Social Construction and Antimemes
July 2, 2022
Among common complaints about life in the modern world there’s one particular cluster which have by now become so familiar as to border on the banal: that the dynamics of public life are driven by clout-seeking rather than integrity or conviction; that interpersonal relating has become cold and transactional; that countercultural spaces are no less tainted by status games than those they react to; that political and moral life has become a proxy sphere for social signalling and power-play; and so on. More often than not, the sentiment expressed in these woes takes the form of neo-Luddism, as it is often technologies—social media, dating apps, and other mechanisms of marketisation and gamification—among the chief suspects implicated in the decay. Yet these complaints have no particular political affiliation, and have proved appealling to diverse camps.
There’s also a familiar counterpoint, which regards the above line of thought as naive. Lurking behind its assumption that the mediation of social reality by political economies of power or status is an intrinsically bad thing, so the counterpoint goes, is a pernicious myth. This is the myth of a pure, non-alienated form of social reality, one untainted by political economies of any kind. Call this the Nostalgia Trap, at work in both the traditionalist yearning for a fictional past, and in the utopian reverse nostalgia for an idealised future. To reject the Nostalgia Trap is to make the claim that social relations are always mediated by political economies, and that such mediation is indeed an essential aspect of social reality.
As with the position it pushes back against, examples of this view can be found across the left-right axis. Hanzi Freinacht‘s criticism of ‘game denial’ is a clear example. A similar rejection premises the argument made by Nick Land (in part I of The Dark Enlightment) that since power always operates in a society, the best society must be one in which power is maximally formalised via a quantificational medium like money, shares, or tokens, so that at least it will not operate in the shadows. Reaching back further, we find Lyotard in Libidinal Economy accusing Baudrillard of falling prey to the Nostalgia Trap in his concept of symbolic exchange, which Lyotard reads as a semiotically inflected version of the noble savage myth, a futile attempt to locate critique at some Archimedean point outside of capitalist relations by appealling to the ‘purity’ of archaic gift exchange (Lyotard, 1993, p. 105).
But there’s another twist along this road: call it the SNAFU Trap. This further counterpoint argues that those who have been inclined to brandish the Nostalgia Trap have tended to go further than it warrants, often seeming to suggest that the way in which social reality is mediated is uniform across time and culture—that not only is mediation a constitutive aspect of social reality, but that this mediation must always be structured in the same way. So in Land’s argument the question of changing the way in which power circulates is replaced by the question of making its circulation—which is treated as an ahistorical given—as explicit as possible; so in Lyotard the question of changing the structure of capitalist social relations is replaced by that of tapping into intensities on a libidinal place conceived as immanent to but autonomous from those social relations; so in Hanzi it is our growing awareness of these games—these economies of power and status that underpin social reality—that can allow us to play them for the right reasons or for the right stakes, while the game itself remains unchanged in its fundamental form. In short, the SNAFU Trap is where you land when your rejection of the Nostalgia Trap overshoots, when the good insight that social reality is essentially mediated is ossified in the bad assumption that social reality is always mediated in the same way at all times.
How can we avoid both the Nostalgia Trap and the SNAFU Trap? We’ve already said it: we merely need to recognise that while social reality is essentially mediated, the structure of mediation is subject to historical change. If we begin to think like this, then we will see that there is a very easy response Baudrillard can make to Lyotard: the contrast he wants to draw between symbolic exchange and the contemporary economy of sign value is not, as Lyotard takes it, a contrast between an unmediated and a mediated form of social relation (or an unalienated and an alienated form of social reality). It is a contrast between two different structures of mediation. The significance of this point is that it opens the door to a critique of specifically contemporary forms of alienation, while at the same providing a criterion of adequacy which guards against nostalgic fictions. For instance, if we want to argue that the present public sphere has been eroded by clout-seeking dynamics then there is no reason why we can’t make this argument, but to do so we cannot simply compare a space regulated by status games to one that is not—rather, we will have to compare these particular status dynamics with others, showing that the latter contexts support possibilities which are undermined in the former. In other words, what we need is not a theory of a social relation unmediated by economies of clout or prestige, but a theory of the difference between clout and prestige.
To flesh out what’s at stake in all this, I’d like to return to Hanzi Freinacht, and to a particular line of thought that pops out vividly in a fairly recent article called NFT’s Are Flowers of Evil, Yes, But They Can Save The World. This article attempts to articulate a link between the political economy of ideas or symbols and the process of social construction.
