The Church of Meme is a newfangled religion due any day now. The meme of its title, however, is not the classic “unit of cultural transmission” proposed by Dawkins and neo-Darwinian memeticists. As a unit of "cultural" transmission - versus the gene, a unit of "natural" transmission - the meme relies on some pre-existing separation of nature and culture, a separation I reject. Instead, the “meme” is here retooled as a pattern of meaning embodied in the world around us. We humans encompass the meme only inasmuch, say, as we encompass the gene - and according to Richard Dawkins' excellent science fiction book, The Selfish Gene, it is genes (or, in this case, memes) who are actually running the show. The meme, then, is not a vision I have, but one that I inhabit: it is, in short, a god, worshipped through ritual transmission and transmutation by humans and nonhumans alike.
Inspired by my work on sf religion, the Church of Meme proposes a meta-religion, one that self-consciously riffs off the histories of categories like religion, magic, and science. Drawing on the classic Euro-American Christian prototype for religion – with its monotheistic, evangelical, and salvational biases – the Church of Meme also assumes functions generally relegated, nowadays, to the political and secular. But then, the nation-state has always been a magical and religious enterprise; examples range from the divine right of kings through the history of Christianity since Constantine, from National Socialism to contemporary U.S. theocracy. Indeed, the Enlightenment separation of Church and State, of the religious and the secular, is little more than wishful thinking: the religious, artificially separated from the social, the cultural, the scientific, and the political, nonetheless thrives in the hidden Utopian urges of all these categories. To what end? Well, camouflaging transcendental or eschatological goals under the mantle of the secular is, of course, the name of the game - witness George W. or, indeed, "intelligent design".
Founded in the recent future, the Church of Meme offers a revolutionary political theology adapted to a post 9-11 world. Less a unit of cultural transmission than a pattern of material-semiotic meaning, the meme is a new god for a new era. As recent events make clear, the separation of Church and State never took place. The meme, imbued with its own tricky agency, is a central player in that science-fictional, speculative-factual space James Der Derian calls the MIME: the military-industrial-media-entertainment complex. But the meme that can be known is not the true meme. A veritable god of the gaps, the Church of Meme meme makes intelligent design and other crackpot propaganda campaigns look like child’s play. In short, the Church of Meme offers elsewheres to contest the cancerous growth of MIME rhetoric: it is a constructivist, anarchist, youtopian “merger” of the always-already merged categories of religion, politics, science and culture.
