Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science (31 page)

1
. Dorion Sagan and Lynn Margulis, “Facing Nature,” in
Biology, Ethics, and the Origins of Life
, edited by Holmes Rolston III (Boston: Jones and Bartlett, 1995), 39–62; Sagan and Margulis, “Gaia and the Ethical Abyss,” in
The Good in Nature and Humanity: Connecting Science, Religion, and Spirituality with the Natural World,
edited by Stephen R. Kellert and Timothy J. Franham (New Haven, Conn.: Island Press, 2001), 91–101.

2
. Monoculturalism is the slippery notion that there is one, scientifically agreeable upon world, discovered by a science that, although it developed in Europe, makes planetary citizens of us all. A seductive example is given by Carl Sagan: “How far will our nomadic species have wandered by the next century, and the next millennium? Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross before we found our way” (
Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
[New York: Ballantine Books, 1997], 334). See Bruno Latour, “Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics? Comments on the Peace Terms of Ulrich Beck,”
Common Knowledge
10, no. 3 (2004): 454.

3
. Alan Watts,
The Book: On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are
(New York: Vintage, 1989), 4.

4
. Josh Mitteldorf, “Aging Is Not a Process of Wear-and-Tear,”
Rejuvenation Research
13 (2010): 322–25; and see Mitteldorf, “Evolutionary Origins of Aging,” in
Approaches to the Control of Aging: Building a Pathway to Human Life Extension,
edited by Gregory M. Fahy, Michael D. West, L. Stephen Coles, and Steven B. Harris (New York: Springer, 2010).

5
. Ed Cohen,
A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics, and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009), 1–2.

6
. As Timothy Campbell says in the translator’s introduction, “In any case, for the present discussion what matters most is that Derrida believes that September 11 cannot be thought independently of the figure of immunity; indeed, that as long as the United States continues to play the role of ‘guarantor or guardian of the entire world order,’ autoimmunitary aggression will continue, provoked in turn by future traumatizing events that may be far worse than September 11” (Roberto Esposito,
Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy,
translated by Timothy Campbell, Posthumanities 4 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], xviii). Esposito is interesting in part because he takes seriously the potential homology between the body and the body politic even while reviling its totalitarian logic: “From this perspective, we can say that immunization is a negative ‘form’ of the protection of life. It save, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or collective, to which it pertains, but it does not do so directly, immediately, or frontally; on the contrary, it subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand. Just as in the medical practice of vaccinating the individual body, so the immunization of the political body functions similarly, introducing within it a fragment of the same pathogen from which it wants to protect itself” (
Bíos,
46). Ironically, a liberal attitude to the Estonian ethologist, somewhat mirroring Adolf Hitler’s vegetarianism, because the former granted such theoretical respect to the inner worlds of animals that he has been embraced by animal studies if not animal rights groups, Uexküll makes clear the terrifying logic of the biostate in his “
Staatsbiologie
, which was also published in 1920 by Baron Jakob von Uexküll with the symptomatic subtitle
Anatomy, Physiology, and Pathology of the State
. Here, as with Kjellen, the discourse revolves around the biological configuration of the state-body that is unified by harmonic relations of its own organs, representative of different professions and competencies. . . . Threatening the public health of the German body is a series of diseases, which obviously, referring to the revolutionary traumas of the time, are located in subversive trade unionism, electoral democracy, and the right to strike: tumors that grow in the tissues of the state, causing anarchy and finally the state's dissolution. It would be ‘as if the majority of the cells in our body (rather than those in our brain) decided which impulses to communicate to the nerves’” (
Bíos,
17–18).

