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Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery
Gudrun Frommherz
Version of record first published: 13 Feb 2013.
To cite this article: Gudrun Frommherz (2013): Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery, Visual
Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology, 26:2, 147-164
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DISCUSSION
Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery
Gudrun Frommherz
Using the example of an emerging transhumanist visuality, this article discusses
visual communication as memes; cultural units that follow the logic of evolutionary
transmission. Memes are thought to self-replicate, based on the principles of compe-
tition, inheritance, variation and mutation [Dawkins 1976]. With this model, com-
munication would be driven by its message units rather than by the messenger;
meditational means, communicative modes and the agency of the social actor would
be solely determined by the selective pressures of memes.
In particular, this article analyzes visual memetic communication in cyborg
imagery and transhumanist art. Parallel to a transhumanist ideology, imagery of
human–machine designs, enhanced embodiment and virtual disembodiment circu-
late through Internet and other public spaces. While a majority of these images are
not directly authored by transhumanist sources, they are still encouraged by trans-
humanists as they aid the meme wars [Young 2006] of the movement. Taking these
memes as a form of self-driven and highly assertive communication, this article
discusses how transhumanist ideas are simulated, imitated and replicated. The
analysis of three visual memes reveals the autonomous, interactive, reflexive and
fictional properties of memetic communication.
Transhumanists ‘‘believe that humanity’s potential is still mostly unrealized.
There are possible scenarios that lead to wonderful and exceedingly worthwhile
enhanced human conditions’’ [Bostrom et al., 1998]. Key themes of transhuman-
ism revolve around evolutionary progression from the archaic human to an
increasingly superior being. The evolution to posthumanity is thought to be dri-
ven by science and by the application of ever-advanced technologies aiding to
overcome ailing, aging and ultimately death. These technologies largely result
from the converging sciences of genetics and informatics, the amalgamation of
superbiology [Stock 2002; Young 2006] with cybernetics.
The age of modernity has taught a science where the inner structure of
matter is made up of perpetually smaller units that serve as building-blocks to
GUDRUN FROMMHERZ is a senior lecturer in Communication Studies at the Auckland University
of Technology, where she teaches digital visual communication. Her research focuses on biocyber-
netic design and, more broadly, the philosophy of technology. She holds an MFA from the Art Cen-
ter College of Design, Pasadena, CA, and earlier has taught media design and theory in the United
States, Germany and India. E-mail: gudrun@aut.ac.nz
Visual Anthropology, 26: 147–164, 2013
Copyright #Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online
DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2013.754649
147
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the manifold and intricate workings of complex systems such as biological
organisms, and indeed systems as large as the universe. The cybernetics project
of postmodernity, possibly more cautious and differentiated yet equally positive,
has taught a similar lesson: information, the immaterial means of material pro-
cesses, is productive capital of its primary units, be these the bits of cyberspace
or the DNA of biospace [e.g., Hayles 1999]. Structural analogies between material
and virtual, bio and info, organic and synthetic, are vital to transhumanist
reasoning as they reinforce a fractured, reductionist worldview where all that
exists is constructed ground-up, and is a compound of smaller entities that are,
above all, observable, measurable and, consequently, controllable.
Postmodernism’s rejection of the absolute viewpoint of modernist thinking
placed a significant pressure on science as a method and scientific knowledge
as conclusive truth. This article proposes that transhumanism, while suggesting
an original view of a technological future, largely reacts against postmodern
critique. In this sense transhumanism can hardly be regarded as a novel philo-
sophical landmark toward the fulfilment of human potential but as a renaissance
of classic–modernist visions. Transhumanist philosophy, with its explicit hailing
of a rational, absolute and objective science, responds to the relativity of postmo-
dernism by kindling a discourse of renewed scientific purpose, binding universal
values, and a totalized philosophical system [Young 2006] that means to reassure
scientific sovereignty. This transhumanist discourse is supported by cheerful
science debates (especially in the fields of genetics, bioengineering and nanotech-
nology), the assertive language of normative futuristic statements,
1
colorful
cybernetic ingenuities in science-fiction literature, and archetypal transhumanist
imagery; all of which perpetuate the dream of an autonomous and omnipotent
humanity. So, in analyzing the transhumanist discourses of an emerging
neo-modernism, this article focuses on examples of future-inspired images that
illustrate the three ideas of evolutionary progressionism, a technological tele-
ology, and the mechanical body. On the whole, I demonstrate how these images
create communicable memes [Dawkins 1976] that propagate an anthropocentric
worldview with a human–technology symbiosis at the center of the origin and
the purpose of existence.
