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How to Survive Totalitarianism: Lessons from Hannah Arendt 如何在极权主义中生存:汉娜·阿伦特的教训
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907159
Zoë Roth
Abstract: In the wake of the Trump election, Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism garnered renewed attention. In it, she argues that totalitarian ideology "is severed from the world individuals perceive through the five senses "and insists on a 'truer' reality concealed behind all perceptible things." By changing what appears true, totalitarian regimes can produce new, upside-down realities built on "alternative facts." The question of perception, appearance, and the senses points to the important role that aesthetics—or what pertains to sense perception—play in Arendt's theorization of totalitarianism. However, scholarly attention to aesthetic concepts in her thinking, including work/fabrication, common sense, and performance, mostly concentrates on later works that largely eschew the concrete political context of totalitarianism, fascism, and the concentration camp. This article argues that Arendt's analysis of totalitarianism provides a crucible for her development of aesthetic concepts and methods. Through drawing out the structure of totalitarianism's perceptual regime, it demonstrates that totalitarianism produces a form of anaesthesia. It destroys the concrete texture of reality and replaces it with hollowed out, atomized, and spectral traces of phenomenal experience. In turn, the article shows that situating Arendt's aesthetic thinking on fabrication and common sense in relation to totalitarianism reveals how aesthetic objects and criticism can challenge political forces' assault on reality.
摘要:特朗普当选后,汉娜·阿伦特的《极权主义的起源》重新受到关注。在书中,她认为极权主义的意识形态“与个人通过五种感官感知的世界是分离的”,并坚持在所有可感知的事物背后隐藏着“更真实的”现实。通过改变看似真实的东西,极权主义政权可以在“另类事实”的基础上产生新的、颠倒的现实。知觉、表象和感官的问题指出了美学——或与感官知觉有关的东西——在阿伦特的极权主义理论化中所起的重要作用。然而,学术界对她思想中美学概念的关注,包括作品/制作、常识和表演,主要集中在她后期的作品中,这些作品在很大程度上避开了极权主义、法西斯主义和集中营等具体政治背景。本文认为,阿伦特对极权主义的分析为其美学概念和方法的发展提供了一个坩埚。通过描绘极权主义的感知体制结构,论证了极权主义产生了一种麻醉形式。它破坏了现实的具体结构,代之以现象经验的空洞、原子化和光谱痕迹。反过来,文章表明,将阿伦特关于虚构和常识的美学思想置于极权主义的关系中,揭示了审美对象和批评如何挑战政治力量对现实的攻击。
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引用次数: 0
The Marriage Plot, Again: A Feedback Loop 婚姻情节,再次:一个反馈循环
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907167
Megan Ward
Abstract: The bigamy plot—the courtship's evil twin—involves characters marrying, then marrying again, a phenomenon rife across Victorian novels. This repetition creates redundancy, both in terms of spouses and, from an informatic perspective, reinforcing the marriage plot's importance. In contrast to a regulated feedback loop that generates stasis, the bigamy plot accumulates more of the same, emphasizing the ongoing centrality of marriage plots in the Victorian novel. This essay argues that this redundancy within the bigamy plot mirrors the emerging imperial information systems and realist aesthetics of the time. With the rise of data management systems like censuses and registries, both literature and empire wrestled with representing individuals both as unique entities and as interchangeable units. Through a reading of the proliferation of records in Jane Eyre (1848), this essay demonstrates how bigamy and its imperial records emerge as a way to understand the struggle for representation, a brief moment in which personhood is extended across the system while also being retracted.
