“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Friday, September 28, 2012

SLSA Liveblog 6: Judith Roof

Unhuman Nose-ologoy: Scalar/Molar Profiles
the nose knows
uncomfortable displacement on the face of things...
base order calculating machine
atavistic signifier of body over mind; demoted through history
metonymical or metaphorical but not itself
imaginary control understood as human vs animal difference
how the molar becomes the scalar; cybernetic exchange
Polyester, John Waters: odorama scratch and sniff cards
analyzing the phenomena of group response by stimuli; self consciously clunky
esther--reaction that gives bouquets
alignment as a low cultural process
smell operates in the present ((hm not sure)
sight is cultural privileged as more reliable
olfactory bulb; olfactory sensory neurons with olfactory dendrites
ligand binding to receptor neurons >> cerebrum >> conscious perception and amygdala and hippocampus
molecular and cellular levels
problem of timing; bringing odors to consciousness is only one
the limbic system isn't very associated with the language part of the brain; olfaction precedes linguistic processes
suggests two kinds of consciousness
most researchers suggest that smelling is unconscious
we assume we are separated; appearance of separability and distance in sound and sight
the environment literally gets into the individual
bodies and groups are always already entangled in a feedback system

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