Psyche-delic: An Unapologetic Swerve toward the Thermodynamic, With Special Reference to the Eleatic Stranger and Fudgy the Whale ( The Whale Formerly Known as "Indole")
(Fudgy appears slightly smaller than actual size. Not a Real Whale. Nothing to see here. Show's over.Move it on...)
Click below for full "shamanic enactment" download, now with bonus track, "Fudgy The Whale Meets Transposon (remix)"
This enactment by the Shaman creates a seductive mirror of the spirit reality that draws the spirits in and directs their power (Taussig, 1993: 106).
Authenticated Podcast Script Follows, with Gratitude to Collaborators. Note: Caveat Emptor Includes hyperbolic claim that haptic modeling was as important as LSD to discovery of double helical model. Obviously overstated for effect under tug of telemechanical pull of living systems. Nothing was as important as LSD to the discovery of DNA besides Watson and Crick's symmetry breaking and rhythmic entrainment as explicated in The Double Helix. Includes Beta Test Scratch and Sniff
“Every victory of science is a triumph of the Absurd”, Jacques Monod
(1)A bloody fingered Cut up: Recombinant Joy Brigade or “ an unheard of 6th juvenile form “
(2)In the beginning was Mimesis: “The Mimesis is not the Territory” Sara Ann Wylie On miming well, signed, mobius – Why don't know what an insect can do!
There are two useful consequences to viewing mimesis as a means of transforming companion species into experimental systems. First, it explains why particular questions are asked of particular species; it is not coincidental that the process of metamorphosis was understood through the bodies of insects whose own metamorphosis is contingent upon the availability of human prey. Second, it helps explain why humans can experience the products of experimental systems as so surprising when they are exported beyond the bounds of the laboratory. To understand the social life of laboratory products, it is useful to draw on anthropological treatments of mimesis.
what is mimed is question begging? Universe as a way of tricking itself
a process he describes as Othering
spirit of mischief”
nasty surprises
mischief spirit dance – insufficiently shamanic in not taking suffficient amounts of the “original material” - birdsong acquisitiion, nottebohm, neurogenesis
“they are useful”
This enactment by the Shaman creates a seductive mirror of the spirit reality that draws the spirits in and directs their power (Taussig, 1993: 106).
Wigglesworth also desires control over Rhodnius.
In order to achieve this control he also had to make himself into an environment attractive the beetle. Wigglesworth wants to dislodge Rhodnius from its Brazilian home to his laboratory in London. He recognizes he can achieve this design by acting or accepting the part of prey, thereby duping Rhodnius into accepting an entirely different space and new set of relationships.
Yes, but how - with special reference to Marcel Marceau
Becoming Other for Wigglesworth requires him to accept the position of victim, a part usually played by the colonized people of Brazil. In becoming the victim, on par with the Colonial other, Wigglesworth becomes familiar to Rhodnius yet he also smuggles in a third form of otherness: his intention to master this insect.
Wigglesworth found that the beheaded 5th stage nymph, under the influence of the 4th stage nymph’s brain, presumably via inhibitory factor, did not metamorphose into an adult insect, but rather into an unheard of 6th juvenile form (Wigglesworth, 1970).
The characteristic
“dimpled” nymphal cuticle appeared
where Wigglesworth painted his initials VBW with inhibitory factor on the back of an adult Rhodnius (see Fig. 3). The ability of “inhibitory factor” to reverse metamorphosis, rather than simply prevent it, lead to its rechristening as “juvenile hormone” (Williams, 1970:47).
With this signature, Wigglesworth expresses his mastery, indeed ownership and control, of Rhodnius’s very biological time. Wigglesworth’s primary goal in mastering Rhodnius was not to address it as a vector of Chagas disease, but rather to render it an experimental medium in which to discover and demonstrate the principles of insect development. In 1939, he wrote and later edited eight subsequent editions of The Principles of Insect Physiology, considered the foundational text of this field, dedicated to revealing the “principles” of insect biology. The first edition begins: “Insects provide an ideal medium in which to study all the problems of physiology” (Wigglesworth, 1939).
Maybe Not? The insect is the spirit medium is the message, a grasshopper lying heavy
Previously a human companion species, Rhodnius was rendered by Wigglesworth an “ideal medium” for the pursuit of pure science,
implosion into a paranoid whole in which the self can no longer be extricated from the other.
spiritualist medium - Wallace channel
(3)What Does Evolution Want? A spirit of mischief “..Natasha .feel the strain of the molecule” motor neurons; blockage of the ego in the indole hiatus fnord
as long as she doesn’t imply…you know.”
fnord
He in turn animated his hypothesis by
entangling us both in this demonstration of his model.
spelling
the “death of nature” (see Merchant,
1983), mechanism in the life sciences might be an interesting site for
feminist analyses of scientific practice.
both could be true
In this chapter, I examine
modes of learning and communication among protein modelers in
research and teaching contexts, paying special attention to how they
use a variety of media, including their own bodies, to animate
chemical and physical processes at the molecular scale. Paying
attention to the expressive body-work of molecular modeling, I show
how researchers’ affects and embodied performances inflect
mechanistic knowledge in structural biology. Rather than deadening
living processes in order to make them more tractable, and so
available to analysis, my informants’ expressive performances show up
n what Donna Haraway has called the “unapologetic swerve of
some ways, it’s plausible to interpret researchers prevalent use of liveliness” that animates both bodies and knowledge in-the-making
machine metaphors as an attempt to quell this tendency to slip into (1997: 137).
animistic language.
