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SLS 2001
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Last updated: October 16, 2001
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Thursday, October 11 Friday, October 12 |
Saturday, October 13 Sunday, October 14 |
Digital Cultural Poetics at Buffalo
Loss Pequeño Glazier, "Algorithmos: A Multimedia Manifesto"
(including a collaborative web project with M. D. Coverly).
Loss Pequeño Glazier is Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC), Adjunct Associate Professor of English, author of Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Alabama, 2001). His performances and installations have appeared in San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, Berlin, Buffalo, Atlanta, London, Salamanca (Spain), Mexico City, and Bergen (Norway).
Paul Vanouse, "Relative Velocity Inscription Device"
Paul Vanouse has been working in interactive electronic media since 1990, critically exploring the intersections of big science and popular culture. His electronic cinema, performances and installations have been exhibited in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Scotland, Spain and widely across the US. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at SUNY Buffalo and Research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
8:45 - 10:15 Session 1
1A. Luhmann (I): Literary Theory and Systems Theory
Chair: Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University).
Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University), "Narratives of Self-Reference in Heinz von Foerster
and Niklas Luhmann. "The primal injunction of George Spencer-Brown's
Laws of Form is to "draw a
distinction." Here I will draw out the distinction between the concepts of structure and system. For instance, a
molecule is a structure of atoms; a cell is a system of molecules. Structures cannot observe themselves; systems can
and must observe themselves. As is often remarked, structure per se is synchronic and
atemporal; systems exist
only by observing their own operations in and through the temporal medium of evolutionary time. Structures are
not autopoietic; systems are, and their autopoiesis proceeds by assembling and observing structures as a reservoir of
elements from which to perform a succession or maintain a regime of selections.
Gregory Eiselein (Kansas State University), "Emotion and the Immunological Role of
Literature." This paper attempts to show how Luhmann's work is less emotionally flat than is usually
presumed, by elaborating his theory of emotion and correlating it to his work on contradiction and art. Luhmann's
work does not cultivate a distrust of affect. Instead he directs our attention to the destabilizing role of contradiction
and surprise, providing a way to understand the immunological potential of literature for the autopoiesis of social
and psychic systems.
Joseph Tabbi (University of Illinois, Chicago), "William Gaddis and The Autopoiesis of American Literature." The function of criticism, implied by Luhmann but rarely practiced, is to participate in a work's autopoiesis, its self-organization, and its observations of its own structure and operations while it aims toward autonomy, toward form. For this to happen, however, must the work itself already exist as an autopoietic system? And what might a literary autopoiesis look like? In this paper I set aside the reflexive mirroring that was such an important thematic in metafiction of the 1960's and instead take as my model the late work of William Gaddis, whose engagement with corporate America - less a 'critique' than a sustained irritation or provocation - remains within the programs and languages generated by an increasingly mediated environment."
Megan Brown (Penn State University), "'All Work and No Play': Coexisting Contradictions in Contemporary American Discourse on Sleep and Leisure." Using the work of Herbert Marcuse and Michel Foucault as a theoretical framework, this paper explores the co-existence of a work ethic and a "sleep" or "leisure" ethic in contemporary American culture. I argue that the two ethics, though seemingly in conflict, have come to look alike. Medical studies and business literature both approach the topic of sleep by focusing on human performance: how much rest does a body need in order to ensure optimum efficiency? Sleep's traditional associations with sensuality, self-indulgence, and dreaming are increasingly being replaced by associations with productivity - a specific version of productivity that, as Marcuse writes, "connotes the resentful defamation of rest, indulgence, receptivity."
Andrew Garnar (Virginia Tech), "Listening to Schreber: A Crisis in Psychiatry's Realm?" Peter Kramer's Listening to Prozac has focused a great deal of attention on the significant changes psychiatry has gone through within the last fifty years. Yet, the vision of psychiatry that Kramer develops is essentially reductionist in its account of human experience: what is most important about the human mind is its biologically underpinnings. This position is not unique, because the biological models are coming to dominate more and more of American psychiatry. This paper will attempt to demonstrate the perils of this approach to psychiatry through an engagement with Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness.
Dale Hudson (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), "Puncturing the Body-Ego in David Cronenburg's eXistenZ." Cronenburg's eXistenZ avoids typical (neurotic) constructions of the cinematic realism and presents a perversion of it. The virtual reality of the game eXistenZ is inhabited by mutant creatures, as fascinating as they are repellant. To play, a player's body is punctured and connected to the game via an 'UmbryCord'. Game and player become one, simultaneously organic and technological. I examine punctures to the body-ego, which Freud calls "not merely a surface entity" but "itself the projection of a surface," in relation to the film's cinematic mise en abîme.
Nicholas Laudadio (SUNY at Buffalo), "The Ones who Hear Airs: Instance and Abstraction in the Fiction of Science." I have chosen the sensory experience of listening as a representation of the act of interpretation, not only for its direct relation to the experience of the organ as musical instrument (or the functional procedure of the ear-organ), but also for the crucial role that it plays in Richard Powers' novel, Galatea 2.2. For it is at this point of sound-interpretation that the cognitive processes of the listener combine the abstract and the material in an effort to make an interpretive gesture and assert her own subjectivity - a gesture which, in the face of Cartesian reductionism, seems the only way to bridge the gap that Milan Kundera, in his Art of the Novel, sees between the novel and science.
Daniel Tripp (West Virginia University), "Drugs, Transcendence, and the Body: Rethinking William Gibson's Neuromancer." For many critics, Neuromancer represents the quintessential example of cyberpunk fiction, which therefore allows them, somehow, to conflate the entire genre of cyberpunk fiction with the aesthetics and themes of Gibson's novel. This paper takes as its basic premise that such generalizations about cyberpunk are fundamentally inaccurate, especially in their reduction of the entire movement to what is apparently dominant or normative in Neuromancer. In many cases, what is dominant in Gibson's fiction doesn't even register in the work of other cyberpunk writers. The idea of bodily transcendence, for example, is marginal, if not absent altogether, in Sterling's Schismatrix (1986), and entirely non-existent in John Shirley's Eclipse (1985).
1D. Science and the Market
Chair: Sue Hagedorn (Virginia Tech).
Anne Goodyear (University of Texas, Austin), "The Pepsi Pavilion: Experiments in Art, Technology, Interactivity, and Social Revolution." Developed for the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan, the Pepsi Pavilion represented a large scale collaborative venture between the soft-drink company, PepsiCo, and the arts organization, Experiments in Art and Technology. At its opening in March 1970, the Pavilion presented a highly sophisticated interactive environment to fair goers--one that combined several different experiences for viewers. Despite a breakdown in relations between EAT and Pepsi, the Pepsi Pavilion remains an important milestone in the development of interactive multi-media art installations. This paper examines the approaches to interactivity developed by the artists and engineers who participated in the development of the Pepsi Pavilion. At the heart of these theories lay the conviction that the construction of new "interfaces" between audience and technologically informed artwork could help to stimulate social change, promoting more cooperative communities.
Sue Hagedorn (Virginia Tech), "Selling Microbiology." The annual meeting for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) attracts over 15,000 attendees, microbiologists practicing from medicine to biotechnology to large scale fermentation to agriculture to environmental studies. Such a huge gathering presents a great business potential--hundreds of commercial displays vie for the attention of the attendees, competing with professional posters, speeches, colloquia, continuing education courses, and press conferences--not to mention the outside attractions of the conference site. This paper will present the marketplace metaphors of the May 2001 ASM annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, a commercial bazaar in the middle of intense professionalism.
David Herzberg (University of Wisconsin), "Pushing Psychotropic Drugs, 1950 - 1990." This paper prescription psychotropic drug advertisements and their critics from the introduction of the first minor tranquilizer (Miltown, 1955) to the tail end of the Valium addiction scare (early 1980s). Advertisers, he argues, promoted a prosthetic utopia that cast its protagonists - white, affluent America - as fundamentally alienated, fragmented, and inauthentic. Critics decried what they saw as a profit-driven "medicalization" of the human psyche. The resulting debate, shaped by the vexed cultural politics of drugs in America, reveals how assumptions about consciousness play into the social landscaping of identity.
Group presentation of a 3-year research project at the University of British Columbia: "An Inquiry into Narratives of Disease, Disability, and Trauma." The recent "Narrative Turn" in literature, health, and the social sciences has valorized, commodified, and technologized narrative as a therapeutic enterprise, said to help reconstruct meaning, psychological, and even physical health. However, the normative constructions of this discourse crucially ignore various functions and even limitations of narrative in different contexts and disciplines. Our collaborative presentation discusses the problematic access of narrative in life-threatening illness and the subversive excess of its meanings in the study of disabled bodies, depressed minds, and other outlaw subject positions.
Ulrich Teucher explores trends in literary studies and the social sciences that propose healing properties and an ethics of sharing illness narratives which, in fact, may place further suffering on patients' lives. But many cancer patients who find themselves too fragile to assert a first person within the spatiotemporal confines of narrative, or read fellow sufferer's accounts, feel more safe and inclined to use metaphors as encapsulations of their conditions. An empirical study of cancer metaphors draws out some dimensions of this ambivalent discourse.
Joy James Henley focuses on Persimmon Blackbridge's Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies, and investigates the ways in which this text, in thickening a particular, outlawed "sense of self," declares and models, imagines and multiplies, various modes of subjectivity. Blackbridge's highly imagistic hypertext produces a form of fictional autobiography that radically critiques psychiatric institutions such as Sunnybrook. In so doing it effects a clearing of psychic and social space for those designated as outlaws and outcasts.
Richard Ingram examines the post-Prozac era of psychiatric medications as "enhancement technologies," in which psychiatry has undergone a transformation that renders many critiques of its practices obsolete. The goals of psychopharmacology increasingly transcend therapy, while the organizational form of the psychiatry-pharmaceutics assemblage has become that of a war machine external to the state apparatus. Suggestions are made for rethinking a psychiatry that is no longer part of a "therapeutic state," and is no longer centred on the concept of "mental illness."
James Overboe asks why it is that when new technologies are designed to be used by disabled people, the aim
is so often to remedy perceived deficiencies. By framing health as the realization of particular forms of
embodiment and mobility, these technologies reinforce divisions between the "normal" and the "abnormal." An
alternative to this ableist approach involves investigating the possibilities for deploying technologies in machinic
assemblages that enable affirmative experimentation with new spaces and times of living.
2A. Bodies, Trace Evidence, and Procedural Accountability: the Continuity of Forensic
Evidence
Guest Scholar Session with Michael Lynch (Cornell University).
Chair: James Bono (SUNY at Buffalo).
Michael Lynch is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University; author of Art and Artifact in Laboratory Science: A Study of Shop Work and Shop Talk in a Research Laboratory (1985); Scientific Practice and Ordinary Action: Ethnomethodology and Social Studies of Science (1993); and co-author with David Bogen, of The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings (1996).
2B. New Media Art
(I): Digital Textuality
Chair: Mark Hansen (Princeton University).
Michel Chaouli (Indiana University), "Writing With Electrons: The Future of Literature in Cyberspace." The paper considers what effects electronic storage and distribution have on the idea of the artwork, specifically on concepts such as "work" and "author." To do so, it seeks to grasp the serious changes that electronically networked communication requires in our understanding of the written archive as well as in the idea of a hypomnestic memory built upon it.
Michelle Glaros and Michael Laffey (Dakota State University), "Web-Specific Writing and/as Art Installation." Working with the computer as writing machine, working in the architectural writing space of the web, readers often respond by querying: "Where's the writing?" We are reminded of the responses of art patrons who first confronted Duchamp's ready-mades in the gallery: "Where's the art?" they asked. This project analyzes installation art and proposes employing it as a model for web-specific compositions. A 4-D art form that arranges and inscribes (and thus "writes") space and time, installation art uses sound and image to sculpt particular "scenes." Web-specific compositions likewise re-frame and re-configure our approach to texts while redefining the community of readers/viewers able to share its meanings and values.
2C. Writing Medicine (I): Gender
Chair: Barbara Baumgartner (Washington University, St. Louis)..
Barbara Baumgartner (Washington University, St. Louis), "The Missing Chapter: Sex and Reproduction in Nineteenth Century Anatomy Texts." The human biology textbook, which combines elements of anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, emerged and evolved into a standard form over the mid-decades of the nineteenth century. While these texts include comprehensive discussions and diagrams of most of the body, the genitourinary and reproductive systems are usually not mentioned, making the body appear genderless. This evasion of gender is suggestive of a similar dynamic in Emily Dickinson's poetry, a strategy to which Dickinson may have been introduced when she studied anatomy at Mt. Holyoke, and one that allows her to defy conventional representations of femininity.
Bernice Noble (SUNY at Buffalo), "Gender and Auto-immunity." In a recent request for research grant applications, officials at the National Institutes of Health stated "Although it is clear that autoimmune diseases disproportionately affect women, the reasons for this are not clear". In the hundred-year history of intensive investigation of normal and aberrant immune responses, the possibility of gender differences and/or sexual dimorphism in those responses has been almost entirely ignored.
2D. Genders, Sciences, Fictions
Chair: Dianne Hunter (Trinity College).
John Bruni (University of Kansas), "Un-Natural Selection: Questioning Social Darwinism in 'The Descent of Man' and The House of Mirth." By looking at the representation of nature and culture in Edith Wharton's "The Descent of Man" (1904) and The House of Mirth (1905), this paper examines how Wharton's response to the debate about social Darwinism-the application of evolutionary theories to human society-at the turn of the twentieth century in America serves to question the ways in which the meanings of science are produced, interpreted, and circulated.
Dianne Hunter (Trinity College), "'Decapitation or Castration': Male Hysteria in Kenneth Branagh's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." Kenneth Branagh's 1994 film manifests male hysteria under pressure from feminism. The film displays on its surface themes latent in the novel that have been made explicit by feminist criticism. It rewrites Shelley's text in order to emphasize single-sex parenting within a plot that builds on male bonding. In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the incorporation of feminism gets beheaded in a tale that turns out to be about fathers and sons.
Alissandra Paschkowiak (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), "Rated XX: Female Identity and Birth in Trouble and Her Friends and Slow River." While many authors carry on with the themes and conventions that Mary Shelley set up with her innovative novel Frankenstein, the male dominated realm of science fiction rarely deals with the very personal anxieties about birth, death, and identity that Shelley presents in her work. In addition, these male authored novels, many which are innovative and crucial to the development of the genre, generally use only stock depictions of women in their work. but stock characters are not enough to engage either a female or a queer readership. A text such as William Gibson's Neuromancer, a standard taught in many science fiction classes, deflects female student interest in the genre. In this paper, I show how the dystopian novels Trouble and her Friends by Melissa Scott and Slow River by Nicola Griffith, both published in 1995, descend from and respond to Neuromancer with a female-centered and queer perspective, thereby engaging other readers.
Carolyn Wald (University of California, Los Angeles), "Gender, Reproduction, and Self-Reflexivity: John von Neumann's 'Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata' and Fictions of Female Artificial Intelligence." Fiction, in particular the novel, is the incubator of consciousness, and consciousness remains - despite Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained -- one of the great conundrums of cognitive science. What might be the connection between cognition and the subjective perspective of the bildungsroman, between consciousness and evolutionary biology? One possible answer may lie in the bildungsroman's reproductive narrative. Reproduction is exactly the task that centrally preoccupied John Von Neumann, one of the early developers of the computer, in his "Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata."
Michelle Kendrick (Washington State University) and Robert Markley (West Virginia University), "Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars, Interactive DVD-ROM Technology and Interdisciplinary Education." In the autumn of 2001, the University of Pennsylvania Press will publish the first scholarly multimedia title developed specifically for DVD-ROM, Red Planet: A Cultural and Scientific History of Mars, coauthored by Robert Markley, Michelle Kendrick, Harrison Higgs, and Helen Burgess. Our experience in authoring Red Planet suggests that new media poses both problems opportunities for scholars willing and able to invest the necessary resources of time, money, and labor to help (re)define what the problematics of visualization of scholarship. In this respect, Red Planet serves as a case study in the ways in which "text" and "visual images" interact dialogically with the changing technologies--sound, video, and dynamic animation--that are redefining the conceptual frameworks for, and practices, of multimedia. Red Planet's dialogic structure, we believe, has significant ramifications for our understanding of educational multimedia, and the ways in which multimedia may be able to deconstruct the boundaries among "scholarship," "pedagogy," and new media.
2F. Technologies, Pedagogies, and Pooh
Chair: Mike Johnson (SUNY College at Buffalo).
Mike Johnson (SUNY College at Buffalo), "Ancient Science in Winnie the Pooh." This analysis of selections from the Pooh corpus will show how the bear of little brain can be used to lead students to a better grasp of some principles of science found in Plato and Aristotle. While written in verse, with humor throughout, this is a serious new analysis of principles of Aristotle's Physics embedded in Milne's stories.
Scott Warnock (Temple University), "Re-imagining the Self in a Milieu of Subtle Technology." I will present data from a qualitative research project investigating an under examined aspect of the influence of computers on student writers, part of a larger project through which I am attempting to define how we re-imagine ourselves in relation to what I call "subtle technology." I have defined subtle technology to mean that we cannot interact with the "engines" that drive the computer world, and, in fact, few experts can (and they themselves must use further technologies to do so); also subtle technology is defined by its digitality, ubiquity, indispensability, reproducibility, and transparency.
3A. Luhmann (II): Epistemology, Memory, Media
Chair: Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University).
Linda Brigham (Kansas State University), "The Systems Art of Memory." Luhmann views memory as facilitating the temporalization of complexity, a process that allows autopoietic systems to respond to more aspects of their environment by ordering events in time. The temporalization of complexity also constitutes a major area of interpenetration between psychic and social systems. A key hypothesis for my talk is that social and psychic memories have greater interpenetration in modernity than in premodernity. I explore this hypothesis by examining a highly individualistic memory: that of Luria's famous mnemonist, Shereshevski, as a throwback to premodern psychic life.
William Rasch (Indiana University), "Absolutely Incomplete Knowledge." The "loss" of faith in the continuum of reason that links the human with a rationally ordered and thus fully comprehensible universe serves as the epistemological basis for Luhmann's systems theory. 20th-century developments in philosophy, math, and logic seem to confirm this assessment. Consequently, it becomes the paradoxical task of all "universal" theories to account for the impossibility of total knowledge while still producing seemingly total descriptions of their domain.
Geoff Winthrop-Young (University of British Columbia), "Luhmann's Darwin, Luhmann's Media: Restabilization and Exaptation." Niklas Luhmann's hitherto untranslated opus magnum, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft ("The Society of Society") contains his most sustained and in-depth discussion of evolution--that is to say, what Luhmann means when he uses that term. Over almost 180 pages, detailed investigations and appropriations of concepts from (neo)Darwinian theories of evolution and Maturana and Varela's work on autopoiesis are thrown together with (uncharacteristically) sweeping statements on the nature and basics of social evolution. Likewise, there is a constant shuttling between biological evolution, media history, and social memory. My investigation will have as its point of departure two questions: (1) How does Luhmann negotiate the uneasy relationship between (the more mainstream) theories of adaptation and those of autopoiesis? (2) How does he expand on the selection/variation model, especially with regard to technological evolution?
3B. Science and Popular Culture (I)
Chair: James McManus (California State University, Chico).
Mischa Peters (Utrecht University, The Netherlands), "Evolutionary Crossroads: Mapping the Body from Cyberpunk Fiction to Popular Science. Cyberpunk literature is a genre which foregrounds the collapse of traditional boundaries and explores the fusion of the human body with technology. Also in contemporary scientific developments the technologiziation of the human body can be witnessed. This paper hopes to show how cyberpunk literature and popular science cross-reference to one another and how echo's of narrative structures, metaphors and images of the technological, gendered body as represented in cyberpunk novels can be found in texts from the popular science genre.
Alan Rauch (Georgia Institute of Technology), "Halos, Broomsticks, and Beakers: Trading Science for the Supernatural in Contemporary Culture." The Harry Potter books, a phenomenon in their own right, reflect a cultural movement that is worth understanding in the world of cultural studies of science. Like so many other cultural productions, the Potter series invests the audience's time and energy in spiritual and supernatural phenomena. On television, too, plot structures are now underscoring the limits of rational thought, materialist premises, and scientific inquiry. What has taken their place is an elusive and ambiguous construction of other forces at work. Some, like the corporately structured, "Touched by an Angel," invoke a traditional and hierarchical Judaeo Christian God, while others like "The X-Files," rely on alien cultures and earthly forces that are beyond human comprehension. This movement in culture is, I believe, a direct response to recent trends in science. The reductive quality of such large - and ultimately teleological - efforts such as The Human Genome Project, have, I believe, moved popular audiences to find the curiosity, openness, and mystery they once found in scientific and technological subjects. What's more, the onslaught of both technical and generic information, whether through the press or the web, has diverted attention from "factual" detail to worlds where fact no longer counts or, at least where fact is flexible. It is fascinating to situate this kind of spiritual relativism in the context of the relativism attributed to postmodern thinking in science studies. I will conclude the paper by addressing the intellectual principles/concerns shared by these two areas in an effort to open up our thinking about where science in culture may be headed.
Julie Wosk (SUNY / Maritime), "Galvanizing Women in Art, Film, and Fiction." In nineteenth and early twentieth-century visual and written images, women appeared in emblematic roles as dazzling goddesses celebrating a newly-emerging electric age, and as seductive sirens whose bodies and identities were wondrously, and sometimes frighteningly, transformed through electricity. Facsimile women were also seen in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's novel L'Eve future, Fritz Lang's silent film Metropolis, and director James Whales' campy film The Bride of Frankenstein. By the late twentieth century, however, women artists and photographers were fashioning their own digital versions of female identity in the electronic age. This paper will draw on images from my book Women and the Machine: Representations From the Spinning Wheel to the Electronic Age (November 2001).
3C. Silvan Tomkins' Affect Theory: Phantom Limbs, Mimicry & AI
Chair: Elizabeth A. Wilson (University of Sydney, Australia).
Adam Frank (University of British Columbia), "Phantoms Limn." In Pandora's Hope Bruno Latour figures theory in terms of limbs broken, stretched, or rended, and maintains an invidious distinction between the theory of science studies and its practice. In this paper I'll use Silvan Tomkins' writing on phantom limb phenomenon to repose this distinction. Here, "theory" may be considered as system/environment relations conditioned by the intrication of (especially kinesthetic) perception, memory, and affect, and that both guides and may be transformed by "practice."
Anna Gibbs (University of Western Sydney, Australia), "Towards a Theory of Sympathy: Entrainment and the Question of Mimicry." From Darwin to psychoanalysis, contemporary infant research and the phenomenological work of writers such as Lingis, 'sympathy' and mimetic communication have been foregrounded as a register subtending symbolic communication. This paper draws on clinical thought and textual theory in the framing context of Silvan Tomkins' affect theory to examine the complex and highly ambiguous activity of mimicry.
