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

Georges Bataille, "Theoretical Introduction" and "Historical Data 1" from The Accursed Share

1. Summarize key points
I find it interesting that Bataille, in his introduction, practically apologizes for writing this book! I didn't catch it at first, but as I was looking for other opinions on Bataille, I came across a post here Trashing Georges Bataille, "Accursed" Stalinist. (Prepare yourself for a long quote from Bataille and these people at notbored...)

"
Bataille also wants to pretend (wants us to believe) that the entire book, all of The Accursed Share, might also have ended up in the trash. In his preface, he writes:

Writing this book in which I was saying that energy finally can only be wasted, I myself was using my energy, my time, working; my research answered in a fundamental way the desire to add to the amount of wealth acquired for mankind. Should I say that under these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book and could not go on writing it? A book that no one awaits, that answers no formulated question, that the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter -- such is the oddity that today I offer the reader. This invites distrust at the outset [...]

It's a fitting conceit, a pretty good joke, and it's irony certainly brings a smile; but it does indeed invite distrust at the outset. Note the (intentional?) ambiguity of "Should I say that under these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book and could not go on writing it?" The only response to this evasively rhetorical question is: "Look, Georges: You should say that you stopped writing it, but only if it's true. If it isn't true, then you shouldn't say it."
"

The only problem is, I read total trash in their conjecture that a) his writing was trash and b) he was purporting his entire premise as untrue. I was a little offended at their conclusion, in fact, so I'm taking them on in Bataille's defense.

The "conditions" Bataille referred to was that of an increase in the common wealth of mankind, but a wealth that he realized was momentary, and ultimately caused greater trouble when too much wealth (excess) had been accumulated. That "condition" is the truth of his book, and yet by that very truth, he was adding to man's immediate wealth by writing this book but contributing to trouble down the line. In his mind, the concepts in his book are so universal and applicable that he had to set aside his misgivings and add to the wealth and energy of the community, because it might someday act as some sort of warning, or negative feedback, and help reduce trouble in the long run.

So, that was his apology, the tentative explanation of his moral dilemma...and these notbored people are shit at understanding Bataille. At least in this instance (they could still prove me wrong, if I read anything else they wrote...).

***

Additionally, 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...).

The meaning of general economy...
If we consider the general movement of economy as a flow of energy across the globe, we have to acknowledge that in biological systems, there is a ton of excess energy. Energy not used for growth of the system must be lost (i.e. thermal). In the economy, so much excess is generated that a lot of the wealth accumulated gets spent lavishly (without profit) and the surplus energy must somehow be lost. He attributes 'useless' activity in history, like festivals, to the unknown (but sensed) need to expel this energy, and considering recent leaps in industrial growth, the excess energy was unfortunately disappated in WWI and II. He argues that if our economy leaves aside a margin for profitless production, this will negate or at least reduce all of this excess accumulated wealth.

(original reading)

Our study of the economy is usually looked at from within the system – the effect of one part (car production) on the whole economic movement. Bataille argues that economy is one system within a larger framework.

There is a circulation of energy produced and used in this point of the universe. That is economy, and we’re ignorant of the rules governing this system of produced energy which we use and operate in. The excess energy in a system must somehow be spent, even if we’re unaware of spending it.  Living organisms require energy for life, so we operate from the perspective that we always need more energy, but in reality, we’re only trying to find enough to make up for the excess that is always lost in consumption and production. No matter what we do, create, eat, shit out, etc, energy is lost because we live in a world of wealth. These excesses can be viewed in an economic perspective, but naturally go against traditional economic assumptions. Because we don’t understand that we need to destroy our surplus energy, it eventually gets to be too much for the system and brings about its own destruction (in this case, war). The only way to prevent an inevitable war is to extend the economy in new ways or to create useless jobs that dissipate the excess energy. We have to surrender commodities without return, enter a general rather than restrictive economy.

The laws of general economy...
A quote that caught my attention: "Precedence is given to energy acquisition rather than energy expenditure," in todays times. The total biomass or biosphere of earth uses up as much energy from the sun as possible, but it's growth is limited by space on earth. Excess energy is given off in fecal waste, or in radiation leaving the planet. Because life is under pressure to exist in every corner it can fit, there is a pressure of competition on all life forms. When one space is vacated, it's immediately vyed for by twelve other species. While spaces unoccupied means there is less accumulation of energy, for the most part the earth is inhabitated and excess energy drains away, leaks (is ebullient) because the laws of physics disctate that so much energy can't keep sitting in one spot.

