{"title":"Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel ed. by Sina Farzin, Susan M. Gaines, and Roslynn D. Haynes (review)","authors":"J. Labinger","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0012","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"233 - 235"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49589608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ing of concepts like intelligence. In his study of computer game play, for instance, D. Fox Harrell found that choosing an “African-inspired” identity “automatically” generated a “less intelligent” avatar (p. 111). Hence, those who, in Benjamin’s words, “insist on digging deeper into the genome” for scientific solutions to individual difference or to social problems simply cannot avoid wading into a kind of techno-racialized eugenics (p. 117). The problem with the New Jim Code, as Benjamin observes, is that its many innovations fail to provide any alternatives to existing social pathologies. Instead, technofixes of all varieties turn out to be rooted in centuries-old racist and misogynistic patterns and norms. And yet, Benjamin’s book is not pessimistic. Rather, in her final chapters (4 and 5), the author turns to digital retooling efforts that are in fact abolitionist in orientation and that can help us reimagine justice. In so doing, she differentiates between the “technological benevolence” that reifies race and class divisions (the kind that absorbs most of her book) and pioneering applications such as Appolition. Founded by the Black trans tech developer Kortney Ziegler, Appolition allows users to contribute small amounts of change toward sizeable donations for bail relief. The crowdfunded venture has been so successful that Appolition was included in Fast Company’s list of the 10 most innovative companies in 2018. Benjamin contrasts Appolition, “a technology with an emancipatory ethos, a tool of solidarity that directs resources into getting people literally free,” with the growing, nefarious field of “techno-corrections,” with its apps like Promise that track individuals using GPS and that expand the scope and reach of carceral practice (p. 163). In the last pages of the book, Benjamin describes a host of largely grassroots applications, what she calls “abolitionist toolmaking,” that empower marginalized and vulnerable people by demystifying technology and mobilizing collective action and reforms. In Race After Technology, Benjamin warns readers of the totalizing influence of big tech: “We are talking about a redefinition of human identity, autonomy, core constitutional rights, and democratic principles more broadly” (p. 31). To the extent that this sweeping statement may be true, the book would, to my mind, have benefitted from a more sustained critique of the avowedly humanitarian goals driving technological design, as well as a more robust analysis of the ways recent innovations complicate (as opposed to simply reproduce) human categories that have never fully been agreed upon. Nonetheless, Race After Technology is a thoughtful, engaging examination of the digital landscape, useful to scholars and accessible to a general audience.
智力之类的概念。例如，D.Fox Harrell在对电脑游戏的研究中发现，选择一个“受非洲启发”的身份会“自动”生成一个“不那么聪明”的化身（第111页）。因此，用本杰明的话来说，那些“坚持深入研究基因组”以科学解决个体差异或社会问题的人，根本无法避免陷入一种技术种族化的优生学（第117页）。正如本杰明所观察到的，《新吉姆法典》的问题在于，它的许多创新未能为现有的社会病态提供任何替代方案。相反，各种各样的技术修复都植根于数百年前的种族主义和厌女主义模式和规范。然而，本雅明的书并不悲观。相反，在她的最后几章（4和5）中，作者转向了数字重组工作，这些工作实际上是废奴主义的，可以帮助我们重新想象正义。在这样做的过程中，她区分了具体化种族和阶级划分的“技术仁慈”（这种仁慈吸收了她书中的大部分内容）和Appolition等开创性应用。Appolition由黑人跨性别技术开发商Kortney Ziegler创立，允许用户为保释救济的大额捐款贡献少量零钱。这家众筹企业非常成功，以至于Appolition被列入了Fast Company 2018年最具创新性的10家公司名单。Benjamin将“一种具有解放精神的技术，一种将资源引导到让人们真正自由的团结工具”与“技术矫正”这一日益增长的邪恶领域进行了对比，并将其应用程序与Promise等使用GPS追踪个人并扩大尸体实践范围和范围的应用程序进行了对比（第163页）。在本书的最后几页，本杰明描述了一系列基本上是草根阶层的应用程序，她称之为“废奴主义工具制造”，通过揭开技术的神秘面纱，动员集体行动和改革，赋予边缘化和弱势群体权力。在《科技之后的种族》一书中，本杰明警告读者大型科技的总体影响力：“我们正在谈论对人类身份、自主性、核心宪法权利和更广泛的民主原则的重新定义”（第31页）。在某种程度上，这一全面的说法可能是正确的，在我看来，这本书将受益于对推动技术设计的公开人道主义目标的更持久的批评，以及对最近的创新使从未完全达成一致的人类类别复杂化（而不是简单地复制）的方式的更有力的分析。尽管如此，《科技竞赛》是一部对数字景观的深思熟虑、引人入胜的研究，对学者有用，对普通观众也很容易理解。
