Memetics Before Memetics: The Prehistory of the Meme

Is there a history of “memetics” before Richard Dawkins coined the word “meme”, in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene? The hypothesis of this essay is that there is indeed such a history (a tradition, if we can call it that) which is quite distinct from memetics post-Dawkins, even though at various points it overlaps in differing ways with memetics.

This is not a history in the sense of being the list of influences that Richard Dawkins (and later writers on memetics) had. Quite possibly Richard Dawkins was not aware of these so-called precursors (with the sole exception of Jacques Monod, who he would have known primarily as a biologist). What I would like to show is how these same questions: the constituents of culture, their transmission and mutation, have been objects of analysis for longer than a century. In this way it is closer to Jorge Luis Borges’ essay “Kafka and his Precursors” which gives us a list of authors whose works we in hindsight can identify Kafkaesque themes and motifs in.

For this reason, I am satisfying myself with a more touch-and-go approach like Borges did, for the precursors on my list, in particular relying on the work of the late Egyptologist Jan Assmann (who was a brilliant non-Dawkinsian memeticist, but one writing after 1976, so out of the scope of this essay). I will start first with Nietzsche (his Zur Genealogie der Moral [On the Genealogy of Morality] was published in 1887) and end with Jacques Derrida’s La vie la mort [Life Death] lectures, given 1975–1976, just on the cusp of the publication of The Selfish Gene (though published only in 2019).

Our protagonists: Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Monod (and his critique by Louis Althusser) and Jacques Derrida.

I will consider Nietzsche through Jan Assmann’s essay “What is ‘Cultural Memory’?” that starts off his book Religion and Cultural Memory. Here, Assmann discusses a variety of forms of memory: the “episodic” and “semantic” memory that we possess as individuals, that are a store of our experiences and what we have learned. There is the “communicative memory” of the French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, which is the social aspect of individual memory that makes it meaningful. Nietzsche, however, is a theorist of what Assmann calls “collective” or “bonding memory”.

This is what Nietzsche describes in great, painful detail in On The Genealogy of Morality (to be exact, in the Second Treatise). For him, early man has to be educated in order to develop a memory, one that lasts, against the natural active impulse toward forgetting. He needs a memory so that he can remember—to fulfill a promise, for example. Debt, law, all this follows from the necessity of creating a man who can remember through force. Early man has to be painfully marked on his body by these apostles of cruelty so that his soul can be beaten and remoulded into shape. It is the acculturation of man over each generation that means that less and less overt and physical forms of cruelty are required.

Nietzsche’s “memetics” is a thoroughly materialist one, which does not begin with culture taken in abstraction and isolation, but in terms of various institutions, practices, rituals which form inscriptions on the body of men, with a cruelty that has slackened. It is these inscriptions that are the analogues of individual memes, and it is by means of this apparatus that they can reproduce themselves from generation to generation¹. This is certainly a very pre-modern, or even pre-historic memetics, where culture cannot be so easily torn into small bits which can replicate freely like image macros. Rather, these memes are tightly bound to particular geographic locales, traditions, and practices.

Assmann continues in a rather Nietzschean mode discussing the various rituals of collective memory, where the explicit mutilation of the body has softened into rigid ritual (we can still however talk about inscriptions, insofar as these rituals have a material base). Many of these rituals might perhaps be unknown to Nietzsche, like the neo-Assyrian Sarsaru ritual (which was supposed to inculcate in various subjects and vassals the memory of the oath made to the new king Ashurbanipal), the Osage festivals and the Osiris mystery-cults. It is not necessary that the original intention of these rituals of memory can be remembered (it is quite possible that the ritual itself survives, the memory being the memory of the ritual, with the origin-myth of the ritual confabulated by later subjects).

The ultimate fact about rituals like this is that for Nietzsche this creates the man as the creature who remembers (Homo memoria?) There is no memetics without memory, especially memory that does not reproduce itself from one generation to the next, which does not become autonomous and imposes itself, instead of existing passively². It is the material and institutional basis of this memory, split into inscription and ritual, that Nietzsche is sensitive to, including the need for cruelty. To hurt is to remember.

