English 5950 Network

Here is our final project on the hybrid in/dividual.  Enjoy!!

These characters are from The Brak Show which used to run on adult swim on cartoon network.  What could they possibly have to do with our class?  Why a connection to Cyclonopedia of course!  Its the answer to all of life's mysteries!  ;)

The description of Angra-Maynu on page 189 of Cyclonopedia reminded me of this character from the first Hellboy movie.  His name is Karl Ruprecht Kroenen.  For those who haven't seen the movie (shame on you) he was a Nazi assassin for Hitler and kept alive through the magic of Rasputin, a famed Russian sorcerer.  He had an addiction to surgery, having his eyelids, and lips removed.

This is a trailer for the movie referred to in Cyconopedia. The entity is most fully described near the end of the movie, but there are a few spots in the trailer where you can see the "oil-like" monster which seems to most closely resemble what the novel talks about:  a personified, petroleum based entity, somewhat representative of The Middle East.  

I think Fiona Apple describes this part of Latour'e explanation quite well (if literally) with this song.  Sometimes we don't realize what lies between our eyes and the images we see or our minds and the perceptions of reality that we have.

Especially the bridge conveys the message to me:

"Because the fact being that

Whatever's in front of me

Is covering my view

So I can't see what I'm seeing in fact

I only see what I'm looking through

So again I done the right thing

I was never worried about that

The answer's always been in clear view

But even when the window was cleaned

I still can't see for the fact

That when it's clean it's so clear

I can't tell what I'm looking through"

There is no such thing as a strict observer with a perfectly clear, unadulterated view.

For complete lyrics go to:

(as you may have already guessed, I like cats.)

Latour challenges the definitions of "society" and "social", declaring it the effect rather than the cause:

"Once again, we don’t want to confuse the cause and the effect, the explanandum with the explanans. This is why it’s so important to maintain that power, like society, is the final result of a process and not a reservoir, a stock, or a capital that will automatically provide an explanation. Power and domination have to be produced, made up, composed."

But this is how "social" and "society" and a number of other words have been viewed and defined for a very long time, as descriptors rather than words in need of description.  Latour dislikes this idea of a definition set in stone, and "society" being just as unchangeable.

"The idea of a society has  become in the hands of later-day ‘social explainers’ like a big container ship which no inspector is permitted to board and which allows social scientists to smuggle goods across national borders without having to submit to public inspection. Is the cargo empty or full, healthy or rotten, innocuous or deadly, newly made or long disused? It has become anyone’s guess, much like the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq."

This is a well-known line generically asked by actors trying to establish why their character is doing or saying something.  This is supposed to help get them into character and make their performance more believable.  I think this has a lot to do with the latest readings.

"It’s precisely because the social is not yet made that sociologists of associations should keep as their most cherished treasure all the traces that manifest the hesitations actors themselves feel about the ‘drives’ that make them act. It is the only way to render productive again the central intuition of the social sciences—before it gets sterilized into an argument about the action of some social stuff. This is why we should paradoxically take all the uncertainties, hesitations, dislocations, and puzzlements as our foundation. Just as actors are constantly engaged by others in group formation and destruction (the first uncertainty), they engage in providing controversial accounts for their actions as well as for those of others. Here again, as soon as the decision is made to proceed in this direction, traces become innumerable and no study will ever stop for lack of information on those controversies. Every single interview, narrative, and commentary, no matter how trivial it may appear, will provide the analyst with a bewildering array of entities to account for the hows and whys of any course of action. Social scientists will fall asleep long before actors stop deluging them with data."

It is the same with us in our everyday lives.  Even if we say we follow our intuition, what gave us that sense of intuition?  The opinions we have about religion or politics or anything else - where do they come from?  Where do these ideas and inspirations originate from?

We also read that every actor is acted upon.  We are all influenced by the world and people around us.  I think the challenge now is trying to find the beginning; was it first an individual that influenced "society" or "society" that first influenced that individual to influence the "society"?  Its a vicious circle.  A circle that includes not only people but things.