Pure diss research? Maybe not. But I do support outbreaks of unbridled creativity, and think terrific horn players with tons of soul could indeed solve existential crises.
19 November 2008
09 November 2008
David Wills
from Prosthesis
“All we can say with any certainty is that within the space inhabited by the phantom, we have suddenly switched to another mode. What has occurred above all else is that rapid transfer; a transfer not so much from the artificial, for instance, to the natural, or vice versa, but into the ghostly space of the prosthetic. If, as we are bound to do, we read the pain as the return of some repressed, then it will not be, for me, the body reasserting its primacy over the ratiocinations of everyday existence, calling from some 30 years back to say ‘you cut me and it still hurts,’ not that so much as the body in its prosthetic function, in its artificial and contrived articulations, coming like some metallic specter to haunt the well-sewn surface of originary flesh.” (11-12)
“Thus it is the otherness that the body must carry in order to move that begins—and a first-person adjective is not ready to bear it—this our prosthesis.” (13)
“At the risk of provoking an abyssal indistinction, I’d like to call every rhetorical form that comes into effect a prosthetic transfer, I’d like prosthesis to be the figure here for differential, and differantial, relations in general. I’d like to ask what it would mean for the term to assume such a universality insofar as reference to it—at least in this instance of which there will be none other, not quiet ever—remains connected, in ways that are the whole story here, to my father’s wooden leg, and in turn to his reluctant body. How would the particular idiomatic and idiosyncratic pathos of this leg that is like no other, the singular event of my father’s prosthesis I am claiming here, how would that remain in and through the inevitable and necessary, imprecise and generalized transfer that occurs the moment this writing begins, and even before? One answer is quite clearly that there never was any such event in its pure singularity: prosthesis is the idea of that. The fact that all this comes down by way of my father is a convenient instantiation of its divisibility; the partial and artificial body that I claim, with dubious authority, as my own, as the basis for at least a part of my text, is a counterfeit countersignature of his suffering and infirmity. Prosthesis is the idea of that and at the same time the insistence on this instance, the singular pathos of this leg. The articulation of one with the other, this leg and that idea, can only be contrived, for instance by means of quotation marks or other diacritical forms, the drawing of distinctions between prosthesis, “prosthesis,” and Prosthesis, in other words by effects of writing. But all that functions only because of prosthesis, because the whole never was anywhere, neither in the singular nor in the total, because the parts were always already detachable, replaceable, because the transfer effect upon which the general is constructed is there at the very beginning, in the nonintegrality of that beginning, called prosthesis.” (15)
“I can find no name for this complex relation that a quotation, to begin with, here puts into play; no name to compete with prosthesis, no more pertinent name, no name for this pertinence, the peculiar appurtenance of the same and the other. So I name it prosthesis, I give a name to the configuration that is too complex and imprecise to have a single name, I let the name generalize out of all bounds, in order to resist or have done with the taxonomical rage or necessity that would presume to account for something that begins as a phantom pain or an ambulatory peculiarity extracted from Virgil. In order to insist that there is no simple name for a discourse that articulates with, rather than issuing from, the body, while at the same time realizing that there is no other discourse-in the sense of no other translation, transfer, or relation—no other conception of it except as a balancing act performed by the body, a shift or transfer between the body and its exteriority. The name for it is the name for the possibility of naming or uttering in general, and thus there is an urgent necessity to name it. To name it with a name that limps into existence; name it, as I do, prosthesis. And then to relate it against the implacable necessity of naming.” (20)
“In this way the wooden leg represents the duality of every prosthesis, its search for a way between emulating the human and superseding the human. A particularly supplemental duality once again.” (26).
“Secondly, the question of order is thrown into doubt by the paradoxical play of analogy, by the fact that the model—wooden leg, robot, computer—well before the advent of any artificial intelligence, can always surpass the original in its functioning, simply do the job better; or rather do all sorts of other jobs the original could not conceive of, like generate this renegade piece of writing.” (29)
“One cannot simply write about prosthesis when one is automatically, just by virtue of writing, writing prosthesis, entering into prosthetic relations, being prosthetic.” (30)
“Prosthesis is about nothing if it is not about measuring distance—that of the necessary separation and unavoidable complication between animate and inanimate form, between natural and artificial; that between types of writing, between memory and art criticism—about the necessity for and impossibility of precision in these relations. It is about close and distant connections of close and distant relatives.” (40)
“By means of prosthesis the relation to the other becomes precisely and necessarily a relation to otherness, the otherness, for example, of artificiality attached to or found within the natural. The relation to the other is denied the reconfirmation of sameness that freezes its differential effect, rigidifies the oedipal structure, and ultimately represses the feminine, the homosexual, and so on. For in spite of the importance of amputation, that relation, once it is a question of prosthesis, cannot be reduced to a matter of presence or absence, of possession or dispossession. It cannot be reduced to a matter of having or not having the prosthesis, for prosthesis is in no way reducible to a wooden leg. Instead, prosthesis of necessity prosthetizes whatever it relates to by automatically inscribing its effect of otherness. Quite plainly, once an artificial limb comes to be attached to a human body, then any second, or rather third body that relates to that divided first one necessarily relates to it as difference, even if it be another divided or prosthetic body.” (44)
“Prosthesis reads this possibility from the following point of view: if an utterance, such as a figure in the center of a painting, can be grafted onto another context, this means that it has no “natural” place, never did have, and that the relations it forms with subsequent contexts inevitably reinscribe that fall out of naturalness. And prosthesis adds the emphasis that what therefore governs recontextualization are forms of contrivance and principles of artificiality. In this sense a principle such as that of analogy, which means, for instance, that the wooden leg is designed to function as much as possible like the amputated one, can occlude neither the fact that the leg is wooden or steel nor the fact that before the principle of analogy could come into effect, the principles of detachability and artificiality already had to be in play.” (45)
“This enfolding or abyssal effect would therefore be the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that is already familiar to this discussion. according to its logic there never was any idea of the human constituted without reference to prosthetic articulations, relations to supposed external othernesses; what seem to be the possibilities of subsequent prosthetic attachments—principles of nonintegrality, detachability, and replacement—are in fact the constituting principles of the human mechanism.” (71)
Perhaps the shift here is simply from the prosthesis of the body to a prosthesis of the mind, but the point is precisely that once soft-ware becomes biological, it can no longer simply be worn; it has become the same sort of commodity as the body, or else the mind itself has become such a commodity, in any case the distinctions among software, body, and mind can no longer be maintained by means of criteria of naturality and artificiality. Similarly it is no longer relevant to ask whether information systems or artificial intelligences do in fact function like the human brain. They become prosthetized to the brain, at least in terms of this reading of a science fiction, in such a way as to insist that the brain is always already designed or destined for them, not just functioning like them but infected by them, always already an intelligence determined by the sense of the artificial, the detachable, the replaceable; always already the site of the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that it contains or produces and that inhabits or infects it.” (72)
