58 research outputs found
Reseña de "Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene"
No full textBook review of Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene.Reseña de Narrating the Mesh: Form and Story in the Anthropocene
The Silent Revolution of Mohammed Dib\u27s \u3ci\u3eQui se souvient de la mer\u3c/i\u3e
No full textA video recording of my presentation for the Parler la terre Colloquium.
This multimodal paper is about aesthetics, speculative philosophy, and the energy humanities. In it, I contemplate Algerian author Mohammed Dib’s visionary novel Qui se souvient de la mer (1962), emphasizing that our guide through the text is a nameless and wandering theorist who eventually goes underground. We encounter in the text an unnamed city—or, rather, cities within cities, and, indeed, cities beneath cities—besieged by fantastic forces and surrounded by a once-rejuvenating sea that recedes—an outré world that exists in its own spacetime. We find in this world minotaurs carrying flamethrowers; resuscitated mummies lying in ambush; an underground mole whose thunderous footsteps leave behind trails of blood; winged “iriace” that devour olives and spit out their pits, which rain down on the city like cinders; winged “spyrovirs” whose deafening shrieks blind and desiccate the city’s inhabitants; slithering walls that imprison and spit them out elsewhere; vomit of stones; holey skulls full of weeds; impossible songs and aromas; explosions without sources; hazy meteors and electric wind; a disintegrating star (the sun?), and so on. We encounter a world, then, where the fantastic is ubiquitous, a weird world that doesn’t belong. I therefore assert that Dib’s novel, which is ostensibly about the Algerian revolution, is a prototype for a new literary genre, le fantastique outré. I elaborate this assertion by closely reading passages from the original French text in apposition to the writings of Tzvetan Todorov, Mark Fisher, Louis Tremaine, Reza Negarestani, Frantz Fanon, David Benatar, Eugene Thacker, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Louis Althusser, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten. Along the way, I argue that Dib’s novel at once renders obsolete capitalist-nationalist epistemologies founded on colonial-racial violence and gifts us a generously infinite energy source in the speculative thought of oil, the absolute of the sea, a nomad space, desert of water. Such is the silent revolution of Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer
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The Damned of the Anthropocene: Performatively Modeling Energy Aesthetics for a New Structuralism
No full textThis study is about speculative aesthetics and philosophy. To speculate is to think an absolute, which is a nonrelative property of something. Not all absolutes are necessary, but all absolutes are possible. This study is also about language, structure, apocalyptic literature, and the energy humanities. Responding to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources, energy humanists ask us to contemplate how the study of language and literature may contribute to a transformation of petroculture, which limits our linguistic imagination of energy to oil. Language and literature shape our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings, and are therefore essential to a transformation of petroculture and its complicity with the capitalist economy of use and exchange, whose shared possibility condition is the colonial-racial reality. This study argues that the energy aesthetics in apocalyptic literature contributes to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to speculatively think absolutes, which gift us energy in excess of petroculture
Imaginaires francophones de l’intelligence artificielle (IA)
No full textIntroduction to the special issueIntroduction au numéro spécia
Imaginaires francophones de l’intelligence artificielle (IA)
No full textIntroduction au numéro spécial Introduction to the special issu
Here comes the author: evolving notions of authorship on social media
No full textRoland Barthes argues that “all identity” (142) is lost in the act of writing, and that the text arises
through interaction between the reader and the written word. Responding to Barthes, Michel
Foucault asserts that this highly relativistic perspective ignores the way that the “author
function” (107) serves to render the writer punishable for potential transgressive social, political,
or legal ideas that the text disseminates. While for Foucault the text’s meanings are unbound
from the author’s intent, he asserts that the authorial role ensures that some social apparatuses are
trained on distinguishable individuals. More recently, scholars such as Carla Bennedetti, Sean
Burke and Amardeep Singh have nuanced the authorial role, noting that authorial presence can
arise through the text. In conjunction with social media becoming central to conducting daily
life, some scholars stress the importance of radically revising existing conceptions of the nature
of authorship. I argue in this thesis that many genres of internet video on social media confirm
and challenge entrenched understandings of authorship, as authorial status vacillates between
creators and the wider userbase. Authority over the text’s meanings, and the consequences of
certain interpretations, are both decentralized from and centered upon the original creator. At
times, authority is spread out amongst other users to both productive and troubling effects. I
suggest questions about identity are pertinent to conversations about determining authorship, as
many social media users’ lives are packaged as content for their viewership while others author
texts without their identity ever being revealed to the public. Ultimately, social media reveals
that not only is authorship polysemous and polyvalent in the digital age, but that conflicting and
contemporaneous notions of authorship tend to exist at the same time and influence textual
reception and engagement.University of Manitoba Institute for the Humanities
Pollard Family FoundationMay 202
Primate protein-ligand interfaces exhibit significant conservation and unveil human-specific evolutionary drivers
