What Are We? The Social Construction of the Human Biological Self

This essay explores how the human biological self is socially constructed, and rejects various truisms that define our character. Rather than being stand‐alone entities, the human biological self forms what biologists call “superorganisms” and what I call “poly‐super‐organisms.” Thus, along with prokaryotes (bacteria), viruses, and other entities, we are combined in an inseparable menagerie of species that is spread across multiple bodies. Biologists claim that only males and females are organisms. As described here, however, human sperm and eggs are equally entitled to that rank. Much about human reproduction is also socially constructed. For example, contrary to scientific wisdom, humans have always reproduced both sexually and asexually. Moreover, human life (the creation of a new organism) does not begin between conception and birth, and neither event creates new life. In addition, some cancer cells are organisms; they are contagious entities formed by asexual human reproduction. Finally, while science universally describes humans as being living entities, accumulating evidence makes clear that the life concept is failing. In fact, much that originates from human bodies does not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. How we construct the human biological self has consequences for understanding our health, how we reproduce, and what we are. These social constructions greatly influence our views on abortion, stem‐cell research, human cloning, and our post‐human future. A more accurate construction of the human biological self will help us better navigate these contentious issues.     

A synaptic common sense? McLuhan’s tactility and electronic media rhythms

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhen proposed that tactility would eventually become a determining factor in electronic media, leading to the formation of a new kind of “common sense.” This article investigates whether by exploring this idea we are able to arrive at an alternative theoretical framework for understanding tactility, a framework that avoids the tactile-optic distinction and the understanding of tactility as a sensation primarily innervated through the bodily part of the hand. McLuhan’s notions of “acoustic space” and “contraction” are directly related to this breakthrough. It is further argued that the resulting theoretical framework can be enriched when considered in conjunction with social analyses of rhythms and used to account for the differentiation and customization or individualization of media use in the digital age. In this way, tactility is treated as embedded within rhythmic signals and fluctuations in media, allowing us to rethink McLuhan’s “common sense” in a singularly illuminating way.     

Innocence and Suffering in the Middle Ages: An Essay about Popular Taste and Popular Literature

Michael Stugrin's essay is both theoretical and practical: he suggests that texts, when viewed as “structures ofperception,” give us the “voices of the reality which they were part of and helped shape.” He then proceeds to apply this theory to a number of spiritual texts popular during the Middle Ages to give us an idea of popular taste at that time. Such texts were structured in a highly affective way to affirm testimonies o f faith and to commemorate God's promises to men. But perhaps most importantly, these spiritual texts, along with such texts as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and countless prose treatises and sermons, provided medieval audiences with a way of “knowing” within the context of human experience in a time of great cultural stress.     

A body passes by: the flâneur and the senses in nineteenth-century London and Paris

Abstract

The flâneur is well-known for being the most emblematic nineteenth-century observer of urban life. Critics have often compared the flâneur to a camera eye which records everything and insisted on the predominance of sight over other senses in the cognitive process. This article emphasises the embodiedness of the flâneur’s vision, which is an experience of all the senses. Urban public space can be envisaged as a ‘metabolic space,’ in which “the links between background and figures are very unstable” (Augoyard 1991). The moving body of the flâneur, which can adapt to this changing space, seems to be in an ideal position to apprehend the metabolic body of the city. The flâneur is not only a “transparent eye-ball” (Emerson 2003), he is “a living eye” which communicates with all the other senses and captures the whole experience of moving through the city. By looking at texts by Balzac, Baudelaire, Dickens and Charlotte Brontë, the article shows that flânerie is a sensory activity that shapes our perception of the city as much as the city shapes our own flâneries by transforming our bodies into scribes who write the “thicks and thins of the urban text” (de Certeau, 1984).     

Odorous childhoods and scented worlds of learning: a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives in Western Europe (1900s-1960s)

ABSTRACT

This paper develops a sensory history of health and outdoor education initiatives which featured (non-)formal schooling, analyzing these as belonging to (a) scented and more generally sensed world(s) of learning. Working with photographs as sensory objects of affect, and using as examples Belgian and Luxembourg open-air schools and associated sanitary and social welfare provisions, the paper explores issues that have gone under-researched in sensory scholarship internationally: those of precise educational purposes, methods, processes and effects of sensory engagement, particularly pertaining to “smell”. Sensory practices and experiences and uses of senses generally are thereby traced in/as “situated, embodied” movements inextricably “enmeshed” with symbolism. The paper argues that while the educational goals underpinning the initiatives investigated and the approaches and practices characterizing these have changed, some (un)intended effects still have an impact today, for instance through Forest School as given shape in the United Kingdom. The concept of “odorous”, or rather “sensuous childhoods”, is proposed to denote ways that particular target groups have come to be imagined as in need of explicitly sensorial health and outdoor education.     

