Audio here. Abstracts below.
“FEAR and Loathing in Affective Neuroscience”
This paper reflects on the rhetoric of animal and human studies in affective neuroscience. I begin with a narrative about methodological struggles involving behaviorist B. F. Skinner, neuroscientist Jak Panksepp, and neuropsychologist Richard Lane. The narrative introduces a tension between experimental methods as a function of ethos in this hybrid field. One of the interesting structural features of affective neuroscience as a field of inquiry is that animal studies produce methodological imperatives to which human studies cannot aspire for ethical reasons, while research focusing on human affect tacitly supports the inhumane treatment of nonhumans. In some quarters, for example, animal studies are considered more legitimate because they provide direct proof of neurogenesis (via autopsy). In other quarters researchers accept indirect evidence of neurogenesis, available through PET scans and fMRI. Both subfields, however, privilege human emotions. What interests me primarily are the underlying assumptions of the two camps. Animal scientists regard their “hard” evidence as more real than the “soft” evidence of PET scans and the like, reproducing both inherited value distinctions and tired critiques. On the other hand, scientists who privilege human experience as the proper subject or end of neuroscience privilege human “creatureliness” in a way that tacitly supports animal experimentation. What would an affective neuroscience uninterested in the differences between human and “other” creatureliness look like? What scientific assumptions would it challenge and what kind of methodologies might it produce? And how would such an approach discipline techno-science not only ethically but epistemologically?
Anthony Paul Smith.
"Creatural Resistance: The Labour of Job and Ecological Niche Theory"
Within the contemporary academy the only sanctioned relationship between the science of ecology and the humanities disciplines of philosophy and religious studies is environmental ethics. Under this regime of thought the humanists are asked to come along with the scientists and tell them what their ethics ought to be, but the relationship rarely yields anything particularly different or new from the perspective of either field. In this paper I seek to challenge this moribund state of affairs and propose a new relationship between philosophical theology (which remains ultimately secular) and scientific ecology. Following the work of François Laruelle I term this relationship a unified theory that mutates both the terms and hopefully opens up new lines of research and inquiry. Such a project is a large undertaking and so in the scope of this paper I focus on sketching the mutation of one idea from both fields – from philosophical theology the grand concept of Nature (with the capital N intended) and from scientific ecology the concept of niche. Following the method of non-philosophy, which I explicate in the course of performing it in the paper, both of these materials have to be mutated by some term from radical immanence they both rely on. That material comes from what could be termed the non-human, which in Laruelle’s sense would refer to the n-dimensional space of human identity or its infinite iterability, which actually opens up the question of the human beyond the borders of what is normally taken as human. In this paper I argue that this means opening up the human to a more general or generic name--that of creature without creator.
Guy Zimmerman.
"The Or(e) in the Off-Stage: Metallurgy and Tragic Drama
“Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs,” write Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology, the War Machine. Given the centrality of the BwO to Deleuze and Guattari, it is not surprising to locate, in contemporary discussions of the emergence of copper metallurgy, the possibility of a common root between two crucial deity figures, Yahweh and Dionysus. Archaeologist Nissim Amzallag places Dionysus at the birth of bronze age metallurgy as a homologue of Yahweh, the god of the Canaanite smelters, who not only commanded transformational powers, but was also able to confer those powers onto men. Amzallag stresses the connection between Dionysus, the god of tragedy, and Yahweh, who was also known in late antiquity as Io or Iao, “the god of magicians and sorcerers.” In this paper I explore how the furnace showed difference to be primary to identity, activating ideas of multiplicity and flow, and taking spatial form in the configuration of the tragic stage. In theater, human suffering can be viewed as an intensive property, and the purpose of the tragic spectacle is to move us toward an affective dissolution in which the recursive operations of the self are brought to a temporary halt, drawing attention to our underlying relational capacities. Furnace and stage are both virtual spaces in which these relational capacities become actual; the capacity of the tragic hero to suffer relates to the capacity of the audience to be moved by that suffering. The birth of metallurgy thus suggests that an intensive difference between a off-stage, on-stage, and audience is the driver of theatrical processes, and that, in tragedy, these processes are disjunctive ones.
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