phallus

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phallus

Herm at Getty MuseumIn classical antiquity, the phallus is the figurative representation of the male organ. It is the figure of hierarchy rather than reciprocity. For the classical Athenians, sex was not a private quest for mutual pleasure. It was rather a declaration of one's public status. Defined as the penetration of one body by the body (specifically by the phallos) of another, sex was conceived as an action performed by one person upon another. The elite corps of adult male citizens held to an aggressively phallic norm of sexual conduct, which lead to an ethic of sexual domination in their relations with males and females alike. (David M. Halperin, in Before Sexuality.) According to Michel Foucault, "The Greeks did not see love for one's own sex and love for the other sex as opposites, as two exclusive choices, two radically different types of behavior...Rather, they saw two ways of enjoying one's pleasure...They believed that the same desire attached to anything that was desirable -- boy or girl." (The Use of Pleasure, pp. 187 ff.) It is the persistence of this phallic model in psychoanalysis that feminists have come to resist (see below). It was the contribution of Christianity's radical ascetics to "strip the body of its ancient, civic associations...by means of an increased emphasis on its intrinsic sexuality...joined together in a somber democracy of sexual shame", and to "see the female body as the condensed essence of all human bondage and all human vulnerability. " (Peter Brown, "Bodies and Minds ," in Before Sexuality.) 

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phantom limbs

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The eminent Philadelphia physician Silas Weir Mitchell first coined the phrase "phantom limb" after the Civil War. In those preantibiotic days, gangrene was a common result of injuries, and surgeons sawed infected limbs off thousands of wounded soldiers. After amputation of movable, functional extremities, the phantom limb seems to be experienced in close to 100 per cent of cases. Oliver Sachs describes them as "fossil images" but explains them as the persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves, especially if there is formation of a neuroma in the stump. (see A Leg to Stand On, p.194,n.) (V. S. Ramachandran has convincingly shown that the locus of the phantom limb is in the brain, not near the hand or leg.

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phase beauty

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"A flowering spray of lily-of-the-valley exemplifies a growth gradient, after a simple fashion of its own. Along the stalk the growth-rate falls away; the florets are of descending age, from flower to bud; their graded differences of age lead to an exquisite gradation of size and form; the time-interval between one and another, or the "space-time relation" between them all, gives a peculiar beauty -- we may call it phase beauty - to the whole." 

(D'Arcy Thompson On Growth and Form, page unknown, quoted in Lindenmayer and Prusinkiewicz, "Developmental Models of Multicellular Organisms", Artificial Life 2, p.230) 

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pharmakos

a person chosen at regular intervals, or as a consequence of some catastrophic epidemic or famine, who was ritually burdened with the impurities of the entire community and then driven across the frontier--if he was not actually killed and his ashes thrown in the sea.

This person is thought of as both the source of the trouble and the pharmakos , i.e. the medicine, the curative charm. ( from Bourgead, The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece. )

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philosophical space

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According to Egyptian myth, space only came into being when the god of air, Shu, parted the earth from the sky by stepping between them. The creation of a vast gap between earth and sky was called chaos in Hesiod's Cosmogony. In the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu addressed the role, in fact the superiority of the contained over the container, of the space within, of the immaterial. 

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philosophy / chaos

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Within the Western tradition, chaos was associated with the unformed, the unthought, the unfilled, the unordered. Hesiod in the Theogony designates Chaos as that which existed before anything else, when the universe was in a completely undifferentiated state. Later in the Theogony , he uses the term chaos to signify the gap that appeared when Heaven separated from Earth. Eros appears in that gap as rain/semen. Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, in The Presocratic Philosophers, see in Hesiod's account of chaos, not disorder, "not the eternal precondition of a differentiated world, but a modification of that precondition." (p.39) 

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phyllotaxis

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Phyllotaxis (gr: phyllous means leaf, taxis means order) refers to the arrangement of leaves on a stem or florets in a composite flower such as a sunflower or pinecone along logarithmic spirals, or summation series, in which each term is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144 etc.. The scales form in double spirals which radiate from the center, one clockwise, the other counterclockwise. The surprising feature is that the number of spirals in one direction is related to the number in the other direction as two adjacent numbers in the Fibonacci series.

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place / identity

"Find your place, dig in, and defend it." --Gary Snyde

Oliver Sachs describes how his paralyzed leg had "vanished, taking its place with it...The leg had vanished taking its 'past' away with it. I could no longer remember having a leg." (See Oliver Sachs, A Leg to Stand On, New York, 1984,)

More and more of us live in what Edward Said has called a "general condition of homelessness," a world where identities are coming to be deterritorialized, or differently territorialized. In a world of diaspora, transnational culture flows, and mass movements of populations, in which familiar lines between "here" and "there", center and periphery, colony and metropole become blurred.

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plane of immanence

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For D+G, philosophy is at once the creating of concepts and instituting of the plane of immanence. (What is Philosophy?, p.41) (see also science / philosophy) According to Deleuze, " Immanence is the very vertigo of philosophy." (Expressionism in Philosophy, p. 180, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, "Absolute Immanence" in Potentialities, p. 226) Giorgio Agamben, calls Deleuze's book, What is Philosophy?, the theory of this vertigo. 

