[HN Gopher] On memes, mimetic desire, and why it's always that deep
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On memes, mimetic desire, and why it's always that deep
Author : lawrenceyan
Score : 39 points
Date : 2025-06-19 22:23 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (caitlynclark.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (caitlynclark.substack.com)
| 57473m3n7Fur7h3 wrote:
| > Of the poor image, Steyerl wrote:
|
| > it's really that deep is a reader-supported publication so i
| can keep it ad-free and bullshit-free. consider becoming a paid
| subscriber to support! <3
|
| Had to read this five times before I realized that it was just a
| poorly placed call to action, and not the quote itself. The quote
| follows right after, hah.
|
| I'm on mobile, and it was confusing because of that. On desktop
| it's a lot more visible that this is not the quote.
| Apreche wrote:
| > The issue is that people become incapable of interrogating why
| we enjoy what we enjoy. Thinking critically about something is
| somehow synonymous with a moral condemnation of that thing.
|
| This is something I have been thinking about for many years. I am
| always introspecting and trying to understand why I am the way I
| am. Why do I enjoy what I enjoy. When making assessments I
| strictly separate moral judgements, from judgements of quality,
| and from personal taste. I find it very difficult to have
| meaningful conversations about even basic things, like books or
| movies, because most people don't seem to even understand how to
| answer the question "why do you like it?"
| card_zero wrote:
| If you tell somebody that they like pink bows because yadda
| yadda overconsumption capitalism socialism, that's a personal
| attack: you're co-opting their enjoyment and insisting they're
| involved with "the system". If you procede to tell them that
| you were criticizing "the system" and that they just don't
| understand that it's not a personal attack, that's another
| personal attack, because now you're calling them stupid. Trying
| to get agreement that these are objective observations is like
| saying "just agree that I'm right about you". Their only option
| to resist is to engage on the same "deep" level, at which point
| they've already lost and conceded that it's all about
| overconsumption capitalism socialism or at least some similar
| shit.
| chownie wrote:
| "why do you like this?" != telling someone why they like said
| thing, this is basically entirely off topic
| koakuma-chan wrote:
| > most people don't seem to even understand how to answer the
| question "why do you like it?"
|
| And how do I answer this kind of question?
| Apreche wrote:
| It depends how far you dig. Let's say there's a movie you
| enjoy. First a person can describe how it made them feel
| overall. Then they can identify which characteristics and
| components of the film made them feel a certain way. What was
| it about those various aspects that caused those feelings?
| Which parts of the experience were the result of the
| craftsmanship of the work in question and which parts come
| from the eye of the beholder?
|
| At that point you have to kind of stop digging. Repeatedly
| asking why will always lead to a psychological or biological
| explanation, which is too reductive to be relevant.
| g-r-a-y-d wrote:
| I like trains
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| If it's any solace, deep rooted individualism is not surviving
| prosperity induced demographic collapse. The mindset has
| experienced a 75% drop in pair bonding and will not propagate
| into the future beyond 2070.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| These kinds of deep dives into superficially trivial aspects of
| modern life can be interesting and, in some ways, healthy. But
| they are also just exhausting if you consume (or produce) too
| many of them.
|
| Most of the things being dissected and critically analysed here
| are popular precisely because they don't demand too much thought
| to engage with in the first place. Being forced to consider the
| political or philosophical root causes of your enjoyment of cat
| memes just turns them from cheap laughs into hard work and saps
| the enjoyment out of them. You might end up more enlightened but
| you will probably also end up less happy.
|
| IMO it's good that there is a blog out there putting out these
| kinds of analyses, so that people can visit it when that's the
| kind of thing they're after, and not visit it when it's not. The
| problem is people either over-consuming this content themselves
| in a manner similar to doom-scrolling, or having the content
| forced on them by people who want to shoe-horn these topics into
| every conversation.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _You might end up more enlightened but you will probably also
| end up less happy._
|
| Ignorance is bliss. Keep smiling peasant, you don't want to
| risk your bliss by knowing that you're bound for the Soylent
| Green factory or that everybody in power and business plays you
| for a foul
| im3w1l wrote:
| This but unironically. In the movie no one was killed for the
| purpose of being turned into soylent green, they just used
| bodies of people who were dead anyway. I remember thinking
| that it's not such a big deal compared to all the other
| misery in that movie, and that ignorance was bliss in that
| respect.
