dewey's girl's Journal

4:10pm: The Secret Life of Lobsters by Trevor Corson
The oceans of the earth abound with lobsters. Lobsters with claws like hair combs sift mud in offshore trenches. Clawless lobsters with antennae like spikes migrate in clans in the Caribbean and the South Pacific. Flattened lobsters with heads like shovels scurry and burrow in the Mediterranean and the Galapagos. The eccentric diversity of the world's lobsters has earned them some of the most whimsical names in the animal kingdom. There is a hunchback locust lobster and a regal slipper lobster. There are marbled mitten lobsters, velvet fan lobsters, and even a musical furry lobster. The unicorn and buffalo blunt-horn lobsters inspire admiration; the African spear lobster, the Arabian whip lobster, and the rough Spanish lobster demand respect.

Nowhere in the world, however, is the seafloor as densely populated with lobsters as in the Gulf of Maine. Though a less sophisticated creature than some it its clawless counterparts, the American lobster, scientific name Homarus americanus, is astonishingling abundant.

[...]

10:45pm: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and ride home.

10:25pm: p. 88 "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding, (London: Penguin Modern Classics, 1964.)

...
But jack was shouting against him.

"Bollocks the rules! We're strong - we hunt! If there's a beast, we'll hunt it down! We'll close in and beat and beat and beat - !"

He gave a wild whoop and leapt down to the pale sand. At once the platform was full of noise and excitement, scramblings, screams, and laughter. The assembly shredded away and became a discursive and random scatter from the palms to the water and away along the beach, beyond the night-sight. Ralph found his cheek touching the conch and took it from Piggy.

"What's grown-ups going to say?" cried Piggy again. "Look at 'em!"

The sound of mock hunting, hystericla laughter, and real terror came from the beach.

"Blow the conch, Ralph."

Piggy was so close that Ralph could see the glint of his one glass[es lense].

"There's the fire. Can't they see?"

"You got to be tough now. Make ' em do what you want."

Ralph answered in the cautious voice of one who rehearses a theorem.

"If I blow the conch and they don't come back; then we've had it. We shan't keep the fire going. We'll be like animals. We'll never be rescued."

"If you don't blow, we'll soon be animals anyway. I can't see what they're doing but I can hear."

The dispersed figures had come together on the sand and were a dense black mass that revolved. They were chanting something and littluns that had that enough were staggering away, howling. ralph raised the conch to his lips and then lowered it.

"The trouble is: Are there ghosts, Piggy? or beasts?"

"Course there aren't."

"Why not?"

"'Cos things wouldn't make sense. Houses an' streets, an' - TV - they wouldn't work."

The dancing, chanting boys had worked themselves away till their sound was nothing but a wordless rhythm.

"But suppose they don't make sense? Not here, on this island? Supposing things are watching us and waiting?"

Ralph shuddered violently and moved closer to Piggy, so that they bumped frighteningly.

"You stop talking like that! We've got enough trouble, Ralph, an' I've had as much as I can stand. If there is ghosts - "

"I ought to give up being chief. Hear 'em"

"Oh lord! Oh no!"

"If Jack was chief he'd have all hunting and no fire. We'd be here till we died."

9:19am: "Rogue Primate" - John A. Livingston
From "Prosthetic Being"

"Extraordinary [...] is the domesticate's acceptance of a remarkable level of sameness, or homogeneity, in its living environment. There is little or no change, from hour to hour, day to day, year to year, in the domesticate's universe of sight, sound, scent, taste, or tactility. All remains exactly the same. Remember this the next time you see a deer tasting the wind, sampling the sound spectrum, checking the littlest details of its visible surround. Try to imagine the scope of its sensory environment. Luckily for the jailed victims of experiential deprivation, most domesticates have dramatically reduced sensory acuity by comparison with that of their wild relatives. Even so, they are alive, and they have sense receptors, which, blunted or not, must still yearn for something in the way of stimulation. But nothing comes in. Nothing. Still, they live, and are fruitful, and multiply.

