Thursday 5 July 2012

On Killing a Meme

Following Jay Foster’s recent article, the Circling Squares blog claims that I’m overgeneralizing Latour’s plasma. I ignored this when Foster said it, but with two people it risks becoming a meme ...
An amusing irony that I neglected to mention in the previous post is that, given that about 10 people usually read this blog (on a good day), Harman would probably have been better off ignoring what I'd said as in picking my post out for criticism he only went and increased my readership tenfold!

Perhaps this is another lesson to note in the critique of critique: if you strike a meme down it might become even more powerful! I jest, of course; I don't expect anyone to take me seriously but it does demonstrate that, once you adopt an actantial, 'object-oriented' or memetic way of thinking, it becomes plain that there is much more to discourse than proclamation and refutation. These things have 'a mind of their own.'

Incidentally, I haven't read Jay Foster's article so I don't believe that I'm reproducing that particular meme.