Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main (...) figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort. (shrink)

In a diverse range of recent research activities, I have worked to develop productive distinctions between embodied knowledge, embodied practice, embodied technique, and embodied research; but I have settled for a brief gloss of the crucial descriptor ‘embodied’.1 In this essay I offer a critical and philosophical approach to embodiment, explaining why we continue to need this concept and what I believe it can still do for us.

This thesis deals with the colonisation of the university by market forces. The object of inquiry is coproduction of academic knowledge between academic and non-academic actors in newly established universities and university colleges in Sweden. The development of knowledge as a main competitive advantage for commercial companies, and the shift in policies accompanying this development, provides an explanation for the introduction of market mechanisms into the governance of university research. The main contribution of the thesis, however, is the analyses of (...) three coproducing research centres – in service research, engineering and collaborative media – on the basis of epistemology, interpreted as different knowledge cultures. In most policy accounts knowledge is treated as homogeneous, which is problematic as it conceals differences in academic disciplines’ relations to the object or phenomenon of inquiry. Such differences have bearing on publication patterns, prospects of generating academic credibility and possibilities to engage external partners in coproduction relationships. Importantly, this has an impact on the prospects of attracting various sources of funding that are of significance for newly established universities and university colleges with fewer fixed resources than the old universities. It is argued that not only are we witnessing a colonisation of the entire university by market forces, but also a colonisation of social science and humanities by science - scientific perspectives and work ways and the technical knowledge interest. (shrink)

In recent years the affective turn has irrupted in gender theory to the point of having pervaded important debates in the field of political philosophy. Recognizing clear precedents in certain works as from the ’80s, the proposal is based in the need to elaborate a conceptualization of affects which abandons a series of dualisms: interior/exterior, public/private, action/passion. The purpose of this critical study is to analyse the impact of such proposal in light of the publication, in the Spanish language, of (...) Lauren Berlant’s El corazón de la nación, which constitutes a key work for the analysis of the extension and of the problems involved in a perspective that calls for the revisiting of issues such as agency, the relationship between past and present and embodiment. (shrink)

In this paper we offer a preliminary study of the various ways in which ‘ruin’ has significance for organization studies. One important motif associated with both modern and romantic treatments of ruins concerns the revelatory impressions they make. In this respect the tradition of ruin writing will talk of their ‘beauty’, their ‘strangeness’ or their capacity to ‘intimidate’, which somehow never fails to strike a responsive nerve in us. In order to attend to this elusive phenomenon we must necessarily breach (...) some of the self-imposed boundaries of our ‘discipline’. Taking up this challenge we follow W. G. Sebald in his use of contiguity as both method and textual structuring device, allowing us to drift across iconic ruin images, ruin theories and our own ruinous research experiences. This helps us learn how to ‘dwell’ in the ruin – without any impatient reaching after fact or explaining away ruins in the terms of an established tradition of theorizing in organization – and open up new analytic spaces and associations for organizational researchers. These concern specifically a distinctive approach to time, history and memory; an increased awareness of the multiplicity of forces impinging on organization, forces from which we so easily retreat behind the cordon sanitaire of organization-studies-as-usual; and a cognisance of how the very way we write is a mode of doing organization that is crucial for our ability and willingness to look into ‘all corners of reality’ so that we might better grasp organizational phenomena. (shrink)

This thesis presents a social ontology. It takes its problem, the emergence of social structure and order, and the relationship of the macro and the micro within this structure, from social theory, but attempts a resolution from the perspectives of contemporary French philosophy and complexity theory. Due to its acceptance of certain presuppositions concerning the multiplicity and connectedness of all life and nature it adopts a comparative methodology that attempts a translation of complexity science to the social world. It draws (...) both this methodology and its inspiration from the work of Michel Serres. After explaining this methodology, it presents a critique of the work of those prominent philosophers of multiplicity who have written on the social: Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Manual DeLanda. Having argued for the need of a ‘non-unit’ of social organisation, it then unsuccessfully surveys the work of Michel Foucault and Gabriel Tarde in search of such a ‘non-unit’. It produces one by extracting elements from different theorists and then proceeds to offer a novel explanation of how these expectations first emerge from the ‘social noise’ and then go through a complex process of self-organisation to produce social structure. Apart from complexity theory, this explanation draws on the temporal ontologies of both Serres and Deleuze. In doing so, it argues that the social replication necessary for this self-organisation cannot be achieved through direct imitation. Instead, it draws on an idea from Stuart Kauffman and argues that this is achieved through autocatalysis. Finally, it argues that social structures and what is perceived to be social order are the effect of the codification, to varying degrees, of these emergent expectations. It concludes that this structure is at its most creative when on ‘the edge of chaos’, when at a point of social chaosmos. (shrink)