This article focuses on the analysis of images as ways in which visual memes
facilitate abstractions and allow metaphoric play that are largely inaccessible to
other forms of communication. If images are ‘‘worth a thousand words’’ they
may be so without explicitly committing to any one of these words. In this
way, visual shorthand can be extremely adaptable to varying (and conflicting)
connotations, which need not be definite yet are nevertheless obvious to the
beholder. In this sense, visual abstractions and metaphors can be considered as
having a prime memetic function.
MEMETICS AS METHOD
Memes, a term inspired by the scientific concept of genes,
2
stand in as units of cul-
tural content—manifest ideas, artifacts and cultural objects. With the transfer of
the metaphor of the gene to cultural processes, the methods and values attached
to genetics as science are equally transferred into the cultural domain. In the
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same way that genes are considered blueprints that define biological expressions
(the human organism, for example), memes are used to address cultural units as
building-blocks that, in aggregation and the ‘‘right’’ combination, form a cultural
expression—a way of thinking, a worldview, or an ideology. Young [2006] calls
these aggregations meme maps,
3
and their purposeful organization into a guiding
mental concept, or a philosophical system, is a metameme. Transhumanism is such
a metameme that, according to the evolutionary principle of natural selection,
seeks replication by spreading from human mind to human mind.
Darwinian evolutionary theory
4
describes natural selection as the struggle of
organisms to win out in the competition for scarce resources. Organisms better
adapted to the environment have a higher chance of surviving, to reproduce
and so to pass on their traits to the next generation. In memetic evolution, mental
attention and memory in the host are the scarce resources in an environment
overflowing with sensory stimuli, material enticements, and vying ideas. There-
fore, memes that are more apt to attract and to keep the mental attention of their
host are more likely to survive and to spread within a culture.
Natural selection relies on the basic evolutionary mechanisms of inheritance,
variation and mutation. Inheritance is the passing on of traits that are present in
the parent and, as such, aims at maintaining existing information. Variation intro-
duces gradual change, i.e., change in small steps, which may not be of immediate
consequence. Unlike the slow change of variation, mutation causes instances of
spontaneous change, an abrupt difference in information. As evolution is a physi-
cal, analogue process, differences between ‘‘copies,’’ however trivial they might
be, are salient. Indeed, Darwinian theory considers natural selection a key driver
of diversification by allowing niches to arise where selective pressures open new
opportunities for otherwise disadvantaged traits. Memetics holds that the process
of natural selection in memes is autonomous with the effect that memes
self-replicate [Dawkins 1976]. Two fundamental questions arise from this model:
(1) what makes one meme more fit for attention than another, and (2) how do
memes self-replicate? I will attend to these questions when analyzing transhuman-
ism’s memetic images in the sections below.
It is worthwhile holding here for a moment, to note a metaphoric ‘‘mutation’’
between the concepts of gene and meme. Genes are units of instruction, a blue-
print to create and to describe the resultant organic system [e.g., Gerstein et al.
2007]. Contrarily memes are units of construction, building-blocks that assemble
a cultural system [Young 2006]. Although memes are thought to behave like
genes (e.g., to define the structure of and behavior in the associated organism),
by virtue of their dependence on a medium (e.g., spoken words, text, image, a
musical sequence, a cultural object), they embody structural units rather than
functional entities. This metaphoric shift is consequential: it parallels structure
and function, taking both as the same by equaling effects while ignoring differ-
ences in cause. It is only because of this causal imprecision that the meme meta-
phor ‘‘works’’ in the first place. The same could be said for the analogies between
material and virtual, bio and info, organic and synthetic, where essential and
causal differences are overwritten by perceived similarities in effect.
