Digital Reading: A Question of Prelectio?

Digital reading as superficial reading is examined by demonstrating that technologies act as placeholders for different types of memory, artificial memory and true memory. This chapter argues that the affordances of digital technologies enable certain types of reading activity, digital reading, but hinders others, such as deep reading. In particular, there is a tenuous relationship between digital reading and scanning for information in the printed text, a form of reading traditionally known as prelectio. This latter is a pre-reading of the text for salient information, not for deep understanding: it is, rather, a scanning or skimming of the text. Since the development of digital reading, there has been a debate about the role taken by digital technologies in the acquisition of reading as an activity. This chapter will, through the analysis of the recent works of Stiegler (2010) and the research group Ars Industrialis, challenge the outright rejection of the digital technologies of reading. Instead, by revisiting the technology of writing as a cure and a poison, as a pharmakon, a positive pharmacology will be proposed. By re-examining the philosophical problematic of reading and writing, the first step of this positive pharmacology will be to identify the necessary curative aspects of the technology

"Death Itself Shall Be Deathless”: Transrationalism and Eternal Death in Don DeLillo’s Zero K

The status of human mortality in the face of rapid and overwhelming scientific and technological change is by no means a new topic in DeLillo’s fiction. For many critics, death fulfills a crucial function in the author’s work, its very possibility operating to maintain the boundaries of time and space that are otherwise under threat of disappearance in post war culture. Don DeLillo’s eighteenth novel, Zero K (2016), offers an augmented examination of this conjunction between death and technology, depicting an industrial and scientific landscape where fantasies of eternal life can be legitimately realized via radical advances in cryonic technologies. Yet rather than circumventing death and prolonging life as intended, this article argues that DeLillo instead presents cryonic freezing as a form of eternal death. Subsumed within the technological matrix, death’s ineluctability is disturbed and remodulated, meaning that temporal and spatial boundaries become violently unhinged and entirely immeasurable. This boundlessness becomes vividly mirrored in the architectural and temporal logic of the “Convergence” facility itself, a “transrational” space that unravels concepts such as time, space, language, and subjectivity

Projects of devotion : energy exploration and moral ambition in the cosmoeconomy of oil and gas in the Western United States

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 715146. The authors also acknowledge the funding received to carry out this research from the Leverhulme Trust (ECF‐2013‐177) and the British Academy (EN150010).This article considers how people working in the oil and gas industry in Colorado perceive their involvement in energy exploration in relation to broader understandings of devotion, compassion, and outreach. I argue that although their energy projects may appear to merely echo companies’ formal promotional pitches, the oil field and corporate actors’ own moral ambitions reveal more-than-human cosmoeconomic visions of oil’s potentiality. This article thus demonstrates how multiple and diverging ethical registers intersect and inform the valuation of oil.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Afterword: three letters

The essays consider issues of affect and emotion in terms of three early English letters - by Chaucer, the Paston family, and Henry VIII - in order to consider issues of the personal and the literary. It also comments on the volume of essays as a whole, and consider the field of the history of emotions and affect studies

Genetic associations at 53 loci highlight cell types and biological pathways relevant for kidney function.

Reduced glomerular filtration rate defines chronic kidney disease and is associated with cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. We conducted a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies for estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), combining data across 133,413 individuals with replication in up to 42,166 individuals. We identify 24 new and confirm 29 previously identified loci. Of these 53 loci, 19 associate with eGFR among individuals with diabetes. Using bioinformatics, we show that identified genes at eGFR loci are enriched for expression in kidney tissues and in pathways relevant for kidney development and transmembrane transporter activity, kidney structure, and regulation of glucose metabolism. Chromatin state mapping and DNase I hypersensitivity analyses across adult tissues demonstrate preferential mapping of associated variants to regulatory regions in kidney but not extra-renal tissues. These findings suggest that genetic determinants of eGFR are mediated largely through direct effects within the kidney and highlight important cell types and biological pathways

The shadows of poetry: Vergil in the mind of Augustine

Imperial ceremony was a vital form of self-expression for late antique society. Sabine MacCormack examines the ceremonies of imperial arrivals, funerals, and coronations from the late third to the late sixth centuries A.D., as manifest in the official literature and art of the time. Her study offers us new insights into the exercise of power and into the social, political, and cultural significance of religious change during the Christianization of the Roman world