The debate concerning ontology is heating up in the social sciences. How is this impacting anthropology and archaeology? What contributions can these disciplines make? Following a session at the 2010 Theoretical Archaeology Group conference at Brown University (“‘Worlds Otherwise’: Archaeology, Theory, and Ontological Difference,” convened by Ben Alberti and Yvonne Marshall), a group of archaeologists and anthropologists have continued to discuss the merits, possibilities, and problems of an ontologically oriented approach. The current paper is a portion of this larger conversation— (...) a format we maintain here because, among other things, it permits a welcome level of candor and simplicity. In this forum we present two questions (written by Alberti and Witmore, along with the concluding comments) and the responses of five of the Theoretical Archaeology Group session participants. The first question asks why we think an ontological approach is important to our respective fields; the second, building upon the first set of responses, asks authors to consider the difference that pluralizing ontology might make and whether such a move is desirable given the aims of archaeology and anthropology. While several angles on ontology come through in the conversation, all share an interest in more immanent understandings that arise within specific situations and that are perhaps best described as thoroughly entangled rather than transcendent and/ or oppositional in any straightforward sense. (shrink)

This article was first published in City, Territory and Architecture, volume 5, Article number : 4 under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. We thank the authors for the permission to republish it here.: The recent, rich scholarship on rhythms, following in the wake of Lefebvre's book Éléments de rythmanalyse, proves that rhythmanalysis is an important sensitising notion and research technique. Despite its increasing recognition, - Urbanisme – Nouvel article.

The Depression Era collective started as several photographers and video artists joined forces in March of 2011 to create an archive of photographic images about the Greek economic crisis, amidst the social and political upheaval provoked by ongoing austerity impositions of the EU on the Greek economy. In this essay, I examine selected images from Depression Era, including images from Marinos Tsagkarakis’s series Non-Places of Transition, Yannis Hadjiaslanis’s series After Dark, Pavlos Fisakis’s series Nea Elvetia, and Georges Salameh’s series Spleen. (...) Bringing together Marxist philosophical approaches to aesthetics, via Walter Benjamin and Jean Luc-Nancy, I argue that these photographers’ work is a performative undoing of capitalist understandings of linear time that capture and foster desires for alternative radical temporalities, for non-capitalist senses of time. I discuss how these works disrupt linear notions of time as progress, and as measure of productivity and economic growth, which are intrinsic to modernity, and the creation of financial debt. Against capitalist linear temporality, these Depression Era photographs enable a performative encounter, a realm of visual experimentation in which the spectator is invited to feel time differently, to imagine different alternative temporalities that emerge from the collapse of capitalism. (shrink)

This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they (...) have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies, as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD. (shrink)

Uncontainable Life: A Biophilosophy of Bioart investigates the ways in which thinking through the contemporary hybrid artistico-scientific practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of life than we encounter in mainstream academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective and in dialogue with contemporary bioscience, bioartistic projects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. They expose the enmeshment between the living and non-living, organic and inorganic, and, ultimately, life and death. (...) Instead of examining the defining criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore and enact life as processual, differential, and always already uncontainable, thus transcending preconceived material and conceptual boundaries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concentrates on the ontology of life as it emerges through the selected bioartworks: “semi-living” sculptures created by The Tissue Culture and Art Project and the performance May the Horse Live in Me by L’Art Orienté Objet. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future conceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

