All posts filed under: biology

New Serres in English: Biogea from Univocal

Tuesday, June 5, 2012
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
biology / daybreak / irreversibility / language / Politics / Serres

“Always the same. This history could make a rock cry from boredom and death. How sad that history seems when faced with the crystalline and floral diversity of things; how often human history seems monotonous in comparison to the enchanting adventures of the world.” (Michel Serres, Biogea) The presses at Univocal have caught fire lately. This first English translation (thanks to Randolph Burks) of a major work of Michel Serres, the Biogea, thunders with the […]

Simondon and the Machine: Technology, Individuation, Reality

Tuesday, November 20, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comments 4
biology / crystal / cybernetics / form / individuation / knowledge / machine / physics / psychology / Science / Mathematics / Technology / Simondon / structure / technology / tension

Fractal Effervescence (2006), David April   Simondon and the Theory of Individuation There is something eternal in a technical scheme… and it is that which is always present, and can be conserved in a thing. Gilbert Simondon Gilbert Simondon’s reformulation of information theory on the basis of a new philosophy of technology has, in comparison to earlier attempts, at least the following major advantages to its credit: – His thought introduces us to an entirely […]

Machinic Autopoesis

Thursday, October 11, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
Leave a comment
abstract machine / biology / cybernetics / form / information / model / ontology / structure / system / theory

Process In Mechanism and Biological Explanation [Maturana 1970], Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela argue that machines and biological forms are very closely related — so closely, in fact, that biologists can reasonably claim living systems are machines. This is not meant merely as a pedagogical metaphor, but rather as a rigorous analogy, which emphasizes important symmetries, and even better, expresses concisely specific experimental and theoretical aims. In what sense, then, are living systems machines? A […]

A Sketch of Gilbert Simondon

Wednesday, September 19, 2007
by Taylor Adkins
comment 1
becoming / being / biology / equilibrium / flux / individuation / metastability / ontogenesis / ontology / Simondon / singularities

Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary. New York: Zone, 1992. 296-319. At the same time that a quantity of potential energy (the necessary condition for a higher order of magnitude) is actualized, a portion of matter is organized and distributed (the necessary condition for a lower order of magnitude) into structured individuals of a middle order of magnitude, developing by a mediate process of […]

Finitude

Saturday, February 17, 2007
by Joseph Weissman
comment 1
biology / death / illusion / knowledge

If we aim to start with that which we know even better than ourselves–are we not beginning at the end? After all, we know that we will die, possibly more certainly than we “know” anything else. Death and decay, the termination of biology and at once its first law—it is against these, indeed in resistance only, that we live. We live around death, amidst death, we live against, in defiance of this universal law; yet […]