Thanks

I still have some comments to post but wanted to take a moment to acknowledge how much I learned from everyone.

As a last post I leave you with this song.

Pranks as agential cuts

Hi everyone

I will not be posting extensively on this weeks readings. I will save my comments for class.    In conversation with the idea of “bioart” as a tactical practice that potentially engages and brings together different groups of individuals; making new publics’ and re-figuring the ethical commitments and conversations in art and science practices alike I leave with you a video of one of my favorite urban situationist prankster; Remy Gaillar.

While he does not make bioart or even art per say his interventions interrupt and intercept the flows of everyday, there is no business as usual with him, in a manner that elucidates  the performative possibilities  of the everyday. Performativity in is hands is a cultural, social and political activity; pranks can be read as protest and social commentary.  Remy, as one might suspect after watching the video, has been arrested several times.

The self professed  moniker that underlines his body of work is; “It is by doing whatever that you become whoever”.  He is most known for his impersonation of sports figures as a means to insert himself in otherwise closed spaces. Dressed as a soccer  or tennis player Remy takes to the field to participate alongside of professional athletes for the delight and confusion of spectators.  Another tactic of Remy’s is to dress as an animal figure and play in urban spaces.

While I admire his work there are certain tactics that he engages that I also find troubling, at times he targets individuals who are on the job., in such  a way that often makes the unsuspecting employees at minim wage jobs the recipient of his pranks. This gesture read alongside other projects of his lends an air of ambiguity as to what exactly Remy’s ethical commitments are, or following his logic such tactics begs the question; who exactly is Remy trying to become? Nonetheless his work uses humor to raise a series of questions about boundaries, social orders and power.

for more information on Remy Gaillar’s work go to his website: http://www.nimportequi.com/en/

The conversation travels

I found a link to this article and thought that it was relevant to our readings this past week.

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/the_body_politic/P1/

Perceptual Tides

The following offers a brief account of the ways in which I was gently pushed and pulled by the reading this week. Movement seems a good place to start this rendering, given that tide prediction is of central importance for coastal navigation. This is a very small “sample” of one of the many currents that I felt moved by and moved through me as I followed Helmreich’s  invitation to “channel- surf”( 2009:25) his travelogue of the microbial sea.

I stare at the spine of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, which is tucked neatly amongst some other books stacked on the corner of my desk. It stares back at me, waiting for a response. My eyes are caught by the jelly fish’s body that is partial hidden under the white crisp font of the book’s title, its iridescent body is suspended in a stretched pose that wraps around the spine of the book.  I am carried away, and get carried away by, imaging the experience of touching, feeling the soft and smooth but structured weight of the small clear jelly fishes that commonly live in the shallow Pacific Ocean waters. For me Jelly fish are imponderable beings, so abstractly beautiful in color, shape and undulating movement that they almost are aestheticized in such a way that they slip right out of the category of animal.  Indeed, it is these bodies that most acutely stretch across and bend time; they seem to slide between alien life form and ancient animal form, collapsing the past into the present. These bodies hover somewhere where between genomic ghost and unearthly other.  Helmreich’s point “that the taxonomy and politics of alien and native species are slippery” ( 2009:26) has worked its way into my experiences of the sea.

I think about jelly fishes awhile longer……………..

Have you ever touched one? Or been touched by one? The ones with color in their bodies sting, the purple ones especially hurt if you rub up aginst them or make the mistake of picking them up out of their watery homes.  I have an affinity for the clear  medium sized ones; the type that wash up amongst the sea cucumbers and shells during low tide and reconfigure the shores sand into a place prime for touching and collecting oceanic and non oceanic life forms.

Growing up next to “the beach” in Victoria a favorite activity of my brother and I was to head down to the waters during low tide and scavenge the remains left behind by the tides; a wandering that usually culminated in a jelly fish fight or wiping each other with sea cucumbers. Surfing along and anchored in the pages of Helmrich’s work, I can’t help now but think of these adventures as engaging in a type of labour practice not dissimilar to that of the large ocean linear’s  that he describes as transporting sea creatures; moving them from “one place to another”.   In a way, on a smaller scale I participated in- by acting as a vehicle of transportation- in the formation of these global swells.  Helmrich citing, and building upon the work of Arjun Appaduri’s points out that, “The language of “flows,” however, widely adopted in studies of globalizations, often consigns to the background the vehicles that allow such movement to take place” ( 2009: 147).  This point draws a sharp breath out of me now, as I stare around my living room, taking in the shells, rocks and bits of drift wood I have collected and taken from the various points in the B.C. coast line  over the years, dragging them back in suit cases to my home here in Toronto.

