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digest 2006-04-13 #002.txt
litsci-l-digest Thursday, April 13 2006 Volume 01 : Number
162
In this issue:
SUB 06 "Intelligent Design"? : A Poetics Approach to Understanding
Creative Evolution
SUB 06: Biotech and the Construction of Cattle
SUB 06 "From Stick Figures to Memnon"
SUB 06 "The Digital, the Virtual, and the Virtual"
"SUB 06" Invisible Monsters, transgenic mice and the actuality of
the Frankenstein myth
SUB 06: Detroit Devolution: Memoirs of a Tourist in the Apocalypse
SUB06 PANEL: INTEROGGATING FEAR
SUB 06: Stelarc and Post-Evolutionary Consciousness
Nanoscience and literature courses
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 08:09:39 -0400
From: "Victoria N. Alexander"
Subject: SUB 06 "Intelligent Design"? : A Poetics Approach to
Understanding Creative Evolution
Where does the Intelligence in "Intelligent Design" come from? A
Poetics Approach to Understanding Creative Evolution
As one who has worked with non-Darwinian theories of evolution
(www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/papers/NeutralEvolution.doc), I find
myself. unhappily, in the middle of the debate between Creationist
(a.k.a. Intelligent Design advocates) and the equally hardheaded
Neo-Darwinists, e.g. Dawkins, and his literary avatars Carroll and
Boyd. What may seem, to some, like another profitless clash between
superstition and science, seems, to me, to raise a valid question, What
are the mechanics behind intelligent-like behavior, in animate as well
as inanimate systems, that cannot be explained in terms of functional
adaptations? The answer, I've argued
(www.dactyl.org/directors/vna/papers/ECO.pdf), can be found in
poetic/semiotic approaches to the problem of teleological nature. (Also
see Wendy Wheeler's panel proposal on Biosemiotics.) I will use
Nabokov's poetics and his approach to evolution (as discussed by
Stephen Blackwell in his presentation) as a springboard for discussion.
The interaction between art and science should not, I argue, result in
one discipline subsuming the other. Carroll and Boyd perceive their
work as a retaliation against the terrorism of deconstruction and
post-structuralism, whose practitioners believe they have eliminated
Evolutionary Psychology's ground for argument. Instead, I believe that
false dichotomies need to be reexamined. (Note: the above links will
expire on 4/20.)
KEYWORDS: Nabokov, Intelligent Design, Non-Darwinian, Semiotics,
Evolutionary Psychology
Victoria N. Alexander, Ph.D.
Dactyl Foundation for the Arts & Humanities
64 Grand Street
New York, NY 10013
212 219 2344
www.dactyl.org
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 08:47:25 -0400
From: Ron Broglio
Subject: SUB 06: Biotech and the Construction of Cattle
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Abstract Paper Proposal for SLSA 2006
Ron Broglio, Georgia Institute of Technology
ron.broglio@lcc.gatech.edu
Biotech and the Construction of Cattle
The Igenety company advertises "insider information" about their
clients' cattle through the company's software analysis of each
animal's genetic profile. The use of genotypes to figure the animal
extends cattle breeding and further colonizes the "inside" of the
animal. This paper will explore the transformation of genetic material
into patented information, verbal and visual rhetoric, and profitable
commerce in shaping particular breeds. Secondly, it will examine this
transformation as it might effect the sense of an animal "inside" and
any sense of animal world. Using genotypes to selectively breed is new
but its results reveal the already extensive history of intervention
and transformation in the lives of other species through selective
breeding according to phenotype. Ranchers and their genetic information
software actually draft and sculpt new looks for cattle as, for
example, the patented "tender genes" or markers for tenderness and
possible future gene specification requirements for a certified Angus
breed cattle. Such genetic intervention transforms the material economy
of genes and animal flesh into an economy of meat and commercial
profit. I will attempt to tracing this transformation from gene to
genetic information to software code and finally back into the body of
animals as a study of the relationship between representational
languages and actual bodies, beasts, and animal world.
This paper connects with several others posted on the list serve
including, most recently, Oron Catt's April 12 submission on extended
phenotypes
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 08:26:56 -0600
From: John Slater
Subject: SUB 06 "From Stick Figures to Memnon"
Panel title: "From Stick Figures to Memnon: Genus and Gesture in Early
Modern
Drama"
Panel Description: This panel concerns both apocope--literally "cutting
off"--
and amplification--both rhetorical and aural--within the discourses of
natural
philosophy and natural history in the early modern drama of England and
Spain.
