Talk:Exe0.1 Fran Gallardo

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Comments from Molly

I really like this concept of a binary between yuk and yum. I am wondering, thought, if it's a dichotomy between "eat vs. don't eat" or "edible vs. not edible" or "desirable to eat vs. undesirable to eat."

Quick spell check: I think lasting "indentity" should be "identity"

I think you could draw really interesting examples here from how computer scientists are using code to explain (and later surely manipulate) genetic code. There is lots of work being done now on RNA, and I refer you to this computer science paper on "greedy molecular folding:" http://arxiv.org/pdf/1508.00510v1.pdf The concept of self-reproduction or decision-making as "greedy" could tie in really nicely with your topic of execution and eating. I also think it could be looking at Haraway's latest work on composting. Fun fact: mealworms can eat and compost plastics in their stomachs.

Thanks for a great read! I look forward to seeing where you go with it.

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//eric comments

This was tasty.

“This article will try to introduce the force of a tongue without government as the site of execution.”: I guess this is coming in a later version. Looking forward to seeing how the tongue makes its entrance here. I guess the yuk-yum interjection will be part of it.

"One cannot not metabolise”: Similarly, Winthrop-Young says one cannot not process incoming data, just as one cannot not communicate (Winthrop-Young, in von Uexküll 2010, p.239). It would be nice to see this further elaborated upon in relation to the piece. Also, Matteo Pasuinelli has been working lately on metabolism (including curating an exhibit), and he has been publishing some interesting recent writing on research suggesting “life emerged on earth under the continuous and excessive irradiation of sunlight: the “pressure” of the sun pushed molecules to form more complex structures in order to channel and disperse energy more efficiently.” (link: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/on-solar-databases-and-the-exogenesis-of-light/). Pressure is maybe an interesting concept here in relation to the idea of cannabalism pressuring organisms into enacting forms of meiotic sex as a form of survival.

“Kauffman and Clayton (2005) expanded that notion in the paper on On emergence, agency, and organization by naming five conditions in order to understand biological agency: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison”: This sounded quite interesting and maybe it could help to give some further detail about Kauffman and Clayton’s take on these five conditions as a way of relating back to the way you are going to work out your own concepts. I guess you have several key concepts here, including things like metabolism—cannabalism—meitoic sex—execution—life, and it would be nice to see how these are going to play across one another or be connected in the article.

“However, there were several aspects of Micoplasma Laboratorium from computational culture”: nice to show this spillover of computational culture into others. Again, this suggests forms of human “pressure”, such capitalist conceptions of innovation and the pressure to maintain ownership over such innvations. This also makes one think of Chun on computational modalities of crisis and the kinds of active metabolisms and ongoing pressures they set into motion.

“If life can be deconstructued, it can also be abstracted”: this is a nice line but maybe just needs a bit more ellaboration in relation to the paper as a whole.




Hi Fran, What I really like about this paper is your lingering on indigestion, life/nonlife and slow violence. Whilst many of the other papers focus on the visible impacts of execution, your paper has the potential to make room for what you describe as the accretive and distributed - hard to trace effects. An account of the slow accretive might shift our register to account for other temporalities of execution.

Rather than yuk vs yum as an endeavour here - tasty indigestion seems more apt, and avoids slipping back into the binaries your are trying to collapse! These indeterminate spaces between life/nonlife, spaces where execution is never complete, or tracing executions, where it is hard to tell what has been undertaken.

I think it would be useful if you drew out a few themes in this paper. At present you are moving very quickly through many different coordinates, so much that some of your interesting ideas around slow violence and the accretive get swamped in other accounts. At some points of the paper this might simply mean connecting up your "science stories" to what tasting slow violence means for life/nonlife. I also feel like I want a textual experience of tasting, which seems lost here - will you be bringing into this text descriptions of an executable recipe to be tasted?

Helen