Momentarily accepting these metaphoric shortcomings for the arguments of
this article, structural memes are thought to act like functional genes by virtue
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of the inheritance mechanisms imitation and replication. Imitation is based on the
observational acquisition of ‘‘how-to’’ information that is then copied in a mim-
icking action; and replication refers to the principal ability to pass on information,
the capacity of ‘‘copying.’’ Here, a further metaphoric shift occurs: in memetic
replication imitation is equated with simulation, which is the creation of a new
entity without drawing from a leading blueprint, a ‘‘child’’ without a ‘‘parent.’’
Let us recall that evolution means change over time, i.e., differences arising
between one generation and the next, between parent and child, between original
and copy. Baudrillard [1994] has pointed out that within the cultural–material
pool of contemporary society there would be no original but rather imitations
of simulations, copies without original, simulacra. The significance of simulacra
for memes is vital: due to the independence of the simulacrum from any norma-
tive primary, memes need not be rooted in an existing ontology; they are auton-
omous simulations, artificial creations of cultural information free of a
relationship to reality and unconstrained by any concerns with truthfulness.
Further, Mitchell [2003] argues that in cybernetic reproduction a copy may not just
be free of ‘‘natural’’ flaws in the primary version but actually better than the orig-
inal, an augmentation. The cybernetic idea of simulacra translated to genetic copy-
ing would then justify creational simulation of new, improved organisms as
envisioned by transhumanists. Consequently the simulacra of enhanced transhu-
manism may arise independently of evolutionary links to humanity, as these
would constitute autonomous inventions, the simulation of a new (posthuman)
species. Young’s [2006: 32] manifesto, ‘‘let transhumanism free us from our biological
chains,’’ appears to resonate such desire for simulation of a genuinely neoteric
human model that has no original in present or past humanity.
Where does this discussion lead us? I could hope, towards the recognition that
the cybernetic metaphor of evolution in memetics as method of transhumanist dis-
course might be fundamentally flawed
5
—while, at the same time, it is these very
flaws that serve transhumanist interests remarkably well. The evolutionary model,
especially in its progressionistic interpretation, itself functions as a metameme
optimized to drive transhumanist missionary aspirations. The analyses of three
visual memes in the emerging transhumanist visuality will demonstrate this point.
Visual Meme 1: Evolution Is Progression
As part of contemporary visual culture, the evolution of man has been visualized
many times, and mostly as a line of progression from early primate to present
human and beyond. Many of these images are recycled and reinterpreted based
on predecessors from early to mid-20th-century scientific drawings, such as
Zallinger’s [1965] The Road to Homo Sapiens, better known as March of Progress,
first published in the Time Life book Early Man by the American anthropologist
F. Clark Howell [1966]. The intention of the original illustration mainly was to
present snapshots of human development—not to make an argument for a linear,
sequential progression of evolution where each order is replaced by its successor.
The textual notes with Zallinger’s image make explicit references to evolutionary
branching, extinctions and influences from other lineages, thus suggesting a tree
structure rather than a straight road. Despite a quite clear scientific argument for
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a much more complex evolutionary pattern of human development, the visual
snapshot of linear sequence became the canonical icon of humanity’s advance-
ment from ape to man. The biologist and critic of progressionist evolution,
Stephen Jay Gould, referred to The Road to Homo Sapiens as ‘‘the one picture
immediately grasped and viscerally understood by all’’ [1989: 31].