“Jacked in, prosthetized, there is no structural distinction between body and machine, indeed between the mechanics of the switching and the fluidity of immersion in one or the other mode. Yes, there is a switch, everything depends on it; no, the switching doesn’t take you to an opposite mode, not opposite in the binary sense that the on/off, in/out function of the switch would seem to presume. Yes, the leg is off, he dives in, the waves smother his infirm body while the boy dances at the water’s edge; no, this is no less prosthetic than the morning’s wakening, shuffling to the side of the bed, easing the stump into the leg and clamping the buckle of the harness, like settling a waterpan on one’s head and setting off up the hill; no less jacked in, in one or the other mode.” (85)
“Let us return to the question: what does it mean to write in the quick of prosthesis? […] It is an old and naïve question, one that has been both raised and repressed by the whole contemporary inquiry into the sign as articulation between word and thing. From a prosthetic perspective, the thing in question can only be the body. That is in any case the hypothesis as well as the thematic undertaking of everything elaborated here. What one talks about here and in general, what language refers to when it names the other, is the body. The linguistic relation, as a form of translation, is articulated through the body as relay for alterity, my own body, that of my mother, of my father, and so on; it is articulated through the experience of the body as experience of the other. Now, still within the perspective of prosthesis, the body, as articulation of this linguistic relation will necessarily be infirm, or lacking, in need of the other. Before any physiology and beyond any psychopathology, the body to be found at the scene of prosthesis is deficient, less than whole, and has always been so. Thus, to the extent that the relation called the prosthetic regulates the operations of sense in general, and to the extent that the body functions in that relation as the reference of first and last resort in the terms that I am about to describe, the the prosthetic body will not be an exception but the paradigm for the body itself. If you will, it is by means of prosthesis that I wish to insist on the non-originary status of the body, on the nonintegrality of its origin, in order to resist the idea that the originary dissemination of sense might be weakened by the presumption of a corporeal entity (a supposition that subsumes the concept of the individual and the law of the proper name). I would hold on the contrary that it is precisely from the disarticulation of the body that the idea of dissemination derives its force. My hypothesis is thus as follows: language’s first reference is made to a body, a non-originary and divided body.” (135-137)
“The struggle here is therefore with a reciprocity of body and word that cannot be reduced to reference, that continues beyond any hope of unity, and that on the contrary installs divisibility as the principle of any enunciation whatsoever.” (141)
“Or else, what ethical interests are served by the exploitation of an entanglement between word and body such as I am encouraging here? In favor of whom and what does this series of chiastic twists turn?” (143)
“I would suggest that it is precisely what I call the prosthtization of the body, its originary and final nonintegrality, that produces the ethical problematic surrounding death, as well as that of life, as a result of which a classical response or solution to the question becomes inconceivable. Ethics (the presumption of integrality) and convenience (the recourse to artifice) collapse into the same sort of chiastic embrace as the body and the word, and if indeed some way out can be found it will no longer have the classic form of a question.” (143).
“All we can say with any certainty is that within the space inhabited by the phantom, we have suddenly switched to another mode. What has occurred above all else is that rapid transfer; a transfer not so much from the artificial, for instance, to the natural, or vice versa, but into the ghostly space of the prosthetic. If, as we are bound to do, we read the pain as the return of some repressed, then it will not be, for me, the body reasserting its primacy over the ratiocinations of everyday existence, calling from some 30 years back to say ‘you cut me and it still hurts,’ not that so much as the body in its prosthetic function, in its artificial and contrived articulations, coming like some metallic specter to haunt the well-sewn surface of originary flesh.” (11-12)
“Thus it is the otherness that the body must carry in order to move that begins—and a first-person adjective is not ready to bear it—this our prosthesis.” (13)
“At the risk of provoking an abyssal indistinction, I’d like to call every rhetorical form that comes into effect a prosthetic transfer, I’d like prosthesis to be the figure here for differential, and differantial, relations in general. I’d like to ask what it would mean for the term to assume such a universality insofar as reference to it—at least in this instance of which there will be none other, not quiet ever—remains connected, in ways that are the whole story here, to my father’s wooden leg, and in turn to his reluctant body. How would the particular idiomatic and idiosyncratic pathos of this leg that is like no other, the singular event of my father’s prosthesis I am claiming here, how would that remain in and through the inevitable and necessary, imprecise and generalized transfer that occurs the moment this writing begins, and even before? One answer is quite clearly that there never was any such event in its pure singularity: prosthesis is the idea of that. The fact that all this comes down by way of my father is a convenient instantiation of its divisibility; the partial and artificial body that I claim, with dubious authority, as my own, as the basis for at least a part of my text, is a counterfeit countersignature of his suffering and infirmity. Prosthesis is the idea of that and at the same time the insistence on this instance, the singular pathos of this leg. The articulation of one with the other, this leg and that idea, can only be contrived, for instance by means of quotation marks or other diacritical forms, the drawing of distinctions between prosthesis, “prosthesis,” and Prosthesis, in other words by effects of writing. But all that functions only because of prosthesis, because the whole never was anywhere, neither in the singular nor in the total, because the parts were always already detachable, replaceable, because the transfer effect upon which the general is constructed is there at the very beginning, in the nonintegrality of that beginning, called prosthesis.” (15)
“I can find no name for this complex relation that a quotation, to begin with, here puts into play; no name to compete with prosthesis, no more pertinent name, no name for this pertinence, the peculiar appurtenance of the same and the other. So I name it prosthesis, I give a name to the configuration that is too complex and imprecise to have a single name, I let the name generalize out of all bounds, in order to resist or have done with the taxonomical rage or necessity that would presume to account for something that begins as a phantom pain or an ambulatory peculiarity extracted from Virgil. In order to insist that there is no simple name for a discourse that articulates with, rather than issuing from, the body, while at the same time realizing that there is no other discourse-in the sense of no other translation, transfer, or relation—no other conception of it except as a balancing act performed by the body, a shift or transfer between the body and its exteriority. The name for it is the name for the possibility of naming or uttering in general, and thus there is an urgent necessity to name it. To name it with a name that limps into existence; name it, as I do, prosthesis. And then to relate it against the implacable necessity of naming.” (20)
“In this way the wooden leg represents the duality of every prosthesis, its search for a way between emulating the human and superseding the human. A particularly supplemental duality once again.” (26).
“Secondly, the question of order is thrown into doubt by the paradoxical play of analogy, by the fact that the model—wooden leg, robot, computer—well before the advent of any artificial intelligence, can always surpass the original in its functioning, simply do the job better; or rather do all sorts of other jobs the original could not conceive of, like generate this renegade piece of writing.” (29)
“One cannot simply write about prosthesis when one is automatically, just by virtue of writing, writing prosthesis, entering into prosthetic relations, being prosthetic.” (30)
“Prosthesis is about nothing if it is not about measuring distance—that of the necessary separation and unavoidable complication between animate and inanimate form, between natural and artificial; that between types of writing, between memory and art criticism—about the necessity for and impossibility of precision in these relations. It is about close and distant connections of close and distant relatives.” (40)
“By means of prosthesis the relation to the other becomes precisely and necessarily a relation to otherness, the otherness, for example, of artificiality attached to or found within the natural. The relation to the other is denied the reconfirmation of sameness that freezes its differential effect, rigidifies the oedipal structure, and ultimately represses the feminine, the homosexual, and so on. For in spite of the importance of amputation, that relation, once it is a question of prosthesis, cannot be reduced to a matter of presence or absence, of possession or dispossession. It cannot be reduced to a matter of having or not having the prosthesis, for prosthesis is in no way reducible to a wooden leg. Instead, prosthesis of necessity prosthetizes whatever it relates to by automatically inscribing its effect of otherness. Quite plainly, once an artificial limb comes to be attached to a human body, then any second, or rather third body that relates to that divided first one necessarily relates to it as difference, even if it be another divided or prosthetic body.” (44)
“Prosthesis reads this possibility from the following point of view: if an utterance, such as a figure in the center of a painting, can be grafted onto another context, this means that it has no “natural” place, never did have, and that the relations it forms with subsequent contexts inevitably reinscribe that fall out of naturalness. And prosthesis adds the emphasis that what therefore governs recontextualization are forms of contrivance and principles of artificiality. In this sense a principle such as that of analogy, which means, for instance, that the wooden leg is designed to function as much as possible like the amputated one, can occlude neither the fact that the leg is wooden or steel nor the fact that before the principle of analogy could come into effect, the principles of detachability and artificiality already had to be in play.” (45)
“This enfolding or abyssal effect would therefore be the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that is already familiar to this discussion. according to its logic there never was any idea of the human constituted without reference to prosthetic articulations, relations to supposed external othernesses; what seem to be the possibilities of subsequent prosthetic attachments—principles of nonintegrality, detachability, and replacement—are in fact the constituting principles of the human mechanism.” (71)
Perhaps the shift here is simply from the prosthesis of the body to a prosthesis of the mind, but the point is precisely that once soft-ware becomes biological, it can no longer simply be worn; it has become the same sort of commodity as the body, or else the mind itself has become such a commodity, in any case the distinctions among software, body, and mind can no longer be maintained by means of criteria of naturality and artificiality. Similarly it is no longer relevant to ask whether information systems or artificial intelligences do in fact function like the human brain. They become prosthetized to the brain, at least in terms of this reading of a science fiction, in such a way as to insist that the brain is always already designed or destined for them, not just functioning like them but infected by them, always already an intelligence determined by the sense of the artificial, the detachable, the replaceable; always already the site of the prosthetic deconstruction of difference that it contains or produces and that inhabits or infects it.” (72)
“Jacked in, prosthetized, there is no structural distinction between body and machine, indeed between the mechanics of the switching and the fluidity of immersion in one or the other mode. Yes, there is a switch, everything depends on it; no, the switching doesn’t take you to an opposite mode, not opposite in the binary sense that the on/off, in/out function of the switch would seem to presume. Yes, the leg is off, he dives in, the waves smother his infirm body while the boy dances at the water’s edge; no, this is no less prosthetic than the morning’s wakening, shuffling to the side of the bed, easing the stump into the leg and clamping the buckle of the harness, like settling a waterpan on one’s head and setting off up the hill; no less jacked in, in one or the other mode.” (85)
“Let us return to the question: what does it mean to write in the quick of prosthesis? […] It is an old and naïve question, one that has been both raised and repressed by the whole contemporary inquiry into the sign as articulation between word and thing. From a prosthetic perspective, the thing in question can only be the body. That is in any case the hypothesis as well as the thematic undertaking of everything elaborated here. What one talks about here and in general, what language refers to when it names the other, is the body. The linguistic relation, as a form of translation, is articulated through the body as relay for alterity, my own body, that of my mother, of my father, and so on; it is articulated through the experience of the body as experience of the other. Now, still within the perspective of prosthesis, the body, as articulation of this linguistic relation will necessarily be infirm, or lacking, in need of the other. Before any physiology and beyond any psychopathology, the body to be found at the scene of prosthesis is deficient, less than whole, and has always been so. Thus, to the extent that the relation called the prosthetic regulates the operations of sense in general, and to the extent that the body functions in that relation as the reference of first and last resort in the terms that I am about to describe, the the prosthetic body will not be an exception but the paradigm for the body itself. If you will, it is by means of prosthesis that I wish to insist on the non-originary status of the body, on the nonintegrality of its origin, in order to resist the idea that the originary dissemination of sense might be weakened by the presumption of a corporeal entity (a supposition that subsumes the concept of the individual and the law of the proper name). I would hold on the contrary that it is precisely from the disarticulation of the body that the idea of dissemination derives its force. My hypothesis is thus as follows: language’s first reference is made to a body, a non-originary and divided body.” (135-137)
“The struggle here is therefore with a reciprocity of body and word that cannot be reduced to reference, that continues beyond any hope of unity, and that on the contrary installs divisibility as the principle of any enunciation whatsoever.” (141)
“Or else, what ethical interests are served by the exploitation of an entanglement between word and body such as I am encouraging here? In favor of whom and what does this series of chiastic twists turn?” (143)
“I would suggest that it is precisely what I call the prosthtization of the body, its originary and final nonintegrality, that produces the ethical problematic surrounding death, as well as that of life, as a result of which a classical response or solution to the question becomes inconceivable. Ethics (the presumption of integrality) and convenience (the recourse to artifice) collapse into the same sort of chiastic embrace as the body and the word, and if indeed some way out can be found it will no longer have the classic form of a question.” (143).