Keywords: pneumatics, botany, drama, speech acts, taxonomy, anatomy
The Phytological Aesthetic in Early Modern Spanish Drama
John Slater (jslater@colorado.edu)
Assistant Professor
University of Colorado, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The scientific development that most clearly marks early modern Spanish
drama
is the importation of plants from the Hapsburg??s American colonies.
While the
new floral abundance overwhelmed taxonomic systems, it also had a
transformative effect not only on the way plants were represented on the
Spanish stage, but also in the way that the literary "anthologia" itself
was
understood by the playwrights of Spain??s Golden Age. This paper
examines the
birth of a "phytological aesthetic" in the works of Lope de Vega, Tirso
de
Molina, Calderon de la Barca, and others. The fascination with plants
among
seventeenth-century dramatists does not denote a radical break with the
Renaissance study and depiction of plants, but rather subtle changes in
the
way plants were perceived that lead to the popularity of extensive
catalogs of
plant names within plays, the dramatic protagonism of plants, and the
use of
plants in political allegory.
Stumps and Other Early Modern Stick Figures
Vin Nardizzi (vincent.nardizzi@duke.edu)
Assistant Professor
Department of English, University of British Columbia
"Stumps and Other Early Modern Stick Figures" focuses on the work of
wood in a
key field of Renaissance knowledge ?± human anatomy. From Falstaff??s
"wood"
finger / penis in The Merry Wives of Windsor (5.5.86), to the
"well-timbered
gallant" Ben Jonson??s Volpone??s Corvino fears has cuckolded him
(4.5.124), to
Lavinia??s "lopped and hewed" off (2.4.17-18) "stumps" or hands in Titus
Andronicus (2.4.4; 3.2.42; 5.2.182), to the host of disabled war
veterans
dubbed Stumps populating the early modern English stage, wood
articulates the
human body??s extremities. I term these bodily articulations "stick
figures,"
and am interested to explore the extreme psychophysiological e-motions
accompanying such articulations. Fear, madness, shame, erotic desire;
running, trotting, dancing: these are the stick figures??
psychophysiological
states. My essay concludes by situating such dramatic bodies alongside
the
records of another kind of early modern performance space ?± the anatomy
theater. There, dissectors probed the surfaces and recesses of the
human
body. As Andreas Vesalius did, they also sometimes published woodcuts
juxtaposing human skeletons with tree stumps. The bodies in these
gorgeously
haunting illustrations ?± of humans and of trees ?± are stick figures
paradoxically and firmly rooted in place. In this capacity, they help
us
reconfigure scholarly truisms about the constitutive fluidity of pre-
and
early modern bodily stuff.
Pneumatic Voices: Renaissance Motion and Sound
Shannon Ciapciak (shannon.ciapciak@duke.edu)
Graduate Student
Duke University, Department of English
Why was there no aural equivalent for the camera obscura? Michel Serres
asks,
and then leaves unanswered, this provocative question in his 1979
monograph
Genesis. To be sure, a family of machines did circulate in Renaissance
literature that corresponded roughly to the vaulted optics chamber, a
family
of camera obscurdesco. Broadly described, these machines or instruments
channeled sound, typically the human voice, rather than light. Drawing
on the
work of Athanasius Kircher and Robert Greene, this project analyzes one
such
sound-filtering machine from the theaters and museums of the
Renaissance.
Specifically, by comparing two uses of voice amplification devices in
two
different settings??Greene??s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and
Kircher??s
universalis musurgia??I hope to explore the relationship between speech
acts,
pneumatic motion and sound on the Renaissance stage. Both uses of the
machine
revisit the fourteenth century trope of mediated communication in the
speaking
statue, but each suggests dramatically different configurations of
privacy,
representation, and information. Rather than reading Renaissance
acoustic
machines as a ?´striking anticipation of telecommunications?? as one
scholar
described the projects of Thomas Wilkins, I believe contextualizing them
will
further the goals of historicizing the pre-disciplinary, including its
radical
potential to engage in dialogue with contemporary, post-disciplinary
science
studies.
