Returning to the level of the skin and beyond: A techno -zoontology.
Item
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Title
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Returning to the level of the skin and beyond: A techno -zoontology.
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Identifier
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AAI3187471
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identifier
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3187471
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Creator
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Weinstein, Jami.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Sibyl Schwarzenbach
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Date
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2005
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Philosophy
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Abstract
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Finding myself on the New York City subway, I noticed the omnipresent, post-September 11th mantra: "If you see something, say something." It failed to signal the now commonplace terror of backpacks concealing explosives or bio-chemical weapons. Instead, I was pondering ontology and biology---and terrorism; the way in which certain antiquated or unsubstantiated biological claims have been effectively terrorizing us since the dawn of western intellectual history with their something , that ever-elusive substance of which we are alleged to be constituted, and their paucity of evidence to justify it. I wanted to expose the fact that the something I see is nothing. And, saying something about the nothing we are is exactly what I do here.;There are four parts. Part 1, the methodological framework, reclaims an ontological theory that was actual virtually in the past. It synthesizes Buddhist and Heraclitean intuitions to harvest a non-substantive, fluid motif of being later transplanted into post-Nietzschean theory. This is cast in contrast to and in repudiation of the hegemonic Aristotelian/Cartesian ontology of substance.;Parts 2 and 3 justify the preference for non-substantive ontology by deploying evidence from recent biology and teletechnology to establish the human as an inextricably interdependent being. Zoontology, the theme of Part 2, bespeaks our interspeciesed nature, the aspect of being that is animalic, a chimerically hybrid force essentially cobbled together with a variety of species---flora, fauna, fungus, and microorganisms. Technoontology, the rubric of Part 3, codes human being and experience as artifactually/technologically textured and reflectively figured. Jointly, Parts 2 and 3 are descriptive and justificative, theorizing transhuman being while providing fuel to raze Enlightenment humanism and its handmaiden substance ontology.;Finally, the conclusions herald the normative effects: how this ontology renarrates the range of responses to the question of how one might live. I assess critiques of situating ontology and ethico-politics in a dynamic relationship and underscore non-substance ontology's capacity both to regulate and limit the sorts of ethico-political platforms we can advocate and to produce novel human possibilities. I suggest that these possibilities square well with progressive ethico-political agendas and gesture toward the realization of that future.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
