Invention and the Tekhnècolour Lab coat: Scientific History’s

Psychotropic Trace

Christopher Rudge

University of SydneyDepartment of English

Society for Literature, Science and the Arts23 September 2011

Derrida on ‘invention’“...there are only two major types of authorized

examples for invention. On the one hand, people

invent stories (fictional or fabulous), and on the other

they invent machines, technical devices or

mechanisms in the broadest sense of the word. In both

cases…invention is seen as production…Fabula or

fictio on the one hand, and on the other tekhne,

episteme, historia, methodos, i.e. art or know-how,

knowledge and research, information, procedure, etc.”

from ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, Reading de Man Reading (1989), p. 32 (my emphasis)

The fabula as ‘technic-coloured’

(i) ‘technic-coloured’ suggests the operationality and

presence of a technic in a story, and that the story is

‘coloured’ by technicity, even in the absence of a

technic.

However, the fabula (as composition) is different to

“the composition which presupposes a first

instrumentalization of language [, which] is indeed a

sort of tekhne…”Derrida, ‘Psyche’, p. 20.

Stories of technicity ‘Now in technicolor!’: The fabula as metacinema

(ii) The fabula is the history of tecnicised life, that

is, of “cinematographic conciousness,”1 but

reproduced

‘now in technicolor!’

Epiphylogenesis 2

is destablised or devalorised

by the fabula.

1 Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps,vol. 3, le temps du cinéma, Paris: Editions Galilée, 1990, p. 35.

2 Stiegler, Technics and Time (I), Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989, passim.

‘Technicolor’ advertisement during a film’s introduction (circa 1950s)

“now in TECHNICOLOR” promotional poster for Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse,

1935.

Stories of technicity ‘Now in technicolor!’: The fabula as metacinema

(ii) The fabula is the history of tecnicised life, that

is, of “cinematographic conciousness,”1 but

reproduced

‘now in technicolor!’

Epiphylogenesis 2

is destablised or devalorised

by the fabula.

1 Bernard Stiegler, Le temps du Cinema, p. 35.2 Stiegler, Technics and Time (I), passim.

The fabula as ‘technicolor’ dream

“The infinite rapid oscillation between the performative

and the constative, between language and metalanguage,

fiction and nonfiction, autoreference and

heteroreference, does not just produce an essential

instability. The instability constitutes that very event—let

us say, the work—whose invention normally disturbs, as

it were, the norms, statutes, and the rules.”

Derrida, ‘Psyche’, p. 13.

Francis Crick and the invention of the DNA structure

James Watson (b.1928, left) and Francis Crick (1916-2004), with their model of part of a DNA molecule, 1953

Rosalind Franklin’s ‘Photo 51’

Photo 51 is the nickname given to an X-ray diffraction image made by Rosalind Franklin in 1951 (hence, it is photo ’51’: the name itself denotes its priority to Crick and Watson’s 1953 article in Nature). It is often said to have been critical to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA structure. Whether Crick had seen

the image prior to 1953, however, has given rise to some debate.

Crick and Watson’s article from Nature, 25 April 1953

Ponge’s Fabula and ‘LSDNA’

From: Derrida, ‘Psyche’, p. 8; Richard Doyle, ‘LSDNA: Rhetoric, Consciousness Expansion and the Emergence of Biotechnology’,

Philosophy and Rhetoric, 35:2, 2002.

Psychotomimetics and other inventive models

• LSD as a ‘model’ psychosis;

• Crick et. al., DNA model as a ‘model’ of the molecular structure of DNA; and

• The Luxor relief features a ‘model’ of a sperm cell that may have been observed by crystals or by the lenses of cows eyes, or imagined. Alternatively, it is not a sperm cell, but a determinative and ideograph meaning “pure, clean.”

• In each case, the model is imprecise, and—like language—may be seen as a pharmakon.

Luxor Temple (the ‘Temple of Man’)

Sperm cell or simple ideogram for ‘purification’? A lotus bud’s angiosperm? In any event, there is a coincidence in the arrangement of the glyph / ideogram as

intersecting with the seminal fluid from the phallus of Min, the god of fertility.

The symbol is sign F17 in Alan Gardiner’s hieroglyph sign-list. It is a combination of F16 (horn) and D 60 (a jar pouring water), which is the ideogram (determinative) for the term, "pure, clean".  Hence the term is /abw/, meaning"purification.” From Alan H.

Gardiner, A. H. 1982 (1957), Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs, Oxford: Griffith Institute, p. 463.

Note, however, that the hieroglyph at Luxor is arranged (intersects) with the phallus and seminal fluid, not the horn, and that the Luxor glyph is reversed.

“Knowing” chance“The role of the inventor (genial or ingenious) is precisely to have that chance...and not to fall upon truth by chance, but, as it were, to know chance, to know how to be lucky, to recognize the chance for chance, to anticipate a chance, decipher it, grasp it, inscribe it on the chart of the necessary and turn a throw of the dice into the work.”

Derrida, ‘Psyche’, p. 55.

Dr Hoffman’s “peculiar presentiment”

“The solution of the ergotoxine problem had led to no fruitful results...And yet I could not forget the relatively uninteresting LSD-25. A peculiar presentiment - the feeling that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations - induced me, five years after the first synthesis, to produce LSD-25 once again so that a sample could be given to the pharmacological department for further tests. This was quite unusual...”

Albert Hoffman, LSD: My Problem Child: Reflections on Sacred Drugs, Mysticism, and Science (1983), p. 14.

Post-script: gaming, ‘virtual’ models and the fabula

Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, published online on 18 September 2011 at http://www.nature.com/nsmb