dust-counting

**Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; or what’s the opposite of human?**
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, til thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.” Genesis 3:19

And what do a journalist, historian, archaeologist, technician, spiritualist, and systems analyst have in common? Countless things of course. Storytellers. Dust-counters. Both builders and slabs of stone, I suppose. It all comes full circle.

I think it would be good to put Ghosh and Wittgenstein (the continuity of his thought from the Tractatus to Investigations) in conversation here, and in particular I’d like to ponder SILENCE, CITY, GAME, because I think these three items are good for talking about how the human and nonhuman engage in the story of The Calcutta Chromosome:

“Our language may be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses…And to imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.” (Wittgenstein, 1953: 7)

One thing that I know I’m not very good at, but would like to pay more attention to, are the spaces of the story, the places where the characters push the story forward. There is significance in Antar and Tara’s kitchen windows being positioned across the airshaft. Without the airshaft no rain would have come in her windows and no pigeon would have tapped on his. Calling attention to the details of these material structures and spaces, I wonder why Ghosh made the choices he did—why do these folks gather at Penn Station—and what choices might have been there before, removed or revised over various versions.

Another thing that would be interesting to get at is movement and travel. How information is [|transmitted], how people travel, across both time and space. What is striking about this novel is how pointedly and purposefully it’s structured. The storytellers control is striking.

“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” (Wittgenstein, 1922: 27).

“…and the way this game’s set up, there’s no way you’re ever going to know whether I’m right or not…” (Ghosh 105).

And for extra measure, a little interpersonal, intertextual transference:

“Both senses of the term “transference” in Freud’s text—transference as the mainspring of psychoanalysis, as the repetitive structural principle of the relation between patient and analyst, and transference as the rhetorical function of any signifying material in psychic life, as the movement and the energy of displacement through a chain of signifiers—thus come together […] it is their very [|interaction] that gives rise to the story and carries out the narrative both as a couple-relation and as the displacement—the transferal of the manuscript.” (Felman, 2003: 182)

**Ashes to ashes, funk to funky; or what’s the other of human?**
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 * Funk to Freak to Fangs**

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**Another one bites da funk; or a genealogy of cyborgs**
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and of course, this naturally follows...

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and how do we differentiate sampling?