This paper surveys the return to materialist concerns in the work of a new generation of cultural geographers informed by their engagements with science and technology studies and performance studies, on the one hand, and by their worldly involvements in the politically charged climate of relations between science and society on the other It argues that these efforts centre on new ways of approaching the vital nexus between the bio (life) and the geo (earth), or the ‘livingness’ of the world, in a context in which the modality of life is politically and technologically molten It identifies some of the major innovations in theory, style and application associated with this work and some of the key challenges that it poses for the practice of cultural geographyThinking is neither a line drawn between subject and object nor a revolving of one around the other Rather thinking takes place in the relationship of territory and earth involving a gradual but thorough displacement from text to territory1

/pdf/materialist-returns-practising-cultural-geography-in-and-for-1e250lprzi.pdf

Materialist returns: practising cultural geography in and for a more-than-human world

The serried ranks of post-prefixed isms marched their way through human geographyduring the 1990s. To open the door to yet another may seem the habitual act of ahopelessly trendy discipline, one derivatively preoccupied with what’s de rigeur in thesocial sciences and humanities. Yet there might be something both apposite andproductive about staging a confrontation between a subject whose very title announcesits determined commitment to ontological purity and a discourse that questions thiskind of delusive hygiene. In one sense, of course, that confrontation has been ongoingfor several years now. Since the early 1990s many ‘human geographers’ have steadfastlyquestioned the adequacy of the appellation used to describe themselves, theirresearch, and their discipline. Drawing upon the thinking of Deleuze, Guattari, andLatour, among many others, they have revealed what Sarah Whatmore, in hercommentary below, calls ‘‘more than human geographies’’. The gravitational forceof their work has not yet exerted a tidal pull on human geography as a whole. But ithas certainly raised some profound questions about the routinised ontological beliefsthat underpin research in the discipline. The full explanatory and normative con-sequences of this questioning will only become apparent in the years ahead, ashuman geography’s ‘structure of feeling’ altersoor does notoin response to itsinsistent demands.What, then, of the discourse of posthumanism? It is hardly new, nor is it unified(Braun, 2004). Like so many of the intellectual currents that have animated humangeography in recent years, it originated outside the discipline, gathering momentumover the last decade. By the time Katherine Hayles published her well-known bookHow We Became Posthumanin 1999 there was already a sizeable literature explainingwhy ‘the human’ must be compulsively draped in scare-quotes.What’s more, the nownot so new neologism ‘posthumanism’ has been fleshed out in a variety of ways that,while generically resonant, are substantively irreducible. Some of these elucidationsare, inevitably, demotic. Francis Fukuyama’s (2002) Our Posthuman Future is partofapredictable genre ofwriting inwhichthe incipient eclipse of the‘human’is lamentedand the ‘post’ taken, in eschatological mode, as a decisive temporal break. Othertheorisations of the posthuman are, fortunately, more sophisticated and thoughtful.

Mapping posthumanism: an exchange

The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890-1940

Aesthetic investigations of computation are stuck in an impasse, caused by the difficulty of accounting for the ontological discrepancy between the continuity of sensation and the discreteness of d...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0263276418770243

Digital aesthetics: the discrete and the continuous

The development of paper-based information technologies in the early modern period is a field of enquiry that has lately benefited from extensive studies by intellectual historians and historians o...

/pdf/carl-linnaeus-s-botanical-paper-slips-1767-1773-51d7do764z.pdf

Carl Linnaeus's botanical paper slips (1767-1773).

In an age of cloning, cyborgs, and biotechnology, the line between bodies and bytes seems to be disappearing. Data Made Flesh is the first collection to address the increasingly important links between information and embodiment, at a moment when we are routinely tempted, in the words of Donna Haraway, "to be raptured out of the bodies that matter in the lust for information," whether in the rush to complete the Human Genome Project or in the race to clone a human being.

Data Made Flesh : Embodying Information

Introduction: Fleshy Data: Semiotics, Information, and the Body--Robert Mitchell and Phillip Thurtle 1. LSDNA: Consciousness Expansion and the Emergence of Biotechnology--Richard Doyle --Response--Steven Shaviro 2. The Virtual Surgeon: Operating on the Data in an Age of Medialization--Timothy Lenoir --Response--Peter Oppenheimer 3. Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments--N. Katherine Hayles --Response--Kathleen Woodward

Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body

By investigating the practices and beliefs of Gilded Agetrotting horse breeders, this article demonstrates therelationship between industrial economic development and thegrowth of genetic reasoning in the United States. As mosthistorians of biology already know, E.H. Harriman, LelandStanford, and John D. Rockefeller not only transformed Americanbusiness practice, they donated heavily to institutions thatpromoted eugenic research programs. What is not widely known, however, is that these sameindustrialists were accomplished trotting horsebreeders with well-developed theories ofinheritance. The article that follows usesthese theories to place the rise of eugenic andgenetic research into the context of the rapiddevelopment of industry in post Civil WarAmerica. Specifically, the study identifieshow functional utility as defined through thenarrow concerns of industrial practices wereprivileged over form and pedigree in Americanhorse breeding. Even more importantly, thisarticle suggests that the continuityestablished between the practices of theindustrial philanthropists and the scientificresearch institutions that they establishedoccurred at two levels: through the valuesprivileged by the development of the dynamicsof a mass society and through the tools used toprocess the large amounts of informationnecessary to understand breeding patterns inslow breeding organisms.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4331707.pdf

Harnessing heredity in Gilded Age America: middle class mores and industrial breeding in a cultural context.

AcknowledgmentsIntroduction I. Harnessing Heredity: Middle Class Mores and Information Management in Large-Scale Breeding Prelude 1. Middle Class Mores: Beaufort's Bastards2. Breeding True: Processing a New Elite Conclusion-"A Backward Glance": Corporate Inheritance as Bastard Birth II. Fish-Market Phenomenology: The Habits of Thought and the Space of Exchange in Late Nineteenth-Century Natural History Prelude 3. The Political Economy of Natural History4. Homologous Networks of Exchange: The Intersubjective Infrastructure of Scientific Exchange5. Categorizing Experience: Space and Time in Nineteenth-Century Natural History6. The Pacific Railway Survey: The Subject in the Panoramic Mode III. History Writing Great Men Writing History: Recapitulation Narratives and Stories as Scientific Models Prelude 7. Storied Pasts8. The Plot Thickens: The Political Economic Dimensions of Biological Stories Conclusion-Osborn and the Horse: The Conservative Literary Inheritance of Evolutionary Stories IV. The Poetics of Wandering: Time, Narrative, and the Affective/Phenomenological Body Prelude 9. Wandering and Narrative10. Wandering and Inheritance in Light of the Sensory-Motor Complex11. Writing, Goods, and Memory Conclusion-New Folds in Space and Time V. Hybrid Space, Hybrid Time: Record Keeping and the Indexing of Genomic Space and Time Prelude 12. Industrial Perspectives: Luther Burbank13. Record Keeping: A Post-Hermeneutic Means for Charting the Space of Flows ConclusionThe Different Domains of Life NotesBibliographyIndex

The emergence of genetic rationality : space, time, & information in American biological science, 1870-1920

While some critics have sought to explain the role of disasters in entertainment media by making recourse to the concept of fantasy, we suggest a different approach. Focusing on superhero comic books, we outline what we call a “logic of the anomalous.” We argue that comic books foreshadow disasters by allowing readers to explore the consequences of anomalies that emerge from differences in the scales of an industrialized society on the one hand, and the scales of embodied experience on the other. Comic books thus act as a database, or novelty library, of extreme or novel experiences, one that allows its users to explore the potentials inherent in the complexity of industrialized societies. This approach to comic books allows us to coordinate three research traditions—political economic analysis; a phenomenologically oriented tradition of media theory; and science and technology studies—to explain the constitutive role of novelty, repetition, and fantasy in contemporary society.

The Acme Novelty Library: Comic Books, Repetition, and the Return of the New

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