{"title":"A Bestiary of the Anthropocene: Hybrid Plants, Animals, Minerals, Fungi, and Other Specimens ed. by Nicolas Nova (review)","authors":"H. Rogers, Hiram Harmon Rogers","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0014","url":null,"abstract":"ing of concepts like intelligence. In his study of computer game play, for instance, D. Fox Harrell found that choosing an “African-inspired” identity “automatically” generated a “less intelligent” avatar (p. 111). Hence, those who, in Benjamin’s words, “insist on digging deeper into the genome” for scientific solutions to individual difference or to social problems simply cannot avoid wading into a kind of techno-racialized eugenics (p. 117). The problem with the New Jim Code, as Benjamin observes, is that its many innovations fail to provide any alternatives to existing social pathologies. Instead, technofixes of all varieties turn out to be rooted in centuries-old racist and misogynistic patterns and norms. And yet, Benjamin’s book is not pessimistic. Rather, in her final chapters (4 and 5), the author turns to digital retooling efforts that are in fact abolitionist in orientation and that can help us reimagine justice. In so doing, she differentiates between the “technological benevolence” that reifies race and class divisions (the kind that absorbs most of her book) and pioneering applications such as Appolition. Founded by the Black trans tech developer Kortney Ziegler, Appolition allows users to contribute small amounts of change toward sizeable donations for bail relief. The crowdfunded venture has been so successful that Appolition was included in Fast Company’s list of the 10 most innovative companies in 2018. Benjamin contrasts Appolition, “a technology with an emancipatory ethos, a tool of solidarity that directs resources into getting people literally free,” with the growing, nefarious field of “techno-corrections,” with its apps like Promise that track individuals using GPS and that expand the scope and reach of carceral practice (p. 163). In the last pages of the book, Benjamin describes a host of largely grassroots applications, what she calls “abolitionist toolmaking,” that empower marginalized and vulnerable people by demystifying technology and mobilizing collective action and reforms. In Race After Technology, Benjamin warns readers of the totalizing influence of big tech: “We are talking about a redefinition of human identity, autonomy, core constitutional rights, and democratic principles more broadly” (p. 31). To the extent that this sweeping statement may be true, the book would, to my mind, have benefitted from a more sustained critique of the avowedly humanitarian goals driving technological design, as well as a more robust analysis of the ways recent innovations complicate (as opposed to simply reproduce) human categories that have never fully been agreed upon. Nonetheless, Race After Technology is a thoughtful, engaging examination of the digital landscape, useful to scholars and accessible to a general audience.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"238 - 241"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45924172","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves explores the intimate violence of Cold War-era state-supported research on chimpanzees and its connection to contemporary corporate and globalized research and consumption practices that make animals killable. It does so through the story arc of a woman named Rosemary and a chimpanzee named Fern who were raised together as part of a science experiment in the 1950s. Yet the central character of the story is plural: Rosemary/Fern and Fern/Rosemary. By depicting an interspecies subjectivity that reconfigures the terms of the experimental apparatus that produced them, the novel imagines the possibilities and limits of becoming-with, drawing attention to the multivocal and embodied traces of this becoming, the distributed agency of multispecies knowledge production, and the limits of speaking for the nonhuman animal.