....However and whenever conceived, however, young domesticated animals never really grow up. The period of infantility is prolonged through the duration of the individual's lifetime. This is of the greatest importance to the proprietor. The last thing we want is our domesticates reaching social maturity. because that would mean their recovery of mutuality and interdependence, and the dissolution of their bond of dependence on us. So we select for animals who never develop the mature social graces of wildness.

On the other hand, it is critically important that the animals develop as rapidly as possible physically. We can countenance no delay in the transformation of feed into meat, whether for the abattoir or the milking barns. Careful selection of breeding stock has accomplished both desirata. We now produce animals of arrested social development who grow like beanstalks, who retain the docility of immaturity while coming to physical (including sexual) maturity at a furious rate. Even adults, by comparison with their wild counterparts, have a babyish look about them. They are rounder in outline, with relatively larger head and eyes, softer facial features, and a decidedly wimpish and unathletic demeanour."

10:30pm: From http://www.soapboxgirls.com/index.html
The Construction of Cyborg Bodies:
fact, fantasy and the cyborg continuum
by Jenny Fry

“Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments...first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics,...and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts.”

When I met Donna Haraway at a conference in Calgary, Alberta in September 1996, I told her that her work had inspired me to write my Gender Studies MA thesis in the field of feminist cyborg theory. She responded with great surprise and said “Oh, is there such a theory?” Yet her 1985 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” prompted my initial theoretical work in this area, together with my enduring love of science fiction, and the resulting realization that feminist political theory and science fiction could be integrated into academic work. I decided to focus on the physical bodies that integrate artificial and organic parts and began to explore aspects of the construction of cyborg bodies in both fact and fiction.

There is no single definition of a cyborg. In 1960, in the context of the NASA space program, Manfred Clynes coined the term ’cyborg’ from ’cybernetic organism’ to refer to “an artificially extended homeostatic control system functioning unconsciously,” or more simply, a self-regulating human-machine system. The primary definition of a cyborg used in my research is “a person whose physiological functioning is aided by, or dependent on, a mechanical or elctronic device.”

I use the concept of the cyborg continuum, which consists of all the possible cyborg combinations that replace, assist, enhance, augment, and improve organic bodies through mechanical and artificial interventions and implantations. At one end of this continuum would be cyborgs with generally visible and removable parts, such as hearing aids, eyeglasses, mobility aids, and artificial limbs. Further along the continuum would be less visible cyborgs with less removable devices such as implants and replacements, examples include breast implants, joint replacements, and pacemakers.

Assisted reproductive technologies, such as in-vitro fertilization and artificial insemination, and genetic engineering occupy other points along the cyborg continuum. Other cyborgs are as yet imaginary and fall within the domain of science fiction, such as those with artificial intelligence and cyborgs who are most familiar to us through television, films and novels. The most recognizable cyborg bodies are the Terminator (living tissue over a metal skeleton), the Borg (mechanical enhancements integrated with an organic host for the purpose of assimilation into the Borg collective), and the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman (replacing injured organic parts with super-strong bionic parts).

How close are we to those imagined cyborg bodies? Some experts predict artificial vision by the year 2040, bionic limbs in 2013, and hi-fi cochlear implants in 2005. The development of bionic persons was deemed unlikely.

Since defining cyborg bodies as hybrids of organic and artificial components, I chose to look at a particular group of people who have undergone surgery for total hip or knee replacements. I conducted fifteen interviews in order to understand the impact of integrating artificial body parts on the quality of people’s lives. I interviewed seven people who had undergone total hip or knee replacement surgery (ranging from 41-78 years of age), four orthopedic surgeons, one orthopedic nurse, one x-ray technologist, and two physiotherapists. Four of the seven who had the surgery were women, three were men; four of the seven had total hip replacement surgery (three women, one man) and three of the seven had total knee replacement surgery (one woman, two men).

