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Vladimir Vernadsky's concept of living matter is central to his biogeochemistry, the science he founded. For several reasons, his original understanding of living matter is one of the most complex notions in the history of the life sciences. First, biogeochemistry is by definition an interdisciplinary enterprise that embraces biology, including evolutionary theory, geology, and chemistry, and combines them into a unique research program. Second, if understood in the original sense as used by Vernadsky, living matter is a concept built into idiosyncratic metaphysics constructed around the so-called principle of life's eternity. Third, the concept of living matter reflects the specificity of Vernadsky's sophisticated philosophy of science as he insisted that 'scientific thought' is a planetary phenomenon as well as a geological force. In our contribution, we will introduce Vernadsky's concept of living matter in its historical context. Accordingly, we will also give some chronology of Vernadsky's work related to the growth of his biosphere concept highlighting the 'Ukrainian' period as it is in this period that he intensively elaborated on the notion of living matter. This will be followed by his theory of living matter as it was formulated in his major works of the later period. We are going to locate the notion of living matter within Vernadsky's theoretical system and demonstrate that he regarded his theory of the living as an evolutionary theory complementary to that of Charles Darwin from the very beginning. Additionally, we will briefly present Vladimir Beklemishev's concept of 'geomerida' which he developed at approximately the same time as Vernadsky was elaborating on his 'living matter' to highlight the specificity of the latter's methodology.
In search for an ecological concept defining a "whole complex of organisms inhabiting a given region" with more methodological value than 'complex organism' or 'biome' and 'biotic community', the British phytocenologist Arthur Tansley introduced the term 'ecosystem' in 1935. [...] Independently of each other, other scientists from different countries also recognized the interconnectedness of all phenomena on the Earth's surface, resulting in the parallel coining of various notions. The Russian Botanist Vladmir Sukachev (1880–1967) introduced the term 'biogeotsenoz' ('biogeocoenosis' or 'biogeocoenose'), which was broadly used in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. It was introduced into Russian in two stages: Following the forestologist Georgii Morozov (1867–1920), who systematically implemented Karl Möbius's term 'biocoenosis', Sukachev first suggested the term 'geotsenoz' ('geocoenosis') in 1942. It was meant to link the earth's surface with its inhabitants and abiotic environmental factors in a dynamic unit. However, in 1944, he changed geocoenosis into biogeocoenosis (BGC), implementing an integral connection with Vladimir Vernadsky's (1863–1945) concepts of the biosphere and the biogeochemical cycles. According to Sukachev, BGC came close to Tansley's notion of the ecosystem which also brings together a biocoenosis with its habitat (the ecotope). However, both terms were not used synonymously: as a more general term, ecosystem was not precise enough to classify the unit of nature itself, whereas the BGC, in accordance with Vernadsky's concept of 'living matter', did not include all abiogenic abiotic factors of the ecosystem. Also, the notions of 'facies' and 'landshaft', which were used by physical geographers, were discussed as similar conceptualization.
Self Study is a genre-bending work of autophilosophy. It opens a rare, rear window into the schizoid position of self-sufficient withdrawal and impassive indifference. This inability to be enriched by outer experiences feeds the relentless suspicion that hell is other people. Laying bare his life and work, Kishik engages with psychoanalysis, philosophy, and cultural inquiry to trace loneliness across the history of thought, leading to today's shut-in society and the autonomous subject of liberal capitalism.
In the retrospect of almost a decade, the year 2015 seems to offer at least two openings which can help us better understand and localize the "end of theory" narratives that began to take hold sometime around the end of the millennium. Rita Felski's much-discussed and much-maligned 2015 book, "The Limits of Critique", construed the long history of "critique" as largely continuous with the more recent (postwar) idea of "theory," which allowed her to question the presupposed progressivity and utility of the dominant critical-theoretical discourses of late 20th-century North American academia. In the same year, Philipp Felsch's "Der lange Sommer der Theorie" (which was recently published in English as "The Summer of Theory") went so far as to assign specific dates, 1960–1990, and tended to define theory not as a purely academic product, but as a much wider cultural movement. Between the two books, questions of the difference between theory and critique, their specific institutional locus within and beyond academia, became objects of acute concern.
In present-day Germany, research on postwar academia, up through the 1960s and beyond, requires no special justification. But from the North American side, the point of this scholarly activity - including the many new editions and a flood of archive-based publications - is much less obvious. For the most well-established figures of the period, the primary international canonizations were already part of the first waves of the reception, the theoretical tectonics established themselves accordingly, and the theories were established as theories - which are in many quarters presumed to be just as reliable today as they were decades ago. One might say that the international and North American reception of European theory has manifested an overall tendency toward sedimentation, while the dynamic of scholarly research about theory, including the archival unearthing of new sources, tends to complicate and undermine the established corpus of "primary texts."