摘要:重婚情节——求爱的邪恶双胞胎——涉及人物结婚,然后再结婚,这是维多利亚时代小说中普遍存在的现象。这种重复创造了冗余,从配偶的角度来看,从信息的角度来看,加强了婚姻情节的重要性。与产生停滞的有调节的反馈循环相反,重婚情节积累了更多相同的情节,强调了维多利亚时代小说中婚姻情节的持续中心地位。本文认为,重婚情节中的这种冗余反映了当时新兴的帝国信息系统和现实主义美学。随着人口普查和登记处等数据管理系统的兴起,文学和帝国都在努力将个人既作为独特的实体,又作为可互换的单位来表现。通过对《简·爱》(1848)中大量记录的阅读,本文展示了重婚及其帝国记录是如何作为一种理解为代表而斗争的方式出现的,这是一个短暂的时刻,在这个时刻,人格在整个系统中延伸,同时也被收回。
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引用次数: 0
Staying Alive: Cybernetic Persistence 生存:控制论的持久性
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907174
Bruce Clarke
Staying Alive:Cybernetic Persistence Bruce Clarke (bio) In some recent writings I ventured to describe what I've called neocybernetic systems theory.1 One way I've approached this description is by drawing a contrast with Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, or ANT.2 A sympathetic colleague remarked that if Latour could own ANT, I should lay claim to my own acronym—NST. Thus, a key difference between these theories is that ANT is built around the concept of network, whereas NST is built around the concept of system. The crucial difference between these two forms is that a network is an unbounded structure—in this respect, it offers an environment open for nodal ramification by its actors, but no internally generated dynamics of its own. In contrast, the specific systems at the fore of NST are, in my formulation, autopoietic systems. That is, they are self-producing, hence internally generated, and in key regards, autonomous, systems: that's what makes them neocybernetic. Even while such systems are open with regard to energy flow, their organizations close upon themselves in processual distinction from the environments that afford them—as in the paradigmatic case of the living cell.3 While both of these theories range well beyond literary application, the idea of literary cybernetics admirably pursued in this NLH forum necessarily turns on the fundamental category of system. And the concept of system—as abstracted from the specific range of technological, biological, psychic, and social instantiations developed in NST—is coupled to a coconstitutive metaconcept of the environment. The environments of NST are themselves potentially suffused with systems, but they are not—they are to be distinguished from—systems per se. As defined in this discourse, an environment is unbounded and, as such, too complex to be systematized. Environments are the mediums out of which systems achieve their forms, the resources from which the productive closures of systems emerge. In any event, this is the theory-form I've taken in my own work in literary cybernetics—literary NST if you will. It pivots from Heinz von Foerster's discourse of recursion and self-reference in second-order cybernetics, to Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela's coupling of autopoiesis and cognition, to the uptake of George Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form in both Varela and Niklas Luhmann's social systems [End Page 1281] theory.4 This cluster of work was the Stanford school in systems theory as I came upon this material at the end of the 1990s: Luhmann and Friedrich Kittler, and thus von Foerster and Claude Shannon, mediated through David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Tim Lenoir, and Stanford University Press's Writing Science series. But cybernetics itself, as Heather Love and Lea Pao develop the topic, is larger than this particular line of elaboration. In their introduction, "Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity," Love and Pao note the robust interdisciplinary mix at