The surgeries took place at Vancouver General Hospital, St. Paul’s Hospital (Vancouver), Jubilee Hospital (Victoria) and Prince George Regional Hospital, and the surgeries were performed between 1989 and 1997. All of the orthopedic surgeons that I interviewed were men, while all of the other health professionals interviewed were women. All but one of the fifteen participants were white and all were residents of Prince George, BC

The discourse of hip and knee replacements is full of medical terminology and medical models of ethics, appropriate care and therapy. Medical language is not easily accessible and lack of understanding obscures and mystifies body functions and processes. It reinforced and perpetuated the idea that we are not experts of our own bodies. The medical discourse of inorganiz parts is one part of cyborg discourse, one connection among many that make up our bodies. Cyborg bodies, therefore, are made up of partial connections to everything else such as other bodies, the environment, technology, power relations, and control mechanisms. Nothing is separate and complete. One can keep adding on in any direction, limited only by one’s imagination, creativity and resources. Practical considerations or constraints in the real world do include time, space, the availability and cost of resources, opportunity and the ability to function in the real world.

One of my main goals was to discover how my research participants felt about having artifical body parts. I found that they did not have mixed feelings about having them, because the artificial parts were a vast improvement over their faulty organic parts. They shared their experiences of having artificial parts inserted into their bodies for the specific and usually urgent purpose of alleviating pain and enabling mobility, which had been extremely difficult due to arthritis. Any complications resulting from the integration of artificial parts into their bodies were less significant than the benefits they experienced from the joint replacement surgery.

Some of them expressed humour at the thought that they were “bionic”, and overall, their attitude was positive. Joint replacement surgery, while still experimental and constantly improving, made a tremendous difference to the participant’s quality of life, and it was unanimously hailed as worthwhile and necessary. Their perspectives were based on their own experiences and sometimes on the experiences of other people, communicated through hospital, family and friens’s stories. The health professionals and the orthopedic surgeons had a broader perspactive that comes with numerous interactions with people who require joint replacement surgery. The perspectives were specific to their particular discipline and role in terms of prevention, treatment, maintenance, and care of total hip and knee replacement patients.

Feminist cyborg discourse can benefit people with total hip and knee replacements because it encourages people to know as much as possible, and it promotes the belief that people can know and contribute to what is happening to and inside their bodies. As patients become agents and actors who collaborate with health professionals, feminist cyborg discourse encourages a broader perspactive that encapsulates the politics, power relations, and risk involved in total joint replacement surgery. Familiarity with the integration of artificial and organic body parts in fiction is empowering to these same people because it provides a sense of where this technology could go, setting up different scenarios, decisions, and consequences for constructing cyborg bodies. In turn, it leads to a future where human identity becomes an issue.

While there are differences between fact and fiction, the cyborg continuum can represent a wide variety of projects that integrate the artificial with the organic. The desire to improve quality of life, through the addition of particular parts or the total emulation of human bodies by artificial means, is an expression of the diversity makde possible by the continuum. Whether writing a novel or building a hip or knee, both activities seek redress for perceived inadequacies, unfulfilled potential, and physical and/or biological limitations. The cyborgs in science fiction seem to bear little resemblance to people who have artificial hips and knees. After all, the imagination of science fiction writers is not necessarily fettered by actual physical and technological limitations.

In the science fiction novels that I explored for this research, the reasons and reactions to the integration of artificial and organic body parts are different and yet related to the discourse of joint replacements. People build cyborgs in “He, She and It” by Marge Piercy and “Virtual Girl” by Amy Thomson for specific purposes, to meet particular needs, such as protection and companionship. In these novels, people are still augmented and repaired to function in the world, whether socially, culturally or physically. The reactions to the artifically intelligent cyborgs, however, are based on fear of difference, the unknown, and prejudice, thus leading to overt struggles for identity, power and control. The difference is by degree and to what extent people’s attitudes and reactions change depending on the level of integration of artificial and organic parts.

