
Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity
Routledge (Publisher)
1st Edition
Published on 27. December 2021
Book
Hardback
186 pages
978-0-367-70545-9 (ISBN)
Description
This book is based upon the collaborative efforts of the Ontogenetics Process Group (OPG) - an interdisciplinary, multi-institutional, multi-national research group that began meeting in 2017 to explore new and innovative ways of thinking the problem of complexity in living, physical, and social systems outside the algorithmic models that have dominated paradigms of complexity to date.
For all the descriptive and predictive power that the complexity sciences offer (the ability to compute feedback systems, recursive networks, emergent dynamics, etc.), they also presume that the living world in all of its modalities (biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social) can be reduced to finite schema of description that delimits in advance all possible outcomes. What is proposed in this volume are conceptual architectures for the living that are not only irreducible to physico-mathematical frames of reference, but that are also as vital as the phenomena they wish to express. In short: life is more complex than complexity. What emerges from this engagement is not the ascendance of a new transcendental principle (or, what amounts to the same thing, a foundational bedrock) derived from the physico-mathematical sciences, but just the opposite: a domain in which the ontological and the epistemological domains enter a zone of strange (and unavoidable) entanglement.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
For all the descriptive and predictive power that the complexity sciences offer (the ability to compute feedback systems, recursive networks, emergent dynamics, etc.), they also presume that the living world in all of its modalities (biological, semiotic, economic, affective, social) can be reduced to finite schema of description that delimits in advance all possible outcomes. What is proposed in this volume are conceptual architectures for the living that are not only irreducible to physico-mathematical frames of reference, but that are also as vital as the phenomena they wish to express. In short: life is more complex than complexity. What emerges from this engagement is not the ascendance of a new transcendental principle (or, what amounts to the same thing, a foundational bedrock) derived from the physico-mathematical sciences, but just the opposite: a domain in which the ontological and the epistemological domains enter a zone of strange (and unavoidable) entanglement.
The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Taylor & Francis Ltd
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 174 mm
Weight
520 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-367-70545-9 (9780367705459)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Cary Wolfe | Adam Nocek
Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity
Book
01/2024
1st Edition
Routledge
€63.00
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Cary Wolfe | Adam Nocek
Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity
E-Book
12/2021
1st Edition
Routledge
€55.49
Available for download

Cary Wolfe | Adam Nocek
Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity
E-Book
12/2021
1st Edition
Routledge
€55.49
Available for download
Persons
Cary Wolfe is Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of English at Rice University, USA, where he is Founding Director of 3CT: Center for Critical and Cultural Theory. His books and edited collections include What Is Posthumanism? and Ecological Poetics, or, Wallace Stevens's Birds. In 2007 he founded the series Posthumanities at the University of Minnesota Press.
Adam Nocek is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, USA. Nocek is the Founding Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies at ASU and the author of Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology.
Adam Nocek is Assistant Professor in Philosophy of Technology and Science and Technology Studies in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering at Arizona State University, USA. Nocek is the Founding Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies at ASU and the author of Molecular Capture: The Animation of Biology.
Content
Introduction 1. Eros and Logos 2. The Epimedial Landscape 3. The Digital Sublime: Algorithmic Binds in a Living Foundry 4. Alienated Life: Toward a Goth Theory of Biology 5. The Square Root of Negative One is Imaginary 6. The Singularity Has Come and Gone: The Beginning of Organization 7. In- Kind Disruptions: Circadian Rhythms and Necessary Jolts in Eco- Cinema 8. Relational Realism and the Ontogenetic Universe: Subject, Object, and Ontological Process in Quantum Mechanics 9. Scientific Thought and Absolutes: For an Image of the Sciences, Between Computing and Biology 10. What "The Animal" Can Teach "The Anthropocene" 11 Ontogenesis Beyond Complexity: Conversations