Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

The diverse materials comprising Impasses of the Post-Global take as their starting point an interrelated, if seemingly endless sequence of current ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and informational disasters. These include the contemporary discourses of deconstruction, climate change, ecological imbalance and despoilment, sustainability, security, economic bailout, auto-immunity, and globalization itself. With essays by James H. Bunn, Rey Chow, Bruce Clarke, Tom Cohen, Randy Martin, Yates McKee, Alberto Moreiras, Haun Saussy, Tian Song, Henry Sussman, Samuel Weber, Ewa P. Ziarek, and Kryzsztof Ziarek

Loading World: (re)Creating Life, Nature and Cosmos in Evolutionary Computer Games

As a generalised field of study, artificial life has produced specific meanings and narratives about what it means to be alive: structured around the concepts of code, information, evolution, connectionism, emergence and cybernetics that connect silicon and carbon life together. Evolutionary computer games and popular programs have introduced the general player and user to advanced artificial life creations, with games based on the nurturing and breeding of silicon creatures placed within new digital natures conceived as computational regimes. Considered is the question of how it has become possible to talk of silicon entities as being alive, and to explore their relationship with carbon life as presented within evolutionary computer games. Similarities between digital and material proposed within computational regimes are also investigated. Playing computer games is developed as a productive practice that constructs meanings, stories and narratives within play. Tracing spiritual and scientific myths and narratives of construction, creation and change, reveals how common stories about life, nature and cosmos are employed in the building of bonds between silicon and carbon. Evolutionary computer games are presented as actively promoting themselves as artificial life products creating links with the life and biological sciences. Meaning produced within play is shown to naturalise and normalise specific definitions of life steeped in neo·Darwinian evolutionism and cybernetics, and how our digital creations have become perfected examples of the essence of this life. Whether this conceptualisation of life, nature and cosmos works within computational regimes is questioned and discussed. Reflecting similar arguments contesting the neo·Darwinian evolutionary perspective within biology, the assumptions employed within this framework are investigated and challenged. Utilising Bruno Latour's program of political ecology and his concepts of proposition and habit. An alternative framework is suggested to examine artificial life, utilising Bruno Latour's program of political ecology, his concepts of proposition and habit, and our relation with these entities

Terraforming

Terraforming is the process of making other worlds habitable for human life. Its counterpart on Earth—geoengineering— is receiving serious consideration as a way to address climate change. Contemporary environmental awareness and our understanding of climate change is influenced by science fiction, and terraforming in particular has offered scientists, philosophers, and others a motif for thinking in complex ways about our impact on planetary environments. This book asks how science fiction has imagined how we shape both our world and other planets and how stories of terraforming reflect on science, society and environmentalism. It traces the growth of the motif of terraforming in science fiction from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron's blockbuster Avatar (2009), in stories by such writers as Olaf Stapledon, Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Pamela Sargent, Frederick Turner and Kim Stanley Robinson. It argues for terraforming as a nexus for environmental philosophy, the pastoral, ecology, the Gaia hypothesis, and the politics of colonisation and habitation. Amidst contemporary anxieties about climate change, terraforming offers an important vantage from which to consider the ways humankind shapes and is shaped by their world

Impasses of the post-global: theory in the era of climate change, vol. 2

The diverse materials comprising Impasses of the Post-Global take as their starting point an interrelated, if seemingly endless sequence of current ecological, demographic, socio-political, economic, and informational disasters. These include the contemporary discourses of deconstruction, climate change, ecological imbalance and despoilment, sustainability, security, economic bailout, auto-immunity, and globalization itself. With essays by James H. Bunn, Rey Chow, Bruce Clarke, Tom Cohen, Randy Martin, Yates McKee, Alberto Moreiras, Haun Saussy, Tian Song, Henry Sussman, Samuel Weber, Ewa P. Ziarek, and Kryzsztof Ziarek

Towards a Buddhist systems methodology (BSM): developing the theory of BSM and testing it in a Taiwanese Buddhist organization

