>>4983
Now, in "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences", Derrida criticizes Lévi-Strauss' notion of the engineer, arguing that the engineer must actually be a myth of the bricoleur, another bricoleur himself in fact, as no individual can be the absolute origin of their own discourse. And furthermore, the bricoleur gains its meaning through its difference with the impossibility of the engineer. Whereas Lévi-Strauss argued that neither the bricoleur nor the engineer necessarily supersedes the other, Derrida argued that there are only bricoleurs. But this is orthogonal to the subject at hand, which is memes.
Memes have become an internet cultural phenomenon, lately bleeding over into real life. Some people refer to 2016 election as the "Great Meme War", and a presidential candidate even referenced certain memes in a high-profile speech. There even exists a veritable encyclopedia of memes along with numerous sites that simplify the creation of memes. There are even memes about being a 'meme farmer', which sounds a lot like being a bricoleur.
In fact, the very term 'meme', coined by Richard Dawkins in the 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene", was, as he explains himself, 'hijacked', and that while the original idea meant a random mutation spread by a form of Darwinian selection, 'internet memes' are altered deliberately by human creativity. The 'bricoleurs' repurposed the scientific concept of 'meme' for the mythological concept of 'internet meme', and thereby became 'meme farmers'.
How does a meme farmer tend to her memes? She maintains a collection of images and videos, characters, situations, reactions, concepts, tropes, one-liners, quotes, references, symbols, etc. She plays with them; she mixes and matches different elements until she creates a rearrangement relevant to whatever happens to be her subject of interest. Different elements applied to different structures relevant to different events.
Now lets looks at Lévi-Strauss' explication of the work of the bricoleur:
>"The elements ofPost too long. Click here to view the full text.