Beyond the Circle of Life

It seems certain to me that I will die and stay dead. By “I”, I mean me, Greg Nixon, this person, this self-identity. I am so intertwined with the chiasmus of lives, bodies, ecosystems, symbolic intersubjectivity, and life on this particular planet that I cannot imagine this identity continuing alone without them. However, one may survive one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps, we bring this back with us to the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it. Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory – so maybe you will be one of the few prepared to become unexpectedly enlightened after the loss of body and self. You may discover your own apotheosis – something you always were, but after a lifetime of primate experience, now much more. Since you are of the Source and since you have changed from life experience and yet retained the dream of ultimate awakening, plus you have brought those chaotic emotions and memories back to the Source with you (though no longer yours), your life & memories will have mattered. Those who awaken beyond the death of self will have changed Reality

FREUD AND SECRECY: ALLEGORY, AESTHETIC AND SILENCE IN PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

PhDThe thesis seeks to explore one of the most singular features of Freudian thought, his radical position in the history of the ideas about language. One of my chief claims is that the Freudian endeavour is not oriented towards a conclusive theory of language as such, but of the conditions of its destruction, its exhaustion, its silence. The obscure centre of Freud's work, the passion for the shattering of language, manifests itself both as an affirmation and as a dissipation of the sense of speech, which cast some light upon the cardinal role of the notion of secrecy, not only in his comprension of language, but also in his conception of subjectivity. Thus, secrecy can be conceived as a fundamental feature of different facets of his writings. The first facet exhibits psychoanalysis as the inheritor of the progressive emergence of silence in the core of modern thought. I argue that the logic of secrecy which appears in Freud's early writings enacts the historical emergence of secrecy which pervaded different discourses of the nineteenth century. This singular logic had its origin at the confluence of the exalted discourses which enthrowned observation and experience in the positivistic conception of knowledge bred by the Enlightenment, the obscure cults of magnetism and the speculative conceptions of subjectivity which emerged from the crisis of the Enlightenment, with the rising of Romanticism and its powerful effects on the Western culture. The second facet exhibits the logic of secrecy as expressed by the acts of language. Secrecy introduces an inner discord in the meaning of signs: it reveals the obsolescence of the referential notion of truth. Allegory emerges from this discord as a privileged aesthetic and theoretical expression. Freud's theoretical creativity canceled the significance of the referential, discursive notion of truth with the violent implications of the notion of primary thought processes and a conception of primal experiences of pleasure and pain irreducible to the narrow margins of rationality. The radical dissipation of the conventional foundations of semantic truth brought into focus an aesthetic -Baroque~ conception of subjectivity. This vision pervades Freud's notion of psychical processes, and engendered a constellation of forms of theoretical expression: psychical processes were apprehended by allegorical figures: the fold, rhythm, movement, displacement involving paradoxical temporalities which offered a contrasting landscape of thought processes that informed desire and aroused anxiety; Freud created thus a theoretical chiaroscuro. A third facet involves two further Freudian notions: sexuality and pain. One of them, sexuality, is almost too notorious in Freud's work; the other, pain, was permanently and explicitly displaced, silenced, excluded. or even emphatically avoided in Freud's writings, and yet it is an notion inherent in his conception of subjectivity. Freud's subversion of the modem notion of experience might be thought of as founded upon his conception of the experience of pain as a constitution~ dimension of subjectivity, as its unspeakable, unapproachable, secret centre.National Council for Science and Technology (CONA,CYT) and the sponsorship of the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico

I IS ANOTHER: The fabulative filmic collaboration with someone recovering from addiction

The research is a critical exploration of the fabulative filmic collaboration with Petra, a participant recovering from heroin addiction. This fabulative approach articulates a cinema practice that seeks to address the issue of addictive behaviours in a way that has rarely been investigated, with a focus on the recovery process in the long-term. The research lies at the intersection of Film Studies, Performance Studies, Philosophy, Psychiatry and Anthropology. Theoretical insights obtained through primary practice-led film research make contributions to addiction studies by reconsidering biomedical, sociocultural and psychological research on addiction; questioning past and contemporary performative nonfiction filmmaking strategies addressing mental health narratives thereby offering a new model of filmic collaboration in relation to practice-led findings in long durational performance art. The collective filmic enquiry explores alternative safe spaces for people recovering from addiction to current cognitive-behavioural therapeutic models by addressing the crucial issue of hidden or neglected forms of mental health narratives. The doctoral research aims at exploring duration in nonfiction filmmaking and during the recovery process, shifting from rather implicit, anticipated and impressive performances to more explicit, spontaneous, subtle and durational ones. This helps to remain focused on nonverbal and more-than corporeal dimensions of addiction, which also generally remain underresearched. The research hypothesises that recovery from addiction is an explicit performance. Instead of only seeing addiction as an issue to solve, a set of symptoms to address or an urge that needs to be controlled, each new step is also a complex and rich performative experience to understand, cope with and re-enact. The model of working tests the hypothesis with help of performative techniques initially practiced in the context of long durational performance art

