Subject and Aesthetic Interface - an inquiry into transformed subjectivities

The present PhD-thesis seeks new definitions of human subjectivity in an age of technoscience and a networked, globalized, Information Society. The perspective presented relates to Philosophy of Science, which includes the Human, the Natural, the Social and the Life Sciences. The project is directed at addressing, and aims to participate in, the further development of Philosophy of Science, or rather, the philosophy of knowing, which leaves a perspective broader than that of science. Methodologically, I combine readings of technoetic artworks, which I approach from a hermeneutical-semiotic perspective, with transdisciplinary research into existing theory concerning the human subject. These readings form my case studies. I keep a particular focus on holistic biophysics (Mae Wan Ho, James Oschman, Marko Bischof). Furthermore, Søren Brier's cybersemiotic theory of communication, cognition and consciousness, which combines a cybernetic-autopoietic and a Peircean semiotic perspective, plays a central role in the project. The project has three parts. Part one contextualizes the study within philosophy of science. It discusses relevant epistemologies, and places the case studies in an art categorical context. It further discusses the philosophical problems involved in writing an academic thesis in the form of a linear, argumentative, critical style, and how it affects the process of meaning making in a way that has consequences to my research. The second part consists of four case studies, each under an overall theme, which applies to the question of human subjectivity. Here I build the concept Extended Sentience, and the concept of an Ideal User. The Ideal User functions as a conceptual frame, which allows me to gradually add more elements to a theory of an altered human subject and knower. The third part presents new ontologies under three basic themes: Time and Relativity, The Life Cycles of Metaphors, and Logos Philosophy and Virtual Grids. These ontologies strongly affect ways of interpretation made in part one and two. Part Three allows more space to my subjective thought processes, which will take precedence over the literature applied. Thus, I, as a post-objective subject observer, will become more transparent. Finally, I will seek an overall conclusion to the project, which should clarify areas where it is evident that the human subject must be reconsidered at a pre-scientific level. It is my thesis that the foundation for human knowledge generation is changing drastically today, and that it has become crucial to reconsider a common understanding of what constitutes the human knower

Proceedings of the 2023 Berry Summer Thesis Institute

Thanks to a gift from the Berry Family Foundation and the Berry family, the University Honors Program launched the Berry Summer Thesis Institute in 2012. The institute introduces students in the University Honors Program to intensive research, scholarship opportunities and professional development. Each student pursues a 12-week summer thesis research project under the guidance of a UD faculty mentor. This contains the product of the students\u27 research. Contents: “How Porous Materials Affect the Boundary-Layer Transition of Hypersonic Flight Vehicles” (Megan C. Sieve) “Ultra-Stretchable, Self-Healing, DLP 3D-Printed Elastomers for Damage-Resistant Soft Robots: A Review” (Robert M. A. Drexler) “Extrapolation of Scalar Measurements in a Helium Jet Using Rainbow Schlieren Deflectometry” (Joseph R. Kastner) “Characterizing the Frequency Response of Pressure-Sensitive Paint” (Charles J. Strunc) “Understanding Calcium Signaling in Invasive Glioblastoma Cells in a Microfluidic Model: A Review” (Jenna Abdelhamed) “A Brief Review on the TGF-β Pathway During Epithelial to Mesenchymal Transition of Glioblastoma Multiforme” (Khadija Fatima) “The Effects of Environmental Factors on Listeria monocytogenes Fitness and Pathogenesis” (Nicolina Valore) “How We Free Ourselves: Contemporary Feminism and Freedom” (Aila A. Carr-Chellman) “Perception of Interpersonal Distance in Reality” (Connor N. Kuntz

The Role of Normal Development in Experimental Embryology

This thesis presents an examination of the notion of ‘normal development’ and its role in biological research. It centres on a detailed historical analysis of the experimental embryological work of the American biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson in the early-1890s. My analysis establishes the centrality of the concept of normal development to the way experimental systems are produced and reproduced, and to how attributions of causality which arise from experimental work are made.This thesis presents an examination of the notion of ‘normal development’ and its role in biological research. It centres on a detailed historical analysis of the experimental embryological work of the American biologist Edmund Beecher Wilson in the early-1890s. Normal development is a fundamental concept in biology, which underpins and facilitates experimental work investigating the processes of organismal development. Concepts of the normal and normality in biology (and medicine) have been fruitfully examined by philosophers. Yet, despite being constantly used and invoked by developmental biologists, the concept of normal development has not been subject to substantial philosophical attention. In this thesis I analyse how the concept of normal development is produced and used in experimental systems, and use this analysis to probe its theoretical and methodological significance. I focus on normal development as a technical condition in experimental practice. In doing so I highlight the work that is required to create and sustain both it and the work that it enables. Variation between embryos can cause problems for scientists trying to produce valid and comparable results. In my study of Wilson’s work, I examine how the practices associated with normal development deal with the variation between embryos. In the 1890s, Wilson became increasingly interested in which causes were responsible for the processes of differentiation (the production of different cells and organs) and determination in the process of embryonic development. He performed a series of experiments on the marine invertebrate Amphioxus, which exhibits considerable variability in early development (Wilson, 1893a). Wilson carefully observed his samples and outlined a normal development based on them, which included a considerable range of variation. How Wilson treated variation was reflected in the different way in which he conceived of the process of development compared to other prominent embryologists, such as Hans Driesch and Wilhelm Roux. 4 Having introduced and assessed normal development, I use two analytical approaches to make further sense of it. Furthermore, these approaches identify why appreciating the role of normal development enables us to understand important aspects of scientific practice, such as experimental methodology and making causal attributions based on the results of experimental manipulations. The two main analytical approaches I use are James Woodward’s manipulationist theory of causation (Woodward, 2003 and 2010), and Hans- Jörg Rheinberger’s experimental systems approach (Rheinberger, 1997). The former assesses the factors involved in assessing proposed causal factors, rather than simply demarcating between causes and non-causes. The latter focuses on the way experimental set-ups are configured by scientists in ongoing series of experiments to frame phenomena of interest: “epistemic objects”. My analysis establishes the centrality of the concept of normal development to the way experimental systems are produced and reproduced, and to how attributions of causality which arise from experimental work are made

