2411 Notes
11/06
nutritional epigenetics - a change in the way that the life sciences configure the relationship between the individual and her environment. “food transforms the organism’s being as much as the organism transforms it”
https://knit.ucsd.edu/sciencestudies/2017/02/01/american-metabolism-by-hannah-landecker/
The transformations undergone by arsenic as it is metabolized in the human body.
Landecker’s talk radically reconfigures the relationship between bodies and environments, following arsenic from its emergence as a byproduct of copper smelting, to its use as a growth promoter in chicken feed, to its biological take-up in rice plants fed on chicken shit, to its metabolized forms in the human digestive tract, to its possible epigenetic effets.
11/07
4월부터 지금까지 아시안 아메리칸 & 타이완 사이키델릭 현장을 봤고, 직전에 제출한 에세이가 땅과 몸에 관한 것이었고 microbiom & toxicity & nutritional epigenetics로 점점 기울어지는 것을 발견하고, 좀더 폭넓은 담론 이론적 지형을 봐야겠다는 생각을 했다. 들뢰지언이 되지 않기 위해 필요한 렌즈가 무엇일지 고민하는 작업, 나아가 나의 사색이 필드를 이해하는 데 도움이 되는 방향이 아니라면 자아가 비대해지지 않기 위해 경계해야 할 점이 무엇일지 고민하는 작업이 필요해보인다.
11월 말에 Tzimei가 대만에 돌아가면, 이제 대만에서 방문한 친구들 모두가 뉴욕에 남아 있지 않게 된다. 어쩌면 6월부터 11월까지 5개월 동안 필드연구를 한 셈이나 마찬가지다. 11월 30일에는 그간의 활동들을 정리하는 시간을 갖는다고 하는 츠메이, 쟈잉, 시팅. 사운드디자이너로서, 정신과 의사로서, 환경운동자로서, 인간의식과 공동체 정치의 가능성에 대해 논의하게 될 듯하다. 대만의 토착민 문화가 하와이, 인도네시아, 호주, 말레이시아 전반의 영토를 가로지르는 Urheimat였다는 사실을 배우면서, 대만 연구의 중요성을 다시금 상기시켰다. 도시 인프라 연구와 사이키델릭-식물 연구의 교차점을 찾을 수 있으면 좋겠네.
접근가능한 자료, 우선순위를 Local Gazetteer와 telegram/cyber community (시그널/웟챕/텔레그램)으로 잡고, 식물학과 무술/양생술의 지식이 어떻게 다르고 유사한지를 볼 수 있을 것이다.
11/08
MDMA - Psilocybin
active condition - full-dose MDMA + Psilocybin - common practice in the underground
Liechti - pharmacotherapy: psychedelics should be a form of psychotherapy - boundary crossings: past life, energy, etc - excessive overly enthusiastic impulses - psychological support - underground culture around it - nondirected psychotherapy - inner healer (non-directive) - training under manual - metaphor of the person’s capacity to heal - frankly mystical direction - PTSD - psilocybin -
without psychotherapy? group therapy? - insurance - in the US side - monetary interest (company) - psychotherapy is extremely opaque - not marketable - “manufacturing” - little pharmacy listed as the manufacturing - Liechti - veteran(bipartisan) - between regulators and individual clinicians - make-shift system - improvised solution that would be - efficacy question: psychotherapy works as a safer way - equally - empirical and numerical questions -
money - regulation - efficacy: individual personal level - states of consciousness - severe psychiatric illnesses - unthinkable open to luck - a lot of management - before and after to safely navigate it - tied together - model a psychedelic therapy that is not psychotherapy -
medicinal chemistry - psychoplastogens - psychlytic - SSRIs are psychoplastogens - restore capacity to learn these things and do things - but you have to do -
trusting relationships - arousing emotions - emotional skills - potent experience - therapeutic
COMPASS - adding on psychotherapy - framing it as a ‘safety measure’ polemic comment — Geneva hospital: LSD treatment of depression - no psychotherapy - in the limited medical use - delix phase 1 study -
demoralizing - relevant to your smoking or not - afterglow - no psychotherapy indigenous epistmology: negative side-effects undesirable
Common factors theory - problem is not psychologically sick -
relationship - setting - narrative - ritual
you don’t insert your own views - profound spiritual experience - nudging necessary - potent - more psychoanlytic background - redirect the attention to their psychological problems - supernatural stuff - nudging - the problem was not a problem anymore - intergenerational trauma - “cultural framework” - experience can also be sobering - temperament, interpretations - self-experimentation