Both of these novels explore the concept of the cyborg as essentially human, where the origin of the components is not what makes us human but it is the life experience and the ability and freedom to make decisions that define us as human beings. The people who participated in my research do not feel that having artificial parts makes them any less human, just as the cyborgs in the novels argue that they do not feel any differently then biologically-produced people. The difference lies in the laws that can be made to affect the lives of people based on their derivation or origin. The qulity of life experienced by cyborgs in science fiction is different from the experiences of the people with artificial joints largely because of the power and identity issues that both separate and connect them together on the cyborg continuum. For my research participants, the difference between an artificial or an organic hip failing was not distinguished, both components were “human” and they were no less human due to the replacement of various parts because it is the accumulation of experience that counts.

The cyborg can be seen as a libreratory figure, whose political discourse can be empowering for us because it encourages strategic and political awareness of the limited utility of binary oppositions, showing us that the social construction of “us” cannot operate without “them” for the future of humanity. A multi-methods research approach leads to a new grounded cyborg discourse by blending actual and daily experiences of those who live as cyborgs with the imagination of those who engage in cyborg discourse. The affirmative power of science fiction is an important factor in the development of cyborg discourse for a variety of reasons. Cyborg discourse means partial power and control for people who have gained a degree of expertise from their knowledge and experience of their own bodies. The freedom to control what happens to our bodies may be restricted by society’s reaction to the integration of artificial and organic parts, and only the recognition and respect for the lived experience of others will promote social change. To demystify the “other” also applies to the fight against racism, homophobia and all other struggles against fear, ignorance, violence, hatred and privilege.

Rather than relying on ’experts,’ we can get information directly from the source (our bodies), and if we begin with what we know, we gain partial power and control. While still remembering that bodies are inscribed biologically, socially and politically, cyborg discourse demystifies and deconstructs how influence and social ideologies affect everything, including power relations, the illusion of control and the abuse of trust by those in authority. Instead of centralized hierarchical authority, cyborg discourse transforms authority into something diffused and wide-spread. Hybridity and partial connections lead to adaptability, flexibility, community, survival, and freedom.

The answer to Donna Haraway’s question is that there is indeed a field of feminist cyborg theory. In my research, feminist cyborg theory interconnects medical discourse, feminist theory, feminist social science methodology and science fiction. The cyborg continuum connect people who are integrating increasingly more artificial parts into their bodies and the construction of cyborgs in science fiction. Those connections are made through many different pathways in the context of feminist cyborg discourse, which is focused on social change. When connections are grounded in the experience of people whose bodies integrate organic and artificial parts, then the implications and insights available from more abstract and fictitious sources become relevant in terms of the future directions of building cyborg bodies.

From my research, it is evident that feminist cyborg discourse can be a valuable tool towards integrating replacement discourse, political awareness and imaginative creativity, contributing to a concept of social change which re-distributes power and control, and promotes awareness, understanding and knowledge. A cyborg discourse opens up the possibilities for adaptation and co-optation of technology and technological applications for feminist purposes and causes. It may also produce a powerful tool for us to name, describe and perhaps control what happens to our bodies now and in the future. Cyborg discourse is both a personal and collective shift in paradigms to balance power and control. It relies on shifting attitudes and perceptions in our relationships with our bodies and the interventions we choose to make in terms of integrating artificial parts into our bodies safely and knowingly. I argue that feminist cyborg discourse sheds light on an avenue for social change, both theoretically and in a way that can affect our daily lives. It affects our relationship with the medical establishment and the increasing intervention and implantation of artifical parts into our bodies, our experiences and our lives.

10:44am: "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" - Julian Barnes
From "Parenthesis"

"Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible 'I' (when I say 'I' you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love - selfish, shitty love - into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.

