Dorothea Olkowski _Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation_ Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999 ISBN 0-520-21693-8 298 pp.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's approach to science is a radical departure from the Cartesian-Newtonian scientific framework and offers contemporary science a pathway toward the cultivation of an alternative approach to the study of the natural world. This paper argues that the Cartesian-Newtonian pathway is pathological because it has as its premise humanity's alienation from the natural world, which sets up a host of consequences that terminate in nihilism. As an alternative approach to science, Goethe's "delicate empiricism" begins with the premise (...) that humanity is fundamentally at home in the world: a notion which forms the basis for a Goethean science that gives primacy to perception, offers a more organic and holistic conception of the universe, and has as its goal the cultivation of aesthetic appreciation and morally responsive obligation to the observed. As an antidote to nihilism and as the basis for a more fulfilling and morally responsive science, Goethean science may serve as a kind of cultural therapeutics, a project which is necessarily interdisciplinary since it requires the integration of multiple ways of seeing from the natural sciences, the human sciences, and the humanities. (shrink)

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

. Values in the cultural timescapes of science. Cultural Values: Vol. 2, No. 2-3, pp. 385-402.

What role do nonhuman animals play in the construction of medical knowledge? Animal researchers typically claim that their use has been essential to progress – but just how have animals fitted into the development of biomedicine? In this article, I trace how nonhuman animals, and their body parts, have become incorporated into laboratory processes and places. They have long been designed to fit into scientific procedures – now increasingly so through genetic design. Animals and procedures are closely connected – animals (...) in science are disassembled and reassembled in various ways. Indeed, biomedical knowledge can be said to rest on a large pile of animal bodies and body parts. The process of producing animal body parts to order has implications for how we conceptualize the body (human or nonhuman), which I discuss in the final section. (shrink)

This essay applies the material developed in The Wounded Researcher to education. The core issue in that book is the necessity to make a place for the complex unconscious in research in order to lay a foundation for an ethics that is based in deep subjectivity. The therapy room has characteristically been the place where this kind of work has occurred, and in this regard therapy has been a form of education. The boundaries of the therapy room have, however, exploded (...) and, given the awesome powers of technology to develop and communicate information, how do we make a place for the unconscious in our educational practices? Drawing upon the work of Carl Jung this essay addresses the following questions: How does one make a place for the unconscious in the classroom, without turning teaching into therapy?; How does a teacher make a place for the unconscious dynamics in the complex interactive field among himself/herself, the students, and the material without overwhelming students?; What are the limits and dangers of this effort?; What are the consequences if we continue to ignore these dynamics in the bodies of knowledge we build? Examples from teaching my book to graduate students in psychology are provided. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction: Education and Controversy Jung on Education and Bloodsucking Ghosts The Educated Soul and Nature: Robert Romanyshyn and Jerome Bernstein Post‐Jungians in the Classroom Jungian Educational Practice in the University Jungian Education in Schools Healing Fiction as Classroom Practice: Visionary and Psychological Reading of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen References.

The anti-utopian technology critique of Ellul, Postman, and other important social analysts has been the primary mode of critical response to technological developments since the 1950s. However, this mode of technology critique has had a disappointingly small effect on the way we, as a society, receive technology. Rather than attribute this failure to the negativity of the anti-utopian perspective, this article suggests that there are other important and largely overlooked factors at work—in particular, the critics' inability to speak about technology (...) in a way that relates to us as social individuals coping with the contingencies and realities of the day-to-day use of technological devices. The purpose of this analysis is not to suggest that we abandon as irrelevant the work and ideas of technology critics such as Ellul and Postman but, on the contrary, to find a way to reframe their important ideas for wider acceptance. (shrink)

C. G. Jung offers education a unique perspective of the dilemma of collective social demands versus individual needs. Indeed, so radical and profound is his vision of the learning psyche as collectively embedded, that it addresses the current crisis over the demand for utilitarian higher education. Hence post‐Jungian educationalists can develop creative classroom strategies, for example in the United States, Canada and Brazil. The article revises two Jungian ideas in order to teach literature by promoting personal and social growth. By (...) taking Jung's categories of literature as categories of reading and by using his notion of therapeutic ‘healing fiction’ to understand literary narrative, both social and psychic individuation and transformation are facilitated. (shrink)

Freud's 1911 case study based on Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness provides the investigator with the opportunity to reexamine Freud's interpretation through a return to the original data Freud used. This study reveals both the insights and limitations of Freud's theory of paranoia. An alternative interpretation of the case is overed from an existential-phenomenological perspective which aims both to expand upon and transform Freud's study without negating its value. Freud draws on the mythologies of the sun to argue for (...) his hypothesis that the "father-complex" lies behind Schreber's God. By following some of the many other mythological themes in Schreber's memoirs, Freud's interpretation is opened to a larger, socially and historically situated context. An examination of cross-cultural and historical studies of mystical experience shows how Schreber's psychosis is simultaneously a form of madness and spiritual breakthrough. Schreber's is viewed as a narcissistic experience of the infant-child in which the imaginal has been exiled from rational, modern adulthood and is inaccessible to Cartesian language. Instead of recognizing the soul-full world of "miracles," Schreber envisions the absorption of the entire world into himself and he thus becomes an inflated caricature of the "heroic ego" at its extreme. (shrink)

This paper argues that spatial contingencies, defined by the relationship between where historical actors are in the narrative and what they say, are crucial for understanding the political and ideological effects of Thucydides' History. A comprehensive approach to these contingencies is linked to two related premises. First, that the city of Athens is the principal spatial referent in the History and, second, that Athens refers both to a set of “real” topographical features and to a transcendent and trans-historical ideal that (...) exceeds those features. The dynamic between these two is mediated by Athens' inevitable defeat and by the related conflict between the History as the presentation of facts about the past, on the one hand, and as the source of future predictions, on the other. Framing this analysis are the distinctive characteristics ascribed to the Athenians as a collective and to the positions of Thucydides and Alcibiades as Athenians in exile. (shrink)

This paper addresses Foucauldian theory and its usefulness to nursing research. It is written in the form of a discussion between the authors on the merits and liabilities of Foucauldian theory as applied to analyses of nursing. As such, it focuses upon some of the more pertinent critiques of both Foucauldian and postmodern theory. By addressing Foucault from two different positions, the discussion seeks to demonstrate the complexity of Foucauldian theory and warns against oversimplification in its application to nursing research. (...) The authors also argue for an awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of any given theoretical stance. (shrink)

This article considers the relevance of time theory for Beck's theory of reflexive modernization and vice versa. It focuses in particular on discontinuity in the context of continuity, on decontextualization, naturalization and responsibility as key concerns of both perspectives on the industrial way of life. It makes explicit the temporal underpinnings of that cultural form with respect to five Cs: the creation of time to human design (C1), the commodification of time (C2), the compression of time (C3), the control of (...) time (C4) and the colonization of time (C5). It concludes that explicit concern with temporal relations shows reflexive modernization in action and facilitates improved knowledge for deliberative change. (shrink)

A Heideggerian reading of J.H. van den Berg's writings contributes to an appreciation of phenomenological psychology as a cultural therapeutics. Both van den Berg's structural phenomenology of human existence and his Metablectic theory of historical changes lead to a notion of culture as a disclosive construction of the world. Our technological culture, in its reduction of all forms of relatedness to functionality (what van den Berg refers to as secularization), has repressed the spiritual dimension of contemporary life. The resultant derangement (...) of social existence gives rise to the individual distress brought in to psychotherapy. Attention to the spiritual unconscious is the ethical obligation of phenomenological psychology that transcends, and in so doing contextualizes considerations of professional competency. (shrink)