**Links to**: [[Meat puppet]], [[Interest]], [[Vision]], [[Pattern recognition]], [[Food]], [[Agent]], [[Subject]]. The following is a series of unfinished notes, for now. Ideas around meat are also found in: [[Buccal polycomputing]] and [[Song]]. ![[Pieter_Aertsen_005.jpg]] <small>Bodegón con la Huida a Egipto, 1551, Pieter Aertsen en la Universidad de Upsala (Suecia).</small> ### The rational sound of meat voices, and the electronic voices of meat sounds We definitely take from Lacan and the mouth, *lalangue*:^[Mariela Vitto first pointed me here, during psychoanalysis.] Lalangue is a _nmamalgam_ of an outward-going, driving libido and inward-going, driving signifiers. “Language is now shown to have not only effects of meaning and signification, but direct effects of _jouissance_. These ideas complicated the received notion that the libido and _jouissance_ were different in nature from linguistic elements.”^[nosubject.com, accessed Jan 14 2023.] In Agbogbloshie, Ghana, we find a massive langular wastefield: a decomposed-decomposing landscape where all the discarded electronic “donations” of EU and others’ waste, which are dumped there, and thereupon harvested for recovering lithium, copper, etc. There are also, of course, things like lithium mines in Atacama desert, in Chile, comparable to Chernobyl-like ecological disaster-level phenomena (Olya Kudina, personal communication, 2024). Among the places where the mining of “rare” Earth materials occurs (also called “conflict” materials because of their scarcity) are, e.g., Congo, Mongolia, Indonesia. Strubell et al. presented research on the amount of energy and resources required to train e.g., GPT2. Our chatbot prototongue. The current interactions with ChatGPT average at 13 million users per day (Kudina quoting Reuters, 2024, live presentation). “The step of model inference... ”. One prompt is estimated to require 500ml of clean drinking water for maintaining the temperature of the data centers hosting the signifiers. This paradigm of digital/cloud-based/opaque/electric/silicon force driving our lacerative electronic tongue is an overheated wasteland of mute, muting mouths. Terrifying. ### Making meat transparent by tearing it, and the noumenon The “subject’s” inability to access itself renders concepts like “reason", “intelligence”, “comprehension” or “understanding” as rather dull.^[A note is made in Hockett, Charles F. “An approach to the quantification of semantic noise.” _Philosophy of science_ 19.4 (1952): 257-260, on how Spanish distinguishes between understanding (_entender_) and comprehending (_comprender_), the first one being a matter of channel noise: something disturbs the transference of a message, and the latter being a matter of difficulty in the semantic comprehension of the message. As a Spanish speaker, I would tend to say it's not that clear-cut, these two words are used interchangeably quite often. But moreover: what is the difference between "channel noise" and "semantic noise" when the medium, the channel, is language itself? Whence comes the division between the channel and the message, after having accepted that the medium is part and parcel of the message? If I don't understand/comprehend the word "conundrum", the event of someone explaining this to me is an instance of language indexing itself, it is not as if the semantics were already there, and I, as a stand-alone agent, receive access to its atemporal objectivity.] Their dullness, like that of a dull knife, emerges, perhaps, from the fact that they pretend to deliver a clean cut, when they in fact hack away at a bloody mess. The agent never was transparent, not only because transparency is often the myth of a stateless function, but also because, if we continue to harmonize with the famous Spinozist reverie: a body does not know what a body can do. This renders the body limitless, but it also renders it a meat puppet. “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” (Deleuze and Guattari, *A Thousand Plateaus*, p. 257). In _Minima Moralia_ we also learn that “The mote in your own eye is the best magnifying glass.” (29: _Dwarf fruit_). A fruit falling not far from the phenomenology of the broken tool. Friction (noise, error, etc.) is key, without friction: only a void. Without friction: only a box factory (“the whole is the false/untrue”, ibid.). Ethics is all things considered in terms of friction; of tarrying with the negative (“The life of the Spirit wins its truth only by finding itself in what is absolutely torn apart.” Hegel quoted in _Minima Moralia_). The objective tendency of spirited non-meat, of that which transcends individual meat, must be observed as a real, emergent phenomenon, but should carefully be observed as a _teleology_. However, perhaps the resistance to Hegel’s _Weltgeist_ comes at the cost of a far too isolated conception of the individual as a freely, voluntarist choosing agent. If, as Adorno reminds us earlier: “The fidelity to one’s own state of consciousness and experience is forever in temptation of falling into infidelity, by denying the insight, which reaches beyond the individuated [_Individuum_] and which calls the latter’s substance by name”,^[Version on: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm, translation: Dennis Redmond, 2005. In: _Dedication_.] this should remind us—_us_—of the non-individual character of thought: of the internal dialogue which is neither owned by the individual nor objectively existing outside. It’s a parade of meat puppets. ### Recognition of meat and its legitimacy Opting for, or acknowledging, friction is the fruit of the philosophical act. According to Xenophon, Xanthippe was hard to get along with. In the _Symposium_ we find a note about Socrates’ choosing of Xanthippe: >It is the example of the rider who wishes to become an expert horseman: “None of your soft-mouthed, docile animals for me,” he says; “the horse for me to own must show some spirit” in the belief, no doubt, if he can manage such an animal, it will be easy enough to deal with every other horse besides. And that is just my case. I wish to deal with human beings, to associate with man in general; hence my choice of wife. I know full well, if I can tolerate her spirit, I can with ease attach myself to every human being else. > >Xenophon, _Symposium_ 17–19 [= 2.10] We are supposed to bear witness to two virtues: the recognition of another _as another_, and that of choosing the frictitious (_fructitious_?) path of most resistance. “In his essay “The Case for Xanthippe” (1960), [Robert Graves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves "Robert Graves") suggested that the stereotype of Xanthippe as a misguided shrew is emblematic of an ancient struggle between masculinity (rationality, philosophy) and femininity (intuition, poetry), and that the rise of philosophy in Socrates’ time has led to rationality and scientific pursuit coming to exercise an unreasonable dominance over human life and culture.” It is because due to the recognition of other people and other animals—and any other friction-beings—as doing something _very similar_ to what “one” does, that one becomes interested in seeing them continue along, persevere? At the same time, as all these entities compete with each other for a certain kind of volume of spacetime, so we are presented with difficult scenarios (when we contemplate actions as based on choices, which is a choice (see: [[09 C is for Communism, and Constraint|09 C is for Communism, and Constraint]])). But is [[Similarity]] a [[Reason]] for [[Empathy]]? Like-mindedness is a wild concept. Consensus has major good-sense vibes (here add Sjoerd notes). _A like for a like and the whole world is dust._ ### Access to _meat_ >Brecht quotes Marx’s sixth “Thesis on Feuerbach” according to which the human essence must be construed as the ‘ensemble of all societal relations’: ‘Likewise, human beings–flesh and blood human beings–can only be comprehended via the processes in and through which they are constituted.’ >S. Giles, ‘Introduction to Brecht,’ in Brecht, _Brecht on Theater_, p. 16, in Mattin’s [[Social Dissonance]], p. 178. ### Even more unfinished notes Deleuze, [[Difference and Repetition]], p. 262: ![[Pasted image 20221204222015.png]] ### Footnotes