A steamy reflection on why I suck at love (and life in general)

I sat in the steam sauna long after the building was evacuated. At first, the steam kept rolling, slow-waves of eucalyptus mist beading my skin with damp. Until my chest ached for breath, the air too heated to for oxygen; panting and sweating I sat, no longer basking, far from relaxed.

Then generators whirred a final time, though I didn't know that until after the purring engines stopped. So I forgot to savor the last moments, unaware. Resolutely gasping I sat, moisture thick upon the air, and dreamed of a room more icy.

The transition was too long to notice firstly, the heady molecules of life sprouting in my chest, a few more here and here again. One less drop of eucalyptus water beading on my body.

Instead, I noticed first the heat. A few minutes, and I felt a prickle. A tightening of skin on my arm, a tingle on my breasts. A smattering of goosebumps pervading my flesh. Anticipation, as the air cooled from boiling to hot, and my cooking process slowed.

Tepid was when I began to miss the heat. A damp fog blanketed my chilled skin, sending shivers rattling all the teeth in my jaws. A dream flickered, as I stared at my new bane of cold mist. A tropical room once powered with a dew, flicked with eucalyptus, heat squeezing the air from my lungs in fierce, heady pleasure.

I licked my lips, consumed by cold and wet, naked and shivering. Remembering, in a disbelieving daze, how I had longed for the cold in the heat. Sensing, or remembering, how I would long again, and again, never content.

And in this circle of dreams, I dreamed anew - of a place where contentment led me to love and tranquility, not these dreams of what I didn't have.

But uncertain, I waited instead for the generators to come on again.

Flusser reading, "Vampyroteuthis infernalis"

1. Summary of key points



I'm reminded of M-P in the beginning of this piece. It begins with a quote, "Nothing that is human is alien to me," and then jumps into observations of differences. While Flusser is careful to establish a relationship in which we feel reciprocated in our observations of the vampyre squid (he sees us too), he definitely doesn't begin by emphasizing our similarities. 
 
"Both of us live separated by an abyss. The atmospheric pressure that he inhabits would crush us, and the air we breathe would suffocate him."

Right after this he goes on to emphasize (darkly) our similarities (the differences must have been his initial hook), and also hints at ways in which the vampyre squid might definitely be cooler than humans? I get the impression he thinks they're on a whole nother playing field while we're still warming up. Sure enough...

"We are both, Vampyroteuthis and humans, eucoelomates. They are the ones that matter, if we want to re-encounter what is common to both of us." And for the record, this is the oldest known organism in Bilateria, and the "first" with a coelem that is still around today (according to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernanimalcula)

We are both eucoelomates (exo, meso, endoderm, and a coelem distinguishing head from anus) which he beautifully illustrates, "The eucoelomates are animals that distinguish themselves from the world, that orient themselves in the world, that act  upon the world, and that absorb it."

 Why did he distinguish a 3rd axis? "For us Bilateria the world is bilaterally symmetrical: there either “is” or “is not”, and the third is excluded. The dialectic of the worm."

As Bataille might snarkily rebuke, we are beings with animal fragility, it is a sign of our excess. "Vampyroteuthes and men are organisms, beings with undeniable animal dignity."

Why were they 'heading towards man'? That sounds like a bad evolutionary biologist, someone oughta set this man straight..."Thus the eucoelomates, who were heading towards man, had a curious moment of hesitation. They sought to rid themselves of their bilateral nature" I also don't understand how the echinoderms "failed" to achieve anything, considering they aren't extinct yet.

For the record, every biologist I've ever met would probably be frothing at the mouth by now...this is like some serious transgression! " There is no doubt that this development represents life’s main  advance towards “intelligence”, to the super-evolved nervous system."



 Otherwise, I like his premise, which is to explore man through the differences and similarities in these elusive, related squid..



3. Words I learned:
chauvinistic: Prejudiced belief in the superiority of one's own gender, group, or kind 

Gilles Deleuze, "Immanence, A Life" from Pure Immanence.

1. Summarize key points
Okay, I wrote this already but it got erased when my computer crashed..oh well. The point is, I wrote about this reading before, and was possessed with a confusion that kept me reading and rereading it. I parsed words out, wrote definitions, drew on other readings and class discussions, tried to make sense of it because no other reading has gripped my mind and evaded my mental capacity so fiercely yet. But finally words are clicking into place and comprehension dawns. A unique feeling, when through your own neurons you have some epiphany and feel in the very fabric of your perception that this is it. You've got it. So, here are the epiphanies of understanding I have to share...

First, the plane of immanence is the most basic form of everything. It precludes a definition; we can no more put definition to it via subject and object than we can walk on our noses. It is, simply and frustratingly. The only time that the phrase, "it just is!" actually applies with truth. Everything comes from it, and it finds meaning from none of those things. Wild!

The transcendental field is a little different. Consciousness is a part of it, traverses it, is immanent within it. We can't define it with consciousness, there is again no subject or object, but it is at least a state of existence that is within immanence. Existence prior to revelations. Prior to experience in the sense of perception or sensation, an existence of pure being and everything. It is radical immanence*, I think, without any singularities*. As Deleuze says, "When the subject or the...

A LIFE is a consciousness immanent in all other life, it isn't being the sense of existing as an entity or process, but it does exist. Radical immanence with singularities.