Gabriel Tarde is a man who has been almost completely excised from intellectual history. Perhaps this comes down to the stature of his great opponent, Émile Durkheim. To us, of course, Durkheim is the great founder of sociology, forming its Holy Trinity with Karl Marx and Max Weber. Sociology as a positivist social science, as an institution and a discipline, is founded by Durkheim (he was, of course, the first professor of sociology in France), its method given in works like his 1895 Les Règles de la méthode sociologique [The Rules of Sociological Method].

Durkheim began with the social, with society as a whole, which has laws, norms of its own, which was bitterly critiqued by Gabriel Tarde, who begins with a kind of social physics. This perhaps might have come from his background in criminology. The twin forces he considers are imitation and innovation. Ideas, habits, beliefs, actions, all spread through imitation, consciously and unconsciously, voluntarily and involuntarily. Tarde’s sociology, instead of beginning top-down from constituted societies, is concerned with the formation of collectives, (perhaps even of non-humans, of stars and planets, as the neo-Tardean sociologist Bruno Latour pointed out³) formed by their links, liaisons. It is this bottom-up approach that makes him approach memetics.

Unfortunately I have been scooped by Paul Marsden at the LSE on Tarde as a forefather of memetics⁴. (I hope I had not unconsciously imitated him, but I welcome you to imitate, consciously, the both of us.) Tarde’s work in books like the 1890 Les lois de l'imitation [The Laws of Imitation] covers the self-propagation of innovation through imitation in a society. Individuals imitate innovations that are useful to them, and tend to imitate those who are superior to them. To imitate is to be part of a society⁵.

Here, we have quite a modern account of memetics, with very definite “logical” and “extra-logical” laws. There are innovations (new memes) produced through re-combinations of existing imitations (memes), which propagate themselves to the extent that they fit their (social) environment. And imitation is modulated by individual desires and social status differentials. What makes this, in my opinion, superior to Dawkinsian memetics, is how it foregrounds the individual as being able to make a choice about imitation, and the meme itself as being concretized in a particular innovation, instead of being diffuse and vague. It’s certainly in my view more rigorous as an account of social diffusion.

It is therefore a disappointment that Gabriel Tarde has been forgotten so much today. Luckily for us, the Tarde revival began with the work of Gilles Deleuze, and more recently by the late Bruno Latour, presenting a neo-Tardean sociology named ‘actor-network theory’. Latour’s work is almost certainly incredibly useful as a toolbox and a method for those interested in doing “memetics” today.

Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis? Here I very deliberately move onto one of Freud’s much lesser known works, his very last work, the 1939 Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion [Moses and Monotheism]. It was written on his deathbed, under the specter of the Nazis. It has been overshadowed by the controversy of its thesis, especially for the believers of the three great Abrahamic religions. From a historical point of view, the thesis is found lacking, both by modern Egyptologists and specialists in the history of Judaism.

Freud’s claims are that Moses was not born a Hebrew slave but was actually born in an Egyptian household, and that he was a priest of the pharaoh Akhenaten. It was Akhenaten who attempted a religious revolution, through the introduction of a quasi-monotheistic religion around the sun-god Aten. He was purged from Egyptian history in a damnatio memoriae, forgotten until 19th century Egyptologists rediscovered him. Freud uses him to “explain” where Jewish monotheism comes from. This monotheistic Egyptian Moses is said to have led his followers out of Egypt, and was later killed by them. The followers of Moses later joined up with a Midianite tribe, and then later spun up a biography of Moses by conflating the Egyptian Moses and that of a Midianite priest, who they also gave the name of Moses.