18 October 2008
work.
I far-too-easily get caught in the 'work-ness' of work lately, conceptualizing my writing as a job, as stress, as an overwhelming and undesirable task. This is how we tend to think of work. "The dissertation" looms as a formidable task, its moniker uttered by others with a combination of awe and fear. And though I rarely forget the privilege of what I do (something chosen, not forced, that does not endanger my life, that allows me freedom and independence and thought), I often forget the pleasure.
Today, I remember the pleasure, the beauty of thinking, of crafting sentences, of weaving narratives of life and theory. I remember that I've chosen to pursue interests that I think--hope--resonate beyond academia's sometimes-impenetrable walls. And, I remember what I learn, beyond the philosophies, theories, books (which I love).
My body revolts lately. My response to stress is physical, and thus my interventions are also physical. This week, I was craniosacrally therapied, and engaged in my normal body-beating exercise. Monday's running cleared my head, but left my knee a wreck (I'm still limping); other attempts at exercise elicited less pain and less relief; I finally settled on swimming for its impacts (on joints, less; overall, more). Despite and because of this, stress today manifests in swollen muscles. I list these complaints not for general whining, nor to evoke sympathy, nor to offer excuses, but because they intrude when attempting to sit still and write and think. They can feel like excuses to walk away, to take a nap, to do anything but maintain this primarily mental activity. This, combined with the solitude of writing, and the aforementioned sneaky and pejorative perspectives on work, only intensifies all of these. I'm lost in my head, struggling not with the work, but with myself, my seemingly lacking will and inspiration.
And then, in the process of this struggle, I read this:
"I'm not disabled, I just don't have any legs."
This, a noble comment for anyone in such a scenario, was uttered by Oscar Pistorius, a South African competitive sprinter, when he was 18.
Pretty cool.
As a result, I do feel like a whiner, but one laughing at herself. My struggles? Not that big a deal, with a little perspective. My inspiration? To give Pistorius (and the rest of us) a critical read, a theoretical ground, a new epistomology for his self-philosophy.
Yeah, I love my job.
Today, I remember the pleasure, the beauty of thinking, of crafting sentences, of weaving narratives of life and theory. I remember that I've chosen to pursue interests that I think--hope--resonate beyond academia's sometimes-impenetrable walls. And, I remember what I learn, beyond the philosophies, theories, books (which I love).
My body revolts lately. My response to stress is physical, and thus my interventions are also physical. This week, I was craniosacrally therapied, and engaged in my normal body-beating exercise. Monday's running cleared my head, but left my knee a wreck (I'm still limping); other attempts at exercise elicited less pain and less relief; I finally settled on swimming for its impacts (on joints, less; overall, more). Despite and because of this, stress today manifests in swollen muscles. I list these complaints not for general whining, nor to evoke sympathy, nor to offer excuses, but because they intrude when attempting to sit still and write and think. They can feel like excuses to walk away, to take a nap, to do anything but maintain this primarily mental activity. This, combined with the solitude of writing, and the aforementioned sneaky and pejorative perspectives on work, only intensifies all of these. I'm lost in my head, struggling not with the work, but with myself, my seemingly lacking will and inspiration.
And then, in the process of this struggle, I read this:
"I'm not disabled, I just don't have any legs."
This, a noble comment for anyone in such a scenario, was uttered by Oscar Pistorius, a South African competitive sprinter, when he was 18.
Pretty cool.
As a result, I do feel like a whiner, but one laughing at herself. My struggles? Not that big a deal, with a little perspective. My inspiration? To give Pistorius (and the rest of us) a critical read, a theoretical ground, a new epistomology for his self-philosophy.
Yeah, I love my job.
