eTopia (E-Journal)
Not a member yet
74 research outputs found
Sort by
OUR POSTHUMANTIES FUTURE: HEARING NIETSCHE ON THE PROBLEM OF SCIENCE
Get PDFIn a recent characterization of the parameters of posthumanism, Professor Cary Wolfe calls upon Jacques Derrida as a means of framing one side of its methodological commitments. In the 1971 interview his Posthumanities webpage cites, Derrida emphasizes how we might criticize science “in the name of something other than truth and science,” and further, how science might look once “the metaphysical value of truth has been put into question.”1 No doubt Wolfe is correct to note Derrida’s concerns here in connection with the future of the humanities. For what threatens this future most is the view that science should reign in the academy based on its ‘more rigorous’ modes of inquiry. Increasingly, administrators fall into step with a current political climate that sees the alpha and omega of higher education in job training, and in related ostensible, pragmatic endeavors. Yet, in this crescendo of utility exists a corresponding Odyssean will to ignore questions as to the possibility of knowledge, scientific or otherwise. And the reasons for these stopped-up ears have an equally unimaginative and circular basis: such problems ‘are no longer worth considering because they do not benefit science or technological progress’. Exacerbating this refusal to hear is the current generation of philosophical nodders, who, while knowing better, do nothing to dissuade us from the belief that scientific methods can discover truth on the basis of common-sense.2 Given these attitudes, it is hardly surprising, despite Derrida’s ‘siren call’, that the humanities are attempting self-renewal. But as we reimagine the humanities we must also understand that the positivist ‘template for knowledge’remains at the helm. Thus, important though Derrida’s questions are for the humanities, post- or otherwise, awakening the academy from its current methodological slumber requires more of an alarm than an enchanting song
___________________________: SILENCE, THE AFFECT PHRASE, THE WAIT.
Get PDFThe relation between experience, language and reality is not immediate or equivalent. While often conflated to demand a commensurate exchange, language is an unstable medium that can be full or empty of ‘truth’. When people have differing accounts of what may seem to be the same reality, the variability of language becomes more apparent. An event may take place before a group of witnesses and each retelling may be different. Indeed, depending on its nature, an event may have caused a trauma to the extent that the experience may never achieve adequate representation in language. Each witness may struggle to recall an experience that exceeds the capacity of conscious perception. The only testimony of such an experience may be silence or inarticulate sound that communicates more than meaning and less than sense. Does this entail that nothing happened? An absence of speech could mean that there is nothing to say or that nothing can be said – silence is indistinguishably non-language and an allusion to the limits of language. Jean-Francois Lyotard’s The Differend: Phrases in Dispute pursues the limits of language. Herein Lyotard asks, "How can you establish what is not without criticizing what is? The undetermined cannot be established" (Lyotard, 9). This paper will examine the potential of silence to depose the subject through Lyotard’s concepts of the differend, the affect-phrase, the event and reality
DEAD TO THE WORLD: EMBODIED GENDER TRANSGRESSION AND THE LOSS OF HUMANITY
Get PDFThe accepted scope of humanity, though broad on first glance, actually represents a narrow, shallow stream. Within Western culture, the expectations, proscriptions and limitations tied to one’s own “human” status remain largely unidentified until they are transgressed. The human body (lynchpin of humanity) is considered something not to be tampered with, at risk of the loss of one’s human status. While some forms of modification, such as plastic surgery, tattooing, and piercing have become more broadly accepted, more extreme modifications of the body, intentional or otherwise, can render the subject as a freak—an implicit social death. Here emerges a curious overlap between the freak and the spectre, both inhabiting a liminal space between inhuman and exhuman, hypervisible in their distance from humanity. Broadly conceived of as mutilated or desecrated, transgender bodies are alternately read as cultural freaks and social specters, demonstrating the loss of humanity that occurs when transgression is physically written onto the body
Ethical Community as More than Human: Food Animals and Aporetic Decision
No full textJacques Derrida made many provocative suggestions about our relationships with other animals in the few years before he passed away in 2004. A question that he did not pursue very far is one that I would want to ask him forever: What is your final position on vegetarianism? One of Derrida’s enduring legacies is his assertion of the ethical imperative that we explore “eating well” or “determining the best, most respectful, most grateful and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self” (1995: 281-82). The urgent context of this imperative is the factory farm, which as Derrida argued, is the site of an unprecedented assertion of human biopower over other animals, and which buttresses a particularly imperious form of human subjectivity in theprocess.1 However, to the disappointment of theorists from David Wood to Paola Cavalieri, Derrida refrained from endorsing vegetarianism as a means of eating well. His reticence is no doubt due to his wariness of ethical programs which as Cary Wolfe has argued “reduce[] ethics to the very antithesis of ethics by reducing the aporia of judgment in which the possibility of justice resides to the mechanical unfolding of a positivist calculation” (2003: 69). While it is crucial to keep such reductions in mind, I posit that Derrida was overhasty in his rejection of vegetarianism. I take as my central provocationMatthew Calarco’s conclusion that Derrida’s reticence to embrace vegetarianism is not what matters most. As he puts it,Derrida is not our pastor or physician, he should not serve as our guide to eatingwell. If Derrida is hesitant to openly declare that, for those who live incontemporary western, urban societies, vegetarianism is generally a morerespectful way of relating to animals than meat eating