Balkinization: The Annotated Cultural Software

The Annotated Cultural Software

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of my 1998 book, Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, Yale University Press has created an new online version with a difference: It allows readers to write comments, questions and annotations for any passage in the book, and to create threaded discussions and links to other projects. They have opened up the book so that readers can use it as a online platform for commentary and discussion.

Yale has done this with a few other titles recently, including Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks and Jonathan Zittrain's The Future of The Internet. The Press should be congratulated for experimenting with innovative ways to present the ideas in their books. Equally important, they have been courageous and innovative in using online distribution to generate interest in print sales as well as make more knowledge available to more people. The idea of spreading information and knowledge widely is what ties these three books together.

Cultural Software was a comparatively early work about memetics; it argues that we can better understand the phenomenon of ideology by thinking about it in terms of the transmission and reproduction of memes in human minds. There have been a bunch of books written about memetics since then, but few have tried to use memetics to talk about questions of ideology, social theory, and justice.

Using memetics to explain ideology has lots of interesting theoretical consequences. First, it dispenses with a range of different problems in the Marxist model of ideology and later models that borrow from Marx in one way or another. In fact, one way of looking at the book is that it offers a post-Marxist theory of ideology. Second, unlike many theories of ideology, the book offers explanations of ideology that don't require any supra-individual entities, just individuals and memes. This makes it easier to merge the study of ideology and its effects into individual and cognitive psychology. In the past decade or so, lots of people, especially in behavioral economics, have made precisely this sort of move.

The book treats memetics as an organizing metaphor for cultural construction and information flows in society, rather than trying to offer a complete theory of what memes are. There's a good reason for this. Subsequent literature on memetics has shown how difficult it is to create a science of memetics akin to a science of genetics. Some scholars, like Dan Sperber, have argued against the memetic model altogether. He argues that instead of transmission of identical content from mind to mind-- which he associates with the memetic model-- much of cultural communication is an elaborate set of inference systems that produce similar beliefs and representations in different people.

In the last third of the book I use the idea of memetics to show an underlying unity in a wide range of different models of ideological effects. People who write about this subject tend to talk past each other; part of the purpose of the book was to synthesize different theories from different disciplines. Some people were initially puzzled by the book's attempt to draw together such a wide range of different literatures-- from economics, psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literary criticism-- and show how they were all connected. But it's always been my belief that in the social sciences there's a lot of unnecessary product differentiation, and that there are deeper unities to a lot of different models and approaches.

Finally, the middle section of the book argues that the study of ideology requires a commitment to transcendent values of truth and justice. This is a highly controversial claim, but I continue to believe that it is essentially correct. Many theories of ideology founder on some version of relativism or fall back on positive descriptions that disguise hidden normative commitments. I believe that when we study ideology we have to postulate certain regulative ideals even if our own views are always subject to revision and ideological criticism. In fact, it is precisely because our own views are always subject to revision and ideological criticism that we have to postulate transcendent standards.

In any case, for those of you who aren't familiar with the book, Yale University Press has made it easier than ever for people to discuss the book's ideas, comment on them and contribute to a discussion about some really interesting topics. Put differently, it's a great way to spread some memes and help them evolve.

Posted 5:59 AM by JB [link]

Comments:

Ack! I've never liked the word "memes" and its implied (or worse, explicit) comparison to genes. Genes evolve because the unsuccessful forms die off without reproducing. Memes, in contrast, don't "die". Nor do they have offspring with shared "dna".

Dawkins should be ashamed of himself.

# posted by

Mark Field : 11:00 AM

I'm with Mark. I hate the word "memes" too. Ever since this morning when I looked it up on Wikipedia.

# posted by

mls : 1:59 PM

This is great news. It reminds me of similar projects at the Institute for the Future of the Book for Mackenzie Wark's Gamer Theory.

I've always wanted to wikify some articles of mine; this will inspire me to get working on that.

It's great to see Y.U.P. realize that books are far more than physical artifacts. In the best case scenario they can generate communities around the ideas they discuss.

# posted by

Frank Pasquale : 11:42 PM

Mark Field said:
I've never liked the word "memes" and its implied (or worse, explicit) comparison to genes.

Memes as genes is just a loose analogy, it's important not to take it too literally.

Memes, in contrast, don't "die".

Of course memes "die" while others thrive. Most memes are only replicated for a limited time. There are countless poems, songs, writings, ideas that are forever lost to history because they were not passed on or recorded.

Nor do they have offspring with shared "dna".

They don't self-replicate, memes are information copied from human to human.

Dawkins should be ashamed of himself.

Why? Dawkins introduced memes as a speculative concept in The Selfish Gene. The idea caught on in spite of him.

Call it what you will, cultural evolution is a well-established field. "Meme" is just a term that many happen to find useful, and of course you don't have to use it.

# posted by

George : 2:40 AM

Nobody should use the term "meme". It's misleading because it implies a false analogy between evolution (Darwinian) and culture (Lamarckian).

And "memes" may disappear, but they don't "die" in any meaningful sense; they can return more often than Freddie.

# posted by

Mark Field : 10:34 AM

Of course, memes *do* die. See the "Library of Alexandria".

# posted by

Tim Tyler : 12:18 PM

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
Agen Judi Online Terpercaya

# posted by

Unknown : 11:48 AM