Elizabeth A. Wilson (University of Sydney, Australia), "Shaming AI." In recent years there has been a return to affect and its infantile corollaries in computational research. Silvan Tomkins has argued that a certain level of infantile organisation ("helplessness, confusion and error") is indispensable to the coherence of an artificial system. This paper uses Tomkins to explore the achievements and limitations of the infant robot under construction at the MIT AI lab. Special attention will be paid to the regulation and transmission of shame in the Kismet project.
Carol Colatrella (Georgia Institute of Technology), "Feminist Narratives of Science and Technology: Artificial Life and True Love in Eve of Destruction and Making Mr. Right." Many nineteenth-century fictions--from Shelley's Frankenstein to Villiers L'Isle-Adam's. The Future Eve--warn readers that male scientists produce technologies destroying rather than enhancing life. In contrast, as a feminist tale of applied science, Lydia Maria Child's "Hilda Silfverling" (1845) imagines how refrigeration technology helps one woman escape from a patriarchal culture. Suggesting feminist principles of applying technology, the films Eve of Destruction (1991) and Making Mr. Right (1987) represent shortcomings of competitive, aggressive male scientists and indicate that science influenced by feminism might better develop technologies alleviating social problems.
Louise Economides (Indiana University), "Anna Barbauld, the Shelleys, and Utopian Science: Contesting the Body of Nature." This paper explores Marxist and Feminist approaches to social ecology through the lens of three 19th century writers who contemplated technology's potential to transform material nature: Anna Barbauld, Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. P. B.. Shelley and Barbauld's belief in science's utopian potential to transform nature for humanity's benefit (and attendant criticism of corrupt social institutions which thwart this project) are contrasted with Mary Shelley's more radical questioning of the ideology of domination underwriting the enlightenment drive to alter both nature and the terms of physical embodiment.
3E. Subjects of Inscription: Sexualities, Dreams,
Bodies
Chair: Irving Massey (SUNY at Buffalo).
Irving Massey (SUNY at Buffalo), "Music and Language in Dreams." I am drawn to this topic because I think of it as a province of the general theory of imagination. At the same time, I hesitate before entering it because I assume that, if I did find something there, it would be a function best described by hard science. One of the involuntary activities during sleep to which little attention has been given is the experience of producing, or, rather, hearing music. A crucial factor about such occurrences is that, whereas image, action, and language all undergo some form of distortion in dream, music remains intact. Unlike music, language in dream shows different features from its conscious counterpart. Language, as we employ it consciously, is always somebody else's language, while in dream we may obtain some relief from the pressures of language, as it becomes our own again.
Lisa Roney (Bucknell University), "Observing My Bionic Body: An Essay about the Personal and the Abstract in Medicine and Literary Studies." This paper examines parallels between the doctor-patient relationship, on the one hand, and the critic/scholar-writer relationship, on the other. Doctors and scholars tend to be viewed in our society as analyzers, while patients and writers are often seen, particularly in academia, as inarticulate experiencers. Even scholars, like Elaine Scarry and Arthur Kleinman, who try to illuminate and respect the experience of those in situations of physical extremis or of the creative process of writing, tend to assume that depth of experience depletes one's analytical skills. I've had cause to think about these divides and distinctions. In fact, this paper explores the ways in which my own personal insights have contributed to my understanding of these abstract issues. While our culture is all for applying analytical apparatuses to personal issues, doing the inverse is still derided. And yet without the personal, the abstract in medicine and in literary criticism and theory becomes empty and defeats the ostensible helping purpose of "objectivity."
3F. Fictions of Post-Capitalist Technoscience
Chair: Jonathan Goodwin (University of Florida).
Anne Brubaker (Dickinson University), "Down the Rabbit Hole: Post-Capitalist Adventures in a Postmodern Wonderland, Cyberpunk, The Matrix, and Murakami." Like Alice’s Wonderland, many postmodern texts open seamlessly onto a hidden technological wonderland where numb and cynical protagonists can reclaim the reassuring myth of agency. Cyberpunk, particularly William Gibson’s Neuromancer, offers a formulaic “space” within a vast urban circuitry, while Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World constructs a simplified shadow world behind an alienated post-capitalist world of anonymity and disconnected numbers. These texts offer a naturalized fantasy space for the middle-class reader, a place underneath or inside technology where s/he can regain the autonomy and agency so crucial to capitalist ideology and yet at the same time feel secure in a socio-economic status that seems invulnerable to change. Neo-Marxist thought like that of Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson provides a lens through which one might understand these postmodern wonderlands. If we consider the role of economics, technology, and ideology at all when we read/view these texts, then we can never see these otherworldly opportunities outside the context of their post-capitalist functions, nor can we fail to see the ways in which these imagined “spaces” ultimately reinforce the status quo.
Jonathan Goodwin (University of Florida), "Greg Egan's Distress and the Limits of Empiricism." Using Egan's unusual novel, I examine some intersections between contemporary psychology, narrative theory, and ideological analysis. Specifically, I will argue that Distress, with its complex array of technological and political speculation, requires a synthetic critical approach to map the provenance of its narrative kernel. After discussing some of the possibilities--and limitations--of Frederic Jameson's "cognitive mapping," I will propose that an unambiguously rationalist epistemology--typified by certain strains of cognitive science--is a more reliable starting point for cultural analysis than strong empiricism.
4A. Poets, Artists, Critics, and Atomic Physics/Relativity, 1920-1955
Chair: Linda Dalrymple Henderson (University of Texas, Austin).
Linda Dalrymple Henderson (University of Texas, Austin), "The Origins of the Cubism-Relativity Myth in Art Criticism in New York in the 1940s." The first major artistic response to Einsteinian relativity theory occurred in Berlin in the 1920s, following the 1919 eclipse that brought Einstein his first large-scale publicity. The resultant rhetoric of "space-time" in the writings of Moholy-Nagy and Siegfried Giedion reached New York in the 1930s/1940s, just as the first major American texts on Picasso and Cubism were being written. This paper chronicles the way in which these two currents of art writing involving a fourth dimension short-circuited during the 1940s, giving rise to the persistent myth that Picasso's Cubist style of 1908 onward was related to Einstein's ideas.
Edward Lintz (Yale University), "Radioactivity and Modernist Poetry: Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams." Beginning with Mina Loy's 1924 poem comparing Gertrude Stein to a "Curie / of the laboratory / of vocabulary" who extracts a "radium of the word," this paper will address how Marie Curie's discovery of radium and the phenomenon of radioactivity influenced Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. What gives radium its poetic power to Loy is its ability to represent two competing manifestations of force: concentrism and excentrism, and Williams Carlos Williams first takes up radioactivity in Paterson III, finding in Curie's determined labor to isolate the "stain of radiance," a compelling model for his search to separate out the pure "stain of sense."
Mark Morrison (Penn State University), "Edith Sitwell's Three Poems of the Atomic Age and the Biological Crisis of Atomic Physics." Edith Sitwell's atomic bomb poems of the late 1940s muster an array of scientific texts from several centuries to understand the role of the organic in the now dangerous atomic order signaled by the bomb. I will explore her attempt to reconnect physics to the life sciences and to ethics through her appropriation of nineteenth- century evolutionary and Naturphilosophen texts by Lorenz Oken, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Lyell, seventeenth-century natural history by Thomas Burnet, and, finally, the sixteenth-century alchemical writings of Paracelsus.
4B. Writing Medicine (II): Loss and Death
Chair: Linda L. Layne (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute).
Katrien De Moor (Ghent University, Belgium), "The Doctor's 'Role as Witness and Companion': Connecting Medical and Literary Ethics of Care in AIDS Physicians' Memoirs." This paper will examine the construction of ethics of care in the memoirs of Abraham Verghese, Kate Scannell, and Peter Selwyn. Without creating an idealized or essentialist view of care, these works portray the authors' gradual development from embracing conventional ideas about a doctor's role ('curing' as primary aim) towards a renewed emphasis on 'caring' in the face of medical uncertainty. I will argue that these doctors extend their medical responsibility of caring to a moral responsibility as authors ('taking care of' the memory of patients).
Linda L. Layne (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Trauma, Memory, and Moral Identity: The Case of Pregnancy Loss." A textual analysis of the newsletters of three pregnancy loss support organizations indicates that pregnancy loss is often a traumatic experience which creates problems of memory. Members of pregnancy loss support groups marshall the resources of consumer culture and post war commemorative culture to deal with problems like the erosion of memory over time, difficulty in finding empathetic listeners, and the fact that there is so little to remember.
N. Katherine Hayles (University of California, Los Angeles), "Utopia to Mutopia: Nanotechnology in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age." The Diamond Age would seem to have the elements of a utopia. Nano-technology provides material abundance virtually without cost; the text explicitly states that some cultures work better than others and provides a blueprint of a successful one; and the narrative comes complete with a traveler who visits strange lands. Yet somehow, although a utopian impulse clearly informs the text, these elements do not cohere to make a utopia. Rather the narrative enacts might more appropriately be called a mutopia, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's phrase coined to allude to the mutability of the postmodern condition that makes it so inimical to the creation of utopias.
Stephen Schryer (University of California, Irvine), "Sitting in the Furrow of Destruction: Cold War Ideology and the Technological Sublime in Don DeLillo's Underworld. This paper takes place against the background of claims of critics such as Joseph Tabbi and David Nye that the romantic category of the sublime has been displaced in favor a new experience - the technological sublime. All too often, however, accounts of the technological sublime slide into ideologizing affirmations of social unity arising from shared wonder in the face of our machines - a variant of Paul de Man's "aesthetic ideology." This paper will interrogate this tendency via a reading of Don DeLillo's 1997 novel, Underworld, which presents two contrasting figurations of technological sublimity - the cold war nuclear scare and current environmental devastation. Using these two figurations, DeLillo presents both the promise and necessary failure of the technological sublime.
Laura Shackelford (Indiana University), "Re-Thinking Mediation From Within: 'Structural Couplings' between Subjects & Technologies of Communication." The humanist distinction between subjects and their technological prostheses - and the representational logic it upholds - is precisely what the posthuman problematizes. Instead, mediation might be understood as a 'structural coupling' between subjects and technologies, an approach that draws from N. Luhmann's non-representational understanding of technologies. Approaching hypertext and literary narrative as equally, though differently, selective modes of 'managing complexity,' recent literary narratives such as John Barth's "Click" translate hypertextual strategies into print and, thereby, provide a critical, comparative, vantage on that which new technologies such as hypertext remember and forget.
4D. Epistemologies of Interpretation Across Disciplines
Chair: Lisa Zunshine (University of Kentucky, Lexington).
Nancy Easterlin (University of New Orleans), "Science, Speculation, and the Simplon Pass." In response to proponents of empirical methods for studying literature, this paper will assert that because it is so difficult to study literary activities empirically and because speculative thought is a vital part of knowledge construction and dissemination within the university, literary studies would be hampered by emulation of the scientific method. The second part of this paper will show how literary criticism can be scientific and speculative at once. Focusing on a brief, well-known passage from Wordsworth's *Prelude*, I will draw on environmental aesthetics, behavioral ecology, and attachment theory to discuss the likely associations of the word "home," an unusual word in the context of a passage whose primary content is philosophical.
Laura Otis (Hofstra University), "Stories from the Lab: Personality and Politics in Scientific Narrative." What is a lab? Do scientific ideas come from individuals, or from interactions among individuals? In science, what is an "author"? To address these questions, I examine physiologist Johannes Müller's lab in Berlin, 1833-58. Müller's students took his ideas in vastly different directions, and their divergent accounts of their Adviser serve their own interests. In seeking the origin of scientific ideas, we must interpret two layers of texts shaped by personal perspectives: those published for other scientists, and those published for historians describing how the science was done.
