"While the religious context attached to the throat-technique has disappeared among the Inuit, the specific vocal technique of the genre has remained; but either the ludic function has survived alone, or it has replaced the religious signified attached to this vocal signifier. This doesn't imply that throat-games do not mean anything today. They mean something else and have a ludic and competitive function. The signifiers have remained, the signifieds have changed." [415-16]
"In sonorous symbolic forms, the form, the signifier, best resists transformations through time. However, the signified, the religious signification of the animal and nature imitations associated with these forms, are evanescent." [414]
"... in the Inuit culture, drum dance songs and throat-games are two different things which are never performed together. But they can be performed in the same festive event. Indeed, they have something in common: the concept of endurance. A good drum dancer is the one who may dance with the heavy drum as long as possible; good throat-game performers are the ones who make the katajjaq last as long as possible without failure." [410]
Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing:
A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach
Jean-Jacques Nattiez
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Dhamma as Sonic Praxis
"Securing protection and generating punya are primary concerns of Buddhist laypeople; mindfulness of and transmission of the Buddha's teachings are primary concerns of Buddhist clergy; paritta incantation is a meeting point of these objectives." [53]
"To many Theravada laypeople, paritta chant is an apotropaic practice, performed in order to bring protection from danger, relief from crisis, and spiritual blessings. Paritta rituals are believed to secure a blessing or protection for worldly pursuits, such as the beginning of a business venture, a house-warming, or a marriage." [51]
"More elaborate rituals in Sri Lanka involve sounding bells and gongs, and extending string from the hands of the chanting monks to those of the laypeople. At the conclusion of some paritta rituals in both Thailand and Sri Lanka, monks give practitioners short lengths of string (in Sri Lanka, this is the same string as used in the ritual itself, cut into shorter lengths) to wear around their wrists as amulets of protection ..." [51]
"... the structure reflects aspects of Burmese speech-tones -- particularly the distinctive falling tones -- in order clearly to articulate the text ..." [50]
"... monks and laypeople practice a mindfulness of the padas of parittas as whole expressive units. Both the textual meter and the various musical renderings of paritta chant clearly articulate the syntactic units of the pada and the gatha, but tend to resist subdivisions of the pada. The pada is the unit of one breath exhalation; it is rendered as a continuous, uninterrupted stretch of sound, preceded and followed by short rests. In my musical analyses of Burmese chant I find no pattern to the rhythm of the chant rendering the padas that could be described as regularly musically metrical in any sense ..." [49-50]
"Numerous commentaries emerged to clarify matters of phonology and accentuation in Vedic recitation. Exceptionally elaborate traditions emerged around incantation of the Samaveda ... in which ancient commentaries specified features of pronunciation, accentuation, melodic-timbral inflection, and rhythm: all of which were painstakingly memorized. Such was not the case for Buddhism, perhaps because in Buddhist chant phonological sounds are considered a means to an end rather than an end in themselves." [48]
The Dhamma as Sonic Praxis
Paul D. Greene
"To many Theravada laypeople, paritta chant is an apotropaic practice, performed in order to bring protection from danger, relief from crisis, and spiritual blessings. Paritta rituals are believed to secure a blessing or protection for worldly pursuits, such as the beginning of a business venture, a house-warming, or a marriage." [51]
"More elaborate rituals in Sri Lanka involve sounding bells and gongs, and extending string from the hands of the chanting monks to those of the laypeople. At the conclusion of some paritta rituals in both Thailand and Sri Lanka, monks give practitioners short lengths of string (in Sri Lanka, this is the same string as used in the ritual itself, cut into shorter lengths) to wear around their wrists as amulets of protection ..." [51]
"... the structure reflects aspects of Burmese speech-tones -- particularly the distinctive falling tones -- in order clearly to articulate the text ..." [50]
"... monks and laypeople practice a mindfulness of the padas of parittas as whole expressive units. Both the textual meter and the various musical renderings of paritta chant clearly articulate the syntactic units of the pada and the gatha, but tend to resist subdivisions of the pada. The pada is the unit of one breath exhalation; it is rendered as a continuous, uninterrupted stretch of sound, preceded and followed by short rests. In my musical analyses of Burmese chant I find no pattern to the rhythm of the chant rendering the padas that could be described as regularly musically metrical in any sense ..." [49-50]
"Numerous commentaries emerged to clarify matters of phonology and accentuation in Vedic recitation. Exceptionally elaborate traditions emerged around incantation of the Samaveda ... in which ancient commentaries specified features of pronunciation, accentuation, melodic-timbral inflection, and rhythm: all of which were painstakingly memorized. Such was not the case for Buddhism, perhaps because in Buddhist chant phonological sounds are considered a means to an end rather than an end in themselves." [48]
The Dhamma as Sonic Praxis
Paul D. Greene
The Flute and Flute Playing
"... in rapidly closing the keys a very audible and disagreeable clap or rattle is produced ..." [141]
"A good embouchure depends for the most part upon a normal formation of the lips and teeth." [135]
"Experience shows that all wood-wind instruments are affected by the manner of blowing so that they become either better or worse with regard to the tones and their production ... The reasons for this have never yet been satisfactorily explained. But it is known, that even after all swellings and deformations of the wood are removed from the flute tube as much as possible by the most careful swabbings, the influence of the manner of blowing still remains perceptible. The best flute loses an easy speech by overblowing and its bright clear quality of tone by a bad embouchure, and conversely gains in speech and tone by a correct handling and a good embouchure." [114]