摘要：凯伦·乔伊·福勒（Karen Joy Fowler）2013年的小说《我们都完全在自己身边》（We Are All Completely Beyond Ourselves）探讨了冷战时期国家支持的黑猩猩研究中的亲密暴力，以及它与当代企业和全球化的研究和消费实践之间的联系，这些研究和消费行为使动物变得致命。它是通过一个名叫罗斯玛丽的女人和一只名叫弗恩的黑猩猩的故事情节来实现的，他们在20世纪50年代的一次科学实验中一起长大。然而，故事的中心人物是复数：罗斯玛丽/弗恩和弗恩/罗斯玛丽。通过描绘一种种种间主体性，这种主体性重新构成了产生它们的实验装置的术语，小说想象了与之相处的可能性和局限性，并引起了人们对这种相处的多声音和具体痕迹的关注，多物种知识生产的分布式机构，以及为非人类动物说话的局限性。
{"title":"Interspecies Ethics and the Limits of Epistemic Authority in Karen Joy Fowler's We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves","authors":"Emily York","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0003","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Karen Joy Fowler's 2013 novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves explores the intimate violence of Cold War-era state-supported research on chimpanzees and its connection to contemporary corporate and globalized research and consumption practices that make animals killable. It does so through the story arc of a woman named Rosemary and a chimpanzee named Fern who were raised together as part of a science experiment in the 1950s. Yet the central character of the story is plural: Rosemary/Fern and Fern/Rosemary. By depicting an interspecies subjectivity that reconfigures the terms of the experimental apparatus that produced them, the novel imagines the possibilities and limits of becoming-with, drawing attention to the multivocal and embodied traces of this becoming, the distributed agency of multispecies knowledge production, and the limits of speaking for the nonhuman animal.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"104 - 77"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49590446","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite decades of labor in the environmental humanities and adjacent fields, scholaractivists working among the convergences of human groups and other species continue to find themselves explaining why the pursuit of social justice and animal wellbeing are united in common cause. Offering one of the most compelling recent analyses that demonstrates why equity for marginalized people and animals must be pursued together, Harlan Weaver’s Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice joins a growing collection of monographs that attend to the necessary and urgent interdisciplinary work of multispecies justice. Embracing the anti-normative and disruptive politics of queer theory to critique the normativities produced through the so-called “pit bull” breed, dog rescues, and canine cultures of the United States, Weaver challenges what he calls the “episteme of rational man,” “like race” logics that compare animal abuse to human suffering in ways that erase or minimize human mistreatment, and “zero sum” logics that erase species harm by prioritizing human suffering over the hardships faced by other species. Instead, Weaver proposes modes of getting along together premised on embodiment, affect, and intimacy that he names “queer affiliations,” an alternative to the “innately hopeful or promising” (p. 130), and often hetero and homonormative, constructions of “family” and “kinship.” Published in the University of Washington Press’s feminist technoscience series, Bad Dog will interest feminist science studies scholars, queer and trans* theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, along with academics who practice within and adjacent to fields such as women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, American studies, multispecies studies, animal studies, disability studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies. Drawing upon intersectional thought established by women of color feminisms and the boundary-disrupting work of feminist and queer theory, the monograph brings together ethnography, autoethnography, and discourse analysis to tell more equitable stories from the multispecies contact zones where people and dogs meet. Bad Dog is “a book with legs,” to borrow Eileen Myles’s memorable phrase.1 An impressive array of original concepts and terms animates the monograph’s four chapters, providing scholars with new lenses to examine multispecies worlds. Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Weaver’s book is “interspecies intersectionality,” a powerful analytic for studying “the confluence of race, gender, sexuality, and species” (p. 15). Beginning from the observation that “relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but in fact actively shape experiences of race, gender, species, breed, sexuality, and nation” (pp. 7–8), interspecies intersectionality