JHU - questionnaire - the nature of people - pop-culture exposure - media stuff - “Pollan Effect” - expectation cut in many direction - psychiatrists are to deflate expectation - need to diversify cultural elements - relational elements with the therapists - “liberals” - buddha statue - make it as non-directive as possible (don’t do any major life changes!……)
individual person - therapists: their own experience wrapped in a particular type of culture, highlighting mystical experiences
RFK junior - heterodox types - creating an opening - not rigidly sticking to technocratic processes - on the other hand, producing a whole lot of cases - not relying to any scientific evidence - FDA wanted to approve MDMA: effective and safe - frankness conduct and fraud - none of them has been verified until now - but they rejected it - controversial treatment, allegations of misconduct - Approved - phase 3 ‘cult’ - cultural shift: Janssen corporate guy … - people in the placebo group did remarkably well -
11/10
biosemiotic influence
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT, one of the alkaloids in Ayahuasca) activates sigma 1 receptor (SIGMAR1) and others. - Enhancing synaptic plasticity - memory reconsolidation and fear extinction, the fear response triggered by the memory can be reprogrammed and/or extinguished. - If new memories replace, co-exist with or bypass old ones.
어제 저녁에는 Arid Spaces라는 전시장에 방문했는데 접근이 사랑스럽다 생각했다. 모든 요소들이 시장과 어떤 연관이 있는지, 내가 투자 받는 입장이자 투자를 하는 입장으로서 무엇을 할 수 있는지 고민하는 부분이 정직하다 생각했다. 키샨이라는 친구를 다시 보게 되는 전시였고, 그 사이에 댄, 다프네와 마주쳤다. 모두 자기 분야에서 한 가닥 하는 사람들이라는 것을 뒤늦게 새삼 깨닫고, 이 공간 안에 내가 좋아하는 사람들이 많아서 기뻤다. 박사과정생이 된다는 것은 어쩌면 후배들을 이끌어주는 역할이 되는 것과 같을까 생각했다. 나는 생각해보지 못했는데…
monoaminergic effects - GABA system - anti-amnesic effects - on the retrieval of repressed memories in PTSD - neurotransmission - in vitro and in vivo - brain-derived neurotrophic factor - mnemonic processes
‘mitochondria-associated endoplasmic reticulum’ membrane
SIGMAR1 gene - enzyme sterol isomerase found in fungi, which is involved in the biosynthesis of ergosterol
epigenetic processes modulation - mechanism -
11/11
There is a lingering anger within myself. Rotten corners do not produce crops anymore, although fungi spreads. Humans live on crops, die with fungi. My anger has been against a sense of failure about the world, about our future, and about the remnants of violence that became itself an automatic gun machine.
I sense that my anger turns into futility. But I am alive. I am still breathing, and my survival instinct constantly calls for something else. What worth is it if the land is on drought, or too much watered, although I strive and manage to produce a complete, decent dissertation thesis that serves as a ladder for the next career? My own survival is not separate from the survival of the common, and I do not know how to cope this.
People say it’s doomsday. Middle-class workers turned their back against the elite and educated. New York Times opinion says that we should carry on a sense of grief and despair, while we focus on taking care of ourselves. () even goes further by examplifying his therapeutic hobby of going back to the vineyards - growing apples and grapes for their best fermentation.
The agriculture of the Gaza strip is still under attack, children are dying, and Fanon’s fierceful voice is still echoing in the air, haunting our conscience, stripping us off for a call for action.
Call for papers - I still do believe in the act of writing, as Derrida metaphorically depicts it as pharmacon. However, this anger is hurting myself - like a boomerang that ends up chasing the back of my head.
