[3] Jaques Derrida, Passages, p. 306.

 2. Paper

Invention and the Tekhnècolour Lab coat: Scientific History’s Psychotropic Trace

Today I will consider the tekhne—or, in its anglocised form, ‘the technic’—as an invention. My particular study of technics is concerned with the relation of the technic to the fabula, a distinction that Derrida introduces in his essay Psyche: Inventions of the Other (Volume 1). As Derrida notes,

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.[i]

For Derrida, the other of the technical invention is not simply the logos or language, but rather the invention of the fabula or the myth, which is “fictional or fabulous.” This typology is “rigourously specific” and for Derrida [quote] “Whatever else may be resemble invention will not be recognised as such.”[ii]

Much of my thinking on this subject follows Derrida’s by working within this rigorous typology. Already in this first typological step there are hints of the Phaedrus wherein writing is considered a pharmakon: inventionality through the logos or through stories is always already contrived as a fabula, and as antithetical to nature.[iii] The technic and the fabula, both exteriorised through the word, determine and express the interiorised psyche, which is at odds with nature, and whose precision in remembering is fallible. Of course, Derrida is aware that his typology is “elliptical”; that it is a foreclosure to say that invention is “only possible” as fabula and as technic. Nonetheless, it is a model for speaking about invention more broadly, and I will consider this in relation to other models of invention as I go on.

In considering the relation of the fabula and technic, I want to propose that the fabula, in the form of a fabulous or fictional invention through a story in language, is always coloured by a technical inventionality. The language of the fabula, in its form – its arrangement and combination of new words— is always coloured by an underlying or coterminous technicity. By ‘form,’ I mean the story’s rhetorical dispositio, i.e., the rhetorical and structural games words play as against phusis, nature, and the exteriorised real of their subject. In order to express this formal aspect of the fabula, its dispositio, I describe the fabula as ‘technic-coloured.’ This expression serves two purposes.

Firstly, technic-coloured signals the covert operationality or latent presence of a technic, even in its apparent absence, it references the technical trace. In the oral histories told by scientists and about scientists of inventions that seemingly arise in the apparent absence of a technic, the deconstructionist reader seeks to identify the trace of the seemingly invisible or ‘lost’ technic in the dispositio of the story itself. One can deconstruct the mythic and posit an exteriorised technic whose presence is not made explicit by the fabula. This is how the story is technicoloured.

Additionally, ‘technicolour’ seems to signal the polyvalent infinity, the indeterminacy, of inventive language and its composition. Even when it is not inventive, arranged language can be constitutive of technicity in that it may instrumentalised as a technic. A science report is thus ‘science’, and a legal statute is thus ‘the law.’ As Derrida notes, “the composition which presupposes a first instrumentalisation of language is indeed a sort of tekhne.”[iv] Presupposition of purpose is thus technical, not inventive. The language of the law and of science is thus more than technicoloured. Strictly, it is technicised: it is ‘put to work’ in the political sense, deployed as a technic; it represses the fabulousness and fictio of the fabula and it erases its mythic origin.

A second conception of the fabula might regard its composition not simply as technicoloured, but rather as a historicised artefact that tells a story of technical invention that is presented ‘Now in technicolour!’ This ‘expression’ derives from a consideration of this expression in its historicality, that is, as a part of the development of cinema.

I am thinking of ‘technicolour’ as the technical process first applied in 1916 for colourising black and white film. On a more rhetorical level, it is also an expression that occasionally appeared in advertisements at the introduction of a technicolour film. Through technicolourisation, the black and white film, itself a fabula, is colourised by hypersaturated chromatic tones, that make the film hyperreal or, at least, hypercoloured. The written fabula performs this same operation. The written fabula saturates the phusis, but represents it fictitiously or mythically, that is, ‘Now in technicolour!’ In a parodic reversal the textual fabula usually reduces the colorised world of nature to the monochromatic black and white of the text.

