
Anything does not go. Discourses and associations are not equivalent, because allies and arguments are enlisted precisely so that one association will be stronger than another. If all discourse appears to be equivalent, if there seem to be “language games” and nothing more, then someone has been unconvincing. This is the weak point of the relativists […]. By Repeating “anything goes,” they miss the work that generates inequivalence and asymmetry.
––Bruno Latour, The Pasteurization of France
The claim that the intermingling of memetics and actor-network theory might prove to be fruitful sounds, admittedly, like some bilateral blasphemy. What good can come from
implementing the mumbo jumbo of those relativistic postmodernists in memetics? Why bother listening once more to the arrogant priests of scientism and reductionism? How can the rigorous rationalists be anything like the intellectual imposters? What have the Anthropocenic powerhouses of radical, academic thought to do with popular philosophical lightweights who are stuck in the Age of Enlightenment? Why on earth would you want to host a get together for Bruno Latour, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett? Before memetics and actor-network
theory can share some common ground and build on each other, it will be necessary, given the tense polemic, to clear some parts of the rusty minefield of the so-called ‘science wars’. What has become known as the ‘science wars’ was in fact an intellectual dispute in the 1990s between scholars and philosophers who studied science, and the scientists who did the science. The scientists who did the dirty work for society to enjoy the fruits of science and technology, like the veterans of so many shady conflicts, were increasingly criticized by bands of ‘troublemakers’ on the presumed home front called academia. The troublemakers –
postmodernists, relativists, philosophers of science, historians of science, sociologists of science, anthropologists of science, ethnographers of science, and constructionists – persisted
81 Not all memes have authors, as is exemplified by proverbs. Cited (in Middle/Early Modern English)