|
| I don't fully remember the movie anymore, but there were many
| other things that were much worse that actually happened on
| an ongoing basis and leading to people suffering. Like the
| poverty.
| olooney wrote:
| Individual water molecules don't do much thinking either, but
| fluid dynamics is still an interesting and useful subject of
| study.
|
| If people seem to be putting considerable effort trying to
| understand such trivial things as memes, perhaps it's because
| they realize they are standing ankle deep in a rising flood and
| wish to avoid being swept away.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Rene Girard - The One By Whome Scandal Comes
|
| The Platonist ontology of imitation and the philosophical and
| psychological conception that, following Aristotle, limits
| imitation to external behaviors, to ways of acting or speaking,
| must therefore be rejected. In both cases, the essential point is
| evaded. Modern romantic philosophy despises imitation, and the
| nearer one comes to the present the more pronounced this scorn
| becomes. Oddly, it is based on the supposed inability of
| imitators to challenge their models. Mimeticism is supposed to be
| a renunciation of true individuality, with the result that the
| individual is beaten down by "others" and forced to yield to the
| common opinion.
|
| Passive, submissive imitation does exist, but hatred of
| conformity and extreme individualism are no less imitative. Today
| they constitute a negative conformism that is more formidable
| than the positive version. More and more, it seems to me, modern
| individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact
| that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will
| upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often
| despises.
|
| When we imitate others, as it is usually said, we are being
| unfaithful to ourselves. The outstanding characteristic of
| imitators is not violence; it is passivity, herd behavior. This
| is what I call the romantic lie, which in the twentieth century
| was most famously described by Martin Heidegger. In Being and
| Time, the "inauthentic" self is identical with the "they" (das
| Man) of collective irresponsibility. Passive and conformist
| imitation abandons the struggle to affirm one's true personality.
| It is opposed to the authentic self of the philosopher himself,
| who has no fear of going to war against adversaries who are
| worthy of him, in the Heracleitean spirit of polemos--the
| violence that is "father of all and king of all." Struggle and
| conflict are seen as proofs of authenticity, of a will to power
| in the Nietzschean sense of the term.
|
| I maintain that passion and desire are never authentic in the
| Heideggerean sense. They do not emerge from the depths of our
| being; we always borrow them from others. Far from seeing
| conflict as a sign of mastery, as Heidegger does, we must see it
| as exactly the opposite, a confirmation of the mimetic nature of
| our desires.
|
| Individualists, as all of us imagine ourselves to be, have the
| impression that they no longer imitate anyone once they have
| forcibly overcome their model. Far from being incompatible with
| imitation, Heracleitean violence is an idealized version of
| mimetic rivalry. A more penetrating critical eye detects in it
| the romantic lie of which I just spoke.
|
| -----------
|
| Rene Girard - Deceit, Desire & the Novel
|
| In The Past Recaptured Proust emphasizes that self-centeredness
| is a barrier to novelistic creation. Proustian self-centeredness
| gives rise to imitation and makes us live outside ourselves. This
| self-centeredness is other-centeredness as well; it is not one-
| sided egotism; it is an impulse in two contradictory directions
| which always ends by tearing the individual apart. To triumph
| over self-centeredness is to get away from oneself and make
| contact with others but in another sense it also implies a
| greater intimacy with oneself and a withdrawal from others. A
| self-centered person thinks he is choosing himself but in fact he
| shuts himself out as much as others. Victory over self-
| centeredness allows us to probe deeply into the Self and at the
| same time yields a better knowledge of Others. At a certain depth
| there is no difference between our own secret and the secret of
| Others. Everything is revealed to the novelist when he penetrates
| this Self, a truer Self than that which each of us displays. This
| Self imitates constantly, on its knees before the mediator.
|
| This profound Self is also a universal Self. The dialectic of
| metaphysical pride alone can help us understand and accept
| Proust's attempt to reconcile the particular and universal. In
| the context of the romantic's mechanical opposition between Self
| and Others, such an attempt would be absurd.
|
| This logical absurdity no doubt struck Proust and he occasionally
| gives up his attempt at reconciliation and slips back into the
| cliches of twentieth-century romanticism. In a few isolated
| passages of The Past Recaptured he declares that the work of art
| must permit us to grasp our "difef rences" and makes us delight
| in our "originality."