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Play

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For Johannes Huizinga: "Play is older than culture," (p.1) and "all culture is a form of play." (According to Lewis Mumford, Huizinga's English translator was so shocked by the latter assertion that he changed the statement to read that "play is an element in culture.")

"Animals play just like men." (This is one way in which the boundary between human and animal can be broken down) Animals, too, can recognise that a sign is a signal. (Bateson) When they engage in mock battle, they have to be able to communicate to each other that "this is play." If the nip denotes the bite, at the same time it does not denote what the bite denotes. The bite is fictional. (see schizophrenia for inability to engage in such metacomunication) Note also the relationship for Bateson between threat and play. Threat also stands for other actions. (see also ritual in animals)

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playtime 1

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playtime 1

I entitled this lecture "Playtime" long before I had any clear idea what I would talk about, and during the past few months the title has often seemed to have a life of its own, gently prodding me towards levity, cajoling me to stop attaching excessive importance to every thought, to every turn of phrase. But it is not so easy to think playfully, to escape the censorships, the policing of thought which we all-to-easily succumb to and collude with. (Why is it so hard to play?) In this lecture, I have not altogether resisted the academic urge to define play, to fix in place that which should escape definition, to close what should be open. But, I have tried to follow a path opened up by the idea of play, a path both made and found. I might describe it as a kind of autopoetic search for ways of talking about technology and architecture today, in ways mediated by concepts of both play and time. Thinking about play has also afforded me ways of talking about the formation of subjects, about relations between technology and nature, about the 1960's, and about the politics of liberation.

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playtime 2

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playtime 2

Feminist interpretations of gender symbolism offer an important way of correlating the social self and technology. In societies where the nurture of children is gendered labor, the birth of the psychological self is necessarily defined in relation to a mother-world. (An interpretation fetishized by Linneaus when he devised the term mammals, meaning "of the breasts", to distinguish the class of animals embracing humans, apes, ungulates, sloths, sea-cows, elephants, bats, and all other organisms with hair, three ear-bones, and a four-chambered heart.) The difficult and painful social labor of the infant is marked by the contradictory desire to remain in, or return to, oneness with the mother-world, but also to become a separate person. But that world is different for male and female infants, for the mothering received by boys and girls is different. According to Nancy Chodorow, Jane Flax, and other feminist interpretors of "object theory", mothers tend to experience their daughters as more like and continuous with themselves and to experience a son as a masculine opposite. As a result, the identity of the male child entails a stronger sense of separation and control, of self-definition in relation to persons unlike himself, while the female child continues to experience herself in terms of merging and identification. The male child consequently establishes relatively rigid ego boundaries, while the female's remain more flexible, Masculinity comes to be defined through the achievement of separation, while feminity is defined through the maintenance of attachment. The limitations of Banham's relation to technology may well derive from technology's role as a transitional object in a decidedly masculine project of autonomy and mastery. The solution seems to me to lie less in rejecting technology or radically opposing it to architecture but in recognizing the greater complexity of our relations to gender, nature, and technology. (and learning to play) 

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Pleasure

The basic assumption of Freud's pleasure principle is that the most salient and unique aspect of human experience is the subjective experience of pleasure (tension reduction) and unpleasure (tension buildup). see Bateson's descriptions of "plateaus" in schismogenesis for a culture with a seemingly different approach to pleasure than one based on release of tension as in orgasm.

For Freud the affective and perceptual experiences are yoked. Without the experience of Hedonic tone, no perceptions would be registered at all.

Kant describes the pleasure we experience when nature conforms to the requirements of our subjectivity in the critique of judgement . (see also unity) He describes the pleasure the transcendental philosopher takes in finding that a particular purposiveness, or conformity to law, which was not necessary, turned out nonetheless to be the case. "The sole pleasure found in disinterested judgements concerning the mere form of objects reveals that nature (feeling) and reason are capable of agreement." (Rodolphe Gashé , The Idea of Form, p.173)

But Kantian aesthetic pleasure is not merely an effect -- an aesthetic manifestation of awareness -- it is intimately tied up with a state of mind in which the powers of imagination and reason become attuned in a judgement of taste. Taste, for Kant is "a tone of mind which is self-maintaining." (p.67) See Gashé , p. 51)

For Michel Foucault, the Greek relation to the body and its pleasures was a completely different model from the Christian relation to flesh and its desires. If the church and the ministry stressed the principle of a morality whose precepts were cumpulsory and whose scope was universal, the demands of austerity in classical thought were stylizations of masculine conduct. In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault sets out to trace the long history of the aesthetics of existence and the "techniques of the self" -- the ways in which the individual is summoned to recognize himself as an ethical subject of sexual conduct.