09 October 2008
04 October 2008
John Haugeland
from Having Thought: Essays in the metaphysics of mind
"In particular, interrelationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal--a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical vocabulary.[...] The contrary of this separation--or battery of separations--is not interrelationist holism, but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body, and world--that is, to undermine their very distinctness." (208)
"It is particularly important for our purposes to counter this impression, since the corporeal discontinuity between our bodies and the world--the very discontinuity that determines these bodies as bodies--misleadingly enhances the apparent significance of bodily surfaces as relevant interfaces for the understanding of other phenomena, such as intelligence." (214)
"In other words, which close interactions matter, when considering the scope and structure of systems, depends fundamentally on what we're interested in--that is, what we're trying to understand." (217)
"If, on the other hand, there is constant close coupling between the ant and the details of the beach surface, and if this coupling is crucial in determining the actual path, then, for the purposes of understanding that path, the and and beach must be regarded more as an integrated unit than as a pair of distinct components. This is the simplest archetype of what I mean by intimacy." (217)
"On the contracy, however, I want to suggest that the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages." (223)
"By contrast, the alternative that I have been sketching sees these nerves as carrying high-bandwidth interactions (high-intensity, in Simon's terms), without any simple, well-defined structure. Thus, by the same criterion, we would not get two relatively independent separable components--a rational mind and a physical body, meeting at an interface--but rather a single closely-knit unity." (227)
"The unity of mind and body can be promoted wholesale, perhaps, on the basis of general principles of monism or the unity of science. Such arguments are indifferent to variety and substructure within either the mental or teh physical: everything is unceremoniously lumped together at one swoop. Here, by contrast, integration is offered at retail. In attempting to undermine the idea of an interface between the mind and the fingers, I am staking no claim to the liver or intestines. (Simon may be right about the glands and viscera.) The idea is not to wipe otu all distinctions and homogenize everything on general principles, but rather to call certain very familiar divisions into question, on the basis of considerations highly peculiar to them." (228)
"As our ability to cope with the absent and covert, human intelligence abides in the meaningful--which, far from being restricted to representations, extends to the entire human world. Mind, therefore, is not incidentally but intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world." (237)
"In particular, interrelationist accounts retain a principled distinction between the mental and the corporeal--a distinction that is reflected in contrasts like semantics versus syntax, the space of reasons versus the space of causes, or the intentional versus the physical vocabulary.[...] The contrary of this separation--or battery of separations--is not interrelationist holism, but something that I would like to call the intimacy of the mind's embodiment and embeddedness in the world. The term 'intimacy' is meant to suggest more than just necessary interrelation or interdependence but a kind of commingling or integralness of mind, body, and world--that is, to undermine their very distinctness." (208)
"It is particularly important for our purposes to counter this impression, since the corporeal discontinuity between our bodies and the world--the very discontinuity that determines these bodies as bodies--misleadingly enhances the apparent significance of bodily surfaces as relevant interfaces for the understanding of other phenomena, such as intelligence." (214)
"In other words, which close interactions matter, when considering the scope and structure of systems, depends fundamentally on what we're interested in--that is, what we're trying to understand." (217)
"If, on the other hand, there is constant close coupling between the ant and the details of the beach surface, and if this coupling is crucial in determining the actual path, then, for the purposes of understanding that path, the and and beach must be regarded more as an integrated unit than as a pair of distinct components. This is the simplest archetype of what I mean by intimacy." (217)
"On the contracy, however, I want to suggest that the human mind may be more intimately intermingled with its body and its world than is any other, and that this is one of its distinctive advantages." (223)
"By contrast, the alternative that I have been sketching sees these nerves as carrying high-bandwidth interactions (high-intensity, in Simon's terms), without any simple, well-defined structure. Thus, by the same criterion, we would not get two relatively independent separable components--a rational mind and a physical body, meeting at an interface--but rather a single closely-knit unity." (227)
"The unity of mind and body can be promoted wholesale, perhaps, on the basis of general principles of monism or the unity of science. Such arguments are indifferent to variety and substructure within either the mental or teh physical: everything is unceremoniously lumped together at one swoop. Here, by contrast, integration is offered at retail. In attempting to undermine the idea of an interface between the mind and the fingers, I am staking no claim to the liver or intestines. (Simon may be right about the glands and viscera.) The idea is not to wipe otu all distinctions and homogenize everything on general principles, but rather to call certain very familiar divisions into question, on the basis of considerations highly peculiar to them." (228)
"As our ability to cope with the absent and covert, human intelligence abides in the meaningful--which, far from being restricted to representations, extends to the entire human world. Mind, therefore, is not incidentally but intimately embodied and intimately embedded in its world." (237)
17 September 2008
the Luke arm
Advances in prosthetic arms from the creator of the segway:
I first found this link on biosingularity.wordpress.com
Wired.com also ran a related article in May 2008.
I first found this link on biosingularity.wordpress.com
Wired.com also ran a related article in May 2008.
14 September 2008
Georges Canguilhem
From The Normal and the Pathological
"To act, it is necessary at least to localize." (39)
"The history of ideas cannot be superimposed perforce on the history of science. But as scientists lead their lives as men in an environment and social setting that is not exclusively scientific, the history of science cannot neglect the history of ideas. In following a thesis to its logical conclusion, it could be said that the modifications it undergoes in its cultural milieu can reveal its essential meaning." (46)
"As if one could determine a phenomenon's essence apart from its conditions! As if conditions were a mask or frame which changed neither the face nor the picture!" (106)
"Because physiology stands at the crossroads of the laboratory and the clinic, two points of view about biological phenomena are adopted there, but this does not mean that they can be interchanged. The substitution of quantitative progression for qualitative contrast in no way annuls this opposition. It always remains at the back of teh mind of those who have chosen to adopt the theoretical and metrical point of view. When we say that health and disease are linked by all the intermediaries, and when this continuity is converted into homogeneity, we forget that the difference continues to manifest itself at the extreme, without which the intermediaries could in no way play their mediating role; no doubt unconsciously, but wrongly, we confuse the abstract calculation of identities and the concrete appreciation of differences." (111-12)
"It is impossible for the physician, starting from the accounts of sick men, to understand the experience lived by the sick man, for what sick men express in ordinary concepts is not directly their experience but their interpretation of an experience for which they have been deprived of adequate concepts." (115)