在最近的一些文章中,我大胆地描述了我所谓的新控制论系统理论我对这一描述的一种解释是,将其与布鲁诺•拉图尔(Bruno Latour)的行动者网络理论(actor-network theory,简称ANT)进行对比。一位同情我的同事评论说,如果拉图尔能拥有ANT,我也应该宣称拥有我自己的缩写——nst。因此,这些理论之间的关键区别在于ANT是围绕网络概念构建的,而NST是围绕系统概念构建的。这两种形式之间的关键区别在于,网络是一个无界结构——在这方面,它为参与者的节点分支提供了一个开放的环境,但没有自己的内部生成动态。相比之下,在NST的前面的特定系统,在我的表述中,是自创生系统。也就是说,它们是自我生产的,因此是内部产生的,在关键方面,它们是自主的系统:这就是它们成为新控制论的原因。即使这样的系统在能量流方面是开放的,它们的组织在过程上也与提供它们的环境相区别——就像活细胞的典型例子一样虽然这两种理论都远远超出了文学应用的范围,但在NLH论坛上令人钦佩地追求的文学控制论思想必然会转向系统的基本范畴。系统的概念——从nst中开发的技术、生物、心理和社会实例的特定范围中抽象出来——与环境的构成元概念相结合。NST的环境本身可能充满了系统,但它们不是系统本身,它们与系统是有区别的。正如本文所定义的那样,环境是无界的,因此太复杂而无法系统化。环境是系统实现其形式的媒介,是系统产生生产性闭包的资源。无论如何,这是我在自己的文学控制论——文学NST研究中采用的理论形式。它从Heinz von Foerster在二阶控制论中关于递归和自我参照的论述,到Humberto Maturana和Francisco Varela对自生和认知的耦合,再到Varela和Niklas Luhmann的社会系统理论中对George Spencer-Brown的形式法则的吸收当我在90年代末看到这些材料时,这一组工作是斯坦福系统理论学派:Luhmann和Friedrich Kittler,因此是von Foerster和Claude Shannon,通过David Wellbery, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Tim Lenoir,和斯坦福大学出版社的写作科学系列。但控制论本身,正如希瑟·洛夫(Heather Love)和李·鲍康如(Lea Pao)所发展的主题,比这条特定的阐述线要大得多。在他们的引言《文学控制论:历史、理论、后学科性》中,洛夫和鲍康如注意到,在1946年至1953年间举行的传说中的梅西控制论会议(Macy Conferences on Cybernetics)上,存在着强大的跨学科混合,但他们也注意到,这些会议在艺术和人文学科方面的代表很少。从戈登·帕斯克(Gordon Pask)的“控制论的意外发现”(Cybernetic Serendipity)到罗伊·雅诗阁(Roy Ascott)的概念实践,英国人对第一批控制论的接受似乎更为乐观无论如何,像Charissa Terranova这样的艺术史学家,从“模糊控制论”的概念繁殖和解放潜力开始,就一直在挖掘重大的、广泛的国际艺术合作洛夫和鲍康如还注意到,在近几十年的科学史上,随着文学和科学、科学技术研究(STS)和媒体研究的兴起,关于“递归、自我参照、自我组织、反馈回路、熵、纠缠和涌现”等概念的丰富文献和批判性工作(3)得到了发展。事实上,根据Pao的说法,“控制论”包含了如此多的群体,以至于它已经成为一个“模糊”的概念。这很难否认。首先,它包含了现在被称为一阶控制论的东西:关于生物和社会系统中反馈机制和循环操作的经典论述,它为诺伯特·韦纳、克劳德·香农、沃伦·麦卡洛克、W·W·库洛克等人参加的梅西会议提供了信息。
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引用次数: 0
Introduction, Literary Cybernetics: History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity 引言,文学控制论:历史,理论,后学科性
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907164
Heather A. Love, Lea Pao
Introduction, Literary Cybernetics:History, Theory, Post-Disciplinarity Heather A. Love (bio) and Lea Pao (bio) In 1948, mit mathematician Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics"—adapted from the Greek word for "steersman" or "governor"—to describe an emerging technology-based discipline focused on the science of "control and communication in the animal and the machine."1 Cyberneticians posited that machines can be programmed to learn from the past, that human brains can be understood as complex computers, and that information can circulate freely along conscious and mechanical channels. Since Wiener's codification of cybernetics as a field of study, the even further-reaching discipline of systems theory has emerged.2 Statistical and probabilistic approaches to communication now permeate our understanding of and engagements with information culture, and terms like "cyberspace" and "cyborg" are part of our everyday parlance. From the start, cybernetics and systems theory saw themselves as intensely interdisciplinary undertakings—the famous Macy conferences on cybernetics that ran from 1946 to 1953, for example, brought together academics and applied scientists working in mathematics, engineering, psychology, anthropology, and more. Even though humanistic ideas (about language, meaning, literature) and scholars (such as I. A. Richards and Yuen Ren Chao) have featured in and shaped these meetings, the humanities and the arts have not often been regarded as an integral part of the cybernetics narrative. However, in recent decades, the work of artists, writers, and literary critics engaging with cybernetics and systems thinking in robust and diverse ways has become more visible. Across several subfields and periods in literary studies, concepts such as recursion, self-reference, self-organization, the feedback loop, entropy, entanglement, and emergence have enabled scholars to frame their objects of study as part of a broader media-technological