Drugged bodies are commonly depicted as passive, suffering and abject, which makes it hard for them to be known in other ways. Wanting to get closer to these alternative bodies and their resourcefulness for living, I turned to body-mapping as an inventive method for telling different kinds of drug-using stories. Drawing on a research project with people who inject heroin and crack cocaine in London, UK, I employed body-mapping as a way of studying drugged bodies in their relation to others, (...) human and non-human, in the injecting event. I invited participants to draw their bodies in describing these otherwise hard-to-articulate experiences. Following Donna Haraway, I conceptualise body-mapping as a more-than-human mode of storytelling where different kinds of bodies can be known. Here, I look at three such bodies – sensing-bodies, temporal-bodies and environment-bodies – and argue that it is through being able to respond to such bodies that more hospitable ways of living with drugs can become possible. (shrink)

Sociological studies into alcohol use seem to find it difficult to deal with the substance itself. Alcohol tends to be reduced to a symbol of a social process and in this way the sociological research loses sight of effects beyond the social. This article suggests a new theoretical approach to the study of alcohol and teenagers' (romantic) relationships, inspired by actor-network theory (ANT). The central feature of ANT is to search for relationships, or rather networks, between all things relevant to (...) the phenomenon. All material and semantic structures, things, persons, discourses, etc. that influence a given situation are described as actants and are entered into the analysis. The aim of this article is to propose a way of including materiality in sociological analyses of alcohol and to explore ways of using focus group interview material in ANT-inspired analysis. By analysing a girl's development from being a non-drinker at the age of 14, to a heavy drinker at 16, the article investigates how the actants brought out by young people in the focus groups themselves constitute different forms of agency. The analysis is based on a qualitative study consisting of 37 focus groups conducted with teenagers in Denmark over a three-year period. (shrink)

This article examines influential recent arguments in science studies which stress the interactive and mutually transformative nature of human-animal relations in scientific research, as part of a broader ontological proposal for science as material engagement with the world, rather than epistemic detachment from it. Such arguments are examined in the light of ethnography and interviews with field biologists who work with meerkats under conditions of habituation. Where philosophers of science stress the mutually modifying aspect of scientific interspecies relationality, these researchers (...) present habituation as a way to study meerkats ‘in the wild’, and to access their putatively natural, undisturbed, behaviour. Building on this contrast, I will argue that the logic of scientific habituation remains difficult to grasp as long as we think of it exclusively in terms of human-animal relations. The seeming ‘paradox’ of habituation – the idea that it transforms precisely that which it aims to hold stable, namely the ‘wildness’ of animals – is an artefact of a frame of analysis which takes animals to be the object of the science of animal behaviour. Habituation ceases to look paradoxical, however, if we remain faithful to these researchers’ own interests, for whom the scientific object does not coincide with the animal as a whole, but is rather only a selected subset of its behaviour. In conclusion I suggest that this account of habituation sheds a new light on the articulations and disjunctions between diverse practices and commitments in social anthropology, philosophy and biological science. (shrink)

This essay provides a theoretical and methodological introduction to the writings of Vinciane Despret. Over the last twenty years Despret has contributed a significant number of books and articles in the fields of philosophical ethology and animal studies, and throughout them all Despret's methodological approach resists easy explanation. There is no single, uni- versal method applicable to all animals, in every situation; instead, Despret responds with an open curiosity to the plurality of animal worlds and the storied versions about them. (...) She studies and works with animals just as much as with scientists, farmers, and conserva- tionists. Taking joy in the diversity of animal behaviour, she creates conditions that allow animals to be interesting, and finds humour, warmth, and care in the stories that they tell. Through the practices of human–animal relations Despret contends that humans are transformed, in their thought just as much as in their practices, as much as animals are transformed. This ess.. (shrink)

