From: Lev Lafayette <lev-AT-ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
Subject: Re: Language as Technology?
Date: Fri, 12 Feb 1999 01:04:06 +1100 (AEDT)


> 
Keachie,


> 
> OK, but I'd still rather have a conversation about technologically based cures for cancer than about the taste of the berries on yonder bush.....
> 

Two answers, Two Directions

*!*
I consider intrumental technologies to provide for contigency; the application
of such technologies is a personal and political question. I remain uncertain
whether mediative technologies, as those which expand the contigency of
communication should not also include an 'event horizon' of insturmental
technologies which are life sustaining.

*2*
The behaviour of cancerous cells is analogous to a communication breakdown;
those cells behave in manner analogous to paranioa. If you can accept
Derrida's philosophy of mind (the idea of proto-writing) then re-encoding
could be achieved with "translater cells". I am not a boitechnologist, so I
can't elaborate further than there.

Of course, this depends on the relative value of cancer as a genetic or acquired
trait. If the former we're talking reversion mutations and all sorts of problems. All existential like.



> Sleep is the answer to which is better, eternal life, or eternal death.   It gives one the chance to enjoy the best of both worlds...
> 
"sleep those little slices of death, how is despise them" Edgar Allan Poe
> Keachie
> 


-- 
Lev Lafayette. lev-AT-ariel.unimelb.edu.au http://ariel.unimelb.edu.au/~lev
* Electorate Officer for Neil Cole, MLA for Melbourne, Parliament of Victoria.
* Thesis in progress: 'A Social Theory of the Internet'. Ashworth Centre
for Social Theory, University of Melbourne.
* President of Mimesis, Inc. An association promoting roleplaying systems.


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