Nikolas Rose, followed by Ulrich Beck or (), diagnosed contemporary therapeutic practices as part of the neoliberal machine. I left behind sick humans in Korea, those who were so aware of their situation that they trapped themselves in immediate comfort.
My fingers are shivering as I begin writing. I don’t know how to think, what to think, I feel I am walking on the brinks of something.
약물과 몸. 사이키델릭, 개영약. 영혼의 문을 연다는 의미에서 사이키델릭의 효능이 알려지기 시작했지만, 약물을 한 이후의 사회적 파급력이 무엇일지 알 수 없다. embodied minds라고 하는데, 기억과 의식이 체화된다는 것이 무엇인지부터 아리송하다. 삶이 좆같음. 그 좆같음으로부터 도피하려는 욕구와 얼마나 다를지도 묘연하고, 이 약물이 인간행위와 사회구조를 더 나은 방향으로 이끌어줬다면 인간이 애초에 이런 상황에 처할 이유도 안 생기지 않았겠나 하는 생각도 든다.
A text is not a text unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover, forever imperceptible. Its law and its rules are not, however, harbored in the inaccessibility of a secret; it is simply that they can never be booked, in the present, into anything that could rigorously be called a perception.
And hence, perpetually and essentially, they run the risk of being definitively lost. Who will ever know of such disappearances?
The dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web: a web that envelops a web, undoing the web for centuries; reconstituting it too as an organism, indefinitely regenerating its own tissue behind the cutting trace, the decision of each reading. There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the “object,” without risking - which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught — the addition of some new thread. Adding, here, is nothing other than giving to read. One must manage to think this out: that it is not a question of embroidering upon a text, unless one considers that to know how to embroider still means to have the ability to follow the given thread. That is, if you follow me, the hidden thread. If reading and writing are one, as is easily thought these days, if reading is writing, this oneness designates neither undifferentiated (con)fusion nor identity at perfect rest; the is that couples reading with writing must rip apart.
One must then, in a single gesture, but doubled, read and write. And that person would have understood nothing of the game who, at this, would feel himself authorized merely to add on; that is, to add any old thing. He would add nothing: the seam wouldn’t hold. Reciprocally, he who through “methodological prudence,” “norms of objectivity,” or “safeguards of knowledge” would refrain from committing anything of himself, would not read at all. The same foolishness, the same sterility, obtains in the “not serious” as in the “serious.” The reading or writing supplement must be rigorously prescribed, but by the necessities of a game, by the logic of play, signs to which the system of all textual powers must be accorded and attuned.
To a considerable degree, we have already said all we meant to say. Our lexicon at any rate is not far from being exhausted.
Therefore the dissimulation of the woven texture can in any case take centuries to undo its web. The example we shall propose of this will not, seeing that we are dealing with Plato, be the Statesman, which will have come to mind first, no doubt because of the paradigm of the weaver, and especially because of the paradigm of the paradigm, the example of the example — writing — which immediately precedes it. We will come back to that only after a long detour.
We will take off here from the Phaedrus. We are speaking of the Phaedrus that was obliged to wait almost twenty-five centuries before anyone gave up the idea that it was a badly composed dialogue. It was at first believed that Plato was too young to do the thing right, to construct a well-made object. Diogenes Laertius records this “they say” according to which the Phaedrus was Plato’s first attempt and thus manifested a certain juvenile quality. Schleiermacher thinks this legend can be corroborated by means of a ludicrous argument: an aging writer would not have condemned writing as Plato does in the Phaedrus. This argument is not merely suspect in itself: it lends credit to the Laertian legend by basing itself on a second legend. Only a blind or grossly insensitive reading could indeed have spread the rumor that Plato was simply condemning the writer’s activity. Nothing here is of a single piece and the Phaedrus also, in its own writing, plays at saving writing — which also means causing it to be lost — as the best, the noblest game. As for the stunning hand Plato has thus dealt himself, we will be able to follow its incidence and its payoff later on.
