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Canalization and Creative Evolution: Images of Life in Bergson and Whitehead
Get PDFWhitehead famously wrote that the status of life in nature constituted the modernproblem both of philosophy and science. But Bergson could just as easily have penned thosewords. Indeed, his Creative Evolution stands as one of the most serious engagements with theproblem of life in recent philosophical history. Life, for Bergson, was to be thought of as a kindof impetus, a drive or force. But he insisted that this was only an image borrowed frompsychology, the best one available, but an image no less. This is because images are essential tothe organization of scientific discourse and practice. We think through them, use them not onlyas explanatory aids, but as callipers first: without them, we are unable to grasp and articulate ourobjects of study, even before the endeavour to communicate what it is that we have managed tograsp. Perhaps most famous of the various images that animate Creative Evolution is that of thecanal, or canalization. It is striking that this image managed to find its way, through Whitehead’sProcess and Reality, into modern embryology, where it continues to serve as an image for theway epigenetic landscapes operate in order to bring about, or canalize, a small number of endresults form a large number of developmental potentialities.This paper briefly traces the history of that image from out of Bergson’s philosophy oflife, through Whitehead’s creative metaphysical appropriation of it, and into the embryology ofC.H. Waddington. In order to make sense of that history, I do three things: first, I situate theimage of the canal in Bergson’s Creative Evolution, elucidating its context and aims; second, Idemonstrate its utility for Whitehead’s metaphysics, the new purposes for which it was deployed;and third, I argue that it was this latter reconfiguration of the concept that prepared it for itsenlistment as a key moment in embryological explanation.I claim that the canal occupies a privileged position in Bergson’s philosophy of life, for itis an image of life that is turned against itself as an image, meant to demonstrate the limits ofimagistic thought. I conclude the paper with a series of comments on this suggestion: that it wasthe image of the canal that found its way into modern embryology tells us something importantabout the relation between science and philosophy, or between image and imagination, matterand life. On these points, Bergson and Whitehead converge on a novel philosophy of nature thatis capable both of responding to scientific discoveries as well as of accommodating them withinan enlarged process-oriented metaphysics
Gender Disintegration: Performance, Context and the Body
Get PDFPosteraro analyzes gender disintegration. His analysis also shows the contextualization of gender
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
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
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Toward an Organismic Subjectivity: Affect, Relation, Entanglement
Get PDFThe motivating ambition of this thesis is the endeavour to think the subject anthropo-eccentrically, to free it of its conscious-agential overtones and to foreground instead the active organism in all its ecologically entangled, metabolically perspectival glory. I define the subject, in the course of the thesis, as a body productive of its own spatial and temporal fields, a body that lives its own space and time. Ecology is pluralized, made bodily. And the body itself is dynamicized and rendered porous—less an absolute limit than a variable topology separating, uniting, and enfolding organism and ecology, self and other, subject and world. I begin, in Chapter 1, with Deleuze and the rhythmic contractions that define the temporal pole of organismic subjectivity. In Chapter 2, I turn toward the way spaces are configured on the basis of the affective enaction of organismic life. This is organismic spatiality. In Chapter 3, I introduce Deleuze’s distinction between the actual and virtual in order to properly theorize the way organismic abilities and environmental layouts are pre-subjectively related such that actual organismic activity individuates a field of spatiotemporal experience. And as the structure of this relation fluctuates, so too does the framework of subjective experience, the sensorimotor-perceptual affects by which experience is defined. Organismic subjectivity is, as a consequence, both relentlessly dynamic and tied irreducibly to the organization of its own world. To think this entanglement is to think subjectivity as swarm, a concept that opens this theory onto an array of new possibilities—toward, to take only one example among a range of many, a human-technological entanglement that conceives scientific apparatuses in their integration with a collectively human subjectivity. I conclude the thesis with a brief gesture toward the implications carried by the development of such possibilities.ThesisMaster of Philosophy (MA
Camera Eyes and Convergence in Creative Evolution
Get PDFThis paper presents an updated argument for Bergson’s theory of evolutionary convergence. Convergence refers to the repeated appearance of like characters, such as the camera-like eye, across distant lineages like snails and spiders, or humans and octopuses. It is an infamously difficult phenomenon to explain by dint of natural selection for chance variations alone. Convergent evolution exacerbates the improbability that chance changes at an insensible scale could be accumulated over generations in order to come together in the composition of a complex eye in one lineage, since it requires that chance variations succeeding each other in a chance order repeatedly arrive together at the same complex result, the eye, across lineages as distant as cephalopods from vertebrates. Bergson’s idea is that convergence is not an accident or anomaly of an otherwise random variational process, but that it rather reveals something important about how evolution works. What it reveals is a deep unity – or homology – underlying the contingent plurality of life forms, and a kind of pattern, or orthogenetic trend, to their repeated convergence on the same organs and traits. This paper explains that idea, links it with the history of orthogenetic theories of evolution, and suggests that it may remain viable according to the current science.Cet article présente un argument pour la théorie de la convergence évolutionnaire de Bergson. La convergence fait référence à l'apparition répétée de caractères similaires, tels que l'œil en forme de caméra, à travers des lignées distantes comme les escargots et les araignées, ou les humains et les pieuvres. C'est un phénomène notoirement difficile à expliquer comme résultant de sélection naturelle pour les variations aléatoires. L'idée de Bergson est que la convergence n'est pas un accident ou une anomalie d'un processus variationnel autrement aléatoire, mais qu'elle révèle plutôt quelque chose d'important sur le fonctionnement de l'évolution. Ce qu'elle révèle, c'est une profonde unité - ou homologie - sous-jacente à la pluralité contingente des êtres vivants, et une sorte de schéma, ou tendance orthogénétique, à leur convergence répétée sur les mêmes organes. Cet article explique cette idée, la relie à l'histoire des théories orthogénétiques de l'évolution et suggère qu'elle peut rester viable selon la science actuelle
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