No full textDespite the vast phenotypic differences observed across primates, their protein products are largely similar to each other at the sequence level. We hypothesized that, since proteins accomplish all their functions via interactions with other molecules, alterations in the sites that participate in these interactions may be of critical importance. To uncover the extent to which these sites evolve across primates, we built a structurally-derived dataset of ~4,200 one-to-one orthologous sequence groups across 18 primate species, consisting of ~68,000 ligand-binding sites that interact with DNA, RNA, small molecules, ions, or peptides. Using this dataset, we identify functionally important patterns of conservation and variation within the amino acid residues that facilitate protein-ligand interactions across the primate phylogeny. We uncover that interaction sites are significantly more conserved than other sites, and that sites binding DNA and RNA further exhibit the lowest levels of variation. We also show that the subset of ligand-binding sites that do vary are enriched in components of gene regulatory pathways and uncover several instances of human-specific ligand-binding site changes within transcription factors. Altogether, our results suggest that ligand-binding sites have experienced selective pressure in primates and propose that variation in these sites may have an outsized effect on phenotypic variation in primates through pleiotropic effects on gene regulation. Author summary Humans are very similar to other primates with respect to their genome sequences, yet exhibit striking phenotypic differences. We hypothesized that changes in a small number of important positions within the protein coding region of the genome may contribute to these phenotypic differences. We focused our study on evaluating the evolution of sites within proteins that interact with ligands, as variation at these sites has outsized potential for broader downstream effects. To uncover the extent to which ligand-binding sites have evolved across primates, we built a large database of sites within proteins that interact with DNA, RNA, small molecules, ions, or peptides. Using this dataset, we have shown that ligand-binding sites evolve more slowly than other protein residues, and that this is particularly pronounced for DNA and RNA binding sites. We have also shown that those ligand-binding sites that do vary are enriched in gene regulatory pathways, and that amino acids that are divergent in humans, but fixed among other primates, are found in several transcription factors. Our work aligns with long-standing evidence suggesting that regulatory networks influence phenotypic differences between primates, while uncovering novel contributions of ligand-binding sites to the evolution of these networks
Complete disruption of autism-susceptibility genes by gene editing predominantly reduces functional connectivity of isogenic human neurons
No full textAutism spectrum disorder (ASD) is phenotypically and genetically heterogeneous. We present a CRISPR gene editing strategy to insert a protein tag and premature termination sites creating an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) knockout resource for functional studies of ten ASD-relevant genes (AFF2/FMR2, ANOS1, ASTN2, ATRX, CACNA1C, CHD8, DLGAP2, KCNQ2, SCN2A, TENM1). Neurogenin 2 (NGN2)-directed induction of iPSCs allowed production of excitatory neurons, and mutant proteins were not detectable. RNA sequencing revealed convergence of several neuronal networks. Using both patch-clamp and multi-electrode array approaches, the electrophysiological deficits measured were distinct for different mutations. However, they culminated in a consistent reduction in synaptic activity, including reduced spontaneous excitatory postsynaptic current frequencies in AFF2/FMR2-, ASTN2-, ATRX-, KCNQ2-, and SCN2A-null neurons. Despite ASD susceptibility genes belonging to different gene ontologies, isogenic stem cell resources can reveal common functional phenotypes, such as reduced functional connectivity
Disease progression in Plasmodium knowlesi malaria is linked to variation in invasion gene family members.
No full textEmerging pathogens undermine initiatives to control the global health impact of infectious diseases. Zoonotic malaria is no exception. Plasmodium knowlesi, a malaria parasite of Southeast Asian macaques, has entered the human population. P. knowlesi, like Plasmodium falciparum, can reach high parasitaemia in human infections, and the World Health Organization guidelines for severe malaria list hyperparasitaemia among the measures of severe malaria in both infections. Not all patients with P. knowlesi infections develop hyperparasitaemia, and it is important to determine why. Between isolate variability in erythrocyte invasion, efficiency seems key. Here we investigate the idea that particular alleles of two P. knowlesi erythrocyte invasion genes, P. knowlesi normocyte binding protein Pknbpxa and Pknbpxb, influence parasitaemia and human disease progression. Pknbpxa and Pknbpxb reference DNA sequences were generated from five geographically and temporally distinct P. knowlesi patient isolates. Polymorphic regions of each gene (approximately 800 bp) were identified by haplotyping 147 patient isolates at each locus. Parasitaemia in the study cohort was associated with markers of disease severity including liver and renal dysfunction, haemoglobin, platelets and lactate, (r = ≥ 0.34, p = <0.0001 for all). Seventy-five and 51 Pknbpxa and Pknbpxb haplotypes were resolved in 138 (94%) and 134 (92%) patient isolates respectively. The haplotypes formed twelve Pknbpxa and two Pknbpxb allelic groups. Patients infected with parasites with particular Pknbpxa and Pknbpxb alleles within the groups had significantly higher parasitaemia and other markers of disease severity. Our study strongly suggests that P. knowlesi invasion gene variants contribute to parasite virulence. We focused on two invasion genes, and we anticipate that additional virulent loci will be identified in pathogen genome-wide studies. The multiple sustained entries of this diverse pathogen into the human population must give cause for concern to malaria elimination strategists in the Southeast Asian region
The social lives of lived and inscribed objects: a Lapita perspective
No full textAs James Cook and his men on the Resolution and Discovery sailed through Polynesia and the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America, they were treated to a number of welcome rituals and ceremonial performances. In this paper the author looks beyond the immediate face value of objects to a more rounded understanding of objects and their agency. The author suggests rethinking objects as social interventions and possible events rather than as portals to archaeological information. To do this I will develop a distinction drawn by feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1994) between lived and inscribed bodies and employ this distinction as a conceptual tool for thinking about the agency of objects, particularly Lapita pottery
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