poison, science, and becoming

It's interesting that the word alchemy derives from the Arabic al-kimia, which roughly translates as "the art of transformation"--a becoming. I mention this because in reading Nietzsche's The Gay Science, he says, "'description'...distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science..."(p.172, S. 112). In this section, cause and effect, "explanation" or "description," is merely a process of perfecting "the image of becoming without reaching beyond the image or behind it"(172, my italics). The process, utilizing this static figure of the image, seems like some sort of transmutation--like taking an element, explaining it, classifying, categorizing, and then, as if a "miracle"--changing it in some essential way.

Nietzche's "miracle" is problematic because it questions the possibility of explanation whatsoever. An attempt to understand "it" and its fluxuations--the phenomena of nature, science, alchemy, etc.--demands working with ideas (or "things" as Nietzsche calls them)--concepts that continually elude perception: "lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces"(ibid.). This perfected image of becoming is an attempt to describe not only the world around us, but most importantly, ourselves. The process of description, scientific or otherwise, hinges on an impulsive act of creation--an ordering of the chaos that suffuses our universe.

How is this creation spread? How does it become habit, custom, common knowledge, etc.? Like a poison, a viral contagion, the continual creation of scientific thinking is that which forms an "impulse to doubt, to negate, to wait, to collect, to dissolve"(173, S. 113). To take this literally, for example, think about batteries. Our scientific understanding of the battery comes from the Voltaic pile (invented by Alessandro Volta in 1800), and is essentially just zinc and copper piled on top of each other with electrolytes in between. As we have discovered in our modern age--once again, scientifically--the battery is a posion and becomes more poisonous and destructive as it degrades. Not only is it a poison in this sense, but also in the sense that it required cruelty, killing, torture, etc. for it to have existed. Only after Galvani began experimenting with his frogs--in essence electrocuting them--did Volta get inspired to make his famous poisonous pile (could we call it a pile of shit?). Not only do frogs get sacrificed for the creation of scientific thought--people do too: "Many hecatombs of human beings were sacrificed before these impulses learned to comprehend their coexistence and to feel that they were all functions of one organizing force within one human being"(ibid.). Remember Walter Benjamin's angel of history? This history, this history of scientific knowledge, is a pile of corpses too.

(this painting is by Giovanni Aldini, Galvani's cousin)