尽管在环境人文和邻近领域工作了几十年，但在人类群体和其他物种的融合中工作的学者们仍然发现自己在解释为什么追求社会正义和动物福祉是团结在一起的。哈兰·韦弗（Harlan Weaver）的《坏狗：比特牛政治与多物种正义》（Bad Dog:Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice。韦弗接受了酷儿理论的反规范和破坏性政治，以批判美国所谓的“比特牛”品种、狗救援和犬类文化所产生的规范性，他挑战了他所说的“理性人的认识论”，即“像种族一样”的逻辑，这些逻辑将虐待动物与人类痛苦进行比较，以消除或最小化人类虐待，以及“零和”逻辑，通过将人类的苦难置于其他物种所面临的苦难之上来消除物种的伤害。相反，韦弗提出了以体现、情感和亲密为前提的相处模式，他将其命名为“酷儿从属关系”，这是“天生有希望或有前途”（第130页）的一种替代，通常是异源和同源的“家庭”和“亲属关系”结构，Bad Dog将引起女权主义科学研究学者、酷儿和跨性别理论家、人类学家、社会学家和文学评论家的兴趣，以及在妇女和性别研究、批判性种族研究、美国研究、多物种研究、动物研究、残疾研究、文化研究和环境研究等领域内和邻近领域执业的学者的兴趣。该专著借鉴了有色人种女性主义建立的交叉思想以及女权主义和酷儿理论的边界颠覆工作，将民族志、自民族志和话语分析结合在一起，讲述了人与狗相遇的多种族接触区中更公平的故事。借用Eileen Myles令人难忘的一句话，《坏狗》是“一本有腿的书”。1一系列令人印象深刻的原创概念和术语为专著的四章增添了活力，为学者们研究多物种世界提供了新的视角。也许韦弗的书中出现的最重要的想法是“种间交叉性”，这是一种研究“种族、性别、性和物种的融合”的有力分析方法（第15页）。从“人类和非人类动物之间的关系不仅反映而且实际上积极塑造了种族、性别、物种、品种、性和国家的经历”（第7-8页）的观察开始，种间的交叉性
{"title":"Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice by Harlan Weaver (review)","authors":"Nathaniel Otjen","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Despite decades of labor in the environmental humanities and adjacent fields, scholaractivists working among the convergences of human groups and other species continue to find themselves explaining why the pursuit of social justice and animal wellbeing are united in common cause. Offering one of the most compelling recent analyses that demonstrates why equity for marginalized people and animals must be pursued together, Harlan Weaver’s Bad Dog: Pit Bull Politics and Multispecies Justice joins a growing collection of monographs that attend to the necessary and urgent interdisciplinary work of multispecies justice. Embracing the anti-normative and disruptive politics of queer theory to critique the normativities produced through the so-called “pit bull” breed, dog rescues, and canine cultures of the United States, Weaver challenges what he calls the “episteme of rational man,” “like race” logics that compare animal abuse to human suffering in ways that erase or minimize human mistreatment, and “zero sum” logics that erase species harm by prioritizing human suffering over the hardships faced by other species. Instead, Weaver proposes modes of getting along together premised on embodiment, affect, and intimacy that he names “queer affiliations,” an alternative to the “innately hopeful or promising” (p. 130), and often hetero and homonormative, constructions of “family” and “kinship.” Published in the University of Washington Press’s feminist technoscience series, Bad Dog will interest feminist science studies scholars, queer and trans* theorists, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics, along with academics who practice within and adjacent to fields such as women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, American studies, multispecies studies, animal studies, disability studies, cultural studies, and environmental studies. Drawing upon intersectional thought established by women of color feminisms and the boundary-disrupting work of feminist and queer theory, the monograph brings together ethnography, autoethnography, and discourse analysis to tell more equitable stories from the multispecies contact zones where people and dogs meet. Bad Dog is “a book with legs,” to borrow Eileen Myles’s memorable phrase.1 An impressive array of original concepts and terms animates the monograph’s four chapters, providing scholars with new lenses to examine multispecies worlds. Perhaps the most important idea to emerge from Weaver’s book is “interspecies intersectionality,” a powerful analytic for studying “the confluence of race, gender, sexuality, and species” (p. 15). Beginning from the observation that “relationships between humans and nonhuman animals not only reflect but in fact actively shape experiences of race, gender, species, breed, sexuality, and nation” (pp. 7–8), interspecies intersectionality","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"105 - 107"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43429293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay argues that the deep, almost rapturous piousness that the physician William Harvey and the poet Richard Blackmore exhibit in their works is built upon their conviction that the fluids that spurt from bodies in pain do so in accordance with nature's orderly rhythms. The wonder that Harvey and Blackmore feel at the beauty of a divinely ordered world, that is, cannot exist without their adoption of an indifferent attitude towards injury and death. By attending to the emotions that indifference enables or magnifies, I interpret indifference as an affective stance that prepares one to experience other forms of feeling instead of a standalone and all-encompassing state of being.