Since the early nineteenth century a membrane or wall has been central to the cell’s identity as the elementary unit of life. Yet the literally and metaphorically marginal status of the cell membrane made it the site of clashes over the definition of life and the proper way to study it. In this article I show how the modern cell membrane was conceived of by analogy to the first “artificial cell,” invented in 1864 by the chemist Moritz Traube (1826–1894), and (...) reimagined by the plant physiologist Wilhelm Pfeffer (1845–1920) as a precision osmometer. Pfeffer’s artificial cell osmometer became the conceptual and empirical basis for the law of dilute solutions in physical chemistry, but his use of an artificial analogue to theorize the existence of the plasma membrane as distinct from the cell wall prompted debate over whether biology ought to be more closely unified with the physical sciences, or whether it must remain independent as the science of life. By examining how the histories of plant physiology and physical chemistry intertwined through the artificial cell, I argue that modern biology relocated vitality from protoplasmic living matter to nonliving chemical substances—or, in broader cultural terms, that the disenchantment of life was accompanied by the (re)enchantment of ordinary matter. (shrink)

En este artículo, exploramos las posibilidades que nos ofrece la filosofía de la individuación de Simondon para subvertir las divisiones ontológicas entre materia y pensamiento, y entre materia inerte y materia viva. Para ello, partimos de la transformación del concepto de potencia operado en su filosofía respecto a la concepción clásica, con el fin de desarrollar el concepto de una estructura auto-actualizante que atraviesa todas las dimensiones de lo real. Nos detenemos a continuación en las diferencias que observa Simondon entre (...) la individuación física y la individuación biológica, centrándonos en el papel que juega en ellas la noción de afectividad. Finalmente, delineamos los desarrollos actuales de una filosofía de los afectos, conectándolos con la filosofía de Simondon pero mostrando a la vez en qué medida nos obligan a ir más allá de ella. (shrink)

OB-scene is a performance centred on a live sonification of biological data gathered in real-time with a medical vaginal probe, made by the author. The use of the photoplethysmograph, which takes inspiration from the first medical vaginal probes used for diagnostic purposes by Masters and Johnson introduces a media-archaeological aspect to this work. Data gathered through the probe is processed and transformed into sound and visuals projected in the exhibition space. OB-scene takes inspiration from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter in which (...) she argues that human agency has echoes in non-human nature and vice versa, shifting away from anthropocentrism towards the concept of ‘vital materiality’ that runs across bodies, both humans and unhuman. Furthermore, OB-scene is affiliated with an emerging movement of women and technology called ‘XenoFeminism’. It introduces the idea of techno-alienation and focuses on the concept of other/diverse desires, new forms of desiring, experiencing something other. In this specific work, this takes the form of a technofeminism incorporating the fluid, the non-human and the diverse. In this performance, the body is fused with the technology, rather than empowered or enhanced by technology itself, body and technology become a unique actant enabling the audience to experience the sensorial assemblage as a space for communal experience with political implications. OB-scene is as an immersive environmental work where the senses, affect and memory were key features of ‘assemblage thinking’. (shrink)

In this two-part article, I propose a new materialist understanding of behavior. The term “mattering” in the title refers to sense-making behavior that matters, that is, to significant habits and materialized behaviors. By significant habits I mean protocols, practices and routines that generate ways of reading material signs and fixed accounts of movement. I advance a notion of behaving that stresses its materiality and sensory shaping, and I provide select examples from music. I note that current definitions of behavior do (...) not capture its material dimension. This is because behavioral science has mostly viewed matter as passive, and not as an active agency. Such an approach has metaphysically framed behavior as a phenomenon of presence that is external from its environment. The approach of behavioral science to matter where there are fixed borders between the internal and external is lacking, since it does not account for agential cuts as conceptualized by Karen Barad. Instead, I consider behavior performatively; as an ongoing iterative practice and as integral to the growth of immanently self-caused matter that spawns metastable relational formations that produce different possibilities for successive formations. In this regard, behavior matters, and matter behaves. One key aspect of my article advances Bernard Stiegler as a critical new materialist thinker. This advancement concerns the technical doings of artworks, which include the material activity that is generative of sensitivity: feelings and beliefs associated with a sense or meaning. I outline an example of the materiality of habits as constitutive of music. After that, I coin the transformative doings of matter on the artist as a “caripulation,” which is a desired movement or motion that transforms the mover and the moved. Finally, I raise “pharmacological” considerations in terms of the Stieglerian aspects of organic and inorganic organized matter. (shrink)