is, then we should proceedwithout him. (2004: 197). Instead, Calarco argues for continuing Derrida’s work in the mode of countersignature—following Derrida according to the spirit of his work and not its letter, which often implies a certain not-following. In Calarco’s words, to approach Derrida’s work in countersignaure is “to think through the disjunction of deconstruction and vegetarianism in order to bring deconstructive thinking to bear on the undisclosed anthropocentric and carnophallogocentric limits of the dominant discourses in animal ethics and vegetarianism” (ibid.).2 In other words, if vegetarianism seems too ethically reductive sometimes, there is no need to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater, as Derrida perhaps did in this particular instance. I say this is with all due respect of the fact that he so rarely did throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead, maybe we can think vegetarianism otherwise, in ways that would hold more water—with Derrida, with ourselves and with other people who aim to be as thoughtful as possible about ethics
BEYOND HUMAN: THE FLIGHT TOWARDS AN ANIMAL IN THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN/CZECH LITERATURE (ČAPEK, KUNDERA—KAFKA, HAŠEK)
Get PDFThe objective of this paper is to argue—to put it somewhat emphatically—that European culture and society regards humanity highly while at the same time degrades and mutilates animals, physically or epistemologically, by exploiting, venerating and pampering them. As the paper tries to argue, these cultural and social attitudes would benefit from the radically deterritorializing schizophrenic treatment of Deleuze as it is anticipated in the works of two Central European modernist authors, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek.As to the outline of the paper, I would like to make few brief notes on the passagefrom the Nietzschean to Deleuzian tradition of an anti-humanist thinking (provided these two can be at all seen as distinct and separate), as well as on the anti-humanist topoi in Western and Central European literature. Second, on the backdrop of this brief and fragmented observation on the genealogy of anti-humanist writing, I would like to offer a further discussion of texts of the four Czech (or Central European) authors I indicate in the paper’s title
FATHER OF THE BOTTOM: TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF SAME-SEX MARRIAGE
Get PDFOn July 20th, 2005, the federal government of Canada passed Bill C-38, the Civil Marriage Act, which changed the legal definition of marriage as the lawful union of two persons to the exclusion of all others. This changed the federal legislation from defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman and broadened the legal definition to include same-sex couples. Canadians for Equal Marriage (CEM), one of the principal advocacy organizations, lauded the change in legislation as an important move towards equality for same-sex individuals. The organization’s advocacy work leading up to the vote in the House of Commons, along with their public media campaigns, reinforced the position that saw the inclusion of queer unions into federal definitions of marriage as an important moment for the queer rights movement. The discourse that surrounded this debate leading up to and after July 20th framed marriage as the cornerstone of queer rights and equality; yet, it lacked any sort of critique about the broader social and political implications for queer identity and the queer rights movement. Conflating marriage with equality, CEM’s discourse around gay marriage lacked any critique of how inclusion into state-legislated familial structures could impact broader discourses of queer identity. Instead, the majority of articles focused on how queer marriage was obligatory and called on all members of the queer community to embrace and organize politically around the issue of marriage. This discourse suggests the recognition of same sex unions is indicative of a broader social equality. However, it must be asked whether this assimilation into a heterosexual/heteronormative framework ensures real equality or merely the assimilation of queer identity through state-mediated kinship structures. Although gay marriage is a tool for enabling the inclusion of same-sex partners into benefits packages, tax breaks and other federally legislated benefits, the language used by gay marriage advocates problematically links concepts of equal rights to marriage without questioning or critiquing the concept of state-mediated kinship structures. Looking at the media campaign around this issue, and how it linked the attaining of rights to legalizing marriage it must be asked whether this would create real social acceptance, or whether the same-sex marriage debate is an in actuality just an attempt to normalize queer relationships into a larger heteronormative framework
Lyotard and the Oikos
Get PDFIn The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard criticises Niklas Luhmannfor making performativity or context-control the goal of systems, claiming that this legitimates the exclusion of partners constituting the context of a system from the decision-making process which administrates it (Lyotard, 1984: 60 ff.). In “Oikos,”Lyotard takes this criticism a step further when he relates the context or environment of the system and the partners constituting it to the etymological root of “ecology,” the oikeion , which stands for the asymmetrical relation of familiarity with or knowledge of something or someone. As the entropic source of the system’s performativity and “reduction of complexity,” the oikeion refers to the alter of undermined humanity as well as other forms of life, whose selective attention is not sufficiently capable or developed to act as ego or be addressed as alter-ego by a receiver within the social system. Lyotard’s approach is not to reaffirm the dualism of Man and Nature, but to instead detect the differend produced by its dissociation from the “inside” of system and the “outside” of environment – for the system is no more like Man than its environment is like Nature in Systemtheorie. Rather, everything is Nature, and those who are able to put its potential into action most efficiently are able to assume the secure position of “Man” in the humanistic war against those who lack this efficiency. Lyotard aims to listen to those who have lost power over their oikos, or the “inside” which has become somebody else’s“outside.
