Memes

How do people discover Internet memes? Do they watch a weekly program that updates the vocabulary of web images? Are there Internet influencers assigned to explaining and popularizing the memes?

No. People discover memes and then share them experientially. They come across them, relate in some way, then share, to the point that the meme becomes part of the new vocabulary.

If you had any doubt about this, the first week of Kamala Harris campaign should have laid those to rest. Seemingly without any campaign effort or coordination, the politically aware suddenly had to become up to date on falling out of a coconut tree, the meaning of Brat Summer, and something having to do with J. D. Vance and couches.

Richard Dawkins, a biologist, coined the word meme in his 1976 book “The Selfish Gene.” The meme was intended to be the idea equivalent of the gene, something that evolved in the culture organically, took on its own meaning and specific definition over time. By the 1990s, memes were everywhere and the meaning had shifted a bit, taking human creativity into account–you could create a meme on purpose, you just didn’t have much control of it once it took off in the wild.

Richard Rorty and Donald Davidson didn’t seem to be aware of memes when they wrote in the 1980s, and memes certainly didn’t have the hold on the culture like they do now. Otherwise, neither man would have had to torture himself with these thoughts trying to explain how metaphors don’t have a strict meaning:

One should not think of metaphorical expressions as having meanings distinct from their literal ones. To have a meaning is to have a place in a language game. Metaphors, by definition, do not. Davidson denies, in his words, “the thesis that associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message.” In his view, tossing a metaphor into a conversation is like suddenly breaking off the conversation long enough to make a face, or pulling a photograph out of your pocket and displaying it, or pointing at a feature of the surroundings, or slapping your interlocutor’s face, or kissing him. Tossing a metaphor into a text is like using italics, or illustrations, or odd punctuation or formats.

These ideas can be expressed so much easier today–we use memes and emojis when we don’t wish to use words. We could be explicit and obvious. It’s just that, in our culture, when so much of our conversation happens purely over text, we need to punctuate the expressions in unique ways to try to be understood … or not understood. And what Rorty goes on to say about metaphors is absolutely true today about memes and emojis:

To none of these is it appropriate to respond with “What exactly are you trying to say?” If one had wanted to say something – if one had wanted to utter a sentence with a meaning – one would presumably have done so. But instead one thought that one’s aim could be better carried out by other means. That one uses familiar words in unfamiliar ways – rather than slaps, kisses, pictures, gestures, or grimaces – does not show that what one said must have a meaning. An attempt to state that meaning would be an attempt to find some familiar (that is, literal) use of words – some sentence which already had a place in the language game – and, to claim that one might just as well have that. But the unparaphrasability of metaphor is just the unsuitability of any such familiar sentence for one’s purpose.

Fortunately, because we have this understanding of non-textual ways of expression in our times, this section of Rorty’s book is intuitive. If you had to read it straight up, trying to connect his rapid blur of names and associations or, even worse, trying to annotate his thoughts as you go along, you’d get lost in a swamp. I sometimes wonder if Rorty created his communications theory to explain his writing style, which depends completely on vibing with him rather than fully getting his meaning.

This paragraph is a perfect example:

I can develop the contrast between the idea that the history of culture has a telos – such as the discovery of truth, or the emancipation of humanity – and the Nietzschean and Davidsonian picture which I am sketching by noting that the latter picture is compatible with a bleakly mechanical description of the relation between human beings and the rest of the universe. For genuine novelty can, after all, occur in a world of blind, contingent, mechanical forces. Think of novelty as the sort of thing which happens when, for example, a cosmic ray scrambles the atoms in a DNA molecule, thus sending things off in the direction of the orchids or the anthropoids. The orchids, when their time came, were no less novel or marvelous for the sheer contingency of this necessary condition of their existence. Analogously, for all we know, or should care, Aristotle’s metaphorical use of ousia, Saint Paul’s metaphorical use of agape, and Newton’s metaphorical use of gravitas, were the results of cosmic rays scrambling the fine structure of some crucial neurons in their respective brains. Or, more plausibly, they were the result of some odd episodes in infancy – some obsessional kinks left in these brains by idiosyncratic traumata. It hardly matters how the trick was done. The results were marvelous. There had never been such things before.

Believe it or not, I get what Rorty is saying here, but there’s no way in hell that I can fully explain it piece by piece. He’s name dropping Nietzsche, Davidson, Aristotle, St. Paul and Isaac Newton, while discussing DNA molecules and cosmic rays and orchids and anthropoids and obsessional kinks created by childhood trauma. What the hell? In one paragraph?

He doesn’t want you to dig into the literal meaning of every cultural artifact he dropped into that snippet. He wants you to capture this metaphorical vibe that sees the beauty in accidents and flashes of genius. Or more accurately, he wants you to understand that there’s no functional difference between a beautiful accident and an act of genius.

If you hold that thought in mind, the rest of this chapter flows easily. The way Rorty sees it, the positivists and Romantics have been locked in a struggle about meaning for two centuries. The positivists see language as slowly evolving to match the contours of the physical world. The Romantics see language as becoming ever more expressive of the true human experience. Rorty thinks they’re both wrong.

The positivists think that great scientific discoveries change vocabularies because they discover something that now describes the world accurately. Rorty says that’s not what happens, they just come across better tools that work better in explaining things for now. The Romantics see great poets innovating and expressing things that couldn’t be expressed before. But Rorty (and Davidson) just see them coming across some new linguistic tools that make readers disinterested in hearing poems expressed the old ways. And these poems too, someday, will be replaced with other linguistic tools, not deeper, more soulful expression.

Rorty believes that the positivists are trying to substitute science for God and the Romantics are trying to substitute human feeling and expression for God. Instead, Rorty argues, just let the gods die. He closes the chapter with this thought:

Once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity. The line of thought common to Blumenberg, Nietzsche, Freud, and Davidson suggests that we try to get to the point where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything – our language, our conscience, our community – as a product of time and chance.

(UPDATE — 7 April 2025) 

It’s rare that I come across a meme that references Montaigne, but this one I saw on Instagram yesterday is too good to pass up.