It is by concord of several visual abstractions that the Zallinger image suggests
the idea of linear progression towards a perpetually improving humanity. First
and foremost, his image illustrates linear progression by sheer arrangement of
the humanoid figures, walking on eye level and in reading direction (to the right)
across the viewing frame of the spectator. As a visual convention in left-to-right
reading cultures, directionality towards right implies forward movement while
left directionality might suggest regression [Halawani 1996]. Next, the image
enforces the meme of progression by depicting its subjects in a march, the action
of decisive forward motion. In transhumanist interpretation the forward march
symbolizes humanity’s will to evolve, ‘‘the capacity for motivational choice by
the conscious, rational mind’’ [Young 2006: 168]. Further, progression is suggested
by a gradual increase in body height and erectness of posture in the figures. Effec-
tively, increasing tallness and straightness create a rising silhouette line [Figure 1]
that visually suggests advancement. Uprightness of stature thus becomes a sym-
bol of evolutionary progress. Bergman [2009: 17] comments on this as an artistic
distortion: ‘‘The figures [ ...] become taller as we move toward modern man,
not because of fossil or other empirical data demanding it, but rather as a result
of artistic license that allows the artist to distort the picture to conform to evol-
utionary theory.’’ If viewed more closely, human prototypes have undergone
repeated variations in body height and erectness that are thought to relate to
environmental pressures rather than evolutionary ‘‘choice’’ (e.g., Early Homo
Sapiens is succeeded by a much shorter Solo Man who emerged 200,000 years after
the former at a different geographical location that imposed different environ-
mental challenges). Hence body size is much more likely to be a result of adap-
tation to existing environmental conditions and not, as suggested with the
progressionist meme, a consequence of purposeful human advancement towards
increasingly higher forms. Lastly, the ascending curve line of body height and
posture effectively arises from a temporal distortion of human development.
Figure 1 The illustrated heights of the evolving human species create an ascending silhouette line
(top red) that suggests progression; the uniform spacing over time (bottom red) suggests steady
advancement. The evolutionary stages shown here are based on Zallinger (color figure available
online).
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Spatially the figures in the image are uniformly spread out along the march of
progress [Figure 1], which suggests an even, and thus continuous, progression
towards a superior human purpose. In considering the actual assumed time-
frames of evolution between each developmental order, a different image arises
[Figure 2]—an image that dissolves the impression of gradual and steady change
in favor of a cluster model where ‘‘change is more often a rapid transition between
stable states than a continuous transformation at slow and steady rates’’ [Gould
1989: 213]. Gould’s theory of spontaneous evolutionary change makes a provision
for species to appear rather ‘‘randomly’’ as a result of favorable evolutionary con-
ditions. Homo sapiens thus may be an incidental product of evolution rather than
the ultimate destiny of the world, as both creationists and transhumanists see it.
As pointed out above, evolutionary transmission is thought to underlie the
mechanisms of variation and mutation. The March of Progress image has been
replicated widely with variations in visual syntax (Figure 3: example of progress-
ive morphing between ape and human), which potentially cause a semantic
mutation, a sudden change in the meaning of the visual. The Gifford image
demonstrates such semantic mutation, where the morph shows a sequence of
receding hairiness and increasing fairness in the evolving human. Here the pro-
gressionist meme takes on a racial preference: the visual example in Figure 3
encodes the ideal of modern man as a fair Caucasian male.
6
A second aspect of semantic mutation arises from the spacing of the figures in
a way that the emerging human appears to move away from its ancestry, leaving
its evolutionary roots behind, to become free from biological chains [Young 2006].
Semantic mutations in the process of recycling and reinterpreting such images
simulate a meme, the meme of purposeful progression towards an ethnocentri-
cally inspired idea of human superiority. Such simulation of memes need not
be based on accepted scientific knowledge (as they are not truthful epistemologi-
cal imitations) but they create a meaning of their own that, by equating simulation
with imitation, infers to be scientifically sound.
Visual Meme 2: Technology Is Sublime
Michelangelo’s ‘‘Creation of Adam’’ (1508–12) is a painting of the Italian High
Renaissance [Figure 4]. The Renaissance is thought to have moved European
cultural thinking towards rationality, placed the humanistic, proto-scientific
Figure 2 Spatial approximation of actual evolutionary timeframes (dates of assumed first appear-
ance; color figure available online).
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method at the center of knowledge, and sought to formalize a universal aesthetic.
