Abstracts, PMC 13.2

Abstracts

Volume 13, Number 2
April, 2003

Zafer Aracagök, Whatever Image

Abstract: This essay can be seen as an attempt to foreground a new approach to representation with an outcome of a new concept, "whatever image." This is undertaken by going through Benjamin's handling of image via Leibniz in the prologoue of "German Tragic Drama" where he problematizes epistomolgy's claim to truth by introducing his idea of constellations and thus opens up the question of a rigid, bounded image of the world to an immanence; Adorno's theories in "Negative Dialectics", concerning the image as the third term, as a screen, between subject and object, by way of which he introduces the question of "the resurrection of flesh" as far as the perception of the world in the form of images is concerned; and Giorgio Agamben's concept of "whatever" in "The Coming Community" by means of which I attempt to introduce a "whateverness" to the concept of image which aims to open the question of image to "experience through flesh."--za

Saul Newman, Stirner and Foucault: Towards a Post-Kantian Freedom

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to explore and to develop a post-Kantian concept of freedom--that is, a notion of freedom that is not circumscribed by the categorical imperative or determined by pre-ordained rational and moral coordinates. The paper attempts this through an exploration of Max Stirner's and Michel Foucault's reflections on freedom. Both thinkers, while not usually discussed together, share a similar critique of essentialist identities and universal rational and moral structures, and the relations of domination and exclusion that flow from them. Broadly speaking, both thinkers see the classical Kantian idea of freedom as redundant, as it is dependent upon fixed rational and moral postulates that restrict individual autonomy. They reconceptualize freedom in ways that increase the power the individual exercises over him or herself. Moreover, they recognize that, rather than freedom being an abstract, metaphysical ideal removed from the world of power, it is in fact situated in relations of power and must be understood in these terms. Stirner, as we shall see, dispenses with the classical notion of freedom altogether and develops a theory of ownness to describe this radical individual autonomy. I suggest that such a theory of ownness can provide a more positive grounding for Foucault's own idea of freedom as involving a critical ethos and an aesthetics of the self. By examining the subtle connections between these thinkers on the question of freedom, it is possible to arrive at a "postmodern" understanding of freedom that goes beyond the Kantian parameters laid down for it. --sm

Eugene Thacker, Bioinformatics and Bio-logics

Abstract: Combining approaches from media studies and science studies, this essay explores the relationship between genetic and computer "codes" through a consideration of the burgeoning field of "bioinformatics"--the development and application of computer technologies to life science research. Bioinformatics ranges in its use from online genomic and proteomic databases to the use of software for gene discovery and protein folding analysis. It is linked to the software industry, governmental-corporate life science research, and application in "in silico biology," medical genetic diagnostics, and database management. As a direct intersection of computer science and molecular biology, bioinformatics promises to transform the study of biological life into computation, where particular gene-protein interactions and even entire cells can be informatically understood through the use of computer technology. This essay provides a critical analysis of several bioinformatics systems, such as BLAST (a standard genome analysis tool). Focusing on the ways in which bioinformatics software contextualizes biological materiality, the essay argues that bioinformatics is a practice of "biomedia," or the informatic recontextualization of biological components and processes. Bioinformatics thus privileges an informatic approach to the body, while evincing a deep investment in the ways in which biological materiality can be technically enhanced; the body becomes a technology, but a technology geared towards the production of a biotechnical body.--et

Darren Tofts, "The world will be Tlön": Mapping the Fantastic on to the Virtual

Abstract: This essay revisits one of the key texts of the fantastic, Jorge Luis Borges' classic 1940 short fiction, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." Borges' short parable of an entirely simulated, fictitious world has become one of the key texts of postmodernism, a touchstone in our understanding of the blurry lines of demarcation between reality and its copies. But it also has much to teach us about our current preoccupation with the creation of virtual worlds in the digital age. To this end, the paper will discuss the capacity of the digital to create virtual worlds that, like the fabulatory world of Tlön, are excessive, "too real." In our contemporary virtual culture, the troubling question at the heart of Borges' fiction is still as urgent--do we need reality any more? The essay also examines the uncanny cultural fallout of the virtual in terms of the publication of a literary hoax by Australian journalist Guy Rundle. Rundle's piece, ostensibly a homage to the power of Borges' writing to convince us of the reality of the unreal, concerned a purported but little known journey Borges took to Melbourne in 1938. In pursuing Borges' imaginary footsteps, a peculiar and unsettling reality starts to emerge. --dt

Meyda Yegenoglu, Liberal Multiculturalism and the Ethics of Hospitality in the Age of Globalization

Abstract: This article problematizes the liberal imperative to tolerate and respect cultural difference under globalization and suggests that it is far from displacing the sovereignty of the host society in question. By making a detour through Derrida's reading of the aporias of conditional hospitality, it suggests that codified multiculturalist tolerance (a form of conditional hospitality) enables the subject to appropriate a universal and sovereign place from which the other is welcomed. Regulating the destabilizing force of the political by enabling a disavowed and inverted self-referentiality of racist hospitality, conditional hospitality entails the repudiation, limitation, or foreclosure of politics proper. To reformulate the problematic of multiculturalism in ethical terms, it follows Derrida's reading of unconditional hospitality which involves an intentional attention to the other which entails an "interruption of the self by the self as other." To rethink the relationship between conditional and unconditional hospitality in political terms, it examines the limitations and congealments conditional hospitality imposes on politics proper. By articulating Antonio Negri's concepts of constituent and constitutive power it establishes parallelism between constituted power and conditional hospitality. Locating the possibility for a democratic politics in the ethical opening unconditional hospitality will bring about, it suggests that such an opening can function to uphold the creative force of constituent power. Further, in resisting constitutionalization, unconditional hospitality can open up the irreducible nature of the political as well as the possibility of an ethical being where the otherness of the foreigner is recognized. This can be seen as the opposite of the foreclosure of the "right to have rights" or democratic politics that is managed by conditional hospitality. --my

CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO PROJECT MUSE, THE ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Last Modified: