1994 research outputs found
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Scales of Life:From Basal Cognition to Planetary Intelligence
Full text linkThis symposium seeks to investigate how information processing, cognition, and other forms of sensing and making sense occur at different scales, and how the ways of understanding these scales inform and deform one another across the contemporary earth and life sciences. An exploration of these issues involves thinking with the increasingly relevant notion of the ‘planetary’ as a question of climate change and empire (D. Coen), as related to Gaia theory and its recent comeback in Earth System Science, as inclusive of the technosphere and its geopolitical implications (B. Bratton), and as a framing for understanding intelligence and life as planetary-scale phenomena (A. Frank et al.). Such an endeavour also entails observing how the study of the behaviour of biological organisms creates a mid-level bias in terms of the understanding of function (agency, teleology), and how looking at life itself through the lens of basal cognition may suspend all assumptions about the necessary material substrates for purportedly high-level capacities (M. Levin). Tracing the history of these ideas and their evolution over time is also crucial to orienting our planetary futures (T. Moynihan)
Sylvia Wynter:and the Scales of the Human
Full text linkSylvia Wynter has produced a rich body of work synthesizing Black studies, anthropology, cybernetics, literary studies, Caribbean studies, feminist theory, and more. One pivotal concept within her theoretical apparatus is that of the human. Despite its use as a cultural weapon, empty promise, theological gambit, or justification for colonial conquest, Wynter thinks the human has yet to be properly articulated. For Wynter, the human operates at multiple scales, ranging from individual consciousness, to its embeddedness in a specific ‘genre’ of being human, to the racialized distribution of humanness at the planetary scale. At the same time, in her analysis, the term ‘Man’ has served as an exclusionary substitute for the human. This orthogonal humanism has invited a volley of disparate readings. Wynter has been rallied, among other things, to afropessimism, posthumanism, counter-humanism, and postcolonial and decolonial thought. This one-day symposium aims to articulate the stakes of Wynter’s work and its reception by way of attending to the different scales of the human, and of how the cosmological, philosophical, theological, economic, scientific, and political narratives in her work map onto one another and generate a rethinking of ‘the human project’
Possible Worlds and Reading Dante’s Commedia:Suspension of Disbelief (Coleridge, Horace, Tolkien, Cecco d’Ascoli) and the Solvents of Narrative and History
No full textMoving from Coleridge’s classic formulation, I discuss the method of reading the Commedia that I call detheologizing and my use, in The Undivine Comedy, of narratology as a solvent that promotes suspending the suspension of disbelief and becoming critical readers of Dante’s poem. When we detheologize, standing outside of the fiction, we detach our interpretation from reliance on the overdetermined binary grid of the Commedia’s structure and unlock the riches of the possible world that Dante made
The Intricate Weaving of The Undivine Comedy
No full textIn 1992 The Undivine Comedy proposed a new paradigm, showing the narrative threads woven by Dante’s single voice through cantos that linked the three canticles rather than separating them into pseudo-theological units. Barolini’s book challenges us to see the Comedy whole cloth, uncut, within and outside its editorially mechanical infrastructure. This recollection reviews especially the narrative of Barolini’s prose and thought across the breadth of The Undivine Comedy not as a collection of singular insights, or glosse puntuali, but as an integrative meditation on the sinews of narrative itself
Teodolinda Barolini and the Signs of Newness in The Undivine Comedy
No full textThis article highlights some of the bold and innovative ideas presented in Teodolinda Barolini's The Undivine Comedy. It examines the question of the veracity or otherwise of the poem according to Dante and according to some of his authoritative interpreters. It then explores the importance of The Undivine Comedy and other works by Barolini for understanding the narrative modes employed by Dante. In so doing, it defines the special status, neither true nor false, of his major work