Rethinking smartness
(2023)
Like many metropolitan centers around the world, Berlin aspires to be a "smart city." Making a city smart usually involves constructing a dense net of sensors, often embedded in and around more traditional infrastructures throughout the urban environment, such as transportation systems, electrical grids, and water systems. The process also requires the city to solicit the distributed input of its inhabitants through active technological means, such as smart phone apps. Finally, the city employs high-end computing and learning algorithms to analyze the resulting data, with the goal of optimizing urban technical, social, and political processes. Yet, perhaps counterintuitively, a smart city is not synonymous with a utopian - or even a specific - form of the city, which would then remain stable for the foreseeable future. In this sense, the smart city is quite unlike utopian cities as they were imagined in the past, when it was presumed that a specific form - such as Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" or the concentric circles of Ebenezer Howard's garden cities - would enable a specific goal, such as integration of humans into natural processes, or economic growth, or an increase in collective happiness, or democratic political participation. Rather, a city is "smart" when it achieves the capacity to adjust to any new and unexpected threats and possibilities that may emerge from the city's ecological, political, social, and economic environments (a capacity that is generally referred to in planning documents with the term "resilience"). In short, a smart city is a site of perpetual learning, and a city is smart when it achieves the capacity to engage in perpetual learning.
Im Wesentlichen liefern die beiden Romane - dies soll im Folgenden gezeigt werden - Beispiele für eine Kontinuitätsthese, die Martin Weiß als Lesart benennt: die Fortführung bzw. das unsichtbare (Wieder-)Aufgehen souveräner Macht im biopolitischen Regulieren und Disziplinieren. Um die 'verbundene Polarität' plastisch werden zu lassen, wähle ich die Metapher des Gängelbands als Veranschaulichung, die eine doppelte Lesart in sich vereint: Zum einen steht sie für einen lebenssichernden, biopolitischen Eingriff, der trotz Kontrolle durch die charakteristische 'Steigerung des Lebens' ein repressives Movens ausschließt; zum anderen erweist sie sich als gleichsam rückläufiges Modell, das das 'alte Recht' der autoritären Zucht rehabilitiert. In diesem historischen Rahmen "gesellschaftlicher Transformationsprozesse", manifestiert sich ein (anti-)biopolitisches Wechselspiel. Dieses Spannungsverhältnis findet sich als literarische Reflexion nicht nur in Grosses Roman, sondern auch in Goethes "Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre" (1795/1796). Die Protagonisten beider Romane treffen auf sektenähnliche Gruppen, die sie wie am Gängelband führen und so direkt in das Leben der 'Jünglinge' eingreifen. Wie sich dies genau ausgestaltet, soll sich in der folgenden Analyse zeigen.
Anarchival practises : the Clanwilliam Arts Project as re-imagining custodianship of the past
(2023)
Where is the past? It is not really behind us, but with us, constantly imagined and re-imagined in public discourse through historical narrations. Using the Clanwilliam Arts Project as a case study, this volume is founded on the 'anarchive', a conceptual constellation that positions the past in relation to the present, bringing into view strategies to facilitate remembering beyond the colonial archive.
Der folgende Beitrag interessiert sich für das Verhältnis des biopolitischen Machtmodells zu Phänomenen moderner Serialisierung und möchte wahrnehmbar machen, in welch großem Ausmaß Technologien der Serialität für die Beobachtung, das Verständnis und die Manipulation bzw. Beherrschung des Lebens eingesetzt worden sind. Dabei soll deutlich werden, dass die Beziehungen zwischen Leben und Serialisierung derart umfangreich und ubiquitär sind, dass eine theoretische Beschreibung der Biopolitik ohne die Berücksichtigung des Konzepts 'Serialität' kaum sinnvoll möglich ist. Das mag teilweise auch daran liegen, dass beide Begriffe, also sowohl die 'Biopolitik' als auch die 'Serie' einen nur schwer zu beherrschenden Bedeutungsumfang aufweisen, der dazu verführt, allzu viele Phänomene mit diesen Konzepten zu beschreiben. Um dem etwas entgegenzuwirken, werden im Folgenden verschiedene Bereiche unterschieden, in denen das 'Leben' und die 'Serie' seit dem 19. Jahrhundert aufeinandertreffen, so dass biopolitische Serialisierung konkreter adressiert und eine allzu vage Verwendung der Begriffe vermieden werden kann. Diese Bereiche betreffen die Serialisierung der Wahrnehmung des Lebens, die Serialisierung der Lebensverhältnisse durch Mechanisierungsprozesse in modernen Industriegesellschaften und die massenmediale Serialisierung, die abschließend noch etwas mit Blick auf die periodische Presse und dem Beispiel des von 1923 bis 1935 erschienenen Magazins "Das Leben" konkretisiert wird.