Adam stands in as the human ideal created after the image of God. Notwith-
standing its cosmogonic theme, the painting also questions the ultimate source
Figure 4 Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Sistine Chapel, Rome, 1508–12 (above) and
schematic of brain shape overlapping the Creator (below). (From Paluzzi et al. 2007 #Royal
Society of Medicine; used with permission; color figure available online)
Figure 3 Stages in human evolution. (#David Gifford, Science Photo Library; used with
permission; color figure available online)
Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery 153
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of sublimity. Some art-historic interpretations of the painting see God reaching
out from his position sitting in a shape that resembles the sagittal section of
the human brain, complete with brain stem, basilar artery, pituitary gland and
optic chiasma [see Figure 4, bottom]. The physician Frank Lynn Mershberger
[1990] analyzed this painting by identifying specific regions of the brain in corre-
spondence with the figures around God (e.g., the ‘‘sad angel’’ placed at an area of
the brain that is understood to be involved in sad thoughts; God is superimposed
over the limbic system that is the emotional center of the brain, a place that has
been thought of as the seat of the soul). Mershberger believes that Michelangelo
has engraved a message in his fresco, the message that God’s ultimate gift is not
life itself (Adam’s eyes are already open, before he is touched by the hand of
God) but the intellect to ‘‘plan the best and highest’’ and to ‘‘try all things
received’’ (excerpt from Michelangelo’s sonnet as cited in Mershberger [1990:
1837]). Such anatomical theories for interpreting imagery are relevant to an
understanding of the transhumanist affinity for Renaissance aesthetics. For trans-
humanists (and modernists alike) the rational mind is the root of all creation,
rendering the origin of human existence a logical and technological affair where
humanity is brought about by technological means. This way, cosmogony is
conceived anthropocentrically with technology as the sublime.
Adam has been recreated in manifold adaptations. Figure 5 replaces the
anthropo-theism of the original painting with a techno-theism of a present-day
expression. The image might suggest that humanity continues the work of God
when creating its own technological children. Alternatively, the image might
signify humans to have been technological in nature from the very onset; God
would then have created technology to take various forms, either as flesh as
we know it or as non-biological entities as they now emerge. The latter interpret-
ation is supported by the use of the original image’s godly hand reaching out to
ignite a technological Adam [Figure 5]. Either interpretation serves the interests
of transhumanists: technology is highest, sublime, power. Importantly, the image
suggests that humanity and technology remain strongly connected through a
mutual original purpose.
The technology publicist Kevin Kelly [2010] takes the idea of techno-theism to
its logical conclusion when he proposes that technology operates as the primary
and universal force that determines all material and cultural processes. Kelly
calls this technological omnipotence technium, which not only stands for every-
thing technological in the past, present and future but also delivers a meme that
means to describe the human condition fundamentally. Figure 6 illustrates the
sublime creation of an essentially material, man-made and technological world.
More precisely, the image suggests that it is by highest authority that humans
ought to create a material-technological world, that it is technology which is
the mission of humanity. Kelly [2009] defines technology as ‘‘anything useful
invented by a mind,’’ a definition that, according to transhumanist thinking, fits
the idea of the meme perfectly. For transhumanists technology is indeed meme-
tic, it is programmed to evolve autonomously by transmitting from mind to mind
and causing human agents to execute technological ideas; this is, according
to Kelly, what technology wants. In his essay ‘‘Humans are the Sex Organs of
Technology,’’ Kelly [2007] asserts that ‘‘technology has its own agenda’’ and
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Figure 6 Evolution of Man, 2010. (#David Larcom, www.davidlar-
com.webs.com; used with permission; color figure available online)
Figure 5 Digital Creation of Adam.(#Mike Monahan, Dreamstime.
com; used with permission; color figure available online)
Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery 155
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supports his argument by observing that technology tends to demand more tech-
nology: ‘‘The more technology we make, the more we need to make to keep it all
going.’’ The technium thus signifies the ultimate purpose of humanity and the
fundamental driver of the human condition.
Visual Meme 3: The Body Is a Technological System
As a common theme in futuristic visualizations of the human body, humans
appear as cyborgs,
7
human-machine designs. Early visualizations of cyborgs
reach back to the 1960s and literary visions of technology-enhanced humans go
back much further.
8
In almost all cyborg fictions, cyborgs take on a principally
human form with technological enhancements more or less visible. Visibly mech-
anical bodies include Verhoeven’s RoboCop [2007], while the replicants in Scott’s
Blade Runner [1982] depict largely opaque cyborg faculties. The Terminator
[Cameron 1984] possibly occupies a space in-between, altering between human
appearance and mechanical. Both forms however share a mechanical functioning
of cyborg faculties portraying the human body as a technology. In contemporary
cyborg imagery, a positively mechanistic interpretation of technology-enhanced
human capabilities appears dominant.
