Abstract: I want to begin with a simple question: How is it that this thing I call "my body" is also, simultaneously, cells, atoms, part of an ecology, and bits of star stuff evolved over billions of years' This is what I would argue is the most radical implication of scalar discourses: they not only describe radically nonhuman perspectives but also imply that the things we experience at this scale are, all at once, all these different things. While the tropes and effects of scale have long been an essential part of scientific, philosophical, and literary productions, the disorienting nature of this kind of scalar rewriting of the cosmos is something that we're just beginning to orient ourselves to.Indeed, given the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A slowdown in the growth of computing performance will have global economic and political repercussions.Marx's formulation of the reserve army of labor and its relation to capital is well known: unemployment is a necessary feature of capitalism because, despite being predicated upon the exploitation of labor, capitalism paradoxically favors the concentration of fixed capital, or the machinic elements of the production process, over the concentration of variable capital, or human labor. As Ernest Mandel puts it, "If the extension of output maintained the given relationship between inputs of living labour and inputs of dead labour (machinery and raw materials), it would rapidly reach both a physical limit (the total ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Distributed Cognition in Medieval and Renaissance Culture is the second book of the Edinburgh History of Distributed Cognition series, which considers a wide range of works from classical antiquity to modernism in order to explore ways in which the humanities benefits from thinking of cognition as distributed via objects, language, and social, technological, and natural resources and environments. This comprehensive and highly ambitious collection coedited by Miranda Anderson and Michael Wheeler explores the notion that mind is spread out across brain, body, and world in the medieval and Renaissance periods. It argues that the various theories of distributed cognition offer an opportunity to integrate the ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Have you ever had a backache while reading Nietzsche—or Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Schelling, Fichte, Herder, Coleridge, Freud, Jung, Bergson, Bataille, Ballard, and Burroughs, to name only the most prominent line of thinkers traced here, albeit not in this order' (An alternative string of lesser-known or more abstruse thinkers also present might go something like: Steno, Oken, Frenenczi, Velikovksy, Reich, Leroi-Gourhan, Blumenberg, Morgan.) If so, then Spinal Catastrophism will resonate deeply, even painfully. Moynihan has produced no mere oddball intellectual history of the role that oft-obscured spinal thinking has played in modern Western thought, however; instead, he has (also) written a marvelous ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: A verdant field ripe for interdisciplinary cross-pollination, plant studies has been slow to take root in the humanities and the arts. Examining the perennial difficulties of representing the lives of plants—ethically, culturally, politically, historically, philosophically, and textually—helps to explain why. Against predominant views of vegetal life as vegetative (in the medical sense), Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari's collaboratively authored Radical Botany charts four-hundred-plus years of storytelling about plant life to identify mainly historical, philosophical, and textual conditions that prove conducive to recognizing the vegetal as a lively, animate force in world-making. Compelled by Gilles Deleuze and ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Upon initial glance at the December 1941 issue of House and Garden, the reader would have come across a seemingly typical overview of the décor in Lester Gaba's New York apartment. Gaba was an enterprising window display designer and mannequin maker who had worked hard to establish himself in the world of fashion and visual merchandising, first in Chicago and then in New York. The peculiar thing about the feature, however, was the person giving the tour. It was not Gaba who led readers through the rooms, but rather his mannequin Cynthia who served as stoic hostess. Here in the living room, Cynthia says, "I spend most of my hours." She continues:I sit at the piano and greet Lester's friends as they come in. ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida's influential account of how animals have been conceptualized and treated over the past two hundred years, he emphasizes the ways in which "zoological, ethological, biological, and genetic forms of knowledge, which remain inseparable from techniques of intervention into their object," led to a radical shift in our understanding of and relationship to non-human species.1 According to Derrida, this modern conception of animals works to reinforce human dominance by depriving animals of a rich, unpredictable inner life that would allow them to elude the grasp of a scientist, philosopher, or slaughterhouse worker. Animals are denied the ability to give "a response that ... Read More PubDate: 2020-10-23T00:00:00-05:00
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