TECHNART 2017. Non-destructive and microanalytical techniques in art and cultural heritage. Book of abstracts

440 p.TECHNART2017 is the international biannual congress on the application of Analytical Techniques in Art and Cultural Heritage. The aim of this European conference is to provide a scientific forum to present and promote the use of analytical spectroscopic techniques in cultural heritage on a worldwide scale to stimulate contacts and exchange experiences, making a bridge between science and art. This conference builds on the momentum of the previous TECHNART editions of Lisbon, Athens, Berlin, Amsterdam and Catania, offering an outstanding and unique opportunity for exchanging knowledge on leading edge developments. Cultural heritage studies are interpreted in a broad sense, including pigments, stones, metal, glass, ceramics, chemometrics on artwork studies, resins, fibers, forensic applications in art, history, archaeology and conservation science. The meeting is focused in different aspects: - X-ray analysis (XRF, PIXE, XRD, SEM-EDX). - Confocal X-ray microscopy (3D Micro-XRF, 3D Micro-PIXE). - Synchrotron, ion beam and neutron based techniques/instrumentation. - FT-IR and Raman spectroscopy. - UV-Vis and NIR absorption/reflectance and fluorescence. - Laser-based analytical techniques (LIBS, etc.). - Magnetic resonance techniques. - Chromatography (GC, HPLC) and mass spectrometry. - Optical imaging and coherence techniques. - Mobile spectrometry and remote sensing

Shaping science with the past : textbooks, history, and the disciplining of genetics

Science is generally not thought of as being deeply historiographical. Although it is clear that scientists frequently write about history in their work — that, for example, they identify the significance of an advance by situating it historically, or refer to a historic source of authority in order to add legitimacy to a position — it is often supposed that the historical claims of scientists are incidental to the scientific. This thesis contests basic assumptions of this view. In a study of the textbooks of twentieth century Anglo-American genetics — of a place where the canon of a science is consolidated, as the heterogeneous approaches and controversies of its practice are rendered unified for its reproduction — I develop a novel taxonomy of the forms in which history can be written, and of the scientific functions that they can serve. Progressing from an analysis of narrative historical accounts, to latent and embedded formulations of the past, I demonstrate the ways in which geneticists used history-writing in the disciplining of the foundations, future practitioners, conceptual order, and boundaries of their science. After an introductory chapter identifying some of the ways in which the textbooks and historical accounts of a science may be contributory, rather than intellectually external and temporally subsequent, to its formation and development, I advance the central argument of this thesis in four chapters. Each examines a different form of historywriting. In the first, I explore the disciplining of the foundations of genetics, with a study of the explicit, narrative histories of hereditary science that were written in three important first-generation genetics textbooks. Identifying radical differences in their accounts of the same nineteenth-century figures, experiments and theories, I argue that these different ways of consolidating history were connected to fundamentally different ideas of the conceptual foundations of the science, and that they were used to advance divergent visions of the science’s future. I then look at the historical case-based and problem-solving method of teaching that was developed in the 1920s-1940s to convey the science of genetics. I argue that this method created 'virtual historical environments' that allowed students to learn and practice not only the principles that were studied by geneticists and were explicitly taught as rules in the text, but also the tacit skills needed to follow, find, and understand these rules. Here, history was used in the disciplining of the mind of the student. In the third chapter, I look at the 'standard historical approach' to teaching in the 1930s-1950s, exploring the establishment of this approach, the functions and consequences of literary devices on which it relied, and the ways in which the meaning of facts and theories were shaped within it. My central contention is that a notion of history was constitutive of the organizational logic, narrative structure, and inner rationality of textbook genetics, thereby performing a powerful function in the disciplining of the conceptual order of the science. The fourth chapter explores the sense of history embodied in the use of the concept of 'classical genetics' in textbooks of the 1960s-1970s. Tracing the semantic development of 'classical' from its first uses in the 1920s, I argue that this term was a politically powerful concept in the language of geneticists: at first used to define and establish sources of scientific authority, it was subsequently developed in arguments about the philosophical and ideological character of genetics, and eventually served to establish the disciplinary identity and boundaries of the science. By differentiating these various uses of 'classical', I show that the disciplinary power of this term — which is derived from the authority of history — relied on the effacement of its historicity and the situations in which it was created and deployed. With this thesis, I push the boundaries on common conceptions of what is involved in, and what should be counted as, the 'history' and 'writing' of history-writing. Advancing a novel taxonomy of the forms in which the historical can appear, I provide a starting point for further historiographical research on the subtle yet powerful ways in which the historicity of our past can make claims upon us

