“there was

a star upon
which clever
beasts
invented
knowing”
nietzsche scott listfield
 part one:
language

scott listfield
vandermeer

“Originally our expedition had numbered

five and included a linguist” (9).
vandermeer

“Someone tricked
into thinking that
words should be
read” (25).

scott listfield
vandermeer

“Yes words.
“‘What are
they made of?’
The surveyor
asked. Did they
need to be
made of
anything” (24)?

scott listfield
atwood

“But there was no longer any comfort in the

words. There was nothing in them. It no
longer delighted Jimmy to possess these
small collections of letters that other people
had forgotten about. It was like having his
own baby teeth in a box” (261).
vandermeer

“‘Something below us is writing this script.

Something below us may still be in the
process of writing this script.’ We were
exploring an organism that might contain a
mysterious second organism, which was itself
using yet another organisms to write words
on the wall” (51).
james

“Each nook and cranny of

creation, down to our very
skin and entrails, has its
living inhabitants, with
organs suited to the place,
to devour and digest the
food it harbors and to meet
the dangers it conceals; and
the minuteness of
adaptation, thus shown in
the way of structure, knows
no bounds.”
scott listfield
spencer

“Regarding
language as an
apparatus of
symbols for the
conveyance of
thought, we may
say that, as in a
mechanical
apparatus, the
more simple and
the better arranged
its parts, the
greater will be the
effect
produced” (1155).

scott listfield
nietzsche

“I mean, a suggestive transference, a

stammering translation into a completely
foreign tongue—for which there is required,
in any case, a freely inventive intermediate
sphere and mediating force” (1176).
vandermeer

“Emanating from this giant thorn is an endless, perhaps

automatic, need to assimilate and to mimic. Assimilator
and assimilated interact through the catalyst of a script
of words, which powers the engine of transformation.
Perhaps it is a living creature living in perfect symbiosis
with a host of other creatures. Perhaps it is ‘merely’ a
machine. But in either instance, if it has intelligence, that
intelligence is far different from our own. It creates out of
our ecosystem a new world, whose processes and aims
are utterly alien—one that works through supreme acts of
mirroring, and by remaining hidden in so many other
ways, all without surrendering the foundation of its
otherness as it becomes what it encounters” (191).
nietzsche

“That immense
framework and
planking of concepts
to which the needy
man clings his whole
life long in order to
preserve himself is
nothing but a
scaffolding and toy
for the most
audacious feats of
the liberated
intellect” (1178).
scott listfield
willard

“These things would be

grotesque to look upon
if they were not so sad,
and laughable if they
did not, in the minds of
thoughtful women,
fatigue indignation and
exhaust pity” (1128).

scott listfield
willard

“we need the stereoscopic

view of truth in
general” (1126).

“In life’s prime and pride

men like to quote ‘Adam
was first formed, then Eve,’
but at the grave they are
ready to declare that ‘man,
born of woman, is of few
days and full of trouble.

“The whole subjection

theory grows out of the one-
sided interpretation of the
Bible by men” (1131-32).
scott listfield
nietzsche

“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors,

metonymics, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of
human relations which have been poetically and
rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and
which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed,
canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have
forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have
become worn out and have been drained of sensuous
force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now
considered as metal and no longer as coins” (1174).
spencer

“The longer the time

that elapses
between the
mention of any
qualifying member
and the member
qualified; the longer
must the mind be
exerted in carrying
forward the
qualifying member
ready to
use” (1161).
scott listfield
nietzsche

“But we produce
these represent-
ations in and
from ourselves
with the same
necessity with
which the spider
spins.” (1173)!

scott listfield
 Jakob von
umwelt

Uexküll
Stroll
Through the
Worlds of
Animals and
Men
nietzsche

“nature is acquainted with no forms and no

concepts, and likewise with no species, but
only with an X which remains inaccessible and
undefinable for us” (1174).
 interlude: why
astronauts?
“To try to philosophize about what it is to be
‘thrown into the world’ without defining more
precisely, more literally […] the sort of
envelopes into which humans are thrown,
would be like trying to kick a cosmonaut into
outer space without a spacesuit. Naked
humans are as rare as naked cosmonauts. To
define humans is to define the envelopes, the
life support systems, the Umwelt that make it
possible for them to breathe. This is exactly
what humanism has always missed” (Bruno
Latour, “A Cautious Prometheus?”).

scott listfield
 interlude: why
astronauts?
“When you check on your space suit
before getting out of the space shuttle,
you are radically cautious and
cautiously radical… you are painfully
aware of how precarious you are, and
yet simultaneously, you are completely
ready to artificially engineer and to
design in obsessive detail what is
necessary to survive” (Bruno Latour, “A
Cautious Prometheus?”).

scott listfield
 part two:
instinct

scott listfield
atwood

“‘You think I was thinking?’ she said. ‘Oh Jimmy!

