Michel Serres reading, "The Parasite"

1. Summarize key points.

I have yet to finish this reading. My summary will only cover material up until page 17, Diminishing Returns (it’s seriously an awesome reading, but I seem to only comprehend it at about 3am, so my reading times are very limited).

An immediate pull into this reading came from the Translator’s Preface, and his mention of French words that contain multiple meanings. Throughout the piece, multiplicity of meaning is the basis for dichotomies (like black and white) engaging in a circular game of chase (black chases white chases black = grey). For example we have the parasite, which eats next to (or eats of) another, or interrupts through noise the processes of an individual. As his piece continues, we come to recognize that a curiosity of these nuanced words like parasite is probably one of the foundations of Serres’ insight and philosophical engagement. A guest is a host and vice versa. The parasite has the capacity to evoke change. To invite Bataille into the conversation (playing both the guest and the host), we could hypothesize that the parasite exists because there is excess. When there is enough luxury to feed yourself and others, whether you will it or not, the potential for change and novelty increases.

Finally, one of the initial curiosities that seems to drive Serres’ investigation is the same as the premise for this course (and I wonder if this book was perhaps Thurtle’s initial inspiration); how do so many human endeavors tie together? How much can we really know; how do these fields of investigation influence our perception of the world and our undertakings for new knowledge in society? In Serres’ opinion,

“such a parasite is responsible for the growth of the system's complexity, such a parasite stops it. The other question is still there: are we in the pathology of systems or in their emergence and evolution?”

I guess I'll have to keep reading to find out... I can't wait :)

***

To tie into Bataille (I also added this to my Bataille reading):


I found a Serres reference on another passing over of the text, in the section on man's extension through technology: "In actual fact the quantitative relations of population and toolmaking -and, in general, the conditions of economic development in history -are subject to so many interferences that it is always difficult to determine their exact distribution." (my emphasis). This is static, which is actually scattered all throughout this piece, and I'm noticing it particularly in this portion. There are a lot of little interruptions. Man is parasitized by his tools (at first the economy grows, but the parasite sucks out enough energy to drop demographic curves after a while) and he also parasitizes the resources to make his tools (or rather consumes them and turns them into growth, which I think might be different...). Man parasitizes his tools for new tools and new energy, until the surplus energy and tools parasitize the system and there is no more room for growth... I might be grasping at straws here, I'm really tired, but it sounded cool in my head. 

My burgeoning idea is that Bataille's Excess and Serres' The Parasite are very closely related to one another. The parasite feeds on excess of any sort, and is present at the beginning of the process of extension, in any system, eating another's waste if it's edible or licking the organism or process itself. The parasite, in turn, can either interrupt the system, or catalyze the generation of something novel (such as nicotine in plants to ward of herbivores and other curious insects...).


3. Words I learned!
epistemology: a philosophy that examines the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and its extent and validity.
polyphony: a diversity of independent but harmonizing melodies.
information theory: A branch of mathematics that mathematically defines and analyzes the concept of information. Information theory involves statistics and probability theory, and applications include the design of systems that have to do with data transmission, encryption, compression, and other information processing.

Michael Andrews reading, "The Life That Lives on Man"

1. summarize key points:
Amazing facts about parasites living on our skin. We start out with a history of human awareness and thought concerning these parasites, and how the field of parasitology developed in tandem with medical science.

We move onto the landscape of our skin - the dry, flaky deserts of our arms with the occasional hairs, and the oily, densely packed landscape of our scalp. Sweat glands, hair follicles, sweat and salt everywhere. What a place for a bacteria to live!


2. Develop an argument about compelling points:
He mixes ecology with the study of parasites, engaging different levels of scale and redefining the original meaning of what it means to study ecology. We use models of our understanding of microbes and scale to even be able to think about the life living on our skin!

Andrews also examines the idea of what it means to be a human, and how human agency is in part a product of symbiotic interactions with microbes and mites, and also our very biology (i.e. salty epidermis) is a product of interactions with various biotic stresses. In other words, our agency is in part a product of the concatenations of many other agencies.



3. Words I learned today:
scurf: a clump of skin scales
squames: tough, horny flakes on the surface of our skin

Deleuze & Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia"

1. Summarize main points
What an intriguing piece! Ties in really well with Deleuze's piece on immanence. It's like he took the idea of A LIFE arising in the space when a person is dying, and broadened that idea into other realms of human existence. It's a private, intimate feeling I get from this piece, like peeking into the collective bedchamber of humanity as they struggle to eradicate their individuations and become nothing but flows of desire...

2. Develop some points...

"The BwO is the egg. But the egg is not regressive; on the contrary, it is perfectly contemporary, you always carry it with you as your own milieu of experimentation...the egg is the milieu of pure intensity."

The Body without Organs is neither a body without its organs nor organs without a body. Either of those would be dead. Rather, it's a beautiful concept of taking one's internal organs and symbolically (or literally) rearranging them. To get rid of "you" and your attachment to "you" and become an existence. As is the case for the masochist who,

"constructs an entire assemblage that simultaneously draws and fills the field of immanence of desire...[he says,] 'Results to be obtained: that I am kept in continual expectancy of actions and orders, and that little by littler all opposition is replaced by a fusion of my person with yours...Thus at the mere thought of your boots, without even acknowledging it, I must feel fear. In this way, it will no longer be women's legs that have an effect on me, and if it pleases you to command me to receive your caresses, when you have had them and if you make me feel them, you will give me the imprint of your body as I have never had it before nd never would have had it otherwise.' Legs are still organs, but the boots now only determine a zone of intensity as an imprint or zone on a BwO."

The point is, nothing is actually taken away or changed, except the BwOs perception, perspective. Rather than being somebody, I would be a feeling, unbridled, a reaction to a cause at all times. Here's why it's like peeking into the bedchamber - for those lucky enough to seek it or stumble upon it, sex can be powerful enough to erase those internal organs, the grasp on oneself. To exist as a bubbling, a swelling, inspiration and exhalation, a powerful enveloping of yourself and your partner. Such a coupling, while rare, would be as close to being one with someone else there is, at least that I can think of. Maybe having a baby exceeds that...

Finally, I had an A-HA! moment while I was reading the tail end of this piece. They write,

"Thus the BwO is never yours or mine. It is always a body. It is no more projective than it is regressive. It is an involution, but always contemporary, creative involution. The organs distribute themselves on the BwO, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients. "A" stomach, "an" eye, "a" mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything; it is not indeterminate or undifferentiated, but expresses the pure determination of intensity, intensive difference."

From a biological perspective, this is how we learn physiology! Currents, volts, signals, chemical gradients; we de-stratify the body in order to learn about how the body works. There is a difference in that we draw the attention to an organ, but the organ for the purpose of study exists within the body, but frequently out of context of other organs. Rather, it's demonstrated as hypothetical processes, movements and changes in response to some stimuli. When they use the word "Involution" there are several defnintions that might be applicable, but I suspect they mean the one in terms of medicine, such as "a decrease in the size of an organ, or a degeneration of normal physiological functioning," or from that of embryology, "the ingrowth and curling inward of a group of cells." The idea is that this body is every body, having deconstructed its individuality and re-assigned its singularities to correlate only to the given moment, the given feeling of intensity...it's another way of existing, in connection to all life.