Entangling the social: Comments on Alexander Wendt,Quantum Mind and Social Science

Alexander Wendt suggests that an emerging field of research on quantum consciousness may have important implications for our understanding of the social world as well. He wants us to consider that the operations of the brain are not “classical” but rather quantum‐mechanical, and that this sheds light on the social worker as well. This article casts doubt on these claims. First, the idea of panpsychism (all physical things possess features of consciousness) is implausible on its face. Second, the findings of “quantum decision theory” are much more limited than Wendt recognizes. Third, the biological quantum effects currently subject to investigation are limited in their application to brains and persons by unavoidable limits of time and space scale on quantum effects. The “brain as quantum computer” or “brain as wave function” theory is very implausible given current knowledge.     

Sensing Bodies and Digitally Mediated Distress

ABSTRACT

In The Five Senses (2008) Michel Serres shows how the body is not an abstracted, dislocated surface that allows for the objectification of the senses and instead illustrates how it is a process: one of continually infolding sensitivities that translate our bodily feelings into a fluid sense of the world. In this article we explore what it means to be a body in the mediated environments of everyday lives of those who visit social media sites that are designed to help people deal with mental distress. We will discuss the way that “bodies” must tack between oft-competing pressures and draws, which emanate from the performance of sense that is contained within these sites. Attempts to “make” sense of the body in such terrains often require an increasingly sophisticated set of skills and expertise and can, despite our best efforts, result in the body being transported to unexpected places. In order to capture a sense of movement, people must try to transform their offline experiences into a set of actions that can be rendered meaningful in terms of an online domain, which we argue is against the way that people sense. We develop a theory of sensory bodies as subject to continual “movement,” drawing on the work of Serres, Simondon, and Manning, before discussing three examples of social media use in mental health, and the potential implications for people having to learn to sense in and through such online spaces.     

Surprising the Senses

ABSTRACT

We perceive the world around us and the objects in it with all our senses. Designers can therefore influence the way we experience everyday products by paying attention to the multiple sensory aspects of products.

When sensory information from two or more senses conflicts, people can be surprised. Currently, more and more product designers are experimenting with designing products that provide incongruent sensory information. Creating such products enables these designers to evoke interest for their products and let people experience something new.

In several studies, we have investigated people's reactions to and opinions about products with sensory incongruities. The results of our studies suggest that evoking surprise by incorporating sensory incongruities in products can be seen as a means to create more pleasurable product experiences.     

Constructing Core Values within the Framework of “Complex Modernity”

中国正处于“现代化运动与中华文明复兴”、“社会主义与资本主义”、“民族国家与全球化趋势”三大张力之中。这三大张力彰显出确立中国未来发展方向所面临的三大难题,是我们认清中国在当代世界历史中的位置,把握中国发展历史趋势的思想坐标。为解决难题,需要建立“复杂现代性”理念,并以此作为分析中国面临挑战的分析框架和探寻中国未来发展方向的方法论原则。同时,需要建立与“复杂现代性”相应的思维方式,建构当代中国社会发展的核心价值。     

The awakening of the body: “Film as Sensation” in the first French avant-garde

ABSTRACT

This article examines the notion of “Film as Sensation” in the first French avant-garde. It begins by exploring the meaning of this notion in a series of key films and aesthetic statements by Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, Pierre Porte, Henri Chomette, Jean Tedesco, and Réne Clair. Contrary to Gilles Deleuze’s account of the work of this school as Cartesian in spirit, this article seeks to demonstrate that it operates a fusion between the senses, disruption, and criticism: the three elements coming together to produce a new, integral art form. Walter Benjamin’s views on the tactile and the absent minded public of film, and Henri Bergson’s critique of time and movement in cinema are also discussed, with the latter being shown to be a key philosophical influence. The essay ends with an analysis of some films by Abel Gance, Marcel Duchamp, and Fernand Léger. It is concluded that the idea of “Film as Sensation” entrained a significant development in thinking about the mediation of perception that, once recovered from the oblivion to which it has been consigned, can help bring film theory to a reconsideration of the senses and a new attention to the aesthetics of filmic sensation.     

