Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216546
L. Possati
Abstract This paper concerns the role of the unconscious in technology. The central thesis is that there exists an experience of non-acceptance and failed incorporation of technology, which (a) does not depend on the technical engineering dimension of the artifact but (b) instead concerns the relationship between the human unconscious and the artifact. This thesis is supported and developed through the analysis of a case study – that is, the creation and development of the first version of Google Glass. The failure of the first version of Google Glass is explained in terms of the non-acceptance of this technology. This paper presents an analysis of users’ experiences and comments as a basis for interpreting the relationship between the unconscious and technology. Their non-acceptance of this technology is explained and further clarified from a postphenomenological point of view, utilizing the concept of “technological uncanny.” The analysis suggests that antimediation can be understood as a form of noise. In fact, as non-acceptance, antimediation directly concerns the relationship between contingency and control.
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216558
Yuk Hui
Abstract In this article I attempt to sketch out what we might call an axiology of contingency, namely the study of the value of contingency. The triadic structure of the article follows the paraphrased epigraph from the Gospel of St John, where the word “word” is replaced with “contingency.” Although I play on the words of John in a Hegelian spirit, what is outlined here is an – admittedly brief – attempt to understand contingency as Begriff.
在本文中,我试图勾勒出我们可以称之为偶然性价值论,即对偶然性价值的研究。这篇文章的三元结构遵循了《圣约翰福音》(Gospel of St John)的改写铭文,其中“词”(word)被“偶然性”(contingency)取代。尽管我以黑格尔的精神玩弄约翰的话,但这里概述的是——诚然是简短的——试图理解贝格里夫式的偶然性。
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216537
Cecile Malaspina
outside his window, Schopenhauer famously lamented, would lacerate his brain and quash every thought in its infancy. In “The Concept of Noise,” which we are happy to be able to republish here, Steven Sands and John Ratey can be credited with first spelling out the cognitive dimension of the predicament that Schopenhauer so lamented, offering the following definition of the “mental state of noise”: “By ‘noise,’ we mean an internally experienced state of crowding and confusion created by a variety of stimuli, the quantity, intensity and unpredictability of which make it difficult for individuals so afflicted to tolerate and organize their experience” (Sands and Ratey 290). However, noise, in this enlarged and cybernetically inflected sense, now alludes to a relation between contingency and control, which includes but is no longer limited to the experience of unwanted sound. In the past few decades this novel, cybernetic conception of noise has become synonymous with the complexity of our world and its global digitised information networks. As the economist Fischer Black put it so adroitly in his seminal paper from 1986, simply entitled “Noise”:
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Pub Date : 2023-05-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2216550
J. Augustus Bacigalupi
Abstract This paper explores how adaptive creativity is continuously generated and sustained in living systems. The philosophical frame and motivations for this investigation will be introduced by juxtaposing an actual creative process with current cybernetic efforts to automate creativity. Past and present process philosophers that have critiqued the implicit commitments of these contemporary techniques will set the stage for further investigations. The litmus test of progress in this investigation will be measured against the extension of two concepts: virtuality, as introduced by Gilbert Simondon (On the Mode of the Existence of Technical Objects), and relevant noise, as introduced by Bacigalupi (“Semiogenesis: A Dynamic System Approach to Agency and Structure”). To refine the concepts of virtuality and relevant noise for our purposes, a rigorous theoretical model will be proposed whose intent is to explain veritable unbounded creativity. This model will then serve as a heuristic lens to explore additional extant models, such as the Kuramoto model (Strogatz), that are used to explain empirical observations of adaptive and creative behaviors in a diversity of biological phenomena. Based on these models of biological creativity and the critique of the contemporary cybernetic project, this paper will conclude by outlining the ethical implications of our culture’s current commitments to a cybernetic world view and how we might evolve beyond it.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192066
T. Correia
Abstract Clarice Lispector’s texts are a peculiar combination of socio-political analysis and cosmological excess. Commentators on her works have explored either of these two dimensions but have not yet brought them into a singular dialogue. I argue that Lispector insists upon an ethical responsibility in her refusal to disregard the microcosm of a “marginal” life even within a cosmos of her own creation. For this reason, her critique is inextricable from these excesses. The displacement of narrative authority in a method of literary production that refuses conquest opens upon an underlying, and not yet “pre-coded,” primordial cosmology characterized by night, incompleteness, and (sensory) impression, rather than self-assertive knowledge. I focus on The Hour of the Star and The Besieged City, two works that illustrate this dynamic, to capture how the interstices of social marginalization is the site from which a cosmo-political vision takes shape. Lispector’s works do not promote supra-territorial community over a privileged nationalist singularity, but rather the vertiginous excess of open possibility.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192073
J. Nancy, Fernanda Negrete
Abstract This text gives an account of the experience of reading Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva in the form of a brief dialogue with the text. It foregrounds the writing voice’s address of a second person and the attention this address brings to the acts of writing and reading that hold the two pronouns in relation, producing at once an infinite and nonexistent distance from being to being. The dialogue observes Lispector’s insistent return to the formulation “atrás do pensamento,” which has been translated into English as “beyond thought” and can also be translated as “behind-thought” or as the background of thought, in a more spatial sense. Nancy reads the translation into French, where this spatial nuance is preserved, in consultation with Lusophone interlocutors about the specificities of the Portuguese original. The dialogue interrogates the link across this dimension, the recurrence of the pronoun it in the original Portuguese version of Água Viva, and the acts of writing and reading a text that brings awareness to a living, pulsing, ongoing, and escaping instant beyond meaning that is nonetheless the cause of the address in the first place. The dialogue follows the thread of this movement as it slips out behind thought, where Água Viva meets other books attuned to the instant and in which the dialogue’s “I” feels their vitalizing effects.