A transcendental field precludes a plane of immanence, which exists in between moments as a singularity of life, and coincides with subject and object to form an actualization, the process of individuation.

transcendental field: a pure immanent consciousness (prior to self-consciousness) lacking object, self, direction, and time. It is the opposite of transcendence; it is the most fundamental basis of existence.

transcendent: being above and independent of the material universe. Preeminent or supreme. What happens when we transcend the transcendental field?

Consciousness transcends from the transcendental field only when reflected on a subject that informs an object.

But because there is consciousness, the consciousness is immanent inside the transcendental field.

Immanence: a life, and nothing else.


2. Develop an argument

We can work backwards: A LIFE is defined by a plane of immanence, and a plane of immanence defines the transcendental field.

A LIFE existing between moments is immanent, but is still a singularity that is existing between life and death. When the possibility of there being existence between moments, we find the singularity, the defining thing of life that makes us all unique even.

A transcendental field is a pre-experienced form of being, a consciousness prior to sensation, prior to the break between living and experiencing the living (Merleau-Ponty's idea of perspective). It's a transcendental empiricism that goes beyond the break that is experiencing sensation. Removed from any revelation. Consciousness moves along the transcendental field at the same speed as the field, and is only produced when the subject and object transcend the field at the same moment in time and space.

The transcendental field has no awareness of itself, it would be pure immanence if we didn't have consciousness arising from it. A plane of immanence is only immanent when it isn't related to anything other than itself.

The transcendental field is defined by a plane of immanence, and immanence is defined by a life (similar to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, it seems). When the person's consciousness goes outside of his own sense of self and experience, it touches something more basic found in everything. We go from being an individual to being a singularity, a part of life that experiences with the rest of life rather than experiencing all of the things that make us unique and alone.

Singularities of a life are actualized into individuations in the subjects and objects, but an immanent life spends time between moments,
A singular life, immanent to the things around it, becomes individualized when the events around it are actualized in objects and subjects (bringing it out of the immanent plane).

2. In reflection of class concepts...

3. Words I learned:
empiricism: the view that experience of the senses is the only form of knowledge
haecceity: the essence that makes something itself and nothing else
beatitude: extreme blessedness or happiness

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.

Sean Carroll reading, the making of an animal from "Endless Forms Most Beautiful"

1. summarize key points
There is breathtaking diversity in life forms, extinct and extant. But within this diversity are patterns, such as homologous traits (i.e. backbones in vertebrates which evolved in the common ancestor to all vertebrates), and repeated parts in structures that have been passed down to many forms of life (i.e. digits in dolphins, salamanders, horses and humans).

All of this diversity and repetition is encoded in the DNA. Genes get turned on or off in individual cells of an embryo, and their protein products cascade to surrounding cells, signaling for different body parts in response to different combos and strengths of signals.

From these gene networks, which are frequently shared between very distantly related organisms (like the nematode worm, fruit fly, and human) come body segmentation, polarity, and limb formation. The study of existing and created mutants has helped us investigate these gene networks and what their normal function is by seeing what they look like when the genes are non-functional.

Carroll runs through embryogenesis - how zygotes begin to divide, and as division occurs, the resulting ball of cells is broken up into geographical ranges of latitude and longitude. There are further divisions that occur until there are specific groups of cells within the whole that have a unique patterning of genes turned on and off. This further regulates gene expression in ever more specific places and groups of cells, leading the rise of body parts and tissue types in the embryo. The finer the detail or pattern (hairs, scale patterns, etc) the more local interactions between cells are responsible.

2. develop an argument bout compelling points

We can think about this in terms of the Delereax reading. All individuals have a singularity in the expression of their genes, and the process of regulation is the virtuality that leads to singularity from the transcendental field of life = self replicating molecules of DNA.

He goes on to state that what happened in embryology is that we made the simple invisible - visible. We can see spots, stripes, and other things as genes turn on and off inside the embryo. This also harks back to Merleau-Ponty's spaz attack against science's reductionist principle. When we break down complicated processes into their component parts and see their interactions to produce a whole, we understand more about the world. This understanding leads to a greater visual experience - one no longer views the fruit fly as some insignificant organism, one understands their origins, and how we all hark back to a similar, intricately-regulated and beautifully -realized common origin. As our understanding grows, so does our appreciation for the diversity and similarities of every form of life around us...

Addressing complexity - a thing mean be emergent, greater than the sum of it's parts, but this arises because the interactions between these parts makes for something unimaginably complex (but keep in mind that most people, when they see a fruit fly, see a nuisance and something nowhere near complexity. Thank you science for that expansion of my humility...). Our modeling is based on finding these simple invisible parts, and using our models to find our complexity with those building blocks (back to Holland).

There is a beginning to this order (in the egg) that came from the parent cell before it. So, really, the chicken came before the egg...

Complexity again! It's fascinating how we respond to complexity, thereby creating more complexity as organisms respond to our responses...All of life and evolution is just one huge interaction, between organisms and organisms, between organisms and environment. It takes the normal law that things go to chaos, and throws a wrench in it. Because there is an excess of energy, everywhere you care to inspect.

3. talk about these in terms of class ideas
Maybe I'll just merge points 2 and 3 together, because they seem to flow together a lot...
4. words I learned!
erudite: having or showing extensive scholarship; learned