"The mouth-hole, the centers of the upper holes on the middle joint, and the axles of the foot keys should coincide in one straight line." [111]
"... the certain speaking and pure quality of tone of a flute depend in a great measure upon a perfect closing of the key, and this again upon a good padding." [106]
"To prove that all the keys on the middle joint or on the foot joint close perfectly, stop one end with a fine cork, and blow into the other end, while all the keys are closed with the fingers; one can then determine whether or not the air leaks out. By strongly blowing in tobacco smoke it will be easily seen which key leaks. But a more certain way is to draw out the air, after which the fingers are removed; if then all the keys remain closed of themselves, it is a sure indication no air leaks in." [105-6]
"Even though kept from violent injuries, the flute, like other mechanisms, will occasionally need repairs. In practical use the keys move up and down a countless number of times, and all metal being subject to wear, the appearance of defects from this cause is unavoidable, even in the most solidly constructed mechanisms. A spring may break or lose its elasticity; the oil, with which the axles and pivots must be covered, will become thick and sticky with time, and especially by the entering of dust, thus hindering the easy movement of the keys; or it may be necessary to replace an injured pad." [100]
"Since the fifteen tone-holes of my flute tube could not be covered by means of the fingers, because the holes were too large and in some instances too far apart, it was necessary to furnish them all with keys which had then to be so arranged that they could be opened or closed at will. For this purpose but nine fingers are available, since the thumb of the right hand is indispensable for holding the flute. The deficiency in fingers must therefore be made up by mechanism, whose systematic coupling makes it possible to close several keys at the same time with one finger." [59]
"Having determined the dimensions and material best suited for the flute tube, it was then necessary to devise a system of fingering by which all scales, passages, and trills in the twenty-four keys could be played, clearly, certainly, and with the greatest possible ease." [59]
"The silver flutes are made of a 9/10 fine alloy; and for the manufacture of wood flutes I usually employ either the so-called cocus wood, or the grenadilla wood of South America. The first, of dark or red-brown color, is especially desirable because its brilliant tone, notwithstanding that this wood contains a resin, which, in very rare cases induces an inflammation of the skin of the lip." [55]
"Any variation in the hardness or brittleness of the material has a very great effect upon the timbre or quality of tone. Upon this point much experience is at hand, for flutes have been made of various kinds of wood, of ivory, crystal-glass, porcelain, rubber, papier-mâché, and even of wax, and in every conceivable way to secure the various desired results. Heretofore all of these researches have led back to the selection of very hard wood, until I succeeded in making flutes of silver and German silver, which now or twenty years have rivaled the wood flute." [54]
"... the tones of a flute will be more easily produced and the development of their full strength will require less effort in blowing, the less the weight of the flute tube. Upon a silver flute, therefore, the thin and hard drawn tube of which weighs only 129 grams, the brightest and fullest tone can be brought out and maintained much longer without fatiguing blowing, than can be done on a wood flute, which even when made as thin as possible still has double the weight, namely 227 1/2 grams." [53-4]
"That the tones of a flute may not only be easily produced, but shall also possess a brilliant and sonorous quality, it is necessary that the molecules of the flute tube shall be set into vibration at the same time as the air column, and that these shall, as it were, mutually assist one another. The material must possess this requisite vibration ability, which is either a natural property of the body, for example as in bell-metal, glass and various kinds of wood, or has been artificially produced, as in the case of hardened steel springs and hard-drawn metal wire." [53]
"... it happens that a wind instrument cut in two in its middle does not give the octave of its fundamental, but a considerably flatter tone." [34]
"For the exact determination of these positions and the other tuning proportions, I had a flute made with movable holes, and was thus enabled to adjust all the tones higher or lower at pleasure." [30]
"The notes of the second octave are produced, as it were, by overblowing the tones of the first, by narrowing the opening of the lips, and by changing the angle and increasing the speed of the stream of air; this results in the formation of shorter tone-waves." [29]
"From accurate investigations it is shown that the disadvantages just mentioned, become imperceptible only when the size of the holes is, at the least, three-fourths of the diameter of the tube." [26-7]
"In order that these proportions might be accurately verified, I made a tube in which all the twelve tone sections could be taken off and again put together, and which was provided with a sliding joint in the upper part of the tube to correct for any defects in tuning." [25]
"The tone-producing current of air must be blown against the sharp edge of the mouth-hole, at an angle which varies with the pitch of the tone. When the air stream strikes the edge of the hole it is broken, or rather divided, so that one part of it goes over or beyond the hole, while the greater part, especially with a good embouchure, produces tone and acts upon the column of air enclosed by the tube, setting it into vibration." [21]
"... the formation of the nodes and segments of the sound waves takes place most easily and perfectly in a cylindrical flute tube, the length of which is thirty times its diameter and in which the contraction begins in the upper fourth part of the length of the tube, continuing to the cork where the diameter is reduced one tenth part." [16]