POSTHUMAN REVISIONS OF ORGANIC FORM IN POETRY
Get PDFWhat does the posthuman have to do with contemporary revisions of organic form in poetry? Do these revisions of organic form have anything to offer to posthumanist theory? Given that literary organicism, in its most familiar Romantic and New Critical forms, evokes holism, aesthetic closure, and the humanizing function of poetry, this pairing seems an unlikely one. Donna Haraway, in the well-known “Cyborg Manifesto” that launched one strand of posthumanism, sees political promise in the cyborg precisely because it escapes the naturalizing logic of organic tropes: “The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature . . . The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust” (Haraway1991, 51). But can decay figure otherwise than as a reactionary reinscription of origins? I argue that Jed Rasula and Frank Bidart, from two disparate poetic lineages, both use figures of decay—even posthumous decay—to revise literary organicism
ART AS OTHER COLLECTIVES
Get PDFArt and nature, art in nature, share a common structure: that of excessive and useless production—production for its own sake, production for the sake of profusion and differentiation. (Grosz 2008: 9)In 1986, artist Lily Yeh was asked by her friend, acclaimed dancer Arthur Hall, to transform the abandoned lot next to his house. He had seen the indoor gardens that she had created in galleries, and asked if she could do a similar project outdoors. When Yeh first entered the North Philadelphia neighbourhood of Fairhill-Hartranft, it was nothing like the neighbourhood she would leave in 2004. Walking down the streets for the first time she saw many adults with suspicious faces staring at her as she made her way past abandoned lot, after abandoned lot. Broken glass in boarded up doorways were the gathering places for people with nowhere else to go. Children played with whatever was lying around; hollering mothers worried about what they were picking up. The lines of poverty and racism, the systematic marginalization and neglect of (primarily) black people in the United States, resulted in the overdetermined positioning of the so-called‘inner-city ghetto.’These lines of death were produced through the conjunctions of policy, brutality, racism and poverty that resulted in a territorialization of this place as a site of crime, violence, drug addiction and hopelessness. But at the beginning of the 20th century, this neighbourhood was the site of summer homes, known for its fields of strawberries. It was then refashioned into a bustling heart of manufacturing, the fields were paved over, and the taste of strawberries turned to burning plastics. The depression hit. Factories began to close, leaving nothing in their wake but a faint rancid smell and contaminated soil. The neighbourhood transformed, riding a wave of white flight and racial tension. People rose up, spoke out and refused to suffer any longer, but in the turmoil, in their anger, they burned the neighbourhood. More suffering, but this time there was simply a feeling of abandonment, hopelessness, stagnation. The policies of the Reagan years left their effect. Lots collected garbage. And so it was that Yeh found herself in North Philadelphia
Morphing Bodies and Mechanicial Eyes: A Reassessment of the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière
Get PDFPhotography’s unique ability to render visible what is ordinarily invisible lends it to scientific observation and artistic expression alike. Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues exploit this capacity of the photograph in their documentation of hysteria—work that is located at a blurry intersection between art and science. The photographs taken at the Salpêtrière women’s asylum in Paris, France, for their original publication in La Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière (1881), came to my attention through Georges Didi-Huberman’s book, the Invention of Hysteria (2003). They depict, through a clinical eye, patients that are mid-gesture, in the throes of hysterical fits. The hysteria documents exemplify an instance where the power of the performed gesture is focalized by doctors in the production of identities, and where the power of the photographic apparatus is deployed in the production of gestures. I intend to show how the body and its gestures might have been understood in the field of neuropsychiatry at the time these photographs were exposed, and then I will look at the means by which machines produce gestures with some degree of autonomy. Given a new understanding of the independent functions of imaging technologies, it will be possible to argue that there are some manners in which the technologies of representation actually participate in the production of bodies