"In the final analysis it is the patients who most often decide -- and from very different points of view -- whether they are no longer normal or whether they have returned to normality. For a man whose future is almost always imagined starting from past experience, becoming normal again means taking up an interrupted activity or at least an activity deemed equivalent by individual tastes or the social values of the milieu. Even if this activity is reduced, even if the possible behaviors are less varied, less supple than before, the individual is not always so particular as all that. The essential thing is to be raised from an abyss of impotence or suffering where the sick man almost died; the essential thing is to have had a narrow escape. [...] The sick man mantains that he is not in any obvious sense disabled. This notion of disability should be studied by a medical expert who would not see in the organism merely a machine whose output must be calculated, an expert who is enough of a psychologist to appreciate lesions as deteriorations more than as percentages." (119-20)
"To be sick is to be harmful or undesirable or socially devalued, etc. On the other hand, from the physiological point of view what is desired in health is obvious and this gives the concept of physical disease a relatively stable meaning. Desirable values are 'life, a long life, the capacity for reproduction and for physical work, strength, resistance to fatigue, the absence of pain, a state in which one notices the body as little as possible outside of the joyous sense of existence' [59, 6]." (121-22; quote from K. Jaspers)
"Physiological constants are thus normal in the statistical sense, which is a descriptive sense, and in the therapeutic sense, which is a normative sense. But the question is whether it is medicine which converts -- and how? -- descriptive and purely theoretical concepts into biological ideals or whether medicine, in admitting the notion of facts and constant functional coefficients from physiology would not also admit -- probably unbeknownst to the physiologists -- the notion of norm in the normative sense of the word. And it is a question of whether medicine, in doing this, wouldn't take back from physiology what it itself had given." (122-23)
"Since norma, etymologically, means a T-square, normal is that which bends neither to the right nor left, hence that which remains in a happy medium; from which two meanings are derived: (1) normal is that which is such that it ought to be; (2) normal, in the most usual sense of the word, is that which is met with in the majority of cases of a determined kind, or that which constitutes either the average or standard of a measurable characteristic." (125)
"We think that medicine exists as the art of life because the living human being himself calls certain dreaded states or behaviors pathological (hence requiring avoidance or c orrection) relative to the dynamic polarity of life, in teh form of a negative value. [...] We, on the other hand, think that the fact that a living man reacts to a lesion, infection, functional anarchy by means of a disease, expresses the fundamental fact that life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and thereby even an unconscious position of value; in short, life is in fact a normative activity." (126)
"Normative, in philosophy, means every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm, but this mode of judgment is essentially subordinate to that which establishes norms. Normative, in the fullest sense of the word, is that which establishes norms. And it is in this sense that we plan to talk about biological normativity." (126-27)
"The Greek nomos and the Latin norma have closely related meanings, law and rule tending to become confused. Hence, in a strictly semantic sense 'anomaly' points to a fact, and is a descriptive term, while 'abnormal' implies reference to a value and is an evaluative, normative term; but the switching of good grammatical methods has meant a confusion of the respective meanings of anomaly and abnormal. 'Abnormal' has become a descriptive concept and 'anomaly,' a normative one." (132)
"To the extent that living beings diverge from the specific type, are they abnormal in that they endanger the specific form or are they inventors on teh road to new forms?" (141)
"Taken separately, the living being and his environment are not normal: it is their relationship that makes them such. For any given form of life the environment is normal to the extent that it allows it fertility and a corresponding variety of forms such that, should changes in the environment occur, life will be able to find the solution to the problem of adaptation -- which it has been brutally forced to resolve -- in one of these forms. A living being is normal in any given environment insofar as it is the morphological and functional solution found by life as a response to the demands of the environment. Even if it is relatively rare, this living being is normal in terms of every other form from which it diverges, because in terms of those other forms it is normative, that is, it devalues them before eliminating them." (143-44)
"There is no fact which is normal or pathological in itself. An anomaly or a mutation is not in itself pathological. These two express other possible norms of life. If these norms are inferior to specific earlier norms in terms of stability, fecundity, variability of life, they will be called pathological. If these norms in the same environment should turn out to be equivalent, or in another environment, superior, they will be called normal. Their normality will come to them from their normativity. The pathological is not the absence of a biolotical norm: it is another norm but one which is, comparatively speaking, pushed aside by life." (144)j
"In other words, other conditions would give rise to other norms. The living being's functional norms as examined in the laboratory are meaningful only within the framework of the scientist's operative norms." (145)
"To act, it is necessary at least to localize." (39)
"The history of ideas cannot be superimposed perforce on the history of science. But as scientists lead their lives as men in an environment and social setting that is not exclusively scientific, the history of science cannot neglect the history of ideas. In following a thesis to its logical conclusion, it could be said that the modifications it undergoes in its cultural milieu can reveal its essential meaning." (46)
"As if one could determine a phenomenon's essence apart from its conditions! As if conditions were a mask or frame which changed neither the face nor the picture!" (106)
"Because physiology stands at the crossroads of the laboratory and the clinic, two points of view about biological phenomena are adopted there, but this does not mean that they can be interchanged. The substitution of quantitative progression for qualitative contrast in no way annuls this opposition. It always remains at the back of teh mind of those who have chosen to adopt the theoretical and metrical point of view. When we say that health and disease are linked by all the intermediaries, and when this continuity is converted into homogeneity, we forget that the difference continues to manifest itself at the extreme, without which the intermediaries could in no way play their mediating role; no doubt unconsciously, but wrongly, we confuse the abstract calculation of identities and the concrete appreciation of differences." (111-12)
"It is impossible for the physician, starting from the accounts of sick men, to understand the experience lived by the sick man, for what sick men express in ordinary concepts is not directly their experience but their interpretation of an experience for which they have been deprived of adequate concepts." (115)
"In the final analysis it is the patients who most often decide -- and from very different points of view -- whether they are no longer normal or whether they have returned to normality. For a man whose future is almost always imagined starting from past experience, becoming normal again means taking up an interrupted activity or at least an activity deemed equivalent by individual tastes or the social values of the milieu. Even if this activity is reduced, even if the possible behaviors are less varied, less supple than before, the individual is not always so particular as all that. The essential thing is to be raised from an abyss of impotence or suffering where the sick man almost died; the essential thing is to have had a narrow escape. [...] The sick man mantains that he is not in any obvious sense disabled. This notion of disability should be studied by a medical expert who would not see in the organism merely a machine whose output must be calculated, an expert who is enough of a psychologist to appreciate lesions as deteriorations more than as percentages." (119-20)
