on the rationalities of individuals & populations

We are animals. All the signs are there, we are warm blooded mammals, everyone knows this. To think otherwise in the West is to be religious or insane. Humans have suppressed and sublimated their animal instincts and have distanced themselves from their creative & destructive tendencies. To deny instinctual thinking and behavior is to rebel against animal nature. Just what is and isn't 'instinctual' is impossible for me to know, but I do believe that in many situations it is possible to act 'otherwise.' And if this were not the case, or believed to not be the case, law would lose nearly all meaning. Also, guilt.

Human society as biopolitic can be understood as a tangled, rhizomatic web of law and biology. Multiple species can be studied as subject to the laws of human society. Postmodernists like Foucault understand societal behavior through a biopolitical framework. Our status as animals and as species changed the way institutions treat human subjects and subsequently how researchers and philosophers conceive of history and freedom.

In a way, evolution can explain every event and no event. Evolution as a mechanism of life exists in cells, organisms, species, up to life itself. Freud theorized we instinctually crave our mother's libidinal energy: her attention. For those conscious of such possible instinctual motives, the past has a definite influence on our behavior. Consciousness is in many ways based on the past.

Human societies develop rhizomatically and so evolutionary thinking is limited in this regard. Whereas we can draw linear geneologies for individuals and species, cultural events have multiple meanings. We can trace the development of species based on fossil records and observed behavior, but we cannot with any certainty completely understand a rhizomatic event. We could go along with E.O. Wilson and say that everything can be explained evolutionarily, but wouldn't we then just be repeating Hegel's mistake by subsuming everything into a single system? In this case it may be Godel's incompleteness theorem that offers us a way out.

Bioart is the genetic & aesthetic creation & integration of biology into artwork. One of bioart's aims is to offer a different perspective and set of values to the advancements of science. We read into Kac's luminescent bunny & DNA-synthesizing Genesis project. We can also ask: is a necessity such as food a cultural force and creative impetus? If so, we can understand agriculture & selective breeding as cultural forces that altered our lives before history in our uncharted genetic pre-Mendelian past. Any attempt at an evolutionary theory of, say, ancient Egypt would be nearly impossible to verify. Evolutionary theory does not bring us close to an understanding of historical forces. Evotheory does give us a better understanding of our place on the planet by providing the tool of species-thinking. We can consider thoughts & modes of behavior as representative of a species, but understanding which ones is very difficult. This is because many meanings are attached to an action, and all understanding of meaning is relative. I can only speak for myself.

molloy:basara

There is a familial relationship between Beckett’s Malone and Basara’s Fritz in Chinese Letter: the father and the son. I feel a familiarity with Basara through youth – Fritz's struggle with the imperative to write reminds me of my own. His is a clever Oulipian exercise of two intimidating + possibly-imagined men demanding a hundred pages of writing, any writing at all.

It is a paean to schizophrenic thought, often comic. Basara presents an image of thought that is cast out, clinicized, operated on. In the same way literature itself has its scalpel to writers, there is an imperative to entertain, to have purpose, to present a story. Fritz as writer and human is presented as an affliction, something to be treated, a malignant growth, a tumor. His risk is that his worthless hundred pages will be unreadable, and his effort will be completely futile. How many Fritzs are out there?

Yet Beckett the father remains in a certain sense unapproachable to me.

Plot, character, setting – these anachronisms bore us. We can no longer honestly depict the psychologically-driven bourgeoisie subject that emerged with the rise of the novel in the 19^th century. Benjamin writes that bourgeois institutions "make it possible for people to avoid the sight of the dying." This applies to institutions of health and of art. These same clinical and literary institutions play key roles in both texts: both Molloy & Fritz write in part to resist the clinical, psychological, and ideological influences that alter and destroy what makes them unique, what makes them subject. They also struggle against the novel itself.

Eternity + death are very big subjects. Beckett, by focusing on the small death of Molloy in dismal+scrutinizing detail, gives us a perspective on death-itself without euphemizing, packaging or commodifying death. For Molloy, nothing is more real than nothing. His nihilism, groundlessness, and close proximity to death as an individual stand in stark contrast to the antiseptic & comforting Whispering Glades in Waugh's Loved One, the great satyric necropolis, a theme park for death. Commercializing death is a cannibal act.

Nothing will be bought or sold at the death of Molloy + Fritz, nothing of real value. And yet these are texts that give American students a different perspective and meaning to their own lives and death. By giving voice to an invalid and a schizophrenic, these authors show how to understand our own contingent, subjective perspective + uniqueness in the world. These are lines of resistance to the dominant mode of thought. Beckett allows us the chance to reflect, and perhaps take a course more in tune with the currents life has given us & with our own individual natures.