The increasing attention to the brain in science and the media, and people’s continuing quest for a better life, have resulted in a successful self-help industry for brain enhancement. Apart from brain books, foods and games, there are several devices on the market that people can use to stimulate their brains and become happier, healthier or more successful. People can, for example, switch their brain state into relaxation or concentration with a light-and-sound machine, they can train their brainwaves to cure (...) their Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) or solve their sleeping problems with a neurofeedback device, or they can influence the firing of their neurons with electric or magnetic stimulation to overcome their depression and anxieties. Working on your self with a brain device can be seen as a contemporary form of Michel Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’. Foucault described how since antiquity people had used techniques such as reading manuscripts, listening to teachers, or saying prayers to ‘act on their selves’ and control their own thoughts and behaviours. Different techniques, Foucault stated, are based on different precepts and constitute different selves. I follow Foucault by stating that using a brain device for self-improvement indeed constitutes a new self. Drawing on interviews with users of brain devices and observations of the practices in brain clinics, I analyse how a new self takes shape in the use of brain devices; not a monistic (neuroscientific) self, but a ‘layered’ self of all kinds of entities that exchange and control each other continuously. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the ways in which bodies and subjects are enacted and negotiated in the encounter between client and practitioner within specialized kinesiology – a specific complementary and alternative medical practice. In the article we trace the ideas of connections and disconnections, which are conceptualized and practised within kinesiology. We attempt to come to grips with these specific notions of relatedness through the introduction of the concept ‘energetic kinship’ and to relate them to more general discussions about (...) the nature of subjects, bodies and social identity in late modern society. We argue that through the particular approach to the body as a prime locus of knowledge on which kinesiological treatment practices are based, kinesiology offers clients an alternative understanding of being-in-the-world. The understanding of the body as the locus of knowledge might, on the one hand, potentially alleviate the individual from the weight of a late modern focus on self-responsible, rational and autonomous individuality, while, on the other hand, it simultaneously supports this understanding. Hence, we argue that kinesiology operates with a subject which is both inherently related and individual at the same time, and that these particular understandings may be appealing in a world in which health and illness are increasingly seen as a question of individual responsibility. The article was written on the basis of interviews and participant observation among kinesiological teachers and practitioners in Denmark. (shrink)

This review article explores the politics of hope and optimism made possible by a re-thinking of touch as a movement towards the not-yet-known, embodied through an engagement with the improvisational character of Argentine tango. Tango discloses the relational and enactive qualities of corporeality, moving us to ask not what bodies are, but rather what can bodies do; what can bodies become? The article engages with the moves to a Spinozist conception of affect developed by Massumi and Deleuze and Guattari, to (...) consider the extent to which touch as affective symbiosis can form the basis of a democracy-yet-to-come. The article asks whether such concepts could and indeed should form the basis of a politics of re-invention, and what might be some of the problems and limitations with aligning affect principally with movement and change. The article situates the discussion within arguments that currently traverse the psychological and biological sciences, and concludes that more cautious reflection on the kinds of ontological turn that are forming the foundation of such processual models is needed. (shrink)

Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to ‘think’ the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow ‘interact’. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology. The discussion will centre on the (...) practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology, and specifically the phenomenon of voice-hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production of subjectivity. (shrink)

Habit is an integral concept for body studies, a hybrid concept and one that has provided the bedrock across the humanities for considering the interrelationships between movement and stasis, being and becoming, and process and fixity. Habits are seen to provide relay points between what is taken to be inside and outside, disrupting any clear and distinct boundary between nature and culture, self and other, the psychological and social, and even mind and matter. Habit thus discloses a paradox. It takes (...) up a unique position in affect modulation, which encompasses both regulation (in the form of discipline) and also extends the body’s potential for engaging the new, change and creativity. In order to understand the basis of the ambivalent duality governing understandings of habit it is argued that a genealogical approach to this question is necessary. This will be located within the recent ‘turn to affect’ and histories of conation within the psychological sciences, particularly taking the writings of William McDougall as a focus. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...) to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)