Rather than strictly defining what is permitted and what is forbidden, the accent of Greek and Greco-Roman ethical thought "was placed on the relationship with the self that enabled a person to keep from being carried away by the appetites and pleasures, to maintain a mastery and superiority over them, to keep his senses in a state of tranquillity, to remain free from interior bondage to the passions, and to acheive a mode of being that could be defined by the full enjoyment of oneself, the perfect supremacy of oneself over oneself." (p.31)

According to Foucault, foods, wines, and relations with women and boys constituted analagous ethical material. They brought forces into play that were natural, but that always tended to be excessive. The dynamic relation of acts, pleasures, and desires was a circular one, and the ethical question of aphrodisia was not: which desires? which acts? which pleasures? but rather with what force one is transported "by the pleasures and desires." (p.43) As Aristotle expresses it, "all men enjoy in some way both savoury foods and wines and sexual intercourse, but not all men do so as they ought." (p.52)

popular culture

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In " Avant-Garde and Kitsch", Clement Greenberg describes a second new cultural phenomenon that appeared in the industrial West: Kitsch. For Greenberg, the new urban masses lost their taste for the folk culture of the countryside, discovered a new capacity for boredom, and set up a pressure on society to provide them with a culture fit for their own consumption. For Greenberg, Kitsch is produced by a rationalized technique that draws on science and industry and erases the values that permit distinctions between good and bad art. 

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Political system

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While the relations between science and political systems is not always obvious, many writers on complexity point out connections between the emerging sciences and what is sometimes called the "new world disorder". But whether one sees current political trends as tending towards chaos or towards new forms of self-organization, it seems clear that some of the analytic concepts of the new sciences provide powerful heuristics for current political analysis.

For example, the problems of nationalism in Eastern Europe, or the problems of ethnic communities in cities like Los Angeles, exhibits scaling self-similarity. That is to say, the problems of minorities occur at multiple scales: Yugoslavia breaks into republics, republics break into smaller pieces, etc. The question of self-determination on ethnic grounds occurs at every scale. Chaos seems to loom around the corner. The speed at which this issue has erupted seems to tell us something about global dynamics at the edge of Chaos. At the same time, these developments may hold out the promise of emergent forms of self-organization. Complex systems exhibit diffusion of authority. (Casti cites democratic governments, labor unions, and universities as examples) They exhibit a social resiliency that comes from their capacity to absorb disruptions and environmental fluctuations. These may be understood as changes in the relation between local and global

The view of "spaceship" earth as seen by the Apollo astronauts, first made the Gaia hypothesis plausible.

The end of the Cold War system and the "Prisoner's Dilemma" Russian Catastrophe theory describes perestroika (metamorphosis) in mathematical terms while acknowledging that their successful study is undoubtedly a result of political perestroika .


For the relations between science and prestige, see big science.

population/typological

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One of the changes in biological thinking brought on by Darwinism is the replacement of the typological thought of the morphological rationnalists by the "population thinking" of the current neo-Darwinist synthesis.

Traditional Biology seeks to be a science of forms. The Linnean hierarchy, which is more empirical that rational, seeks to classify forms through a structure of nested classes (taxa) of the traditional, Aristotelian kind, whose members are individual organisms. In this system, a "higher" taxon can be said to be more 'abstract' in relation to a lower one, requiring fewer properties for membership and with a greater extension. But according to Driesch, the Linnean hierachies of genera and species were only related on the basis of empirical abstraction, not on the kind of fundamental concepts that carry principles of division and allow for a rational systematics. In the latter case, according to Driesch, "The so-called ' genus' ... then embraces all its 'species' in such a manner that all peculiarities of the species are represented already in properties of the genus." (The Science and Philosophy of the Organism, p.245)

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positional info

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One way of explaining regulation is to think of cells being able to obtain positional information as to where they are and to use that information in development. This way, cells can be moved about and interchanged (in experiments or accidents) without disturbing the developmental process. Gradient fields could be one source of positional information. (see also morphic fields) For Lewis Wolpert, "positional information is about graded properties" measured with reference to a "coordinate system." Wolpert's simple "French flag" model appealed to the "non-mathematical but theoretically minded." A gradient described as a straight inclined line, could have threshold points translating into patterns (eg red, white, and blue). But "just what moves this answer beyond the realm of tautology remains obscure." Evelyn Fox Keller

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Postmodernism

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"Postmodernism is what you have when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good." Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, p. IX. "We might say that postmodernism is what you have when the modern theory of social constructivism is taken to its extreme and all subjectivity is recognized as artificial." (Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 196) "The point is that we are within the culture of postmodernism to the point where its facile repudiation is as impossible as any equally facile celebration..." (Jameson, p. 62)

Any account of postmodernism must address the tangled relationship between its writing and its object. As Frederic Jameson admits, "I would not want to have to decide whether the following chapters (of his book Postmodernism) are inquiries into the nature of such "postmodernism theory" or mere examples of it." Some disaffected critics claim that "A key to understanding the postmodern temper is that, for it, the distinction between truth and illusion has lost its purchase. " (Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modernity, p.87)

Frederic Jameson is not quite so sure. He goes on to ask whether we can identify some "moment of truth" within the more evident "moments of falsehood" of postmodern culture.

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power

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For Foucault, every relation between forces is a "power relation." Power is not essentially repressive. It is practiced before it is possessed, and it passes through the hands of the mastered no less than through the hands of the masters. Therefore we should ask: "How is it practiced?" It is a physics of abstract action. (Deleuze, Foucault, p. 72) 

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