Thinking about the fabula as a reproduction of the technical invention but ‘Now in technicolor!’, wordplay and irony notwithstanding, seems consistent with Bernard Stiegler’s conception of consciousness as having “an essentially cinematographic structure.”[v] By suggesting interiorised conscious life as cinematographic in structure, I am lead to think of the exteriorisation of consciousness, through the writing or reading of the fabula, as supplementing cinematic consciousness. The invention of a fabula presents not just the invention of technical history, but a metacinematic history of consciousness ‘Now in technicolour!”

Stiegler’s conception of cinematic consciousness relates to his understanding of technics as the force among hominising forces: the vitalism that brought about the human. For Stiegler, technics thus enabled the invention of the humand and its psyche. In Stiegler’s account, Derrida elides or misses this point in Of Grammatology and elsewhere: Derrida thus can not think of consciousness as the condition of technical hominization, that is, as the product of a technical form of anthropogenic evolution that Stiegler denominates ‘epiphylogenesis’, a form of epigenetics that seems to take into account the tool-making abilities of different groups among species and populations.

In Derrida’s defence, epiphylogenesis focuses our attention on the question of ‘what came first within such groups of hominids: the technic or the fabula?’ and Steigler’s rich encounter with Derrida seems itself to elide this and other questions, such as ‘which of these lasts longer; or which has the higher entropy?’ and ‘how do these two interact?’ My first response to epiphylogenesis is thus to suggest that the form of the fabula acknowledges technicised hominization, or technical determinism. That is, the fabula may be read as always already ‘technic-coloured’ in its form and arrangement, and are thus not as extricable as it would seem they are for Derrida. The fabulous text, then, in its arrangement and form, is a complication or complexification of its ‘innate’ technicity. The machinery of the mind recalculates the technic, and the fabula emerges. It is thus technic-coloured

My second response to epiphylogenesis is that by representing such a technical determinism inventionally, that is, by thus mythologising the technic ‘Now in technicolour!’—and perhaps simply by inventing an ‘other’—the fabula destabilises and devalorises technicity in a profound and lasting way, thus playing its own part in hominization.

Thus, in its arrangement and form, and in the complex transmissibility and infinite interpretability of the fabula, belief in technical hominization is not suspended, but modified, so that further hominization is mobilised, through admixture, indeterminacy, randomness, polysemy, and so on. We can thus read the fabula as a dramatic performance that generates doxological meaning out of the constative technic. And it is thus that Derrida suggests that the “[F]able, owing to a turn of syntax, is a sort of poetic performative that simultaneously described and carries out, on the same line, its own generation.”[vi]

It is in this broad sense that the fabula, like the logos, is thus a pharmakon. It is indeterminate and it dreams of memory that is without a technic, and thus presents a false memory, an illusion. As Pickstock notes of language as a pharmakon: it is “an aid to reminding and not to memory…deceiving those who learn to use it.”[vii] Derrida’s description of this sense experience of technicity being ‘Now in Techniclour!’ through the inventive language of the fabula sounds like a description of a dream or hallucination that is performed in or by the text:

The infinitely rapid oscilation 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 inventions normally disturbs…the norms, the statutes, and the rules.[viii]

How might the ‘technicolour’ be ‘put to work’ in relation to specific fabulae in the history of science? Crick and Watson’s 1953 proposed model of the DNA structure is an important inventional technic, in the broad Derridean sense, which has occasioned an interesting fabula that localises around an indeterminacy related to Crick’s ability to invent or propose such a model. This indeterminacy stems from the apparent ‘originary lack’ of technic and the textual inadequacy (indeterminacy) in explicating the genesis of the model for DNA.

Crick and Watson’s discovery, it has been suggested, would have been impossible in the absence of experimental research, that is to say, a technic.

Based on this reasoning, and some anecdotal evidence, Crick and Watson are thought to have borrowed in their theoretical model from the experimental research of Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins, in a race to scientific achievement, particularly from Rosalind Franklin’s x-ray image of the DNA structure, taken in 1951, and thus the so-called ‘Photo 51’.