“If I was a DNA polymerize what would I
want to do?” Laughing And that’s fine between us,
because we have this underlying, deep, ingrained
appreciation of the fact that we’re talking about what
is energetically favorable for a molecule to do!
laughs
Lynn and Joanna recognize that analogies are potent devices that can
produce risky, unwanted effects for their rather impressionable
students. They don’t want their students to come away with the idea
that molecules actually are miniature machines—they’re not
comfortable enough with their knowledge of what machines are, never
mind what machines can do, to really develop those analogies with
any level of precision. But they also don’t want students to come away
with the “illusion” that molecules have “human characteristics” and
“desires.”
since when is desire human?
They are approaching introductory biology education as a
kind of public relations effort to produce properly aligned supporters of
Joanna: interrupts Human characteristics of their evolutionary theory. As they see it, the risk in using
molecule—that it’s selecting to change itself! And it’s anthropomorphisms to describe molecular behaviors is not that they
just….I mean it’s a little thing. As experts we can say, will necessary instill creationist ideas in their students’ minds; equally
well “it’s the chemistry in the molecule.” But as intro problematic is that by suggesting that molecules have desires—that
to biology students, these guys don’t see that it’s… they “want” to do things—they may seduce their students into
conceiving Lamarckian views of evolutionary progress.
liveliness and the indole
as long as she doesn’t imply…you know.”
do the lacuna mutata
Scale!
(4)whales Michael Paul Rossi
Scale!
"Though Michel Foucault famously dismissed natural history as nothing more than the “nomination of the visible” – the excision of those characteristics of living things that can’t be translated to a visual classificatory grid – the authenticity of Andrews’s model transcended the purely visible.7"
I think this misrepresents foucault's concept of visible invisibility, natural history already over by the time of the fake whale hoax liveliness authenticity hijinks
word authority more habit forming than heroin
Lilly's ridicule for presuming to talk to dolphins; the dialogic language poem with GAIA
Unlike a photograph, however, a cast was three-dimensional, and captured not just a representation of the subject, but, in Lucas’s terms, its reality.
realize “ the vast dimensions attained by the giants of the cetacean order = scalar order of magnitude differance
like huge sections of psychedelic butternut squash.
nothing has ever been like huge sections of psychedelic butternut squash. Until Now!
A Feeling of Werirdness
Precisely to seduce the insect: the grasshopper lies heavy
From Plato's Sophist
Well, then, pursuing the same analytic method as before, I think that I can discern two divisions of the imitative art, but I am not as yet able to see in which of them the desired form is to be found.
Theaetetus:
Will you tell me first what are two divisions of which you are speaking?
Eleatic Stranger:
One is the art of likeness-making;-generally a likeness of anything is made by producing a copy which is executed according to the proportions of the original, similar in length and breadth and depth, each thing receiving also its appropriate colour.
Theaetetus:
Is not this always the aim of imitation?
Eleatic Stranger:
Not always; in works either of sculpture or of painting, which are of any magnitude, there is a certain degree of deception;
-for artists were to give the true proportions of their fair works, the upper part, which is farther off, would appear to be out of proportion in comparison with the lower, which is nearer; and so they give up the truth in their images and make only the proportions which appear to be beautiful, disregarding the real ones.
Theaetetus:
Quite true.
Eleatic Stranger:
And that which being other is also like, may we not fairly call a likeness or image?
Theaetetus:
Yes.
Eleatic Stranger:
And may we not, as I did just now, call that part of the imitative art which is concerned with making such images the art of likeness making?
Theaetetus:
Let that be the name.
Eleatic Stranger:
And what shall we call those resemblances of the beautiful, which appear such owing to the unfavourable position of the spectator, whereas if a person had the power of getting a correct view of works of such magnitude, they would appear not even like that to which they profess to be like? May we not call these "appearances," since they appear only and are not really like?
Theaetetus:
Certainly.
Eleatic Stranger:
There is a great deal of this kind of thing in painting, and in all imitation.
Theaetetus:
Of course.
Eleatic Stranger:
And may we not fairly call the sort of art, which produces an appearance and not an image, phantastic art?
Theaetetus:
Most fairly.
Eleatic Stranger:
These then are the two kinds of image making-the art of making likenesses, and phantastic or the art of making appearances?
5)Yes we have No Bananas; The Eternal Return of the Psyche - sophia roosth
psyche appears AS shit to ego, makes ego feel like shit
vibrational theory of smell - Turin
Open Source that shit!
public key
More taylorism, please
(6)purposive method - did I have any trouble with it?
a little overwhelming because there was
so much information.
And what happens with the digital? You take more pictures. There’s
more data to go through. laughs…I’d think at least twice as much… [slight
groan] because we don’t delete things in the field. We don’t do that…What we
do is we try to go through…those digital files and we try to pick the best
picture of an individual and put them in the best folders for that encounter. So
when you come home, there are the five whales that were in the best photo of
each one. Usually we don’t get that done because we’re just really tired.
We had a specially designed database for us on the Mac
volunteers ( cf Greenberg)- think mime here, think protein dance:
With the slides, I would call out every picture I took. I would say
left dorsal, right dorsal, and if possible the animal and if I wouldn’t know the
animal I would say A1 or C1 or whatever just to indicate it’s the first adult….
A volunteer would definitely hang on my lips and write everything
down…. Unfortunately, now we don’t still do that.
Have fun! Modes of working with these images please! Could you develope ways for t5hem to work with these images., to open to more volunteers etc?
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