A Pastoral Understanding of Positive Aging

Abstract

Positive aging may be more dependent on spiritual well-being than physical capacity. Understanding the spiritual perspective derives from the dichotomy between the “perceptual” and the “spiritual” realms of human awareness. Awareness of spiritual process in relationship to positive aging may also offer counseling additional challenges and opportunities, including: a balanced perspective on life issues, a sense of humor, counter-factual thinking, internal strengths and resources for growing through life losses and crises, and compensation skills that focus on current capacity and chosen pathways rather than dwelling on lost abilities.     

Agentive Spaces,the “Background”, and Other Not Well Articulated Influences in Shaping our Lives

What is special about all our living exchanges with our surroundings is that they occur within the ceaseless, intertwined flow of many unfolding strands of spontaneously responsive, living activity. This requires us to adopt a kind of fluid, process thinking, a shift from thinking of events as occurring between things and beings existing as separate entities prior to their inter‐action, to events occurring within a continuously unfolding, holistic but stranded flow of events, with no clear, already existing boundaries to be found anywhere (Mol & Law, 1994)—a flow of events within which we ourselves are also immersed. We thus become involved in activities within which we find things happening to us, as much as we make things happen in our surroundings—in other words, our surroundings are also agentive in that they can exert “calls” upon us to respond within them in appropriate ways. Consequently, what we can learn in such encounters is not just new facts or bits of information, but new ways of relating or orienting ourselves bodily to the others and othernesses in the world around us—although much can “stand in the way” of our doing this. My concern below is to explore events happening on the (inter)‐subjective side of the Cartesian subject/object divide which “shape” our spontaneous ways of acting in, and reflecting on, the “worlds” within which we live out our lives.     

Violence against animals: an epistemological inquiry

What follows is an attempt to outline some of the more important conceptual and theoretical considerations regarding the relationship(s) between man and animal in the Western world. More specifically, I am interested in how man justifies the killing of animals and acts of violence against them. The human condition testifies to the cruelty and violence of man to man and man to animal. While the former has significantly been tamed over the centuries, the latter continues on a scale of significant proportion. There is no attempt here to answer the question, “why do men inflict violence and suffering on animals.” Rather, I endeavor to offer a more modest perspective and paint a conceptual picture of what has been argued as man’s dominion over animals and therefore man’s right to treat animals as he sees fit. I will also present a counter argument which claims that man has a duty and responsibility to treat animals in humane ways.     

The Historical Forms of Materialism and the Philosophical Domain of Historical Materialism

Natural materialism, humanistic materialism and historical materialism are the three historical forms of materialism. The “material” in historical materialism is a social thing which is “perceptible and imperceptible by the senses” and connotes social relations; and the “history” in historical materialism is the realm in which contradictions between man and nature and between man and society are able to unfold, so historical materialism is “actually a critical view of the world” that inherently contains dialectics in a “rational form.” The formulation of historical materialism opened a new path for the development of materialism and even philosophy as a whole. In the course of its critique of capitalist society, which unfolds with capital as a core category, historical materialism sublates abstract existence and discovers real social existence, thus putting an end to metaphysics, which is grounded in abstract ontology.     

E-Nose for News?

ABSTRACT

Many journalists claim to have a “nose for news.” This metaphor, where a body part is used in a transferred sense for metaphorical change has occupied a central place in journalists' discourses. It appears to express something essential about their identity, profession, practice, and how they “see” and experience the world. This article uses the figure/ground approach of Marshall McLuhan to inform an exploration of the “nose for news” metaphor. By studying the “nose for news” we can understand how and why electronic noses and the Internet have made this once vital and living metaphor obsolete. We can also discover ways to reanimate this metaphor in order to: (a) help recover something of the essence of journalism expressed by journalists' claims to possess a “nose for news,” and (b) re-conceptualize the current “crisis” in journalism.     