This story is complicated by the fact that the Crick and Watson paper of 1953 explicitly denies knowledge of Wilkins and Franklins’ work, and then by other accounts that suggest that only Watson had seen the x-ray diffraction image known as ‘Photo 51.’

Of course, Crick and Watson used a 3d molecular model to theorise the structure of DNA, manipulating this model in order to find a chemically and physically explicable blueprint for the molecular arrangement. In this way their inventionality was technical or technicised. But this structural model also suggests a manipulation of the technic itself, or rather, the invention of a technic. Before this, there was never any complete technic so much as a technic in the process of its own conception. The 3d model is thus an act of tool making, of a tool becoming. The method is not technicised so much as coloured by the covert operationality of a technic even as it is apparently absent or incomplete. Here, we have something very similar to the argument relating to the form and arrangement of the fabula as technic-coloured. A new combination in the arrangement of molecules, like new combinations in the arrangements of words, implies not an instrumentalisation of a prior technic but rather the inventor’s intuition of a potential technicity that is yet always indeterminate.

The second element at play is a supplemental narrative tracing Crick’s inventionality to his use of LSD in small doses at the time of his and Watson’s modelling of the structure. This story is based on discussions that Crick is reported as having about this LSD use with various of his colleagues and friends throughout his life. This story mobilises specific elements of the fabula, or what structural linguists call ‘mythemes.’ While parts of the story might be regarded as ‘hearsay’ in the language of law, or as simply ‘immaterial’ in the language of science, in  Richard Doyle’s article, entitled LSDNA, and elsewhere, the language of the story, and inventions of its form, suggest new means of understanding Crick’s technicity, that is, his ‘knowing’ intuition of technicity, as semisynthetic, that is, as connected to the use of LSD.

In particular, Doyle’s fabula reanimates an indeterminate doxa: the popular belief in Crick’s LSD use in his inventive portmanteau, ‘LSDNA’. Here, in a rhetorical flourish, a technicolour dream of memory, of the psyche, and of a technicised psychoactivity, without an exterior technic, is dreamt. In apprehending the portmanteau ‘LSDNA’, temporal and causative bridges are built across the history of scientific invention in an hallucination of thought. Like Francis Ponge’s fable, entitled ‘Fabula’, which is carefully examined by Derrida in Psyche, the name of the work describes its operation. The portmanteau implies the transmissibility of technicity—that is, know-how—across time. It also indicates the possibility of LSD’s role in aiding later scientific inventionality, and thus it suggests the technicity of LSD itself, a drug with no accepted medical uses—but what about its uses as a technic? Through this inventive gramme, one may trace a lost technic to LSD, just as one may re-watch Crick’s discovery of DNA as a fabula, ‘Now in Technicolour!’

Another example of an absent technic in the face of an inventive model arises in the case of a curious representation, on a Temple relief in Luxor, Egypt, of what appears to be a sperm cell. In its context, the Egyptian relief may be read, like Doyle’s portmanteau, as an inventive, even coincidental, arrangement of words or glyphs that generate a fabulous meaning. Here, the putative spermatazoon appears to rise from a vase, beneath which is written, according to some hieroglyphic translations, ‘the water of life.’ Som Egyptologists have pointed out that the glyph is a variation on Alan Gardiner’s identified hieroglyph ‘F17’, which means to ‘purify or cleanse.’ This hieroglyph is usually crossed by a bull’s horn, however, and not a phallus or by seminal fluid, like it does in this relief.

The relief thus presents a fabulous text: its form is a combinatorial of meaning through which we may trace a technic, indeed, an invention, that is yet absent; an absence that represents for history, as for technicity, an ‘originary lack’. Scholars of the glyph, however, have struggled to explain this ‘seeming presence of knowledge amid the absence of a technic’.