Pressure leads to extension, that is life expands itself into every niche possible (birds and plants take to the air). When there is still uneven pressure on life to keep expanding, stay ebullient, we get competition (eating, which wastes tons of energy; only ~1/10 of the energy of the eaten organism is used for growth by the consumer), we get death (none of the organism's energy is utilized) and we get sex - in all three there is a squandering of excess energy, which is a sign of luxury. In general, this is the state Bataille argues we are in.

He expands on death and sex with an interesting take - he claims that death occurs in order to make room for the one who will take our place, and that death and sex can be viewed first as the negation of the self (annhiliation or combination) and then as the reasons for the movement of life. Kinda intuitive, but kinda cool. (Funny how circular and interconnected death and sex are, in reality and in this idea. Sometimes I think humans just see a neat trend, find some words that describe in a unique way and then love to talk about it like it might be fact. We're evolved to see patterns and we love to shoot the shit...) Regarding sex, I love his distinction of sex as growth of the population, but the luxury of the individual.

On the biological level, I question the idea of sex as a squandering of energy, however (For humans it makes total perfect sense, but is this just too much extrapolation?). For the male, there is energy in the initial frantic act of sex (they either defeat competition for females and then mate with them, or they woo a female first), but in most systems (Syngnathidae aside) the female's energy expenditure is limited while she waits for or encourages the male in sex, and THEN gestates the offspring, which is overall a higher cost I'd presume (even if the male assists in raising offspring or the female doesn't protect her offspring after her eggs are laid). So why the higher cost for females? Because females are the missing link in the equation - a male's reproductive success depends more on the female than hers does on the male, to a certain extent - and so they require more energy, but have less luxury? Also, why do most organisms have sex in order to make babies, but some (groups of primates, orcas and I think some dolphins, possibly some beetles, I've seen some crazy beetle sexcapades in the UW Botany Greenhouse), have enough luxury to squander their energy in sex for pleasure? Life history traits and luck of the draw, evolutionarily speaking? My main concern is, how does this energy-squandering hypothesis hold up against comparisons of typical energy-expending curves for various organisms? Do we have a way to measure energy expended during sex (I'm sure we do) and average that over a species, and compare it to other species? If so, we might expect those raunchy orcas to expend a higher proportion of energy having sex than doing other things like hunting (compared to other species), but have a relatively high energy acquisition compared to energy spent not having sex... Like this.

Finally, Bataille ties these ideas back into the economy. He believes that as the economy grows, we are in a process of extension, developing our tools, technology, and interpersonal relations at the business level. From this comes growth, for there is so much space for man to fill and the sky's the limit once we have the means to expand. But eventually this leads to so much surplus that we stagnate beneath it - our growth and therefore our expansive production (of babies and tools) drops. "Henceforth what matters primarily is no longer to develop the productive forces but to spend their products sumptuously."

Once again, I find myself wondering...if this is the case, then is Bataille arguing that over the history of humanity, and possibly the world, this system of squandering and sloughing off excess energy has been going on? In mass extinction events, what excess energy led to such destruction? During the Holy Crusades, Ghengis Khan, the Bubonic Plague, etc, what extreme forms of excess could we correlate to all of that war, sickness, death?

In The Accursed Share, we come to the extreme luxury of wealth, and it sounds like Bataille might be arguing that the best course of action is to let the wealthy be wealthy and live so luxuriously it negates a bunch of this excess. Sounds a little far-fetched, though, because overall there are so few rich (even though they do have a ton) and we have so many ways of expelling excess a piece at a time (hit the gym, go to a concert, celebrate  a holiday in style with your hometown, etc). But I'll assume he worked out the math and is right - in the meantime, a brilliant turn of phrases and thought that I enjoyed...