And they write this stuff called love poetry. It's collected into books called The Great Lovers' Valentine World Anthology of Love Poetry or whatever. Then there are love letters; these are collected into The Golden Quill Treasury of Love Letters (available by mail order). But there is no genre that answers to the name of love prose. It sounds awkward, almost self-contradictory. Love Prose: A Plodder's Handbook. Look for it in the carpentry section."

*********************

I remember on our first date
he kissed me and he walked away.
I was only seventeen
I never dreamed he'd be so mean.
He told me "darlin', I love you"
Baby, baby you lie
You lie
You know that you lie
Lie
Lie...

1:04pm: More "Rogue Primate" - John A. Livingston (gee, I like this book)
From "Zero-Order Humanism"

"Pre-eminent in the necessary prosecution of the humanization (domestication) of Nature is the role of science and technology. The chauvanism (indeed, the cultural despotism) of science and technology in our time receives its legitimation from two sources. First, there is the basic human dependence on an external agent of control (how-to-do-it). Second, there is the sanctity of reason, especially as it is exemplified in reduction and quantification. Science and technology are the heirs apparent and ranking princes of the humanistic faith. For the incumbents of positions so exalted, hubris is rarely far away.

In the 1920s John Dewey was moved to express his concern about the effect of scientism (not his word) on "the art of knowing":

The failure to recognize that knowledge is a product of art accounts for an otherwise inexplicable fact: that science lies today like an incubus upon such a wide area of beliefs and aspirations.... [T]he real source of the difficulty is that the art of knowing is limited to such a narrow area. Like everything precious and scarce, it has been artificially protected; and through this very protection it has been dehumanized and appropriately by a class. As costly jewels of jade and pearl belong only to a few, so with the jewels of science. The philosophic theories which have set science on an altar in a temple remote from the arts of life, to be approached only with peculiar rites, are a part of the technique of retaining a secluded monopoly of belief and intellectual authority.¹²

That science and technology occupy the dominant place in our cultural hierarchy is exemplified in the imperial position of modern medicine. Medicine is mystical, mythical, magical, magisterial. It is beyond all criticism. It is not infallible, but its agenda - its program of action - is consecrated by the ideology of the necessary primacy of the human enterprise. As the very personification and embodiment of zero-order humanism, medicine towers above all other realms of science and technology in our society.

This is because medicine stands for one thing. It is against death - against human death, that is. Medicine is engaged in the subjugation of human death, which is another way of saying the mastery of Nature. Now, most physicians of my acquaintance are against human pain and suffering as well as human death. But the medical establishment - or, if you like, the industry - in which they participate presents itself as I have indicated without the slightest equivocation. On any given day in a Toronto subway car I can read advertisements placed by foundations dedicated to the vanquishing of particular diseases. Such advertisements tell me how many people will die of that diease this year, and where to send money.¹³

I already know that a great many people will die this year, but I have never been able to bridge the synapse between that simple fact and the need to send money. If I send money, will these thousands upon thousands of people not die, or will they die of something other than the ailments advertised? If I do not send money, will more people die of these causes and fewer of other causes? The logic has always escaped me. Life, afer all, is fatal. I have often wondered what the medical industry would prefer I die of. It is abundantly clear, however, that no foundation wants me to die of its disease. Certainly I do not want any of my loved ones, or myself, to die in protracted agony. If the subway advertisements were to say to send money for palliative care in terminal cases, or to finance legislative lobbying for legal euthanasia or human population abatement, I would send money. But I have no money for the humanists' undifferentiated, total war on Nature.

Pleas for the advancement of the medical conquest of Nature are most often cast in the context of research. "Research" is another of the self-justifying shibboleths in our society. The rhetoric surrounding research funding, especially in biomedicine, is mysteriously vague on some points. Surprisingly often, we are not told what the research is for, except that it is "for" a specific disease. What is meant is that it is for research into the amelioration, control, or eradication of the effects of some malady. Rarely are we told what the researchers want to do, and, almost never, how they intend to do it.