ecology and to forge interdisciplinary connections between literature and more technical fields. In the Anglo-American sphere, Kathleen Woodward's work has invited us to "think cybernetically" about literature and culture; historians of theory such as Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan and Lydia H. Liu have traced the [End Page 1193] exchange between and among cybernetic discourses, French theory, and literary criticism; literary scholars such as Patricia S. Warrick, David Porush, William R. Paulson and N. Katherine Hayles have analyzed literary and cultural theory at the intersection of society, technology, and science, drawing attention to the (implicit and explicit) collaborations between the humanities and sciences, as have Marjorie Levinson, who suggests that systems-theory concepts, such as self-organization and recursion, can provide a new account of lyric form, and Bruce Clarke, who reengages second-order systems theory with narrative theory to capture complex and "extrascientific" processes like cogniti
1948年,麻省理工学院的数学家诺伯特·维纳创造了“控制论”一词——改编自希腊语中的“舵手”或“管理者”——来描述一门新兴的以技术为基础的学科,专注于“动物和机器的控制和交流”科学。控制论认为,机器可以通过编程从过去学习,人脑可以被理解为复杂的计算机,信息可以通过有意识的和机械的渠道自由流通。自从维纳将控制论编纂为一个研究领域以来,甚至更深远的系统理论学科已经出现统计和概率的沟通方法现在渗透到我们对信息文化的理解和参与中,像“网络空间”和“电子人”这样的术语是我们日常用语的一部分。从一开始,控制论和系统理论就认为自己是高度跨学科的事业——例如,著名的梅西控制论会议从1946年持续到1953年,汇集了在数学、工程、心理学、人类学等领域工作的学者和应用科学家。尽管人文主义思想(关于语言、意义和文学)和学者(如理查兹(i.a. Richards)和袁仁超(Yuen Ren Chao))在这些会议中发挥了重要作用,并塑造了这些会议,但人文和艺术并不经常被视为控制论叙事的一个组成部分。然而,近几十年来,艺术家、作家和文学评论家以稳健而多样的方式参与控制论和系统思维的工作变得越来越明显。在文学研究的几个子领域和时期,递归、自我参照、自我组织、反馈回路、熵、纠缠和涌现等概念使学者们能够将他们的研究对象作为更广泛的媒体-技术生态的一部分,并在文学和更多技术领域之间建立跨学科的联系。在英美领域,凯瑟琳·伍德沃德(Kathleen Woodward)的作品邀请我们“从控制论的角度思考”文学和文化;伯纳德·狄奥尼修斯·盖根(Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan)和Lydia H. Liu等理论史学家追溯了控制论话语、法国理论和文学批评之间的交流;Patricia S. Warrick、David Porush、William R. Paulson和N. Katherine Hayles等文学学者在社会、技术和科学的交叉点分析了文学和文化理论,引起了人们对人文科学之间(隐性和显性)合作的关注,Marjorie Levinson也提出了系统理论概念,如自组织和递归,可以为抒情形式提供新的解释,Bruce Clarke,他将二阶系统理论与叙事理论重新结合,以捕捉复杂的“非科学”过程,如认知;最后,唐娜·哈拉威和加里·沃尔夫的后人文主义探究了人文主义思想史、人类、技术和世界之间的移位星座这种对控制论和文学的持续兴趣与许多相邻学科的发展相交叉:数字人文学科和以人文学科为重点的大学“中心”和“实验室”的兴起,计算技术迅速扩展到更多种类的有机和非有机系统,形式主义的回归,也许最有趣的是,引发了如此多讨论的“后批判”转向。在这些批判和理论范式中,最后一点值得特别注意,因为控制论话语虽然提供了自己的一套复杂的分析概念,但并没有简单地映射到追求无意识、被压抑或症状的传统解释学框架。由于这个原因,控制论思维可能为批判性和后批判性阅读提供了一个额外的视角,为我们的阅读和解释实践提供了不同的视角。与此同时,控制论为计算思维提供了另一种途径,它不仅是数字人文学科的祖先,而且要求重新强调系统、通信和信息的模拟和中介性质。也就是说,控制论并没有被数字化所取代,因为作为概念化和方法论的控制论本身并不是数字化的,但它确实允许我们根据类型、物质性、历史、美学和社会实践来思考信息和计算。由于人们对控制论与文学和更广泛的以人文学科为基础的学术的相关性越来越感兴趣,因此对其前景的自我反思还有更多的空间……
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引用次数: 0
Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare 记忆工作和脏活累活:写老年人护理的劳动
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907156
Susan Fraiman
Abstract: "Memory Work and Dirty Work: Writing the Labor of Eldercare" identifies the US eldercare memoir as a burgeoning subgenre of life writing. Typically written by daughters about nursing their parents at the end of life, these memoirs—searing accounts of care for declining bodies—make eldercare visible as a major category of unpaid feminized work. Most home care aides in the US are also women, many of them Black and/or immigrants, performing this important job for meager wages. Eldercare memoirs are thus substantially concerned with the nature and devaluation of a particular form of labor. Dramatizing its feminization, they lead me to pursue a further question: to what extent are female aides and their unequal, quasi-familial relationships with daughters given space in these narratives? Texts treated in detail include Sue Miller's The Story of My Father (2003) and Ruth Tosic's I Am Not the Girl: Memoirs of a Certified Nursing Assistant (2021).
