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. In deed and in story how many more than two are there. |
6.6 |
no orientations, no meanings, no apparatus, no nonsense
.
.©.
François
Lachance
.1996.
.