The deterritorialisation of the meme of FAUST.

Adapted excerpt from https://gumroad.com/l/faust THE FAUSTIAN MINDSET.

For most of history of man, memes were localised.

Memes here are to mean culture, artefacts, language, anything that inhabits a concept essentially. A meme being localised meant that it was restricted to a group of people, that the memes worked alongside that group of people. Memes for a long time were directly linked to the biological abstractors of those memes, if we are to use human brains as abstractor nodes.

Those groups of people entered and emerged from a co-symbioses with those memes, culture provided evolutionary value, those memes reinforced gene spread, which reinforced meme spread. Meme exchange and trade increased rate of innovation.

Wars were the spread of memes and genes, then memes were spread via trade, the silk road, started to deterritorialise memes. The cultures that engaged in meme exchange, increased the total exposure to the memespace. The memespace had more memes, and thus the memes competed more, the best meme won. It slowly created a marketplace of memes. This also coincides with the notion that trade increases power of a territory.

This bubbled and grew, and increasing population, meant there was increased number of humans to further mutate and abstract these memes. Thus increasing substrate mediums for the memes to inhabit and grow.

Demon Summoned.

Globalisation is the use of market forces, to commodify and transact goods and services. However like the silk road, not only are goods and services exchanged but also, the exchange and spread of ideas and memes, the most powerful of these ideas, memeplexes were religions, one can track the spread of religion through the many contact points exposed by these trade routes.

These ideas, memes, culture, no longer were terrritorialised. This is doubly true in the modern age, where it matters less where the idea originates today. All is meshed together. The internet can be seen as a memesphere, and the topology of which can be used as categorisation of memes.

This has lead to where we are now, memes spread around the globe at breakneck speed, trying to control social contagions seems a difficult task, political propaganda seems to be coming from every direction.

This increased memetic velocity, has lead to increasing speeds of which memes are delocalised from their reference points in meat space, deterritorialised and reterritorialsed and taking hold in a certain area.

One aspect of this demon is that there was increased competition of memes. These memes competing more, meant that those memes which were best suited for this increase in human populations and trade, meant that they would spread the most.

This demon, of memetic exchange, of virality, is indeed a double edged sword, as one can see with uncontrolled memes running rampant, society can be inexplicable changed by these memes.

With the industrial revolution, trade has taken off world wide, there has been huge benefits to society, people are living longer and so on. However there are downsides, people are more likely to be suicidal, be on antidepressant medication and such. We are living longer but there are people who are sorry that they are even alive, defeatist and pessimistic attitudes pollute the world.

Demon Head from the film Faust (1994).

Demons and Summoners

It is important to note the distinction. The distinction of demon and summoner. Like in the myth of faust, faust the erudite summons a demon to give him worldly power and success. The faustian spirit may have summoned the demon, but it does not mean that the demon is necessarily faustian. It looks and feels similar, but the demon is wearing its skin. It has mutated out of shape, and is now hardly recognisable.

So it may have been in the west, England, the midlands, the industrial culture where it had been summoned this meme, and thus this meme a demon, has now torn off the skin of the summoner, and is wearing its skin. This demon’s name is neoliberalism, this singular meme is shaping the world, is it western ? Caplan thinks so. Others blame it as well as seek its benefits.

I disagree, in other nations there were similar notions of worldly sacrifice, of transmutation for results, newton was faustian as were those who he read on optics, he kept pursuing the meme of alchemy. Other technologies arose from other areas, trade was facilitated, which facilitated innovation via meme spread. It is too first order an explanation as hindsight is 20/20, there are many instances where history had been too different, the library of alexandria was a setback.

The frontier is full of demons taunting you to turn back.

The painted skin, a common phrase in Chinese vocabulary, “a synonym for duplicity that wears an outwardly human face but is inwardly demonic”. The summoner, Faust should be noticed as distinct from the current modernity.

Where we are now. The demon meme of hyper capitalism, has spread, it no longer looks like what summoned it. People are fearful, there is stagnation it seems. When faustus summoned the demon, mephistopheles he was hopeful, he was optimistic. He was searching for more frontiers to explore. This was the spirit of Faust, the explorer, the exploring and traversing he did was of knowledge, of memespace.

We are in need of frontiers in our modern world. Many are resigned to the notion we are without frontiers, that there is nothing left to explore. They are weak and have victim mentalities, bug men. Funnily enough they are the products of the modern world, the state of the world in sorry state of mushiness. Their ideology as well as their aesthetics are bastardly.

There is always more to explore for those that inhabit the greatest aesthetic, as discussed here. There is always the availability of reinvention, to reinvent is to create. Everything is reverberated back into itself, memes, culture, being the eternal ouroboros. This what the FAUSTIAN MINDSET espouses, eternal creators and explorers who are willing to keep pushing the frontiers. The faustian fire needs a reignighting.

Call to action!

Excerpt adapted from The Faustian Mindset. Pre-Order here : gum.co/FAUST

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