"On the other hand, the raising of the standard of living is in no way represented as a requirement of luxury. The movement that demands it is even a protest against the luxury of the great fortunes: thus the demand made in the name of justice. Without having anything against justice, obviously, one may be allowed to point out that here the word conceals the profound truth of its contrary, which is precisely freedom. Under the mask of justice, it is true that general freedom takes on the lackluster and neutral appearance of existence subjected to the necessities: If anything, it is a narrowing of limits to what is most just; it is not a dangerous breaking-loose, a meaning that the word has lost. It is a guarantee against the risk of servitude, not a will to assume those risks without which there is no freedom."

Life exists among an excess of energy; the most incredible example is the sun, which gives (to the earth) without receiving. Chemical processes produce excess, which is magnified at each scale level higher (think of the excesses of energy wasted as we travel up trophic levels). The excess energy is used partly for the animal’s growth, and the rest in reproduction (I think the cell cycle, with its growth phase and its process of division, is a good illustration of that.). Then individual/group growth is limited by other individuals in the group/environment and overall growth is limited by the terrestrial biosphere.

This means life is limited by space, and this creates a pressure. We call the spaces available for life ‘niche space’. The volume of life increases as the limits on its growth are increased. We get adaptive radiation into any available niche spaces. If none are found available, then the pressure, the excess energy, is simply lost. Life is possible in certain places, but soon the effects of pressure cause new niches to be taken advantage of. We get differences of all sorts! 

2. Ideas in terms of class...
Bataille gives us solid rules for thinking about immanence. We need time. Over time, pressures build up inside a system. Exchange marks time. Capital, interestingly enough, denies time, or at least equalizes some sense of time with the value of ownership, making money an exchange of time.We put money on the future when we exchange it for time.

This also speaks to Malthus, who thought that resources only increase exponentially. Really, the only thing we lack is equipment to deal with or move those resources, and the ability to dissipate our excess energy garnered from production.

Excess: we get luxury. we get waste. we get change -----> leads to ------> limited competition which generates: Necessity

Not all things are a necessity, and not all things have equal value.

Excess is about a sense of balance and general freedom. The contract of the law is to not impinge upon other's freedoms, which keeps everyone changing in a way that society can get something from everyone. The slow food movement is about changing our focus from how we produce to how we consume. The law impedes upon neither, but lets our own movements create new demands and new production within the defined laws of how we do produce and distribute food. Having this amount of excess (in production, time, quantity and quality of food) allows a lot of movement and generation of pressures within our culture. Change is luxury. Excess comes about when growth is no longer possible.

Our world operates on the politics of difference - our ideal of equality is born out of a recognition of our differences.  Different cultures place more or less difference on what can be equalized. In Bhutan they have a gross domestic measure of happiness. But since equality is predicated on differences, it's forever a measure of the dynamic. Since we're immanent in our system, everything we do is forever changing and being changed by these dynamic values. The change of excess influences everyone in a way I think can be seen in the Vietnam war and people's responses to it, and how it's forever affected and in some ways defined a generation...

Growth is about capturing the subject and the object, but change is about radical immanence. Like the observer's dilemma - the act of witnessing something can change it. This gives us almost infinite perspectives and narratives of events. In post-modernism, the problem with this is that each one has equal value, but as we've learned from Bataille, not everything is equal.

In Thurtle's neo-modernism, some moments escape the value of narration because the experience goes beyond that of subject and object, and instead ascends (or descends) into radical immanence. You get to transcend the limits of your immanence in the world! For example, the process of death is the process of leaving behind your subjectiveness and becoming a process of change. It delimits our ideas of agency in the world and brings perspective.


4. Words I learned:
a fortiori: for a still stronger reason, furthermore
vitiate: to impair the quality of or invalidate
irreconcilable (yes I had to look this one up): ideas or beliefs that cannot be brought into harmony
ebullition: a sudden, violent outpouring (as of pent up energy being released)
effervesce: to emit small bubbles of gas from a liquid
exudation: an oozing out
ossature: framework or statue
virility: masculine vigor/character, potency

William Connelly reading, "A World of Becoming"

1. Summary of key points...

2. Develop an argument about compelling points:

There’s a break between the humanities and the sciences, for several reasons, but there’s this complexity theory that might be able to bridge that gap. It purports the following 3 ideas:

From any given moment and perspective in time, we’re unable to predict what will arise in the future, especially on a large scale. This is because everything that happens depends in some part on its environment. Some of the changes that happened in the past, which resulted in some sort of occurrence (or in the field of organismal biology, some trait) that hasn't been lost since then, might encounter novel aspects in the environment at just a time to make that trait or occurrence become suddenly important. These are unpredictable from our perspective, because we don’t understand all of the dynamic rules that are in flux and the underlying, “unimportant” traits or properties that will mix under such rules and fluctuations. And if we don’t understand those rules, how could we understand either the potentials for what they might become, or the direction these elements will take in the present-and-given-future?

