The Banana Peel Project

In the temporary absence of original thought (if, indeed, there is such a thing), a couple of tidbits from my own intellectual family tree:

[C]ertain organisms, such as man, tend for a time to maintain and often even to increase the level of their organization, as a local enclave in the general stream of increasing entropy, of increasing chaos and de-differentiation.  Life is an island here and now in a dying world.

Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (1954), p. 95

Language continually asserts by the syntax of subject and predicate that “things” somehow “have” qualities and attributes.  A more precise way of talking would insist that the “things” are produced, are seen as separate from other “things,” and are made “real” by their internal relations and by their behavior in relationship with other things and with the speaker. […] It is necessary to be quite clear about the universal truth that whatever “things” may be in their pleromatic and thingish world, they can only enter the world of communication and meaning by their names, their qualities and their attributes (i.e., by reports of their internal and external relations and interactions).

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature (1979), p. 67-68

We don’t want a theory of innocent powers to represent the world, where language and bodies both fall into the bliss of organic symbiosis.  We also don’t want to theorize the world, much less act within it, in terms of Global Systems, but we do need an earth-wide network of connections, including the ability partially to translate knowledges among very different–and power-differentiated–communities.  We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for a future.

Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” (1987), p. 187