Through an empirical analysis of YouTube videos, blogs, and interviews, this article explores how partners experience intimacy and desire in relation to trans men’s body modifications. Building on Salamon’s conception of trans bodies as emerging within relations of desire, I argue that partners’ experiences of trans men’s bodies are crucially shaped by their intimate bonds with trans men as people, rather than reducible to generic parts. Partners continue to experience trans men as essentially the same people through gender transition, despite (...) fears that testosterone might alter their personalities. Their intimate bonds with trans men also open up space for new relations of desire to emerge, including attraction to bodily changes they might otherwise find unattractive. These partnerships work to expand ideas about which bodies can be desired as male or masculine, and undercut the literalness of sexual identity labels. Thus, the lived realities of gender transition, as they materialize within this context, challenge hegemonic conceptions of gender, sexuality, and desire. (shrink)

This article analyses the skills and knowledges involved in multiplayer first-person shooting games, specifically Call of Duty 4 for the Xbox 360 games console. In doing so, it argues that the environments of first-person shooting games are designed to be intense spaces that produce captivated subjects – users who play attentively for long periods of time. Developing Heidegger’s concept of attunement and Stiegler’s account of retention, the article unpacks the somatic and sensory skills involved in videogame play and discusses how (...) videogame environments cultivate a sense of captivation. In conclusion the article reflects on the politics of captivation for the bodies that engage with these games through the idea of vulnerability as an ‘opening of the body’s capacity for sense’. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 215 Seiten: 143-192.

Work injury compensation and pensions are often determined according to medical disability rating scales attributing a percentage to each impaired body part or function. Incorporated into central medical–administrative networks of committees and examinations, these produce disability as a calculable space. This article examines the specific case of the Israeli National Insurance regulations regarding work injuries of 1956 and analyzes the shifted order they set. Looking at this system in the specific historical context of transition from the British Mandate workmen’s compensation (...) system to the “disability percentages” system, provides insight into the process of structuring and stabilizing durable numerical forms and the production of centralized government. Drawing on conceptualizations regarding the sociotechnical role of classification systems, I contend that through encoding and calculating classifications of disability, heterogeneity is eliminated and an ordering based on physiology is “black boxed,” illustrating the importance of technoscientific formations in structuring the “medical model of disability.”. (shrink)

_Phenomenological insights into health issues relating to bodily self-experience, normality and deviance, self-alienation, and objectification._.

Becoming an animal rights activist is not just a process of identity change and re-socialization but also implies, as this article suggests, a “re-engineering” of affective cognitive repertoires and processes of “sensibilization” in relation to nonhuman animals. Activists thereby develop their mental responsiveness and awareness and refine their embodied sensitivity and capacity for sensing. The article proposes a theoretical perspective for understanding these processes. Empirically, this article examines the development of affective dispositions informing activists’ subjectivity and embodied sensibilities. It looks (...) at the ways in which visceral, bodily, or affective responses are cultivated to reinforce activist commitments. First, the analysis identifies “micro-shocks” and “re-shocking” experiences as mechanisms for sustaining commitment. Second, “emphatic identification” and “embodied simulation” are highlighted as mechanisms for nurturing empathy towards animals. Finally, it identifies the role of “affective meat encounters” and the cultivation of disgust as mechanisms for nurturing sensibilities. The analysis is based on a case study of animal rights activists in Sweden. (shrink)

Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he argues, organizes great parts of Serres' work into a promising philosophy (...) of science as well as a challenge to the narrower field of French epistemology, to which it has often been limited. Simons highlights how the concept encompasses Serres' commitment to positive relations between science and culture and his rejection of pleas to purify the scientific self from imaginative and cultural elements. It helps to situate Serres between the distinct traditions of Bachelard and Latour as well as progressing the innovative aspects of Serres' philosophy for current debates in the philosophy, history, and sociology of science. Showing how Serres' philosophy can serve as a normative approach to science and technology, Michel Serres and French Philosophy of Science takes in themes of materiality, religiosity, modernity and ecology to advance a timely alternative to philosophy of science for contemporary life. (shrink)

