Ethical questions feature prominently on today's cultural andpolitical agendas. The Ethics of Cultural Studies presents an ethicalmanifesto for Cultural Studies, an exploration of its current ...ethicaland political concerns, and of its future challenges.The book is concerned with ethics in the material world, and drawson examples as diverse as cloning and genetics, asylum andimmigration, experiments in plastic surgery and in electronic anddigital art, memories of the Holocaust, September 11th, and mediarepresentations of violence and crime.The Ethics of Cultural Studies is a groundbreaking intervention thatsets the debate on ethics in cultural study, and offers an invaluablesource of ideas for students of contemporary culture.
An examination of ethical challenges that technology presents to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human and a proposal for a new ethics of life rooted in the philosophy of alterity.
Bioethical ...dilemmas—including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion—have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, among the public, and in professional and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media, Joanna Zylinska argues, is the transformation of the very notion of life. In this provocative book, Zylinska examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, she goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose a new “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop. After a detailed discussion of the classical theoretical perspectives on bioethics, Zylinska describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac's infamous fluorescent green bunny. Zylinska addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, Zylinska makes the case for a new nonsystemic, nonhierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.
Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, Joanna Zylinska argues ...that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, last but not least, extinction. Offering a critique of the socio-political underpinnings of AI, AI Art: Machine Visions and Warped Dreams raises poignant questions about the conditions of art making and creativity today. The book critically examines artworks that use AI, be it in the form of visual style transfer, algorithmic experiment or critical commentary. It also engages with their predecessors, including robotic art and net art. AI Art includes a project from Zylinska’s own art practice titled ‘View from the Window’, which explores human and nonhuman forms of intelligence, perception and action. The book closes with speculation on future art – and on art’s future.
¿De qué manera puede hablar el ser humano a la sombra de la crítica poshumanista? Este ensayo surge de un momento prolongado de duda, de una confusión cognitiva y afectiva sobre la ontología y el ...estatus de aquello denominado “hombre”. Ahora bien, claramente la confusión no es novedosa, ha sido inherente a la investigación disciplinar dentro de las humanidades, y en particular a la investigación asociada, durante las últimas décadas, al posestructuralismo filosófico. A inicios del siglo xxi, han contribuido aún más a la incertidumbre en torno al “hombre” los in tentos de dar un giro hacia un involucramiento más serio de las humanidades con aquellas ciencias duras que tratan diferentes partes y par tículas humanas —anatomía, neurología, genética—, así como el descubrimiento de que los típicos puntos de medición del ser humano, como el lenguaje, el uso de herramientas, la cultura (o “dejar rastros”)
Life typically becomes an object of reflection when it is seen to be under threat. In particular, humans have a tendency to engage in thinking about life (instead of just continuing to live it) when ...being confronted with the prospect of death: be it the death of individuals due to illness, accident or old age; the death of whole ethnic or national groups in wars and other forms of armed conflict; but also of whole populations, be they human or nonhuman. Even though Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene is first and foremost concerned with life—understood as both a biological and social phenomenon—it is the narrative about the impending death of the human population (i.e., about the extinction of the human species), that provides a context for its argument. “Anthropocene” names a geo-historical period in which humans are said to have become the biggest threat to life on earth. However, rather than as a scientific descriptor, the term serves here primarily as an ethical injunction to think critically about human and nonhuman agency in the universe. Restrained in tone yet ambitious in scope, the book takes some steps towards outlining a minimal ethics thought on a universal scale. The task of such minimal ethics is to consider how humans can assume responsibility for various occurrences in the universe, across different scales, and how they can respond to the tangled mesh of connections and relations unfolding in it. Its goal is not so much to tell us how to live but rather to allow us to rethink “life” and what we can do with it, in whatever time we have left. The book embraces a speculative mode of thinking that is more akin to the artist’s method; it also includes a photographic project by the author.
Immune-potentiating functions of
strains in the common carp were evaluated.
Fourteen days of feeding fish dry diet supplemented with the bacteria provided parameters of nonspecific humoral immunity ...(lysozyme, ceruloplasmin, γ-globulin, total protein levels, and serum bactericidal activity) and cellular immunity (pinocytosis, respiratory burst activity, and potential killing activity of organ phagocytes), as well as the proliferative response of organ lymphocytes stimulated with mitogens. The resistance of fish to infection with
was also determined.
Dietary supplementation with
had a substantial influence on the activity of organ phagocytes, especially the potential killing activity of head kidney cells. A significant increase in the proliferative activity of LPS-stimulated B lymphocytes and in the levels of γ-globulins and total protein was observed. The supplemented diet conveyed higher resistance than the control diet as the cumulative fish mortalities after infection with
were 65% and 85%, respectively.
The results indicate that dietary supplementation with
stimulates the antibacterial resistance of common carp and may reinforce defence against bacterial infections, but further studies need to be conducted.
Imaginary Neighborsoffers a unique and significant contribution to the contemporary debate concerning Holocaust memory by exploring the most important current political topic in Poland: Jewish-Polish ...relations during and after World War II. Drawing on the controversy and attention generated by Jan Gross's landmark bookNeighbors, whose description of the brutal Jedwabne massacre reignited the debate over Polish-Jewish relations during the war, this timely volume presents a rich and nuanced examination of the manner in which past and present relations between Poles and Jews are understood in Poland and in the Polish and Jewish diasporas.
Rather than revisiting historical details of Jedwabne, this innovative collection uses an interdisciplinary approach to understand the reverberations of the events-and the scholarship that has evolved around them-within the context of the Polish national community. Combining scholarly essays with literary and journalistic accounts,Imaginary Neighborsdemonstrates that the Holocaust memory in Poland, together with the memory of Polish Jews and Jewish culture, continues to be engaged in conflict. What emerges is a passionate conversation among cultural critics, philosophers, literary theorists, historians, theologians, and writers on the vexing issues of responsibility, forgiveness, reconciliation, and national and religious identity.
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