7
. The engagement of the biopolitical is “medieval-microcosmic” in its unapologetic appropriation/recognition of the biological for political discourse. The equivalence brain:body; govt:body politic, like the equivalence immune system:body; national security forces:body politic is homologous not only in terms of cultural derivation and a pre-French revolutionary thinking to do with the divine right of kings, but also perhaps in terms of the natural development that is far easier for a social Darwinism/futurism/sociobiology/scientism/Nazism to embrace than traditional humanism and the “once burned, twice shy” mind-set of humanities and posthumanities from cultural anthropology/sociology/social studies of science to geography and so on. It is anathema to think the bios as always already more than human when it is always already mediated by human consciousness. This is a constitutive aporia that cannot be solved by a new agential cut. The impossible shape of {{{nature}culture}nature} (to put it in hierarchic notation with the outer brackets being the most inclusive) allies it to Paul Valéry’s line that he lives in a world inside his head inside the world. Nonethe
less,
if we accept for the sake of argument that the three imploded buildings of September 11 were demolished as a provocation for “an endless cycle of violence” (as Dick Cheney put it), we can, with no need to identify the perpetrators in whole or part, interpret the phenomenon in terms of the autoimmunity of globalization. Compared with the demolishing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II, the destruction was nowhere so severe. But the importance for the global body politic was equally if not more profound: whoever did it, the eradication of the Twin Trade Towers initiated a global immune response. If it was a false flag operation, the latest and most spectacular of the nationalist master weapon of killing one’s own to trigger systemic response, then we have a perfect conflation of the political and biological acts of autoimmunization. The catastrophe would be formally equivalent to a vaccination against the perceived dangers of spreading, suicide-friendly, Islamic terrorism.

It only requires an abdication of absolute morality to imagine the mind-set of a globalist supranational hegemony that would not be above faking Islamic, white power, and other attacks to preclude them, as well as to consolidate power using the Machiavellian “short cut” of engineered fear and crisis conditions. Fears of backlash against elite leaders, not to mention scenarios of mob mobilizations potentially worse than engineered terror, work to concretize the propagandistically useful notions of democracy, antisexism, antiracism, multiculturalism, and so on and embolden extralegal power checked only by its own equally deceptive, functionally criminal, and powerful cousins. False flags as a politico-military attractor can thus potentially be understood within the framework of realpolitik and “immunization”—you purposely stage a feared threat, taking the wind out of the sails of those who would do it to you. You make big bucks in the process, all the while congratulating yourself on your mastery of population control and applied Platonism. Shadia Drury argues that neocons learned from Leo Strauss, who argued that Plato’s real mouthpiece is not Socrates but Thrasymachus, whom Strauss defends along with Machiavelli as political realists necessary to protect against the stupidity of the masses and reprisals against their secretive masters (Danny Postel, “Noble Lies and Perpetual War: Leo Strauss, the Neo-cons, and Iraq,” 2003,
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5010.htm
[accessed May 20, 2012]).

8
. Whitehead,
Science and the Modern World
, 10.

9
. Cohen,
A Body Worth Defending,
281.

10
. McFall-Ngai, “Origins of the Immune System.”

11
. Esposito,
Bíos,
17.

12
. Herbert Spencer, preface to
The Data of Ethics
(London: Williams and Norgate, 1879).

1
. Otto Rank,
The Trauma of Birth
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929).

2
. Paul West,
Master Class: Scenes from a Fiction Workshop
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 2001).

3
. Samuel Butler,
The Shrewsbury Edition of the Works of Samuel Butler,
edited by Henry Festing Jones and A. T. Bartholomew (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923–26).

4
. Alan Watts,
Does It Matter? Essays on Man’s Relation to Materiality
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1970).

1
. Thomas Hager, “World’s Greatest Invention,”
http://thomashager.net/haber-bosch-the-worlds-greatest-invention/
(accessed May 28, 2012).

2
. A. S. Eddington,
The Nature of the Physical World
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 74–75.

3
. C. P. Snow,
The Two Cultures
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 14–15.