{"title":"Dispassionate Dissections and Their Emotional Rewards: Reading William Harvey and Richard Blackmore","authors":"L. Peh","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0001","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay argues that the deep, almost rapturous piousness that the physician William Harvey and the poet Richard Blackmore exhibit in their works is built upon their conviction that the fluids that spurt from bodies in pain do so in accordance with nature's orderly rhythms. The wonder that Harvey and Blackmore feel at the beauty of a divinely ordered world, that is, cannot exist without their adoption of an indifferent attitude towards injury and death. By attending to the emotions that indifference enables or magnifies, I interpret indifference as an affective stance that prepares one to experience other forms of feeling instead of a standalone and all-encompassing state of being.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"25 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42374318","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:Originating in the works of early twentieth-century authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, weird fiction is experiencing a renaissance in contemporary literature. Several scholars have presented this literary mode as uniquely suited to speak to the anxieties generated by the current ecological crisis. In this essay, we examine Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (2019) as part of a wave of recent works that mark a sharp departure from the immersive strategies with which weird fiction is typically associated. We argue that this encounter between the weird and the "meta" is particularly effective in bringing out the strange entanglement of human societies and the nonhuman world in times of climate crisis, serving as a powerful model for future iterations of the weird.
{"title":"The Weird and the Meta in Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts","authors":"Marco Malvezzi Caracciolo, G. Ulstein","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0000","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:Originating in the works of early twentieth-century authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, weird fiction is experiencing a renaissance in contemporary literature. Several scholars have presented this literary mode as uniquely suited to speak to the anxieties generated by the current ecological crisis. In this essay, we examine Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts (2019) as part of a wave of recent works that mark a sharp departure from the immersive strategies with which weird fiction is typically associated. We argue that this encounter between the weird and the \"meta\" is particularly effective in bringing out the strange entanglement of human societies and the nonhuman world in times of climate crisis, serving as a powerful model for future iterations of the weird.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"1 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44309415","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay traces an imaginative history of protoplasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a material that still exists today, though, with the advent of DNA and cellular biology, in a somewhat different form. For the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and the short story writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), protoplasm was the key to the specific nature of evolved life. Not only was it the material that, in the living organism, was given shape, but it was also the place where the hereditary information of what shape to give was passed on from one generation to the next, making evolution possible in the first place. For Haeckel, it was the missing piece in the puzzle that Darwin had almost completed, and with it the whole mystery and wonder of life was within explanatory reach. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, it was the very essence of the shapeless, primitive, and fundamentally menacing quality of life that civilization had to keep at bay. Though protoplasm plays a very different role in modern science than it did then, its imaginative legacy lives on in a whole range of fiction genres nowadays, and Haeckel's and Lovecraft's both very different and very similar conceptions provide a starting point for exploring a conception of biological life that is far from dead.
