Posthuman ethics with Cary Wolfe and Karen Barad : animal compassion as trans-species entanglement

Although critiques of humanism are not new, the currency of posthumanist discourse on the nonhuman – the animal, the environment, or the object – suggests rising concerns about humanity’s place in the ecological order. This article interrogates Cary Wolfe's posthumanist framework as he approaches the questions of activism and agency in the context of animal ethics and disability politics. By drawing attention to the contradictions in his own commitments to rethinking human exceptionalism, I examine how Wolfe's appeal for a more compassionate account of ethics vis-à-vis the notion of ‘trans-species empathy’ can be more gainfully addressed through the work of feminist and quantum physicist Karen Barad. This essay contends that by preserving the difference between the human and the nonhuman (or animal) as something that is given rather than interrogated, the assumption of ‘the human’ as a self-contained identity is left unchanged and unchallenged.19 page(s

The Paradox of self-reference : sociological reflections on agency and intervention in the Anthropocene

18 page(s

Originary synaesthesia

This paper reflects on Iris van der Tuin's reading of the connections between microagressions and contemporary feminist theory. In particular, I address van der Tuin's discussion of echolocation and mirror-touch synaesthesia as empirical instances of the material, ontological complexity of individuation. For van der Tuin, recent findings in the science of perception rework our understanding of microagressions beyond its routinely atomistic logic and the subject/object divide that underpins it. Importantly, echolocation's and mirror-touch synaesthesia's confounding of the interplay between biology and environment also offers interesting insights into the epistemological and methodological question of how to 'measure' or know an imperceptive sort of experience like microagressions.4 page(s

The Ecological significance of brain plasticity

This chapter explores the concept of neuroplasticity alongside anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s work on the ecology of mind. In the last three decades, a growth of research areas in neuroscience has drawn attention to the role of social interactions in organising brain circuitry. Some of the most compelling findings in this area of study are documenting the transformative potential of brain plasticity and its broader implications for learning, education and rehabilitation programs. However, most researchers working in this area take the brain or the psychology of an individual to be a self-evident entity lodged within an inner, subjective world that responds to changes in an external environment. Reading across disciplinary registers, Bateson’s ecological approach to mental processes challenges this individualistic model of the brain. He proposes a relational notion of learning that reconceptualises the assumption that an idea, a thought, or a habit originates from an individual. In Bateson’s account, mental processes are shaped by prevailing social and ecological circumstances, and these circumstances are themselves informed by specific historical contexts. This view of the biosphere as a self-organising system challenges dualistic depictions of mind and matter, individual and environment, self and system. This chapter explores how an ecological perspective of motivation recasts conventionally individualistic assumptions of agency.9 page(s

Neuroplasticity as an ecology of mind : a conversation with Gregory Bateson and Catherine Malabou

Neuroplasticity research marks a considerable shift in focus from localization theories of the brain to more holistic, or systemsoriented, theories of the body-brain-environment interrelation. In What Should We Do with Our Brain?, philosopher Catherine Malabou calls attention to the political significance of neuroplasticity for engaging questions of agency and accountability. This paper addressesMalabou's ethical concerns by way of anthropologist Gregory Bateson's ecological view of human agency. By redefining the individual mind as an ecological 'tangle', Bateson's perspectives offer an important provocation, namely, a re-examination of the conventional parameters that bound the mind or the brain as a localized entity or that bound the mind or the brain as a property of an individual entity. This paper brings together Malabou and Bateson's views on agency and consciousness.23 page(s

Systematicity: the human as ecology

This thesis investigates a foundational question in the humanities and social sciences: the interplay between individual agency and social structures. By problematising the ontological and epistemological status of the human subject as a self-evident, discrete and bounded entity, this thesis argues for a reexamination of the view that moral agency is necessarily located in a given individual. What is agency if the sense that I am the author of my intentions is born of the system that enables me in the first place? This is the motivating question behind sociologys inception, one that informs a shift in methodological emphasis from the subjective and the particular to the objective and the general. This extension of the empirical methods of science to the study of morality, politics and history not only enlarged the conventional definition of science, but also what being human means. Yet, the challenge of reconciling notions of subjectivity and objectivity is evident in the precarious position that contemporary sociology continues to embody: as neither fully humanities nor fully science. This is often amplified in social scientific accounts that align nature and/or biology with determinism, and humanity with the agency to enact social change.This thesis begins with an extended meditation on the sociological problem of individuation through the works of Auguste Comte and Émile Durkheim. As this problem has been taken up in systems science and cybernetics scholarship, a close engagement with three prominent systems theorists, namely, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson and Cary Wolfe, provides us with a novel means to challenge and reconceptualise received assumptions that underpin the ethics and politics of humanism. These analyses in chapters two to four examine, respectively, the interface between system-environment, neurology-ecology, human-posthuman. This thesis concludes with an empirical case study of sensory substitution, a phenomenon whose manifestation as both a neurological and an ecological condition evokes the very problem of locating the origin of agency, in this case, neuroplasticity. As neuroplasticity disperses any simple notion of identity as discrete, static and separate, indeed, neurology is an expression of systematicity, the certainty that grounds human identity will need to be substantially reworked