In Between

Today I learned about cyborgs again.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

Johnson, Samuel W. 1900. How Crops Grow: A treatise on the chemical composition, structure and life of the plant, for students of agriculture. New York: Orange Judd Co.


“All matter may be divided into two great classes – Organic and Inorganic. Organic matter is the product of growth, or of vital organization, whether vegetable or animal…All matter which is not a part or product of a living organism is inorganic or mineral matter (rocks, soils, water, and air).”
Thus begins the first chapter to Samuel Johnson’s 1900 treatise written for students of agriculture, titled “How Crops Grow.” Johnson’s training and political actions were critical in the formation of the Agriculture Experiment Stations in the U.S., departments based at agricultural colleges around the country focused on the scientific, or theoretical understanding of growing plants and animals. This idea is so powerful that it must be said, even when Johnson complicates the issue himself in the following pages. The organic portion of a plant is volatile, or combustible under the heat of fire, morphing into the invisible atmosphere. The inorganic portions of a plant morphed into ash, or a solid, when put under a flame. But Johnson says
“this is not an entirely accurate distinction. What is found in the ashes of a tree or of a seed, in so far as it was an essential part of the organism, was as truly organic as the volatile portion, and, by submitting organic bodies to fire, they may be entirely converted into inorganic matter, the volatile as well as the fixed parts” (Johnson, 1900: 14, emphasis mine).
Now there is apparent confusion between the “two great classes” of matter. In the ashes of a burned tree we see that there are essential parts of that tree that were equally as organic, or “the product[s] of growth,” as the parts that disappeared into air. Non-living elements comprised a living organism, which confused Johnson. This slippage between categories, while not more than a passing note in Johnson’s text, relates an analogous tension present in Haraway’s (1991) cyborg manifesto concerning the nature of objects. Johnson’s natural philosophy, the dominant theme in U.S. scientific agriculture at the time, rested on the division between organic and inorganic. Their reconciliation could not go unobserved to him, but he lacked the intellectual tools for a new ontology where the division between the two categories of organic and inorganic could be merged somehow. Haraway highlights the boundary breeches in the late 20th century between human/animal, machine/organism, and physical/non-physical, showing that the “backslash” is where we find cyborgs. Johnson’s plants, then, the objects of agriculture, could in their own way, in their own place and time, also be read as cyborgs, the confounding and confusing interplay between two parts of his reality: organic and inorganic.
Next I explore how reading Haraway’s cyborg manifesto might help us understand this tension that Johnson encountered some 90 years earlier. While the context from which they are writing is different, I believe they met the same philosophical problem. Haraway argues for the “cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource…the cyborg is our ontology…the cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality” (150). Here Haraway is saying that we need a new resource that allows us to comprehend the world we have created. The cyborg is more than metaphoric, though, it is also descriptive of objects in the world, including objects that used to be termed “organisms,” “machines,” “humans,” and “animals” under the old capitalist, racist, sexist, progress-centered and appropriationist-centered ontology. This is Haraway’s political project, then, to both forecast and describe a new way of being outside of these divisions that were necessary for the “achievements” of modernity. To keep categories secure in modernity, a constant border war was required between the above mentioned groups to maintain their separation. Separation meant authority, domination, and control by some over others, which is the heart of many of the problems we encounter in today’s world: violence rooted in racism, oppression based in sexuality, and domination based on non-human. Haraway calls for us to find pleasure in cyborgs because when we start to see things outside of “human,” “machine,” etc., then we are stepping towards a dissolution of the categories that have caused so much harm.


If Johnson could have read Haraway’s 1991 article he may have understood plants in terms of an affinity of molecules rather than in terms of living or non-living. He says that “chemical affinity is that force or kind of energy which unites or combines two or more substances of unlike character, to a new body different from its ingredients” (Johnson, 1900: 30). Johnson’s agent of change was affinity, the force that creates a whole greater than the sum of its parts. Haraway’s affinity functions much the same way. It is the force that brings a group of unlike bodies together to form a larger body to affect the sphere of politics. The living and non-living molecules of a plant are both necessary to form the body, or whole plant. The affinity, or the fact of amalgamation itself becomes the plant, and the categories themselves of organic and inorganic fall out.
Using the cyborg model retroactively is useful because it demonstrates how categories have shaped our understanding of, in this case, the botanical world in 1900. The cyborg as a tool allows us to observe assumptions from the past that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Johnson came to know the differences between organic and inorganic parts of a plant because he assumed that living and non-living were natural categories. He was seemingly confused by his observations that some elements, like carbon and nitrogen, could be found in each. His classification scheme shaped his observations.

Humanity?

Today I learned about cyborgs.

Haraway, Donna J. 1991. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The reinvention of nature. New York: Routledge.

For this lesson, I post quotations from the Cyborg Manifesto that I underlined. If you've ever heard the character The Hybrid speak, from the TV series Battlestar Gallactica, this is how Haraway writes. In fact, I'd not be at all surprised to discover that the writers for that TV show used this chapter to build that character's script. Translations to these passages are in-progress.

"Modern medicine is full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality."

"Modern production seems like a dream of cybord colonization at work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic."

"Modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, and $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget."

"The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality."

"The cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense...the cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature...this is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars."

"The cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household."

"I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy."

"The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project."

"The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust."

Whew.

Yeast Comes to Life!

Today I learned about situational goodness.

Dubos, Rene. 1960. Pasteur and Modern Science. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Most famous for his involvement in the development of germ theory and penicillin, Pasteur actually began work on his doctorate degree at the Ecole Normale Superieure studying crystallography. The lesson from Dubos is that Pasteur's career illustrates "that what an individual achieves in life depends less upon the circumstances in which he has to function than upon what he brings to bear upon them." Napoleon wrote in his diary that "no situation is good or bad in itself, everything depends upon what one makes out of it."
Dubos also reveals the crucial lesson for a scholar of any field, that Pasteur "demonstrated one of the most fundamental characteristics of the gifted experimenter: the ability to recognize an important problem, and to formulate it in terms amenable to experimentation." It takes a long time to be able to ask the right question, if only because so many questions have already been asked and responded to. But it is another thing altogether to ask a good question that is answerable with the skills and tools that the researcher has at their disposal.

Pasteur recognized in 1855 that what before were thought of as chemical catalysts in the fermentation process of making alcohol were actually living creatures (yeast) that were eating the sugars. He demonstrated that "fermentation is a phenomenon correlative of life," which represents the historically symbolic moment of the beginning of microbiology.

Observing the changes that occur in organic matter (putrefaction of meat, souring of milk, fermentation of grape juice, etc.) with this lens of little life forms moving all about, the question arose 'where did the microorganisms responsible for these changes originate?' The doctrine of spontaneous generation said that with each organism, there began a colony of microorganisms de novo. Others argued that in fact 'omnis cellula e cellula,' or only from cells arise cells.

Photography

Today I learned about photography.

Miller, Rick. 2009. "Nomadic and Domestic: Dwelling on the edge of Ulaambaatar." Unpublished manuscript. Los Angeles, CA.

Moore, Gemma, Ben Croxford, Mags Adams, Mohamed Refaee, Trevor Cox, and Steve Sharples. 2008. The Photo-Survey Research Method: Capturing life in the city. Visual Studies 23 (1):50-62.

The use of photography in geographical research is an obvious coupling, yet photography remains obscure in geography partly because it has been difficult to bring into a clear methodological frame. Despite convention, I think photos and maps are complementary tools for geographers, yet photos tend to end up in "art," and maps tend to end up in "geography." Maps allow us to simultaneously visualize disparate places of the earth's surface, normally from a 90 degree above angle. They allow us to see spatial trends. They are necessarily limited representations of the world. Photos, likewise, are limited representations of the world. They, as well, never tell the whole story. While photographs may not allow us to see spatial trends with the same poignancy as maps, they can give us a glimpse into experiences and perceptions that may be had in the places that aggregate to make spatial trends. Lastly, while maps let us see lots of places at once, photographs let us see one place at a time, but with a richer texture.

Might a geographer who studies landscape take more interesting or informative pictures of landscapes? I was inspired when I discovered that Rick Miller's research in Mongolia utilizes his own photographs as an integral part of data collection about how people in Mongolia view their dwellings with respect to mobility. This seems like an excellent method to bring together the studied and the studier. A presentation without (in this example) Rick's insight and perspective would be devoid of authorship, while a presentation without the perspective of those who are the focus of the research would be imperialist. Meeting half way, then, is inevitable, so using the photograph to create a shared, common vocabulary is useful.

The Moore et al article lays out a case in which photographs were used to capture people's perceptions of their urban environment. The collection of these perceptions, or local knowledges, were then represented in photographs. The project was meant to tap into the visual imagination of the participants to make sense of the cacophony of the city. This project, unlike Rick's, asked the participants to make their own images rather than interpret those images of the author.

The next meeting of the Association of American Geographers is this March in Las Vegas. As part of the conference I have registered for a day-long workshop with the theme of "using photography to investigate urban landscapes." The workshop is lead by Caroline Knowles from the Centre for Urban & Community Research, and Paul Halliday, from the University of London. We are meant to learn the types of images that are useful to urban exploration, and how professional geographers read photographs to say things about the urban environment. Part of the workshop includes time to go out into the city in small groups and take pictures. We will then assemble them in an exhibit which will show during the week of the conference.

I was also photographically inspired by a recent exhibit I saw at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City. They showcased the work of 1960s photographer Merle Porter, who traveled around making postcards. I would categorize his images as "desert vernacular." One of the inspiring things about these postcards is the lenghty, informative descriptions on the back.
From the CLUI:
"Known as 'the postcard king of the west,' Porter was on the road at least 9 months a year, distributing cards to remote motels, gas stations and souvenir shops, while constantly shooting images for new cards with his 4x5 Speed Graphic camera. Typically his route took him through the California, Arizona and Nevada desert areas in winter, and the California beach areas in summer; his aversion to big cities kept his work out of major metropolitan areas like Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the height of his career, Porter was putting 1,000 miles a week on his Ford Econoline van (which served both as living quarters and portable inventory room), and circulating one million cards a year, under the name Royal Pictures of Colton, California."