What is an internet? Norbert Wiener and the society of control

By means of a philosophical reading of Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics, this thesis attempts to derive anew the concepts of internet and control. It develops upon Wiener’s position that every age is reflected by a certain machine, arguing that the internet is that which does so today. Grounded by a critical historiography of the relation between the Cold War and the internet’s invention in 1969 by the ‘network’ of J. C. R. Licklider, it argues for an agonistic concept of internet derived from Wiener’s disjunctive reading of figures including Claude Bernard, Walter Cannon, Benoît Mandelbrot, John von Neumann and above all, his Neo-Kantian inflected reading of Leibniz. It offers a counter-theory of the society of control to those grounded by Spinoza’s ethology, notably that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, and attempts to establish a single conceptual vocabulary for depicting the possible modes of conflict through which an internet is determined

Microbial Geopolitics: Living with Danger and the Future of Security.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017

Queer Surrealism: Desire as Praxis

This dissertation examines an overlapping range of concerns, practices and ideas shared by sur-realism and gay liberation and attempts to situate them in relation to each other in order to theo-rize a specifically “queer surrealist” nexus and identify its political and creative potential for the present day. In order to do so it identifies three particular loci of concern: the erotic, aesthesis as a perceptual mode, and the occult, and then examines the specific treatment and theoretical use the two movements made of these in order to identify generative possibilities for their synthesis. Building on this analytical work, the dissertation then proposes a model of a Queer Surrealism as a deliberate cultivation of subjectivity rooted in praxis and positioned against a perpetually de-ferred and utopian horizon that consequently requires constant rearticulation/reimagining. It fur-ther offers a research-creation component (a collection of prose poems) that attempts to actively engage and embody these ideas as a complement to the critical or theoretical exploration

World Beats

This fascinating book explores Beat Generation writing from a transnational perspective, using the concept of worlding to place Beat literature in conversation with a far-reaching network of cultural and political formations. Countering the charge that the Beats abroad were at best naïve tourists seeking exoticism for exoticism's sake, World Beats finds that these writers propelled a highly politicized agenda that sought to use the tools of the earlier avant-garde to undermine Cold War and postcolonial ideologies and offer a new vision of engaged literature. With fresh interpretations of central Beat authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs - as well as usually marginalized writers like Philip Lamantia, Ted Joans, and Brion Gysin - World Beats moves beyond national, continental, or hemispheric frames to show that embedded within Beat writing is an essential universality that brought America to the world and the world to American literature

Laws of the Sea

Laws of the Sea assembles scholars from law, geography, anthropology, and environmental humanities to consider the possibilities of a critical ocean approach in legal studies. Unlike the United Nations’ monumental Convention on the Law of the Sea, which imagines one comprehensive constitutional framework for governing the ocean, Laws of the Sea approaches oceanic law in plural and dynamic ways. Critically engaging contemporary concerns about the fate of the ocean, the collection’s twelve chapters range from hydrothermal vents through the continental shelf and marine genetic resources to coastal communities in France, Sweden, Florida, and Indonesia. Documenting the longstanding binary of land and sea, the chapters pose a fundamental challenge to European law’s “terracentrism” and its pervasive influence on juridical modes of knowing and making the world. Together, the chapters ask: is contemporary Eurocentric law—and international law in particular—capable of moving away from its capitalist and colonial legacies, established through myriad oceanic abstractions and classifications, toward more amphibious legalities? Laws of the Sea will appeal to legal scholars, geographers, anthropologists, cultural and political theorists, as well as scholars in the environmental humanities, political ecology, ocean studies, and animal studies

Leaving Unleaving

These poems were selected to be in this volume of life writing, "Offshoot" as they are autobiographical, spanning 18 years of my daughter's life, and my role as her mother