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Chronology of Science and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Shelley

David H. Guston, Ed Finn, Jason Scott Robert, Joey Eschrich, and Mary Drago (eds)

in Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds

The editors provide a brief chronology of important dates in the history of science in the context of Mary Shelley’s life and important aspects of the novel.

Keats’ Medical Milieu

Hrileena Ghosh

in John Keats' Medical Notebook: Text, Context, and Poems

This chapter offers an account of the London teaching hospitals to show that Keats had privileged access to intellectual capital. London was a hotbed of intellectual ferment, as embodied by ... More

This chapter offers an account of the London teaching hospitals to show that Keats had privileged access to intellectual capital. London was a hotbed of intellectual ferment, as embodied by professional bodies like the Guy’s Hospital Physical Society and which found expression in the Vitalism Debates. The milieu within which Keats lived and worked is explored, focusing particularly upon characteristic aspects of Romantic medical training that are now obsolete, such as dissection of corpses freshly exhumed by ‘resurrection men’. The only known account of Keats in action as a surgeon is discussed, revealing that Keats was not fully persuaded by the prevailing Brunonian hypothesis of physiology. The chapter draws upon unpublished contemporary manuscripts in dating Keats’ medical notes, thus resolving an important and hitherto uncertain issue.Less

Introduction

Miranda Anderson, George Rousseau, and Michael Wheeler (eds)

in Distributed Cognition in Enlightenment and Romantic Culture

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory ... More

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.Less

Adieu to Negativity: Deleuze

Benjamin Noys

in The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory

Gilles Deleuze is the most explicitly and consistent affirmative thinker. This chapter analyses the origin of this orientation in his reading of Henri Bergson’s vitalism. The use of Bergson allows ... More

Gilles Deleuze is the most explicitly and consistent affirmative thinker. This chapter analyses the origin of this orientation in his reading of Henri Bergson’s vitalism. The use of Bergson allows Deleuze to positivise difference, but this comes at the expense of a more nuanced political and theoretical understanding of the forms of capitalist power. This chapter then attends to the elements of negativity that can be found in Deleuze’s engagement with aesthetics and politics, particularly in his reading of Marx. It suggests that there is another ‘political Deleuze’, attuned to negativity, which is contrary to the usual affirmative image of this thinker. In particular, it suggests that Deleuze offers a possibility of grasping the articulation of negativity with forms of political subjectivity.Less

Immeasurable Life: Negri

Benjamin Noys

in The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory

Antonio Negri has presented one of the most convincing articulations of affirmation as necessary to the constitution of a radical communist politics. In this chapter his work on political ontology ... More

Antonio Negri has presented one of the most convincing articulations of affirmation as necessary to the constitution of a radical communist politics. In this chapter his work on political ontology and his vitalist politics of the powers of ‘Life’ as excess is critiqued through attention to the traces of the negative that remain. Focusing particularly on Negri’s work on art an engagement with the necessity of negation to the process of creation and production can be recovered from his work. Also, this chapter sharpens the critique of Negri’s recourse to an affirmative concept of the ‘multitude’ as political agent. While claiming a radical political agenda Negri’s theorisation remains problematically dependent on the capitalist categories – creation, production, the immeasurable – it aims to exceed.Less

The Garden in the Machine:: Biomimetic Hybrids and the Tragedy of Singular Use

Raymond Malewitz

in The Practice of Misuse: Rugged Consumerism in Contemporary American Culture

This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. ... More

This chapter positions Thomas Pynchon's encyclopedic novel Gravity's Rainbow alongside recent models of human-object interactions such as biomimetics, actor-network theory, and new vitalism. Pynchon's characters view the social histories of two important objects in the novel—the V-2 rocket and celluloid plastic—as either linear or circular. In the case of the former, objects are designed to maintain their structural integrity over time, which completely separates producers and consumers and, for Pynchon, catalyzes the environmental crisis of the late twentieth century. In the case of the latter, commodities, like natural materials, operate in a constant state of flux and thus have no singular use-value. This ecological model of an object's social life destabilizes the producer-consumer divide, reclaims the commodity as a site of creative re-production, and partially ameliorates the environmental crisis unleashed by industrial design procedures.Less

Making Music Speak

Andrew H. Clark (ed.)

in Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous

This chapter examines the manner in which music was seen in the eighteenth century as a common good. In both religious and secular communities it was envisaged as a strategic means to effect and ... More

This chapter examines the manner in which music was seen in the eighteenth century as a common good. In both religious and secular communities it was envisaged as a strategic means to effect and potentially control the public (usually through its effect on a listening body) and to create a sense of shared sentiment, purpose, and citizenship. It explores the ways in which three well-known eighteenth-century Europeans who wrote on music and its effects—Denis Diderot, Johann Mattheson, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau—theorize dissonance in their social therapies and make music speak for specific sociopolitical goals or cures. For each, bodies possess a certain kind of musical instinct that makes them particularly responsive to music. Musical metaphors, such as “dissonance,” were harnessed to articulate and potentially control unspeakable forces and relations visible in animal and social bodies. Whereas writers such as Mattheson and Rousseau tried to minimize dissonance in their social therapies, others such as Diderot saw it as important.Less

10 Double Bind: On Material Ethics

Andrej Radman

in Ecologies of Architecture: Essays on Territorialisation

The chapter champions the neologism ethico-aesthetic in order to underline the inseparability of action and perception. The chapter argues that it is practice and experimentation that actively shape ... More

The chapter champions the neologism ethico-aesthetic in order to underline the inseparability of action and perception. The chapter argues that it is practice and experimentation that actively shape the subject. Until recently the sentient was considered as a mere supplement to the sapient. The ranking order in major philosophical systems clearly reveals a historical bias towards the cognitive over the affective. But it is in the manner of such lowly supplements to end up supplanting what they are meant to subserve.Less