"To be sick is to be harmful or undesirable or socially devalued, etc. On the other hand, from the physiological point of view what is desired in health is obvious and this gives the concept of physical disease a relatively stable meaning. Desirable values are 'life, a long life, the capacity for reproduction and for physical work, strength, resistance to fatigue, the absence of pain, a state in which one notices the body as little as possible outside of the joyous sense of existence' [59, 6]." (121-22; quote from K. Jaspers)
"Physiological constants are thus normal in the statistical sense, which is a descriptive sense, and in the therapeutic sense, which is a normative sense. But the question is whether it is medicine which converts -- and how? -- descriptive and purely theoretical concepts into biological ideals or whether medicine, in admitting the notion of facts and constant functional coefficients from physiology would not also admit -- probably unbeknownst to the physiologists -- the notion of norm in the normative sense of the word. And it is a question of whether medicine, in doing this, wouldn't take back from physiology what it itself had given." (122-23)
"Since norma, etymologically, means a T-square, normal is that which bends neither to the right nor left, hence that which remains in a happy medium; from which two meanings are derived: (1) normal is that which is such that it ought to be; (2) normal, in the most usual sense of the word, is that which is met with in the majority of cases of a determined kind, or that which constitutes either the average or standard of a measurable characteristic." (125)
"We think that medicine exists as the art of life because the living human being himself calls certain dreaded states or behaviors pathological (hence requiring avoidance or c orrection) relative to the dynamic polarity of life, in teh form of a negative value. [...] We, on the other hand, think that the fact that a living man reacts to a lesion, infection, functional anarchy by means of a disease, expresses the fundamental fact that life is not indifferent to the conditions in which it is possible, that life is polarity and thereby even an unconscious position of value; in short, life is in fact a normative activity." (126)
"Normative, in philosophy, means every judgment which evaluates or qualifies a fact in relation to a norm, but this mode of judgment is essentially subordinate to that which establishes norms. Normative, in the fullest sense of the word, is that which establishes norms. And it is in this sense that we plan to talk about biological normativity." (126-27)
"The Greek nomos and the Latin norma have closely related meanings, law and rule tending to become confused. Hence, in a strictly semantic sense 'anomaly' points to a fact, and is a descriptive term, while 'abnormal' implies reference to a value and is an evaluative, normative term; but the switching of good grammatical methods has meant a confusion of the respective meanings of anomaly and abnormal. 'Abnormal' has become a descriptive concept and 'anomaly,' a normative one." (132)
"To the extent that living beings diverge from the specific type, are they abnormal in that they endanger the specific form or are they inventors on teh road to new forms?" (141)
"Taken separately, the living being and his environment are not normal: it is their relationship that makes them such. For any given form of life the environment is normal to the extent that it allows it fertility and a corresponding variety of forms such that, should changes in the environment occur, life will be able to find the solution to the problem of adaptation -- which it has been brutally forced to resolve -- in one of these forms. A living being is normal in any given environment insofar as it is the morphological and functional solution found by life as a response to the demands of the environment. Even if it is relatively rare, this living being is normal in terms of every other form from which it diverges, because in terms of those other forms it is normative, that is, it devalues them before eliminating them." (143-44)
"There is no fact which is normal or pathological in itself. An anomaly or a mutation is not in itself pathological. These two express other possible norms of life. If these norms are inferior to specific earlier norms in terms of stability, fecundity, variability of life, they will be called pathological. If these norms in the same environment should turn out to be equivalent, or in another environment, superior, they will be called normal. Their normality will come to them from their normativity. The pathological is not the absence of a biolotical norm: it is another norm but one which is, comparatively speaking, pushed aside by life." (144)j
"In other words, other conditions would give rise to other norms. The living being's functional norms as examined in the laboratory are meaningful only within the framework of the scientist's operative norms." (145)
Randy Allen Harris
From Rhetoric and Incommensurability
"Not only does incommensurability not hamstring sicence, it proves epistemologically wholesome in several respects." (5)
"The works of Boyle and Newton, not to say Bacon and Hobbes and Locke and Hume and Descartes, include strategic screeds against teh contaminating influence of fancy-Dan word-mongering, the lasciviousness of metaphor, the wheedling dishonesty of rhetoric." (15)
"Other reasons to believe simply come into or fall out of fashion, like gods and miniskirts." (16)
"[...] the lowest categorical reading on our incommmensurometer [sic]." (23)
"Or, I suppose (but how would weknow), it might be the case that humans and dolphins, or humans and ants for that matter, have an ongoing case of brick-wall incommensurability. Certainly, humans try to communicate with dolphins, but it clearly hasn't gone anywhere; and I've seen my son earnestly talking to ants, with even less results. The ants may be talking too, or pheromoning, and dolphins could be clicking epic poems to us, or superstring theorems, but, if so, they aren't getting through, and it's doubtful that we're getting through either beyond (in the case of dolphins) 'jump through that hoop and I'll give you a fish.'" (28)
"[a] telling quotation from Max Planck: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because tis opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it' (Planck 1950, 33-34; Kuhn 1996, 151; see R.A. Harris 1998)." (31)
"As Native American linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (2000) has articulated the difficulties of incorprating Amerindian perspectives into English, 'the bitch of it is, even verb is a noun!'" (35)
"Or, take this meme: 'If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.' It is very widespread on the Web, in collections of quotations, always attributed to Wittgenstein, but never linked to a specific text. As it turns out, Wittgenstein never wrote it. But people like what it expresses, and, what the hell, Wittgenstein is famous for being really smart and deep, so it sounds a lot better coming from him." (35)
"It's semiotic webs and meaning variance all the way down." (43)
"A good rhetor (one who wants not just to communicate, nor simply to persuade, but to reach understandings and agreements), observes teh affordances an audience opens up, and the rhetorical constraints it exercises." (51)
"[...]why all the ink spilled on this topic? Because there really are rhetorical problems among rational, earnest scientists (and other people) that amount to very different argument appraisals, so taht what looks powerful to one side looks unimportant or perverse to the other." (54)
"That's a good deal of murk; my apologies." (67)
