Spartan Daily, March 7, 1996

Volume 106, Issue 30https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/8815/thumbnail.jp

Body of glass: cybernetic bodies and the mirrored self

This thesis examines the ontology of the cyborg body and the politics inherent to cultural manifestations of that image, and focuses on the links between glass and human-machine integration, while tracing the dangerous political affinities that emerge when such links are exposed. In the first chapter, the cyborg’s persistent construction as a cultural Black Box is uncovered using the theories of Bruno Latour and W. Ross Ashby. It examines why the temptation to explore the cyborg solely through close readings of contemporary incarnations leads only to confusion and misreading. The second chapter builds on the work of the first by placing the cyborg within its proper historical context, and provides a detailed examination of the period in which the cyborg was not only named, but also transformed into a physical possibility with an existent political agenda. It then investigates the phallogocentricity, hyper-masculinity, and inherent racism of the cyborg body, and demonstrates how representations of human-machine integration reinforce the pre-existing racist, hetero-normative, patriarchal hegemony of the Cold War. The discussion then explores the issue of the emergent property in the cyborg body; specifically, the figure’s persistent construction as a ‘body of glass.’ It demonstrates how cyborgs are not only associated with objects like the mirror, but also how that figure is tied to visual motifs such as the double or doppelganger. Accordingly, the theories of Jacques Lacan are employed to elucidate the issues that arise when one of the most pervasive images in Western culture also doubles as a reflector. The final chapter seeks to expand upon the framework provided by Lacan, and examines the cyborg not as a mirror, but as a portal. Subsequently, this section challenges not only the cyborg’s current status as a posthuman figure, but also current theoretical assumptions which frame the cyborg as the point of transition from humanism to posthumanism

Radioactivists: community, controversy and the rise of nuclear physics

This dissertation is a social and technical history of radioactivity research in the 1920s, and of the emergence of nuclear physics in the 1930s. It is concerned with the production, circulation and certification of practice and knowledge in these fields of scientific research. By 1914, the study of radioactivity was confined to a few centres - Paris, Berlin, Manchester and Vienna - possessing relatively large quantities of radium. The politics and organisation of this relatively closed network were irrevocably altered by the First World War. The election of Ernest Rutherford to the Cavendish Chair of Experimental Physics at Cambridge in 1919 brought radioactivity research, and a programme of Imperial physics, to the Cavendish Laboratory. Rutherford’s programme of research, based on his speculative nuclear model of the atom (1911), sought to map the internal topography of the atomic nucleus by means of scintillation counting experiments. Rutherford’s work on artificial disintegration, combined with F.W. Aston’s elucidation of the isotopes of the light elements by means of the mass-spectrograph, brought about a profound change in physicists’ and chemists’ views of atomic architecture. In the early 1920s, as laboratories in Europe recovered from the war, the work of the Cavendish Laboratory was unchallenged. During the 1920s, as other laboratories entered the field of nuclear research, however, a series of controversies brought into question the reliability of the scintillation technique and the integrity of all experimental results based upon it. The foundational data yielded by the mass-spectrograph, too, were contested, occasioning a ‘crisis of certitude’ in radioactivity research, and prompting a redistribution of trust into alternative sources of experimental evidence - electronic (Geiger) counters and cloud chambers. The crediting of these techniques (which proved to be as problematic as those they ostensibly replaced) opened up new kinds of problems to experimental investigation. In virtue of the new kinds of skills now required in the laboratory, a re-definition of the investigative community accompanied technical innovation. In the wake of a prolonged controversy between Cambridge and Vienna, a conference was convened at the Cavendish Laboratory in 1928, as a direct result of which researchers in several other European laboratories (including Maurice de Broglie and the Joliot-Curies in Paris, Bothe in Berlin and Pose at Halle) entered the field of nuclear research, multiplying the number of sites at which the new techniques were deployed. Theoretical physicists like George Gamow, too, began to apply the novel methods of wave mechanics to nuclear problems, gradually transforming the bounds of the possible and the plausible in nuclear research. A reconfigured network of embodied practice gradually crystallised around the development of these material and conceptual technologies. This network - including laboratories and researchers in Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, Rome, Vienna, New York, Berkeley and Washington D.C. - embodied the emergent discipline of ‘nuclear physics.’ Chadwick’s disclosure of the ‘neutron’ in 1932 using the new experimental techniques ratified this social and technical re-alignment. The emergence of Nuclear Physics as a recognised discipline by 1934 was thus the simultaneous certification of a new regime of practice, a new sociopolitical network of laboratories and a new ontology