I was trying to figure out what Poincare resonances are when I stumbled onto this interesting blog, http://quantumresonance.wordpress.com/tag/poincare/.  First let me just take a moment to say that it’s RIDICULOUS when a class transmits some understanding that then becomes the ability to read meaning and information where I previously would have gotten gibberish. Second, this blog helped me interpret the meaning of Poincare resonances through the example of a harmonic string that vibrates in response to a string nearby of the same note that vibrates first. The transmission that happens there is due to complex rules in the environment (it seems to me, btw that this examples makes it impossible to reduce the world to something we only experience in our heads) allowing the strings and the vibrations to resonate with one another. To make the string example greater, think of an orchestra. If a whole bunch of strings are vibrating together next to another, then the string from one cello is likely causing vibrations in a harmonic string from the next cello, so on and so forth, creating a vibrational effect that…may be undetectable to the normal ear?...but has a subliminal effect that may explain why we’re so drawn to live music, or huge orchestras. And probably this is a horrible example, but potentially there’s some self-organizational aspect, in that the composer works from both the individual sounds and the subliminal sounds of the vibrations, to inform his composing so that these sounds build into one another and inform each other in a way that leads to this incredible musical phenomena… And while we could say that these reactions or these huge (emergent) creations are due to chance, the very fact of this being inside of a system (or environment) means that the result is due to complex interactions that come about thru the play of the system’s rules and the actual causal point (or more appropriately, infinite points of causality, each informing the next). And here I’m going to refer again to this blog post I found, because I think he took this concept even further…

“Causality has from a philosophical viewpoint two integrated elements: The causal potential and the complex harmonic receptor effects. Together they form a complex adaptive system of resonant layers between which new phenomenons emerge where resonances support information/energy exchange.”

I think this is essentially saying what I blathered on about. Each causal point informs every other causal point when it’s effect filters around through time and space, such that each changing point in the system ripples through time, space, and the changes each mechanism or agent caused can to become potentially larger than the cause it initially started, because one small change can cause changes nearby that cause huge changes later on (i.e. the butterfly effect).

“Those layers of emergent properties are on the lowest layers seperated by boundaries of symmetry-breaking phase transitions. More on those in my next posts.”

And then…wtf? The closest I can think of this (using models!) is that one emergent property, i.e. resonating strings, is in a way delineated by another emergent property, such as matter and sound waves, so that only nearby strings of the same note or harmonic can vibrate in response to the original string. 

I think I touched on this already, as it pretty flawlessly flows from the previous 2 points Connelly made. But I’m curious about the idea of systems being open. This may somewhat contradict the previous point made by my bloggist, and his idea of “symmetry-breaking phase transitions.” Or they may inform one another, and this is actually an example of how what you know really informs how much and the caliber of what you get from information. Scary thought…We're all trapped in our own perspective.

...

 Agency AND creativity! Each thing has a mechanical ability to become something in this world. This is both dependent upon its abilities and it’s environments, and also the springboard for its agency. The becoming, as I see it now, is something like…(the strong desire for sleep, which is all that I crave now)…no, it’s like the emergent phenomena of things acting inside a system. The emergent phenomena of e.coli eating shit in our gut is the digestive system! Or a part of it. The becoming of neurons firing and synapsing electrically is our brain…and more importantly our perceived SELF.