What is the relationship between this odd and almost certainly wrong theory and memetics? It comes from Freud’s curious psychoanalytical reasoning that comes afterward. Freud supposes that a few centuries later, the rebels would have come to regret the murder of Moses, the Egyptian Moses, and repressed the fact of this primal murder. This repressed, collective guilt, Freud claims, has been passed down, generation to generation, to the present day, causing neurotic symptoms in Jewish people⁶.

In Moses the Egyptian (1997), Jan Assmann relates Moses and Monotheism to the tradition of the mnemohistory of Moses and Egypt in the West. Mnemohistory is the study of the past as remembered, as memory (what Assmann sometimes calls “cultural memory”), not as history. We know, of course, that despite the occasional Egyptian color, like the name of Moses himself, the events of Exodus cannot have historically happened in the same way that the Bible presents it. What Assmann points out is that we do not have to treat Moses and Monotheism as a (failed) attempt at a historical account, but as the analysis of a particular inherited memory, as an archive of traces, which for Freud is manifest in both the neurotic symptoms faced by Jewish people and in anti-Semitism.

For this, Freud ends up enjoining us to see a cultural inheritance that is passed down as repression, as a blank in an archive. Freud himself sees this in a quasi-Lamarckian, quasi-biologistic way, but obviously we do not have to go that far. Freud distinguishes forgetting and repression on this basis. Both do not speak of some x, but forgetting abandons its object, while repression retains and intensifies it, allowing it to become the locus of repetition and various symptomatic responses, giving it a great deal of psychic power. Freud’s innovation comes in his scale transition from individual psychology to a collective psychology, with tradition and memory standing in for conscious memory and repressed memory respectively. Tradition is passed down overtly, and if it was merely so, it is something that someone could think about, nitpick, critique, and it certainly would not have the staying power that it has. It is however the unconscious, repressed side of memory that gives what is repressed, the power to bring you under its spell, such that it can persist and continue to exist. (This is how Freud explains the persistence of monotheism in Judaism, and the integrity of Judaism itself, because it is the repression of the murder that constitutes the Jews as a people founded by Moses) Freud ends up bringing out a powerful memetics of forgetting and repression that we have not really come to understand yet, by showing the active special power of the meme to act through the facility of the unconscious. Crypts are equally able to pass down, and perhaps we should expand the notion of meme to include them.

Of all the authors I have mentioned, it is Jacques Monod who is the most Dawkinsian. Perhaps this is because of his being a biologist like Dawkins is. Monod won the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, with François Jacob (more on him in the next section) and André Lwoff “for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis”. Wikipedia goes on to claim that his influence extends to Daniel Dennett, Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky and (of course) Richard Dawkins⁷.

He shares his preoccupations with Dawkins: the defeat of the twin evils of vitalism and animism (Plato, Hegel, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Spencer and Marx come under this umbrella according to him). This is through showing how teleonomy (the appearance of teleology) can come about in the absence of a teleological process. All this appears in his 1970 book Hasard et la Nécessité [Chance and Necessity], which would be translated into English in 1971.

The last chapter of Chance and Necessity, “The Kingdom and the Darkness”, sets forward the scientific ethics that Monod sees as being implied by science, and even here, Monod is not too dissimilar from Dawkins. It is in this chapter that the crown jewel is presented, in the section titled “the selection of ideas”. I can now let Monod speak in his own words.

For a biologist it is tempting to draw a parallel between the evolution of ideas and that of the biosphere. For while the abstract kingdom stands at a yet greater distance above the biosphere than the latter does above the nonliving universe, ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role⁸.

He goes on to analyze the “performance value” of an idea and its “spreading power” and culminates in the human need for a “complete system”, expressed in the philosophical systems of Plato, Hegel and Marx. He describes an ethic of knowledge which is less important here. The entire apparatus of memetics is here, except for the “meme” as the analog of the gene as the minimum unit of cultural reproduction⁹.

Interestingly, it is this portion of Monod’s project that the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser set out to criticize. Althusser was part of the “scientific moment” of French philosophy in the 1960s, when it was concerned with issues of epistemology and science, drawing on French epistemologists like Gaston Bachelard, who are very different from Anglo-American and analytic philosophers of science.

