3 April 2009: "Carles Presents MEME: a Blog Post on HIPSTERRUNOFF.com"

This post is about the Other. Or in other words, it is about words, about the mediation of language that separates us from the Real. That is to say, it is about the transcendental signifier which is not itself made up of significations. It is about finding the Archimedian point from which one can use a lever to move the world.

Carles translates this quest into his preferred nomenclature, shifting the semiotic analysis from the study of phonemes and signifiers to the study of memes, truncated and perhaps liberated units of meaning, a pure ecstasy of meaning, infinitely varied and eminently quantifiable at the same time. By creating what he calls a meme, but which Leibniz would have called a monad, Carles risk falling into a perpetually tautological discourse, but this is only to expose the sense in which all our discourse is always already tautological, and how meaning in its ultimate and fully resolved essence, always manages to elude us. Carles evokes the meme to end all memes, the transcendental meme which would authorize and guarantee the sense of all the others, but realizes, naturally that such a meme is not possible:

What happens if 1 meme changed everything we once knew about memes, changing the way that we meme, and shattering pre-existing notions of memery? Is the world ready for this meme? So many memes–but when can a meme be more than ‘just another meme in the meme economy’?

The answer lies in the movement of the trace. The meme economy is precisely that movement of meaning among memes, not in an ontology of a meme as such.

So his concluding question is more of a rhetorical taunt than a challenge: "Carles asks: Can 1 meme …change the world?" The answer is plain. One meme in isolation can achieve nothing, would not even be recognizable as a meme. All memes rely on their supplement to become legible. The meme is only epistimologically salient after it has been exposed, discredited, revealed to be nothing but an old meme. Perhaps Carles warns us of identifying ourselves and reducing ourselves to such a meme.