In 1905, the tradition of Diogenes Laertius was reversed, not in order to bring about a recognition of the excellent composition of the Phaedrus but in order to attribute its faults this time to the senile impotence of the author: “The Phaedrus is badly composed. This defect is all the more surprising since it is precisely there that Socrates defines the work of art as a living being. But the inability to accomplish what has been well conceived is precisely a proof of old age.
We are no longer at that point. The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words. It unties a whole sumploke patiently interlacing the arguments. What is magisterial about the demonstration affirms itself and effaces itself at once, with suppleness, irony, and discretion.
This is, in particular, the case — and this will be our supplementary thread — with the whole last section, devoted, as everyone knows, to the origin, history, and value of writing. That entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss, have done without. In trusth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to the other.
Always with irony. But what can be said of irony here? What is its major sign? The dialogue contains the only “rigorously original Platonic myths: the fable of the cicades in the Phaedrus, and the story of Theuth in the same dialogue.” Interestingly, Socrates’ first words, in the opening lines of the conversation, had concerned “not bothering about” mythologemes. Not in order to reject them absolutely, but, on the one hand, not bothering them, leaving them alone, making room for them, in order to free them from the heavy serious naivete of the scientific “rationalists,” and on the other, not bothering with them, in order to free oneself for the relation with oneself and the pursuirt of self-knowledge.
To give myths a send-off: a salute, a vacation, a dismissal; this fine resolution of the khairein, which means all that at once, will be twice interrupted in order to welcome these “two Platonic myths,” so “rigorously original.” Both of these myths arise, moreover, in the opening of a question about the status of writing. This is undoubtedly less obvious — has anyone ever picked up on it? — in the case of the cicada story. But it is no less certain. Both myths follow upon the same question, and they are only separated by a short space, just time enough for a detour. The first, of course, does not answer the question; on the contrary, it leaves hanging, makes time for a rest, and makes us wait for the reprise that will lead us to the second.
Let us read this more closely. At the precisely calculated center of the dialogue — the reader can count the lines — the question of logography is raised. Phaedrus reminds Socrates that the citizens of greatest influence and dignity, the men who are the most free, feel ashamed at “speechwriting” and at leaving sungrammata behind them. They fear the judgment of posterity, which might consider them “sophists”. The logographer, in the strict sense, is a ghost writer who composes speeches for use by litigants, speeches which he himself does not pronounce, which he does not attend, so to speak, in person, and which produce their effects in his absence. In writing what he does not speak, what he would never say and, in truth, would probably never even think, the author of the written speech is already entrenched in the posture of the sophist: the man of non-presence and of non-truth. Writing is thus already on the scene. The incompatibility between the written and the true is clearly announced at the moment Socrates starts to recount the way in which men are carried out of themselves by pleasure, become absent from themselves, forget themselves and die in the thrill of song.
But the issue is delayed. Socrates still has a neutral attitude: writing is not in itself a shameful, indecent, infamous activity. One is dishonored only if one writes in a dishonorable manner. But what does it mean to write in a dishonorable manner? and Phaedrus also wants to know, what does it mean to write beautifully? This question sketches out the central nervure, the great fold that divides the dialogue. Between this question and the answer that takes up its terms in the last section, the thread remains solid, if not easily visible, all through the fable of the cicades and the themes of psychagogy, rhetoric, and dialectics.
Thus Socrates begins by sending myths off; and then, twice stopped before the question of writing, he invents two of them — not, as we shall see, entirely from scratch, but more freely and spontaneously than anywhere else in his work. Now, the khairein, in the Phaedrus’ opening pages, takes place in the name of truth. We will reflect upon the fact that the myths come back from vacation at the time and in the name of writing.
The kharein takes place in the name of truth: that is, in the name of knowledge of truth and, more precisely, of truth in the knowledge of the self. This is what Socrates explains. But this imperative of self-knowledge is not first felt or dictated by any transparent immediacy of self-presence. It is not perceived. Only interpreted, read, deciphered. A hermeneutics assigns intuition. An inscription, the Dlphikon gramma, which is anything but an oracle, prescribes through its silent cipher; it signifies as one signifies an order — autoscopy and autognosis. The very activities that Socrates thinks can be contrasted to the hermeneutic adventure of myths, which he leaves to the sophists.