This discussion, in turn, shall lead us to an understanding of a more generally pervading principle of sociology: the social construction of reality or social constructionism. Simply put, we have gone from a (Modern) situation in which social construction was mostly unconscious and implicit, to one where it has become understood to a point where it can be hacked (Postmodernity), and we are now entering a cultural situation where it is becoming obvious and apparent, out in the open in all of its absurdity, and can thus be actively harnessed for purposes good and evil (Metamodernity). The genie of social construction is, as it were, out of the bottle for all to see—and for many more of us to use.
A new social game emerges: whoever can make others believe in the value of their tokens, wins. It’s the game of social magic. The game of wizards of social construction. And to increase the value of your tokens, you have to get people to believe that others will believe in it, too, so that their investments will pay off in terms of spiking valuations. The mastery over social construction has risen to the top of the savviest minds—in tech, in finance, in arts, and soon across the field.
Let us first ask: is the claim really that a new social game has emerged? As they write, reality was always socially constructed. What has changed in their view is that in the past it was constructed unconsciously, but during the subsequent transition through postmodernity and then metamodernity this process became increasingly transparent, first to insightful individuals and then to public consciousness. The article argues, essentially, that this awareness of the social construction of reality is an opportunity to take control of it and start deliberately socially constructing a good time. This strategy is striking in that it is distinctively Hanzian, appearing in various guises throughout the project and in embryonic form in earlier writings (such as How to Outcompete Capitalism). It is a bold strategy, it must be said—it also resonates with the actual practices of current cultural elites, and is weirdly underdiscussed among Hanzi readers. In my opinion, it is also wildly misguided.
To see why it is misguided, I think we have to start taking seriously the claim that this newfound transparency has changed the game of social construction into something other than what it was. We should remember, here, that social construction is in the first place a process of construction—which is to say it produces something, this slippery thing we call ‘social reality.’ As such it can succeed or it can fail. It is the idea that rather than our social performances referencing some reality that exists prior to them, it is the social performances themselves which produce the very reality that they have historically presented as the natural truth which is their referent. What is implicit in Hanzi’s argument is that nothing essential has changed when the rules of social performance no longer contain the demand that their product be cloaked in the reified form of a natural referent, i.e. that this will have no effect on the capacity of the performances to successfully construct the realities.
And this is exactly the problem, because if we think about how social construction actually works—about how our performances create realities—it seems that our being unconscious of the process is critical to its success. It is the very fact that the subjects falsely believe the king’s authority to be a divine right that institutes that authority as a practical reality; the moment the subjects become aware that the king possesses power only to the extent they give it to him is precisely the moment at which that power flickers and dissolves. Indeed, this is exactly what we tend to see in these modern forms of social-construction-out-in-the-open (like NFTs, or the art market, or the financial markets which serve as their archetype) in which Hanzi finds a ‘protopian’ potential: unmoored from any referent outside themselves—real or imagined—their representation of value goes into speculative free-fall, subject to incessant boom and bust cycles destablising the confidence required to determine it in any non-fragile way.
Let’s come at this point another way. I’ve often complained about a psychologising stance common in contemporary thought which manifests, to give just one example, in a tendency to substitute questions about whether certain ideas about society are optimistic or cynical for questions about whether they are true. At face value, the problems with this stance are not far to seek: we might point out, for instance, that there’s no way to adjudicate whether a theory is cynical without first knowing whether it is true. It is certainly cynical to adopt a theory which falsely makes the world seem a worse place than it is, but if the theory is true then adopting it is simply a precondition for solving those very real problems—surely the duty of an optimist. In this respect, the psychologising stance seems to beg all the important questions. But if we take seriously the insight of social constructivism—that our attitudes play a consitutive role in producing social reality—then this stance begins to look more justified. If our beliefs about society are partly what make society, then the question of whether we should adopt cynical or optimistic theories precedes the question of whether they are true, since there is no prior fact of the matter. In this broad outline we can see how Hanzi’s appeal to social constructivism actually serves as a justification for the political significance they place in developmental psychology. In this respect, Hanzi’s ideas about social construction can be seen to play a more fundamental role in their framework than their ideas about developmental psychology (which only makes it all the more baffling that this aspect of Hanzi’s metamodernism hasn’t received more attention).
But something’s been smuggled in here. If we look closely at this, what is being appealled to is a distinctively subjectivist reading of social construction. The subjectivist reading takes it that our individual subjective attitudes construct social reality directly, which is why its focus moves immediately to assessing attitudes in terms of subjective criteria (like whether they are cynical or optimistic). We all know this direct, subjectivised reading of social construction—it is what is colloquially expressed in the phrase ‘fake it til you make it.’ What it disregards, however, is that it appears to be precisely the fact that our attitudes are staged in discursive contexts in which they are subject to objective criteria—that they are implicitly truth-directed—that allows them to successfully construct a social reality in the first place (by which I mean only that they institute a system of norms which command a de facto legimitacy). In a way, the subjectivist reading of social construction is oxymoronic—what it omits is the social dimension of social construction, represented in this case by our collective truth practices, the public space of rational assessment. And it is this subjectivised version of social construction (or if we wanted to put it more provocatively, this privatised version of social construction) that ultimately justifies Hanzi’s psychologistic stance. The problem is that it is not at all clear that this subjectivised form of social construction can ever construct a properly social reality. In a way, Hanzi’s observations are dead right: we really do live in a time where the means of social constuction have been privatised (because the game of social construction has become transparent—as it does for the king’s subjects the moment they realise he’s just some guy—the signifiers or norms one adopts have accordingly become a matter of personal choice). But Hanzi’s conclusion—that this represents a great opening in our capacity to construct social realities—is dead wrong, since it is the very fact that these means have been privatised that makes them incapable of constructing anything more than fragile, private realities, which in their speculative circulation on the clout market offer little more than a mirage of social depth.
My claim is that NFT’s can play a key role in releasing our joint efforts imaginative efforts to redefine social realities. This happens first, perhaps, with virtual worlds and the Metaverse (the emmerging, immersive version of the Internet). But, as what Baudrillard called hypereality increasingly drives and reorganizes the experience of and relationships pertaining to everday life, life and society as we know them can also transform as a result.
What Hanzi is arguing, of course, is that social construction has always had this speculative dimension. And this is not wrong. But the argument I am making is not for some pure form of social construction untainted by speculative logic. It is rather that such a speculative system can only be said to have given substance to a reality if it does so robustly. The stabilising function required by this robustness has historically been performed by the fiction of a natural referent, the truth index which implicitly orients all speculators to an objective reality with a determinate content, even when they disagree on what this content might be. Or to put it differently, it is precisely that the speculators do not take themselves to be speculating, but to be basing their evaluations on an external reality, that allows the speculative system to converge on a stable arrangement. Without this stabilising inertia, the system becomes inherently inflationary. And indeed, this is the whole point of Baudrillard’s hyperreality, which signifies nothing other than a consensus reality subjected to hyperinflation—a social substance thinned out to nothing through the process of its own metastasis. If we appreciate this point, we will see that Hanzi’s call to actively speculate in cultural capital is utterly complicit in this inflationary dynamic. In the end it makes no difference what we speculate on, whether cultural capital accrues to the right contents, the right signs and symbols, since the inflationary problem is one of sheer, formal excess.
If this analysis is right, then it suggests that the required strategy is something very different to Hanzi’s. In fact it suggests the exact opposite: rather than the speculative accumulation of cultural capital, the route to meaningfulness in a socially constructed world must lie in the active squandering of cultural capital. If the present situation is defined by the disappearance of the real in its over-production, then the only way to recover the real will be in the paradoxical act of its destruction. What we must take seriously (far more seriously than Hanzi does) is the claim that a new social game has emerged, and that there is no guarantee that a given social game will successfully construct a social reality. But what is this new social game? To put in our earlier terms, what actually is the difference between clout and prestige? So far this difference has been addressed only in terms of its results—as suceeding or failing to construct social reality, or as an implicit or transparent awareness of social construction—but what does it mean at the level of practice?
I think the answer is this: clout is just prestige stamped with the commodity form. More precisely, clout is what you get when prestige is stripped of any index to a particular context, freeing it to be transmitted, repeated, and circulated across many different contexts, to whose particularities it is indifferent. There’s a joke among writers that the best way to get published these days is to become famous for something completely unrelated and only then pivot to writing a book. This is a uniquely clouty dynamic, alien to the dusty corridors of prestige. Literary aficionados will look down their noses at you for doing this. But this doesn’t matter, because accumulating clout is not about people placing value in your work, least of all aficionados. It’s about getting people to believe that others have placed value in it. Compare with, say, a highly respected OG operator in the Finnish dark ambient scene. This is an individual with carloads of prestige, but zero clout. I want to say that all this means is that this prestige is context-locked—it means nothing to anyone who is not an active participant within that scene, to anyone without access to that context. To everyone else it is just illegible, which makes it valueless on an open market. If we wanted to bring out the Marxian undertones of this point, we could say that in this case the prestige is consumed in the very same context in which it is produced, which is just to say that there no sense in talking about a consumer/producer division here at all. It is a form of cultural value which can never be extracted as surplus.
