6.0

A body beginning again to trace the intertwining of reproduction, technology and perception might begin again with a quotation from an account of the social and psychological impact of cybernetics.  That body might settle upon a single and simple statement by Sherry Turkle and find within that statement a ruling syntagm.  The body does begin again.  The body does query one preposition in a statement by the author of The Second Self:

There is passion behind theory construction. (Turkle 31)

That body in its typical Erasmian fashion and with a flair for philology asks about the positioning and wonders if there can be theory construction behind passion.  This body is not content with mere reversal for it is being keen on the synchronicity of cognitive modes.  The body wonders if there does not rustle here in the statement by Turkle a bias that takes the emotional to be more primitive than the rational.  The body knows the bias comes to the fore if the spatial marker, the preposition, also encodes a temporal relation.  The behind may operate as a before.

6.0

6.1

This body wonders for this body is apt to conceive of the expression of passion as a way of testing the world.  The body fashions theory construction as a mode of passion.  What labyrinths close readings open when they concentrate on the relation of the rational and the emotional and what tangles these readings create when they judge the passionate and the theoretical to be both constructed through expression.

6.1

6.2

This body would take such an insight into the constructed and expressive nature of the passionate and the theoretical and read again Marshall McLuhan and his dichotomous division of hot and cool mediums, a division likely pilfered from Lévi-Strauss who ranks whole societies by temperature.  The body would stop, steal a moment, pause, take its own temperature.  The body would again be puzzled as to how McLuhan could graft visual and aural onto hot and cool.  The body would persist.  The body might perspire.  The body would above all compare and carefully read for rhetorical and narratological ploys and deploy its own expressive strategies.  It does.  It did.

6.2

6.3

The body did tackle McLuhan.  The body did compare McLuhan with Benjamin and found the one to deal with prosthetics and the other with proxemics and both to truck with the question of reproduction.  The body restless, some would say in labour, strove to understand what sensory bias informed the stories of biological and social reproduction as told by Louis Althusser and Mary O'Brien.  In its striving the body came to ask how it was that dyads came to rule not only the stories of reproduction and their sensory bias but also the very act of questioning, an act which the body took and takes to be the basis of producing stories.

6.3

6.4

The body was not content to find reproductive stories in texts dealing with technology and perception and conversely in texts dealing with reproduction to find stories about technology and perception.  Somehow this particular ring of associations or set of linked stories was grasped as a single model generated by a shared epistemology and thus the body became concerned with autopoetic structures, semiotic squares and the complexities of emulation.

6.4

6.5

The body found itself thinking of bodies including itself as a machine.  The body found that those thinkers that stick to building models out of dyads have great difficulty with machine-like entities and, as well, such thinkers are likely to fetischize a particular sensory modality.  However, the body did not desire to pathologize these thinkers.  They obviously had found an intellectual niche and belonged to the ecology of ideas.  The body set out to examine their habitat often referred to as the hermeneutical circle.  The body wanted to count.  The body wants to know how many players they permit in their games of interpretation.

6.5

6.6

The body found that two was not too many.  Indeed, it was not enough.  The body found itself storing and sorting, punctuating, once more, readings, perceptions, sequences and stories.  The body found again itself as some body.  The body knew any body would listen for the unhurriedness of the unheard at play and any body would find the beginning to end again where Gertrude Stein begins A Novel of Thank You:  "How many more than two are there."  Anybody then knew the tense risking at work and praise of the folly of bodies and the queer story risky praise and praised risk make.  Odd couples like these:

No equation to explain the division of the senses [...] drawn by the whispering shadows into the mathematics of our desire.

Fred Smith and Patti Smith
"It Takes Time"
Until The End Of The World
Warner Bros. Records, 92 67074, 1991.

Tell a story of a virus.
Of greed ambition and fraud
A case of science gone bad
Tell a tale of friends we miss
A tale that's cruel and sad
Weep for me, Scheherazade.
Weep for me, Scheherazade.
John Greyson and Glenn Schellenberg
"Scheherazade (Miss HIV)"
Zero Patience, A Musical about AIDS
Milan Entertainment and Zero Patience Productions, 1994.

In deed and in story how many more than two are there.

6.6