Telos

[|"What's He Building?". So, Tom, what is he building in there?] "[|He's a tweaker.] [|I don't know.] [|My theory] is that he's [|talking about himself]. [|I don't know what it is]. [|It's just one of those strange little short stories.]" media type="youtube" key="-HX4VchHjXI"

We want to build an [|apparatus], to [|kludge] a sense-making, force-vectoring machine for engaging the contemporary biotechnosciences as [|created and creative] experimental systems involving material, rhetorical, and cultural forces (among others, and apologies for the redundancy). We want to develop [|lines of flight] that will carry each of us into new projects.

The approach is best described as [|empiricist], which can be roughly translated as: ethnography + concept creation, sometimes referred to as philosophy. Many readings come from the journal Kim Fortun and I have recently become co-editors of, [|//Cultural Anthropology//]. These are essays that represent very recent ethnographic, empirical, long-term research projects that have attempted to document and analyze what Michael Fischer calls "emergent forms of life," where "life" slides across scales and zones: DNA samples, cells, disease-ecologies, political economies and their commodities, planetary existences, and other [|systems of differential reproduction.] (Like [|this one,] or [|these ones here].)

You will have wikied something in response to the reading(s) each week, preferably by Wednesday evening. You will have read the wikiings of your others, wikiing anew as appropriate. Wiki unto others as you would have others wiki unto you. (WWJW- What Would Jesus Wiki?) You will have made the wiki live. You will have produced notes, article summaries, blocks of text, well-honed questions, and similar writings that will be useful to you and to friends -- your readers, many of whom you do not yet know. You will practice writingthinking and questioningwriting until you begin to become-Agee, just for example.