What is it about these forms that compelled me to collect them up and display them?

This museum of objects displayed neatly in my living room are more than neutral items on display, they are mimetic devices, what Levi- Struass in his work, Two Approaches to Studying Myths,  aptly dubbed “totemic operators”. I often use these objects to “think with” to tell an “origin story” about who I am and where I am from; the West coast. I feel tangled and moored in the ocean in ways that are too thick to neatly parse out. I am inside the ways I touch and have been touched by the Pacific Ocean, even at the risk of participating in the narrative traditions that are overly romantic about the sea. It is a self conscious journey of sorts where I move between Helmreich’s account and my past experiences, which are being re-worked by his description.

I leave the jelly fish and the beach for a moment………and return to my living room. I walk over to my book shelves.

Perhaps tellingly my pirated sea treasures are positioned next to my books- scattered and rubbing up against- spine on spine.   This point of literal contact between the ocean and the literary world offers another movement. It a point of convergences that extends on and draws other forces into the process that move the tide;  tidal phenomena after all, are not limited to the oceans, but occur in other systems whenever a gravitational field that varies in time and space is present.  Akin to Benjamin, who unpacks his library as a way of seeing the world and the micro biologist who catalogue and sequence microbial forms, both of whom appear inside of Helmreich’s work ( 2009:61). I think about the fate of this book; I wonder where will I place this ethnography? Who is it that lives amongst Helmreich’s work? What histories swirl about and give the book form?

I return to the description Helmreich offer us of himself, sitting and picking through colonies inside the lab. Sitting working he looks into  a dish containing a sample taken from Hawaiian waters and, “sees each well as a Russian Doll” ( 2009:60). The image of the Russian doll returns me to earlier readings of the course.  Book in hand I scan my book self, skimming past the work of Richard Dawkins till I find, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, by François Jacob. In his seminal treatise Jacob while grappling with systems of life inside the emerging field of molecular biology, notes that, “there is not one single organization of the living, but a series of organizations fitted into one another like nests of boxes or Russian dolls. Within each, another is hidden” (Jacob 1981: 16). For now I will place Helmriech’s richly detailed ethnography next to François Jacob on my bookshelf.

• All of the photos are of, Gonzales Bay, Victoria, B.C., and were taken by me Dec. 2009.

“Mary”

In conversation with Jordan’s presentation I offer an alternative rendering of Mary……..

Anxious Anatomy; Inter-species Relations

This post is organized around two sets of separate yet interrelated concerns; replication and reading practices framed as acts of consumption. This week raised a series of questions for me most of which I am still processing, so this rending might come across as tangential……….

I am slowly chewing and digesting, Shukin’s work, “Animal Capital; Rendering Life in Biopolitical Times”. In comparison to last week’s reading of Melinda Cooper’s work,  I find myself moving at a much slower pace, partially because I don’t want to miss a beat of her work and it for me personally   is also a required pace. I slow down because she ask me as a reader to chew on stringing sinews of the works of Foucault, Deluze, Marx and Hardt and Negri- to name a few- that stretch and sometimes break across the surface of her work.  I was particularly compelled with how this piece works to stand with, although not always alongside of, writings that have addressed the question of inter-species relations. Her work pushes off of contemporary thought, to trace delicate and often tense intersections of materiality, corporeality and capitalism. Rubbing metaphor against material her work refuses to displace the concept of the real, a trend which organizes so many contemporary works.

For me her work offers a new vivisection into the question of how living beings (re)produce themselves and are themselves (re)produced by others.

Here, I the use of the term vivisection not to invoke a kind of autopsy or forensic violence but rather to position her work  in conversation with Karen Barrd’s notion of agential cut. There work is congruous in that Shukin too acknowledges the agential capacity of matter, and by doing so cuts agency away from humanism.    Additionally I bracket  the term  (re)production as a way to signal that I am still working through the different stakes operating through the terms  production, reproduction and renderings and their associated concepts, all of which have very different, yet sometimes overlapping trajectories and are used to articulate divergent sets of political concerns.  I have yet and perhaps never will find a comfortable way of locating, and qualifying my use of these terms.

But back to the question of living beings and reproduction, this question has not only shaped a series of pressing concerns in eighteenth and nineteenth natural philosophy but seems to have captivated ‘Western’ philosophy and culture at large. This fascination is evident from the development of such technologies as the microscope which fulfilled and fueled the desire to observe the replication of ‘life’ at the molecular and cellular level, to the proliferation of taxonomies of species that drew organisms in relation to each other but almost always maintained a distinction between species organized and centered on reproduction habits. At last but not least, theories of heredity to scientific approaches that adhere to the notion that valid results are directly synonymous with reproducible results.