"The higher tones of the first octave are obtained by shortening the length of the vibrating column of air, for which purpose lateral tone-holes are bored in the tube. The holes should be as large as is possible, since the effective shortening of the tube is proportional to the ratio of the size of the hole to the diameter of the bore." [15]
"The bore of the head-joint is gradually reduced in diameter by two millimeters, from the joint upwards to the cork. The free speech of the tone and the correct tuning of the higher octaves depend upon the particular form of this curvilinear reduction in the diameter." [14]
The Flute & Flute Playing
Theobald Boehm
"A good embouchure depends for the most part upon a normal formation of the lips and teeth." [135]
"Experience shows that all wood-wind instruments are affected by the manner of blowing so that they become either better or worse with regard to the tones and their production ... The reasons for this have never yet been satisfactorily explained. But it is known, that even after all swellings and deformations of the wood are removed from the flute tube as much as possible by the most careful swabbings, the influence of the manner of blowing still remains perceptible. The best flute loses an easy speech by overblowing and its bright clear quality of tone by a bad embouchure, and conversely gains in speech and tone by a correct handling and a good embouchure." [114]
"The mouth-hole, the centers of the upper holes on the middle joint, and the axles of the foot keys should coincide in one straight line." [111]
"... the certain speaking and pure quality of tone of a flute depend in a great measure upon a perfect closing of the key, and this again upon a good padding." [106]
"To prove that all the keys on the middle joint or on the foot joint close perfectly, stop one end with a fine cork, and blow into the other end, while all the keys are closed with the fingers; one can then determine whether or not the air leaks out. By strongly blowing in tobacco smoke it will be easily seen which key leaks. But a more certain way is to draw out the air, after which the fingers are removed; if then all the keys remain closed of themselves, it is a sure indication no air leaks in." [105-6]
"Even though kept from violent injuries, the flute, like other mechanisms, will occasionally need repairs. In practical use the keys move up and down a countless number of times, and all metal being subject to wear, the appearance of defects from this cause is unavoidable, even in the most solidly constructed mechanisms. A spring may break or lose its elasticity; the oil, with which the axles and pivots must be covered, will become thick and sticky with time, and especially by the entering of dust, thus hindering the easy movement of the keys; or it may be necessary to replace an injured pad." [100]
"Since the fifteen tone-holes of my flute tube could not be covered by means of the fingers, because the holes were too large and in some instances too far apart, it was necessary to furnish them all with keys which had then to be so arranged that they could be opened or closed at will. For this purpose but nine fingers are available, since the thumb of the right hand is indispensable for holding the flute. The deficiency in fingers must therefore be made up by mechanism, whose systematic coupling makes it possible to close several keys at the same time with one finger." [59]
"Having determined the dimensions and material best suited for the flute tube, it was then necessary to devise a system of fingering by which all scales, passages, and trills in the twenty-four keys could be played, clearly, certainly, and with the greatest possible ease." [59]
"The silver flutes are made of a 9/10 fine alloy; and for the manufacture of wood flutes I usually employ either the so-called cocus wood, or the grenadilla wood of South America. The first, of dark or red-brown color, is especially desirable because its brilliant tone, notwithstanding that this wood contains a resin, which, in very rare cases induces an inflammation of the skin of the lip." [55]
"Any variation in the hardness or brittleness of the material has a very great effect upon the timbre or quality of tone. Upon this point much experience is at hand, for flutes have been made of various kinds of wood, of ivory, crystal-glass, porcelain, rubber, papier-mâché, and even of wax, and in every conceivable way to secure the various desired results. Heretofore all of these researches have led back to the selection of very hard wood, until I succeeded in making flutes of silver and German silver, which now or twenty years have rivaled the wood flute." [54]
"... the tones of a flute will be more easily produced and the development of their full strength will require less effort in blowing, the less the weight of the flute tube. Upon a silver flute, therefore, the thin and hard drawn tube of which weighs only 129 grams, the brightest and fullest tone can be brought out and maintained much longer without fatiguing blowing, than can be done on a wood flute, which even when made as thin as possible still has double the weight, namely 227 1/2 grams." [53-4]
"That the tones of a flute may not only be easily produced, but shall also possess a brilliant and sonorous quality, it is necessary that the molecules of the flute tube shall be set into vibration at the same time as the air column, and that these shall, as it were, mutually assist one another. The material must possess this requisite vibration ability, which is either a natural property of the body, for example as in bell-metal, glass and various kinds of wood, or has been artificially produced, as in the case of hardened steel springs and hard-drawn metal wire." [53]
"... it happens that a wind instrument cut in two in its middle does not give the octave of its fundamental, but a considerably flatter tone." [34]
"For the exact determination of these positions and the other tuning proportions, I had a flute made with movable holes, and was thus enabled to adjust all the tones higher or lower at pleasure." [30]