{"title":"The Protoplasmic Imagination: Ernst Haeckel and H. P. Lovecraft","authors":"Ulf Houe","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0002","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay traces an imaginative history of protoplasm in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a material that still exists today, though, with the advent of DNA and cellular biology, in a somewhat different form. For the biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and the short story writer H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), protoplasm was the key to the specific nature of evolved life. Not only was it the material that, in the living organism, was given shape, but it was also the place where the hereditary information of what shape to give was passed on from one generation to the next, making evolution possible in the first place. For Haeckel, it was the missing piece in the puzzle that Darwin had almost completed, and with it the whole mystery and wonder of life was within explanatory reach. For Lovecraft, on the other hand, it was the very essence of the shapeless, primitive, and fundamentally menacing quality of life that civilization had to keep at bay. Though protoplasm plays a very different role in modern science than it did then, its imaginative legacy lives on in a whole range of fiction genres nowadays, and Haeckel's and Lovecraft's both very different and very similar conceptions provide a starting point for exploring a conception of biological life that is far from dead.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"47 - 76"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46954004","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
in her sixties” (p. 43) or “cow-colored pit bull-type dog we [rescue staff and volunteers] guesstimated to be about three years old” (p. 128). While the move to describe people and dogs in a similar fashion underscores the need for equitable relations and should be applauded, such descriptions, when used repeatedly, tend to flatten the complexity, messiness, and mutability of identity, and run against the very arguments of the book. A better approach could involve taking more space to tell the stories of individuals through their own words, or, in the case of canine informants, to describe their lives using the best information available and in ways that center their perspectives. The monograph could have also situated multispecies justice within the existing body of research constituting this field and elaborated on such work within the contexts of dog rescues and cultures. Weaver correctly attributes the concept to Haraway, his graduate mentor, in a footnote buried within the introduction and then briefly revisits the term in the final pages of the book where he invents the phrase “multispecies transformative justice” (p. 184). At no point, however, is the larger body of work associated with multispecies justice—or with multispecies studies and multispecies ethnography, for that matter—mentioned or engaged, even though Bad Dog participates in these areas of thought. Despite constituting part of the title, the field of multispecies justice is conspicuously absent from the rest of the book. Engaging the work of David Naguib Pellow, David Schlosberg, Kyle Whyte, Ursula Heise, Sunaura Taylor, Thom van Dooren, and Danielle Celermajer —to name a few—would have not only placed Bad Dog in conversation with the growing field, but also explicitly placed multispecies research that remains hesitant to focus on race, sexuality, ability, class, and gender in conversation with feminist and queer theory that continues to overlook the roles of other species. Indeed, the absence of multispecies literature points to an institutional gulf separating multispecies research from the social justice–oriented scholarship that guides the book. Bad Dog insists that the pursuit of equitable, multispecies worlds requires departing from the confines of disciplinarity to instead coinhabit the mutual, multi-sited, multispecies spaces that dogs and people make together every single day. In doing so, Weaver’s book exemplifies the participatory, public-facing scholarship needed to assemble more accountable modes of thinking and relating.
{"title":"Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition by Antoine Traisnel (review)","authors":"Kara M. Mitchell","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0005","url":null,"abstract":"in her sixties” (p. 43) or “cow-colored pit bull-type dog we [rescue staff and volunteers] guesstimated to be about three years old” (p. 128). While the move to describe people and dogs in a similar fashion underscores the need for equitable relations and should be applauded, such descriptions, when used repeatedly, tend to flatten the complexity, messiness, and mutability of identity, and run against the very arguments of the book. A better approach could involve taking more space to tell the stories of individuals through their own words, or, in the case of canine informants, to describe their lives using the best information available and in ways that center their perspectives. The monograph could have also situated multispecies justice within the existing body of research constituting this field and elaborated on such work within the contexts of dog rescues and cultures. Weaver correctly attributes the concept to Haraway, his graduate mentor, in a footnote buried within the introduction and then briefly revisits the term in the final pages of the book where he invents the phrase “multispecies transformative justice” (p. 184). At no point, however, is the larger body of work associated with multispecies justice—or with multispecies studies and multispecies ethnography, for that matter—mentioned or engaged, even though Bad Dog participates in these areas of thought. Despite constituting part of the title, the field of multispecies justice is conspicuously absent from the rest of the book. Engaging the work of David Naguib Pellow, David Schlosberg, Kyle Whyte, Ursula Heise, Sunaura Taylor, Thom van Dooren, and Danielle Celermajer —to name a few—would have not only placed Bad Dog in conversation with the growing field, but also explicitly placed multispecies research that remains hesitant to focus on race, sexuality, ability, class, and gender in conversation with feminist and queer theory that continues to overlook the roles of other species. Indeed, the absence of multispecies literature points to an institutional gulf separating multispecies research from the social justice–oriented scholarship that guides the book. Bad Dog insists that the pursuit of equitable, multispecies worlds requires departing from the confines of disciplinarity to instead coinhabit the mutual, multi-sited, multispecies spaces that dogs and people make together every single day. In doing so, Weaver’s book exemplifies the participatory, public-facing scholarship needed to assemble more accountable modes of thinking and relating.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"107 - 110"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45900636","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
(p. 193). Such an ethics remains rooted in a respect for the “unbridgeable distance between living beings” (p. 195), one that we can see, Traisnel insightfully notes, in the ethology of Uexküll. Traisnel’s theory of capture and his interest in genre provoke two important questions that future work must consider. While Traisnel tracks the afterlives of capture in the present-day factory farming industry, one wonders about how this theory of capture might apply to the proliferation of pets at the turn of the century (many of whom were and are literally “captive,” as it were, in houses); at the end of the nineteenth century, the pet industry began to burgeon into existence and thereby dramatically reconfigured human relationships with animals. How, then, does capture—“from capere, meaning to seize with one’s hands,” as Traisnel reminds us (p. 18)—apply to these domesticated creatures raised by hand, as it were? Traisnel’s book also provokes questions about the genre of poetry, most especially when one arrives at the conclusion and reads the haunting epigraph from Dickinson: “I held it so tight that I lost it / Said the Child of the Butterfly / Of Many a vaster Capture / That is the Elegy —.” If Hawthorne’s “poetic” speculations resist a paradigm of capture, then how did poems in the nineteenth century resist and perhaps participate in this same paradigm? Future answers to these questions must rely on the help of Traisnel’s remarkable new book.
{"title":"Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now by Vincent Ialenti (review)","authors":"Eileen A O'Shaughnessy","doi":"10.1353/con.2022.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2022.0006","url":null,"abstract":"(p. 193). Such an ethics remains rooted in a respect for the “unbridgeable distance between living beings” (p. 195), one that we can see, Traisnel insightfully notes, in the ethology of Uexküll. Traisnel’s theory of capture and his interest in genre provoke two important questions that future work must consider. While Traisnel tracks the afterlives of capture in the present-day factory farming industry, one wonders about how this theory of capture might apply to the proliferation of pets at the turn of the century (many of whom were and are literally “captive,” as it were, in houses); at the end of the nineteenth century, the pet industry began to burgeon into existence and thereby dramatically reconfigured human relationships with animals. How, then, does capture—“from capere, meaning to seize with one’s hands,” as Traisnel reminds us (p. 18)—apply to these domesticated creatures raised by hand, as it were? Traisnel’s book also provokes questions about the genre of poetry, most especially when one arrives at the conclusion and reads the haunting epigraph from Dickinson: “I held it so tight that I lost it / Said the Child of the Butterfly / Of Many a vaster Capture / That is the Elegy —.” If Hawthorne’s “poetic” speculations resist a paradigm of capture, then how did poems in the nineteenth century resist and perhaps participate in this same paradigm? Future answers to these questions must rely on the help of Traisnel’s remarkable new book.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"30 1","pages":"110 - 112"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43311018","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
ABSTRACT:This essay focuses on the “epidemic notes” of frontline healthcare workers as a form of qualitative observation that can potentiate public intelligence about emerging infectious disease crises. As one coterie of healthcare workers, registered nurses who write about frontline experiences can immerse nonexperts in an epidemic sensorium, and productively involve them in evolving medical advisories and health policies. I draw on print and oral history archives of registered nurses at the frontlines of the typhoid and yellow fever (1898–1901), influenza (1918–1919), and HIV/AIDS (1981–present) pandemics to analyze epidemic notes as an incremental, situated, and provisional knowledge-making in the face of radical uncertainty.
{"title":"Epidemic Frontlines: The Slow Science of Observation","authors":"B. Ghosh","doi":"10.1353/con.2021.0028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2021.0028","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT:This essay focuses on the “epidemic notes” of frontline healthcare workers as a form of qualitative observation that can potentiate public intelligence about emerging infectious disease crises. As one coterie of healthcare workers, registered nurses who write about frontline experiences can immerse nonexperts in an epidemic sensorium, and productively involve them in evolving medical advisories and health policies. I draw on print and oral history archives of registered nurses at the frontlines of the typhoid and yellow fever (1898–1901), influenza (1918–1919), and HIV/AIDS (1981–present) pandemics to analyze epidemic notes as an incremental, situated, and provisional knowledge-making in the face of radical uncertainty.","PeriodicalId":55630,"journal":{"name":"Configurations","volume":"29 1","pages":"389 - 403"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49613454","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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