Shukin carefully builds upon and extends the notion of replication in her examination of how human beings as animals replicate in multiple and interrelated ways –physiologically, artistically, linguistically, systems of organization- to examine what is tangibly at stake in modes of productions and reproduction. In her chapter, Rendering’s Modern Logic, she re-centers the concept of reality inside of mimesis as a way to take seriously the power dynamics inside mimetic practices, while unhinging history from the metaphysics of progress, a move that calls both the work of Aristotle and Kant into question. Rather than produce an account of mimicry that is underlined with an emancipator capacity or a way out of the system she reaches for a rendering of repetition that does not mock the real but instead is a self conscious and ethical way of showing and making bodies that have never been depicted as real, really count.

I thought the juxtaposition offered by these two renderings and those of the traditional subject matter of anatomists drawings,  offer some interesting “food for thought”. Both renderings posted below were inspired by, and clearly in conversation with the tradition of rendering anatomies visible inside the logic of medical visual rhetoric.

“Bugs Bunnies Anatomy“ By Hyungkoo Lee.

For more works by this artist checkout http://www.hyungkoolee.net/animatus/animatus.html

“Under the skirts of Marvin the Martian“ by Michael Paulus.

For more of this artist’s work check out; http://michaelpaulus.com/section/59023_CHARACTER_STUDY.html

The Politics Of Intervention and Development

Apologies for my late post, I have been busy having my health status secured, measured and assessed through various biotechnological apparatuses this past week. As it turns out, my biology is not a threat to myself or anyone else, this time!  Due to the late posting this rendering has benefited from, and is in conversation with our in-class discussion and the individual readings posted.

This week I am thinking about the relationships between disaster relief and interventions, the technologies of development and politics of belonging.  To borrow a phrase from anthropologist James Ferguson- who is most noted for his work on politics, anthropology and international development- I am curious about biotechnologies and “the development of underdevelopment” . (Ferguson 1994)

In her work, Life As Surplus: Biotechnology & Capitalism In the NeoLiberal Era, Melinda Cooper provides the reader with a wide reaching genealogy of the ways in which neoliberal theories, intersect with economic expansion articulated in the development of new biotechnologies. For Cooper the rise of biotechnology is inexplicably bound up and mirrors the central tenants that underwrite neoliberalism. In other words, capital flows through the circuits of biology and biotechnology in ways that create new frontiers of economic development and life forms in ways that are predicated on the ideals of autonomous individuality, choice and consumerism. The role that biotechnology plays in the expansion of frontiers, for her, appears to outpace a series of previously entrenched boundaries that governed life. Notably, the rate at which these expansions proliferate for Cooper, and judging from our in class conversation the reader, is dizzying and gives rise to states of delirium.

While at points I found Cooper’s text frustrating to read, perhaps because as was suggested it moves quickly; therefore  inducing a type of critical vertigo, an  aspects  that I found particularly insightful is that Copper highlights how speculative developments are underwritten by promissory notions.  She points out that in order for the limits of life to expand in ways that are conducive for economic developments promissory agreements are essential. In her conversation on international patterns of borrowing and spending, she states that;

“The speculative moment is only one side of debt form, however, since the debt needs at some point to needs to redeem its promised futures, to remember them to the past as if they had already been realized. In this way debt form is not merely promissory or escapists but also deeply materialist; that is it seeks to materialize its promise in the production of matter, forces, and things” (Cooper 2008:31).

Inside of this quote is the suggestion that futures are carved out and held captive through transnational modes of exchange, and accumulation. This insight is helpful in thinking about the way in which economic transactions make bids on futures in ways that powerfully materalizes them, so to speak. However  after reading Cooper’s work I am still left with, what I think are fundamental question; What is development? And how do the politics of scale shape the effects and affects of development in the biotechnology industries?  Copper’s work tends to focus on the intersection between “hightech” biotechnologist and development (in the broadest sense), which she depicts as hyper mobile, but are there ways in which these technologies are met with resistances and are unable to move into developing new frontiers?

Ferguson, James. (1994) The Anti-Politics Machine; “Development”, Depoliticization and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho, University of Minnesota Press.

A newer work by Ferguson, that I have yet to read but comes highly recommended: Fergson, Jamea. (2006) Global Shadows:Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Duke University Press.

