On memes, mimetic desire, and why it's always that deep

> 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?”

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.

> 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.

> Because we often lack the tools to challenge these structural problems at their root through collective action (...) we tend to interpret these structural problems through a purely individual, moralistic lens.

Isn't that the other way around? We lack those tools because we, as social apes, govern and influence each others via the shortcuts of feelings (symbols and morality are quicker than knowledge).

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.

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.

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.

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.

I like trains

René 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 pólemos—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.

-----------

René 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.