"The notes of the second octave are produced, as it were, by overblowing the tones of the first, by narrowing the opening of the lips, and by changing the angle and increasing the speed of the stream of air; this results in the formation of shorter tone-waves." [29]
"From accurate investigations it is shown that the disadvantages just mentioned, become imperceptible only when the size of the holes is, at the least, three-fourths of the diameter of the tube." [26-7]
"In order that these proportions might be accurately verified, I made a tube in which all the twelve tone sections could be taken off and again put together, and which was provided with a sliding joint in the upper part of the tube to correct for any defects in tuning." [25]
"The tone-producing current of air must be blown against the sharp edge of the mouth-hole, at an angle which varies with the pitch of the tone. When the air stream strikes the edge of the hole it is broken, or rather divided, so that one part of it goes over or beyond the hole, while the greater part, especially with a good embouchure, produces tone and acts upon the column of air enclosed by the tube, setting it into vibration." [21]
"... the formation of the nodes and segments of the sound waves takes place most easily and perfectly in a cylindrical flute tube, the length of which is thirty times its diameter and in which the contraction begins in the upper fourth part of the length of the tube, continuing to the cork where the diameter is reduced one tenth part." [16]
"The higher tones of the first octave are obtained by shortening the length of the vibrating column of air, for which purpose lateral tone-holes are bored in the tube. The holes should be as large as is possible, since the effective shortening of the tube is proportional to the ratio of the size of the hole to the diameter of the bore." [15]
"The bore of the head-joint is gradually reduced in diameter by two millimeters, from the joint upwards to the cork. The free speech of the tone and the correct tuning of the higher octaves depend upon the particular form of this curvilinear reduction in the diameter." [14]
The Flute & Flute Playing
Theobald Boehm
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields
OF PARADIGMS & SCIENTISTS
"From their emotional, psychological, and linguistic preferences, we see that organicists continually return to a modified philosophical realism. The debate over the status of laws becomes a debate over the nature of form. Organicists reject the reductionistic approach primarily because they refuse to see the world as singular." [205-6]
"For Harrison the limb field is like a liquid crystal and unlike a jigsaw puzzle. for Needham the embryo is like history interpreted from a Marxist viewpoint and unlike an automobile with gear sifts. For Weiss butterfly behavior is like a random search and self-correcting device and unlike a deterministic stimulus-response machine. Such a catalog could be continued indefinitely, but the basic point is that organicists, even granting their internal differences, share central perceptions on the level of images and language." [205]
"In summary then, it is possible to maintain that there is a crucial discontinuity between vitalism -mechanism and organicism-reductionism. There has been a paradigm change, but a basic duality is preserved around a very important, if unresolvable, issue: Is the world one or many? Is knowledge literal and single or metaphoric and plural?" [199]
"Therefore, the position of this study is that there exists a basic difference between vitalists and organicists that rests on a switch from metaphysical to epistemological debate. But embedded in the epistemological claims remains a root belief that science can reveal nature. Biology must be autonomous because organisms are somehow different and unique, even if no clear explanation is given to show precisely how one can know hat. Reductionists allow organicists to proceed as if their field were logically and really independent, but at heart they believe that the truth is elsewhere. In like manner, organicists allow reductionists to proceed as if the world were single and simple but know that wisdom eludes them." [198-99]
"The concrete nature of models, metaphors, and artefacts, is essential to science because it limits the implications of any particular abstract system." [189]
PAUL WEISS
"The "weaving of threads into fabrics, such as we find in living tissu" seemed to necessitate the judgment that "some sort of 'macro-crystallinity' [was] a basic property of living systems"." [170]
"Weiss was profoundly impressed with orthogonal tissue organziation and its genesis. He frequently drew from the work in lectures and general speculative articles." [170]
"After observing the intact lamella, Weiss and Ferris took electron microscopic pictures of reconstruction of the membrane after wounding. The sequence of events was easily determined: Epidermal cells first migrated over and covered the wound. Fairly uniform fibers of small size (less than 200 A) spread in the space between the underside of the epidermis and the subjacent fibroblasts. These small fibers were oriented at random. Then, proceeding from the epidermal face downward, a "wave of organization" spread over the fiber mass, straightening and orienting its elements. The fibers became packed in the characteristic layered structure and enlarged until they were about 500 A in diameter." [170]
"But terms such as field and organization were not explanations in themselves. Weiss constantly stressed that fact and saw his study of chondrogenesis as a probe of the biotechnology that underlay field processes. The net of development had to be resolved into component processes if words such as field were not to be an excuse for analysis." [164]
"He countered Loeb's doctrine by insisting on the relevance of scale to the organism. Organization was based on a hierarchy of envelopes. To say that the operation of a higher level is based on the proper functioning of the components of a lower is not to say the operation of the higher can be reduced to the lower. Rather, the higher complex is given as a unit that requires its own laws. The distinction is the same as that made years later by Polanyi: boundary conditions left open by processes of a more elementary level are determined by the organizational plan of the next order." [149]