And because of previous points, let’s keep in mind that this act of becoming through our agency is unpredictable, and certainly not progressive. Here’s how he finally defines agency, which isn’t totally how I would have thought about it (I thought anything being able to interact with anything else would have some degree of mechanical agency):

And then of course he goes on to make the distinction between agency, mechanical stuff, and proto-agency, tying in the idea of emergent properties with the idea of becoming and attaching a degree of human-centered ideation and progress on his values of agency. It feels a little out of character with everything else he says. But he does eventually mention mechanical agency and how even things like electricity can be harnessed and formed into something with degrees of becoming. He talks about a power grid, I prefer to think of a streak of lightning…

Agency is further examined and broken down into the parts of minimal agency (something reacts to rules and does stuff), proto-agency involves life, meaning, and values (and so can react with intention, such as a baterium performing chemotaxis to find glucose), and complex agency, which humans and certainly some other primates seem to possess.

And what I said earlier about the butterfly effect, I'm realizing can be stated better: change to one agent in a system sets off concatenations of reactions. Whether we're discussing mechanical, proto-, or complex agents, the interactions of these things in a system of rules can cause novel or creative changes to emerge, that were not foreseen from the behaviors and understanding of the rules before that novel change emerged. 

To hearken back to my boyfriend's argument about free will, if we were some transcendent being that new all of the parts and the rules at every scale, every emergent property would be inevitable. There would be no creativity or surprise. Our sense of emergence comes from being embedded in the system.

3. Words I learned today:
concatenations: connected or linked in a series
confluences: a gathering, flowing, or meeting together at one juncture or point
dynamical: changing, objects in motion (adj)
apodictic: demonstrably true, incontrovertible
incontrovertible: impossible to dispute, unquestionable
flouts: to show contempt for or scorn
holism: The theory that living matter or reality is made up of organic or unified wholes that are greater than the simple sum of their parts

John Holland reading, "Emergence from Chaos to Order"

Re-reading points:
generators = laws
agents = laws that interact to create emergence
building blocks = the basic parts interacting in the emergent system
(these are all 'mechanisms')


1. Summary of key points...

What draws us into the world, into questioning? Observation and wonder of complexity coming from the unlikeliest places…

Examples of emergence, of something seemingly more than the sum of its parts, is everywhere!

These systems are constantly changing, though the rules stay the same. As scientists, we think it’s because of  the “historical contingency” of the individual parts, which are moving and being moved under the rules of their systems. From this we get patterns - the interaction of rules, patterns, and agents leads to emergence and novelty.

The regular rules are what we end up seeing, because humans see patterns, and we form hypotheses or models to help us find those rules, then to better study the parts and their inherent processes.

The parts are the agents, mechanisms of change, obeying the rules of their system.

These agents can be recombined in innumerable ways in order to create something magnificent, each end product different from the rest. If we just recombine the building blocks in different ways, without a central agent (on the same scale?), they can adapt to one another and alter each other, and then we have great potential for something emerging from the basic system.

 And each level or scale of agents can be the building blocks under a different set of rules for yet another scale.

 In science, we try to find these rules and break down, or reduce how each agent is most likely to interact with others or otherwise react to the rules of its system. We try to find the generalities and apply a greater level of generalities to each greater complexity using the rules of the previous scale, when the interactions of agents has probably redesigned rules altogether at the greater level through emergent properties. So reduction is useful to a point, but emergence is another aspect of systems that reductionism may be unable to examine. Despite the effort of many scientists, emergence is about the interactions of all these pieces and their "historical contingency" of their previous behavior and rules, not just one rule affecting elements at greater scales in the same linear way.

2. Develop an argument about compelling points:

Somehow I never quite thought of using metaphors for models. I should make it my goal now to find models, translate them into metaphors, and then explain them to other people (students, friends, family, coworkers). One day I might create my own working model…

...

With discovery comes greater discovery. The more time passes, the greater the average human IQ becomes - not because we're collectively smarter, but because collectively we know so much more, and are building our lives around the emergent properties forming from years of rules interacting together...

Being able to produce models is a way in which we can study rules underlying a system. When we want to inspect something complex, like how a tree comes from a seed, then we build models to find out where we should look. 

As our investigation progresses, we keep refining and changing our models, to direct our search, and also to build upon observed, repeated phenomenon that appear to be the result of rules in the system.

But, this requires a great deal of abstraction, which pretty much becomes the same thing as reductionism. As Holland says, "When we talk of numbers, nothing is left of shape, or color, or mass, or anything else that identifies an object, except the very fact of its existence."