4
. Frank L. Lambert (b. 1918), a professor emeritus of Occidental College, Los Angeles, has since 1999 produced publications that have led to twenty-nine chemistry textbooks, reaching approximately 450,000 students (to date), to discard  “disorder” as a description of entropy. See, for example, Frank L. Lambert, “Disorder—a Cracked Crutch for Supporting Entropy Discussions,”
Journal of Chemical Education
79 (2002): 187–92; Lambert, “Shuffled Cards, Messy Desks, and Disorderly Dorm Rooms—Examples of Entropy Increase? Nonsense!”
Journal of Chemical Education
76 (1999): 1385–87; and Lambert, “Entropy Is Simple, Qualitatively,”
Journal of Chemical Education
79 (2002): 1241–46. His websites include secondlaw, shakespeare2ndlaw (where he discusses C. P. Snow), and entropysite, all with the suffix
oxy.edu
; the latter containing multiple links to relevant publications at a variety of levels.

5
. Dennett,
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,
69.

6
. Where Δ
S
is change in entropy,
dq
is change in energy, and
T
is temperature.

7
. Ludwig Boltzmann,
Lectures on Gas Theory
(1898), 443.

8
. Myron Tribus and Edward C. McIrvine, “Energy and Information,”
Scientific American,
September 1971, 224.

9
. Frank L. Lambert, “The Conceptual Meaning of Thermodynamic Entropy in the Twenty-First Century,”
International Research Journal of Pure and Applied Chemistry
1, no. 3 (2011): 67,
http://www.sciencedomain.org/issue.php?iid=82&id=7
.

10
. Steve Adams, “No Way Back,”
New Scientist,
October 22, 1994, 1–4.

11
. Frank Lambert, “Disorder in Thermodynamic Entropy,”
http://entropysite.oxy.edu/boltzmann.html
(accessed June 22, 2012).

12
. Harvey Leff, “Thermodynamics Is Easy—I’ve Learned It Many Times,”
Physics Teacher
45 (February 2007): 71–72. That initial brief article has now been very thoroughly supported by a series of five articles for physics instructors that are accessible online,
http://www.csupomona.edu/~hsleff/selpubs.html
.

13
. Isabelle Stengers,
Cosmopolitics I, In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine’s Challenge
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 24.

14
. P. M. Harman, ed.,
The Scientific Letters and Papers of James Clerk Maxwell,
vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 947.

15
. Jesper Hoffmeyer,
Signs of Meaning in the Universe
(Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1997).

16
. Buckminster Fuller,
I Seem to Be a Verb: Environment and Man’s Future
(New York: Bantam Books, 1970).

17
. Giorgio Agamben,
The Open: Man and Animal,
translated by Kevin Attell (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

18
. Wendy Wheeler,
The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics, and the Evolution of Culture
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006).

19
. Agamben,
The Open.

20
. Candace B. Pert,
Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind–Body Medicine
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999).

21
. Josh Mitteldorf and John Pepper, “How Can Evolutionary Theory Accommodate Recent Empirical Results on Organismal Senescence?”
Theory in Biosciences
126, no. 1 (2007): 3–8.

22
. Jesper Hoffmeyer, “Semiotic Freedom,” in
Information and the Nature of Reality: from Physics to Metaphysics,
edited by Paul Davis and Niels Henrik Gregersen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 185–204.

23
. Dorion Sagan, “Thermodynamics and Thought,” in Margulis, Asikainen, and Krumbein,
Chimeras and Consciousness,
241–50.

24
. Dorion Sagan and Jessica Whiteside, “Thermodynamics and the Purpose of Life,” in
Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century,
edited by Stephen H. Schneider, James R. Miller, Eileen Crist, and Penelope J. Boston (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 173–86.

25
. Eliseo Fernández, “Energy, Semiosis, and Emergence—the Place of Biosemiotics in an Evolutionary Conception of Nature,” Eleventh Annual International Gathering in Biosemiotics, Dactyl Foundation, New York City, June 21–26, 2011.

26
. Peter Brooks,
Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).