Becomings; Bodies at Work

Embodied Practices

I chose this article because, while at times a little to literal, speaks to Natasha’s curiosity and careful focus on the intersections between modes of embodiments, becomings and pedagogy.

How are we trained and how does that training stay with us? What type of analytical and affective purchase is afford us by acknowledging that the processes of learning are constituted through a series of ambivalent relationships? Do we ever stop becoming?  Do the lessons we learn stay in our body, if so what type of labour is involved with ridding ourselves from bad habbits? These are a few of the questions that came up for me.

Admittedly I feel a certain amount of anxiety about speaking back or moving off of a professor’s words who has directly taught me. In many ways such an exercise performance the very dynamics that Natasha’a manuscript captures. I feel like I am ‘acting out’,  perhaps this sensation accounts for the nerves and the jumpiness that underwrite this rendering.  But hey ‘becoming’ can be nervous risky business the kind that requires one to learn to be dexterous- shifting modes of attention- in order to cultivate a feel for the dynamics they are in, a part of, and documenting.

In Natasha’s manuscript, Modeling Proteins, Making Scientists Rendering Molecular Life in the Contemporary Biosciences, she reminds us that the very models that we use to understand objects of analysis are intimately tied up, entangled in biopoilitical projects. Our work is in the world as much as the world is made visible in our work.  In this line of thought, thinking the world is a way of making the world. Thinking is a gesture an embodied action that has productive consequences in the world and for the bodies -in the broadest- that a movement of thought identifies, names and animates. However, from my reading, naming alone does not create the object of study. Her work also foregrounds concerns and questions of belonging in practical and material terms. By doing so it reaches towards a theoretical space of possibilities and multiplicity vis -a -vis material relationalism. This builds a map of being and becoming that  break step with epistemological frameworks which contend that modes of belong and being as separate, or that this modes are singular or highly individually oriented.

One of  the many points that particularly resonated with me is the way in which Natasha frames ethnography as a practice, she states that,” As researchers shift their attention from reading to writing DNA sequences to modeling protein, their interlocutors must keep pace” (Pg 21). This is an interesting way to frame ethnography, it positions it as a mode of  inquiry that moves with and shaped by the very phenomenon that it studies. In reminding me that I use a tool that is shaped in relation to how others use their tools, I realize that I become the ethnographer while tracing others becoming. This makes ethnography a thick sticky process. The kind where you feel through, and sometimes get stuck.

Society of the Spectacle

I will not be posting a rendering in conversation with this weeks readings. Instead I offer a whimsical take, that was found on u tube, on situationalism. Who can ‘resit’ anti-capitalist plant life who sing out a warning against the danger of boredom that comes with accepting the structures of modernity and believing that the society is an already made entity.

“After all, it was modern poetry, for the last hundred years, that had led us here. We were a handful who thought that it was necessary to carry its program in reality, and in any case to do nothing else” ~ Guy Debord, Panegyric (1989)

Is the map the territory?

This rendering is taken from the animation film;  ‘Ryan’, it was nominated in 2005 OSCARS for Best Short Animation. The film is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator and was made by fellow Canadian animator Chris Landret who also made a great short; Spine.

This film offers a poignant example of some of the themes that lace across this weeks articles and raises several issues connected to the larger themes of Life, Labour and Language.

For me there are multiple points of convergence between the readings in the course so far and this film.  I was initially struck by ( no pun intended)  the way in which perception of events is depicted as a force that powerfully reconfigures the characters bodies. Not only does the film take up the issue of partiality but it seems to suggests that events  mark the body in visibly violent ways. By doing so it suggests that physic life of power leaves traces on the flesh, which in my reading dissolves the notion of that life begins ends and is contained within the surface of the skin. Rather it highlights  the ambiguity between the interior  self as a pre -fixed and bounded entity and the exterior outside world. The film foregrounds more ambiguity in that it bends spatial temporarily as the characters carry the past with them, literally on them. This for me demonstrates the way in which the past and the present are artificially parsed out and separated from each other and that these neat separations shift depending on interactions.

Mind you the film seems to take an existentialist turn following from Sartre’s works to  imply that everyone is similarly  born whole and is made partial through difficult or traumatic events.  I am not entirely comfortable with notion because of the way it fails to attend to how bodies are torn, divided and made bloody from birth along the edges  of gender, race, class and sexuality, however; nonetheless  for me this short clip seems to demonstrate how maps can illuminate new territories and bodies or give new life to old territories and bodies.

I will marry this rendering to this weeks assigned readings in more details in the the next day or two.

But for now enjoy!