"The basic assumption of Loeb's doctrine was that a like result must imply a like causal chain: there exists a rigid material mechanism, which when completely revealed, would make possible strict prediction of every aspect of animal behavior. Furthermore, the relevant level of the animal was the chemical level. In his thesis work Weiss tested these assumptions by studying the resting behavior of fatigued butterflies." [148]
JOSEPH NEEDHAM
"The flowering of genetics has occupied attention at the expense of study of form and pattern. But at a deeper level it is possible to argue that a convergence has been prepared." [143]
"Thus Needham found himself forced to accept a radical dualism. Mechanism was necessary to science but could never deal with consciousness. Its success might be due only to the peculiar construction of our minds and have nothing to say about the structure of the natural world. He rejected any split between organic and inorganic but preserved the division between mind and body. He did not envision mind and body as ultimate categories but as aspects of reality that must not be confused." [125]
"The use of the fiber and tissue metaphor amply expresses Needham's mature conception of the resolution of the field-particle dichotomy in biological field theory." [125]
"... Needham saw field law as a dynamic description of the establishment of order and form during development. He was convinced that fields were an advance over static anatomical description in embryology. Fields provided a rich source of images for the experimental task of concretization." [125]
"Fields invited the introduction of topographical models and reasoning. For example, Needham described, a kind of qualitative mathematical model of an amphibian neurula." [125]
"Needham believed that fields were distinguished from simple geographic regions of the embryo by three criteria: any given point within the field force had to possess a given quality, a given direction, and a given intensity. Fields were judged in terms of instability and successive equilibrium positions." [124]
"The section called "The organization of development and the development of organization" contained two points of importance. The first concerned the relation of biology to physics. Traditional physics was incapable of explaining the development of form or organized growth. Needham stressed that a new physics and chemsitry would be required. "But their present condition is not a stationary one and much may be expected when the new concepts of physics, having penetrated the realm of chemistry [ see Langmuir] come at last to that of embryology" ... The reference to Langmuir highlighted the nature of the expected change in physics and chemistry: they would become sciences of structure and form, that is, they themselves would operate from organismic perspectives." [114]
"There are at least three interesting examples of the image of 'disengagement' that prompted Needham to ask further questions about the picture he was drawing. First, closely associated with the idea of gears is the notion of reversibility. He discussed this implication in the context of work on differentiation and regression in planaria and in sponges. Under conditions of starvation, planaria can reduce markedly in size without changing morphologically. But in ascidian regression, considerable dedifferentiation accompanies loss of mass ... The second example is Needham's search for a 'primary shaft' in development. He had distinguished two types of dependence on a whole: existential dependence, in which a part would cease to exist if separated from the whole, and dependence with regard to properties, in which certain aspects of isolated parts are modified. The latter was indicated by analysis of the relevant literature; there were definite boundaries to the independence of parts, definite selectivity in the engagement and disengagement of gears." [107]
"Explanation implies a picture, and analogy is a vehicle for connecting the internal subjective perception of the structure of a phenomenon with the public function of theory building." [106]
ROSS HARRISON
"The essential problem, however, was not true symmetrical organization but residual asymmetry of organisms; it was this study that occupied so much of Harrison's attention. In the speech Harrison explained that symmetry comes from commensurability and implies order, regularity, and arrangement. Geometrically symmetry is defined by operations of rotation, inversion, and translation. In nature. crystals and organisms embody the rules of symmetry; this simple fact underlies the historical analogy between crystal and organism. Harrison's work may be seen as a search for the appropriate degree and nature of the analogy in modern embryology. In our period, attention has been focused on internal laws of order for both sorts of entities; external form is a function of principles of arrangement, of inner patterning." [98]
"Some kind of paracrystalline organization, specific for a type of cytoplasm, would underlie form relations and form changes -- morphology and morphogenesis. Progressive orientation of protoplasmic elements (restriction of degrees of freedom) could account for polarity and symmetry, without any need to postulate the cell as a homogeneous system. Crystal organization in organisms was itself an example of an intermediate level of organization, joining processes of organic and inorganic nature. And perhaps most significantly, Harrison's use of crystal analogies allowed him to bypass assumptions of the mosaic-mechanistic theories of development about part-whole relations and to account for the existence of equipotential systems without turning to either entelechies or classical machines." [93]
"The concept of fields resulting from structured activity is a typical organicist resolution of the field-particle polarity. The resolution rests, essentially, on going beyond the structure-function dichotomies." [90]
"Which structure determined which? Harrison's conclusion was that "the emphasis upon 'determiner' and 'determined' leads to a very lopsided and often erroneous view of the process, for it is questionable whether one factor can influence another without itself being changed" ..." [87]
"Experimental method and the machine paradigm are by no means inseparable ..." [85]
"The abnormal and altered were pregnant with clues to normal processes; to ignore such sources of information would be to refuse to concretize concepts of form in embryology.