Delicious molecules: big food science,the chemosenses,and umami

Abstract

Since the closing decades of the twentieth century, molecular techniques of mapping chemosensation (the chemical senses of taste and smell) have been woven into a universalizing, evolutionary explanation for human eating behavior. In a prominent example, umami (translated from Japanese as “savory deliciousness”) has come to be understood as the “fifth basic taste sensation,” elicited by the common flavor enhancer monosodium glutamate (MSG) along with other amino acids and ribonucleotides. Meanwhile, socialized associations of food desirability, undesirability, pleasure, and disgust have likewise come to be interrogated on the molecular level – in the oral cavity, in the brain, and throughout the gastrointestinal tract. In this paper, I abridge this molecularization of sensuous eating with the provocation that the sensory is affective is molecular is political. This phrase signals the stakes with which taste and smell are ontologized as fundamentally embedded in memory (and thus in affect and in culture); as conducted in train with corporate food and beverage research and development; and effected at molecular sites of transduction (chemical reception). It is to say that, in recent decades, the sensory and affective domains have been made molecular. And in the context of food science, that molecular knowledge is interested. This paper conducts a brief, critical accounting of how chemosensation is made knowable and actionable, and for what purposes. It suggests that the most authoritative knowledge of how taste and smell mediate human health (the sensory) is shaped by the corporate imperative to determine what chemical compounds humans register as pleasurable (the affective), and thus what food products humans can be relied upon to buy (the political). As a result, a lack of scientific consensus on wider questions of metabolism – of glutamate, for instance – is built into chemosensory science, which has privileged the work of product design.     

本轮经济全球化的后果及其成因探索

由于本轮经济全球化主导观念的重大偏误，导致当今世界人与自然、人与人、人与自身的对立后果愈演愈烈。本轮经济全球化以“经济人”假定为逻辑起点，以发达国家的最大利润和经济效益为目标，实质是大资本在全球范围内对利润的持续性、体制化的疯狂劫掠，巧立名目地将人类共同资源与财富转化为利润装进了资本家私人口袋的同时，却把资本主义基本矛盾必然引发的人与自然的割裂、人与人的纷争和人相对于自身的异化等诸多脱序状况丢给了普罗大众。认清本轮经济全球化主导观念的偏误，有利于我们在实现“中国梦”的进程中，重树“道德人”的规范，积极化解这三大对立，而不是被“经济全球化”等中性概念所蒙蔽，受制于资本逻辑羁绊，苟安于日益危脆的世界之中。     

Portent Lore and Medieval Popular Culture

Norman R. Smith begins his essay by pointing out that there is no such thing as “popular” monster lore (teratology) in the Middle Ages, but goes on to say that a knowledge of the teratological thought of, say, Isidore of Seville, may give us a very good insight into the popular thoughtof the day. Ideas concerning “monstrous births,” considered portentous until recent times, tell us a great deal about the concepts men had of themselves in relation to their world, their god, and their historical place, factors which illuminate the imaginatively constructed ideas and their popularity during the Renaissance. Monster lore, of course, remains popular in our own day, hence our passionate interest in the Loch Ness Monster and our devotion to the myriad types of Frankenstein that have appeared recently, a fact that perhaps links us and our time in a rather startling way to the Middle Ages.     

An Analysis of the Psychological Mechanism of Confucius’ Benevolence

讨论中国人的观念系统在很大程度上离不开儒家思想, 分析儒家思想要从孔子开 始。孔子因 “德命” 受挫而形成 “时命” 观, “时命” 观挑战了 “以德配天” 的思 想, 这需要更为本源的终极观来应对。孔子在内外心理框架的互动中, 反思体悟而形 成 “仁” 的终极观。在此理念的支配下, 向内修德凝道而 “内圣”, 向外践行 “仁 政” 而 “外王” , 内外并重以获得充沛丰盈的生命意义感。

关键词:仁 内圣外王 心理机制

The discussion of the conceptual system of the Chinese is, to a large extent, inseparable from Confucian thought, and its analysis should start from Confucius himself. He developed the idea of shiming (时命), or the mandate of the times, after the idea of deming (德命), or the mandate of virtue, encountered repeated setbacks. Shiming challenged the idea that “Heaven is aligned with the virtuous,” and coping with this challenge required an ultimate worldview of a more original nature. Confucius formed his ultimate world view of “benevolence” (ren 仁) through the interaction between his internal and external psychological framework and his reflections and realizations. Gripped by this idea, he cultivated inward virtue and adhered to the Way while outwardly practicing benevolence, with the goal of becoming “a sage within and a king without.” The balancing of the interior and the exterior was the key to enjoying a rich and meaningful life.