摘要:《记忆的工作与肮脏的工作:老年护理的写作》将美国老年护理回忆录视为一种新兴的生活写作亚类型。这些回忆录通常是由女儿们写的,讲述她们在生命的最后时刻照顾自己的父母,这些回忆录对照顾日渐衰弱的身体进行了灼热的描述,使老年人护理成为女性无偿工作的一个主要类别。在美国,大多数家庭护理助理也是女性,其中许多是黑人和/或移民,从事这项重要的工作,工资微薄。因此,老年人护理回忆录实质上关注的是一种特殊劳动形式的性质和贬值。戏剧化的女性化,让我进一步追问一个问题:在这些叙事中,女性助手以及她们与女儿之间不平等的准家庭关系在多大程度上得到了空间?详细研究的文本包括苏·米勒的《我父亲的故事》(2003)和露丝·托西奇的《我不是那个女孩:一位注册护理助理的回忆录》(2021)。
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引用次数: 0
Coupling Men in Couplet Space: Pope to Gunn 对联空间中的耦合人:Pope to Gunn
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907161
Dustin D. Stewart
Abstract: Donald davie, a serious man, had serious doubts, but his friend Thom Gunn kept assuring him that contemporary poetry could be at once really gay and really traditional. Gunn thought so partly because several major poets who helped forge the tradition as he and Davie knew it, poets such as Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, were themselves gay.1 He also thought so, as his recently published letters confirm, because of his counterintuitive conviction that historical poetic techniques can enhance "improvisatory and up-to-date subject matter."2 Free verse caught the sensation of modern freedom but sometimes fell short in reflecting on it or thinking through it. Gunn, who moved from Cambridge to California in 1954, maintained that poets seeking to represent a queer experience or unconventional setting might be better off relying on the time-tested shaping power of established meters and rhymes. Formal control could then serve as both a defining part of the exploration—an order within freedom—and a device for assessing it, as though from the outside. This inside-and-out defense of traditional form is one he adopted from his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters, for whom poetry's formal discipline (as Gunn puts it) "does not reject experience" but offers "a means of simultaneously conveying it, in all its variety, and evaluating it."3 Experience was the rub for Donald Davie, who in 1982 claimed that his friend's poetry had cut itself off from the literary past by embracing queer content.4 Gunn had good reason to disagree. The very sequence in which he came out in his verse, far from marking a clean break with Winters and traditional form, attests to his ongoing involvement with them. That coming-out sequence takes place in couplets that deserve to be called Popean. But they're Popean in a specific sense, defined not just by regular meter and rhyme but especially by line-ending punctuation that allows enjambment to make room for intimacy.
