Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bodily Experientiality of Contemporary Ecological Science Fiction
21 Feb 2020-
TL;DR: The work in this paper explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-than-human modes of embodied experience, and traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction, and synthesizes these approaches into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and morethanhuman aspects of readerly engagement.
Abstract: Reading Mutant Narratives explores how narratives of environmental and personal transformation in contemporary ecological science fiction can develop more-thanhuman modes of embodied experience. More specifically, it attends to the conflicted yet potentially transformative experientiality of mutant narratives. Mutant narratives are viewed as uneasy hybrids of human-centered and posthumanist science fiction that contain potential for ecological understanding. Drawing on narrative studies and empirical reading studies, the dissertation begins from the premise that in suitable conditions, reading fiction may give rise to experiential change. The study traces and describes experiential changes that take place while reading works of science fiction. The bodily, subjective and historical conditions of reading are considered alongside the generic contexts and narrative features of the fictional works studied. As exemplary cases of mutant narratives, the study foregrounds the work of three American science fiction authors known for their critiques of anthropocentrism and for their articulations of more-than-human ecologies: Greg Bear, Paolo Bacigalupi, and Jeff VanderMeer. While much of contemporary fiction naturalizes embodied experience and hides their own narrative strategies, mutant narratives have the potential to defamiliarize readers’ notions of bodies and environments while also estranging their embodied experience of reading fiction. As a theoretical contribution to science fiction studies, the study considers such a readerly dynamic in terms of embodied estrangement. Building on theoretical and practical work done in both embodied cognitive and posthumanist approaches to literature, the study shows how engagements with fictional narratives can, for their part, shape readers’ habitual patterns of feeling and perception. These approaches are synthesized into a method of close reading, performative enactivism, that helps to articulate bodily, environmental, and more-thanhuman aspects of readerly engagement. Attending to such experiential aspects integrates ecological science fiction more deeply into the contemporary experiential situation of living with radical environmental transformation.
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TL;DR: For example, anyone familiar with feminist scholar Sara Ahmed's work will know that an interest in gender studies is often associated with the dour face of the "killjoy".
Abstract: Anyone familiar with feminist scholar Sara Ahmed’s work will know that an interest in gender studies is often associated with the dour face of the ‘killjoy’. As the less scholarly (but equally femi...
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: Evan Thompson's Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy as mentioned in this paper is a landmark and a tipping point in the field of consciousness studies.
Abstract: Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Evan Thompson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014, 496 pages, $32.95 hardcover.Consciousness is like no other object of study. In fact, it is no object at all, but rather the precondition for anything to be taken as an object of attention or thought. This unique status makes it ver y unlikely that ordinar y, one-dimensional, objectif ying strategies of research may bring much light to the nature and origin of consciousness (at least if these strategies are used in isolation). Consciousness must be approached from within, at least as much as from without, from the midst of lived experience, at least as much as from an objective scientific vantage point. Consciousness must be apprehended from where it is, not only from where one hopes to contemplate it. Prioritizing this lived, embodied, approach to consciousness is the program of phenomenology, as Edmund Husserl and his lineage defined it. Articulating the lived domain of phenomenology with the scientific study of objective correlates of mental structures, and buttressing the study of one onto the study of the other, is the extended program of neurophenomenology as developed by Francisco Varela. Some philosophers of mind also advocated such a balanced attitude, by prescribing a triangulated approach to consciousness (Flanagan, 1993) or a "reflective monist" theory of consciousness (Velmans, 2009). But, unlike neurophenomenologists, they did so shyly since they fell short from prescribing an extensive methodology of first-person inquiry, and adopted a kind of non-committal metaphysical standpoint instead.Evan Thompson makes full use of the neurophenomenological strategy, in his remarkable book Waking, Dreaming, Being : Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, which will soon be considered a landmark and a tipping point in consciousness investigations. He systematically confronts data from cutting-edge neurocognitive science with various sources of knowledge about the corresponding lived experiences; and he carefully extracts from each one of these approaches the most relevant information to make sense of the other one. True, the best possible neurophenomenological methodology would include experimental control on both sides of the first-person/third-person divide, but even though this requirement is not fulfilled in some of the cases studied by Thompson, his intellectual mastery of the subject is such that he offers a convincing compensation for it.Yet, Thompson's most admirable achievement is probably not this one. It can rather be found in his thorough exploration of a host of so-called "altered states of consciousness," from lucid dreaming to near-death experiences. It can also be found in Thompson's masterly use of texts from the Indo-Tibetan civilizational area, which most valued the methodic culti vation of these states and the study of the corresponding experiences. This input from such sources as the Upanishads and the Advaita Vedânta, as well as Yogacâra and Mâdhyamika Buddhism, is rich, accurate, scholarly, and immune from any temptation of syncretism. Thompson's book thus comes close to what I consider an ideal of consciousness studies: opening them to the full range of experiences that may occur in human conscious life (and beyond), taking into account all the data that have been accumulated in various spiritual traditions about such experiences, and yet remaining painstakingly critical about any speculative over-interpretation of these experiences. This book avoids both the Scylla of narrow-minded materialism and the Charybdis of facile esotericism, in a single stroke: the stroke which consists in adopting the phenomenological stance.The importance of feeding the investigation about consciousness with its altered states pertaining to sleep, psychedelic drugs, or Yoga, is reluctantly accepted by philosophers, perhaps because discourse about these altered states has been hijacked by new-age circles. …
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TL;DR: Mark Fisher's The Weird and the Eerie arrived at a strange time as discussed by the authors, not only did the book appear shortly before Fisher's sudden death, but also it emerged at a moment when he seemed to be deeply in a...
Abstract: Mark Fisher’s The Weird and the Eerie arrived at a strange time. Not only did the book appear shortly before Fisher’s sudden death, but also it emerged at a moment when he seemed to be deeply in a ...
34 citations
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Abstract: Contents: Preface. Introduction. Part I: The Environment To Be Perceived.The Animal And The Environment. Medium, Substances, Surfaces. The Meaningful Environment. Part II: The Information For Visual Perception.The Relationship Between Stimulation And Stimulus Information. The Ambient Optic Array. Events And The Information For Perceiving Events. The Optical Information For Self-Perception. The Theory Of Affordances. Part III: Visual Perception.Experimental Evidence For Direct Perception: Persisting Layout. Experiments On The Perception Of Motion In The World And Movement Of The Self. The Discovery Of The Occluding Edge And Its Implications For Perception. Looking With The Head And Eyes. Locomotion And Manipulation. The Theory Of Information Pickup And Its Consequences. Part IV: Depiction.Pictures And Visual Awareness. Motion Pictures And Visual Awareness. Conclusion. Appendixes: The Principal Terms Used in Ecological Optics. The Concept of Invariants in Ecological Optics.
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"Reading Mutant Narratives : The Bod..." refers background in this paper
...This enactive performativity plays a part in the constitution of embodied subjectivities, as theorized by feminist critics (Butler 1990, Warhol 2003)....
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...Through repeated engagements, readerly choreographies can be naturalized and habituated, which can contribute to the lived experience and bodily actions of readers (Butler 1990, Warhol 2003)....
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TL;DR: Lakoff and Johnson as mentioned in this paper suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning, and they offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind.
Abstract: People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary - devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that - they're "metaphors we live by", metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, Lakoff and Johnson offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of the metaphor.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a Phenomonology of modernity and post-modernity in the context of trust in abstract systems and the transformation of intimacy in the modern world.
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