This special issue on posthumanist perspectives on affect seeks to create a platform for thinking about the intersection of, on the one hand, the posthumanist project of radically reconfiguring the meaning of the “human” in light of the critiques of a unified and bounded subjectivity and, on the other, the insights coming from recent scholarship on affect and feeling about the subject, sociality, and connectivity. Posthumanism stands for diverse theoretical positions which together call into question the anthropocentric assertion of the (...) human as a distinctive, unique and dominant form of life – in turn, the concept of affect has been linked with ideas of increasing and decreasing energetic intensities, which underlie, but for some also precede, processes of individuation and subjectivation.The contributors to this issue consider critically the vistas opened by affect studies and by posthumanism. Coming from diverse disciplinary traditions, including literature, philosophy, critical sociology, visual arts, and heritage studies, the articles contribute to the four thematic idioms of this issue in an attempt to structure a dialogical space on posthumanist perspectives on affect and on affect-based politics. Questions of environmental governance, the critique of speciesism, the formation of cross-species solidarity, the politics of the “inhuman”, biopolitics and necropolitics form the intellectual mosaic of this issue. Finally, we pose the question of “academic affects”, in circulation in the researcher's encounter with her others – humans, insects, ghostly presences or inanimate objects – and we ask how these affects, including anger and mourning, but also joyful affirmation, are brought to bear on the process of writing. (shrink)

When bodies are conceived as permeable fields our physical forms become inseparable from each other and the world from which they manifest. The extension of one’s subjectivity to include cosmological divinities emphasizes the many other bodies which, in some cultural contexts, may overlap and unite with the world. In this article I explore how narratives of a Tibetan Buddhist high-lama’s death and trajectory of lives contain complex formulations of Tibetan theories of embodiment. An ethnographic attendance to biographical writings and teachings (...) at the time of his funerary ceremonies reveals not only how trikaya, or the notion of three bodies, coheres in Tibetan conceptual frameworks, but also how the articulation of these bodies affects new ways to intersubjectively engage with the deceased. (shrink)

Tibetan understandings about the bodies of spiritual teachers or lamas challenge the idea of a singular and bounded form. Tibetan Buddhists believe that the presence of the lama does not depend on their skin-encapsulated temporal body, or a singular lifespan. After death, it is not uncommon for a lama to materialize in other appearances or to become incorporated into the bodies of others through devotees’ consumption of their bodily remains. In this article, I discuss how the European ingestion of the (...) holy bodies of Tibetan lamas creates new possibilities for embodied intersubjectivity, and also how this practice repositions bodily substance in cannibal discourse. (shrink)

Indeterminate Bodies organizes a number of theoretical and empirical studies around the concept and actuality of indeterminacy, as it relates to body and society. Located within the struggle to apprehend different categories of ‘body’ in the volatile flows of late-capital, indeterminacy is considered through such multiple incarnations as economy, contingency, inheritance, question, force, uncertainty, materiality and affective resistance to determination. While indeterminacy is often positioned as the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation (framed as ontological or empirical challenge), it also (...) engenders affects such that some subjects are both in and out of recognition. Questions of indeterminacy overlap with work on imperceptibility, giving rise to interlocked questions about the modes of representation, categorization, inclusion, exclusion and sensibility in the production of bodies. We address the hesitancies, difficulties and necessities of working with and through indeterminacy in order open up new descriptions, visions and modes of political work. (shrink)

As robots increasingly become part of our everyday lives, questions arise with regards to how to approach them and how to understand them in social contexts. The Western history of human–robot relations revolves around competition and control, which restricts our ability to relate to machines in other ways. In this study, we take a relational approach to explore different manners of socializing with robots, especially those that exceed an instrumental approach. The nonhuman subjects of this study are built to explore (...) non-purposeful behavior, in an attempt to break away from the assumptions of utility that underlie the hegemonic human–machine interactions. This breakaway is accompanied by ‘learning to be attuned’ on the side of the human subjects, which is facilitated by continuous relations at the level of everyday life. Our paper highlights this ground for the emergence of meanings and questions that could not be subsumed by frameworks of control and domination. The research-creation project Machine Ménagerie serves as a case study for these ideas, demonstrating a relational approach in which the designer and the machines co-constitute each other through sustained interactions, becoming attuned to one another through the performance of research. Machine Ménagerie attempts to produce affective and playful—if not unruly—nonhuman entities that invite interaction yet have no intention of serving human social or physical needs. We diverge from other social robotics research by creating machines that do not attempt to mimic human social behaviours. (shrink)