"In several ways, the differend is a much more finely honed instrument for dealing with the diachronic discontinuities we label with incommensurability, a word that contains a late-modernist ideology -- especially in its sense that there is always a resolution which excludes and renders one of the parties partially unintelligible or mute. There is even a nicely symmetrical sense of the irrational to LYotard's concept, in a linkage to theGreek term incommensurability -- arrhetos, 'unspeakable.' The victim in a differend, because the regulation occurs in an unaccommodating idiom, is left without a way to speak his case, perhaps being forced entirely into silence. But for all that, differend remains peripheral to the current project, and we can only glance at a word that overlaps in fascinating ways with our cornerstone term, in a discourse preoccupied with the sorts of communicative misalignments that drove Feyerabend's and Kuhn's work, and that feeds value incommensurabilists." (79)
"But the real issues are misunderstanding and disagreement, which concern not things directly, but people's attitudes to things (and to each other), and, socially, the arguments they build around those attitudes. The most useful application of incommensurability, in the end, is a name for a condition not of theories (things), but of theorists (people)." (92)
"If incommensurability is a syndrome, then rhetoric -- the search for ways to adjust ideas to people, people to ideas -- is the cure." (94)
"Since it does not cause the practical problems one would predict for science; since communication is hindered and confounded, perhaps, but not blocked; since evaluation and comparison are difficult, perhaps, but not impossible -- incommensurability is an invitation to explore how scientists get their jobs done in the face of misalignments and discontinuities in meanings, themes, and practices." (97)
"Misconstruals in an atmosphere of conviviality -- when a very different set of blinkers lead us to take another person's words in the ways we can build on them as indulgently as possible -- move in teh direction of ascribing insight." (111)
"Incommensurability plays a vital role in these processes, and an inevitable one, given the nature of meanings, values, practices, and humans. But it is not always generative, and it only becomes visible with the big dust-ups." (115)
"Not only does incommensurability not hamstring sicence, it proves epistemologically wholesome in several respects." (5)
"The works of Boyle and Newton, not to say Bacon and Hobbes and Locke and Hume and Descartes, include strategic screeds against teh contaminating influence of fancy-Dan word-mongering, the lasciviousness of metaphor, the wheedling dishonesty of rhetoric." (15)
"Other reasons to believe simply come into or fall out of fashion, like gods and miniskirts." (16)
"[...] the lowest categorical reading on our incommmensurometer [sic]." (23)
"Or, I suppose (but how would weknow), it might be the case that humans and dolphins, or humans and ants for that matter, have an ongoing case of brick-wall incommensurability. Certainly, humans try to communicate with dolphins, but it clearly hasn't gone anywhere; and I've seen my son earnestly talking to ants, with even less results. The ants may be talking too, or pheromoning, and dolphins could be clicking epic poems to us, or superstring theorems, but, if so, they aren't getting through, and it's doubtful that we're getting through either beyond (in the case of dolphins) 'jump through that hoop and I'll give you a fish.'" (28)
"[a] telling quotation from Max Planck: 'A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because tis opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it' (Planck 1950, 33-34; Kuhn 1996, 151; see R.A. Harris 1998)." (31)
"As Native American linguist Dan Moonhawk Alford (2000) has articulated the difficulties of incorprating Amerindian perspectives into English, 'the bitch of it is, even verb is a noun!'" (35)
"Or, take this meme: 'If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world.' It is very widespread on the Web, in collections of quotations, always attributed to Wittgenstein, but never linked to a specific text. As it turns out, Wittgenstein never wrote it. But people like what it expresses, and, what the hell, Wittgenstein is famous for being really smart and deep, so it sounds a lot better coming from him." (35)
"It's semiotic webs and meaning variance all the way down." (43)
"A good rhetor (one who wants not just to communicate, nor simply to persuade, but to reach understandings and agreements), observes teh affordances an audience opens up, and the rhetorical constraints it exercises." (51)
"[...]why all the ink spilled on this topic? Because there really are rhetorical problems among rational, earnest scientists (and other people) that amount to very different argument appraisals, so taht what looks powerful to one side looks unimportant or perverse to the other." (54)
"That's a good deal of murk; my apologies." (67)
"In several ways, the differend is a much more finely honed instrument for dealing with the diachronic discontinuities we label with incommensurability, a word that contains a late-modernist ideology -- especially in its sense that there is always a resolution which excludes and renders one of the parties partially unintelligible or mute. There is even a nicely symmetrical sense of the irrational to LYotard's concept, in a linkage to theGreek term incommensurability -- arrhetos, 'unspeakable.' The victim in a differend, because the regulation occurs in an unaccommodating idiom, is left without a way to speak his case, perhaps being forced entirely into silence. But for all that, differend remains peripheral to the current project, and we can only glance at a word that overlaps in fascinating ways with our cornerstone term, in a discourse preoccupied with the sorts of communicative misalignments that drove Feyerabend's and Kuhn's work, and that feeds value incommensurabilists." (79)
"But the real issues are misunderstanding and disagreement, which concern not things directly, but people's attitudes to things (and to each other), and, socially, the arguments they build around those attitudes. The most useful application of incommensurability, in the end, is a name for a condition not of theories (things), but of theorists (people)." (92)
"If incommensurability is a syndrome, then rhetoric -- the search for ways to adjust ideas to people, people to ideas -- is the cure." (94)
"Since it does not cause the practical problems one would predict for science; since communication is hindered and confounded, perhaps, but not blocked; since evaluation and comparison are difficult, perhaps, but not impossible -- incommensurability is an invitation to explore how scientists get their jobs done in the face of misalignments and discontinuities in meanings, themes, and practices." (97)
"Misconstruals in an atmosphere of conviviality -- when a very different set of blinkers lead us to take another person's words in the ways we can build on them as indulgently as possible -- move in teh direction of ascribing insight." (111)
"Incommensurability plays a vital role in these processes, and an inevitable one, given the nature of meanings, values, practices, and humans. But it is not always generative, and it only becomes visible with the big dust-ups." (115)
12 September 2008
Michel Foucault
"We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. If is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim -- through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality -- to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasure."
The History of Sexuality, Vol I (157)
The History of Sexuality, Vol I (157)
Elizabeth Grosz
"On the other hand, while there must be some kinds of biological limit or constraint, these constraints are perpetually capable of being superseded, overcome, through the human body's capacity to open itself up to prosthetic synthesis, to transform or rewrite its environment, to vontinually augment its powers and capacities through the incorporation into the body's own spaces and modalities of objects that, while external, are internalized, added to, supplementing and supplemented by the 'organic body' (or what culturally passes for it), surpassing the body, not 'beyond' nature but in collusion with a 'nature' that never really lived up to its name, that represents always the most blatant cultural anxieties and projections."
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (187-188)
Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (187-188)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