- --
John Slater
Assistant Professor
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Colorado at Boulder
126 McKenna Languages Building / CB 278
Boulder, CO 80309-0278 USA
"Yo conozco la andrachne, y el aconito,
el absintio, el aneto, el apiastro,
el carpofilo, el dictamo, el rodoro,
la efimeron, la satureia, el silio,
el polipodio, el frago, la mandragora,
y otras de mil virtudes esquisitas!"
- -Lope de Vega, Los Ponces de Barcelona
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 14:25:39 -0400
From: Aden Evens
Subject: SUB 06 "The Digital, the Virtual, and the Virtual"
The Digital, the Virtual, and the Virtual
The digital is characterized by two different virtuals. One is the
popular notion of the virtual, referring non-specifically to anything
that happens in or through computers. The concept of virtual reality
is the apotheosis of the popular virtual, marking a teleology of the
computer, an eventual total immersion that eliminates the interface
of the computer as well as the danger of real world encounters.
Though this popular notion of the virtual is often opposed rather
strongly to the sense of the virtual drawn from the work of Gilles
Deleuze, this paper argues that digital ontology can only be
understood through the attribution of both senses of virtuality to
the digital. For if the virtual is to interact meaningfully with the
"real" world, it must retain, despite the apparent rigidity and
fixity of the binary code, some measure of the indeterminate. To
understand how the digital matters, it must be connected to the
virtual as a process of differentiation, which cannot be equivalent
to the deterministic logical calculus that governs the flow of
electricity through computer chips. This paper looks for those events
that mark the intrusion of the Deleuzian virtual into the popular
virtual, both historical developments in the history of computing and
technical contrivances that inject a measure of indeterminacy into
the midst of the self-identical 0s and 1s that constitute the binary
code.
Keywords: virtual, virtual reality, digital, ontology, Deleuze
Aden Evens, aden@who.net
Assistant Professor of New Media Studies
Dartmouth College, Department of English
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 11:39:26 -0700 (PDT)
From: Ellen terGast
Subject: "SUB 06" Invisible Monsters, transgenic mice and the actuality
of the Frankenstein myth
Invisible Monsters, transgenic mice and the actuality
of the Frankenstein myth
Abstract
In the 200 years since Shelley published her novel
Victor Frankenstein became the stereotype of the mad
bio-scientist, his hideous creation the archetype of
science out of control. How does modern biotechnology
relate to the obscure activities of Victor
Frankenstein? In contrast to the world of
Frankenstein, today??s science is controlled by strong
internal and external review and laboratory practice
guided by strict safety procedures. Monsters like
Frankenstein??s do not exist in laboratories. They are
the product of fantastic literature and wild
imagination. In this paper I propose that with the
birth of the first transgenic mice and their
successful invasion in the life sciences a new type of
monsters arrived. Their monstrous character however,
is less visible. These mice are not out of control
hurting the innocent. They are safely hidden away in
scientific laboratories. No human body parts are
stitched on their backs. Invisible to the eye human
genes are inserted in their DNA. Partly human, these
living artifacts are pioneers in the future world of
biotech. As they show, reshaping life is no longer a
myth. Being real but invisible these monster mice ask
for a close rereading of the classic novel.
Key words:
Biotechnology, transgenics, ethics, Frankenstein
Ellen ter Gast, MSc MA, PhD Researcher (Philosophy and
Biology)
Dept of philosophy and science studies,
Radboud University Nijmegen,
Netherlands
Postbus 9010
6500 GL Nijmegen
ellentergast@yahoo.com (also:
e.tergast@science.ru.nl)
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
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------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 15:47:37 -0400
From: "Marcel O'Gorman"
Subject: SUB 06: Detroit Devolution: Memoirs of a Tourist in the
Apocalypse
Abstract of "Paper" for SLSA 2006
Marcel O'Gorman, Associate Professor/Director
Electronic Critique Program, University of Detroit Mercy
Detroit Devolution: Memoirs of a Tourist in the Apocalypse
Detroit, Michigan -- burned out, abandoned, and in rapid decay -- is=20
the post-industrial city par excellence. But of course we all know
this=20=
because Detroit, America=92s urban apocalypse, has played host to a=20
multitude of tragedy tourists. These post-urban colonizers, from the=20
out-of-state graffiti artists looking for fresh walls, to the
suburban=20=
DJ=92s hosting dance parties in empty automotive plants, are eager to=20
capitalize on the city=92s empty spaces and sublime ruins. And then=20
there=92s the Detroit digerati: bloggers and flickr feeders who
gather=20=
the city=92s remains piece by piece and post them as digital
curiosities=20=
for a global audience. Detroit, like a VHS library, is a devolving=20
archive begging urgently for a remix. But blogging and sampling--even=20
the sampling of that genre known as Detroit Techno--don=92t save a city.