You always think everyone is thinking. Maybe I
wasn’t thinking anything’" (92).

scott listfield
james

“Its Definition.—Instinct is usually

defined as the faculty of acting in
such a way as to produce certain
ends without foresight of the ends,
and without previous education in
the performance. Instincts are the
functional correlatives of structure.
With the presence of a certain
organ goes, one may say, almost
always a native aptitude for its
use” (391).

scott listfield
james

“The actions we call instinctive all conform to the general reflex type; they are
called forth by determinate sensory stimuli in contact with the animal’s body,
or at a distance in his environment. The cat runs after the mouse, runs or
shows fight before the dog, avoids falling from walls and trees, shuns fire and
water, etc., not because he has any notion either of life or of death, or of self,
or of preservation. He has probably attained to no one of these conceptions
in such a way as to react definitely upon it. He acts in each case separately,
and simply because he cannot help it; being so framed that when that
particular running thing called a mouse appears in his field of vision he must
pursue; that when that particular barking and obstreperous thing called a dog
appears there he must retire, if at a distance, and scratch if close by; that he
must withdraw his feet from water and his face from flame, etc. His nervous
system is to a great extent a preorganized bundle of such reactions—they are
as fatal as sneezing, and as exactly correlated to their special excitants as it is
to its own. Although the naturalist may, for his own convenience, class these
reactions under general heads he must not forget that in the animal it is a
particular sensation or perception or image which calls them forth” (391).
atwood

“When did the body first set out on its own adventures? Snowman
thinks; after having ditched its old traveling companions, the mind and
the soul, for whom it had once been considered a mere corrupt vessel
or else a puppet acting out their dramas for them, or else bad
company, leading the other two astray. It must have got tired of the
soul’s constant nagging and whining and the anxiety-driven intellectual
web-spinning of the mind, distracting it whenever it was getting its teeth
into something juicy or its fingers into something good. It had dumped
the other two back there somewhere, leaving them stranded in some
damp sanctuary or stuffy lecture hall while it made a beeline for the
topless bars, and it had dumped culture with them: music and painting
and poetry and plays. Sublimation, all of it; nothing but sublimation,
according to the body. Why not cut to the chase?

“But the body had its own cultural forms. It had its own art. Executions
were it tragedies, pornography its romance” (85).
james

“Man has a far greater variety of impulses than any lower

animal; and any one of these impulses, taken in itself, is as
‘blind’ as the lowest instinct can be; but, owing to man's
memory, power of reflection, and power of inference, they
come each one to be felt by him, after he has once yielded
to them and experienced their results, in connection with a
foresight of those results. In this condition an impulse acted
out may be said to be acted out, in part at least, for the
sake of its results” (395).
atwood

“What had been

altered was nothing
less than the ancient
primate brain” (305).

scott listfield
james

“It makes no difference whether the arc be organized at

birth, or ripen spontaneously later, or be due to acquired
habit; it must take its chances with all the other arcs, and
sometimes succeed, and sometimes fail, in drafting off the
currents through itself” (397).
james

“The animal that

exhibits them loses the
‘instinctive’ demeanor
and appears to lead a
life of hesitation and
choice, an intellectual
life; not, however,
because he has no
instincts—rather
because he has so
many that they block
each other’s
path” (398).
scott listfield
james

“This emotion has no utility in a civilized man, but when we notice the
chronic agoraphobia of our domestic cats, and see the tenacious way
in which many wild animals, especially rodents, cling to cover, and only
venture on a dash across the open as a desperate measure—even then
making for every stone or bunch of weeds which may give a
momentary shelter—when we see this we are strongly tempted to ask
whether such an odd kind of fear in us be not due to the accidental
resurrection, through disease, of a sort of instinct which may in some of
our remote ancestors have had a permanent and on the whole a useful
part to play” (414)?
vandermeer

“The terrible thing, the thought I

cannot dislodge after all I have seen,
is that I can no longer say with
conviction that this is a bad thing.
Not when looking at the pristine
nature of Area X and then the world
beyond, which we have altered so
much. Before she died, the
psychologist said I had changed,
and I think she meant I had changed
sides. It isn’t true—but it could be
true. I can see how I could be
persuaded” (192).

scott listfield
“there was
a star upon
which clever
beasts
invented
knowing”
nietzsche scott listfield