Thanatopolitics and colonial logics in Blade Runner 2049

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110439
Author(s):  
Ali Rıza Taşkale
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Biology ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Reproductive Capacity ◽  
Biological Engineering ◽  
Blade Runner ◽  
Post Colonialism ◽  
The Relationship

This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present.

A Māori Girl Watches, Listens, and Learns – Coming of Age from an Indigenous Viewpoint: Mauri (Merata Mita, 1988)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous People ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
Indigenous Woman ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines Merata Mita’s Mauri, the first fiction feature film in the world to be solely written and directed by an indigenous woman, as an example of “Fourth Cinema” – that is, a form of filmmaking that aims to create, produce, and transmit the stories of indigenous people, and in their own image – showing how Mita presents the coming-of-age story of a Māori girl who grows into an understanding of the spiritual dimension of the relationship of her people to the natural world, and to the ancestors who have preceded them. The discussion demonstrates how the film adopts storytelling procedures that reflect a distinctively Māori view of time and are designed to signify the presence of the mauri (or life force) in the Māori world.

Spaces of Consumption in American Literary Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 391-410
Author(s):  
Gary Totten
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Natural Environments ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
New Strategies

This chapter discusses how consumer culture affects the depiction and meaning of the natural world in the work of American realist writers. These writers illuminate the relationship between natural environments and the social expectations of consumer culture and reveal how such expectations transform natural space into what Henri Lefebvre terms “social space” implicated in the processes and power dynamics of production and consumption. The representation of nature as social space in realist works demonstrates the range of consequences such space holds for characters. Such space can both empower and oppress individuals, and rejecting or embracing it can deepen moral resolve, prompt a crisis of self, or result in one’s death. Characters’ attempts to escape social space and consumer culture also provide readers with new strategies for coping with their effects.

Hidden Places: Hyper-realism in Björk’s Vespertine and Dancer in the Dark

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
DANIEL M. GRIMLEY
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Musical Identity ◽  
Theoretical Context ◽  
Lars Von Trier ◽  
The Relationship

Björk’s collaboration with the director Lars von Trier on the film Dancer in the Dark was marked by well-publicized personal and aesthetic differences. Their work nevertheless shares an intense preoccupation with the nature and quality of sound. Björk’s soundtrack systematically explores the boundaries between music and noise, and the title of von Trier’s film itself presupposes a heightened attention to aural detail. This paper proposes a theoretical context for understanding Björk’s music in the light of her work with von Trier. Whereas Björk’s soundtrack responds to the visual and narrative stimuli of von Trier’s film, the use of sound in her album Vespertine thematicizes more familiar Björk subjects: the relationship between music, landscape and the natural world, and Björk’s own (constructed) sense of Nordic musical identity. By placing Vespertine alongside Björk’s music for Dancer in the Dark, the sense of ‘hyperreality’ that defines both also emerges as a primary characteristic of her work.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

scholarly journals Protected area management in a post-natural world: negotiated governance at the Danish Wadden Sea

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cormac Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Protected Areas ◽  
National Parks ◽  
National Park ◽  
Wadden Sea ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Protected Area Management ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Large Protected Areas ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractNational parks and other large protected areas play an increasingly important role in the context of global social and environmental challenges. Nevertheless, they continue to be rooted in local places and cannot be separated out from their socio-cultural and historical context. Protected areas furthermore are increasingly understood to constitute critical sites of struggle whereby the very meanings of nature, landscape, and nature-society relations are up for debate. This paper examines governance arrangements and discursive practices pertaining to the management of the Danish Wadden Sea National Park and reflects on the relationship between pluralist institutional structures and pluralist, relational understandings of nature and landscape.

scholarly journals Management and Economics: Question of Development Goals

Upravlenie ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Толкачев ◽  
P. Tolkachev
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Complex Nature ◽  
Economic Management ◽  
Common Path ◽  
Fundamental Properties ◽  
Development Goals ◽  
Life On Earth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Large Groups ◽  
The Relationship

The article discusses the relationship of economic management with the economic basis. The thesis is substantiated that effective economic management depends on economic ideal, to which society will strive to achieve. The world surrounding a person constantly retains its essential fundamental properties. And in this way it is perfect. Man spiritually assumes himself above nature. Potentially, he sees himself as a master of the natural world. However, acting in nature as an independent free force, he constantly reveals his imperfect. Because of his limited knowledge of the infinitely complex nature, everything that a person creates is imperfect. The path to perfection is the natural goal of man’s life on earth. However, on this common path, all nations and their large groups – civilizations – are moving along different roads. And in modern conditions, these differences have reached a dangerous feature – more and more the confrontation of civilizations is emerging. The historical feature of the Russian economic worldview is the absolute priority of moral ideals. Its deep economic ideals are not aggressive in relation to other countries and peoples. These ideals are in finding and multiplying of good. Therefore, potentially, Russia can counteract the negative scenario of the development of civilizational conflicts.