摘要本文以与文本的简短对话的形式,讲述了阅读Clarice Lispector的《Água Viva》的经历。它预示着书写声音对第二人称的称呼,以及这个称呼给书写和阅读行为带来的关注,这两个代词保持着联系,同时产生了从存在到存在的无限而不存在的距离。对话观察到利斯佩克特坚持回归“atrás do pensamento”的提法,该提法已被翻译成英语“超越思想”,也可以被翻译成“思想背后”或更具空间意义的思想背景。Nancy在与葡语对话者就葡萄牙语原作的特殊性进行协商后,将译文翻译成法语,在法语中保留了这种空间上的细微差别。对话询问了这一维度上的联系,代词it在葡萄牙语原版《Água Viva》中的重复,以及书写和阅读文本的行为,这些行为让人意识到一种超越意义的鲜活、脉动、持续和逃避的瞬间,而这正是演讲的最初原因。对话遵循了这一运动的主线,因为它滑出了思想的后面,在那里,Água Viva遇到了其他适应当下的书籍,在对话中,“我”感受到了它们的生命力。
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192057
M. Schuback
Abstract This article presents Clarice Lispector’s view on writing, showing that for her literature is the writing of the act of writing itself. In question is the writing of the act while acting, the is-being of existence. In this sense, Lispector described her writing as the writing of a screaming object, as abstract writing, almost a painting. Following some central passages of different works, the article is an attempt to seize the main traits of what could be called the gerundive act of literature of Clarice Lispector.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192060
Daae Jung, João Paulo Guimarães
Abstract In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector’s view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben’s conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben’s notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one’s living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector’s heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192070
Colby Dickinson
Abstract For Clarice Lispector, language is a sacrament on dazzling display in her work, where the celebration of writing and the emergence of a creative consciousness through the act of writing about writing access an immanent experience of grace beyond any historical religious sensibility. In this, she simultaneously accesses the “great potency of potentiality” that is an experience of freedom undoing anything bound up by language. She embraces the failure of language as the “glory of falling,” the useless experience of grace, and of experiencing the gift of having a body beyond whatever words we can place upon it. In the struggle to behold the “it” underneath language, she strives for an impersonal love – a joy – that respects the inviolability of nature, the “Force of what Exists and that is sometimes called God.” If “the absence of the God is an act of religion,” as she claims, the inviolability of nature is that which preserves an experience of immanent grace in our world. Rather than describe the limitless potential of the self, one’s immersion in the joyful failure of language points toward the self in unique and profound ways without offering definitions, instead allowing internal contradictions to condition one’s selfhood. In Lispector’s fiction we thus confront the pure paradox of the self: an internal, singular individual who yet maintains within themselves (hence, its immanence) a plurivocal affirmation of existence itself and a redefining of God.
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Pub Date : 2023-03-04DOI: 10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192071
Krzysztof Ziarek
Abstract The essay develops a parallax between Lispector and Heidegger with regard to the question of being: being not as an idea or a concept, or as anything substantive, but being in the spatio-temporal sense of being in being, of the event which lets each instant of “in being” take place. Instantiating this proximity, the essay focuses on dis-humanization and the role that openness to nothingness plays in this context. Lispector’s writings, especially Passion, illustrate how what hinders the true humanity of human beings is not barbarity or animality but what she calls “false humanization,” which sets humans apart from all other beings as if separate from life and nature. Heidegger’s critique of humanisms and their machinational approach to things and the world opens a similar perspective on being. Although presented in markedly different tonalities of writing, Lispector’s and Heidegger’s texts concern the “same” of the passion/pathos of being.
{"title":"All of Nothing","authors":"Krzysztof Ziarek","doi":"10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192071","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2023.2192071","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The essay develops a parallax between Lispector and Heidegger with regard to the question of being: being not as an idea or a concept, or as anything substantive, but being in the spatio-temporal sense of being in being, of the event which lets each instant of “in being” take place. Instantiating this proximity, the essay focuses on dis-humanization and the role that openness to nothingness plays in this context. Lispector’s writings, especially Passion, illustrate how what hinders the true humanity of human beings is not barbarity or animality but what she calls “false humanization,” which sets humans apart from all other beings as if separate from life and nature. Heidegger’s critique of humanisms and their machinational approach to things and the world opens a similar perspective on being. Although presented in markedly different tonalities of writing, Lispector’s and Heidegger’s texts concern the “same” of the passion/pathos of being.","PeriodicalId":45929,"journal":{"name":"ANGELAKI-JOURNAL OF THE THEORETICAL HUMANITIES","volume":"28 1","pages":"113 - 124"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42456852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}