Lisa Zunshine (University of Kentucky, Lexington), "Models in Cognitive Literary Studies: Moving Beyond New Criticism?" In his recent essay, "Questioning Interdisciplinarity: Cognitive Science, Evolutionary Psychology, and Literary Criticism," Tony Jackson points out that some of the recent "cognitive" readings of literary texts are "simply very fine new-critical close-reading[s]." I have heard similar charges leveled against a number of cognitive literary interpretations, and in most cases, I agree with them. Still, why does it have to be this way? Is there something in the theoretical models currently available to scholars interested in cognitive approaches to literature that makes a new-critical exegesis particularly compelling? Or is it a question of academic politics, i.e., the attempt to co-opt the "next new thing" to prove the "intellectual bankruptcy" of the currently fashionable theoretical paradigms?
Respondent: Robert Markley (West Virginia University).
Jill A. Fisher (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) "Exhuming the Baron: Medical Narratives of Münchausen Syndrome." Characterized by self-inflicted injury and dishonesty, Münchausen's syndrome is a medical classification that blends the literary with the medical. This paper will excavate the multiple layers of identity that have been imposed upon the historic figure of the Baron von Münchausen and upon contemporary physicians and patients. By examining the intersection of these literary and medical narratives, I will discuss how the reality of disease is continuously (re)constructed through diverse literatures, medical classification systems, and physician communications.
Ken Fleischmann (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Simulating Surgery: Travels in CorpoReality." Educational simulations provide an example of the convergence of artificiality and reality. While surgical simulators become increasingly realistic, the traditional practice of surgery is being replaced by artificially mediated, automated, and simulated technologies such as telepresence surgery. These transitions are leading to a merging of the previous discursive categories of artificiality and reality into the hyperreal. In this paper, I will explore the ways that this convergence affects how we view embodiment.
Arthur C. Fricke (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Trust No One: Rhetorics of Responsibility in SETI and UFOlogy." SETI radioastronomers use large radio telescopes to 'listen' for intelligent radio broadcasts from outer space. UFOlogy researchers take the position that alien intelligences are already visiting this planet. Although SETI and UFOlogy investigators contend that their respective goals and methods are diametrically opposed, these two communities nevertheless utilize similar strategies in their public enrollment efforts. This presentation will explore ways in which parallel techniques of rhetorical construction are employed by the SETI and UFOlogy communities to validate their respective conceptions of truth in the search for intelligent extraterrestrial beings.
Torin Monahan (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Ersatz Art Worlds: Productions of Value in Art Education." This paper follows the production of artistic value through narratives and practices of digital creations. Art education provides an ideal locus for observing how meanings emerge in practices of production. I draw upon ethnographic research at arts education high school sites in Los Angeles to demonstrate how the ""real"" value of art is constantly negotiated in tension with circulating definitions of material and virtual purity. This negotiation, through art discourse and production, is always grounded in relational contexts of meaning. Art works are open to valuation through experience, yet art mediums present boundaries to artistic possibilities. Artistic value, then, is always co-constructed by narratives and practices in mediums of constrained underdetermination.
4F. Video Screening of Margaret Edson's W;t
For Session 6D, Saturday,
10:30 - 12:00: Writing Medicine (III).
Elizabeth Grosz is Julian Park Professor of English and Comparative literature at SUNY/Buffalo, author of Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (1994), and Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (1995).
5A. Science as Intra-Action (I): Digital Anatomies, Bodily Realities
Guest Scholar Session with Karen Barad (Mt. Holyoke College).
Chair: Susan Squier (Penn State University).
Karen Barad is a theoretical particle physicist and Chair of Women's Studies at Mount Holyoke. She is the author of numerous articles on physics, feminist epistemology, philosophy of science, cultural studies of science, and feminist theory, and is currently completing a book entitled Meeting the Universe Halfway.
5B. Medical (Mind/)Body Projects
Chair: Eve Keller (Fordham University).
Eve Keller (Fordham University), "The Psycho-technologies of Self-Healing: Mind and Matter in Popular Medicine." This paper examines implicit subjectivities of contemporary cancer self-help books, hoping to make the general point (by contrast to pre-modern self-help medical guides) that much of current "alternative" medical literature shares with the biomedicine it critiques a deeply rooted and (gender-inflected) mind/body dualism.
Shelley McKellar (University of Western Ontario), "Rebuilding Bodies: The Implications of Artificial Organs." Artificial organs challenge what we think about the limits and potential of mechanical devices as a medical therapy. Today, it is possible for machines to compensate for organ failure. The concept of our bodies as machines, with replaceable parts, confronts our notion of what it is to be human. What has been the impact of artificial organs on the experience of the body, and how have the perceptions of patients, practitioners and the public differed? This paper will focus on the experiences and meaning of mechanically supported lives by examining the artificial kidney and the artificial heart. Both technologies replace organ function either temporarily or permanently. Both technologies have successfully extended lives. Both technologies raise issues of illness, disability and body autonomy, but present significant differences of experiences and meaning.
5C. Programs, Procedures, and Codes in Literary Production
Chair: Joseph Conte (SUNY at Buffalo).
Sabiha Ahmad (University of Michigan), "Alchemical Procedure and the Trials of Early Modern English Travel." This paper considers the invocation of the "trial" in Sir Walter Ralegh's Discoverie of Guiana (1596) as symptomatic of a larger cultural preoccupation in early modern England over the epistemological status of travelers' tales. Travel narratives as a genre self-consciously respond to problems of knowing the as-of-yet unknown in their measured self-positioning and their repeated invocation of evidentiary structures such as testimony, proof, and eyewitnessing. The recourse to alchemical knowledge within these tales serves to prove the truth of the tale by invoking the language of trial. I examine the ways in which the trials of travel are tied up with the experimental trials in alchemy. How does alchemy as a procedure or protocol of knowledge production relate to the alchemical trial as a model for proving oneself and one's experience to be true and reliable? How does the resurfacing of archaic models of alchemical knowledge characterize the authorizing function of procedural language within the travel narratives?
P. K. Aravind and Lance Schachterle (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), "Abbott's Flatland: Victorian Satire Masquerading as Mathematics (or is it the other way 'round?)." Abbott's 1884 geometrical romance anticipates both the multi-dimensionality of modern physics and the multi-gendering of modern society. The central mathematical problem of FLATLAND is this: how can a creature from three dimensions convince a Flatlander (the Square in Abbott's novel) of the reality of the third dimension? Abbott devotes much of the technical part of his narrative to the solution of this thorny problem. P. K. Aravind will present an alternative solution to Abbott's problem made possible by the resources of modern computer technology: a set of computer animations that try to convey the idea of a third (and even fourth) dimension to a Flatlander and also the mathematically curious members of the literary community. Lance Schachterle will discuss how Abbott's commentary on women addresses another thorny problem of late Victorian society: the role of women.
Joseph Conte (SUNY at Buffalo), "Postmodern Proceduralism in John Barth's The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor." Postmodern fiction that reveals an immanent design deep within the chaos of its materials can be designated as "proceduralist." Such novels formulate a plan comprised of arbitrary and exacting rules, carrying it out in spite of--or in anticipation of--the narrative consequences. In his essay on the affinities of postmodernism, chaos theory, and arabesque design, John Barth points out that complex systems share feedback mechanisms "in which output loops back into the system as input." The patterning that emerges--in the Mandelbrot set, Persian carpets, or the arabesque design of his novels--is the product of rules that govern the system, but the patterning is not predictable from the rules alone.
Robert Logan (University of Toronto), "Chaotics and the Origin of Speech, Literature, and Narrative." Our dynamic systems model of the mind is used to understand the connections between technology, commerce, artistic expression, narrative and science to generate what we have playfully called the Grand Unification Theory of Human Thought. Pre-verbal proto-languages represent more than just the transition to spoken language and abstract conceptual thought. Transformed by spoken language and the abstract thought that followed in its wake, they also served as prototypes of three fundamental activities of modern humans, namely technology which emerged from toolmaking, commerce which emerged from social intelligence and the fine arts which emerged from mimetic communications. In this way we link these activities to those associated with the verbal languages of speech, writing, math, science and computing. Language is the link which united all the activities of human enterprise.
5D. CANCELLED.
5E. Bodyworks: Medicine, Technology, and the Body at the Turn of the Millennium
Chair: Bernadette Wegenstein (SUNY at Buffalo).
Thomas Donovan and Brandon Stosuy (SUNY at Buffalo), "Funyons: Abject Delight, Abject Pleasure, Abject Devotion, Abject Surrender in Contemporary Home Video." Funyons are a dried onion-flavored snack funneled through a seemingly limited direct market. We discovered, in a class of twenty-five composition students, that only one had eaten Funyons. Considering the average age and dietary habits of the group, this is a bit shocking. Funyons are made with buttermilk and are packaged in a bright yellow and green plastic bag. The Funyons website is modest, the aesthetic of Shaker furniture. In approaching the Funyons project we considered video documentation as a private and more immediate medium than film. Video, as opposed to film, would be a form allowing us to diaristically portray moments in the life of the person (identity, body) we are in the midst constructing as the subject of the work. Issues arising from the project are: the confusion of the public and private sphere; mass consumption in late-capitalism; the place of the body in relation to consumerist trends, obsessions, and addictions; food as an other insofar as it is alienated from the productive forces of the consumer; the ecstatic experience of consumption; a Spinozo-Deleuzian re-reading or re-positioning of the body outside of lack; the morphogenesis of the body by a technology or an in-organics of food (i.e.: the construction and permutation of the subject by his or her consumerist habits).
Bernadette Wegenstein (SUNY at Buffalo), "Bodyworks Issues."
Malinda Lo (Stanford University), "Dana Scully Uncovered: The X-Files, Fan Fiction, and
the Post-human." "X-Files" fans, also known as "X-philes," come from a variety of backgrounds, ranging
from conspiracy enthusiasts to former Star Trek fans. My research has focused on a specific group of fans: those
who engage in the practice of fan fiction writing; i.e., writing stories featuring the characters and situations of
"The X-Files." This paper will explore how fans, through fan fiction, engage with the character of Dana Scully. I
will examine several continuing narrative themes from "The X-Files" that focus on the character of Special Agent
Scully, and fan reaction to those themes as expressed in fan fiction. Those themes include fears about disease,
specifically cancer; the ambiguous representation of Scully's sexuality; and the pervasive anxiety about
reproduction that has peaked this year in the eighth season narrative arc of Scully's pregnancy.
Tiffany Romain (Stanford University), "Relabeling Death: Reifying Science Fiction Through Cold Storage." Cryonics began in 1967 when Robert Nelson and the Cryonics Society of California froze James Bedford immediately after his death, hoping he would be pulled from his vat of liquid nitrogen and revived once "science" has developed the appropriate technology. Incorporating video clips from my documentary "Relabeling Death" into my paper presentation, I will explore cryonicists' shared interests and perspectives, many of which originate in science fiction. These perspectives include an unquestioning faith in science, a human evolutionary tract which "naturally" leads to the attainment of immortality, a Cartesian conception of the self and an emphasis on identity residing within the brain, a shared fantasy of post-reanimation (space travel, uploaded consciousness, transformation of the physical body), and the problematization and deconstruction of the binarism life/death. These perspectives are expressed through the community's histories, narratives, fantasies, disagreements, and their specific vocabulary and language which blends science and medicine. Most interesting, however, is the community's insistence that by calling cryonics a science, it simply becomes one.