Althusser’s project broke through in collaborative works like Pour Marx [For Marx] and Lire le Capital [Reading Capital], both in 1965, to go back to the text of Marx to read him as a scientist, against Hegelian, humanist and even Stalinist distortions of him. While Althusser’s philosophy was in flux, the existence of distinctions between science and ideology, materialism and idealism, are important to him. It is with this context that we should look at his 1967 seminar Philosophie et philosophie spontanée des savants [Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of Scientists]¹⁰. In the fourth and last session (presented as an appendix in publication), Althusser goes into a close reading of a text of Monod—not Chance and Necessity—but a kind of précis of it in Monod’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, published by Le Monde on 30 November 1967.¹¹

I have to proceed slowly and haltingly here, because while Althusser presents a sober and serious reading of Monod, I am only cursorily familiar with Althusser’s work in general. I will have to be a little touch-and-go and I cannot cover and do justice to all of Althusser’s argumentation. Any slip here is probably mine, and not Althusser’s. Moreover, his reading is obviously linked to his Marxism, and Monod’s anti-Marxist socialism, and I certainly cannot assume the reader’s sympathy for Marxism, so I will pursue this reading to the extent that there is an “immanent” critique and not touch on political points.

Nevertheless it is actually Althusser’s Marxism that puts him very close to Monod and makes him appreciate Monod’s scientific work, to the extent of finding Monod crucial for a scientific Marxism (I will leave this behind). This comes from Althusser and Monod’s shared anti-teleological orientation and suspicion of the mystification of the dialectic. His is what Monod’s scientific work and his organization of the scientific facts: the discovery of DNA, the concepts of teleonomy & heredity, the transformation of old concepts like evolution & finality and the rejection of old philosophical theories like vitalism.

He goes on to analyze and praise the materialist and even dialectical component of Monod’s “spontaneous philosophy of science”, which he calls Element 1. This is because of Monod’s rejection of Teilhardian finality, especially as an account of the origin of life, instead subsuming the emergence of life to chance, and because he comes up with a scientific concept of emergence that applies to biology. Against Monod, who associates dialectical materialism with the most frightful kind of metaphysics that we see in someone like Lysenko (which, to be fair, is also Althusser’s enemy), Monod’s scientific work is in line with what he considers “dialectical materialism”.

It is Element 2 of his spontaneous philosophy of science that Althusser puts down as extra-scientific and idealist (as compared to Element 1, which is inseparable from scientific work and therefore intra-scientific). It is in Monod’s espousal of memetics that Althusser sees the work of the idealist Element 2. Monod, who rejects Teilhard in the realm of science, takes up the Teilhardian term “noosphere”, when speaking of memetics. Althusser considers him introducing spiritualistic and mechanistic elements here (both of which he considers idealist), in the talk of the noosphere and the mechanical application of genuine materialist scientific concepts from the biosphere to the noosphere. For Althusser, it does not help Monod’s case that he goes so far as to claim that language created man. Moreover, for Monod it is the immaterial noosphere, not the materiality of social conditions of experience, that end up as the base of history.

Althusser’s critique of Monod’s extra-scientific use of “emergence” is instructive. Monod’s definition is as follows: “Emergence is the property of reproducing and multiplying highly complex ordered structures and of permitting the evolutionary creation of structures of increasing complexity.”¹² In biology, Monod uses this concept to show why there are living systems if there is no living matter, and this is based on the material support of DNA. In memetics, however, Monod involves emergence whenever something new occurs, like a deus ex machina. And a concept that can explain everything ultimately explains nothing, says Althusser in effect. (Though this sounds like Popper, this is actually Hegel’s critique of Schelling he refers to.)

