I have a few parasites of my own, and for once I'm not talking about the Fool.
These are more vampires upon my time and energy than mental illness.
Anyone remember these:
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jg9oz
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgbfc
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jg9rw
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgawg
http://www.plurk.com/p/3jgau0
Or how about that phone call I got from @cephalopod on Wednesday asking me to go to lunch with her so she could physically stay up?
http://www.plurk.com/p/3q8fvd
http://www.plurk.com/p/3q7wbp
I serve my purpose to these people. In the capacity of friendship, feedback generator and bouncing board, etc. I am available because I make myself so, sharing books, time and ideas and what do I get?
I get exactly what I ask for. Which by nature of our relationship, isn't much: the occasional conversation and tea. Did Harker ask much of Dracula? What does the country mouse ask of the city mouse? What did Master Abraham ask of Murr?
As I sit in class now, listening to the conversation about Serres and what we're getting, what we want from the text, I think the question applies here as well. We are the excluded third of Parasite. It's pushing us where we're used to pushing the text, forcing our way in. What are we asking of the text? But also, what is the text asking of us?
I state it here: I'm pushing. I'm asking that you push back.
And that's what I believe the text is doing as well. Pushing us and the only way we can understand it is to push back.
Our Parasites
"If we're going to compare the class to a sort of organism, why not go with the metaphor of an immune response. Sure, it may have been rude of Eli to interrupt and not be completely in terms with the way the class is run, but I personally found her input stimulating.
If you completely isolate a biological system, say our class, and then randomly introduce foreign bodies, you kind of have to expect a certain level of chaos to accompany that introduction. Exactly like what happens when those little black critters get in through the little boy's nose (mouth? I don't remember). [Referring to a video we'd watched]
My point here is that I don't think Eli served so much as an invader as she did a vaccine. You can't expect the incoming bodies to follow the same routine and must adapt accordingly until they are gone. "
I take this quote from a blog post made by someone in the Nanotext class I had with Tony last spring.
The post was about a girl, Eli (pronounced like what is perhaps the more familiar spelling of Ellie), who visited the class at the invitation of one of our peers and the reactions the class had to her on plurk afterward.
I bring this up because I see it as being relevant to our Parasites class. Would we have the same kind of reaction? I hope that with all our discussion of the interruption that the answer would be no, but if I recall correctly, even in Nanotexts, we'd just finished a rather lengthy section on alterity and the meaning of the other, the exterior.
In thinking about this though, I'm brought to the question of what is a parasite unto our collective Parasites class? Clearly there are a select few of us in the 2:30 class who are parasites upon Tony's time. We're welcomed by the gracious host that he is, but even still, we encroach on his office hours, essentially owning the class from the inside out as we discuss what is, what was and what is to come: often eying others as an intrusion.
And here, I think the answer is in ourselves. We are our own parasites, interrupting and disturbing the quiet status quo of the class. To relate to another text from Nanotext we are the Ned Slades upon the Hand. We have infiltrated the system and are slowly destroying it from the inside out. This is our education.
A last point on the idea of ideas
I've already posted this as a plurk update, but wanted to reassert and expand upon it in a more cohesive format:
We hear talk of energy and tend to think it is bound within the realm of physics, that it obeys the first law of thermodynamics, but with the energy of ideas -- or rather ideas as a form of energy -- this is wrong. Ideas and technology work together as a kind of perpetual energy machine, generating more energy (ideas) than is input and required in other systems. The teme is self-replicating. It is parasite.
It's a matter of infrastructure. We've built the kind of infrastructure in our technology that allows this growth with minimal maintenance. To send a message to 20 people no longer takes a three hours of writing, 1+ days travel per message, etc. Yes, we've expended that kind of energy in building the technology to allow us to bypass that, but that was a one-off. We do not use that every time we send a message. We're standing on the shoulders of giants.
Once we've sent off enough ideas, the exchange of that being sent versus that being put in to maintain the system becomes uneven. Our investment has more than paid for itself.
If we think of the meme/teme as a unit of the energy of an idea, we see that this growth has the potential to be exponential. A hyperlink, a small underlined blue word can send us to a page full of thousands more words, images and even videos. Or you input 5 words, and it's replicated 20 times with the same amount of energy it took you to put those in.
We see it here in that video we watched in class:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnsSUqgkDwU
A simple search of a few key words brings us thousands (and even thousands upon thousands) of search results, of ideas. And I've said it before and I'll say it again; ideas are dangerous. Ideas are parasitic in their ability to control you. This whole update represents the small seed of Tony sitting next to me in class on Wednesday and mentioning the word energy. Like clicking an internal hyperlink in my mind, we take one simple word and expand it.