‘Who Makes the Morning Darkness’: God and Creation in the Book of Amos

1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Gillingham
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Natural World ◽  
The Other ◽  
Genesis 1 ◽  
The Relationship

This paper has been the result of teaching and comparing two very different Old Testament texts, both of which are concerned with the relationship between God and the created order. One is Genesis 1, with its priestly concerns for harmony within the created order; the other is the book of Amos, where one encounters a profoundly pessimistic view of the coming disorder throughout the natural world. In making associations between these two texts, one cannot help but ask why the earlier reflections in Amos offer such aradical and developed understandingof God's relationship with creation — quite distinct from the view of God evidenced in the first chapter of Genesis.

Specimen Collectors

2021 ◽  
pp. 151-188
Author(s):  
Reed Gochberg
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Henry David Thoreau ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Louisa May Alcott ◽  
Research And Teaching ◽  
Comparative Zoology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Philosophical Writings

This chapter examines the early history of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and broader conversations about the representation of the natural world as fixed and stable. While the museum’s founder, Louis Agassiz, emphasized the value of preserved specimens to research and teaching, many collectors and writers questioned such practices. After donating turtles to the museum, Henry David Thoreau contemplated the ethical and scientific implications of freezing nature for extended study. In children’s fiction, Louisa May Alcott emphasized the relationship between collecting specimens and moral order, while highlighting the growing gendered divide between scientific practice in the museum and the parlor. And in philosophical writings, William James drew on classification to consider more flexible possibilities to fixed theories. These accounts show how writers sought to promote a deeper understanding of flux and change both within the museum and beyond.

Language, early modern philosophy of

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltan Gendler Szabo
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Anecdotal Evidence ◽  
Human Language ◽  
Philosophical Discussion ◽  
Origin Of Language ◽  
Precise Analysis ◽  
Natural Element ◽  
Animal Language ◽  
The Relationship

Philosophical interest in language during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was strong but largely derivative. Most thinkers shared Leibniz’s view ‘that languages are the best mirror of the human mind, and that a precise analysis of the significations of words would tell us more than anything else about the operations of the understanding’. The three most important areas of philosophical discussion about language in the modern period were the nature of signification, the origin of human language and the possibility of animal language. Signification was generally viewed as a relation between linguistic signs and ideas. There was no agreement whether signification is entirely conventional or contains a natural element, but the view is that it is entirely natural virtually disappeared. Even those who retained the belief in the possibility of a philosophically perfect language insisted that such a language should be constructed anew, rather than rediscovered as the lost language of Adam. The traditional biblical account of the origin of language was more and more contested but, as more naturalistic theories emerged, the problem of why other animals cannot talk became especially pressing. Debates about language in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were highly speculative; participants in these debates often relied on simplistic biological theories, inadequate grammars or anecdotal evidence from travellers. What makes these discussions important is less their scientific contribution than their engagement with the philosophical problems concerning the relationship between the human mind and the natural world.

Natural selection and adaptation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Lewens
Keyword(s):  
Natural Selection ◽  
Functional Traits ◽  
Evolutionary Biology ◽  
Skin Pigmentation ◽  
Essential Element ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Modern Biology ◽  
Biology Textbook ◽  
Selection For ◽  
The Relationship

Students of the natural world have long remarked on the fact that animals and plants are well suited to the demands of their environments. ‘Adaptation’, as it is used in modern biology, can name both the process by which organisms acquire this functional match, and the products of that process. Eyes, wings, beaks, camouflaging skin pigmentation and so forth, are all ‘adaptations’ in this second sense. Modern biological orthodoxy follows Darwin in giving a central role to natural selection in explaining the production of adaptations such as these. This much is uncontroversial. But a number of more contentious conceptual questions are raised when we look in more detail at the relationship between natural selection and adaptation. One of these questions concerns how we should define adaptation. It is tempting to characterize adaptations as functional traits – eyes are for seeing, large beaks are for cracking tough seed-casings. This in turn has led many commentators in biology and philosophy to define adaptations as those traits which have been shaped by natural selection for their respective tasks. Others – especially biologists – have complained that such a definition trivializes Darwin’s claim that natural selection explains adaptation. This claim was meant to be an important discovery, not a definitional consequence of the meaning of ‘adaptation’. These worries naturally lead on to the issues of how natural selection itself is to be understood, how it is meant to explain adaptation, and how it should be distinguished from other important evolutionary processes. These topics have a historical dimension: is Darwin’s understanding of natural selection, and its relationship to adaptation, the same as that of today’s evolutionary biology? Textbook presentations often say yes, and this is surely legitimate if we make the comparison in broad terms. But differences emerge when we look in more detail. Darwin, for example, seems to make the ‘struggle for existence’ an essential element of natural selection. It is not clear whether this is the case in modern presentations. And Darwin’s presentation is largely neutral on the inheritance mechanism that accounts for parent/offspring resemblance, while modern presentations sometimes insist that natural selection always implies a genetic underpinning to inheritance.

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