Center for the Humanities Lecture Series

This is a chapter in a book in production called Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming. The chapter addresses the intercoded limits of human exceptionalism and sociocentrism, tying both to a tacit assumption of gradualism with respect to large planetary processes such as species evolution, climate, ocean currents, glacier flows and so on. After defining and exemplifying the first two concepts in prominent work it shows how recent breaks with gradualism in the earth sciences trouble them. It briefly presents two examples of rapid, dramatic change in planetary processes, even before the rise of the Anthropocene. After exploring institutional and existential sources of reluctance in the humanities and human sciences to break with exceptionalism and sociocentrism, it advances a notion of entangled humanism as one aspect of an alternative urgently needed today.

In recent decades, many of us have been prompted to rethink our views of parasitism. Long perceived in negative terms, parasitism is now taken by many in the biological sciences to have certain value: parasites and other symbionts, it is argued, are integral parts of ecosystems, human immunity, and genetic development. Not only that, but they can help us better understand the entanglements of human and nonhuman life, leading, perhaps, to more ethical and sustainable approaches to existence in the anthropocene. When applied to human life, however, the term is widely reserved for negative use; as an insult, "parasite" remains a staple of American politics, particularly its right wing. What would it mean, however, to apply the nonhuman parasite's increasing association with complexity and even ethical life to human meanings of the term? This talk will consider nineteenth-century writers for whom such application was an important strategy. Tracing the history of the term "parasite," it shows that for a short time in the nineteenth century - before human and nonhuman meanings of the term diverged - the parasite helped writers and intellectuals imagine the ambiguity of matter and the complexity of relations between its forms.

What is Matter? The seventeenth century mathematician and philosopher Rene Descartes had an elegant answer to this question: the essence of matter, or of body, is extension-extension in length, breadth, and depth. And since Descartes also held that the mind is indivisible while everything extended is divisible, the classic mind-body problem was born: How are we to find a place for the mind in a material world. But the material world has undergone quite a few changes since the seventeenth century, or at least our conception of it has, and we no longer have an elegant answer to the question of what is matter, if we have an answer to it at all. In my talk, I shall grapple with some of the difficulties of understanding the concept of matter and ponder the question of what implications "the thinning of matter" might have for our philosophical theorizing about the mind-body problem.

We all think we know what matter is, even if we don't know the details of contemporary physics, and we assume that materialism is an ancient and clearly-defined view whose main alternative is dualism. In fact, however, the history of the concept of matter takes a number of surprising twists and turns, and through much of that history, materialism would have seemed not only unattractive but downright incoherent. This talk will present a whirlwind tour of this history of the concept of matter in Western natural philosophy from ancient Greece to the 19th century.

Steven Horst is Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan, and author of Symbols, Computation and Intentionality (1996), Beyond Reduction (2007), Laws, Mind, and Free Will (2011), and Cognitive Pluralism (in press).

When early Royal Society member John Wilkins sat down to create a language that would precisely mirror the reality of things, he found himself privileging poetic aspects of language. Scholars often read Wilkins's Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) as expressing a scientific worldview that condemns figurative language and aims for transparent representation. This, however, is an inadequate caricature of Wilkins's book and seventeenth-century natural philosophy more generally. Faced with the difficult - if not impossible - task of capturing nature's complexity in language, Wilkins chooses to embrace language as a necessary (and necessarily flawed) form of mediation. He thus structures his language around very non-transparent principles of rhyme, and he invents a special mark that should be added to words to indicate metaphoricity. He even suggests that heightened attention to the material properties of language helps us avoid naiveté in the search for philosophical and scientific truth. Wilkins thereby offers a provocative take on an issue that we are still grappling with today: what are the relationships between and among language, human minds, and nature? This talk will explore Wilkins's understanding of language and materiality alongside recent new materialist experiments in engaging language as a material practice and in using language in the service of understanding the material world.

