The Age of Narrative and Symbol Is Over. Memes Are Post-Narrative/symbol

That book strikes me as "Western" in the sense that a lot of anime criticism and other literature from Japan of that time, particularly

https://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Fighting-Girl-Saito-Tamaki/...

where you'll find an actual psychiatrist has heard of Lacan absorb heavily from French theory and do it in a way quite different than we have done it in America because the close tie between French and English causes serious problems of over and under-translation. [1] In Japan $20 dollar words are explained with $1 words and when it is translated to English it comes across as remarkably clear.

I'll grant that there is a certain naive reaction to French theory and thinking inspired by it that an analysis is so incisive that it would be the basis for an revolutionary intervention. I had that when I read Simulacra and it took me a while to realize that and Seduction are accelerationist.

I'd argue though that there is space for an intervention in terms of getting the old guard to at least understand that they don't understand memes, that some brainrot scrawled on bullet casings doesn't mean you're a radical TransFurry or right wing because you talk like a Redditor.

A catholic school student recently wrote a thesis on the application of Girardianism to pornography which is an excellent application but he had the same naive reaction that I had to Baudrillard once that you could understand a phenomenon you could make it go away.

Girard's idea of mimetic desire is interesting, particularly applied to pornography where various "attributes" have stuck like the nasty scowls that make western pornography dead to me yet somebody must think it is acceptable if not arousing because they've seen so much of it. Yet I think desire in the ordinary sense has nothing to do with memes -- you take a pleasure in spreading them that is intrinsic and instantaneous and self-reinforcing the same way a dog takes pleasure in barking. There is the thwarted desire that something might not spread or the boredom of waiting for something to arrive, but those are secondary. You can participate in the meme system without any desire to make something spread, in fact that desire to have some impact outside the meme system is... outside the meme system.

[1] French words are often "fancy" in English if you go to a gas station in Quebec there is an ad for an everyday breakfast sandwich, coffee and hashbrown combo advertised as "L'Ensemble Quotodienne" -- a rock band is "L'Ensemble" and a dive bar that it plays advertises the "SPECTACLE" that Guy Debord warned you about, Derrida got Différance under-translated but I'd argue that L'evenment should also be under-translated even though it is a technical term that Debord and Badiou use in entirely different ways.