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Metabolism has long served as a broad organizing concept in Russian and Soviet culture for the exchange of material and energy between organisms and their environment. The Russian term 'obmen veshchestv', literally meaning "exchange of substances", semantically ranges beyond the Latinate 'metabolizm' (metabolism) and provides a framework for reflecting on bodies and material objects as open systems engaged in a constant process of transformation. 'Obmen veshchestv' appears in public discourse in mid-19th century Russia as a calque from the German term 'Stoffwechsel' (or 'Wechsel der Materie'). Its usage in Russia reflects the enduring influence of German science. In this entry, I will explore the development and expansion of this concept of material and energy exchange between organisms and their environment in Russia and the Soviet Union. In the course of a century, metabolism migrated from discussions of plant nutrition into physiology, thermodynamics, and ultimately into the Soviet practice of state economic planning. This entry will therefore pay particular attention to the early Soviet period when existing debates on metabolism took on new urgency as tools for praxis on every scale, from the body of the individual worker to humanity's future collective management of planetary material and energy flows.
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.
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.
The Soviet Union is remembered as a lab for socioeconomic changes on larges scales and environmental catastrophes: the Chernobyl disaster, the Aral Sea tragedy, and ecocide. However, little is known about the groundbreaking concepts and theories of Russian and early Soviet science which laid the foundation for systemic ecological thinking, environmental consciousness for nature conservation, and corresponding initiatives of the revolutionary years after 1917. The isolation of Eastern Europe that came as a result of Stalinism and the Cold War led to Soviet science developing its own scientific approaches and terminology during the 20th century. This does not only include ideological constructions and practices such as the pseudo-scientific Lysenkoism which outlawed genetics and led to disastrous effects on agriculture, the people, and the scientific community. Soviet science has also managed to continue and unfold the new concepts and interdisciplinary dynamics of the ecological turn on the threshold of the 20th century, a development which, at that time, was only sporadically noted in the West. In the context of its thematic focus on Eastern European ecological terminology, this issue discusses a selection of these concepts.
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.
Aumiller writes lists to externalize what overwhelms her. To be in control. To master and move on. Yet, her lists circle back to her. The process of writing the same list every day or the same act of writing the list is a looping. She returns to herself, to the parts she can remember and to the parts she can't remember, but also can't leave behind.
Usually, fears and phobias range under anxiety disorders, and are listed in psychiatric manuals. Their variety seems infinite, and their severity varies from a slight uneasiness or tension to a condition in which a state of great panic is induced by the specific stimulus, which can be an object, an animal, a number, people, spaces, ideas, or a particular situation. The list of fears by Czech artist Eva Kot'átková is part of the installation "Asylum" that was presented at the Venice Biennale in 2013. Kot'átková's works often reflect on the processes that restrict and manipulate people within institutions such as psychiatric hospitals or schools.
Proust list impulse
(2022)
Lists litter Marcel Proust's pages of "À la recherche du temps perdu" ("In Search of Lost Time"), but also the works about it. This short contribution collects together a number of those lists, and offers some reflection on the list's place and function within the work, on the level of the sentence and as a form in its own right.
This short essay offers thoughts on bell hooks's use of the list form in the phrase 'white supremacist capitalist patriarchy'. While this list suggests that the social forces it contains work together in one unified direction, we can also look to instances in which they pull in opposing directions. However, the function of the list may not be to faithfully map the complexities of social life, but, rather, in its reduction and simplicity, to enable us to believe that social transformation is possible.
On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
Law is other wor(l)ds
(2022)
This paper turns to the thought of Yan Thomas to address the way of constructing categories and operating through them that is typical of law. The art of law displays a special quality: the reduction of the 'things' of the social world through the construction of categories, and the use of these same categories to conduct legal operations. The paper argues that the quintessential legal performance is instituting, and it finally asks how to exercise a legal imagination for Gaia.
The question of home is a complicated one. While home is emplaced, the notion of home does not simply point to just a location. This chapter thus utilizes what I call the trope of the 'vignette' to look at the concept of home in order to identify some aspects of what constitutes and/or (re)creates it for displaced individuals. It does so by performing a close reading of key moments in the film "Salt of this Sea" by Annemarie Jacir and the collection of essays "The Idea of Home" by John Hughes.
The chapter explores the dimension of the living present as a form of temporal reduction, looking at its manifestation in literary texts. Bazzoni proposes here a focus on the living present as different from a still, eternal moment, and contrasts the experience of the living present with the reduction at play in trauma. Finally, the author discusses the affective, ethical, and political dimensions of the temporality of the living present as a site of subjectivation, which effects a counter-reduction of normative discourses.
In the age of pervasive computing the way our body interacts with reality needs to be reconceptualized. The reduction of embodiment is a problem for computer music since this music relies heavily on different layers of (digital) technology and mediation in order to be produced and performed. The article shows that such a mediation should not be conceived of as an obstacle but rather as a constitutive element of a permanent, complex negotiation between the artist, the machinery, and the audience, aimed at shaping a different temporality for musical language (as the Italian artist Caterina Barbieri develops).
Nothing beyond the name : towards an eclipse of listening in the psychotherapeutic enterprise
(2022)
What are the different kinds of reduction that take place in a psychotherapeutic discipline? This article looks at the agonistic relations between the two types of reduction that fundamentally constitute a psychotherapeutic paradigm: naming and listening. At any given moment in the history of psychological theory, various schools and theories are in contention with each other over an institutional and state legitimation that will only be granted to one or some of them. It is argued that these disciplinary contentions for a dominant status subordinate the names and concepts that populate a particular psychotherapeutic paradigm to a property regime, thereby obscuring or compromising the attention paid to forms of listening that occur on the edge of naming and meaning.
Feminist, queer, and trans studies are all influenced significantly by anti-identitarian thought. Yet, contemporary gender and sexual identities only seem to be proliferating: nonbinary, graysexual, demigender, and more. This chapter focuses on a series of reference guides that schematize this recent expansion. Often miming reductive reference forms (the dictionary, the A-Z list), these texts and the questions they raise help to rethink the place of 'identity' across gender and sexuality studies.
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography - her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris - as a final instance of the line, as border.
Given the prospect of post-oil futures, this chapter historically situates contemporary Gulf Futurism within cybernetic and logistical aspirations underlying the current global trend of the smartness mandate. Working through the complex visuality that the cybernetic black box animates, the chapter revisits Fredric Jameson's cognitive mapping as an allegorical model for the inherent frictions of computational capital. To this end, it discusses Kuwaiti artist Monira Al Qadiri's artistic practice that reclaims a right to speculate while condensing material reality and imaginative threads, thereby going beyond a mere gesture of unveiling or mapping.
Structural anthropology remains a hidden influence in Frantz Fanon's theory of the 'sociogenesis' of mental illness. This chapter outlines how Fanon's belief in the therapeutic capacity of 'socialization' critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss's examination of the link between 'madness' and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute 'semihospitalization' as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis (1958–60).