Not Sure If Brilliant or Merely Pedestrian: Toward a Rhetoric of the Meme by Phill Alexander

A photo of Keanu Reeve with the text'what if Plato is just messing with me and there was no Socrates'

Figure 5: Epiphany Keanu, taken from the Troll.me but now lost to time

Of course the meme isn't terribly far afield from mimesis, or "imitatio." Imitation, as translated, was reviled by Socrates in Plato's (360 BCE)in the Republic as weakening thought and allowing mankind to become lazy. Not one to let such a thought fester, Aristotle instead proposed that mimesis wasn't something that was a singular solidified practice and hence might be useful for learning by mimicking masters (350 BCE). And so imitation continued to be a teaching method from the era of Aristotle through the current day, with students regularly attempting to replicate famous works of art, famous speeches, even learning to write as another draws the letterform.

This rhetorical sense of mimesis, as is best explicated by Matthew Potolsky (2006) in his book Mimesis, stated that imitatio leads to things like intertextuality and reminded readers that theorists like Northrope Frye often claimed there were but a few stories with but a few architypes written over and over in different ways to begin with. Interestingly enough, this sounds more like a precursor to "remix" as it is currently understood than it does to the meme itself. Due to this seemingly deep fissure, it is my belief that the meme as we know it has much less to do with imitation as rhetoric knows it and much more to do with propagation and spread akin to what Dawkins described.

The meme, then, is a unit and an action, a product which is transmitted but also a practice of making (techne) and a plea, a command, a demand, or merely a submliminal insistence on replication and redistribution. It is this final element-- the fact that the meme as we know it insists upon itself and its spread-- that separates it from traditional mimesis and indicates that it is, again, a new replicator.