This paper will examine how innovation should respond to intellectual traditions outside of its normal purview, in order to keep the creative engine of its activities vibrant. Drawing mainly from philosophy, but revolving around a single sentence from Arujun Appadurai’s ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’ – in which he asks refugees “not to let their imaginations rest too long” – this paper will argue for a theory and practice of innovation to be ‘restless’. A ‘restless’ innovation will (...) have a number of particular characteristics, and this paper will note especially those that relate to its space. Not simply because the refugee noted by Appadurai is determined as such by its relation to space, but also because innovation will be determined by the spaces it creates and by which it is created. A ‘restless innovation’ will therefore be one that is topologically complex and ontogenic. (shrink)

Timbre is simultaneously one of the most powerfully immersive and one of the most ungraspable properties of music and musical aesthetics. And yet there is no critical idiom to assess timbre. There are not even adequate words to describe it, nor is there a definition that is more precise than one ex negativo: timbre is “the difference between two tones with the same pitch and volume”. The synonym “tone colour” is synesthetically muddled: it is a visual metaphor used to describe (...) an auditory phenomenon. This paper analyses the double dualism that pervades the musicological and critical assessment of tone colour. First, timbre is either considered in an idealist way as the expression of the inexpressible, or in a materialist way as the manipulation of sound waves and instruments. Second, there is disagreement as to whether timbre does or does not signify anything more specific than this “incommunicable”. Timbral dualism, however, separates matters that are – and cannot be but – inseparably entwined. Timbre is both an unstable object and an ungraspable Thing: in fact it resides in the space between those opposites. A theory of timbre, therefore, has to be inclusive rather than dualist: timbre bridges the gap between material origins and immaterial effects, between the ontology and the phenomenology of music. In this sense timbre epitomises the idealism/materialism debates in music epistemology. I argue that an inclusive theory of timbre would have to be based on vibration and vitality. Timbre is a vibration of sound waves crossing over from instruments to our listening bodies; a vibrating theory of timbre can cross over from ontology to phenomenology. The aesthetic experience of timbre is active and participatory : hearing timbre is interacting with musical epistemology itself. (shrink)

Resumen: Este texto consiste básicamente en una presentación general de la corriente filosófica del nuevo realismo surgida en 2007 y en la que participan autores europeos y norteamericanos. Un punto en común de las diversas posiciones dentro de esta corriente es el deslinde crítico frente a la filosofía posmoderna y a la filosofía moderna en general. Explico esta crítica y sus implicaciones para la posibilidad de un restablecimiento en la filosofía contemporánea del pensamiento metafísico.: This text is basically an overview (...) of philosophical new realism which emerged in 2007 and involves European and American authors. A common point to the various positions within this current is a critical detachment from postmodern philosophy and modern philosophy in general. i explain this criticism and its implications for the possibility of a restoration in contemporary philosophy of metaphysical thought. (shrink)

Cultural studies need nihilism. The current canon of work focuses too heavily on a political age and human condition that is rapidly being altered and replaced by the use of neoliberal technologies. A new understanding of ontology and politics is necessary to make sense of and challenge the changing technological orientation of human beings by what Deleuze has called a mutation of capital. It is not through institutional discipline that power permeates our being any longer but through our orientation to (...) exist through and for neoliberal networks via our participation with internet technologies. Neoliberal technologies include and appropriates all bodies and experiences via their reduction to data and network flow; difference is no longer a tool of resistance. This work will assert that a move to a nihilist reading of ontology is what is missing from the work of cultural scholars and from current political movements interested in challenging the power of capital in the present. This work will attempt to build through nihilism a lens and an orientation via psychoanalytic theory and the work of Slavoj Žižek that offers resistance to neoliberal governance. (shrink)