Figure 7 illustrates the mechanical cyborg that not only enhances human abili-
ties by adding new features but also aestheticizes the human body as a machine,
a functional apparatus. Vita-More [2011], the conceptual designer of the Primo
Posthuman and a core member of the transhuman extropists, states: ‘‘the stylized
cyborg combines the ideal of perfection with the machine.’’
Some popular cyborg visualizations draw on illustrations of Renaissance autop-
sies and Enlightenment medical drawings. Vicente’s image [Figure 8] belongs to
a series of anatomical art prints where the interior is always functional, whether
as a mechanical or as an organic apparatus. The image replicates the aesthetics
Figure 7 Primo Posthuman, 1997. (Embodied personal agency #Natasha Vita-More; used with
permission; color figure available online)
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of historic ‘‘scientific’’ medical illustrations and, in this way, simulates a histor-
icity of cyborgism as science. These human–machine designs perpetuate the
modernist idea of the operational body while suggesting a newly emerging era
of human dexterity. Hence transhumanist conceptualizations of the technological
body build on modernity’s construction of the medical body as a logically
Figure 8 Fig1y2, 2010. (#Fernando Vicente, www.fernandovicente.es; used with permission;
color figure available online)
Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery 157
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operating system. Consequently the technological body, like the medical body,
conceives the human as observable object, a body to look at [Romanyshyn
1989]. Indeed, the technological body in cyborg imagery tends to be inoperative,
a human simulation that is inactive and appears dysfunctional despite its sophis-
ticated machinery. These bodies are predominantly shown in an idle position; half
assembled or dismantled, as a visual spectacle of technology. While the medical
body sought to rationalize organic processes by using a mechanistic metaphor,
the spectacle of the technological body by far exceeds general human aptitude.
The technological body is extendable and malleable, a site of purposeful
design-by-technology. Young’s [2006] call for a Designer Evolution echoes a confi-
dence that the human organism can be wilfully designed to meet personal and
cultural interests. Here, there appears to be a fascination with a perceived infalli-
bility of the machine and with what I would like to call technology’s uninterested
performativity, in which futurists seem to have so much faith [e.g., Kurzweil 1999,
2005; Moravec 1988; Toffler 1970; Young 2006]. Uninterested performativity refers to
a reliable functioning of each individual part in a system, unaware of a larger pur-
pose or the perception of a whole. It is this fracturing into functional units and a
Figure 9 Death Cult. (Dimmu Borgir cover art #Joachim Luetke, www.luetke.com, used with
permission; color figure available online)
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separation of process from purpose that fundamentally enlightened the modernist
metameme.
The body that is a machine necessitates a mechanical mind [e.g., Kurzweil
1999; Moravec 2000]. In the understanding by transhuman futurists, especially
around the artificial intelligence project, the mind is a functional process of the
brain, which principally can be recreated in any other suitable matter [Kurzweil
2005]. The idea of the disembodied mind has been simulated and replicated
often—either as depictions of the mind as computing patterns (the invisible
cyborg) or as a cyborg brain assembled from the crudest of machinery (the visible
cyborg [Figure 9]). If we follow the popularity of mechanistic cyborg images, the
mechanical intelligence that futurists seek to replicate appears to remain predo-
minantly hardware-driven: cogs, cables, wheels and wires form a large part of
these visualizations. The emphasis on highly visible mechanistic contraptions
intends to encapsulate the meme of the technological body; it does not aim at
a demonstration of emerging NBRIC
9
technologies, which otherwise inform the
transhumanist vision of a technology-enhanced humanity. Also here the cyborg
meme is a visual abstraction of the idea of the technological body, not a scientific
statement of how a humanity of the future might (and possibly could) look. The
technological body embodies the dream of a humanity that can be observed,
measured and controlled [Romanyshyn 1989]. Such a body can be fabricated
bottom-up (e.g., through nanotechnology) with little or no reference to any
existing model. Also in this example, simulation informs the visual memes of
transhumanism; the cyborg body is not an imitation of scientific knowledge
but a simulacrum of the technological meme. Stock [2002: 20] sums this up:
‘‘Hollywood images of humanlike cyborgs lull our thinking because they so com-
pletely ignore the messy realities of basic physiology.’’
