bordarretazos

«Technological innovations in medical science, social media biotechnology, life extensions that fuse biology and technology have led to an unprecedented degree of intimacy and dependence between flesh and machine. Also, Ning De-Eknamkul points out that ‘The changing relationship between man and machine defines the thinking machine’ (2016: 60). This change in relationship is also manifest in fiction for children as the selected texts provide scope to deal with the ideas of thinking machines – a type of mechanical device thought to be capable of replicating human bodily motions, as well as function of human thought (Lausa, 2009: 5). This paper discusses how children’s fiction presents child readers alternative ways of imagining interconnectedness between human and the machine that is suggestive of the cybernetic ontology.

Dan Gutman’s Homework Machine (2006) and its sequel Return of the Homework Machine (2009) are examples of burgeoning ubiquity of technology in the lives of children and how in their everyday use of technology they derive pleasure and entertainment from it. They also engage with the complexity of technology with respect to the moral and ethical implications of the use to which it is put to. The narrative of the Homework Machine revolves around a group of fifth graders who come together because of a machine code named- ‘Belch’ that does their homework for them.»

Texto completo aquí: https://culturemachine.net/vol-21-antropoficciones/the-case-of-thinking-machines-posthumanism-and-techno-human-hybrydity-in-childrens-literature-shubneet-kaur-kharbanda/

«En total, once esturiones blanco, una especie en peligro de extinción, murieron de manera misteriosa en un corto periodo de tiempo sorprendiendo a los biólogos que intentan salvar a un pez que se tambalea hacia la extinción»

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/26/sturgeon-die-off-endangered-british-columbia-canada

“No estábamos interesados simplemente en tomar una postura crítica, como si siendo investigadores/artistas universitarios estuviéramos situados fuera de la situación y no estuviéramos participando en la nueva economía y, a nuestro propio modo, sacando beneficio de ella. Queríamos trabajar en el meollo de las tensiones —creativas, institucionales, urbanas, económicas— y construir a partir de ellas.

Estábamos buscando habitar de otra manera, practicar lo que llamamos, siguiendo a Gilles Deleuze y Félix Guattari, una crítica “inmanente.” Una crítica inmanente se compromete con nuevos procesos más que con nuevos productos, y lo hace desde un ángulo constructivista. Busca energetizar nuevos modos de actividad, ya en estado germinal, que pueden ofrecer un potencial para escapar o desbordar las canalizaciones pre-establecidas hacia el sistema de valores dominante. La estrategia de crítica inmanente consiste en habitar las complicidades que nos componen y “hacer que se conviertan en otra cosa”

Erin Manning y Brian Massumi en Thought in the Act. Descargable aquí: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=7AB41192BF4710C9FBFA7CF8240F61C3

“One might think of this as a pre-condition for a certain kind of science. The object of study has to be delimited in time and space, to be bracketed off from the world. This stable object of study then has to yield regularities to be considered an object of knowledge at all. The «freak storm» can’t then appear, as it is outside the starting parameters.

In a startling move, Ghosh links this habit of thought to the categories of setting and period in the novel. The novel too exists because of discontinuities. Setting and period define a stable object. Setting as metonym for the nation; period as metonym for history. A certain kind of science and a certain kind of fiction exist because of this carving out of a miniature stable world. One might almost say then that all modern fiction is science fiction.

(…)

The bourgeois novel generally draws a sharp distinction between the human and the nonhuman, and concerns itself with actions, motivations and inner lives of its humans. Not only are the setting and period discontinuous with the world (although sometimes a metonym for it), the actions of the humans are discontinuous with other agents. “But the earth of the Anthropocene is precisely a world of insistent, inescapable continuities…” (62) Ghosh sees this as a problem, as he sees understanding climate change as a problem of understanding continuities. But he wants to see the human as continuous with the nonhuman while playing a bit less attention to the inhuman, to collective labor and its instruments. The emphasis on the continuous is also a bit one sided, given that climate change results from a metabolic rift, a discontinuity, in the way imperial and commodified systems of production function.”

McKensie Wark, aquí: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3356-on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the-anthropocene

“sf is a sign for science fiction, speculative feminism, science fantasy, speculative fabulation, science fact, and also, string figures. Playing games of string figures is about giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads and failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for finite flourishing on terra, on earth. String figures require holding still in order to receive and pass on. String figures can be played by many, on all sorts of limbs, as long as the rhythm of accepting and giving is sustained. Scholarship and politics are like that too—passing on in twists and skeins that require passion and action, holding still and moving, anchoring and launching.”

Donna Haraway, aquí: Haraway – Staying with the Trouble_ Making Kin in the Chthulucene

“We need to talk about population. If you are like most people, you don’t want to. But the truth is that at present, given the danger of environmental disaster, we don’t have the right to have more than one child, and this is something that needs to be discussed. We’re not living sustainably with our present population of 7.3 billion, and the United Nations’ most recent estimate is that our numbers will reach 9.7 billion by 2050, and then a hard-to-imagine 11.2 billion by 2100. And this is when the global average for women is to have about two children. Yes, population would eventually stabilize, but if it becomes stable at an astronomically high number it will still be a disaster. This isn’t something we have a right to bring about.

“El filósofo Nick Land ha captado agudamente esto, si bien con la creencia miope, aunque hipnótica, de que la velocidad capitalista por sí sola podría generar una transición global hacia una singularidad tecnológica sinprecedentes. En esta visión del capital, el ser humano podría ser eventualmente desechado como un simple lastre por una inteligencia planetaria abstracta que se construye frenéticamente a sí misma uniendo los fragmentos de civilizaciones anteriores. El neoliberalismo landiano confunde, sin embargo, velocidad con aceleración. Puede que nos estemos moviendo rápidamente, pero es solo dentro de una serie estrictamente definida de parámetros capitalistas que, por su parte, no vacilan nunca. Experimentamos nada más que la velocidad creciente de un horizonte local, un simple espasmo clínicamente muerto en lugar de una aceleración que sea también «navegacional», un proceso experimental de descubrimiento dentro de un espacio universal de posibilidades. Es esta última forma de aceleración la que consideramos esencial.

“los regímenes neo-socialistas de la Revolución Bolivariana en América del Sur, no obstante su alentadora habilidad para resistir a los dogmas del capitalismo contemporáneo, siguen siendo, de forma decepcionante, incapaces de presentar una alternativa más allá del socialismo de mediados del siglo XX. Las organizaciones laborales, debilitadas sistemáticamente por los cambios forjados por el proyecto neoliberal, son escleróticas a nivel institucional y, en el mejor de los casos, solo pueden mitigar levemente los nuevos ajustes estructurales. Pero sin un enfoque sistemático para construir una nueva economía ni la solidaridad estructural necesaria para imponer tales cambios, las fuerzas laborales permanecen, por ahora, relativamente impotentes. Los movimientos sociales que han aparecido desde el final de la Guerra Fría y que experimentaron un resurgimiento después de 2008, han sido igualmente incapaces de articular una nueva visión ideológico-política. Por el contrario, estos movimientos consumen una gran cantidad de energía en los procesos internos de democracia directa y en la autocomplacencia afectiva en detrimento de la eficacia estratégica, y proponen frecuentemente una variante de localismo neoprimitivista, pretendiendo combatir la violencia abstracta del capital globalizado con la frágil y efímera «autenticidad» de la inmediatez comunal.”

«Manifiesto por una política aceleracionista» Alex Williams y Nick Srnicek