In this presentation, Detroit Techno will play backbeat to a sampling=20
of texts and images from America=92s urban apocalypse. What I hope to=20
demonstrate is nothing less than the constraints of cyberculture, or=20
more precisely, of digital rhetoric. I will argue that the=20
unwillingness of digital culture to =93ground itself,=94 to embrace
the=20=
finitude of the body, to choose place over space, leads us headlong=20
into esotericism, devolution, entropy. I will conclude by examining
an=20=
urban ecology movement that acknowledges this disembodied carnival,
but=20=
grounds it in the materiality of lived space.
Keywords: devolution, Detroit, techno music, electronica, Graffiti,=20
disembodiment, urbanism, planning, architecture
- -----
Professor Marcel O'Gorman, PhD
Director, Digital Media Studies
University of Detroit Mercy
Detroit, MI 48221-3038
phone: 313.993.2009 || fax: 313.993.1166
marcel@e-crit.com || http://ogormamm.faculty.udmercy.edu=
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 15:23:46 -0400
From: Banu Subramaniam
Subject: SUB06 PANEL: INTEROGGATING FEAR
*/Interrogating Fear: Bioterror, the Environment and the Construction of
Threats/*
* Panel Description: *We live in contradictory times. On the one hand,
panic and fear surrounds us everywhere. Simultaneously other issues are
surrounded by neglect and willful silence. Fears evolve. The bald eagle,
once feared and despised, is now an icon of American survival, freedom,
and imperial power. This panel addresses the politics of threat, panic
and fear that surround environmental and biological discourses. It
addresses /how/ environmental and biological fears are used to
manufacture threats to individual, national and global security.
Simultaneously it addresses why other environmental and biological
issues recede to relative neglect and obscurity. The panel explores why
we must systematically interrogate "fear" and "threats." In order to
understand the continually evolving nature of fears and threats, we must
understand the historical, political, and cultural specificity of fear
and anxiety.
*Panelists and Papers:*
*Betsy Hartmann*
Director, Population and Devdelopment Program at Hampshire College
*//*ehss@hampshire.edu
/Strategic Demography and the Naturalizing of National Security/
This paper explores the framing of national security threats in
demographic terms, or what is sometimes called "strategic demography."
Strategic demography not only employs demographic statistics in its
calculus of threats, but alarmist images, tropes and narratives to
identify, describe and build fear of the enemy. Of particular
importance is the 'degradation narrative,' the belief that population
pressures in rural areas precipitate environmental degradation,
migration and violent conflict. This narrative is central to the
development of the environmental conflict field which reached its zenith
during the mid-1990s but which continues to have policy repercussions,
especially in terms of the growing militarization of conservation. It
also serves as a link to other strategic demographies such as the "youth
bulge" used to build and sustain anti-Islamic prejudice in the 'war on
terror', the "bare branches" theory that Asia's surplus male population
poses a security threat, and neo-Malthusian renderings of immigration.
The paper examines the diverse actors and interests involved in
constructing these threats, from population and conservation
organizations to private foundations to the role of military agencies.
*Jackie Orr*
Associate Professor, Dept of Sociology, Syracuse University
jtorr@maxwell.syr.edu
/
Making Civilian-Soldiers: Panic and the Politics of Memory/
How to re-think the contemporary militarization of U.S. civilian
psychology against the historical backdrop of World War II and Cold War
efforts to target the psychic life of civilians as a battlefield
component of 'total war'? Tracing the entangled histories of academic
social science, the mass media, and military technologies, this paper
suggests that the post-World War II emergence of the U.S. national
security state is founded in part on the calculated promotion of
civilian insecurity and fear. The militarization of civilian psychology
becomes visible as a strategic administrative imperative of U.S.
goverment. Can a more public and collective memory of this strategic
militarization make a difference in the complex politics and cultures of
terrorism today?