Indeed, the very way humans operate is to reduce their surroundings to recognizable building blocks, and then build those blocks back up into the coherent whole or complex surroundings...Which eventually leads us to ask if everything is just a process of reducible parts and rules. The key point is that after we reduce the system down to its parts and rules, we must recognize the new rules that emerge from the interactions of the previous level.
Really, using metaphors to explain models is almost a form of modeling itself. Your break the important bits down, translate them to something easier to understand, and then build those new pieces back into the overarching concept of the original model. It's like humans are meant to understand things by changing scale or by pulling information from a variety of places and ideas.

3. Words I learned...
recondite: concealed, hidden, or not easily understood, ambiguous.
invariant: doesn't vary, static
propitiate: to appease an offended power

serendipitous: lucky in making unexpected discoveries

scintillation: to sparkle or shine, be brilliant

a fortiori: for similar but more convincing reasons

perforce: by necessity

efficacious: producing or capable of producing a desired effect

Merleau-Ponty reading, parts 1 & 2

Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, parts 1 and 2

1. Summarize key points:
Ponty bashes on science because science tries to reduce the world to small parts and to reconstruct it with the tools and models we have built from our perception of the world, which is inherently non-objective.

Our perception of the world is non-objective because we see the physical world around us. We also can see ourselves, and see ourselves seeing, and this makes us a) exist inside of the world, and b) exist inside of ourselves. Our vision gives us the ability to distinguish between inside and outside.

From this meeting of inside and out, we get perception, and from perception we have life. But there's a duality about this whole process. Think of a mirror seeing and reflecting the world around it, and from that we can see and reflect on a reflection...our minds produce a similar phenomenon, we interpret our vision so that the individual parts of a visual collective make a whole, like shadows and lines and lighting make a mountain on the horizon.

Painters, when they paint, are immersed in a world of vision, of taking the reception of reality down to perception, and building perception into a painting, which is then seen by others who receive the painter's reality. And it resonates within us because vision rises beyond the actual, existing world, and tugs at a part of us that makes emotional associations with visual perceptions.

And finally, we can tie this altogether into the thought that beyond (or fundamentally holding together) everything we see, is some Being, some existence that is inside of us and outside, all around, each of us embedded inside of it.

"Further, associated bodies must be brought forward along with my body - the 'others,' not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but the others who haunt me and whom I haunt; the 'others' along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those beings of his own species, locale, or habitat."

2. Develop an argument about compelling points:

Part 1
1st, he bashes on science. Not for the scientists purpose in life which is fundamentally curious, but for the embedded process by which we take apart the world, and reconstruct meaning in it using the tools we built from it. His argument against science is that it, "admits only the most 'worked-out' phenomena, more likely produced by the apparatus than recorded by it. From this state of affairs arises all sorts of vagabond endeavors." I like that he calls science a bunch of vagabond endeavors. I'm a little offended, even though he's mostly right and I've struggled with such thoughts myself... He thinks that "science's agile and improvisatory thought will learn to ground itself," that it will come to understand "the 'others,' not merely as my congeners, as the zoologist says, but the others who haunt me and whom I haunt; the others along with whom I haunt a single, present, and actual Being as no animal ever haunted those beings of his own species, locale, or habitat." This line opens up new doors, in my eyes, to view the window of the world in which everything is one, comes from one thing, and the process of perspective is as important to individuality and becoming as is its actual being or agency.

Part 2
Here are quotes about painters and painting that had a particular resonance or understanding with me...

This illuminates how paintings can often be so weird, and feel so blank to me. Almost soulless. They aren't often statements, they're a singular way of viewing the world, and from that viewing can come any interpretation. There is no right and wrong, no command buried inherently. Just visual interpretation and appreciation.

How we see things ("our motor projects") is unique and is also embedded in how we exist. We have vision, so we view the world. We are a part of the physical world, so we only see what is physically around us. We view the world with our eyeballs and interpret the image in our minds, so what we see and how we see it is a part of the actual world, but is not all of the world. And since we view the world and are a part of it, the world also views us. He does say that, "the see-er does not appropriate what he sees; he merely approaches it by looking," but I think that in our subconscious mind are enough filters that we can say this isn't true - we filter what we see before we even realize we've seen it, which is why the mind takes on its own agency in the process of our viewing.