Revolutionary thinking : a theoretical history of Alexander Luria's 'Romantic science'

The Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977) asserted that human consciousness is formed by and participates in forming history. His explicitly Marxist approach to psychology and neurology itself emerged from a particular time and place. This thesis seeks to restore Luria’s work to its history, situating his research in its Soviet context - from the October Revolution in 1917 through the collectivisation of agriculture and Stalinist Terror to the Second World War. This PhD follows the course of Luria’s career through Soviet history, and is also structured around the developmental trajectories that informed his research. Luria’s work was consistently concerned with tracing the emergence of the ‘culturally developed’ human being, defined as an educated person capable of exerting an influence on their environment. He argued that this figure was the result of various developmental trajectories: the biological evolution of the species from animal to human, the cultural development of societies from ‘primitivism’ to ‘civilization’, and the maturation of the individual from baby to adult. Chapter 1 discusses Luria’s early engagement with psychoanalysis and his rejection of the Freudian death drive. Chapter 2 considers experiments Luria conducted in Soviet Central Asia during the period of the First Five Year Plan (1928-1932), exploring his engagement with Stalinism through an analysis of his attempt to trace a transition from ‘primitive’ to ‘civilized’ thought. Chapter 3 focuses on the contradictory figure of the revolutionary child, who occupied a symbolic position in Soviet culture between change and continuity. Finally, Chapter 4 turns to consider Luria’s work with people who survived brain injuries inflicted during the Second World War. It concludes by arguing that the war violently interrupted the progressive developmental trajectories Luria’s work had hitherto been structured around (which broadly agreed with orthodox Marxist-Leninist accounts of historical progress). It is at that moment, I contend, that he finally developed the ‘real, not sham’ Marxist psychology he had always sought to create

PAINTING THE SKY BLACK

Dieter Häussinger, Direktor des HITM und der Medizinischen Klinik und Poliklinik für Gastroenterologie, Hepatologie und Infektiologie und Lehrstuhlinhaber für Innere Medizin an der Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, ist im Bereich der klinischen und experimentellen Hepatologie und Gastroenterologie aktiv. Er engagiert sich für die Weiterentwicklung der klinischen Infektiologie. In diesem Zusammenhang erfolgte die Zertifizierung seiner Klinik als Zentrum für Infektiologie, der Aufbau einer tropenmedizinischen Ambulanz und Infektionssprechstunde, die Errichtung des Leber- und Infektionszentrums mit der einzigen Sonderisoliereinheit in Nordrhein-Westfalen für hochinfektiöse Patienten sowie die Gründung des Hirsch-Instituts für Tropenmedizin

Ethnography of pedagogy and visual cultures in contemporary structural biology

Thesis (Ph. D. in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HASTS))--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 260-277).This ethnography tracks visualization and pedagogy in the burgeoning field of structural biology. Structural biologists are a multidisciplinary group of researchers who produce models and animations of protein molecules using three-dimensional interactive computer graphics. As they ramp up the pace of structure determination, modeling a vast array of proteins, these researchers are shifting life science research agendas from decoding genetic sequence data to interpreting the multidimensional forms of molecular life. One major hurdle they face is training a new generation of scientists to work with multi-dimensional data forms. In this study I document the formation and propagation of tacit knowledge in structural biology laboratories, in classrooms, and at conferences. This research shows that structural biologists-in-training must cultivate a feel for proteins in order to visualize and interpret their activity in cells. I find that protein modeling relies heavily on a set of practices I call the body-work of modeling. These tacit skills include: a) forms of kinesthetic knowledge that structural biologists gain through building and manipulating molecular models, and by using their own bodies as mimetic models to help them figure out how proteins move and interact; and b) narrative strategies that assume a teleological relationship between form and function, and which figure proteins through analogies with familiar human-scale phenomena, such as the pervasive description of proteins as "machines." What I find is that these researchers are not only transforming the objects of life science research: they are training a new generation of life scientists in forms of knowing attuned to the chemical affinities, physical forces and movements of protein molecules, and keyed to the tangible logic and rhetoric of "molecular machines."(cont.) This research builds on concerns in the feminist science studies literature on modes of embodiment in scientific practice, and contributes to studies of performance in science by examining visual cultures as performance cultures. In addition, I incorporate historical studies of the life sciences to map the making of the protein-this intricately crafted entity whose forms and functions, I argue, are recalibrating scientific expertise, reanimating biological imaginations, and reconfiguring the very contours and temporalities of "life itself."by Natasha Myers.Ph.D.in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society (HAST