Monod’s definition of emergence in biology involves the reproduction of existing systems and the creation of the new, including systems of higher complexity. In biology the two are coupled together, with the production of more complex systems depending on the pre-existent reproduction of organisms. This is missed by Monod in the extra-scientific sphere, claims Althusser. Althusser’s problem with Monod is the bald application of scientific concepts like emergence, but also natural selection and chance, outside of biology in a messy and un-rigorous fashion. Monod however, writing in Chance and Necessity, does not seem to understand the thrust of Althusser’s critique, seeing it as a claim that Monod’s scientific work is idealist and not materialist.¹³ From what we have seen what Althusser has written, this is plainly not the case.

To what extent is Althusser’s critique on point? I skip the discussion on world-views, theories of history, the dispute over Marxism. As a critique of Monod it seems to me on track, especially since Monod sees fit to even re-introduce finalism when it comes to history, as we can see in the last chapter of Chance and Necessity, despite his thorough critique of teleology in biology. I suspect that Dawkins would fall for many of the same critiques. Is it possible to have a memetics that does not fall prey to this problem? That is an open question.

To speak of “memetics” is to identity, or propose as a hypothesis, an isomorphism between nature and culture. Usually, it relates the two as explanans and explanandum respectively, where culture is said to be explained by means of nature, and therefore subsumed under it. Obviously this appeals to those of a more scientistic cast and tenor.

This is why it is surprising to see a similar argument being made in Jacques Derrida’s 1975–1976 seminar La vie la mort [Life Death], delivered at the Paris École Normale Supérieure (ENS Paris), for students taking the agrégation de philosophie exams. These unusual discussions are sparked by Derrida’s unusual choice of text, François Jacob’s La logique du vivant [The Logic of Life]. Jacob, as we have seen earlier, was a Nobel Prize-winning biologist, and he came up with the notion of messenger RNA. Derrida discusses this popular-science work of Jacob alongside texts by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Hegel, even Freud’s Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond The Pleasure Principle].

The topic of the seminar is the relation between the terms la vie and la mort, life and death, a logic that would not oppose or identify the two terms, This leads into a very perceptive reading of Jacob and modern genetics, which in my opinion is of interest to scientists, too.¹⁴ However, I will not be going into this discussion of Jacob here.¹⁵

From the point of view of memetics, the significant part is Derrida’s account of the “program” and “reproduction” in Jacob. Jacob says that there are two types of memory, the genetic and the cerebral. Nature and culture. Both can be thought of as the transmission of a given program. Genetic memory is rigid and cannot learn (hence why there is no transmission of acquired characteristics), while cerebral memory has a much greater degree of flexibility. There is nevertheless an analogy between the two kinds of memory, which is why Jacob can use institutional metaphors like “teaching” when it comes to genetics. This is why Derrida can say, “Now since there are certain “analogies,” this again is Jacob’s word, between the two systems, that of genetic memory and that of mental memory (brain, thought, language), the intuitive analogy—and thus all the genetico-institutional metaphorics—has some legitimacy.”¹⁶ Both involve the transmission of programs, a rigid transmission of programs and a more flexible transmission of programs.

It is, seemingly, the flexible system (brain, thought, language), the one that would be more naturally compared to the pedagogical institution, that has a relation to its outside and registers its effects; it is porous, susceptible to the influences of history and of the politico-economic field. The other program, on the contrary, the genetic, is completely closed off to all this, repeating, like a parroting scholasticism, the internal prescription.¹⁷

Derrida however argues that there is a dis-analogy between the genetic logic and the cerebral-institutional logic, from the point of view of the humanities. This is not by claiming that the worlds of nature and culture have to be separated by an even greater gulf, that genetics and institutions are too different, but by showing that both genetic memory and cerebral memory have the same logic, with the difference between them being a difference of degree (a degree of flexibility), not of kind. It must be remembered that in 1975, Derrida (as is the rest of French thought) was still under the shadow of the structuralism that took the human sciences (linguistics, anthropology, literary criticism and so on) by storm.