In the twentieth century, systems thinking developed in the West from a recognition that a new way of thinking was needed to deal with complexity. In the East, Buddhism offers a powerful perspective to observe the world and its problems, and has been successfully helping people in their daily lives for nearly two thousand five hundred years. This research develops and tests a new perspective for problem solving and problem prevention by integrating selected ideas from Buddhist thinking and systems thinking. The purpose is to generate a methodology of specific relevance to Buddhist organizations in Taiwan. Similarities and differences between aspects of Buddhist thinking and systems thinking are examined to reveal potential synergies. However, difficulties in integrating various Buddhist and systems perspectives are also identified. The chosen solution is to establish synergies via the "systemic intervention" perspective that provides a rationale for allowing theoretical and methodological pluralism in the development of locally relevant approaches to intervention. Therefore a Buddhist Systems Methodology (BSM) is proposed which combines systemic intervention with Buddhist concepts and which appears to offer a new systemic perspective for problem solving and problem prevention in organizations in Taiwan. The BSM methodology is field tested by carrying out an intervention in Buddha's Light International Association, Republic of China (BLIA, R. O. C. ). The intervention identifies and tackles an issue of major concern to the organization. An evaluation of the BSM intervention by stakeholders, carried out six months after implementation, reveals significant progress towards resolution of the issue and wide acceptance of the usefulness of the BSM

Anti-computing

We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations. Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels

Anti-computing

Anti-computing explores forgotten histories and contemporary forms of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It also asks why these moments tend to be forgotten. What is it about computational capitalism that means we live so much in the present? What has this to do with computational logics and practices themselves? This book addresses these issues through a critical engagement with media archaeology and medium theory and by way of a series of original studies; exploring Hannah Arendt and early automation anxiety, witnessing and the database, Two Cultures from the inside out, bot fear, singularity and/as science fiction. Finally, it returns to remap long-standing concerns against new forms of dissent, hostility, and automation anxiety, producing a distant reading of contemporary hostility.At once an acute response to urgent concerns around toxic digital cultures, an accounting with media archaeology as a mode of medium theory, and a series of original and methodologically fluid case studies, this book crosses an interdisciplinary research field including cultural studies, media studies, medium studies, critical theory, literary and science fiction studies, media archaeology, medium theory, cultural history, technology history

Developing animal theology : an engagement with Leonardo Boff

This thesis seeks to develop animal theology in dialogue with Leonardo Boff, specifically in relation to his liberation, ecological, and contextual theologies. Through an examination of his major works relating to creation—notably, Jesus Christ Liberator: A Critical Christology of Our Time (1972), Saint Francis: A Model for Human Liberation (1981), Ecology and Liberation: A New Paradigm (1993), and Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor (1995)—this thesis unravels the anthropocentric and instrumentalist thinking that characterises Roman Catholic thought about animals. In Jesus Christ Liberator, the work of Christ is considered only in relation to humanity, which in practical terms means that human beings—their life, worth, and destiny—are God’s primary, if not exclusive, concern. In Saint Francis, despite the obvious moral example provided, Boff almost wholly ignores Francis’s significance for other creatures, and his ecological theology tantalisingly remains insufficiently attentive to the animal issue. Yet Boff’s ecological theology represents a significant shift, and at least notionally, he accepts the rights of other creatures. So paradoxically, his ecological theology is a catalyst for greater concern for creation, including animals. Boff may have influenced the thinking of Pope Francis, especially in the pope’s Laudato Si’ (2015), and has certainly engendered greater theological thinking on the environment. Finally, this thesis proposes a non-anthropocentric reconstruction of the Trinity as Gentleness, Solidarity, and Fraternity, reinforced by Boff’s work in Trinity and Society (1986) and Holy Trinity, Perfect Community (1988). A Trinitarian theology of animal liberation is suggested based on, inter alia, the notion of communion as being “for” creation and the idea of Triune sight. The Trinity is proposed as a model for human–animal relations