Not so much an enigma as it explains why we think as we do. We are in the world, we see the world, and we see ourselves seeing. So we become the center of the world, we sense the world and we sense the ability to sense inside our self, so we become the center of the physical world. Because we have a continuous moment of sensing/seeing, and realizing that we sense and see, we have a past and a future, and an elusive present that's forever slipping away into past or future time. It also ties back together why Merleau-Ponty thinks science has it wrong - it isolates these things when really, there is a continuation between the sensed and the sensing, and "vision happens among, or is caught in things." It also hints at why we go about analyzing the world as we do. Everything is separate from us, because we see it, but also everything is a part of us because we are embedded in it. And so we have an unflappable curious desire to know what it is, to know what we are, but must break what we see into pieces so we can isolate one rule or phenomenon from each other, and build back up into a coherent part with a model of the world...

What is life? It's the process of seeing and being seen, when recognition of these things comes together as perspective inside our minds. We are alive because there is a meeting of the outer and the inner, of seeing and being seen. Life is being part of the whole and separate from it, all at once.

From the awareness of our own existence, we can create an abstraction of the world. First we see (and unaware of it, our mind processes what we see) and then that image is granted to our mind for analyzation, for appreciation, for intake and rumination. And from that rumination comes our image of the image, and icon of what we view. And we have associations, which cause us to have emotional responses to images, and to ideas. And that in turn becomes its own thing, has its own moment of becoming something, once it is painted, photographed, or otherwise seen (internally or externally). It is the imaginary, and this imaginary is real in its own way. It's a real map for my mind and body to use as a representation of something in the actual world, but it's also just an actual trace of lines, colors, etc, in which an exchange between the outside (the painting) and the inside (my associations which inform my reading of the painting).

The eye is like a computer, it learns from seeing and sees from what it learns. And it takes the world and puts some part of it to painting, it makes something that can be possessed only at a distance, just like vision takes the world and makes it something that can be possessed, but only thru vision.

A painting is created from vision, and from the vision of the painter passing thru the objects, holding them in his mind as some sort of icon, and interpreting that icon into texture, color, and shapes that make up the painters playground. He takes the outer world with his vision, his vision sees it in the private world, and as a painter he makes it into a shared world.

...

To tie it all together - the painter takes the elements of the visible world, such as lines, shadow and depth, and tries to pull them altogether in a way that still allows us to see the thing it makes up, such as a mountain. He doesn't know what all the elements of vision are, or how they react together to make a painting, but he's always painting in order to take that vision and translate it, with those elements present, into a whole thing.

The painter looks at the world and the world looks at him, and thus his act of painting is an act of continuous birth, because according to Ponty a birth, a new existence occurs when something is simultaneously looked at and looks back, simultaneously becomes "visible for itself and us." Though personally, this reminds me of Schroedinger's cat, which I always understood to be anthro-centric, and kinda ridiculous. I think Ponty would have been more on target if he'd stuck to life being a process of visualization that allows for a perception of internal and external, though I think he was trying to extend that to include the external also looking back at you....which seems very cool and eastern.

And as the world looks back at you, painters begin to see a big circular vision, with one vision encompassing another vision endlessly, such that you have to question if there is a "total or absolute vision, outside of which there is nothing and which closes itself over them." It goes back to his original enigma - that the body simultaneously sees and is seen. The painter sees, is seen, and creates a new seeing on his canvas, and the rest of the world can see that seeing in the canvas, and each person then sees and is seen. In a way, it makes us alive, and brings the painter back to life, because we are seeing the painter see. As the painter sees he paints, and as we see his painting we are seeing him seeing, and in a ghostly way, we see him see as well.

3. Words that I learned:
congeners: a member of the same kind, class, or group
transubstantiations: conversion of one substance into another
antinomies: a paradox, two truths or principles that seem opposing but equally necessary.
obverse: counterpart or complement, the more conspicuous of two alternatives
idios kosmos: latin for private world
koinos kosmos: latin for shared world
profane: contempt for what is sacred, or secular
oneiric: of, relating to, or suggestive of dreams