Neal Bukeavich (West Virginia University), "Embracing the (Un)Imaginable: J. G. Ballard and Environmental Apocalypticism." Few critics of J.G. Ballard have paid much attention to the ecological themes that pervade much of his science fiction, perhaps because Ballard's fascination with 'inner space' and the landscapes of the mind have led critics to downplay the significance of the material landscapes in his works. Or perhaps it is because much of his early and late fiction seemingly celebrates ecological catastrophe, or attacks institutional environmentalism. Yet to characterize Ballard's treatments of ecological catastrophe merely as incidental or as a ''politics of environmental nihilism'' is to ignore the ways in which his fiction challenges the separation of nature and culture that structures Western modernity and social reality. In this paper, I will argue that Ballard's optimistic invocations of ecological catastrophes work to re-imagine social reality to include a repressed 'ecological real.'
Christopher. P. Csikszentmihályi (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), "Narratives of Technology and Scientific Production: Notes from a Participant Observer." Technology has historically been defined as that which is not nature, and some would say that they mutually co-define each other. Starting with the work of Claude Seaver, whose 1958 NLP (natural language processing) project used human infant subjects to sunder the cognitive from the cultural aspects of language, through my current participant-observation ethnography of a startup biotech company, I will show a variety of telling exemplars in the culture of technical production.
Catharina Landstrom (University of Western Sydney, Australia), "Australian Biological Control." As a technoscience biological control produces facts and artefacts while changing reality. However, biological control researchers do not invent things from scratch, they use the available resources, material as well as immaterial. This makes it interesting to look at the links between this technoscience and surrounding cultural narratives. This paper identifies three figures - 'a genealogy of success', 'authentic Australian nature' and 'redemption of colonial evils', which appear in the stories told to a wider audience in securing public acceptance of various biological control projects.
Phoebe Sengers (German National Computer Science Research Center), "Information Appliances, or Proactive Nostalgia for the Kitchen of the Future." Computer scientists and product engineers are busy designing the kitchen of the future. These "information appliances" will streamline and simplify your cooking experience, with fridges that allow you access to email, to microwaves that tell you how to cook in 7 easy steps, to cabinetry that monitors your consumption and orders more sprite and lucky charms when you are in danger of running out. The kitchen of the future, overloaded with industrialized technology, will make us nostalgic for the kitchen we can have, right now. Things could be different. I will argue that technical design can and should include humanist considerations, by describing alternative information appliances which would enhance rather than simplify and erase the cooking experience
6A. Luhmann (III): Luhmann's Conceptual Design
Guest Scholar Session with David Wellbery (University of Chicago).
Chair & Respondent: Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech University).
David Wellbery is LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago; author of The Specular Moment: Goethe's Lyric and the Beginnings of Romanticism (1998); co-editor, with Nancy Kaiser, Traditions of Experiment: Essays in Honor Peter Demetz (1992).
6B. New Human Beings in Post-humanist Theory
Chair: Catherine Kerr (Harvard Medical School).
Catherine Kerr (Harvard Medical School), "Beyond Dualism? The Meaning of Bodily Practices in Butler's Critical Gender Theory and Kuriyama's Version of Chinese Medicine." "Beyond Dualism?" compares Judith Butler and Shigehisa Kuriyama's attempts to historicize and establish the specifity of what has previously been taken to be a universal form: the human body. While it may seem strange to line-up Butler and Kuriyama side-by-side (the post-structuralist philosopher and prominent queer theorist; and the historian of Chinese Medicine), both writers are working towards the same goal of de-naturalizing and historicizing the interface between bodily experience and body-morphology, in order to build their larger argument that practice and discourse create bodies. This similarity between Butler and Kuriyama has some important implications for critical discussions of embodiment which the paper will consider. It suggests that there may be a range of philosophical writings, practices and experiences - e.g., traditional Chinese medicine or Tibetan medicine - outside of what is commonly considered the canon of liberal humanist discussion of subjectivity and agency and outside the canon of post-structuralist attacks on liberal subjectivity, in ways that may be very salient for contemporary discussions of subjectivity and embodiment.
Jane F. Thrailkill (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "Traumatic Realism and the Suffering Child." Trauma theory, I argue, entails an occult theory of language, in which representation is replaced by reliving, and communication is possible only through possession. Far from subverting a naïve realist epistemology, this theory of language takes it to a radical extreme by insisting that words convey not the story of trauma, but the experience of trauma -- or as Cathy Caruth puts it, "an encounter with the real," as in the exemplary instance of the father who receives the words of his dead (yet paradoxically suffering) child as "a transmission." It is, to quote Ruth Leys from her Trauma: A Genealogy, "as if the ghosts of the past could speak to those living in the present, contagiously contaminating them in turn." The suffering of the healer, then, becomes an index to the reality of transmission. This theory of trauma, I contend, is not limited to a small coterie of academics, but animates the contemporary rage for what I term the "quotidian occult" plots of myriad television shows (Roswell, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and films such as The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense.
Respondent: Tyler Curtain (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill).
6C. Science and Popular Culture (II)
Chair: James McManus (California State University, Chico).
Serena Keshavjee (University of Winnipeg), "Spiritualism and French Symbolist Art." During the late nineteenth century, France experienced a renewed interest in religiosity. Many became involved with unusual doctrines such as Vitalism, Monism, and Spiritualism. Here I will concentrate on the popularity of the spiritualist movement's philosophy of life after death. Spiritualists produced visual imagery ranging from automatic drawings, photographs of "ectoplasmic" apparitions, to theatrical séances. These images and events were created both by the true believers, and by scientists in their investigation of the movement. The interest in ghosts by prominent scientists such as William Crooks and Camille Flammarion served to legitimize this belief system in the eyes of general public.
Deborah Schizer Scott (St. Joseph's University), "The Beast Within: Piltdown Man and his Late Victorian Predecessors." Much discourse about human evolution, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focused on the development of the human brain, with its capacity for moral, technological, and aesthetic thought and thus, it follows, for civilization. Such discourse was fraught with anxiety, however, about the prospect of devolution. This paper will examine how such apprehension was explored, between 1885 and 1915, in fiction by Stevenson, Conrad, Wells and Conan Doyle, as well as in scientific prose regarding the 1912 discovery of Piltdown man, itself a fictional construct.
6D. Writing Medicine (III): Margaret Edson's
W;t
Chair: Mary Ellen Pitts (Rhodes College).
David Flood and Rhonda L. Soricelli (MCP Hahnemann / Drexel University), "'She's Tough. She Can Take It': The Patient as Research Subject in Edson's W;t." Margaret Edson's drama W;t, which details an English professor's terminal bout with cancer and experience as a clinical research subject, provides the opportunity to examine many ethical and humanistic concepts relevant to the practice of medicine. Issues such as breaking bad news, informed consent, the conflicting roles of the physician-researcher, and protectionism and justice in research involving human subjects will be key to the discussion. Broader aspects of the hospital experience, physician-patient and nurse-patient relationships, and end-of-life care will also be addressed.
Mary Ellen Pitts (Rhodes College), "Dramatic Techniques in W;t." Margaret Edson's intricately layered W;t is about textuality--Donne's texts, the body as text, life itself as text. As Vivian Bearing analyzed Donne's complexities, medical researchers now analyze her as a text. Central to the play of texts is a set of identities: Vivian is scholar, professor, patient, and commentator, but she also has suppressed roles: child, young woman, and woman (an identity evident only in her ovarian cancer). Through the interplay of identities and texts, Edson explores life, death, intellect, and the human puzzle.
Bernice Hausman (Virginia Tech), "Dead Babies, Medical Responsibility, and Scientific Motherhood: Narrating Culpability." This paper examines how physicians talk among themselves about issues of medical, social, and managerial culpability in a case of infant death. The particular case study here was an afternoon discussion at a physicians' conference concerning a case of infant death involving a brestfeeding mother and negligent healthcare and social service systems. The paper will address how a story about a managerial crisis in medicine and a story about credentialing medical expertise emerged from respondents' contributions to the session, and how such stories serve to facilitate medicine's increasing authority over social practices like infant feeding.
Susan Squier (Penn State University), "Science Fiction as Rubbish: Medicine and Transformative Narrative." This paper addresses the role of science fiction as a literary subgenre that mediates the current biomedical transformation of the human body from a transient to a durable subject.
Julie Boddy (Library of Congress), "Clinical Trials: Testimony to the President's Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments." Between 1994 and 1995 the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments convened a series of open meetings across the country, many of them near the major sites where the nuclear industry first was financed and developed. The meetings attracted a number of rural people, and at least some of them endured grueling hardships so that they might enter their experiences into public discourse in a cogent venue. An outcome of these ventures is a rich collection of narratives of nuclear power's advances through the tissues, veins, nerves and memories of some of those who found themselves in its wake.
Richard Doyle (Penn State University), "Double Take: Self-Experimentation and Repetition in Halucinogenic Research." While trolling for new pharmaceuticals as an employee of the Sandoz corporation, chemist Albert Hofmann first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD-25 (Lyserg-saure-diathylamid) for laboratory usage. This talk will focus on the dynamics of Hofmann's own encounters with LSD - both before and after his second synthesis of it - as a case study in both the epistemology of self experimentation and its pragmatics. Given the role of self experimentation and ecstasis in some examples of scientific innovation, how can we cultivate practices of experimentation not only of the self, but on it?
Nicolas Pethes (Stanford University), "Terminal Men: Biotechnical Experimentation and the Reshaping of Anthropology in Contemporary Medical Thrillers." This paper examines the anthropological implications of the debate on biotechnology using an uncommon account of this debate, the popular genre of Medical Thrillers. Fictionally staging experiments with human beings - genetic engineering, organ transplants, AI - these books make a statement on a 'designed' mankind. Thus narrating the possible results of research with human beings, novels by Michael Crichton, Robin Cook et al turn out to be themselves 'experiments': They observe the possible development of a society that transforms the very basis of its ethical consent.
Alice Adams (Macalester College), "Fetal Sexuality and Hybrid Agency." Although he worked with rats, Günter Dörner's references to women in "The Induction and Prevention of Female Homosexuality" (1969) indicate that the sexual orientation of women is at stake. In the rat study, something invades the fetal body of the female rat and acts upon in, perverting its destiny. That "something" is a hybrid agent composed of injected hormone/researcher protocol/lab/research institution. The title of Dörner's study indicates that if the collective action of hormones/masculinity/homosexuality can be de-activated early enough, the female rat returns automatically to heterosexual service in an orderly evolutionary narrative.
Lucy Suchman (Lancaster University, England), "Machinic Intra-Actions: Reflections on Sociomateriality." This paper draws on a collection of writings by feminist theorists, on analyses of the projects of robotics and artificial intelligence, and on a lesser known cyborg figure named Deidre, born in 1944. The premise is that close readings of technoscience can identify both old agendas and new spaces for intervention. Much as recognition is central to feminist conceptions of the subject, objects come to matter within a matrix of culturally constituted familiar possibilities. Technologies are both produced and destabilized in the course of these reiterations.
Elizabeth A. Wilson (University of Sydney, Australia), "Evolution as Intra-action." Darwin's texts are notable for describing a nonhuman world that is constituted through fierce reciprocation. For Darwin, evolution is the intra-activity of coral reefs and mountain ranges and coloured feathers and barnacle shells and clover flowers and emotion in dogs and the mental capacities of worms. This is not a simple ecology within which entities cohabit in equilibrium and breed with their own kind. Evolution, under Darwin, is active commerce between species, between kingdoms, between organic and inorganic forms, between biology and geology and culture and psychology. This paper will outline how nonhuman (natural) agency is given sophisticated expression in Darwin's writing, with special attention to Darwin's last text, The formation of vegetable mould through the action of worms with observations on their habits (1881).
7B. New Media Art
(II): Digital Materiality
Chair: Mark Hansen (Princeton University).
