Cary Wolfe
- Published in print:
- 2003
- Published Online:
- February 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226905136
- eISBN:
- 9780226905129
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226905129.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to ...
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This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”Less
This book examines contemporary notions of humanism and ethics by reconstructing a little-known but crucial underground tradition of theorizing the animal from Wittgenstein, Cavell, and Lyotard to Lévinas, Derrida, Maturana, and Varela. Through detailed readings of how discourses of race, sexuality, colonialism, and animality interact in twentieth-century American culture, the author explores what it means, in theory and critical practice, to take seriously “the question of the animal.”
Bruce Clarke
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816691005
- eISBN:
- 9781452949406
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816691005.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book rethinks narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s ...
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This book rethinks narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative theory. This book offers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, it interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Mind of My Mind), movies (Avatar, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and even Aramis, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway.Less
This book rethinks narrative and media through systems theory. Reconceiving interrelations among subjects, media, significations, and the social, this study demonstrates second-order systems theory’s potential to provide fresh insights into the familiar topics of media studies and narrative theory. This book offers a synthesis of the neocybernetic theories of cognition formulated by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, incubated by cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, and cultivated in Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory. From this foundation, it interrogates media theory and narrative theory through a critique of information theory in favor of autopoietic conceptions of cognition. Clarke’s purview includes examinations of novels (Mrs. Dalloway and Mind of My Mind), movies (Avatar, Memento, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and even Aramis, Bruno Latour’s idiosyncratic meditation on a failed plan for an automated subway.
Peter Harries-Jones
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780823270347
- eISBN:
- 9780823270385
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823270347.003.0006
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
Communication involves several layers of relationship of self-with-others all at the same time, and people can easily get into a tangle or ‘bind’ with others. In any family, silence on the subject ...
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Communication involves several layers of relationship of self-with-others all at the same time, and people can easily get into a tangle or ‘bind’ with others. In any family, silence on the subject matter of relationship can lead to pathology, for it is never enough for human beings to agree that they love, hate, respect each other, they must forever re-affirm that fact. Silence is a condition of schizophrenia, and psychotherapists originally termed the condition a reversion to primitive mentality. Bateson re-evaluates schizophrenic behavior as an inability to perceive appropriate context in communication initiated by double binds of communication. Against arguments that schizophrenia is brought about by genetic determination, he argues for a many-level, or holistic approach, with therapy introduced by way of a theory of levels or logical types, with each logical type representing a relationship. R.D. Laing realized how profoundly Bateson’s notion of ‘madness’ as an ‘inner voyage’ with its endogenous dynamics spoke to his (Laing) own personal experience of mental illness.”Double Bind” was by far the most notable contribution of the Bateson Research Group at Palo Alto, which apart from the originality of its approach to pathology of communication, gave the English language a new phrase. A many-level approach continued at the MRI in Palo Alto after Bateson left his research team and can still be found today among those favoring a non-medical, alternative approach to schizophrenia, represented in a movement called “mad pride.”Less
Communication involves several layers of relationship of self-with-others all at the same time, and people can easily get into a tangle or ‘bind’ with others. In any family, silence on the subject matter of relationship can lead to pathology, for it is never enough for human beings to agree that they love, hate, respect each other, they must forever re-affirm that fact. Silence is a condition of schizophrenia, and psychotherapists originally termed the condition a reversion to primitive mentality. Bateson re-evaluates schizophrenic behavior as an inability to perceive appropriate context in communication initiated by double binds of communication. Against arguments that schizophrenia is brought about by genetic determination, he argues for a many-level, or holistic approach, with therapy introduced by way of a theory of levels or logical types, with each logical type representing a relationship. R.D. Laing realized how profoundly Bateson’s notion of ‘madness’ as an ‘inner voyage’ with its endogenous dynamics spoke to his (Laing) own personal experience of mental illness.”Double Bind” was by far the most notable contribution of the Bateson Research Group at Palo Alto, which apart from the originality of its approach to pathology of communication, gave the English language a new phrase. A many-level approach continued at the MRI in Palo Alto after Bateson left his research team and can still be found today among those favoring a non-medical, alternative approach to schizophrenia, represented in a movement called “mad pride.”
John Johnston
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- August 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780262101264
- eISBN:
- 9780262276351
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262101264.003.0005
- Subject:
- Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence
This chapter examines John von Neumann’s theory of self-reproducing automata and Christopher Langton’s self-reproducing digital loops. Langton’s theory of artificial life (ALife) as a new science ...
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This chapter examines John von Neumann’s theory of self-reproducing automata and Christopher Langton’s self-reproducing digital loops. Langton’s theory of artificial life (ALife) as a new science based on computer simulations whose theoretical underpinnings combine information theory with dynamical systems theory is contrasted with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoiesis, which leads to a consideration of both natural and artificial immune systems and computer viruses.Less
This chapter examines John von Neumann’s theory of self-reproducing automata and Christopher Langton’s self-reproducing digital loops. Langton’s theory of artificial life (ALife) as a new science based on computer simulations whose theoretical underpinnings combine information theory with dynamical systems theory is contrasted with Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana’s theory of autopoiesis, which leads to a consideration of both natural and artificial immune systems and computer viruses.
Marjorie Levinson
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780198810315
- eISBN:
- 9780191864841
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198810315.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Chapter 3 pursues Chapter 2’s immanent critique of the new historicism. Whereas new historicism’s bedrock is epistemology—questions about the domain of rationality—metaphysics is the province of ...
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Chapter 3 pursues Chapter 2’s immanent critique of the new historicism. Whereas new historicism’s bedrock is epistemology—questions about the domain of rationality—metaphysics is the province of questions about reality. The change in Romantic poetry crystallizes in effects that resist our codes not through denial, displacement, or repression—the conditions for a hermeneutics of suspicion—but through something like indifference. We see a new kind of negativity. This version of Romanticism verges on withdrawal from the scene of interpretation, resistance to the depth hermeneutics of earlier Marxist criticism. It is enabled by Spinoza’s theory of conatus; the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose Marxist historicism arises from the nature and biology side; and the notion of autopoeisis of neurophysiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The relevant patterns in Romantic poetry are then illustrated through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay.”Less
Chapter 3 pursues Chapter 2’s immanent critique of the new historicism. Whereas new historicism’s bedrock is epistemology—questions about the domain of rationality—metaphysics is the province of questions about reality. The change in Romantic poetry crystallizes in effects that resist our codes not through denial, displacement, or repression—the conditions for a hermeneutics of suspicion—but through something like indifference. We see a new kind of negativity. This version of Romanticism verges on withdrawal from the scene of interpretation, resistance to the depth hermeneutics of earlier Marxist criticism. It is enabled by Spinoza’s theory of conatus; the work of Sebastiano Timpanaro, whose Marxist historicism arises from the nature and biology side; and the notion of autopoeisis of neurophysiologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. The relevant patterns in Romantic poetry are then illustrated through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquillity and Decay.”