COMMUNICATION AS MEMETIC SYSTEM
The three visual memes discussed above demonstrate that memes are cybernetic
units that are interactive, reflexive and autonomous. Memes are interactive as they
seek communication with and transmission to another host, ideally a new, still
unaffected, human mind. Indeed, memes have been likened to viruses that spread
like contagions [e.g., Brodie 1996; Dawkins 1991; Lynch 1996]. In visual memes,
the process of transmission is supported by gross simplicity of the memetic mess-
age, a crystallization of complexity into a reduced and rationalized representation
[Lohmar 1997]. Livingston argues [2009: 248] that it is the reproductive cycling of
simulacra that displaces qualitative complexity in visuals with a quantitative den-
sity in the visuality these images produce. In other words, the scale of memetic
penetration determines the perceived message quality of the meme. With this
mechanism, the progressionist idea of evolution wants to be perceived as episte-
mologically intact by sheer number of variations and replications, e.g., of the
March of Progress icon. In memetic communication, quantitative complexity itself
constitutes a semantic mutation in the qualitative significance of a meme.
Memetic reflexivity arises from the capacity of a meme to change the behavior
in the host with the goal of nurturing the interests of the meme over the interests
of the host [Dennett 1999; Kelly 1994]. Bergman [2009] points out that F. Clark
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Howell, the author of Early Man [1965] for which the Zallinger image was com-
missioned, knew very well of the contemporary theories that conceived human
evolution as a branching tree, not a linear pathway. Nevertheless, the simplicity
and intuitive quality of the linear abstraction ‘‘constituted powerful visual ‘proof’
for human evolution that even a small child could grasp’’ [Lubenow 2004: 39].
Howell apparently appreciated the persuasiveness of visual abstraction above
scientific rigor. In another example of memetic reflexivity, Young [2006: 23] calls
memes power tools in a ‘‘battle of ideas played out within a culture to influence
the direction it will take.’’ Here the attraction of a readily available power tool
might have tricked its host into thinking that because such tools are possible, there
also needs to be a ‘‘battleground’’ wherein to exercise these tools. A reviewer
10
of
Luedke’s cyborg art [Figure 9] states: ‘‘You can‘t touch it, but it will touch you; you
can try to hide, but it’s completely useless.’’ Dennett [1991: 207] asserts ‘‘memes
restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes.’’ Memes
are so powerful because they operate as closed systems nurtured by their internal
logic. Visual memes do this by presenting a semiotically condensed system of ico-
nized visual abstractions which erase their links to reality, omit all frictions, and
delete the ability to question the authority of the message. Memetic abstractions
are not only pervasive as visual messages but also highly assertive of the encom-
passing metameme. In this respect, memes operate via the cybernetic mechanism
of autopoiesis, the capacity to self-create ‘‘through interactions and transformations
[which] continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations)
that produced them’’ [Maturana and Varela 1980: 78]. Indeed Maturana and Varela
[ibid.: 112] see evolution itself as a secondary process within a larger autopoietic sys-
tem that, for transhumanists, is a technological teleology. Hence, the metameme is
both the means and the end of memetic communication.
Memes are autonomous as they inherently carry the mission to self-replicate, to
spread the ideology of their metameme within a culture. While memes require a
medium of transmission (a material semiotic system), they do not require the
intention of their host to further transmit the meme [Dawkins 1991; Dennett
1991]. The above visual examples suggest that memes arise and transmit by iso-
lating bits of information from their original contexts, turning these bits into icons
of public half-knowledge (e.g., ‘‘evolution improves a species’’) and by attaching
a simplified intuitive value (e.g., ‘‘progression is good’’) to these iconic snippets.
These messages are then replicated by sheer intuitive powers: they function as
‘‘sticky’’ ideas that are easily grasped and easily reinterpreted; thus neither accu-
racy nor truth value is relevant. What is important is their convenient encapsula-
tion as memorable phrase, a quotable slogan, an iconic image, a visceral idea.
Memes appear to seek the attention of the mind but not to engage the mind;
memes tend to leave the critical mind of their host uninvolved [Dennett 1999].
