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Practices of Speculation
Get PDFThis volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice
Practices of Speculation
No full textThis volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice
Practices of Speculation
Get PDFThis volume offers innovative ways to think about speculation at a time when anticipation of catastrophe in an apocalyptic mode is the order of the day and shapes public discourse on a global scale. It maps an interdisciplinary field of investigation: the chapters interrogate hegemonic ways of shaping the present through investments in the future, while also looking at speculative practices that reveal transformative potential. The twelve contributions explore concrete instances of envisioning the open unknown and affirmative speculative potentials in history, literature, comics, computer games, mold research, ecosystem science and artistic practice
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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transMadness, in terms of: An Emblogged Experiment
No full text“transMadness, in terms of: An Emblogged Experiment” uses the concept of transMadness as a theoretical, epistemological, and methodological approach to engage practices of digital gender, sexual, and diagnostic self-determination. I turn to Tumblr, Reddit, and other virtual platforms, not only as sites of camaraderie amid social abandonment, but also as spaces of lived theoretical intervention. Community-coined xenogenders and neopronouns, self-diagnosis, and alterhuman subjectivities are sites of radically inventive identity negotiation. Drawing on epistemological interventions in trans studies, critical disability/Mad studies, and feminist science studies, this text is simultaneously an illustration of the rigorous, relevant transMad discourse occurring, often deliberately, outside the bounds of the academy, and an argument to engage seriously with rigor’s transMad, very online Others. I trace the genealogy and ongoing impacts of transMad communities online and beyond through four themed chapters, whose successive keywords build upon each other: autonomy, opacity, discourse, and pedagogy. Fusing intersubjective autoethnographic, poetic, and textual analytic methodologies, I engage bloggers and social media users not as subjects but cotheorizers and fellow practitioners of trans-formative scholarly care, asking what epistemic possibilities, if any, open up when the grammars of carceral classification are stolen back and thoroughly scrambled by their “objects.” Ultimately, I argue that transMad language choices constitute a form of practical speculation, which, being always and already relational, facilitate the emergence of sustainable creative publics able to support them
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Ruptures: Life without Germs in the Microbiome Era
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the legacy of germfree animal research in 21st-century human microbiome science. I show how the scope and diversity of human-associated microorganisms are being revealed through a deep cultural imagination of life in the absence of microbes. Across professional and popular scientific writing as well as fiction, I uncover a pervasive rhetorical maneuver I term speculative germfreeness: the imagination of aseptic catastrophe, at the nested scales of individual bodies, societies, and planets, deployed to prompt readers into revaluing the microbes that surround them. Speculative germfreeness is a cornerstone of contemporary microbiome discourse, essential to its claims for the importance of microbiome research in transcending the conventional paradigm of microbial eradication. Chapter 1 surveys the origins of germfree animal research in the late nineteenth century and its first adoption as a speculative device in the fiction of H. G. Wells. The chapter documents the historical imagination of germfree planets and societies in fiction and in popular science and concludes by showing how microbiome scientists and journalists draw on these precedents. Chapter 2 follows the thread of germfree disaster on a smaller scale in examining how fiction and popular science have told stories of bodies, both animal or human, confined to germfree bubbles. I detail how microbiome discourse reworks these narratives as parables for the folly of the antibiotic approach to microbial life. In Chapter 3, I argue that obstetric microbiomics is rewriting the stories of germfree disaster fiction in order to frame birth as a consequential passage between the germfree uterus and the germy planet. The chapter suggests that these rewritings cast mothers as singularly responsible for seeding their children’s nascent microbiomes and also burden them with the obligation to mother the microbial planet itself. Finally, Chapter 4 demonstrates how microbiome research, in its recent shift to translational metagenomics, has moved away from earlier themes of germfree disaster by developing novel metaphors of human-bacterial conversation. I argue that the ideal of speaking with one’s microbiome loosens the strictures of germfree obligation by establishing bacteria as agential participants in a conscientious human-microbial partnership
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Modeling Revolution: A Global History of Games as Model Systems
No full textThis dissertation tells a history of how games have been employed as model systems. By focusing on the influence of games upon the theory and design of symbolic computation from the seventeenth century till the end of the twentieth, it argues that games are the paradigmatic technologies for a still-ongoing revolution in modeling practice. From probability theory to general-purpose computers and from game theory to artificial intelligence and machine learning, the domains and technologies emerging from this modeling revolution define every aspect of industrial and post-industrial life.My first chapter argues that games were central to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s philosophy as modeling tools by which situations arising in the world could be formalized and subsequently rationalized. By contextualizing Leibniz's project within the earlier Llullian art, the theory of probability derived from games of chance, and other discourses of games in medieval and early modern Europe, I describe how his approach to games was unique in European history and synthesized many different discourses into a general science of games.