In addition to this "goal-directed" research, insofar as its goals are actually articulated, there is the matter of "pure" or basic biomedical research, not necessarily directed at any particular problem, but rather toward the biological fundamentals, the way living beings, and their chemistries, physiologies, and psychologies function. An example would be the phenomenon of pain, in the experimental study of which the researchers appear to be endlessly engaged. A great deal of this relies on experimental studies of individual non-human beings."

¹² John Dewey, Experience and Nature, p. 382.
¹³ There was once a lottery on behalf of "mental health". I shall not pursue that here.

12:40pm: "Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication" - John A. Livingston
From "Other Selves."

"The concept of 'self' is an expression of dualism. It dichotomizes our world by requiring the additional concept of 'other'. The twin notions are mutually reinforcing. They are analogous if not identical to the conceptual human/Nature dichotomy. Both are part of the greater cultural tradition under which we labour, part of the prosthetic device which provides and sustains our ideologies.

The ideological prosthesis allows (indeed requires) us to undertake all the familiar rationalizing which goes into the poignant task of demonstrating the human transcendence of natural (animal) nastiness and brutishness. We usually transcend animal nastiness and brutishness through our moral and ethical systems. Such systems, and the smugly complacent warmth they kindle in us, not only feed our collective self-esteem but also help to maintain the cultural edifice or our emacipation from our own biological reality.

Few exercises in rationalization have invovled quite so much intellectual pretzel-bending as the task of demonstrating absolute human uniqueness. Our obsession with this is revealing. It's not enough that every individual, and every species, is a unique, one-time-only, event. Fanatical humanism demands more. All species are unique, we may acknowledge, but one species is uniquely unique. Which reveals a good deal more than bizarre English usage.

Thanks to studies in ethology and behavioural ecology, the religion of human uniqueness has sustained a series of notable set-backs in our lifetime. We have had to abandon a substantial list of "unique attributes": tool using, tool making, language, tradition and culture, abstraction, teaching and learning, cooperating and strategizing, and others, less inflamatory, such as caring and compassion. There's not a lot left. But the ultimate fall-back position, the central jewel in the human imperial crown, had always been self-awareness. Then along came little Washoe."

8:33pm:
( more advertising )

6:10pm: "The Divine Comedy" - Inferno - Dante
(lines 1-21)

Midway this way of life we're bound upon,
I woke to find myself in a dark wood,
Where the right road as wholly lost and gone.

Ay me! how hard to speak of it - that rude
And rough and stubborn forest! the mere breath
Of memory stirs the old fear in the blood;

It is so bitter, it goes nigh to death;
Yet there I gained such good, that, to convey
The tale, I'll write what else I found therewith.

How I got into it I cannot say,
Because I was so heavy and full of sleep
When I first stumbled from the narrow way;

But when at last I stood beneath a steep
Hill's side, which closed that valley's wandering maze
Whose dread had pierced me to the heart-root deep,

Then I looked up, and saw the morning rays
Mantle its shoulder from the that planet bright
Which guides men's feet aright on all their ways;

And this a little quieted the affright
That lurking in my bosom's lake had lain
Through the long horror of that piteous night.

6:09pm: Psst.. You!
I have a big backlog to get through. It might be two entries a day until the carpal tunnel takes over.

You've been warned!

8:28pm: "Rogue Primate" - John A. Livingston
From "The Exotic Ideology"

"I have described an ideology as a structure of interacting component beliefs. All ideologies develop though a process of multidimensional mutualistic interaction and relationships. Just as lion and zebra and giraffe and hyena evolved together as an interdependent group, so to our European science, philosophy, technology, and assorted belief systems evolved over time. Our ideology evolved as a unit. It is no accident that our science fits our philosophy fits our technology fits the convoluted belief system that sustains them. Like the African savannah wildlife community, they go together, and they are appropriate, each to all the others, in a mutually supporting community of common interest.