Mark Hansen (Princeton University), "The Time of the Body: Proprioceptive Duration in New Media Art." This paper investigates proprioceptive experience of time within the space of the body. This temporal experience is properly post-Bergsonist, since it spatializes time in a far different way than does metaphysics (and, as Bergson understood it, the cinema). It is also "post-Deleuzean," since it "contains" virtual time within bodily proprioception, thus marking the irreducible correlation of virtuality and actuality in a way that diverges from Deleuze's analysis of the time-image. As part of a larger project on the specificity of the digital-image, this investigation will treat several examples from recent media art.
Lisa Lynch (Rutgers University), "Dematerialization and Didacticism: Art and/as Text in the Work of Eduardo Kac." Over the past year, Eduardo Kac achieved good deal of celebrity through his GFP Bunny project, a controversial conceptual work that included the "creation" of a transgenic rabbit whose DNA was blended with that of a fluorescent jellyfish. I will argue that Kac's work moves from a focus on shattering signification through foregrounding the signifier as material object, to a focus on the "readerly" possibilities of the digital signifier, to what he describes as a "dialogic" aesthetics that extends from this earlier work but which also contains a seemingly paradoxical level of didactic content.
Timothy Campbell (Cornell University), "Wireless Marconisti: Technicians of Writing in the 1900 Discourse Network." My paper is an examination of the function of the early wireless in the discourse network of 1900, or more specifically how the Marconi-wireless and the institutions coupled with it (wireless companies and European militaries) altered the selection and processing of data in the first quarter of the last century. I begin by focusing on wireless-operators, marconisti as they were known in Italian, and show how they become receivers of a discourse previously reserved for the hallucinating authors of the 1800 discourse network. The conditions for their emergence are, I argue, the result of a coupling of signifier and body whose genealogy may be found in the work of psychophysicists Giuseppe Sergi and William Preyer.
Gretchen Michlitsch (University of Wisconsin), "Embodying the Old and the New: Narrative of a Heart Transplant for the Future." This paper addresses the struggle to renew traditional ideologies of medicine in the midst of a futuristic reliance on biomedical technology. In Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), a work of speculative fiction set in the gutted urban wasteland of a futuristic Toronto, the teenage mother Ti-Jeanne must learn the value of her grandmother's African-Caribbean ways of knowing. Hopkinson's attention to the embodied experiences of injury, healing, sustaining, and aging, as well as her detailed understandings of both old and new ways of knowing medicine underlies this analysis of her narrative.
Astrid Vicas (St. Leo University), "Web-linked Agency." This paper focuses on a form of agency that may arise with the advent of Web-linked appliances and, eventually, ubiquitous, wearable, and ambient computing, abbreviated as Web-linked agency. It is proposed that short-duration Web-linked agency may be configurational and non-directional, as opposed to productive and directional. Agency as typically construed in the Indo-European tradition is productive and directional. The paper outlines what is meant by the productive, the configurational, and by directionality in order to discuss the distinctiveness of short-duration Web-linked agency.
7D.Versions of Inscription: Galvanism,
Essayismus, and The Realist
Chair: Joan Steigerwald (York University, Canada).
Mark Freed (Central Michigan University), "Latour and Musil: Toward a Non-Modern Problematics of Psychopathology." Drawing on Bruno Latour's notion of "non-modernity" this paper uses Robert Musil's novel The Man Without Qualities to propose a non-modern critique of the legal accountability of psychopathology. Through the non-modern discursive practice of essayismus, Musil's novel problematizes the ability of modernist legal accounts to come to terms with insanity.
Elizabeth Mazzolini (Penn State University), "The Realist and Interdisciplinarity in 1929." This paper finds one of the key early points for science studies to be the brief appearance in 1929 of an ambitious journal with high-profile contributors (Wells, the Huxleys, Haldane, e.g.) called The Realist: A Journal of Scientific Humanism. Even though the journal ceased publication shortly after the stock market crashed, its appearance is significant for the social and financial interests in which it was published, and for the questions it raises for scholars interested in interdisciplinarity. This paper will examine The Realist's appearance as a moment rife with cultural, disciplinary and economic contingency, even as science studies began to make emergent claims to universality.
Joan Steigerwald (York University, Canada), "Romantic Phenomeno-technologies: Galvanic Inscriptions around 1800." This paper will draw upon theories of inscription, as developed by Latour and Rheinberger, in a reading of Ritter's galvanic experiments. Ritter produced particular inscriptions in his nerve-muscle preparations through particular galvanic arrangements, particular combinations of a nerve, a muscle and metals. He maintained that the specific positions or formal arrangements of these elements had significance for the electrochemical phenomena produced, and the direction of galvanic activity. Ritter then translated these experimental inscriptions into pictorial inscriptions, diagrams or pictograms, as a form of instrumental language, both abstract and material, which in turn facilitated the writing of his formal theory. He utilized these pictograms, this instrumental language, to write and read, then rewrite and reread, his developing conceptions of the phenomena he studied. Both the experimental arrangements and pictograms are technologies for representing the phenomena studied, material signifiers instrumental to the writing of Ritter's galvanic theory.
7E. Criminal Minds, Gendered Bodies
Chair: Stephen Kern (Northern Illinois University).
Stephen Kern (Northern Illinois University), "The Causal Role of Sexual Desire in Modern Detective Novels." Modern novels describe sex in increasing detail, show shift from the Victorian "sexual problem" of sexual control to modern problem of impotence. Moderns kill out of sex deficiency in Faulkner's Sanctuary, Greene's Brighton Rock, Rendell's A Demon in my View, Harris's Red Dragon, McCreary's The Minus Man. This history of causal role of sexual desire pivots on developments in sexology, psychoanalysis, endocrinology. Modern killers explained in terms of hormones by Huxley, Dreiser, and Sanders.
Melissa Littlefield (Penn State University), "'Playing the Role of a Scientist': The Authorizing Narratives of the Lie Detector." Manifested in several sites during the 1920s and '30s (scientific journals, detective stories, and even comic books) the lie detector is presented as both an instrument of science--an empirical witness--and as an infallible detective capable of capturing the greatest criminals, and solving the most trying consumer conundrums. This presentation argues that the "science of deception detection" could not sell itself effectively on fact alone; it was only through a partnership with popular culture that the "laboratory" could create authorizing narratives for its newest gadget.
Alana Hermiston (Carleton University), "Hungry for Control: Nutritional Discourses in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s." Nutritional knowledge - what constitutes 'proper' nutrition and definitions of malnutrition - is often contradictory and thus contentious. This paper examines the emergence of nutrition as a national concern in Canada in the 1930s and 1940s. Despite professed commitments by government agencies and other interested parties to cooperate and to coordinate their respective efforts, a review of their correspondence reveals often intense competition to become 'the' voice of authority. The gendered nature of these credibility struggles is also considered.
Friskjen van Veldhoven (Carleton University), "Repetitive Strain Injury Sufferers in the Netherlands." Present day workplace injuries, such as repetitive strain injuries (RSI), are invisible and hence more insidious in nature. Often their work-relatedness is questioned by medical professionals, and some professionals question the very existence of the injury. This effectively undermines a system of financial support for a large number of injured workers in many jurisdictions. Based on the fact that work-relatedness is not at issue in the Netherlands in terms of disability insurance, it might be assumed that Dutch workers who developed RSI should have no problem collecting benefits. However, a closer investigation of the matter reveals that many such workers are faced with struggles for recognition of their condition, despite state driven programs to educate the public about RSI as a legitimate claim. This paper discusses the findings this researcher obtained through talking to injured workers in the Netherlands and their experiences with RSI..
Emma Whelan (McGill University), "Knowing the Endometriotic Body: Contestation and Cooperation Between Patients and Gynecologists." In social studies of medicine, rigid distinctions often are drawn between patients' knowledge (subjective, experiential) and biomedical knowledge (objective, scientific). However, a comparative epistemology of patients' and gynecologists' claims about endometriosis demonstrates that both communities routinely draw upon both "experience" and "science" in their claimsmaking work. Although patients and gynecologists assert that their knowledges are dichotomous, they are in fact mutually constitutive. This analysis explores the political dimensions--and questions the epistemological validity--of the expert-lay divide in medicine.
8A. Representation and Reality
Chair: Jay Labinger (California Institute of Technology).
Benjamin R. Cohen (Virginia Tech), "Classifying Chemistry: The Visual Cognition of Chemistry Tables in the Eighteenth-Century." In this paper, I place a brief survey of different types of (pre-periodic) chemical tables within a broader view of the general epistemological significance of 18th and 19th century taxonomies. The classificatory scheme of tables allowed for a dual role, collating current knowledge, yet leaving space for future knowledge. As such, the use of a table was not merely a passive holding place for what was known, but also guided and constrained future research. Reading the chemistry table as a discursive tool thus played a crucial role in its function as a taxonomic organizer.
Dennis Desroches (McMaster University), "Who Speaks? Speculations on the Epistemological Limits of Science Studies." This paper examines the stakes that inhere in science studies's representation of the production of scientific knowledge-which is to say, its representation of scientific representation. Shapin and Schaffer's landmark study of the Hobbes/Boyle dispute and the socially embedded production of Boyle's air pump experiments, marked the culmination, in a sense, of an epistemological turn that had taken place in the exact sciences at the beginning of the twentieth century. If Bohr's concept of "dynamic interaction" in the experimental arrangement, and Heisenberg's move from relativism to uncertainty, marked new ways in which the scientist participates in, rather than passively observes, the production of knowledge, now, with Shapin and Schaffer's study, that insight is brought to its most radical articulation: we, and we alone, are responsible for what we know, and now the exact sciences can be opened up to inquiry on cultural grounds.
Jay Labinger (California Institute of Technology), "The Map is not the Territory." Representation in science has been a major focus of science studies, encompassing topics such as the roles of analogy and metaphor, the use of models of all sorts - mathematical, visual, mechanical, etc. - and others. It has been amply demonstrated, again and again, that science cannot proceed without relying on representation. But how far does this go? Do scientists come to treat the representations they work with as more real than the underlying phenomena that are represented, evaluating their hypotheses solely against the former and disconnecting from the latter? And if so, what are the consequences? Does this pose a risk, or is it just part of the normal course of science? I will describe my response to these questions as a practicing scientist, inspired (or perhaps provoked) by some examples from the field of computational chemistry.
Ann Starr (Independent Artist), "Medicine's Clinical Representations of Abnormal Human Bodies." Despite the "unblinking truth" of the camera, contemporary clinical photos of preserved fetal and infant specimens safely distance us from experience of the subject. While photographed "babies in bottles," as Susan Squier calls them, are used to generate fire-storms in public policy about abortion and genetic therapies, I suggest that contemporary medical photographs are no more objective in their interpretations of this subject than completely unobserved images in other media, from whatever era. My paper will examine contemporary medical images of abnormally developed infants and fetuses, considering them as documents about both medical and about non-medical reactions to monstrosity.
Respondent: Stephen J. Weininger (Worcester Polytechnic Institute).
Vicki Kirby (George Washington University), "Just Figures." The conversation between flesh and bone in forensic facial reconstruction is a measured one, conducted through algorithmic translation. The identification of an individual emerges from a "cast of thousands", a "statistical death mask" of calculations drawn from bones with no apparent connection to those under investigation. And yet this anonymous data recognise the figure (number and name) of a very particular face. By way of Saussure, Derrida and Simondon I explore the implications of this uncanny interfacing for the question of ethical responsibility.