In 2014 I commenced a postdoctoral project that involved collaboratively planting and maintaining a community garden on a block of land that was once part of the East Armidale Aboriginal Reserve in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, Australia. At the edge of this block of land is an introduced, invasive willow tree. In this article I write with and alongside the willow tree to interrogate the potential and limitations of anticolonial projects undertaken from colonial subject (...) positions predicated on relations of social and environmental privilege. Anticolonial scholarly activism demands a critique of individual and institutional complicity with ongoing colonial power structures. The following analysis offers a personal narrative of what it has been like to be involved in an anticolonial multispecies research project while working within the confines of the neoliberal university. Exploring the intersection of academic, social and environmental ecologies, I position the community garden as an alternative pedagogical and public environmental humanities research site that interrupts the reproduction of settler colonial power relations by cultivating tactics of collective resistance in alliance with the nonhuman world. (shrink)

Emile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, two of the most important thinkers of early 20th-century France, give us different accounts of the relationship between habits, society and life. The article focuses on their use of embodied metaphors to illustrate how each thinker conceives of habit as a force of life. It argues that Durkheim uses the metaphor of ‘lifting’ to describe how social life creates habits capable of transcending bodily instinct. Bergson also recognizes the force of habits; he uses the language (...) of leaping to describe the kind of action required to transcend them. The article makes three claims. First, it argues that these metaphors are central to each thinker’s understanding of the means by which habits attach us to life. Second, they offer a means of revisiting, and explicating, Bergson’s tacit critique of Durkheim in his Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Third, they both symbolize processes of conversion that inform each thinker’s diagnosis of the moral challenges faced in modern social life. (shrink)

In this article I set out to trace some of the implications of recharging the political potency of nature in more-than-human terms. This shifts attention from a biopolitical focus on the inventiveness of the life sciences and what this means in terms of the emergence of ‘cyborg’ political subjects to an onto-political focus on the inventiveness of knowledge controversies and what these mean for techno-political practices. Specifically, the article examines the onto-politics of ‘natural’ hazard events and their capacity to force (...) thought in those affected by them, and so to place new demands on research practices in terms of rendering such events affective and amenable to political interrogation. I work these arguments through the demanding experimental ethos of the philosopher Isabelle Stengers, for whom scientific practices produce reliable knowledge claims only in so far as the questions they address are at risk of being redefined by the phenomena mobilized in them, and who extends this ethos to elaborate an understanding of, even a test for, an adequate political theory and practice. I do so with reference to a recent research experiment in which I collaborated with social and natural scientists and people affected by flooding in the UK. (shrink)

In a symposium built around a critical reassessment by Nicholas Gaskill of Richard Rorty's pragmatism, this contribution examines the provocative question of whether Rorty's rhetoric hinders Rortian aims. When reconsidering him in company with “the philosophical wing of science studies” (Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, and Donna Haraway), Gaskill finds that Rorty's persistent assumption of nature/culture and word/world dichotomies is politically dangerous and prevents his comprehending both distributed agency and the complexity of human entanglements with the nonhuman. Gaskill's Rorty lacks a (...) sustained and coherent positive project, but a fuller picture, outlined in this article, reveals not only greater alignment of Rorty with science studies and agential realism but also key Rortian contributions to those fields that are particularly of moment in our “post-truth” condition. (shrink)

Sociologists usually conceive of emotions as individual, episodic, and categorical phenomena while emphasizing their social and cultural construction. At the same time, the term emotion refers to a wide range of conceptually and ontologically distinct components and is therefore best thought of as a relatively unspecific umbrella term. This article argues that the routes leading to the social and cultural construction of emotion, for example, norms, rules, values, and discourse, are unlikely to be applicable to each of these components in (...) the same way. This is particularly true for an element of emotion that is often portrayed as being most essential and basic and therefore to some extent avoiding the formative forces of culture and society, namely, affect. Although affect is an established notion in sociology, it has remained conceptually underdeveloped. The article therefore discusses different perspectives on affect from cultural studies that emphasize its relational and bodily character. In a second step, it contrasts and reconciles these views with existing theories of affect in sociology and social psychology and considers a number of essential characteristics that can be used to circumscribe affect and its social and cultural correlates. Finally, concepts from relational sociology are introduced and concrete examples to specify the relational character of affect and to develop an understanding of affect, that is both theoretically fruitful and conducive to empirical research, are discussed. (shrink)

