Subcategory:
Category:
Words:
392Pages:
1Views:
234This plastic materiality also implies that environmental signals can stimulate diverse phenotypic and behavioral outcomes from a constant genotype which molds new lifeforms to their circumstances in both pathological and beneficial ways Goldstein 70 Overall the scientific cultures of reductionism preformation and genetic determinism have for too long sketched the subjectivities of nature as wholly self sufficient and self developing closed mechanistic automata inside a universe of phenomena of predictable and controllable natural laws The concept of pre scripted biologies composed merely of inherited code nurture impoverished limited subjectivities and sociopolitical systems Broadly this project proposes that the poetics of the science of epigenetics its logic lexicon genre aesthetic and imaginary are attractive for refiguring the manufacture of subjectivity in Romantic literature and modern science fiction Ultimately epigenetics which hypothesizes that environmental interaction and learning directly act on the formation and metamorphosis of living beings provides a framework for developmental and object relations psychoanalytic theory to understand and intervene in the myriad natural forces and complex social factors that form the emerging human self rather than describe human behavior as merely thwarted and repressed gene derived instinctual desire Narratives about the ontogenesis of subjectivity matter
These maps of psychosocial material semiotic becoming will not only extend the dystopian vision and reach of capitalism s sociotechnical machines thus reproducing the despairingly dizzy feeling of present entrapment within its self perpetuating and self devouring pluralism Indeed the illuminating dye flowing through the nodes and networks of industrial capitalism and its climate changed terrain will reveal future possibilities and potentialities for existential horizons antithetical to its structures of power and meaning How are subjectivities and their regulatory regimes dependent on transitions in epistemological paradigms and their understandings of nature In reducing the creativity and value of nature these Cartesian and dehumanizing sciences respectively have resulted in social injustices i e gender oppositions class antagonisms and ethnic dominations and our contemporary environmental crises such as mass species extinctions and deforestation alongside expanding agribusiness and are the products of psychosocial developmental mechanisms under a capitalist system that is thoroughly patriarchal My work asks what other developmental methods and modes of subjectivization and knowledge production might we build out of this wreckage other than Cartesian individualism s reductionism or the anonymous swarm s transformation of nature into networks of enslaved production How does Romantic science fiction employ an epigenetic poetics in order to trace a more accurate and emancipatory politics of subjectivity and environment