Thomas Lamarre (McGill University), "Haptic Space and the Ethics of Affect." Many theories of the haptic imply a synaesthetic encounter, an interplay of seeing and touching. In cultural theory, haptic space often poses a challenge to the way in which we think about readers or spectators, by transforming the way in which one thinks about the relations between perception, movement and space. This paper centres on Deleuze-Guattari's notion of the haptic, through a shifting dialogue, first with Noel Burch, then with Derrida and Levinas. In this dialogue emerges a tension between two profoundly different ways of treating the sensible and sensation. My aim is not to reconcile or connect these different ways but to encourage certain ethical and practical considerations to arise between them. Nevertheless, both approaches tend to shift our attention to affect, which has profound implications for how we imagine the impact of perception, optical devices, and spectatorship.
Joseph Murphy (University of Florida), "Time in Generating the Compound Object of Literature and Science." One finds in cultural studies a good deal of speculation on the idea that in the 20th century bodies become the subject through the proliferation of new media to new spaces and times, such that the old idea of a single, objective space and time has been invalidated. However the mechanism for incorporating these new spaces and times is seldom specified. Standing up a program of research on the problem of sensibilities requires consulting the disciplines that take time and space as fundamental categories, principally literature, physics, history and cognitive neuroscience. However, it is not likely that the resulting compound object will be tractable to existing protocols of literary criticism.
8C. The Mind-Body-Technology Problem in Physics and Beyond: From Galileo to Bohr
Chair: Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue University).
Makato Katsumori (Akita University, Japan), "Complementarity, Hermeneutics, Deconstruction: Niels Bohr's Thought in Contemporary Philosophical Context." Niels Bohr's idea of complementarity is examined in its possible intersections with the hermeneutic philosophy of Gadamer and Ricoeur as well as with Derridean deconstruction. The study indicates that Bohr's complementarity as a relation between the roles of "actors" and "spectators" is closely parallel to the hermeneutic view of the relation between "belonging" and "distanciation" or "alienation." Unlike the hermeneutic philosophers, however, Bohr does not prioritize the moment of belonging, but rather develops a 'deconstructive' critique of the traditional notion of the 'spectator's' purely detached knowledge.
Arkady Plotnitsky (Purdue University), "The Final Cut: The Body as Experimental Technology in Classical and Quantum Physics." Arguably the most vexing of many vexing problems of quantum physics is that two incompatible theories and modes of description apply and appear to be necessary at two different levels-classical physics at the macro level and quantum physics at the micro level of the (presumably) ultimate constitution of matter. At the same time, the borderline between these two levels of physical description, sometimes also known as the "cut," appears to be indeterminate. We do not know where the quantum world ends and where the classical world begins, let alone how one becomes another (one of the great outstanding problems of fundamental physics). The "cut" is sometimes argued to be arbitrary, a matter of choice, in view of the fact, or at least a strong possibility, that the ultimate constitution of all matter (including that of life and human bodies, the "instruments" of perception and consciousness) is quantum. This paper will consider, from this perspective, the role of the human body as experimental technology in classical physics and then in relativity and quantum physics.
David Reed (Duke University), "Units of Measurement and the Various Mathematics of Classical Physics." Starting with Maxwell's discussion of units of measurement at the beginning of his Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, I explore the ways in which mathematics is linked to physical measurements in Maxwell, Galileo and Newton. The various approaches to establishing these linkages used by these authors involve, in turn, the use of different types of mathematics. In particular, certain problematic aspects of Maxwell's use of the notion of "units of measurement'" are highlighted and provide a new perspective on the prehistory of the issues of measurement that have arisen in quantum mechanics.
8D. Writing Medicine (IV): Diagnostics
Chair: Mary Ellen Pitts (Rhodes College).
Moira M. Grant (University of Toronto), "The Discourse of Diagnosis: Mystification of Medical Tests." I offer an interpretation of diagnostic testing as part of the discourse of power among health professionals and between physicians and their patients. I uncover some of the assumptions of medical tests: assumptions of accuracy, representativeness, and quantifiability of disease. I question the language of medical testing that obscures understanding by those it is meant to help, and I point to the obstacles to accessing patient health information as suggestive of a control mechanism over health information.
Mary Ellen Pitts (Rhodes College), "Extratextual Codes and the Ethics of Information in Medical Discourse." Following Allen B. Wiese in Medical Odysseys and my own research, this paper explores the intersection of data and the human body with emphasis on two points: (1) the paradox of misleading or inconclusive data and (2) the always present need for naming in medical discourse, even in the face of fuzzy data. Francois Jacob juxtaposes "day" and "night" science, the first following clear reasoning and conclusions and the second imaged as wandering among dim, winding streets. This paper pursues the notion of extratextual codes associated with two widely known conditions--hypoglycemia and mitral valve prolapse--and a third condition that has only recently received public attention, lobular carcinoma in situ (which is actually not a cancer in spite of its name).
Lisa Lynch (Rutgers University), "Anatomy of An Exhibition: Genetic Aesthetics and the Controversy Surrounding 'Paradise Now': Picturing the Genetic Revolution." This paper analyzes and documents a recent gallery show that itself attempted to document and analyze the social implications of genetic research. "Paradise Now" was launched - and financed - as if it were a museum blockbuster event. Quickly, however, it became the exhibit that art critics loved to hate: it was assessed as disorganized, vapid and amateurish. And not only the critics reacted negatively to the show: in an unusual move, several of the artists from the exhibit organized a "protest panel" to react to the show's curation, specifically to complain that the motivation and intent behind their work had been hijacked by the way the show was organized and marketed. Examining the show's genesis, curation, funding, and critical reaction - and presenting selected examples of artwork - I will address both specific questions about the "failure" of the show itself and larger questions about what it means to aestheticize genetic research and its possible risks and implications.
Benjamin J. Robertson (SUNY at Buffalo), "Being-Genetic, Becoming-Genetic: Deleuze's Conceptual Life and the Possibilities of the Posthuman." If the human is defined in part by a tendency towards intellect, then a possibility of the posthuman that leads away from a being genetic must proceed through a different tendency. Such a shift would consist in a radical break with the human, a shift that must be intuitive, in Henri Bergson's formulation. This paper explores this possibility of the posthuman through Deleuze's reading of Bergson's concept of duration and the subsequent work by Deleuze and Guattari on the idea of becoming and the practice of science.
8F.
CANCELLED.
Featuring: D. D. Ellis and the Wildcats
Barri Gold and Russel Kauffman (Muhlenberg College), "Poetry for Physicists: Rereading Maxwell." It is a commonplace among physicists that Maxwell's equations are poetic. Far less well-known is his poetry. Rereading Maxwell's equations in conversation with his poetry, we find that Maxwell demands a mode of understanding which is as poetic--even romantic--as it is mathematically sophisticated. And as he struggles with the question of whether there are "real analogies in nature," he evolves a science and an aesthetic in which the analogy about nature emerges as the most real statement of all.
Azfar Hussain (Washington State University), "The Ghost of Mathematics and the Body of Poetry: Towards a Calculus of Criticism." In this theoretical undertaking I seek to fashion a new calculus of criticism by way of identifying and theorizing certain parallels, similarities, homologies, and isomorphisms between the language of poetry and that of mathematics. I begin by arguing that the ghost of mathematics continues to haunt the body of poetry in ways in which the mathematical and the poetical can by no means avoid each other. Taking cues and clues from poets such as Ezra Pound who maintains that "Poetry is after all inspired mathematics"--while also using Pythagoras' theorem, Zeno's paradox, and contemporary calculus--I advance what I wish to call a "mathematical reading" of the poetry of Stephan Mallarme, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.
9B. Writing Knowledge: Complexity, Ravishment, and the Visual Revolution
Chair: Nancy Barta-Smith (Slippery Rock University).
Ken Baake (Texas Tech University), "Complexity: A Term Evolves and Sweeps Through the Arts and Sciences." I present an etymology of the term "complexity" as found in popular and academic texts. Books published before the mid 1980s typically use the word to suggest a state of being that is difficult to unravel, or complicated. Now "complexity" embraces a new postmodern meta-science that brings together researchers from many fields to consider how interactions among agents and environments yield surprising results. The evolution of this noun reveals a Kuhnian paradigm shift in the sciences and the humanities.
Nancy Barta-Smith (Slippery Rock University), "Out of Site, Out of Mind: How Accounts of the Visual Revolution Leave Out the Evolution of Technical and Scientific Writing in English Studies." Discussions of the latest communication "revolution" generally neglect to mention writing done in pragmatic contexts, especially technical writing. This paper argues that such neglect has obscured important continuities between print and the new visual media, and that it is hard to believe visual media will revolutionize how we think or act if vision has been important all along. For instance, in the beginning of print technology, the use of spatial layout can be seen as having similarities to the spatial sense we develop within the surrounding terrain visible to the eye and traversed by touch. For instance, white space "opens up" the page, allowing us to see, just as open space in any field does. The integration of images and text we currently see in new media bears a resemblance to such visual displays in Renaissance print. To the extent that new ways of writing provide for interactivity, they mimic our daily interactions.
Sharon Stockton (Dickinson University), "Bodies, Violence, and Promise in Academic Disciplines." Personal histories of rape survivors show the victims of sexual violation experiencing "subjectivity" defined apart from agency - a subjectivity further delimited by relentlessly clear boundaries of physical embodiment. It is more than ironic, then, that rape has served in the Western tradition as the master trope of transcendent possibility: one need think only of Yeats's "Leda and the Swan." To trace the academic history of the study of rape is to embark on an elusive quest. Circulating through the discourse networks of anthropology, sociology, criminology, psychology, biology, history, critical theory, and philosophy, the study of rape both reinforces and puts into question the disciplinary structure of the university curriculum.
Meegan Kennedy (Trinity College), "Poor Hoo Loo: Curious Narratives of Sentimental Medicine in Dickens and The Lancet." The medical case history (with graphic full-length engraving) of "Poor Hoo Loo and His Tumour" published in The Lancet in 1829 demonstrates how a "curious" or sentimental medicine persisting into the nineteenth century precipitates a widespread anxiety over how inappropriate medical texts and practices might torpedo the soon-to-be professional authority of clinical physicians. In contrast, Dickens's embrace of curiosity and the grotesque, and his sentimental portrayals of illness and death, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840) advertise his sympathy with eighteenth-century British medicine rather than the newly-ascendant clinical medicine.
Kathryn Miele (University of Delaware), "Darwin and Doctors: 19th Century Visuality and Empathy in Medical Science." This paper explores the relationship between 19th century observational practices and medical empathy. To extend the boundaries of scientific knowledge beyond what could be supported through sensory data, the imagination was accepted into scientific discourse. Literature was an important vehicle for exploring he centrality of empathy to Victorian medical science and culture. Empathy was a means of linking the imagination with science, through which Victorians could deal with the tensions over the potentially conflicting roles of the doctor as caregiver and as scientific researcher.
Lilla Vekerdy (Washington University, St. Louis), "Asclepius and the Muses." There seems to be a curious opposition between Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine, and the Muses. But are the sciences indeed in dichotomy with the arts? This paper examines forms of possible cooperation between the two realms by looking at various genres where either arts are applied in medicine or medicine is applied in different fields of the humanities. The focus is on the healing and the fine arts as reflected in medical rare books: examples of artistic anatomy and ars medica by authors such as Charles Bell (1774-1842), Julien Fau, Jean Salvage (fl. 1796-1812), Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564), and others.
9D. Evolutionary Psychology and Literary Studies
Chair: Ian Jobling (SUNY at Buffalo).
Jon Gottschall (St. Lawrence University), "Male Biased Sex Ratios in the Homeric Epics: An Evolutionary Perspective." Homer's epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, like much orally composed literature, contain detailed genealogical information. This information is consistent with historical and archaeological evidence that Homeric era Greeks, like Greeks of subsequent centuries, engaged in the twin practices of preferential female infanticide and neglect. All evidence suggests a dearth of daughters and a glut of sons. This paper considers male biased sex ratios in the Homeric poems in light of two complementary evolutionary theories: Trivers-Willard theory and the differential payback hypothesis.