Organization and wholeness for Harrison were not answers to biological questions; they were the biological questions par excellence." [83]
"Birefringent material was seen in Harrison's material, especially at cell membranes. Harrison noted that their work was preliminary and should be followed up systematically. "Especially should the cell boundaries be examined thoroughly, for it is there, perhaps more than anywhere else in the cell, that we may expect to find the seat of directive forces" ... A glance at current journals in cell and developmental biology reveals the appropriateness of the admonition to study cell membrane systems in relation to form problems." [82]
"Area boundaries overlap, and tissue of an intermediate region is organized into one organ or another as a function of the center whose influence predominates. Such systems came to called fields, but it is not a word used by Harrison in that context until the late 1930s. As Waddington cautioned later, the term field should convey more than a geographical meaning; he suggested a term such as area or district when one does not intend to refer to the complex of processes involved in organ formation ... Harrison's discussion of structures and processes involved in axis determination of the limb and ear is an analysis of the nature of a field and constitutes one of the first and most basic of such studies. Harrison did not use the word field very often and especially not as a deliberate theoretical concept as Weiss would have done; but nonetheless, it was his fundamental work that first gave concrete content to the organicist notion." [80]
THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANICISM
"Asymmetry in organisms has historically been a cornerstone for theories of vitalism. Inorganic nature was widely felt to be the province of regular symmetry relations; the organic world was conceived as the realm of extraordinary spatial forms, such as the logarithmic spiral of Nautilus shells and the fivefold radial symmetry of starfish. Neither shape can be reduced to the simple geometry of crystalline space lattices. Crystals manifesting simple geometrical shapes surely were products of the laws of chemistry and physics, but the peculiar symmetries and asymmetries of organisms seemed to call for unique organizing principles." [48-49]
"Problems of form grade naturally into a consideration of symmetry, polarity, and pattern." [48]
"Tissue metaphors have been critical to an understanding of muscle fibres and more recently of microtubules and microfilaments Albrecht von Haller forthrightly states that "the fiber is for the physiologist what the line is for the geometer" ... The globular image important for the cell theory was an alternate early analogy for the fundamental structure of matter. These strongly visualizable forms are more than props for the imagination; they have been intrinsic to explanations of basic properties of life." [41]
"Biological forms are grown, not assembled piecemeal. That simple fact hides the immense difficulties of accounting for the genesis of a species or of an individual." [39]
"From an organismic perspective, the central and unavoidable focus of biology is form. Every other consideration of the biological sciences leads up to the task of at last stating the laws of organic form. Form is more than shape, more than static position of components in a whole. For biology the problem of form implies a study of genesis. How have the forms of the organic world developed? How are shapes maintained in the continual flux of metabolism? How are the boundaries of the organized events we call organisms established and maintained?" [39]
PARADIGM & METAPHOR
"For anyone in the eighteenth century to have felt that biology might be more fundamental (not just blessed with archaei, which is cheating) than physics would have been absurd. But that is exactly what J. S. Haldane thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was accused of being a vitalist; he was only a bit unclear. But Whitehead too insisted that the unity of science was based on organic 'events' rather than simple atoms; he was some what clearer." [25]
"Descartes' immense influence was a major factor in the dominant scientific belief after the mid-seventeenth century that the universe was composed of minute corpuscles. Particular kinds of motion and interaction were part of the world picture of Cartesian atomism." [10]
"This book attempts to trace in some detail a process of paradigm change in metaphor from machine to organic system that took the ground out from under atomism and animism alike in developmental biology." [7]
"... a view of scientific theory that does not give a large place to metaphor, with its predictive value and potential for development, has trouble accounting for the very progressive aspect of science such views are most often interested in." [3]
INTRODUCTION:
"Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is also a polemic, one I would conduct differently today, but not one I would abandon. The narrative of this book is classical. A hero -- materialist organic systems theory -- defeats the dragons of mechanism and vitalism, which threaten the country of true biology with their fire-breathing, binary, reductive or idealist predations. Today, in debt to the last thirty years of feminism's life-changing critique of this cyclopean and teleological narrative form, I look for other ways to tell stories and build explanations. I now look for myriad connections and emergences that do not necessarily find their form in levels, hierarchies, and holist oppositions to fragmentation. Heroes are in short supply, but actors are proliferating." [xix]
"From their emotional, psychological, and linguistic preferences, we see that organicists continually return to a modified philosophical realism. The debate over the status of laws becomes a debate over the nature of form. Organicists reject the reductionistic approach primarily because they refuse to see the world as singular." [205-6]
"For Harrison the limb field is like a liquid crystal and unlike a jigsaw puzzle. for Needham the embryo is like history interpreted from a Marxist viewpoint and unlike an automobile with gear sifts. For Weiss butterfly behavior is like a random search and self-correcting device and unlike a deterministic stimulus-response machine. Such a catalog could be continued indefinitely, but the basic point is that organicists, even granting their internal differences, share central perceptions on the level of images and language." [205]
"In summary then, it is possible to maintain that there is a crucial discontinuity between vitalism -mechanism and organicism-reductionism. There has been a paradigm change, but a basic duality is preserved around a very important, if unresolvable, issue: Is the world one or many? Is knowledge literal and single or metaphoric and plural?" [199]
"Therefore, the position of this study is that there exists a basic difference between vitalists and organicists that rests on a switch from metaphysical to epistemological debate. But embedded in the epistemological claims remains a root belief that science can reveal nature. Biology must be autonomous because organisms are somehow different and unique, even if no clear explanation is given to show precisely how one can know hat. Reductionists allow organicists to proceed as if their field were logically and really independent, but at heart they believe that the truth is elsewhere. In like manner, organicists allow reductionists to proceed as if the world were single and simple but know that wisdom eludes them." [198-99]
"The concrete nature of models, metaphors, and artefacts, is essential to science because it limits the implications of any particular abstract system." [189]
PAUL WEISS
"The "weaving of threads into fabrics, such as we find in living tissu" seemed to necessitate the judgment that "some sort of 'macro-crystallinity' [was] a basic property of living systems"." [170]
"Weiss was profoundly impressed with orthogonal tissue organziation and its genesis. He frequently drew from the work in lectures and general speculative articles." [170]
