Human Embodiment of Accident / Event

In our projects, we are trying to develop a metaphysics of human decision-making; an act that is situated and defined by the parameters of a world or reality that is always already underway. Our goal is to enact the shift from dasein--being, the presence of the human in the world, in an ontological sense--to ereignis--something coming into itself through itself--which can be understood as an historical event. When we make a decision, it is an enacting of ereignis. The elements of the choice, including the choice itself, have already been made. The individual him or herself only comprises approximately two percent of the drive that constitutes a decision (class notes). Tradition has already made a whole series of choices and we exist inescapably among them. When we make a decision, all the factors that lead to the moment of choice are already existent, so, in essence, we are only gathering together and reformulating in our own contexts what already exists--and perpetuating these ideas and practices, which, with repetition, constitute what becomes tradition.

The question electracy asks is which parts of what constitutes a decision-making act do we have control of and which parts part do we not have control of. We put ourselves in the position of answering this question when we think of the event from a first person perspective. The electrate subject experiences the event as something that is happening in real time; he or she experiences the world through the apparatus--he or she undergoes the electrate apparatus (class notes). In electracy, the thought about the accident happens through the apparatus. The apparatus is a relay, but the thought itself, through the mechanism of the apparatus, always comes back to us, to the human embodiment of the thing itself, which, when identified, carries a whole history of meaning though time--it gives a sort of foundation to a new logic of understanding while also enabling a whole series of influences that exist as equally valid despite the fact that it may seem that only chance bought a current fact or dilemma into being over time. For example, professor Ulmer traced back the tar pitch that protects wood from eroding in utility poles in Gainesville, FL, to the origins of the spice trade and trade shipping routes. Early ships made of wood had to be protected from the water erosion and molluscs known as teredo navalis that bore into the wood and weakened its efficacy, so they were coated in tar pitch to repel molluscs. The practice of treating wood, therefore, was brought to America because of the spice trade, particularly, pepper. Pepper--in other words, the human need to enjoy the taste of food--constitutes the human embodiment of the event of the accident that is the soil contamination around the Koppers Superfund site in Gainesville. The problem of contamination is an unforeseen, unplanned, consequence of a particular human need. The current soil contamination problem, viewed/thought from the first person position of the event (ereignis), through the electrate thinking apparatus, can be traced back to a past event that constitutes a human embodiment of the current problem (pepper and the human need for better tasting food), which carries a whole history of associations from the past to create the current situation. All of these influences might be thought of as random, chance occurrences, but electracy argues that the social influences that bring something into the present (the whole history of decisions that created the soil contamination problem in Gainesville) have a uniquely human logic.

Professor Ulmer asked individuals in the class to identify the human embodiment of their accidents. We had to identify or think “the sprawl functionality in our accidents” (class notes). First, we had to identify the human aspect of our accidents; then we had to determine the intersection between the fundamental organic life aspect of our accident and the technical aspects of it, or its technics. Professor Ulmer stated that “for there to be accident, there has to be a human vitality and a tool that intersects” (class notes)--“humanity is subsequent to technics” (class notes).

We are dealing with two forces (class notes):

1. TECHNICS (tool prior to humanity)
2. PLAY

To think of the cancer cells with this logic, I’d have to identify that an untreated cancer cell’s proliferation will eventually (and ironically) cause death. The logic of a cancer cell’s compromised suicide program (apoptosis) can be compared to the manifest sprawl and the social effects of a capitalist economy. In this context, professor Ulmer suggested that in the current social and political economy, nobody wants to admit that death is necessary. Cancer is aberrant to the social norm of life, prosperity, healthy growth. The rap against capitalism is that it compromises everything to grow. The capitalist machine can be allied to the growth and spread of cancer (class notes) but without a physical, breathing body to establish a cap or limit. The human embodiment of the accident space of a cell gone awry in the human body is either 1) the human body itself (the human being, human flesh) as an accident, as the fatality of the event or 2) the meaning and history of the term apoptosis as analyzed through a specific type of cancer (with its own series of environmental and biological factors that can be traced back though time to an initiating factor), as an accident and fatality of the body. The term apoptosis is the term the Greeks used “to describe the ‘dropping off’ or ‘falling off’ of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees” (OED). In modern usage, it is a medical term for “resolution, relaxation, or loosening of something.” In biology, it refers to the “death of individual cells” (OED). It is the manner in which a normal cell acts after it has served its purpose or in order to preserve the cellular order needed for healthy human life. Natalie Angier, in Natural Obsessions, describes it as the process that occurs “when a cell essentially ‘decides’ to die for the good of the body around it, and initiates a sequence of molecular events to literally blow itself apart.” Angier calls it a cell’s “suicide program” (xvi).

(Genetics Home Reference, NIH, 2011)

As I stated in last year's spring course, the various historical meanings of the term apoptosis have interesting literary associations dealing with the changing seasons, longing, and death through the work of Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shelley, and no doubt many other poets and artists. I think that I will still have to chose a specific cancer before working in Prezi, but the human embodiment of the accident space of a cell with a damaged suicide program is the science (technics) that brought (and continues to bring) knowledge of how the disease is caused, and how it can be prevented, across the centuries to the present day, along with how cancer "plays" in the logic of its reality in the terms associated with it through history and the literature which addresses the related questions of loss and death. Additionally, when (or if) I choose a particular cancer to focus the accident space later in the course, the series of meanings than can be drawn from the term apoptosis can be analyzed in terms of the history of the specific cancer, how it acts in the body, how it is treated, how it is caused, etc.