In reading this beautifully written entry, I couldn’t help casting myself back to my undergraduate days, reading The Selfish Gene, being excited by its logic, but also repelled, not least when I encountered Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid. Nowadays, the digital meme seems to have more in common with Deleuzian involution than Dawkins’s cultural evolution. The focus seems to be on the unit that does the moving – on its heady promiscuity and ready transformation. In reading about what used to be called gene transfer technology, countering the narrative optimism of genetic advance was the argument that bodies were set up to combat invasive genes. I don’t want to suggest that stable memes jump across bits of society viewed as functionalist bodies, but I do want to ask how are we to think about the collective units (they can be more or less cogent) which memes move into and through, demarcate and change, are absorbed by, are reconfigured in, and are ejected from? Tarde and Latour might be guides here.

Mike Michael