"After observing the intact lamella, Weiss and Ferris took electron microscopic pictures of reconstruction of the membrane after wounding. The sequence of events was easily determined: Epidermal cells first migrated over and covered the wound. Fairly uniform fibers of small size (less than 200 A) spread in the space between the underside of the epidermis and the subjacent fibroblasts. These small fibers were oriented at random. Then, proceeding from the epidermal face downward, a "wave of organization" spread over the fiber mass, straightening and orienting its elements. The fibers became packed in the characteristic layered structure and enlarged until they were about 500 A in diameter." [170]
"But terms such as field and organization were not explanations in themselves. Weiss constantly stressed that fact and saw his study of chondrogenesis as a probe of the biotechnology that underlay field processes. The net of development had to be resolved into component processes if words such as field were not to be an excuse for analysis." [164]
"He countered Loeb's doctrine by insisting on the relevance of scale to the organism. Organization was based on a hierarchy of envelopes. To say that the operation of a higher level is based on the proper functioning of the components of a lower is not to say the operation of the higher can be reduced to the lower. Rather, the higher complex is given as a unit that requires its own laws. The distinction is the same as that made years later by Polanyi: boundary conditions left open by processes of a more elementary level are determined by the organizational plan of the next order." [149]
"The basic assumption of Loeb's doctrine was that a like result must imply a like causal chain: there exists a rigid material mechanism, which when completely revealed, would make possible strict prediction of every aspect of animal behavior. Furthermore, the relevant level of the animal was the chemical level. In his thesis work Weiss tested these assumptions by studying the resting behavior of fatigued butterflies." [148]
JOSEPH NEEDHAM
"The flowering of genetics has occupied attention at the expense of study of form and pattern. But at a deeper level it is possible to argue that a convergence has been prepared." [143]
"Thus Needham found himself forced to accept a radical dualism. Mechanism was necessary to science but could never deal with consciousness. Its success might be due only to the peculiar construction of our minds and have nothing to say about the structure of the natural world. He rejected any split between organic and inorganic but preserved the division between mind and body. He did not envision mind and body as ultimate categories but as aspects of reality that must not be confused." [125]
"The use of the fiber and tissue metaphor amply expresses Needham's mature conception of the resolution of the field-particle dichotomy in biological field theory." [125]
"... Needham saw field law as a dynamic description of the establishment of order and form during development. He was convinced that fields were an advance over static anatomical description in embryology. Fields provided a rich source of images for the experimental task of concretization." [125]
"Fields invited the introduction of topographical models and reasoning. For example, Needham described, a kind of qualitative mathematical model of an amphibian neurula." [125]
"Needham believed that fields were distinguished from simple geographic regions of the embryo by three criteria: any given point within the field force had to possess a given quality, a given direction, and a given intensity. Fields were judged in terms of instability and successive equilibrium positions." [124]
"The section called "The organization of development and the development of organization" contained two points of importance. The first concerned the relation of biology to physics. Traditional physics was incapable of explaining the development of form or organized growth. Needham stressed that a new physics and chemsitry would be required. "But their present condition is not a stationary one and much may be expected when the new concepts of physics, having penetrated the realm of chemistry [ see Langmuir] come at last to that of embryology" ... The reference to Langmuir highlighted the nature of the expected change in physics and chemistry: they would become sciences of structure and form, that is, they themselves would operate from organismic perspectives." [114]
"There are at least three interesting examples of the image of 'disengagement' that prompted Needham to ask further questions about the picture he was drawing. First, closely associated with the idea of gears is the notion of reversibility. He discussed this implication in the context of work on differentiation and regression in planaria and in sponges. Under conditions of starvation, planaria can reduce markedly in size without changing morphologically. But in ascidian regression, considerable dedifferentiation accompanies loss of mass ... The second example is Needham's search for a 'primary shaft' in development. He had distinguished two types of dependence on a whole: existential dependence, in which a part would cease to exist if separated from the whole, and dependence with regard to properties, in which certain aspects of isolated parts are modified. The latter was indicated by analysis of the relevant literature; there were definite boundaries to the independence of parts, definite selectivity in the engagement and disengagement of gears." [107]
"Explanation implies a picture, and analogy is a vehicle for connecting the internal subjective perception of the structure of a phenomenon with the public function of theory building." [106]
ROSS HARRISON
"The essential problem, however, was not true symmetrical organization but residual asymmetry of organisms; it was this study that occupied so much of Harrison's attention. In the speech Harrison explained that symmetry comes from commensurability and implies order, regularity, and arrangement. Geometrically symmetry is defined by operations of rotation, inversion, and translation. In nature. crystals and organisms embody the rules of symmetry; this simple fact underlies the historical analogy between crystal and organism. Harrison's work may be seen as a search for the appropriate degree and nature of the analogy in modern embryology. In our period, attention has been focused on internal laws of order for both sorts of entities; external form is a function of principles of arrangement, of inner patterning." [98]
"Some kind of paracrystalline organization, specific for a type of cytoplasm, would underlie form relations and form changes -- morphology and morphogenesis. Progressive orientation of protoplasmic elements (restriction of degrees of freedom) could account for polarity and symmetry, without any need to postulate the cell as a homogeneous system. Crystal organization in organisms was itself an example of an intermediate level of organization, joining processes of organic and inorganic nature. And perhaps most significantly, Harrison's use of crystal analogies allowed him to bypass assumptions of the mosaic-mechanistic theories of development about part-whole relations and to account for the existence of equipotential systems without turning to either entelechies or classical machines." [93]
"The concept of fields resulting from structured activity is a typical organicist resolution of the field-particle polarity. The resolution rests, essentially, on going beyond the structure-function dichotomies." [90]
"Which structure determined which? Harrison's conclusion was that "the emphasis upon 'determiner' and 'determined' leads to a very lopsided and often erroneous view of the process, for it is questionable whether one factor can influence another without itself being changed" ..." [87]
"Experimental method and the machine paradigm are by no means inseparable ..." [85]
"The abnormal and altered were pregnant with clues to normal processes; to ignore such sources of information would be to refuse to concretize concepts of form in embryology.