This lecture tackles the assumption made in books such as Neil MacGregor's The History of the World in 100 Objects that things are in fact objects, either blindly subject to the commands of their human owners or willing on their own account to serve human purposes. I explore the possibilities of dissidence among things, and how they establish sets of agendas quite opposite to ours, as if aware that they are likely to outlive us (in the shape, for example, of keepsakes). Implacability then is the unmistakable sign of colliding interests evident when humans try to persuade themselves that ownership of personal property is (in the words of Blackstone) a position of absolute dominion over things. How this table gets turned is the theme of the talk.

Quantum mechanics and relativity have shown us that the nature of matter is vastly different than materialists and mechanists ever imagined. Even so, trying to accommodate conscious minds into the natural order has led to the hard problem of consciousness and other seemingly insoluble problems. Indeed, even in the field of consciousness studies more and more researchers in both philosophy and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness are becoming skeptical that any form of materialism or reductionism can resolve the hard problem of consciousness. The two emerging contenders seem to be strong emergence versus some form of panpsychism. Unfortunately, the terms of the ancient debate between strong emergence and some form of inherence such as panpsychism have not changed very much in the last few hundred years. So we allegedly have conscious agents either inexplicably popping out of brains as in strong emergence or we have something intrinsically experience-like hiding at the metaphysical 'center' of fundamental physical entities inexplicably combining to form mature minds. To see the way out, we must begin by noting that with the exception of conscious experience itself, both views share a physicalist or ontologically reductive framework. On both views, with the exception of consciousness itself, the world is just as physicalism or ontological reductionism says it is. Can we do better? Yes, neutral monism of the sort defended by William James and others is the key. The latter holds that the very idea of mind and matter as essentially distinct in the first place, is the root of the hard problem. Neutral monism deflates the hard problem and allows us to reconceive both matter and mind in a harmonious and naturalistic way, all of which puts meaning back into the heart of nature.

A city is a layered site used and lived by many. It is a space where everything has multiple meanings: a building serves as a destination for some and a metaphor for others. Public spaces become overcrowded with the ghosts of politics, old and current. The city where street performances are enacted becomes a permeable scenographic space by incorporating its characteristics into a given production's dramaturgy. Here I analyze the exchange that occurs between street performances featured at Festival Internacional Santiago a Mil between 2012 and 2015 and the public sites they occupy. I show how the exchange between audience and site promotes the blurring of the audience - performer space, by reclaiming the performative qualities of a given urban space for the community.

December 2014 marked the 30th anniversary of the gas leak tragedy that occurred at the Union Carbide Corporation's pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Due to the initial exposure to methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas during the explosion, and due to the further exposure of residual chemical contaminants in the soil and ground water left after the disaster, the status of reproductive health continues to be an issue for both survivors of the Bhopal Tragedy, as well as new generations of local residents. As MIC continues to exert its effects on the reproductive biology of women, men, and children in Bhopal, remarkably, there is a growing market of in vivo human labor developing in this city that depends precisely on the promissory futures made possible by the remaining potential for reproductive value that exists in this very same population and location. By tracing the breakdown of Bhopali survivors' reproductive bodies, their chromosomes, and their bodily fluids due to MIC exposure, and by simultaneously examining the embryonic development of new fetal bodies through genetic materials and proteins provided by surrogate women, my aim is to explore the compound MIC as a catalyst for the placental migration of transnational biopolitics. By conducting an analysis of these entanglements and ruptures-genetic, reproductive, and otherwise-my hope is to contribute to interdisciplinary conversations between feminist science and technology studies (STS), postcolonial STS, and new materialisms.

When did we come to think of memory, language, and emotion as "hard-wired" functions of the brain? We will explore the origins of this enduring metaphor by revisiting the explosion of brain research during the 19th century. Developments in pathological research shined a light on the brain's physiology, but psychologists, philosophers, and neurologists looked outside the laboratory to uncover the nature of cerebral matter. Their conversations converged around advances in communications technologies - from the telegraph, to the telegram and telephone - which furnished a new language for the "circuitry" of the space between our ears. Yet that language, far from having resolved the problem of the mind's relation to the body, instead supported the arguments of materialists and idealists alike. The brain's history, as we will see, was not limited to scientific discoveries, but unfolded at the intersections of machinery, selfhood, and society.