Postmodernism strkies again!

[btpound]

So I was on facebook today, and a sort of friend of mine posted this video. She is a student at UCONN and a libertarian I think.

http://sciencestage.com/v/492/daniel-dennett-ants-terrorism-and-the-awesome-power-of-memes.html

Here was my reply on the little conmment section below the video:

I did not like it. I have heard this idea before about memes. He starts out by talking down about Islam in a very negative way saying that it is making people self destruct, and finishes by saying the his little pet study "memology" is a "neutral science". Ridiculous. I'm sure he doesn't view his own beliefs with such cynicism. Nevermind that the fundamentalist Islamic groups that are growing in the middle east and all over the world are logical responses to US imperialism that has invaded their home nations both economically and politically. These "memes" are characterized as entities that have wills of their own. They are even likened to a virus. Nevermind that a virus is a scientifically verifiable entity that has a chemical network the pushes it to do what it does. This is the penical of idealic jargon. This whole concept promotes the philosophy that ideas just spring into existence fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus.

"So what do you want to do today?"
"Let's blow ourselves up!"
"Why?"
"...I don't know!"

Ideas do not work like that. They take shape right here in the material world for material reasons. They don't just float down here from the ether! The entire concept is a facade to prop up his cynical postmodernist agenda. I guess Mr Dennett has traded in his old christian god for a new imaginary friend, the malevolent Meme! All in all, it's kinda like a science, kind of like a philosophy, but entirely false.

God these fuckers are annoying. But you know what they say, "Spare the rod spoil the bourgie postmodernist student fuckhead".

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

You are right about memes. The best semi-popular analysis/criticism of memetics I have come across was in fact written by a theologian! If you can look past that, it is very incisive:

McGrath, A. (2005), Dawkins' God. Genes, Memes, And The Meaning Of Life (Blackwell).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawkin's_God

Ignore everything but the chapter on memes!

[Ravachol]

The entire 'god' debate is absurd nonsense. In all my time debating the issue, ranging from the time I was still religious myself as a child to this day I've never ever come across someone presenting a clear definition of 'god'. I see no merit in debating the existance or absence of something not clearly defined. It's logically impossible.

As for memetics, the concept of the 'meme' as a piece of cultural information being reproduced isn't that new. I share the conviction that culture as the collective experience of traditions and social rituals spreads, but the comparison with DNA is pseudoscientific nonsense. Primarily because DNA is self-replicating and exists independant of the structures it creates. Ideas and culture do not. They have no 'will of their own' and don't just, as stated very clearly above by btpound, fall from the sky. They originate in the material reality. It is the material conditions of existence that cause the human mind to reflect upon these conditions and produce what is called 'Signs' in semiotics. Human social interaction, ritualization of material processes and standardization of these signs give rise to cultural experience (roughly, I know this is a little bit simplistic but this is a forum, not an academic debate). The whole concept of 'meme' is a dumbed-down version of the 'Sign' merged with the unscientific comparison with DNA. Yes, memes 'spread', as examplified by internet humor (particularly 4chanesque humor), but not by themselves and out of nowhere. Material conditions give rise to signs which reproduce through collective cultural experience. The same goes for the extremely large and complex 'sign-network' that is religion. Suicide-bombings aren't an instance of 'people blowing shit to pieces because of a silly idea'. Yes, the idea is silly but their dedication to it, the spread of the idea and the origin of the idea have material conditions, most of them socio-economic, some of them psychological (which in turn has mostly sociological conditions but that's another complex debate). Suicide-bombings, which mostly happen in name of a religion (in some rare cases ethno-identity politics give rise to them as well (Eg. the LTTE)) are in my eyes an extreme instance of biopolitics where the body and life itself are used as an object of resistance.

So yeah, that TED talk wasn't that great :p

[ROBOTROT]

Ideas do not work like that. They take shape right here in the material world for material reasons. They don't just float down here from the ether! The entire concept is a facade to prop up his cynical postmodernist agenda. I guess Mr Dennett has traded in his old christian god for a new imaginary friend, the malevolent Meme! All in all, it's kinda like a science, kind of like a philosophy, but entirely false.

God these fuckers are annoying. But you know what they say, "Spare the rod spoil the bourgie postmodernist student fuckhead".
I agree that this meme stuff is rubbish (I think that largely it is just grafting traditional bourgeois ideological assumptions of intrinsic competitiveness onto evolutionary theory without any proper scientific investigation), but I don't think it's at all correct to characterise Dennett as a postmodernist. He seems totally committed to the idea that evolutionary science can pretty much explain absolutely everything that living things do. As far as I know this would not gel well with postmodernists who often insist that there is no absolute truth and that anything we think is objectively true is just a representation constructed by our culture/language in a particular way. It would seem to me that these two camps would be at absolute loggerheads.

[Belisarius]

philosophically speaking Dennett isn't a postmodernist. Postmodernism is pretty much a continental tendency (Lyotard, Deleuze, Foucault,...), but in anglo-saxon philosophy postmodern thoughts are very rare (Kuhn for example being an exception, since he said scientific thought is a historical process where one never can get an absolute truth, just puzzles, and when they are nearly solved someone throws it in a garbage can (for example: Einstein ruining Newtonian physics)).