Structuralism takes an anti-humanist perspective that asserts the primacy of structures (especially those that can be expressed in a formal manner) over consciousness. The origin was in the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralist linguistics, analyzing language as a formal system of differential elements. This caused a renaissance in France, beginning with the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. It was the bridge between the human scientists and the new sciences like cybernetics; several of those involved like Michel Serres were trained in mathematics, while the great mathematician André Weil contributed a mathematical treatment of Lévi-Strauss’ structural kinship structures. It is the proximity of structuralism to both science and the humanities which is perhaps why Derrida evokes it.

Instead of taking this rather easy and well-trodden path, I would like to ask in particular about the consequences or the implications of the fact that, at the very moment he opposes the genetic program to the “mental” program (of language or of thought, and so for us of the cultural institution), at the very moment he opposes the genetic program to the institutional program, the process, language, and topos of Jacob’s discourse describing the genetic program are the very ones with which, today, a certain modernity marked by psychoanalysis, linguistics, and a certain Marxism describes the functioning of institutional programs, academic ones in particular.¹⁸

The structures of the human sciences do not have conscious authorship (a language, for example, as it exists in its variations, has not been dictated by someone). These function as programs with a given set of relations to particular social relations and to other programs, and create a number of effects in their functioning. From the humanistic point of view, these characteristics, which are reminiscent of those applied by Jacob to genetic memory, apply to cerebral memory.

This is especially true for educational institutions like the École Normale Supérieure which Derrida is teaching at. As Dawne McCance points out, Derrida was teaching at ENS as an agrégé-répétiteur and that “Derrida’s position as a “repeater” at the state-controlled ENS required him, at least ostensibly, to conform his teaching to a program that was delivered “from on high” every year.” ¹⁹ The logic of reproduction functions both in biology and in pedagogy, as the repetition and the self-reproduction of the same, being concerned with the transmission of “instructions”, in Jacob’s language. And in genetic and cerebral memory both, the operation of repetition includes a contingent element, an intervention that would come from without (in biology, this is mutation). Nevertheless, both programs resist interventions from without.

It is the sterile reproduction-repetition of the same that is equivalent to death, both for the institution and the living organism. But a pure proliferation of differences is incompatible with life, too. Consider cancer as a consequence of uncontrolled mutation. Nevertheless, difference is irreducible as that which poses a risk and nevertheless is required for the program to function, whether it be the institution or the organism.

While Derrida’s focus is on the educational institution, there is no reason that the analysis cannot be extended to other institutions in society, and to society as a whole. There are surely other sites of reproduction-repetition too. Derrida’s attempt in Life Death is to draw out as much as possible the isomorphism of structure between the logic of genetics and that of culture, the latter which with some renewed justification we can call memetics.

What makes Derria different from memetics is his focus on institution, and reproduction of a program as a whole (ergo, he is concerned with the analogue not of individual genes but of the genome, what in memetics is the memeplex). He is less interested in the spread of memes like viruses but rather the transmission of a bound set of instructions and the variations and flexibility of this operation. This leads him, in this work and others, to be able to give an account of the counter-institution, which would introduce flexibility and suppleness to the mechanical repetition of the institution. The most important, in my opinion, is that Derrida is able to rigorously work out the hypothesis of the isomorphism of genetics and culture, not from the side of science but from the side of the humanities (contrasting with most memeticists including Dawkins himself.)

So far, I have worked out in detail various “memetic” theories that can be found in our cast of characters: Friedrich Nietzsche, Gabriel Tarde, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Monod (and his critique by Louis Althusser) and Jacques Derrida. With the exception of Monod, all these figures are humanists, not scientists, and therefore come to accounts of culture which are quite different from those invented by STEM-educated memeticists. My hope is that by posing their problems and work in terms of memetics, that the stakes of their projects can be made manifest, and that it just might be able to re-found memetics on Nietzschean, Tardean or Derridean forms. I also hope that there is here are useful critiques of memetics, especially in the post-Dawkinsian form here, hence my exposition in detail of Althusser’s critique of Monod’s memetics.