This pragmatic study addresses the question of the plural realities that emerge from perception, based on an empirical analysis of the tasting activity of wine amateurs and olfactory experts. Though they share the same requirement of rooting taste in the product under scrutiny, they also significantly differ regarding the constraints with which their tasting results have to comply: repeatability for experts’ tasting results, and activity contiunuation for amateurs. Both therefore foster the emergence of two contrasting realities: a stabilized one for (...) experts; an ‘un-stabilized’ one for amateurs. Both happen to fit with the ‘fiction’ and the ‘reference’ modes of existence of Latour’s inventory, which extends and relaunches the analysis of the coexistence of activities initiated by the works on ‘boundary objects’ some decades ago. Finally, the notion of taste is reinterpreted as a translation operator between tasting realities. (shrink)

Drawing from ethnographic research conducted in Alberta, as well as across multiple sites in Canada, this article describes and discusses the practices and experiences of heating off the grid with renewable resources (i.e. passive solar and wood). Heating with renewable resources is herein examined in order to apprehend the cultural significance of dynamics of corporeal involvement in the process of creating indoor warmth. A distinction between energy for which corporeal involvement is relatively high (hot energy) and relatively low (cool energy) (...) is then made. Off-grid indoor warmth is therefore understood as a hot energy requiring intense involvement. The authors argue that thermoception is a type of affect with catalytic properties. (shrink)

For humans, Artificial Intelligence operates more like a Rorschach test, as it is expected that intelligent machines will reflect humans' cognitive and physical behaviours. The concept of intelligence, however, is often confused with consciousness, and it is believed that the progress of intelligent machines will eventually result in them becoming conscious in the future. Nevertheless, what is overlooked is how the exploration of Artificial Intelligence also pertains to the development of human consciousness. An excellent example of this can be seen (...) in the film Being John Malkovich (1999). In the film, different characters have their perceptions altered as a result of hacking into the mind of John Malkovich, which produces sensations that may have remained hidden to their consciousness due to their dis-abilities. This article engages with the research question: Can the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines trigger an artificial consciousness for humans? An artificially created consciousness is the premise that a machine can generate knowledge about an individual that is not already present in the person. For the same purpose, the article takes the cinematic text Being John Malkovich by Spike Jonze for exploring concepts such as human/robot rights, virtual sex, virtual rape, and bodily disability, which are essential topics in the midst of increasing human- Artificial Intelligence interaction. The purpose of this article is to contribute towards the creation of a better understanding of Artificial Intelligence, particularly from the perspective of film studies and philosophy, by highlighting the potential of Artificial Intelligence as a vessel for exploring human consciousness. (shrink)

Among the contemporary philosophers using the concept of the Anthropocene, Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers are prominent examples. The way they use this concept, however, diverts from the most common understanding of the Anthropocene. In fact, their use of this notion is a continuation of their earlier work around the concept of a ‘parliament of things.’ Although mainly seen as a sociology or philosophy of science, their work can be read as philosophy of technology as well. Similar to Latour’s claim (...) that science is Janus-headed, technology has two faces. Faced with the Anthropocene, we need to shift from technologies of control to technologies of negotiations, i.e., a parliament of things. What, however, does a ‘parliament of things’ mean? This paper wants to clarify what is conceptually at stake by framing Latour’s work within the philosophy of Michel Serres and Isabelle Stengers. Their philosophy implies a ‘postlinguistic turn,’ where one can ‘let things speak in their own name,’ without claiming knowledge of the thing in itself. The distinction between object and subject is abolished to go back to the world of ‘quasi-objects’ (Serres). Based on the philosophy of science of Latour and Stengers the possibility for a politics of quasi-objects or a ‘cosmopolitics’ (Stengers) is opened. It is in this framework that their use of the notion of the Anthropocene must be understood and a different view of technology can be conceptualized. (shrink)