Memes do not ask questions but provide simple answers to complex problems,
which might be one of their key appeals [e.g., Harich 2010]. The analysis of visual
memes suggests that the more simplified, intuitive and assertive a meme is, the
easier it replicates.
Above all other characteristics of memetic communication, memes tend to be
fictional [e.g., Midgley 2010]. The discussions above demonstrate that memes
are inventions, e.g., ideas that arise from simulation (not imitation) of information.
160 G. Frommherz
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In the process of simulation, memes produce mutations, spontaneous changes in
the meaning between the original context of a message and its re-contextualized
interpretation. The original context may still serve to validate the new meaning
(as the historic images of Renaissance medical illustrations validate Vicente’s
robotic carcasses as being scientifically plausible). However, the mutated meaning
in the resulting meme carries a different message: that the body is technological in
nature and therefore it ought to be technology that will resolve the human con-
dition. Gould [quoted in Shermer 2004: 32–36] once said: ‘‘Debate is an art form.
It is about the winning of arguments. It is not about the discovery of truth. There
are certain rules and procedures to debate that really have nothing to do with
establishing fact.’’ The same might be said for memes; memes are the art of
encapsulating and spreading a simulated episteme that essentially is ‘‘not [ ...]
a truth-seeking but power-seeking device’’ [Scruton, cited in Ede 2005: 64].
CONCLUSION
Alongside three examples from a nascent transhumanist visuality, I have demon-
strated an unfolding transhumanist discourse that utilizes conceptual tools from
postmodern cybernetics to revive the modernist ideal of the autonomous subject,
to be realized through technology. In this discourse memetics emerges as a power-
ful communication strategy to insinuate scientific grounding of a neo-modernist
worldview that, by other measures, could be viewed as ideologically motivated.
Visual memetics, through its reliance on autonomous simulacra that purposefully
(mis)represent semiotic inventions as accepted knowledge, serves as a power tool
‘‘converting the possibility of a ‘posthuman’ future into an actuality’’ [Verdoux
2009: 49].
NOTES
1. Prime examples of a powerful and assertive language are Simon Young’s book Designer
Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto [2006]. Natasha Vita-More’s Transhumanist Arts
Statement [1982], and Ray Kurzweil’s numerous publications on the subject, including
The Age of Spiritual Machines [1999] and The Singularity is Near [2005].
2. It is commonly accepted that the term ‘‘meme’’ was coined by the biologist Richard
Dawkins [1976] to address the smallest cultural units acting like genes: memes are
thought to replicate and respond to selective pressures in the same way that genes
are believed to do.
3. Susan Blackmore [2003] calls such meme maps memeplexes (meme complexes) after the
concept of gene complexes where multiple genes are inherited together because of
their functional proximity.
4. Memetics largely draws on general Darwinian evolution that I follow here as well.
This is not to ignore a fine-graining of Darwinian theory, to discredit alternative evol-
utionary theories or to turn a blind eye to the many critics of Darwinism. However, to
stay focused on the objectives of this article, i.e., to demonstrate how an unfolding
transhumanist discourse utilizes the cybernetic metaphor of memes, a narrower view
on Darwinian evolution appears justified.
Memetics of Transhumanist Imagery 161
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5. The simplifying analogy between genes and memes has been criticized by a number of
scholars, for example in Benitez-Bribiesca’s Memetics: A Dangerous Idea [2001]. See also
Lanier [2000] for a more general critique of cybernetics as an inclusive epistemological
methodology.
6. The racial aspect of modern evolutionary theory has been widely discussed, for
example in Bergman [2009] and Gould [1989].
7. Cyborg, a term coined in 1960, stands for ‘‘cybernetic organism,’’ meaning a being that
has both biological and artificial parts (i.e., electronic, mechanical or robotic).
8. Some resources consider the protagonist John A. B. C. Smith in Edgar Alan Poe’s
1843 novel, The Man that was Used up, as one of the earliest examples of cyborg
characterizations.
9. NBRIC refers to the applied sciences of nanotechnology, bioengineering, robotics,
information sciences and cognitive sciences.
10. Author unknown, as published on the beinart website at http://beinart.org/artists/
joachim-luetke/# (accessed November 13, 2011).
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