摘要:唐纳德·戴维,一个严肃的人,有严重的疑虑,但他的朋友汤姆·冈恩不断向他保证,当代诗歌可以同时真正的同性恋和真正的传统。葛恩之所以这么想,部分原因是他和大卫所知道的那些帮助形成这一传统的主要诗人,比如克里斯托弗·马洛和沃尔特·惠特曼,他们自己就是同性恋正如他最近发表的信件所证实的那样,他也这么认为,因为他违反直觉的信念,认为历史诗歌技巧可以增强“即兴和最新的主题”。自由诗抓住了现代自由的感觉,但有时缺乏对它的反思或思考。古恩于1954年从剑桥搬到加利福尼亚,他坚持认为,诗人在寻求表现一种奇怪的经历或非传统的环境时,最好依靠经过时间考验的既定的格律和押韵的塑造能力。于是,正式的控制既可以作为探索的定义部分——一种自由内部的秩序——又可以作为一种评估自由的手段,就像从外部一样。这种对传统形式的彻底辩护是从他的斯坦福老师Yvor Winters那里学来的,对他来说,诗歌的正式纪律(正如冈恩所说)“并不排斥经验”,而是提供了“一种同时传达各种经验,并对其进行评估的方法”。经历对唐纳德·戴维来说是一种摩擦,他在1982年声称,他朋友的诗歌因为接纳了奇怪的内容而与过去的文学隔绝了葛恩有充分的理由不同意。他在他的诗歌中出现的顺序,远没有标志着与温特斯和传统形式的彻底决裂,证明了他对他们的持续参与。这种出柜的顺序是在对联中发生的,值得被称为教皇。但在某种特定意义上,它们是罗马式的,不仅由规则的韵律和押韵定义,而且尤其是由行尾标点来定义,这种标点可以让联系为亲密留出空间。
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引用次数: 0
On Poems (System and Environment) 论诗歌(制度与环境)
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907165
Jack W. Chen
Abstract: In this essay, I propose a different approach to how we might conceptualize poetry, one that understands the poem not simply in terms of human-centered agency (that is, the complex of author-persona-reader) but as an emergent informatic-system. I focus on how the material and immaterial media of language, prosodic rules, and generic constraints all possess their own kinds of agency, comprising a set of limitations for what words the poet may select in composing the poem. Taking a poem by the Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei, I build upon a number of theoretical framings to argue that these strictures function as the constitute the field of what is possible in terms of poetic composition, that the compositional loop between an individual poet and poem is a cybernetic system and the set of constraints that delimit what is compositionally possible is the cybernetic environment.
摘要:在这篇文章中,我提出了一种不同的方法来解释我们如何概念化诗歌,这种方法不是简单地从以人为中心的代理(即作者-人物-读者的综合体)的角度来理解诗歌,而是将其视为一种新兴的信息系统。我关注的是语言的物质和非物质媒介、韵律规则和一般约束,它们都有自己的代理,构成了诗人在创作诗歌时选择的词汇的一系列限制。以唐朝诗人王维的一首诗为例,我在一系列理论框架的基础上提出,这些限制构成了诗歌创作可能的领域,诗人和诗歌之间的创作循环是一个控制论系统,而限定创作可能的约束是控制论环境。
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引用次数: 0
Genre at Earth Magnitude: A Theory of Climate Fiction 地球量级的体裁:气候小说的一个理论
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907162
Derek Woods
Abstract: What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular "metagenre" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation.
摘要:评论家和出版商现在所称的气候小说是一种不断发展的体裁,吸引了评论界的极大关注。这篇文章理论化了这一类型的两个特征之间的关系,一个是形式的,一个是政治的,在它们所处理的尺度框架中:气候的行星尺度,或者许多科学家称之为地球系统。阐明这些特征的档案包括一种流行的关于气候小说的数字话语,其中大部分是在飓风桑迪之后出现的。我没有去看个别作品,也没有去叙述它们的历史,而是阅读了这本流行的“元集”,从中汲取关于这一流派的隐含理论。根据元范畴,气候小说的抽象特征包括说教目的和规范形式。气候小说的目的,无论其社会影响如何,最终都是为了促进地球气候的稳定。其次,这种类型的最终形式是(或应该是)外推现实主义。外推现实主义叙事建立在科学共识的基础上,以想象可信的未来。气候小说的惊人之处在于,它的目的和形式是一种相互矛盾或成反比的关系。如果该类型通过促进气候平衡来实现其目标,那么其真实性将会减弱。如果气候继续不稳定,那么这种类型的现实主义将以牺牲其目的为代价得到证明。气候小说是独一无二的,因为它在个别小说和电影的内容中承诺了外推现实主义,但却以一个阻止未来气候实现的目标的构成和矛盾的存在来实现这一点。分析气候小说的目的和现实主义之间的构成悖论的关键不是陶醉于讽刺,把最后的定论留给意识形态批判,或者忽视气候小说的流行美学。相反,这种悖论可以概括为人类世的世界观或宏大叙事:气候小说的目的和形式之间的矛盾,揭示了与技术统治和科学合法化紧密联系在一起的更普遍的时间结构。
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引用次数: 0
Slaughterhouse Intimacies 屠宰场亲密
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907157
Samantha Pergadia