|
| These scattered passages are the result of Proust's lack of a
| theoretic vocabulary. But the attempt at logical coherence is
| quickly swept away by inspiration. Proust knew that in describing
| his own youth he was describing ours as well. He knew that the
| true artist no longer has to choose between himself and Others.
| Because it is born of renunciation, great novelistic art loses
| nothing and regains everything.
|
| But this renunciation is very painful. The novelist can write his
| novel only if he recognizes that his mediator is a person like
| himself. Marcel, for example, has to give up considering his
| beloved a monstrous divinity and seeing himself in the role of an
| eternal victim. He has to recognize that his beloved's lies are
| similar to his own.
|
| This victory over a self-centeredness which is other-centered,
| this renunciation of fascination and hatred, is the crowning
| moment of novelistic creation. Therefore it can be found in all
| the great novelists. Every novelist sees his similarity to the
| fascinating Other through the voice of his hero. Mme de la
| Fayette recognizes her similarity to the women for whom love has
| been their undoing. Stendhal, the enemy of hypocrites, recognizes
| at the end of The Red and the Black that he is also a hypocrite.
| Dostoyevsky, in the conclusion of Crime and Punishment, gives up
| seeing himself alternately as a superhuman and as a subhuman. The
| novelist recognizes that he is guilty of the sin of which he is
| accusing his mediator. The curse which Oedipus hurls at Others
| falls on his own head.
|
| This is the meaning of Flaubert's famous cry: "Mme Bovary, c'est
| moil" Flaubert first conceived Mme Bovary as that despicable
| Other whom he had sworn to deal with.
| blamestross wrote:
| Memes are well labeled. A semantic compression of an entire
| sentiment. The pinnacle of communication by compressed
| experiential and cultural context.
|
| And humans like compressed communication, makes them feel warm
| fuzzy and agentic when they can take in a external-coded token
| and decompress it into a bunch of internal-coded tokens.
| strken wrote:
| The "just let people enjoy things" trope always seems, to me, to
| be used when someone can tell that an argument is wrong but can't
| explain exactly why.
|
| In this case, I think the author's rhetorical toolkit can be used
| to criticise pretty much anything. Women wearing pink bows today
| are doing it because of capitalist repression turning them into
| kids; yesterday, overly professional workplace attire was because
| capitalism wanted to make everyone homogeneous; tomorrow, any new
| trends in women's fashion will inevitably turn out to be caused
| by capitalism.
|
| And yeah, capitalism is a big motivating force behind everything,
| but because it's behind _everything_ you can use the same
| critique for _anything_. The casual observer can tell that this
| argument is bullshit, but can 't quite explain why, and hence
| just wants to be allowed to enjoy things. Few people are willing
| to argue they should just be allowed to enjoy conflict diamonds
| or chattel slavery or anything which has genuine reasons to be
| attacked.
| shayway wrote:
| I enjoy the kind of analysis the author talks about, and also see
| the anti-intellectualism among younger folks. I too have felt
| disconnected from the many people who aren't interested in taking
| a deeper look into things.
|
| But when posts like these are making the case for intellectualism
| I can't really blame people for finding it distasteful. The
| author gives a moral argument for why one should engage in
| critical analysis, but that's weak; there are far more morally
| just and productive things to do with one's limited time and
| effort than analyze TikTok trends, and also, people do just need
| some room for lighthearted fun. People don't engage with memes
| because they think it's righteous, so to say they shouldn't
| because _that 's_ righteous doesn't make a lot of sense.
|
| I think the best argument to be made for looking deeper into
| things is that it's _fun_. Learning is fun, analyzing is fun,
| understanding how things work is fun. I particularly like this
| tweet from the post:
|
| > "let people enjoy things" ok i enjoy critical analysis and
| being a hater
|
| I believe the perception of so-called intellectualism as
| something relegated to those with the time, effort and
| convictions to engage with it does far more to repel people than
| attract them. The case may be that it helps fight consumerism and
| whatnot, but that should arise naturally as a result of
| curiosity; curiosity with a goal kinda misses the point of
| curiosity. So while I disagree with this:
|
| > We can -- in fact, we must -- interrogate the culture and
| society that simultaneously shapes us as we shape it. Otherwise,
| we submit to our own perceived powerlessness to make change.
|
| I strongly agree with this:
|
| > The way to resist anti-intellectualism is not to say that the
| "intellectuals" are a distinct, superior class of educated
| elites, but rather that we are all capable of becoming
| intellectuals ourselves, if we so choose.
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