Insinuated Bodies, Corporeal Resignification and Disembodied Desire in Novels by Jeanette Winterson

My dissertation examines the various ways in which the following novels written by Jeanette Winterson Written on the Body (1992), Gut Symmetries (1997), The.PowerBook (2000), and The Stone Gods (2007) interrogate and denaturalize preexisting power structures by disentangling the body from the discursively inscribed identity categories of gender and sex. Dominant conceptions concerning desire, commonly thought to be an innate byproduct of a wholly natural body, are likewise disrupted in the unraveling of gender and sex from corporeality. Desire is thus opened up to possibilities that exist beyond the limited purview of gendered, heterosexist ideologies. Much like the field of queer theory, this dissertation draws together different branches of knowledge poststructuralism and resignification, psychoanalysis, nomadism, posthumanism, cyborg narratives in order to closely analyze what Wintersons works do to bodies, to language, to gender, to sexuality. The novels studied here offer a way of re-insinuating bodies to desire in ways that are much more inclusive and much less prohibitive. Although my consideration of these novels critically engages with many theorists throughout, there are four key thinkers that helped to shape each chapter: Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Katherine N. Hayles and Donna Haraway. My first chapter examines the parallels between Butlers theory of the sex/gender/desire matrix and Written on the Body, assessing the novels twofold operation of resignification: the body is first extricated from its naturalization before becoming reformulated in ways that move outside of the framework of the current grand narratives on desire. My second chapter surveys the relationship between Grosz and the Deleuzian Bodies without Organs (BwOs) in Gut Symmetries, while my third chapter explores Hayless version of posthumanism alongside Haraways figure of the cyborg, in relation to The.PowerBook and The Stone Gods, respectively. These novels widen the cracks in the signifying system, shifting conceptions of materiality and desire elsewhere. If we are to acknowledge that desire does indeed come from outside rather than from within the subject, then sexuality can be dissociated from the subjects body subsequently endangering genders impact on how we conceive of our desire

Heuristics of capital: a historical sociology of US venture capitalism, 1946-1968

This thesis examines the emergence and early history of venture capitalism in the US as a project of capitalization. As theorized in recent literatures on valuation studies and the “new” history of capitalism, capitalization is a collective activity, simultaneously cognitive and socio-technical, of “turning things into assets.” As such, it requires the capitalizing subject to “think as an investor.” The history of capitalism can be reconstructed as a history of successive “regimes of investment,” differing in terms of which assets get capitalized and under what terms. Before stabilizing as a “regime,” however, capitalization begins as a project that is logically and historically anterior to the institutions and technologies that will later hold it together. Rather, projects of capitalization emerge as ways of imagining certain objects as investments, or capital assets. In the early history of venture capital in the US, this imagination was targeted at young, small, technology-based firms. Prospective investors — who eventually became early venture capitalists — deployed a set of informal heuristics adopting some of the categories from the classifications used by the applied financial and managerial disciplines. This thesis follows the sequence of episodes through which these heuristics increasingly became centered on “people,” eventually helping create a novel action under a description and, to put it in Ian Hacking’s terms, a corresponding human kind — technical entrepreneurs. Accordingly, the analytical approach is nominalist: no claim is made as to whether the heuristics deployed by the actors featuring on the pages to follow could serve as a substitute for probabilistic calculation or any other formal calculative device. Yet however “effective” these heuristics might have been, they did have certain dynamic effects, applying and creating new classifications of investment opportunities, companies, and, eventually, people. As a result, in the early 1970s, venture capitalists defined themselves as being engaged in the “people business.” Rather than effectively “turning engineers into entrepreneurs” through coercive or performative effects, they created the category of “technical entrepreneurs” as a human kind, that is, as an open possibility for being a certain kind of person, without necessarily becoming one

Folklore in the Digital Age: Collected Essays. Foreword by Andy Ross

Online and digital cultures are among the most personally gripping effects of globalisation in our increasingly networked world. While global multimedia culture may seem to endanger traditional folklore, there is no doubt that it creates new folklore as well. Folklore in the Digital Age vividly illustrates the range of e-folklore studies in updated papers and essays from the author’s 21st-century research. The themes covered include not only the most serious issues of the day, such as the 9/11 attacks and natural disasters, but also cheerier topics, such as online dating and food culture. In these essays Professor Krawczyk-Wasilewska paints a convincing picture of digital folklore as a cultural heritage. She covers a wide range of issues from all levels of society and offers fascinating insights into how online culture affects our postmodern lives