Abstract: This essay traces slaughterhouse intimacies, sites of material entanglement between and among species, gender, race, sexuality, and reproduction. The phrase may seem paradoxical: the slaughterhouse is a line of death and dismemberment; intimacy connotes vital connection, private interiority. Yet the history of industrial animal farming, I argue, traffics between the intimateexchanges of gender, race, and species at the slaughterhouse, an institution that binds species to reproductive control, alters how animals are known, and changes the tempo and scale of violence itself—making the unthinkable possible. Two strands of scholarship recruit animals or species to comprehendviolations of human-based difference. Second-wave feminists often recruitedan analogic comparison between animals and women to outlinethe contours of a sexism that treats women like animals. The burgeoning field of Black animality studies has focused attention on the race-as-species metaphor in the history of scientific racism. Yet little attention has been paid to the material pathways through which industrial farming changed the entanglements of race, species, and gender. By close reading Ruth Ozeki's novel, My Year of Meats (1998), I unpack the material connectionslying beneath metaphorical comparisons and trace the circulation of U.S. meat through global circulation networks that produce and reproduce our notions of gender, race, time, species, sexuality, and reproduction.
摘要:本文追溯了屠宰场的亲密关系,物种、性别、种族、性和繁殖之间的物质纠缠。这句话似乎自相矛盾:屠宰场是一条死亡和肢解的线;亲密关系意味着重要的联系,私人的内在。然而,我认为,工业化动物养殖的历史在屠宰场中进行了性别、种族和物种之间的亲密交换,这是一个将物种与生殖控制联系在一起的机构,改变了人们对动物的认识,改变了暴力本身的节奏和规模——使不可想象的事情成为可能。两股学术研究利用动物或物种来理解对人类差异的侵犯。第二波女权主义者经常在动物和女人之间进行类比比较,勾勒出把女人当作动物对待的性别歧视的轮廓。新兴的黑人动物研究领域将注意力集中在科学种族主义史上的种族作为物种的隐喻上。然而,很少有人关注工业化农业改变种族、物种和性别纠缠的物质途径。通过仔细阅读露丝·奥泽基的小说《我的肉年》(1998),我打开了隐喻比较下的材料联系,并通过全球流通网络追踪美国肉类的流通,这些流通网络产生并复制了我们对性别、种族、时间、物种、性和生殖的概念。
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引用次数: 0
Literary Cybernetics: The Point (of the Spear) 文学控制论:矛的尖
2区 文学 0 LITERATURE Pub Date : 2023-03-01 DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2023.a907175
N. Katherine Hayles
Literary Cybernetics:The Point (of the Spear) N. Katherine Hayles (bio) Cybernetics and literary studies are on a collision course that will transform what it means to read, to write, and to be human. The essays on "literary cybernetics" in this issue touch on many different ways in which this phrase can be interpreted, but for all their rich variety, they do not entirely capture either the urgency of our present situation or the inevitability of the coming transformations, even if we do not know and cannot reliably predict exactly what new forms will emerge, postcollision. At the pointy end of the spear driving into the heart of literary studies are the large language models (LLMs) created by rich tech companies and increasingly available to the general public such as OpenAI's GPT-3, -4, and ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer, versions -3 and -4), Google's LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), and Google's BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers). GPT-3, for example, was trained on forty-five terabytes of human-authored texts, mostly scraped from the web (a terabyte of data would fill about 570 million pages).1 Reading for GPT-4 is very