The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 19
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other, self-community, and self-world relationships. Our memes very often determine what we
do in these relationships-they are not ideas we form after the fact.
In the world of literary narration, the motivation behind focalization is, similarly, not a
product of the ghost in the narrator's (or author's) machine but of memetics and culture instead.
This assumes that authors model narrators and characters after our ideas about consciousness, or,
at least, that we decode what we read about these narrators or characters according to what we
know about ourselves, how we think, and what consequences this knowledge has for us. Dennett
asks, "What foundation, then, can we stand on as we struggle to keep our feet in the memestorm
in which we are engulfed?" To borrow his own answer, there is no we (as Cartesian dualism has,
for so long, taught us to understand that term) to either stand or struggle in the first place.21
Memes are not biology, they are behavior. As Keen points out,
[C]onsciousness expresses its intentionality, simultaneously attuned to
multiple layers of meaning, through behavior visible to others who, like
itself, are embodied and through their bodies are sensitive to the same
world. We can add that these sensibilities are codified into cultural
categories of meaning, so that it is not only the same world. It is a shared
world. Consciousness without a world, consciousness without a body,
consciousness without behavior that bodily engages the world is a mere
abstraction, an imaginary unicorn of psychology, nowhere presented as
data.22
Though far more experimental and far more free in form than real consciousness, narrators and
focalizors offer points of departure into the dialog between culture and consciousness by being
not only a model of that dialog, but one of its artifacts as well.23
So far, my examination of memetics in perception and focalization has simply been a
discussion of what we do with what we learn. The important difference is that we do not simply
gather memes as our brains see fit. However, memetics differs from other behavioral analyses in
that it propones that we do not acquire our behaviors; rather, our behaviors acquire us. Memes19
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/23/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .