Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons^™

Reading In The Future: Literacy And The Time Of The Internet, David R. Cole

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

David R. Cole's Reading in the Future: Literacy and the Time of the Internet locates the literacies of the internet -- itself read as the end game of western technology or the Machina Mundi, the Great Chain of the World that has a centre that is everywhere and a circumference that is nowhere -- in a contradictory space. But Cole also self-consciously locates his own writing at a moment in time when the initial technological hype of the internet is subsiding in the face of the boredom of informational overload and the internet is emerging as both an unlimited …

Reading Owen's Between Reason And History: Habermas And The Idea Of Progress , Ali Rizvi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From the start Habermas' work has been an attempt at synthesising certain core insights from Kant and Hegel, as it is clearly evident from the beginning chapters of his first major work Knowledge and Human Interest (KHI). In the structure of the book Marx's position is as the mediator of Kant and Hegel and all subsequent authors are considered in order to overcome the shortcomings of this Marxian mediation (KHI: chapter 1-11, Habermas, 1982: 239ff Cf. Kortian, 1980).

Portals To Knowledge: Confluence And Conflict Between Enlightenment And Postmodern Currencies, Benjamin G. Lanier-Nabors

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In order to provide any viable critique of twenty-first-century discourses -- whether signified by late capitalism, epistemological hegemony, cultural domination, or globalization (the catch-word for all of these) -- one must not employ an ahistorical or static lens; alternatively, one must dredge up and analyze the sediments that underlie current discourses, and many of these sediments are found in the eighteenth century. More specifically, by reading the thoughts of such writers as Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, one is forced to read the links and antipathies between the discursive economies of epistemology -- philosophical, scientific, and economic -- …

Cultural Topology: An Introduction To Postmodern Mathematics, Brent M. Blackwell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

This essay develops a new way of thinking about the cultural relationships among and within the sciences and the arts through a new understanding of the term postmodernism that at once derives from literary theory and the mathematical discipline of topology. While topology forms the main vertebra of this connective approach in its capacity as the mathematics of connectivity, quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry -- the atlas and axis of this spinal column -- form the context through which this “postmodern” approach will develop. However, in order to position topology as a “postmodern” branch of mathematics, some brief …

From Guts To God: Credulity, Postmodernism, And Contemporary Physics, Michael Hardin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In an attempt to remove one of the major misunderstandings made by individuals in the humanities about contemporary physics, the issue of incredulity, this essay examines Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge against contemporary and twentieth-century theories and discoveries in physics. One of the best arguments against incredulity is the frequent use of god as metaphor within physics. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, two physicists, argue that the use of metaphor is one of the characteristics of postmodern science; this essay concludes with a discussion of those elements …

To See More Clearly And Broadly: Science And The Postmodern Sentiment, C. Jason Smith, Robert Froemke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

What we call postmodernism, whether we refer to the sciences or the humanities, is a certain preoccupation with the role of the human observer in the composition and perception -- perhaps even construction -- of reality. The postmodern condition, so to speak, is the moment in history when the hard sciences and the sciences of man seem to be suffering from the same anxieties about the relevance of the self-reflexive interaction between the observer and the subject to the fabric of existence and the web of knowledge. In simplest terms, we would define the postmodern question as this: …

Of Parts And Wholes: Self-Similarity And Synecdoche In Science, Culture And Literature, Dirk Vanderbeke

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The discussion here centers on how self-similarity, or parts resembling a whole, has been a recurring aspect in the most diverse fields of human thinking from antiquity to the present. Primary examples are drawn from physics, biology, cybernetics, alchemy, philosophy, myth and, of course, language and literature. The author argues that self-similar patterns are one of the persistent ways in which the human mind structures its experience and knowledge of the world, and then examines some of the questions that arise when an almost ubiquitous concept, structure or linguistic and literary phenomenon resurfaces in a new guise in …

Cyborg Bodies And Digitized Desires: Posthumanity And Phillip K. Dick, Jennifer Attaway

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

The interaction between human beings and intelligent machines has challenged the traditional understanding of what it means to be human. In his novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, phillip k. dick rethinks human identity through the positioning of human beings within a technologically mediated reality that displaces the biological body and the spontaneity of human sensation. Written in 1968, dick's novel anticipates the effect of a technologically mediated culture on the formation of a posthuman identity. dick's fictional juxtaposition of the human being and the organically anthropomorphic android complicates conventional implications of embodiment. Androids are physically …

Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, And The Cape Canaveral Fiction Of J. G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis, Melanie Rosen Brown explores the ways in which the so-called Cape Canaveral short stories of J.G. Ballard anthologized in the collection Memories of the Space Age exemplify the promises of posthumanity as articulated by posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Although Ballard's fiction is viewed by many as a needlessly pessimistic and derogatory portrayal of NASA's space program, viewed through a posthuman lens, Ballard's fiction instead reveals him to be optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously …

Schizophrenics, Cyborgs And The Pitfalls Of Posthumanism, Angela Woods

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In Schizophrenics, Cyborgs and the Pitfalls of Posthumanism, Angela Woods invites us to revisit two canonical analyses of the postmodern: Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism and Donna Haraway's A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s. Jameson and Haraway introduced to contemporary cultural criticism two posthumanist icons: the schizophrenic, a pathologized victim of postmodernity, and the cyborg, a vision of strategic posthuman subjectivity. In her timely and critical analysis of these articles, Woods challenges the established notion of an oppositional relationship between the schizophrenic and the cyborg. She turns …

Toward A Posthuman Ethics, Dongshin Yi

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editor's Introduction]

Setting a posthuman ethics as a goal toward which the collaboration of posthumanism and ethics must move, Yi in his essay, Toward a Posthuman Ethics, points out that the collaboration is detained because current debates on the cyborg harbor on the question of representations and consider how political, social and cultural problems of the human are reconfigured, and possibly resolved, by the cyborg. Thus, the debates are bound to be retrospective in approach and circular in direction, as they fail to recognize new possibilities that the cyborg may present. Arguing that the failure indicates the cyborg is being …

The Infinite Plasticity Of The Digital: Posthuman Possibilities, Embodiment And Technology In William Gibson's Interstitial Trilogy, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

Ever since William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his debut novel Neuromancer, his work has been seen by many as a yardstick for postmodern and, more recently, posthuman possibilities. This article critically examines Gibson's second trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru and All Tomorrow's Parties), focusing on the way digital technologies and identity intersect and interact, with particular emphasis on the role of embodiment. Using the work of Donna Haraway, Judith Butler and N. Katherine Hayles, it is argued that while William Gibson's second trilogy is infused with posthuman possibilities, the role of embodiment is …