CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Luong, James |
|---|---|
| Title | Prolegomena to Any Future Memetology |
| Summary | Memes are a form of digital content typically instantiated as static image macros (combinations of images and text) circulated on social media. Memes have been used to tell jokes, parody, influence elections (Diresta 2018), articulate lived experiences (Dahanayake 2018), challenge fiat currency, and instigate pointless debates, among countless other illocutionary purposes. Indeed, memes have enjoyed widespread adoption in myriad & disparate discourse communities on social media. From filmmaking to palaeontology, chess to urban planning (& more), memes have taken the world by storm. & yet, we still don’t understand them. Or, worse, we take them to be the innocuous flotsam of public forums– mere epiphenomena to mainstream discourses that predate the Internet. The objective of this thesis is to carry out an ontological & epistemological analysis of memes. Despite their cultural & political significance, memes have not been the subject of philosophical attention. It is my hope that the present work will motivate further philosophical study of memes & develop points of juncture between disparate philosophical subdisciplines (epistemology, philosophy of art). I will pursue these aims by developing the analysis of memes first, as art, & then, as speech: • Memetic ontology: I begin with an investigation into the ontology of memes qua works of art. I draw upon Wollheim’s type/token framework (1968) from the philosophy of art in order to explicate the dual meanings present in the colloquial usage of the word Ğmemeğ & to build on preceding ontological accounts of memes (Evnine 2018, Vulliamy 2022). By the end, I will show that memes present a genuinely sui generis ontological puzzle. • Memetic epistemology: I draw on the notion of testimony in order to make sense of epistemic interactions involving memes. The resulting concept, memetic testimony, speaks to a largely unrecognised positive epistemic dimension of memes– how memes might be epistemically edifying. • Memetic futures: I conclude by outlining future research directions. |
| Supervisor | Asya Passinsky |
| Department | Philosophy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/luong_ja.pdf |
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