Organization and wholeness for Harrison were not answers to biological questions; they were the biological questions par excellence." [83]
"Birefringent material was seen in Harrison's material, especially at cell membranes. Harrison noted that their work was preliminary and should be followed up systematically. "Especially should the cell boundaries be examined thoroughly, for it is there, perhaps more than anywhere else in the cell, that we may expect to find the seat of directive forces" ... A glance at current journals in cell and developmental biology reveals the appropriateness of the admonition to study cell membrane systems in relation to form problems." [82]
"Area boundaries overlap, and tissue of an intermediate region is organized into one organ or another as a function of the center whose influence predominates. Such systems came to called fields, but it is not a word used by Harrison in that context until the late 1930s. As Waddington cautioned later, the term field should convey more than a geographical meaning; he suggested a term such as area or district when one does not intend to refer to the complex of processes involved in organ formation ... Harrison's discussion of structures and processes involved in axis determination of the limb and ear is an analysis of the nature of a field and constitutes one of the first and most basic of such studies. Harrison did not use the word field very often and especially not as a deliberate theoretical concept as Weiss would have done; but nonetheless, it was his fundamental work that first gave concrete content to the organicist notion." [80]
THE ELEMENTS OF ORGANICISM
"Asymmetry in organisms has historically been a cornerstone for theories of vitalism. Inorganic nature was widely felt to be the province of regular symmetry relations; the organic world was conceived as the realm of extraordinary spatial forms, such as the logarithmic spiral of Nautilus shells and the fivefold radial symmetry of starfish. Neither shape can be reduced to the simple geometry of crystalline space lattices. Crystals manifesting simple geometrical shapes surely were products of the laws of chemistry and physics, but the peculiar symmetries and asymmetries of organisms seemed to call for unique organizing principles." [48-49]
"Problems of form grade naturally into a consideration of symmetry, polarity, and pattern." [48]
"Tissue metaphors have been critical to an understanding of muscle fibres and more recently of microtubules and microfilaments Albrecht von Haller forthrightly states that "the fiber is for the physiologist what the line is for the geometer" ... The globular image important for the cell theory was an alternate early analogy for the fundamental structure of matter. These strongly visualizable forms are more than props for the imagination; they have been intrinsic to explanations of basic properties of life." [41]
"Biological forms are grown, not assembled piecemeal. That simple fact hides the immense difficulties of accounting for the genesis of a species or of an individual." [39]
"From an organismic perspective, the central and unavoidable focus of biology is form. Every other consideration of the biological sciences leads up to the task of at last stating the laws of organic form. Form is more than shape, more than static position of components in a whole. For biology the problem of form implies a study of genesis. How have the forms of the organic world developed? How are shapes maintained in the continual flux of metabolism? How are the boundaries of the organized events we call organisms established and maintained?" [39]
PARADIGM & METAPHOR
"For anyone in the eighteenth century to have felt that biology might be more fundamental (not just blessed with archaei, which is cheating) than physics would have been absurd. But that is exactly what J. S. Haldane thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was accused of being a vitalist; he was only a bit unclear. But Whitehead too insisted that the unity of science was based on organic 'events' rather than simple atoms; he was some what clearer." [25]
"Descartes' immense influence was a major factor in the dominant scientific belief after the mid-seventeenth century that the universe was composed of minute corpuscles. Particular kinds of motion and interaction were part of the world picture of Cartesian atomism." [10]
"This book attempts to trace in some detail a process of paradigm change in metaphor from machine to organic system that took the ground out from under atomism and animism alike in developmental biology." [7]
"... a view of scientific theory that does not give a large place to metaphor, with its predictive value and potential for development, has trouble accounting for the very progressive aspect of science such views are most often interested in." [3]
INTRODUCTION:
"Crystals, Fabrics, and Fields is also a polemic, one I would conduct differently today, but not one I would abandon. The narrative of this book is classical. A hero -- materialist organic systems theory -- defeats the dragons of mechanism and vitalism, which threaten the country of true biology with their fire-breathing, binary, reductive or idealist predations. Today, in debt to the last thirty years of feminism's life-changing critique of this cyclopean and teleological narrative form, I look for other ways to tell stories and build explanations. I now look for myriad connections and emergences that do not necessarily find their form in levels, hierarchies, and holist oppositions to fragmentation. Heroes are in short supply, but actors are proliferating." [xix]
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