Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0801250045001.23213@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: some characteristics of organic and emanent life
Date: Fri, 25 Jan 2008 00:45:20 -0500 (EST)
some characteristics of organic and emanent life homeostasis - boundary maintenance + (coherency of avatar body) elaboration: coherency references a body that remains topologically connected, no matter what external and internal motions occur. consideration: of course the body may be split by wounding, division, and other processes; in these cases, the body homeostatically repositions itself. external motions: the organism or emanent changing position in relation to the external world (space time coordinates); internal motion: processes, motions, within the body of the organism. immunity - identity maintenance + (database accountancy) elaboration: immunological processes based on body identification (organism) and database stability and stable addressing of whole and parts (emanent). consideration: relationship of dis/ease and disease/hacking. identity maintenance occurs within absolute fluidity; with organism, motility and bodily changes (disease/death/exhaustion/dissolution/decay/ extinction/mutation etc.), and with emanent, 'remakes' (new textures, bodies, accouterments, etc.), corporate transformations (economy, merger, dissolution, etc.), and interest/disinterest/defuge in relation to maintenance. culture - remembrance and communality + (history of interactivity) elaboration: organism - culture occurring 'all the way down,' with internal/external memories/storage/data-processing/quantum and molecular, etc. memory and communality inhere. emanent - relation- ship of external (organic) or internal (digital) mind to avatar _steerage_ (which is intentional). consideration: mind inhabits organism inhabits mind; inherence is primordial, backgrounding. there is a complex relationship between this inhabitation and issues of health, disease, death, etc. - issues that simultaneously reify and parcel the body, and a turn towards moments or places/spaces of body (pain for example) that call for tending. there are qualitatively different tendings for organism and emanent; it is a matter of time before they coalesce. negation - circumscription of an other + (avatar interactions, game physics) elaboration: circumscription sends the other to the pale; structures gesture and language, transforms ikonic into indexical. consideration: semantics of avatar boundaries on a subtextual level; semantics of organic boundaries on the supra-textual. the latter is ikonic, the former, indexical. (perhaps there is no place for the symbolic in the midst of emanents and organisms.) consumption and excretion tropisms (energy flow) elaboration: evanescent organic life as abject spew, continuous breathing. a stationary emanent requires no energy; a stationary organism continues its tropic behavior. consideration: nature of the tropism, energy-seeking, pollution- fleeing. direction of emanent irrelevant; energy comes from external steerage. variegated metabolic processes (chemical, quantum, atomic) elaboration: striations and differentiations within organism. epistemologically, organism transforms internally and externally from horizon to horizon; emanent possesses epistemological equivalence (substance) and differentiation occurs in syntactics. consideration: herbert simon's nearly decomposable hierarchies; differentiation in organism occurs on the level of the phoneme. emanent and organism meet on the plane of semantics, sememe. -- absorption and excretion elaboration: or circulation, necessary for organism, and only for emanent in the sense that mind requires circulation (as do computers in terms of cycles, energy-flow, etc.). consideration: note in all of these instances we're considering life in terms of the _metabolic,_ flux-processes, remembering, identity, recognitions, tropisms, negations, perceptions. -- reproduction elaboration: organisms most often self-reproduce through one or multiple generations; emanents do not. organic emanent minds do but not electronic emanent minds, do not. consideration: reproduction is not necessarily a constituent of life - dreams of the loch ness monster point in another direction. and there is always the exhaustion, punctum, of the 'last of a species' or reproductive pool, which is becoming more and more common. say that reproduction temporally smears the organic while identity spatially restricts the organic. ----- carrier image (reproductive plan, layout) + (template) elaboration: reproduction is haunted by the organism to be, whether template or internal processes. consideration: with organism, reproduction is always already uncanny; with emanent, reproduction is canny. with organism, internal and with emanent external, steered. the emanent is always already hallucinatory, which is not to say inexact or 'unreal'; its model and modeling are elsewhere. let us say that the emanent is freed from reproduction but an emanent class is bound to steering mind for continued existence. maintenance of interiority elaboration: what goes on inside, stays inside, is maintained inside. for organism this includes temperature control (or adjustments to non-control); for emanents, this again is a matter of contiguity at best. consideration: wounds close, bruises heal, diseases disperse; there is an ideal at the back of organism, backgrounding organism, as if primordial (and when i use 'primordial' here, i mean nothing meta- physical, only primitives, backgroundings, against or within which everything else occurs). nothing immediately with emanents, but a long time ago, in irc (internet relay chat), netsplit would occur, and members of coherent communities would be cut off from each other - there would for example be two, not one *love channels. it would be of interest to think through the metabolism and political economy of irc channels and channel communities as organisms. biome and niche maintenance (immediate vicinity cleanup) elaboration: what happens outside the body of the organism, more or less in the immediate vicinity (think of potential exceptions such as albatross or plankton, bring them into the model by including mobile niches, evanescent biomes). emanents also tend to control their immediate vicinity; sl avatars will have a 'home' teleport site, will fly to a certain height, will be admitted or not to restricted territories (and may create restricted territories of their own). consideration: mobile niches within evanescent biomes are of great interest; they reflect the potential of taz (temporary autonomous zones) and extend the concepts of home and territory - the latter might be considered a personal niche, and the former, that biome which provides a necessary degree of comfort for its species and occupants. different species may connote different biome definitions which overlap and are displaced from 'human geography' and its defining characteristics. contiguity of body or bodies + (substructure of sheave-skin) elaboration: organic body held together by skeletal (internal and external) structures, skin and muscle, etc.; the sheave-skin held together by parent-child relationships and restrictions on size and angle. contiguity is complex with sheave-skins; importing a bvh file into blender requires hand-setting the parent-child relationships, and motion capture models permit extensions and topological remodelings of these. generally organic bodies are topographically defined; there are physical restraints to size, etc. while emanent bodies are topological, once 'set' into structure by node assignments. again, the latter reference external steerage. consideration: this external steerage of emanents is mapped in various ways - through mind and gui or other interfaces, through virtual reality interaction software, through software itself which may operate emanents autonomously, so that the emanent becomes nothing more than an output display of a program epistemologically other. of course this may change in the future; there is no reason why emanents should not be autonomous and locally-so, so that steerage, communication, etc., is part and parcel of the emanent software, integral to it, inhering. regulated, homeostatic communication elaboration: organisms and emanents are nodes, channels, transmitters, receptors, codes, encodings, decodings, part-objects and their per- ception, skins and sheave-skins and their perception. to the extent that regulation occurs, cohering semantics emerges; to the extent that noise or parasitism enters the systems, transformations and possible mutations occur, beneficial or destructive, possibly inher- ited or not (and the latter, with emanent mind-steering, becomes to some extent an issue of conscious choice). consideration: one begins to approach a _plasma model_ within which forms flux, and flux forms, stases are imminent and always in the process of forming and dissolving; memory is primordial (in the above sense). -- internal and external + (between mind and emanent) elaboration: internal processes are homeostatically regulated in organism; it is moot whether such occur in emanents except to the extent that _emanents are inherently part of the gamespace, do not ontologically exist other than as gamespace._ consideration: external communication - one might bring issues of data-bases with both organism and emanent, steerage, community and individual memory, community and individual hallucination, etc. it's here that language comes forth as the mutual orienting of cognitive domains (maturana); while one might speak of the cosmos as languaging and only languaging (epistemologically and ontologically), one might also conceive of languaging as ikonic in terms of the primordial, the thinging of language, or language grounded (as in electronic grounding) in things. in this sense, language is literally an after- thought, shape-riding. -- emitters and receptors (within and without organisms) elaboration: sm (sado-masochist/abject) maws/fits/misfits, the contradictory transformed into the contrary or wayward. consideration: emitters and receptors are in-line, online, bought into line vis-a-vis codings. without emitter and receptor interfaces, languaging doesn't happen; one might think then of emitters and receptors _themselves_ as ikonic languages, so that sign-flows are fundamental (but not symbols or indices). ---- emitter and receptor codings (entranceways and exits) elaboration: entrances and exits but also molecular or protocol structures, sm touch/scent/contact. information must obey etiquette, otherwise it's noise. etiquette touches on the aesthetics and efficiency of coding. _coded emanents have no code_; their code is external steerage, subtextual beneath the surface, in the dis/splay of sheave-skin. consideration: it's important to think through analog/ikonic and digital/indexical here. organism code is ikonic to the extent that, for example, dna coding _is_ molecular, while emanent code is indexical since to some extent programming languages are interchange- able, they're teleologically drawn-out to steerage goals, and they form/construct a performative layer which runs the emanent directly. ---- domain orientations (tropic turns towards energy, communication potentials) elaboration: organisms are tropic, turning towards, away, or skew- orthogonally; emanents are tropic through camera positioning (without the camera, emanents are invisible, non-existent, which are not equiv- alent) within the aegis of mind. consideration: cameras move emanents as residue, dejecta, abject stain on occasion blocking the field of view. pollutions and abjections (body disposal, chemical slough) -- purifications and expulsions elaboration: this operates on the epistemological if not ontological dichotomy described re: kristeva, douglas, etc. organisms are channels and flows; the flows channel, and the channels flow. the abject is integral to organism, just as purification and expulsion may be integral to emanent. consideration: this may be far too simplistic, but it's a step at least. when the true world is considered, emanent and organism are interpenetrated, intermingled, formed and in/formed together at the limit. emanents and avatars inhere, cohere, mishmash, spew, emit, slur, slough, intermingle, interpenetrate, within the true world, they are true-world- ing, in a sense mind-only, but only in the sense that steerage is always present, from language through metabolic process through retinal process- ing, immunological defense systems, heartbeat, hormonal maintenance, soft- ware updating and replacement, membrane filtering, and so forth. this is _not_ life force, but inherited and inhering organization in relation to reproduction, within which the carrier image is but a dream, our dream, our presentification of the future anterior. (elements marked + pertain in particular to emanent/avatar process. note that in the above, 'emanent' and 'avatar' are to some extent equivalent, although the latter is mostly reserved for entities within second life and other online/offline 'virtual' worlds.)