Ian Jobling (SUNY at Buffalo), "Personal Justice and Homicide in Scott's Ivanhoe: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective." Although people are biologically designed to seek justice through personal revenge, contemporary nation-state societies compel them to forego this manner of achieving justice. Understanding this conflict between biology and culture enables us better to understand the dynamics of the work of Walter Scott. Scott vacillates between portraying personal revenge as heroic and denigrating it as dangerous and immoral. He thereby covertly gratifies his readers' desire for personal revenge while officially supporting the ideology of the nation-state.
Blakey Vermeule (Northwestern University), "Gossip: The Palm-Oil with which Stories are Eaten." My paper explores how cognitive and evolutionary approaches can be used to develop a narratological analysis of a single novel, Chinua Achebe's 1958 masterwork Things Fall Apart. A cognitive or mind-first approach to literary studies can help us develop a unifying yet flexible research method for the study of human values; and the breathtaking formal and psychological complexity of Achebe's novel are so tightly interwoven that they demand to be unfolded in tandem. While I will try to unpack the local and specific content of Achebe's metaphor usage, the larger burden of the paper will be to show how such local metaphors are the ground on which the story of the Ibo people's conquest, disgrace, and disintegration unfolds. I hope to show that a cognitive analysis of a few scenes from the novel can account for the relationship between local metaphor and a broader narrative line.
9E.
Stranger than Science Fiction: Targeting the Human Body in Postmodern Literature
Chair: Lisa Yaszek (Georgia Institute of Technology).
Doug Davis (Georgia Institute of Technology), "Wandering Targets on the Home Front: Revisiting World War II in Slaughterhouse Five and Gravity's Rainbow." Focusing on two works of fiction written at the height of the Cold War, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, this paper shows how postmodern fictions about the Second World War's strategic bombing campaigns also work within their moment to 'free' the bodies stuck in the Cold War's nuclear threat. By representing the first American targets of total air war as subjects of discourse who wander through and even escape from the many narrative devices that have conventionally been used to describe the history of total war, the experience of urban bombardment begins to look like a product of narrative invention, in the process undermining-albeit problematically-the received memory of World War II that helped put all Americans on the front lines of World War III as targets.
Lisa Yaszek (Georgia Institute of Technology), "'A grim fantasy': Retargeting American History in Octavia Butler's Kindred." This paper examines Afro-feminist responses to the representations of American history produced by the commercial television industry in the 1960s and 1970s. Two seemingly distinct events from this period--the emergence of civil rights and black power movements in the political sphere and the shift to "lifestyle" marketing in the economic sphere--encouraged television executives to acknowledge the demographic importance of black viewers. Not surprisingly, advertisers and programmers alike began targeting this lucrative new audience with representations of American history that specifically emphasized African American contributions to that history. In her 1979 novel Kindred, Octavia Butler adapts science fiction tropes like time travel and "the journey to another world" to the neo-slave narrative, showing how commercial television programming continues to erase the complexity of African American women's histories.
9F. CANCELLED.
10A. CANCELLED.
10B. Modernism and Science: Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and Jean Charcot
Chair: Steven Meyer (Washington University, St. Louis).
Alex Csiszar (University of British Columbia), "Gertrude Stein Counting While Anybody is Listening." Counting is a linguistic technique for setting up correspondences between language, our body, and our world. Numbers are transitional objects (Winnicott): it is to be left undecided whether they are subjective objects, or refer to external objects. Scenes of counting arise at critical moments in certain Stein texts. These numerical episodes ground an investigation into Stein's desire for precision (and literary authority) as writer and as observer of her own writing: By willfully engaging with objects founded on a suspended paradox, Stein achieves a precarious dedifferentiation of object and concept, of writer and reader, of patient and therapist.
Steven Meyer (Washington University, St. Louis), "The Neurophysiological Imagination: Francisco Varela and Gertrude Stein." In a recent essay Francisco Varela provides a three-part analytic structure for the "complex texture" of experienced time, and hence of the neurophysiological connection between affect and temporality. The present paper considers Varela's argument from three angles: the alignment of his "neurophenomenological" position with William James's radical empiricism; the role played by several references to the actual writing of the essay; the relation between Varela's understanding of writing and Gertrude Stein's. The paper concludes with a definition of the neurophysiological imagination and several instantiations of it in Stein's opera Four Saints in Three Acts.
Antje Pfannkuchen (New York University), "From Vortex to Vorticism: How the Victorian atom-model became Pound's 'pigment of art'." "The vorticist relies on this alone: on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else" - Ezra Pound writes in his vorticist manifesto published in the first number of the magazine BLAST 1914 in London. Pound, together with Wyndham Lewis, had been the co-founder of the artists' group he called 'vorticists'. In their art they were influenced by Futurism and Cubism but the name came almost straight out of 19th century English physics, where, in an early atom model, the vortex was understood as a very 'primary pigment'.
Jane V. Rago (West Virginia University), "Hysterical Drag: Charcot and Medical/Scientific Discourse." An apt illustration of some of Judith Butler's concepts might be found in the hysteric of the nineteenth century. The hysteric is directly linked to the repetitive and frantic performance of femininity in a heterosexual structure that at once must fail (eruptions of excess) and succeed (in naturalizing gender, sex and sexuality as original and inherent). In particular, Charcot's demonstrations of hysteria at the Salpetriere Hospital in France during his famous Tuesday lectures can be argued to literally illustrate mimesis, frantic repetition, psychic excess, imitation and desire - all within a highly gendered framework that, ironically, is revealed as constructed through this very display, the ultimate drag show, if you will, watched by the authoritative gaze of the doctor.
10C. Figurative Beasts and the Book of Nature: Early Modern Science
Chair: Richard Nash (Indiana University).
Allison Kavey (Johns Hopkins University), "A World You Could Draw: Constructions of Nature and the Body in Erra Pater's Book of Knowledge." Both the 1767 and 1793 American editions of Erra Pater's oft-reprinted perpetual almanac, The Book of Knowledge, produce a model of nature that combines elements of medical, astrological, natural philosophical, providential, magical, and "folk" knowledge. I contend that this little book, in each incarnation investigated, intertwines different pieces of these knowledge and textual traditions to form a multi-faceted and highly functional lens for making sense of the highly chaotic 18th century natural world.
Richard Nash (Indiana University), "Figurative Beasts, Metaphoric Animals: Border Work in Enlightenment Cognitive Science." Who are the "figurative beasts, metaphoric animals" of my title? One answer, provided by a distinction widely accepted in the eighteenth century, and considered common-sense truth until (at least) very recently, is: we are. I wish to mobilize contemporary arguments in cognitive science as figures for eighteenth-century discussions of literal and figurative language, human and animal identity. Paying special attention to the writings of Swift, Gay, and Defoe, I want to offer some suggestions for how Augustan writers engaged emerging theories of literal and figurative language with particular emphasis on animals as human figures.
10D. I Feel Your Pain
Chair: Louis Goldberg, (SUNY at Buffalo).
Inéz Azar (George Washington University), "Fiction, Language, and Pain" Cervantes' Don Quixote is one of the first European works of fiction in which pain and suffering are viewed not as symbolic forms (punishment for wrongdoing, signs of moral weakness or cowardice) but as legitimate dimensions of human life as we know it. Don Quixote is the first European text I know of that confronts its characters (and readers) with questions as the following: How can anyone truly understand what I really mean when I express a pain that I alone feel? The text provides no definite answers to these and other similar questions but it offers, as many literary works do, a wealth of descriptive expressions that allow us to make distinctions and identify differences within the still hard to define and encompass domain of suffering and pain.
Diane Christian, (SUNY at Buffalo), "Pain and Poetry." Poetry comes from pain according to myths like the nightingale and swan. Keats says the pain of melancholy is the necessary contrary of joy, for feeling requires extremes. Language speaks through opposites and pain would seems to be a silent extreme, an opposite of poetry. Job in the grip of affliction curses all comment, and warrior Philoctetes can only cry "Aie, Aie." Philoctetes' suppurating foot needs a surgeon and a pharmacist, not a poet. This paper addresses poetry's use and uselessness in the stories and strategy of naming pain.
Louis Goldberg, (SUNY at Buffalo), "Pain, Language, and Science." Elaine Scarry suggests that pain is unshareable--we cannot feel each other's pain. Pain, she also notes, is resistant to language and cannot be objectified. Scientists, however, are in the business of objectification and believe that they will eventually come to understand pain, and ultimately control it. If the literal and anti-connotative nature of science makes this an impossible task, will we have to rely on the creativity of language as our best hope of comprehending the unshareability of pain and the nature of its resistance to language?
Carolyn Korsmeyer (SUNY at Buffalo), "Pain and Disgust." Expressive and powerful literature can arouse emotions and other affective states in the reader. Even aversions such as fear and disgust can become components of the experience of appreciation and enjoyment. Pain, however, has no equivalent "aesthetic" arousal. Stories often vividly describe the infliction and suffering of physical pain, and the reader may flinch and feel pity on behalf of a character. But unlike affects such as disgust, pain is not actually aroused in the reader. The absence of relevant touch sensations might seem the obvious reason; however, this ready answer raises as many problems as it solves. This paper investigates the role of sensation in emotion and feeling by examining several examples of stories with disgusting and painful content.
10E. Science as Narrative: Models, Affects, Agencies
Chair: Carol Schilling (University of Pennsylvania).
John Marvin (SUNY at Buffalo), "Willing Evolution: Toward a Nietzschean Theory of Everything." Nietzsche, when he went mad, was in the process of producing a narrative that he hoped would unite all knowledge in much the same way that the physicists hope to when they speak of a "theory of everything." His science was based upon 19th century understandings, but he moved somewhat beyond his better trained colleagues with a point-particle sub-atomics and a steady state cosmology. He believed he needed a scientific foundation upon which to build an ethical philosophy because any religious underpinning for ethics had been shattered by science, especially Darwin. Without a replacement he feared that the 20th century would be a blood bath.
Mirko Petric (University of Split, Croatia), "Missing Narratives: The Notion of 'Grand Recit' in Artificial Agent Modeling." Researchers in the field of artificial agent modeling have recently shown a renewed interest in the issues of narrative as applied to artificial intelligence. Both the attempts to define 'narrative intelligence' and to develop 'socially intelligent' artificial agents have revealed the need for a wider and primarily socially centered interpretive framework in which to account for or model the agents' behavior. This paper aims to explore the possibilities of application of Jean-François Lyotard's notion of grand récit (grand narrative) to the field of artificial agent modeling.
Carol Schilling (University of Pennsylvania), "Models, Maps, and Tinkertoys: Emulation and Affection in Scientific Practice." Linus Pauling's vision of a consistently patterned universe converts even its remotest, most elusive parts into a familiar, dependable, knowable place. Pauling brought home this vision when he attempted to repeat the angle of the carbon atom in the structure of his Palo Alto house, joining his affection for the molecular world he took pleasure in discovering to the site of familial affection. I propose to talk about the centrality of emulation and affection in scientific practice, particularly by citing the instance of one of Pauling's admirers and emulators, Jim Watson. I will focus on his account of constructing scientific knowledge through making models. His and Crick's model of the molecular structure of DNA is one kind of model he creates. I describe it as a mimesis of the phenomenal world that engaged Watson's empathic response with the material he shaped, a response resembling an artist's empathy for his work, which both contains and extends into the world its maker's sensory and cognitive perceptions.