The work of Gaston Bachelard is known for two crucial concepts, that of the epistemological rupture and that of phenomenotechnique. A crucial question is, however, how these two concepts relate to one another. Are they in fact essentially connected or must they be seen as two separate elements of Bachelard’s thinking? This paper aims to analyse the relation between these two Bachelardian moments and the significance of the concept of phenomenotechnique for today. This will be done by examining how the (...) concepts of Bachelard have been used from the 1960s on. From this historical perspective, one gets the impression that these two concepts are relatively independent from each other. The Althusserian school has exclusively focused on the concept of ‘epistemological break’, while scholars from Science & Technology Studies, such as Bruno Latour, seem to have only taken up the concept of phenomenotechnique. It in fact leads to two different models of how to think about science, namely the model of purification and the model of proliferation. The former starts from the idea that sciences are rational to the extent that they are purified and free from obstacles. Scientific objectivity, within this later model, is not achieved by eradicating all intermediaries, obstacles and distortions, but rather exactly by introducing as many relevant technical mediators as possible. Finally, such a strong distinction will be criticized and the argument will be made that both in Bachelard’s and Latour's thought both concepts are combined. This leads to a janus-headed view on science, where both the element of purification and the element of proliferation are combined. (shrink)

In this article I propose to reframe debates about ideals of emotion in medicine, abandoning the current binary setup of this debate as one between ‘clinical detachment’ and empathy. Inspired by observations from my own field work and drawing on Sky Gross’ anthropological work on rituals of practice as well as Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm, I propose that the normative drive of clinical practice can be better understood through the notion of attunement. In this framework individual types of emotions (...) are not, as such, appropriate or inappropriate, but are evaluated depending on their synchronicity with the specific rhythms of the practice. To set up this proposal, I show how typical arguments about emotions in medicine—what I call emotion-entity focused frameworks—are insufficient. I then draw on ethnographic observations from two orthopaedic departments and interviews with medical practitioners to show (1) how clinical practice is driven by rhythmicity, shaped in the case of orthopaedic surgery by a clinical aim of efficient, controlled intervention, and (2) how clinicians continuously refer to this drive and the flow of rhythms when evaluating inappropriate or problematic emotion. I argue that the use of a rhythm framework rather than ideals of detachment or empathy allows for a sensitivity to the complexity and situation-dependent elements of emotional ideals in clinical practice; and I end by proposing the term ‘attuned concern’—which stresses the importance of regulation and adjustment to circumstances rather than of maintaining a constant distance/involvement—as a more fitting alternative to ‘clinical detachment’. (shrink)

This paper is about the ontology of a cancer diagnosis at high-end hospitals in Colombia. Drawing on a seventeen-month ethnographic fieldwork study in this country, it pays attention to how dermatologists, pathologists, and oncologists looked at my partner’s skin during a routine medical checkup and enacted two seemingly contradictory diagnoses: a lethal melanoma and a benign dysplastic nevus—commonly known as mole. Because their differences under the microscope or through dermatology goggles may be subtle, physicians often disagree on what they see. (...) When medical services are not unrelated to the economic possibilities of patients to pay for them, what emerges through a microscope might be different. With neoliberal medical reforms in Colombia as background, this paper focuses on the ontological indeterminacy of cancer and its relationship to high-end hospitals and a patient who could, albeit not without effort, pay for the treatment. Thus, I argue that how physicians saw was not unrelated to what they saw and therefore to their practices of medicine in neoliberal Colombia. How do medical practices and ways of seeing in Colombia enter into composition with the bodies they study? Could the same skin tissue simultaneously be cancerous and noncancerous? (shrink)