And the kharein takes place in the name of truth. The topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent. The themes, the topics, the (common-)places, in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site. They are dramatically staged, and in this theatrical geography, unity of place corresponds to an infallible calculation or necessity. For example, the fable of the cicades would not have taken place, would not have been recounted, Socrates would not have been incited to tell it, if the heat, which weighs over the whole dialogue, had not driven the two friends out of the city, into the countryside, along the river Ilissus. Well before detailing the genealogy of the genus cicada, Socrates had exclaimed, “How welcome and sweet the fresh air is, resounding with the summer chirping of the cicada chorus”. But this is not the only counterpoint-effect reqruied by the space of the dialogue. The myth that serves as a pretext for the kharein and for the retreat into autoscopy can itself only arise, during the first steps of this excursion, at the sight of the Ilissus. Socrates then mockingly proposes a learned explanation of the myth in the rationalistic, physicalist style of the sophoi: it was while she was playing with Pharmacia that the boreal wind caught Orithyia up and blew her into the abyss, “down from the rocks hard by,” “and having thus met her death was said to have been seized by Boreas… For my part, Phaedrus, I regard such theories as attractive no doubt, but as the invention of clever, industrious people who are not exactly to be envied.”
This brief evocation of Pharmacia at the beginning of the Phaedrus — is it an accident? An hors d’oeuvre? A fountain, “perhaps with curative powers,” notes Robin, was dedicated to Pharmacia near the Ilissus.
11/14
하나의 논문: Acacia Confusa, Intra-action, Cognition/Consciousness, Regulation 으로 퉁치고 싶은 수업들
Conceptual Framework: Participant Observation as a Form of Life
Methodology: Ethnobotany, Historical Studies in PTSD
Literature Discourse/Trend: Intoxication, Poison, Toxicity, Porosity, Plastic Brain
FDA Controversy - On Clinical Methods
리뷰 한 편
Tripping On Utopia - BioSocieties 리뷰
초록
Body In Excess @Rutgers
Bodily Sociology @SNU
4S, 3A (웹사이트 참고해보기)
번역
Dreams and Secrets
영상
Plants II,III
11/19
11/20
Life was created for the purpose of experiencing multiple possibilities, and in the initial frequency of creation, the option of “experiencing degradation” was included. Human beings, as individuals with free will, may choose to experience darkness in order to understand light, to emphasize the significance of light; or they may choose to experience a state of lack of love in order to learn about love, to contrast the difference between love and lovelessness. When the soul enters the material body, we forget the motivation for choosing to experience certain experiences in the first place, and this is the opportunity for free will to be tested.
However, we are likely to make choices that are not in line with our soul’s purpose, and therefore not have the learning and experiences we want, and die with confusion and even anger, sadness, and resentment. If a life is ended in a way that leaves behind myths and regrets, the unfulfilled goal will allow the soul to move on to another life until the true goal is realized, and this is the mechanism of karma. Individual karma often needs to be manifested through interactions with others, and thus collective karma of various sizes develops, with various attachments and ignorance resonating and stimulating each other until someone finally decides to break free.
11/27
Is it necessary to link ‘security’ and ‘evidence’ that are seemingly tied together as a way of projecting state-power? Unavoidable?
Body that does not matter? What is referred to as body, then? Other than documentation or heuristically repurposing the concept of body based on the cases that have been ethnographically investigated? How about body as witness?
Ch1 how biometric systems prioritize technical accuracy over individual realities, errors are integral to producing "truth" in biometric systems
Ch2 Migrants’ injuries symbolize structural violence and are often used as evidence in legal and political contexts, revealing the complexities of care and criminalization. migrants’ legal status can overshadow medical needs, emphasizing the conflict between state policies and human ethics.
Ch3 E-Verify allows employers to verify workers’ immigration status, creating a system that exacerbates exploitation and fear among undocumented workers. Ethnographic evidence reveals how undocumented workers adapt to the anxiety of potential deportation, contributing to their precarity.
Ch4