different than for a human child learning to decode letters. Words are broken into tokens (generally word fragments of about four letters) and transformed into vectors processed through its ninety-six layers of neurons. This generates probability matrixes which are then processed further through a software function such as Softmax and output as words. The outputs are probabilistic projections of what the next word (or series of words) in a sequence would be.2 These models instantiate many of the cybernetic concepts discussed in this volume's essays, including the qualities emphasized in Paul Jaussen's "The Art of Distinction." They include recursivity (outputs are fed back into the model as inputs) and environment/system distinctions. Originally the training set of texts constitutes an LLM's environment, but as the model learns, assumptions in the data set are absorbed into the continuously adjusted weights of the different neuron layers; after training, the model's interactions with human interlocutors constitute another kind of environment/system distinction. So intricate are the model's instantiations of these and other [End Page 1289] cybernetic ideas that the models can legitimately be called the ultimate cybernetic machines. The textual outputs of GPT-4 are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those produced by chatbots such as Siri and earlier algorithmic text-programs. GPT-4's texts are not only syntactically correct and semantically coherent; they often also demonstrate dazzlingly complex turns of rhetoric and logic. Indeed, they are often so good that they cannot be reliably distinguished from human-authored texts. From the technical description above, it would be quite surprising to discover that GPT-4 can discern and reproduce literary styles as
N.凯瑟琳·海尔斯(生物)控制论和文学研究正处于碰撞的过程中,这将改变人们阅读、写作和做人的意义。本期关于“文学控制论”的文章触及了许多不同的方式来解释这个短语,但尽管它们种类繁多,它们并没有完全捕捉到我们当前形势的紧迫性,也没有完全捕捉到即将到来的变革的必然性,即使我们不知道也不能可靠地准确预测碰撞后会出现什么样的新形式。文学研究的核心是由富有的科技公司创建的大型语言模型(llm),这些模型越来越多地为公众所使用,比如OpenAI的GPT-3、-4和ChatGPT(生成预训练的变形金刚,版本-3和-4),谷歌的LaMDA(对话应用的语言模型)和谷歌的BERT(变形金刚的双向编码器表示)。例如,GPT-3是在45太字节的人类撰写的文本上进行训练的,这些文本大多是从网络上抓取的(1太字节的数据将填满大约5.7亿页)GPT-4的阅读与人类儿童学习解码字母的阅读非常不同。单词被分解成符号(通常是大约四个字母的单词片段),并通过它的96层神经元转换成向量。这将生成概率矩阵,然后通过软件功能(如Softmax)进一步处理并输出为单词。输出是序列中下一个单词(或一系列单词)的概率预测这些模型实例化了本卷文章中讨论的许多控制论概念,包括保罗·詹森(Paul Jaussen)的《区分的艺术》(the Art of Distinction)中强调的品质。它们包括递归性(输出作为输入反馈到模型中)和环境/系统差异。最初文本的训练集构成了LLM的环境,但随着模型的学习,数据集中的假设被吸收到不断调整的不同神经元层的权重中;经过训练后,模型与人类对话者的交互构成了另一种环境/系统区分。这些和其他控制论思想的模型实例是如此复杂,以至于这些模型可以被合理地称为终极控制论机器。GPT-4的文本输出比Siri等聊天机器人和早期的算法文本程序产生的文本要复杂好几个数量级。GPT-4的文本不仅句法正确,语义连贯;他们还经常展示出令人眼花缭乱的复杂修辞和逻辑转折。事实上,它们通常非常好,以至于无法可靠地将它们与人类撰写的文本区分开来。从上面的技术描述中,我们会很惊讶地发现GPT-4可以识别和复制像钦差版圣经和马克吐温这样多样化的文学风格,更令人惊讶的是它还可以识别和复制像流派这样的高级文学品质。2 . GPT-3的论文已经像本科生一样提交给大学教授进行评估,并获得了优异的成绩(A和A-),并得到了积极的评价正如Lea Pao在《控制论思维的方式》(Ways of Cybernetic Thinking)一书中所指出的那样,教育工作者立即想到的一个问题是,这将给人文学科课程带来混乱,在人文学科课程中,学生展示他们综合和解释所学知识的能力的典型方式是让他们就指定的主题写文章。尽管这种若隐若现的抄袭浪潮可能具有破坏性,但从哲学意义上讲,它是最不具变革性的影响。更根本的争论是,机器生成的文本可以有什么样的意义,实际上,如果它们可以说有任何意义,超出了人类读者投射到它们身上的意义。对于文学研究来说,人类认知和机器学习之间界限的模糊意味着,关于人类学习、使用和操纵符号抽象和语言的能力的独特性的假设立即被纳入了问题机器生成的文本在体育等公式化的文体中已经无处不在……
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引用次数: 0
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