In this introduction, we address some of the complexities associated with the emergence of medicine’s bodies, not least as a means to ‘working with the body’ rather than simply producing a critique of medicine. We provide a brief review of some of the recent discussions on how to conceive of medicine and its bodies, noting the increasing attention now given to medicine as a technology or series of technologies active in constituting a multiplicity of entities – bodies, diseases, experimental objects, (...) the individualization of responsibility for health and even the precarity of life. We contrast what feminist theorists in the tradition of Judith Butler have referred to as the question of matter, and Science and Technology Studies with its focus on practice and the nature of emergence. As such we address tensions that exist in analyses of the ontological status of ‘the body’ – human and non-human – as it is enacted in the work of the laboratory, the randomized controlled trial, public health policy and, indeed, the market that is so frequently entangled with these spaces. In keeping with the recent turns toward ontology and affect, we suggest that we can regard medicine as concerned with the contraction and reconfiguration of the body’s capacities to affect and be affected, in order to allow for the subsequent proliferation of affects that, according to Bruno Latour, marks corporeal life. Treating both contraction and proliferation circumspectly, we focus on the patterns of affects wrought in particular by the abstractions of medicine that are described in the contributions to this special issue. Drawing on the work of A.N. Whitehead, we note how abstractions such as ‘medical evidence’, the ‘healthy human body’ or the ‘animal model’ are at once realized and undercut, mediated and resisted through the situated practices that eventuate medicine’s bodies. Along the way, we touch on the implications of this sort of perspective for addressing the distribution of agency and formulations of the ethical and the political in the medical eventuations of bodies. (shrink)

Responding to Guattari’s call for a ‘mutation of mentality’, the article explores unconventional horse-assisted leadership learning as promising ways of embodied learning to be affected and response-able. By drawing on and continuing the work of Guattari and posthuman feminist scholars, we aim to show that studying the affective pedagogics of opening up the senses and learning to be affected is of vital importance. We analyse a posthuman auto-ethnography of developing capabilities to live and breathe together that allow us to relate (...) in alternative ways. Experiments with affective pedagogy are conducted as they affect bodies through indeterminate and liminal contact zones and use aesthetics to evoke transformation in senses and thoughts, care and response. Since they are both domesticated and non-human, horses are promising companions in this endeavour of entrainment. However, these sensorial experiments also call for an ethics of cutting connections and, not least, of permitting refusals of refusals. (shrink)

This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to establish new practices (...) of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty? (shrink)

We explore contested meanings around care and relationality through the under-explored case of caring after death, throwing the relational significance of ‘bodies’ into sharp relief. While the dominant social imaginary and forms of knowledge production in many affluent western societies take death to signify an absolute loss of the other in the demise of their physical body, important implications follow from recognising that embodied relational experience can continue after death. Drawing on a model of embodied relational care encompassing a ‘me’, (...) a ‘you’ and an ‘us’, we argue that after death ‘me’ and ‘us’ remain (though changed) while crucial dimensions of ‘you’ persist too. In unravelling the binary divide between living and dead bodies, other related dichotomies of mind/body, self/other, internal/external, and nature/social are also called into question, extending debates concerning relationality and openness between living bodies. Through an exploration of autobiographical accounts and empirical research, we argue that embodied relationality expresses how connectedness is lived out after death in material practices and felt experiences. (shrink)

Surgical training has traditionally involved a lengthy apprenticeship to a series of master surgeons, who teach medical students and residents the techniques of surgery while allowing them to work on patients in the operating room. This article examines surgical training as a structured environment that prepares students for the embodied lessons taught by a surgeon. It argues that even the most seemingly mechanical of surgical techniques contains social lessons when taught by a surgeon within the rich environment of the operating (...) room. (shrink)

This article uses Betty Friedan’s idiosyncratic invocations of heart disease in her work from the 1960s through the 1990s, as well as her autobiographical comments about it and her theory of the feminine mystique, to grapple with a feminist articulation of heart disease. Although this leading cause of death for women in industrialized countries has been peripheral to feminist health discourse and most women’s preoccupations, heart disease played an interesting narrative role in Friedan’s work and life. Drawing on Friedan’s unconventional (...) philosophy of health provides an opportunity to problematize health awareness and reconsider the role of disease and health in feminist critique more generally. As we try to understand gendered stories of disease that are emerging at the dawn of the 21st century, rereading Friedan can help illuminate the limits, possibilities and dangers of framing heart disease as a ‘women’s health issue’. (shrink)