In chapter two, I describe how Charles Babbage’s earliest work on a machine for general computation was inspired by his mathematical study of games. This research on games, which Babbage explicitly credits to Leibniz’s own study of the “geometry of situation” through games, was also a topic of interest in the early correspondence of Babbage and Ada Lovelace. Games provided crucial tools for notational description of mechanisms, the depiction of computational processes using abstract spatial grids, and temporal sequences of operations that would allow for the development of techniques like the “anticipating carry” mechanism.
In my third chapter, I take a broader view of twentieth- and twenty-first century systems thinking—comprising formal mathematics, cybernetics, computer science, AI/ML, cognitive science, operations research, economics, and other related domains—to argue that the game of chess modeled for these domains the twentieth-century concept of a formal-symbolic system. I index the ubiquitous discussion and study of chess in systems thinking in the first half of the twentieth century to changes in the concepts, strategies, and institutions of chess in the decades immediately prior. Subsequent changes in chess, including the creative ‘hypermodernist’ movement and its crosspollination with competitive Go, continued to have impacts on how games were understood, discussed, and studied in the sciences.
In chapter four, I focus more specifically on chess in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that it transformed in the early USSR into a tool for modeling dialectical materialism. Chess was understood by Soviet scientists, politicians, and competitors as a tool for cultural uplift and social rationalization, as well as a neutral site for the empirical demonstration of the superiority of socialism over capitalism, because it allowed both ideologies to be represented simultaneously across the board. Finally, I describe a 1926 state-sponsored psychotechnical study on the game of chess as a (now forgotten) exemplar of a Marxist theory of games as modeling technologies that provides a far more nuanced description of games as evolutionary tools than that of Johan Huizinga a decade later.
Chapter five returns to the topic of symbolic computation as a global domain of technoscientific research to argue that differing conceptions of chess were central to the twentieth-century development of symbolic computation, cybernetics, organizational research, and artificial intelligence. By recontextualizing the pivotal ITEP-Stanford match between Soviet and American AI researchers in light of Soviet theories of chess and intelligence, I argue that, far from being a ‘fall from grace’ for AI, the ideological neutrality of chess allowed computer chess research to influence systems thinking far more broadly than AI alone could have done. I conclude by describing the chess theory of Soviet control systems engineer, computer chess researcher, and world chess champion Mikhail Botvinnik. I suggest that Botvinnik’s project of formalizing “the algorithm” of historical chess masters into computer language in order to optimize economic planning and other massive social projects represents a revolutionary theory of modeling practice that can help us to reimagine the possibilities of games and computer technology alike in our moment. The mid-century synthesis of communist and capitalist game research produced all the necessary tools for us to construct entirely new futures, and these tools are everywhere around us. It is time to understand them as such
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How to Build a Planet: Science Fiction, Planetary Science, and the Making of Worlds
No full textThis dissertation describes the construction of speculative planetology over the course of the 20th century. Speculative planetology is a conceptual toolkit for understanding planets as whole, interconnected systems. It has been negotiated through disciplinary exchanges among science, mass media, and public discourse. For example, climate scientists cite science fiction in their textbooks, while meteorologists take up computer graphics techniques designed for imaginary worlds. Across social media, in scientific publications, and at science fiction conventions, scientists and fans come together to speculate about planets like Mars, Venus, Arrakis, and Trappist-1e. Understanding our planet has required not only data collection on, and computation about, our world and others in our solar system, but also cultural work and impulses of the imagination. While the climate crisis has lent urgency and increasing importance to the scientific modeling of planets, the frames, metaphors, and forms used to limn a world were often borrowed from the arts and public culture before they became conceptual tools of science. These themes are elaborated roughly chronologically in four chapters, each of which traces interactions between science fiction and science about how to build worlds. My first chapter treats the origins of the interdisciplinary field of planetary science, showing how it emerged alongside genre changes in science fiction. I index these with Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity and the journal Icarus, both of which privilege planets as sites for interdisciplinary convergence. The second chapter is about a discourse and set of assumptions shared between climate science and planetary science fiction. With Frank Herbert’s Dune as the main example, I show feedback loops between science fictional references by climate modelers and science fiction’s own use of scientific theory and rhetoric. The third is a study of how speculative planetology was picked up in the field of computer graphics. Here, science fictional narrativity in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and 2010: The Year We Make Contact helped bridge between epistemic scales, allowing computer scientists to claim they were “simulating natural phenomena” despite drawing on decidedly unrealistic mechanisms to create their visualizations of planets. The fourth chapter explores the ethical and political concerns that emerge from a planetary perspective. Drawing on feminist science studies and examining cultural objects from the first successful general circulation model to the videogame SimEarth, it argues that speculative planetology—when done right—requires its practitioners to recognize that no perspective on any planet is complete, or comparable with a putatively universal perspective. This project makes the case for humanists to take up our part of the burden of planetary knowledge production by using the tools of critical analysis on a wider range of materials and contexts in order to reshape the modalities of speculative planetology
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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