To say that the new game is defined by competition for clout rather than competition for prestige, then, is to say that this is a game in which the winner is whoever is able to produce not just value, but specifically context-free value. This distinction between context-free and context-locked value tracks well against a distinction TJ Richards has recently made between memes and ‘antimemes.’ TJ unpacks these terms as referring to regions on a “spectrum of information evaluated by its propensity for propagation,” citing “passwords, conspiracies, indefinite philosophical profundities and unsolved problems in mathematics” as prime examples of antimemes. While TJ provides information theoretic and entropic conceptions of the meme-antimeme spectrum, one other possible way we might consider it is as a measure of the degree to which understanding a piece of information requires access to its context. In this regard, a good example of an antimeme might be something like an in-joke. An in-joke resists memetic propogation precisely because its meaning is indexed to shared context. You need to know the backstory to get it. Similarly, the figures in Greek mythology are antimemetic in the sense that their layered and ambiguous meanings are difficult to grasp without also having grasped the entire narrative and cultural context to which they belong. Contrast this with characters from American sitcoms, whose memetic promiscuity is displayed in the fact that their entire narrative function can often be condensed into a single phrase, such as ‘the blond one.’ Generalising, we might say that a symbol is antimemetic to the extent that grasping its meaning requires grasping its context, whereas it is memetic to the extent that its meaning can be grasped purely by grasping its transparently defined relationships to other publicly legibile symbols. We do not grasp the trope of the blond one through the particularities of the shows it appears in—these are interchangeable—we know it through the common narrative tensions and allegiances it forms in relation to the nerdy and sporty ones. (Elsewhere I’ve explored these ideas in terms of the contrast between pastiche and remix.)
Here we see the link between a propensity for memetic transmission and what Hanzi identifies as the ‘transparency’ of postmodern social construction—memefied symbols are transparent precisely because they index no context and are therefore legible to all. For Hanzi this point is built in at the level of axiology:
[Capital is] something that creates a positive feedback loop, which changes social relations, so that power is accumulated, for the person or organization to which the loop is linked.
Context-locked symbols are terrible at creating positive feedback loops precisely because they cannot propagate across multiple contexts. For Hanzi, who makes no distinction at all between social value and cultural capital, this means only that antimemetic phenomena are strictly invisible. Witness:
So just like having lots of money helps you get even more money (that’s the positive feedback loop), so does having a lot of friends help you get even more, and, these things can be exchanged for each other. Can’t buy friend you say? Well, why do rich people usually have a lot of people they call their friends, while bums on the street tend to be all alone? Capital attracts other capital, and if you have a lot of one kind it’s easier to get the other kinds you need.
But the difference between having a friend and paying someone to LARP as your friend is obvious: it is nothing other than the presence of the index to particularity in the former case. If you can pay someone to LARP as your friend then anyone else could have paid them to LARP as theirs, and in this sense the social relationship you have with this person contains nothing which is particular to you. Not so with a real friendship, which is essentially a relationship between these people. This becomes clear if we consider what would happen if someone were to breach the sacred universality of the money transaction by only agreeing to sell their performance of friendship to one, particular person (not as part of the deal, but because they simply choose to). We can imagine that in this faux pas of the market the simulated friendship couldn’t help but threaten to become true friendship, with unspoken obligations beginning to linger, never fully annulled in the ritual of cash payment (as it is for Chow Mo-wan, the protagonist of Wong Kar-Wai’s romance noir 2046, whose efforts to keep his affair with the prostitute Bai Ling light and transactional by insisting on paying her a nominal fee after each visit never quite invoke a magic powerful enough to banish the intolerable threat of love.) Friendship cannot be bought because the social value it represents is essentially constituted by its antimemetic index to concrete particularity—Hanzi cannot see this because Hanzi has no theory of the antimeme.
Where does this leave us? At this point I hope to have made clear that the three distinctive properties of the postmodern form of social construction—its transparency, its subjectivised quality, and its free-floating speculative character—are all aspects of the same phenomenon. The difference between clout and prestige is the same as the difference between cultural capital and social value, and this is a difference which can be framed in terms of the tension between the memetic and the antimemetic. I have argued that successful social construction depends on an antimemetic index to the real—it is the very fact that in our world this process has been refracted through the commodity form, which requires precisely the stripping away of this index, that contemporary social games fail to construct robust social realities. My recommendation to actively squander cultural capital is, then, a specific instance of what TJ dubs an ‘antimemetic practice.’ To destroy capital is not to destroy value—it is to take value out of circulation and lock it into a concrete context, where it cannot help but become invisible to a marketplace whose optics reveal only what has already been distentangled from contextual particularity.
References
- Lyotard, J.-F. (1993). Libidinal Economy (I. H. Grant, Tran.). Indiana University Press.