From Nature to Matter

Jane Bennett

in Second Nature: Rethinking the Natural through Politics

In this chapter, Jane Bennett questions whether discourses of nature or second nature are capable of pressing us to attend to the “force of things.” Bennett argues that a “politics of vital ... More

In this chapter, Jane Bennett questions whether discourses of nature or second nature are capable of pressing us to attend to the “force of things.” Bennett argues that a “politics of vital materialism”–which she both draws and ultimately distinguishes from 19th and 20th century vitalism–may better challenge the “destructive fantasies of mastery” of American consumption and production practices. It does so, on Bennett's account, because rather than attending to “biocultural assemblages” as products of human action and agency–as she sees “second nature” discourse as doing–a politics of vital materialism marks the presence and power of non-human things and forces. In facing up to how we may ultimately be unable to “give voice” to these nonhuman agentic assemblages and activities of assemblage, we may encounter precisely the “outside” that vital materialism seeks to mark–not an outside that commands or is commanded by us, but which we encounter, respond to, and act with and sometimes against. Through attempting and pushing us to attempt with her this “impossible task,” Bennett thus calls us to see that vital materiality is a site of our contestation, imitation, and effort, but that it is not only this–it also resists our very attempts to understand it in these terms.Less

Epigenesis as Spinozism in Diderot’s Biological Project

Charles T. Wolfe

in The Life Sciences in Early Modern Philosophy

Diderot’s natural philosophy, which emerges some decades prior to the appearance of the term ‘biology’ in the 1790s, is profoundly ‘biologistic’. Both the metaphysics of vital matter in D’Alembert’s ... More

Diderot’s natural philosophy, which emerges some decades prior to the appearance of the term ‘biology’ in the 1790s, is profoundly ‘biologistic’. Both the metaphysics of vital matter in D’Alembert’s Dream and the more empirical concern with physiology in his unpublished Elements of Physiology display a fascination with the uniqueness of organisms. This ‘biologism’ presents Diderot’s interpreter with some difficulties, notably regarding his materialism, for contemporary forms of materialism reject emergence, vitalism, teleology or other appeals to biological irreducibility. Here I examine a little-known aspect of Diderot’s proto-biological project: his association of epigenesis with Spinozism in the short article “Spinosiste.” Why defend a particular developmental theory in an entry on Spinoza (who was barely concerned with the specific properties of organisms)? My response also addresses the relation of Diderot’s biological project to biology as a science that appeared after his death. Indeed, Diderot’s ‘epigenetic Spinozism’ stands conceptually outside the history of biology.Less

Birth

Rebekah Sheldon

in The Child to Come: Life After the Human Catastrophe

The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? ... More

The fourth chapter asks why the figure of the child continues to circulate at all. What sentiments attaches to the child under conditions of neoliberalism and its regimes of flexible accumulation? Once upon a time, perhaps, the figure of the child served as a link between the domestic interior and the national domestic, therefore centralizing sexuality and reproduction as the basis for economic vitality and designating the vigor of the household as the mechanism by which the nation rises and falls. By analyzing Margaret Atwood’s 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale next to her MaddAddam trilogy, this chapter explores how humanity’s age of “somatic capitalism” (neoliberalism + biopolitics of reproduction) requires the constrained vitality offered by reproduction and its issues.Less

Observers of Locomotion: Theories of Walking in the French Science de l’homme

Andreas Mayer

in The Science of Walking: Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century

This chapter details the predicament of observation as it became most acute in the ambitious program of the French “science of man” derived from Montpellier vitalism (Barthez) and its further ... More

This chapter details the predicament of observation as it became most acute in the ambitious program of the French “science of man” derived from Montpellier vitalism (Barthez) and its further proponents in Paris (Moreau de la Sarthe, Gerdy). In this context, practices of observation were often opposed to forms of experiment, following a well-known opposition within the disciplinary development of anatomy and physiology. The chapter asks whether the new experimental physiology championed by Magendie was successful in opposing the larger cultural framework of the anthropological physiologies of locomotion. The tension between a semiotic approach to walking and a new mechanics grounded on animal experiment played out in several polemical discussions among Paris physicians. At the end, Balzac’s “Theory of walking” is presented and discussed in this context. His conception of a “social pathology” of the gait lead to the skeptical conclusion that there may be no such thing as the “natural gait.” The flâneur-observer, then, is left with the task of seizing the entire spectrum of culturally shaped manifestations and deformations of walking: an endless project, doomed to failure. Balzac’s essay can serve as a cultural index of the epistemological predicaments of the human sciences of this period.Less

Vitalism and the Metaphysics of Life: the Discreet Charm of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism

Charles T. Wolfe

in Life and Death in Early Modern Philosophy

I examine a series of definitions, defences and rejections of early modern vitalism. This yields a broad distinction between more or less metaphysically committed forms of vitalism. Given the ... More

I examine a series of definitions, defences and rejections of early modern vitalism. This yields a broad distinction between more or less metaphysically committed forms of vitalism. Given the plurivocity of the term, I suggest that we restrict the term ‘vitalist’ to thinkers who are actively concerned with the distinction between life and non-life (whether or not they substantialize this distinction), with special reference to the case of eighteenth-century Montpellier vitalism – where the term was first explicitly used. Further, I discuss the association of vitalism with a (potentially problematic) metaphysics of life as partly a polemical construct – which is internal to the process of defining projects and programs in life science, where one vital(istical)ly oriented author will, almost desperately, seek to brand a predecessor or a rival as a vitalist in order to legitimize her own apparently more ‘experimental’ brand of organicism. But perhaps metaphysics is endemic to vitalism?Less