The Egyptians had no known knowledge or uses of glass, so how might they have observed cellular materials? One Egyptologist suggests that multiples of cows’ eyes or crystals in certain lights might have been used to achieve the orders of magnification required for this aporetic discovery. There is, however, nothing in the glyph to demonstrate this.

The bas relief, as a fabula whose logos is indeterminate, then, must be supplemented by the story of the hypothesis of the cows’ eyes and crystals. Again, this historical narrative is readable, rightly or wrongly, as the invention of a story that supplements the absence of a technic, and the absence, more strictly, of a technical logos. In the absence of a technics, however, the cows’ eye fabula traces technicity, and thus invents a discovery (of sperm cells) through a technic (the cows eyes’) through a fabula (the glyph). Such connections problematise the nature of the possibility of invention and, in their totality, resonate with the impossibility of inventing the human, and, for Derrida, the impossibility, and thus the otherness, of the psyche.

And yet Derrida indicates a capacity to overcome this indeterminacy when he suggests that it not for the inventor to

…fall upon truth by chance, but, as it were, to know chance, to know how to be lucky, to recognise 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.[ix]

By this logic, knowing chance would seem to require an inventionality that is prior to technicity, and is the mythic. Albert Hoffman had to know, (and did know, as his account in LSD: My Problem Child suggests), where to “find luck”, as it were, in the Derridean sense of the “knowing how to be lucky”.

As Hoffman’s well-known story of the LSD discovery begins,

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…[x]

Acting upon this presentiment – by which Hoffman says he was “induced” ingest LSD, and interesting kind of scientific induction qua inductivism, Hoffman resynthesised the compound only to become delusional. Riding home upon his bike, Hoffman, at times, felt as though he was going to die, while at others, felt he had found a paradisiacal world of discovery and myth.

This possibility of this presentimental “aptitude for invention”, this strange foreseeability, resonates with the effects of LSD itself, which straddle the distinction between the illusion and the delusion. Near to this context, Freud speaks of “endopsychic myths”, and sometimes valorises what he calls endopsychic perception, a mode in which as the interiorised view of the psyche—afforded through certain psychotic delusions—achives creativity or inventivity at the intersection between technology and the unconscious. Similarly, Jung refers to the “mythopoeic imagination” and the “myth-forming structural elements of the psyche.” With Derrida, the mythic or in his word, the fabula, is similiarly an invention of the psyche, but the psyche is always already an Other. Derrida may thus be read, in variance with Stiegler, as regarding the psyche not so much as ‘unconscious’ than as responsive to technicity.

In this sense, the fabula in all of its indeterminacy, enlarges as it reconstitutes cinematic consciousness; it introduces even in the scientific act, the technic-coloured metacinema of the imagination, the hallucination, or the dream. The fabula thus also spans across time and epistemes, it preserves the pre-human while it also imparts a lucky chance to hominize, to intuit, the next kind, the neo-hominid.

By tracing the ‘originary lack’—an absent technic or a technic that is only just becoming— the fabula restructures technical determinism and reveals in an aporia of doubt, in an hallucinatory dream, the possibility for a kind of inventionality that is rehominizing, that enables one to think of oneself differently, that is, as the same but ‘Now in technicolour.’

Postscript

On 19 September 2011, players of the game Foldit accurately modelled an enzyme, a Mason-Pfizer monkey virus (MPMV) retroviral protease, an AIDS like retorvirus, in just three weeks, whereas that structure had eluded scientists for nearly a decade. The game Foldit makes use of players’ 3D puzzle-solving abilities and competitive nature to solve problems that computers alone have been unable to do.

The biochemist in charge of the trial stated that its aim was

“to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed. The ingenuity of game players is a formidable force that, if properly directed, can be used to solve a wide range of scientific problems.”

On this note, we might look forward to a time when the intuitive skills we have have acquired through creating games, as well as those presentimental and intuitive knowledge we have acquired in producing and reading stories and fabulae over millennia, may be fruitfully instrumentalised to structure discovery and invention itself.