*Banu Subramaniam*
Associate Professor, Women's Studies, UMass Amherst
banu@wost.umass.edu
/The Obligation of Reluctance: Natives, Aliens and the Politics of
Immigration/
Fears of invasive plants and animals continue to proliferate.
Historicizing this fear seems particularly instructive. How do we
reconcile our panic around foreign plants today with the fact that in
1898, the United States Development Agency (USDA) developed a "foreign
seed introduction project?" How have our biological theories of nature,
its evolutionary ad demographic histories shifted over time? What
conceptions of biology, evolution and nation underpin our assumptions?
Drawing on the literature on evolution, ecology, science and ethnic
studies, this piece explores the historical, political and cultural
specificity of our fear and anxiety surrounding immigration, of plants,
animals and humans.
*Charles Zerner*
Barbara B. and Bertram J. Cohn Professor of Environmental Studies, Sarah
Lawrence College
czerner@slc.edu
/Emerging Cartographies of Environmental Danger: Africa Ebola, and AIDS/
This essay explores the production of environmental imagery and
rhetorics, and their links to racist geographies of African culture and
environment in policy discussions, fiction, non-fiction, and film.
Zerner examines the ways in which Ebola virus is configured as a
"terror", the historic layering of imagery about Africa, women, and
viruses, as well as the trajectories of dissemination -- globally and
nationally. His work suggests how an environmental and public health
problem is constructed and managed through military interventions and
institutions, embodying a larger turn, in conservation particularly, and
social policy more generally, toward the resolution of public sector
problems through militarized "solutions" and the amplification of
environmental fears.
Keywords: fear, environmental politics, threats, bioterror, rhetoric
------------------------------------
>>> Michael Filas mfilas@wsc.ma.edu> 4/13/2006 4:22:41 PM >>
SUB 06: Stelarc and Post-Evolutionary Consciousness
The Australian performance artist, Stelarc, argues that humanity has
reached a point where Darwinian evolution can no longer provide the
adaptations our species needs to survive. In the contexts of digital
matrices and artificial intelligence, our bodies are obsolete anchors
to a physical dimension that has become secondary in importance to
the goings on in digital and extraterrestrial domains. Stelarc
considers the present age a time of post-evolution, a time when
synthetic integration with manufactured environments and virtual
worlds is more important than perpetuation of unified subjects
existing in individual bodies. His performances and writings
dramatize contemporary possibilities for distributed consciousness
and a post-evolutionary devaluation of embodiment.
I will situate Stelarc??s work in the context of cyberpunk literature
and film??usually dystopian narratives emphasizing the human loss
associated with post-evolution. Specifically, I will ground my
discussion in the ideas broached by William Gibson in his 1984
cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer, and the representation of distributed
consciousness in popular films such as the Wachowski Brothers?? The
Matrix (1999) and David Cronenberg??s eXistenZ (1999). I will also
introduce current post-evolutionary research in the scientific
community by British researcher Kevin Warwick, and how his human-
machine connectivity experiments relate to Stelarc??s more brazen
demonstrations.
Keywords: Stelarc, Kevin Warwick, Post-Evolution, Distributed
Consciousness, Cyborg
I see some links between my presentation and Oron Catts's proposed
discussion of non-Darwinian beings.
Michael Filas, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
Westfield State College
Westfield, MA 01086
413-572-5683
mfilas@wsc.ma.edu
www.wsc.ma.edu/mfilas
---------------------------------------
>>> "Avery, Todd" Todd_Avery@uml.edu> 4/13/2006 5:18:09 PM >>
Nanoscience and literature courses
I am writing to ask whether anyone on this list knows of courses
currently being taught, in the U.S. or elsewhere, that deal
exclusively with literary representations of and responses to
nanoscience/nanotechnology/ nanomanufacturing.
I am preparing a course, "Nanoscience and Literature," for next
year and would enjoy corresponding with others involved in
similar projects.
Many thanks in advance.
Todd Avery, Ph.D.
Department of English/Nanomanufacturing Center of Excellence
University of Massachusetts Lowell
61 Wilder Street
Lowell, MA 01854
Office Telephone: (978) 934-4184
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