The total interwoven package we no longer call European. Until very recently we called it Western, or Euro-American, but now we call it northern. Except for its selectively changing usage in geopolitical rhetoric, the modifier has little importance. What does matter is the self-righteous zeal with which the package is advanced. Within it are varying measures of the several mutually sustaining ideologies of scientism, determinism, historicism, fundamentalist evangelism, and the free-whelling technological chauvinism of the industrial growth imperative. It is important to note here that the exotic ideology transcends political persuasion. Both "right" and "left" subscribe to and are subsumed by the greater ideology of the industrial-growth ethos.

The product and its promotion are administered by the multinational technocratic elite. No rationalization or justification of the product is required; the virtues of the ideology, like those of other manifest truths, are self-evident. The contemporary code-word for the advancement of the industrial enterprise through the consumption of Nature is "development."⁹

This process is often viewed in retrospect as an exercise in the domination of (a) human societies, or (b) Nature, or both. I doubt that there was at any time a conscious articulated intent to dominate anyone or anything. If we must see "domination", then we should see it as a means, not an end. Indigenous peoples provided handy slave labour, and that was convenient, but the goal was wealth, not human subjugation¹⁰ If Native peoples had to be destroyed toward the advancement of the greater purpose, that would be seen as regrettable, but also as necessary - an unavoidable peripheral "incalculable" or "externality". If they were not utilizable, Native peoples were simply in the way. The humanization of the planet means the face-lifting of the planet in our image, not some other image. Pseudospeciation helps here. The conquest is not of people. The conquest is of animate and inanimate "resources."¹¹

The exotic ideology has been advanced in the last few decades under a variety of banners. The words may change, but the message is constant. "Resource management," of course, is now a centenarian; of more recent arrival was "resource development." This soon mutated into the lunatic term "ecodevelopment," one which, despite some very considerable expenditure of effort, I was never able to penetrate. At roughly the same time we had "appropriate technology," which was perilously close to being internally contradictory. At the present moment we have "sustainable development," a full-blown oxymoron. What these slogans seem to say is "How to plunder Nature and get away with it." A cultural and ideological imperative, which only a domesticate deprived of ecologic sensibility could have conceived in the first place."

⁹ In the early 1990s the international mercantile buzzword had become "globalization."

¹⁰ Certainly, the Christian missionaries were casting their nets to capture souls for salvation, but in doing so they were admirably serving the expansionist interests of their imperial sponsors.

¹¹ Some insight into the technoculture's commodification of all living things is conveyed in the term "human resources".

8:32pm: Of a Woman, Dead Young - Dorothy Parker
(J.H., 1905-1930)

If she had been beautiful, even,
Or wiser than women about her,
Or had moved with a certain defiance;
If she had had sons at her sides,
And she with her hands on their shoulders,
Sons, to make troubled the Gods -
But where was there wonder in her?
What had she, better or eviler,
Whose days are a pattering of peas
From the pod to the bowl in her lap?

That the pine tree is blasted by lightening,
And the bowlder split raw from the mountain,
And the river dried short in its rushing -
That I can know, and be humble.
But that They who have trodden the stars
Should turn from Their echoing highway
To trample a daisy, unnoticed
In a meadow of small, open flowers -
Where is Their triumph in that?
Where is Their pride, and Their vengeance?

8:28pm: Inscription for the Ceiling of a Bedroom - Dorothy Parker
Daily dawns another day;
I must up, to make my way.
Though I dress and drink and eat,
Move my fingers and my feet,
Learn a little, here and there,
Weep and laugh and sweat and swear,
Hear a song, or watch a stage,
Leave some words upon a page,
Claim a foe, or hail a friend -
Bed awaits me at the end.

3:04pm: "Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication" - John A. Livingston
From "The Exotic Ideology."

