Books by Joshua Schuster
Introduction to: The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscalo... more Introduction to: The Ecology of Modernism: American Environments and Avant-Garde Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015)
Papers by Joshua Schuster
Ecopoetics: Essays in the Field, 2018
Abstract: Extinction is a fact of biological periodicity and deep time, but it is also a marker o... more Abstract: Extinction is a fact of biological periodicity and deep time, but it is also a marker of modernity and the present. Biologists estimate that over 99% of all species in the history of earth have gone extinct. The vast majority of life on earth has perished, and all species are fated for extinction eventually, yet it is still common to see philosophers of life as different as Gilles Deleuze and Richard Dawkins argue for generativity and productivity as the defining characteristics of life. This essay argues for a philosophical thought on biology that understands extinction to be at the heart of the process of speciation in making and unmaking the conditions of life. I discuss how philosophers ranging from reductionism to vitalism (Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz) minimize the significance of extinction at the same time as they argue for the unimportance of the species form. I then turn to some recent arguments for (Ray Brassier) and against (Quentin Meillassoux) understanding extinction as the definitive context for the overlapping of biological and philosophical problems of finitude. I discuss how Brassier’s estimation of extinction as the decisive undoing of correlationist philosophies may be the correct philosophical assessment but it overstates the flattening effects of extinction and diverts problems of biology onto problems of philosophy. The essay finishes with a return to emphasizing the importance of how Darwin describes the sustenance and collapse of life together in the same unfolding processes of evolution. After Darwin, philosophical thought on life must account for both becoming and the failure to become, species transformation and species eradication, difference and devastation, uniqueness and erasure.
Essay can be found here: http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia27/Parrhesia27_Schuster.pdf
Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, 2017
Abstract: Recent environmental humanities scholars have called for thinking at planetary-scales t... more Abstract: Recent environmental humanities scholars have called for thinking at planetary-scales to develop new theoretical tools to conceptualize the massive ecological changes wrought in the Anthropocene. This essay proposes that humanities scholars expand their planetary thinking further to consider how one subfield of astronomical science today – the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) – can be helpful in developing new ways of thinking environmental futurity. SETI research is not just for looking for aliens, but can be turned back on Earth to understand it as one planet among others. SETI also involves thinking about the durability of messages, contact with other cultures, and the longevity of any civilization’s effects on a planet. I then turn to considering how these same concerns of cultural longevity in SETI and environmental futurity are also concerns relevant to poetics. This essay then makes an exploratory double proposition: the theorizing of poetics can learn much from the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), and SETI research and technology can learn much from poetics. Many of the questions poetry asks about the function and limits of form, meaning, communication, and the longevity of messages are raised in a similar way, although in a very different context, by SETI research. Specifically, the essay involves a series of close readings of the long poem “Exobiology as Goddess” by Will Alexander. This poem is shown to exemplify a series of tropes taken from classical poetics and from science fiction that culminates into what can be identified as “exopoetics,” which names the convergence of poetics and SETI thinking and applies these to planetary scale concerns.
Article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/stable/pdf/10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0147.pdf
Extinction narratives are typically divided into two streams: last human stories that usually dep... more Extinction narratives are typically divided into two streams: last human stories that usually depict apocalyptic ends for the planet, and last animal stories that cast a melancholy look at species finitude but view modernity continuing as usual. But as animal extinction rates are rising now across the planet, these narratives can no longer be seen as distinct. This essay discusses the convergence of these extinction plots in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (also called Lilith’s Brood). Finished in 1989, this trilogy brings contemporary science on genetic modification and gene banking into the purview of a science fiction story about an alien species interested in mating with humans, a nearly extinct species due to nuclear war, in order to absorb their genetic material. Butler’s novel examines issues central to biopolitics and animal studies that appear specifically at the threshold of extinction events. This essay discusses the ways her novel calls upon the reader to think self-reflexively about how extinction and genetic knowledge intertwine in contemporary cultural and scientific debates about the decline of biodiversity.
Essay can be found at: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2012/schuster.html
Jacket 2, 2011
Paper can be found at: http://jacket2.org/article/making-tender-buttons
Architecture and Philosophy: New Perspectives on the Work of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, ed. Françoise Kral and Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 95-112. New York: Rodopi, 2010.
This essay considers the implications of Arakawa and Madeline Gins' architectural body as predica... more This essay considers the implications of Arakawa and Madeline Gins' architectural body as predicated on a non-dualistic theory and therefore against meta-biological models of life. This approach emphasizes the quotidian availability and participation of the body in its surround that opens into a new way of considering causality as an architectural and philosophical problem. I argue that their work suggests a new manifesto for building around causal movements rather than cause and effect structure. The combination of new motifs of causal change and new biological models converges in a political aesthetic that I call "biotopian."
This essay considers the implications of Arakawa and Madeline Gins' architectural body as predica... more This essay considers the implications of Arakawa and Madeline Gins' architectural body as predicated on a non-dualistic theory and therefore against meta-biological models of life. This approach emphasizes the quotidian availability and participation of the body in its surround that opens into a new way of considering causality as an architectural and philosophical problem. I argue that their work suggests a new manifesto for building around causal movements rather than cause and effect structure. The combination of new motifs of causal change and new biological models converges in a political aesthetic that I call "biotopian."
Conference Presentations by Joshua Schuster
Catherine Malabou has argued in several essays and interviews that Derrida did not go far enough ... more Catherine Malabou has argued in several essays and interviews that Derrida did not go far enough with deconstruction, and that nothing is undeconstructible. At certain moments, especially in later writings, Derrida indicated that there were limits to what could be deconstructed, pointing to justice, democracy, hospitality, and a “messianism without religion.” Malabou questions how Derrida makes a decision not to deconstruct, and she states that none of the undeconstructibles from Derrida come from the assertion of a true transcendens or universality. Each of Derrida’s supposedly undeconstructibles appear tied to a notion of a self-making, self-effacing subject who is not at all transcendental, but rather dependent on temporary configurations of life on an unstable planet. However, there is another way to understand Derrida’s resistance to deconstruction that is not dependent on retaining the central figure of the subject. If everything is deconstructible, then deconstruction becomes an automatic work, an calculable system guaranteed in advance. Also, Derrida does not make subjectivity into a transcendens, but rather a point of singularity, an uncalculable turning point. It is given in advance that everything is plastic and every subject position can be deconstructed, but at the same time each life is unbreakably singular, non-replaceable, and not calculated in advance.
Book Reviews by Joshua Schuster
thought it would be. The bioart project became well-known in its time: to implant a poem inside t... more thought it would be. The bioart project became well-known in its time: to implant a poem inside the DNA of bacterium d. radiodurans that would be read by the organism each time its genome replicated, expressing another poem as RNA pairs up for transcription. The bacteria would become
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Books by Joshua Schuster
Papers by Joshua Schuster
Essay can be found here: http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia27/Parrhesia27_Schuster.pdf
Article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/stable/pdf/10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0147.pdf
Essay can be found at: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2012/schuster.html
Conference Presentations by Joshua Schuster
Book Reviews by Joshua Schuster
Essay can be found here: http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia27/Parrhesia27_Schuster.pdf
Article can be found here: http://www.jstor.org.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/stable/pdf/10.5250/resilience.4.2-3.0147.pdf
Essay can be found at: http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue%2012/schuster.html