"Human attacks on other humans frequently (perhaps invariably) involve the phenomenon which has been termed "pseudospeciation,"⁵ the use of violence toward one's own species of a sort which would normally be reserved for use against against other species, such as prey animals. (This very occasionally happens among wild predatory animals, in which case it is seen as pathological.) Like the wild predator, we take the lives of other species as a matter of course. We are used to knocking meat animals over the head, and we do it with aplomb, because the two of us are of different species; when we decide to knock another human over the head, that human is no longer a person. As Joseph Meeker, author of The Comedy of Survival, has pointed out, "in the history of human culture... this remarkable behavior has become institutionalized."⁶ When we can see another human as not being of our species, then it is a very short step to perceiving another social class, or another culture, or another human race, as another species, in which case the usual intraspecific modes of behaviour are suspended, and the interspecific modes may kick in. The divide is most often used on a grand scale in time of war, when the enemy is portrayed as non- or subhuman so that the necessary atrocities may be committed without inhibition. It is also useful within totalitarian societies or any others in the catagorization of groups toward whom aggression may be contemplated."

⁵ - Joseph Meeker, The Comedy of Survival, pp. 70-72. The term was coined by Erik H. Erikson.
⁶ - Ibid., p. 71

11:40am: "Primate Visions" - Donna Haraway (1989)
From the Introduction: The Persistence of Vision.

"I have tried to fill Primate Visions with potent verbal and visual images - the corpse of a gorilla shot in 1921 in the "heart of Africa" and transfixed into a lesson in civic virtue in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City; a little white girl brought into the Belgian Congo in the 1920s to hunt gorilla with a camera, who metamorphized in the 1970s into a writer of science fiction considered for years as a model of masculine prose; the chimpanzee HAM in his space capsule in the Mercury Project in 1961; HAM's chimp contemporary, David Greybeard, reaching out to Jane Goodall, "alone" in the "wilds of Tanzania" in the year in which 15 African primate-habitat nations achieved national independence; a Vanity Fair special on the murdered Dian Fossey in a gorilla graveyard in Rwanda in 1986; the bones of an ancient fossil, reconstructed as the grandmother of humanity, laid out like jewels on red velvet in a paleontologist's laboratory in a pattern to ground, once again, a theory of the origin of "monogamy"; infant monkeys in Harry Harlow's laboratory in the 1960s clinging to cloth and wire "surrogate mothers" at an historical moment when the images of surrogacy began to surface in American reproductive politics; the emotionally wrenching embrace between a young, middle class, white woman scientist and an adult American Sign Language-speaking chimpanzee on an island in the River Gambia, where white women teach captive apes to "return" to the "wild"; a Hallmark greeting card reversing the images of King Kong with a monstrous blonde woman and a cringing silverback gorilla in bed in a drama called "Getting Even"; the anatomical drawings of living and fossil female apes sharing the basic lines of their bodies with a modern human female, in order to teach medical students the functional meaning of human adaptations; ordinary women and men from Africa, the United States, Japan, Europe, India, and elsewhere, with tape recorders and data clipboards transcribing the lives of monkeys and apes into specialized texts that become contested items in political controversies in many cultures.

I am writing about primates because they are popular, important, marvelously varied, and controversial. And all members of the Primate Order - monkeys, apes, and people - are threatened. Late twentieth-century primatology may be seen as part of a complex survival literature in global, nuclear culture. Many people, including myself, have emotional, political, and professional stakes in the production and stabilization of knowledge about the order of primates. This will not be a disinterested, objective study, nor a comprehensive one - partly because such studies are impossible for anyone, partly because I have stakes I want to make visible (and probably others as well). I want this book to be interesting for many audiences, and pleasurable and disturbing for all of us. In particular, I want this book to be responsible to primatologists, to historians of science, to cultural theorists, to the broad left, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and women's movement, to animals, and to lovers of serious stories. It is perhaps not always possible to be accountable to those contending audiences, but they have all made this book possible. They are all inside this text. Primates existing at the boundaries of so many hopes and interests are wonderful subjects with whom to explore the permeability of walls, the reconstitution of boundaries, the distaste for endless socially enforced dualisms."