Agnotology in Literature, Culture, and the Arts (MLA: New Orleans Jan. 9-12, 2025)

deadline for submissions: March 20, 2024

full name / name of organization: Amit Ray/Rochester Institute of Technology

contact email: axrgsl@rit.edu

This a a call for a Special Topics Panel to be held at the Modern Language Association Conference in New Orleans, January 9-12, 2025.

Agnotology, the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, has emerged as a critical lens through which to examine the production, dissemination, and contestation of knowledge within various spheres of human expression. This interdisciplinary panel seeks to investigate the intersections of agnotology with literature, culture, and the arts, and to explore how these fields both reflect and contribute to the construction of ignorance and uncertainty.

We welcome proposals for papers that engage with the following topics (but are not limited to):

  1. The representation of ignorance, misinformation, and epistemic uncertainty in literary texts, visual arts, film, and other cultural artifacts.
  2. Historical and contemporary instances of agnotology and its effects on social, political, and environmental discourse.
  3. The role of language, rhetoric, and narrative in the construction and perpetuation of ignorance and doubt.
  4. Counter-narratives, resistance, and strategies for challenging or subverting agnotological forces.
  5. The relationship between agnotology and power dynamics, including issues of race, gender, class, and colonialism.
  6. Agnotology in digital and virtual spaces, including social media, online communities, and digital archives.
  7. Pedagogical approaches to teaching agnotology and critical media literacy in educational contexts.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of no more than 300 words, a brief biographical statement, and any audiovisual or technical requirements.

Paraquat, Parkinson’s Disease, and Agnotology

Ray Dorsey and I published an article on “Paraquat, Parkinson’s, and Agnotology” which appeared in Movement Disorders in March of 2023. It has since been reprinted twice in The New Lede, and Arts and Opinion. The article elicited a subpoena from Swiss-headquartered Syngenta Corporation (a division of Chinese-owned Sinochem) regarding pending lawsuits against them from Parkinson’s patients. It is worth noting that Syngenta manufactures Paraquat in the north of England, but the pesticide is banned in Switzerland, the UK, and China.

Here is a brief overview of our work in RIT News.

movement-disorders-2023-dorsey-and-ray-paraquat-parkinson-s-disease-and-agnotologyDownload

Photo Credit: Scott Hamilton sdhmkt@rit.edu

This is what extinction feels like.

A melting planet, an accelerating (accelerant) species. Hyper nationalism and ideological militancy… I mean what’s not to like about a species that toys with its own extinction, as it demands growth on every front that can be monetized and brought into financial logic? Our very extinction seems to be available for extraction and profit—a growth industry that ends in collapse. Ours is a species in bloom. #autocolonialism

Hybrid note to E and T

Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. In this sense the human begins to actively restructure itself. And, militaries and companies are the ones that are exploring such processes most intensively. Such invisibility begets all kinds of trauma, deformation, and amnesia-cal qualities in a species toto. It boggles my mind. This is happening. Much has likely already happened. The big nation states have only ever been war machines, no?

And corporations eased themselves into alignment over much of the last century. Corpor-national phenomena.

They are our militarily industrialized complexities, within which secrecy abounds

This evacuates and exhausts me. I suspect it exhausts those within and outside what we might consider to be the spectrum between secrecy and propriety. Secrets of trade and otherwise.

Our missing cores, our absent presences.

We, as a species, are dangerous. And we are self-destructing.

And its as if there is nothing we can do…this is what we are made of. This is the tissue, the latticework of ages. These last remnants of (en-machinated) language.

These gasps, if you will. #languageisleavingus

I repeat: This is a species that will be content to self-destruct, given it was functionally built upon machines of war, first and foremost. As we extend into the nucleus of not just the atom, but of the cell. As mere decades pass. (And to think we’re still here.)

I don’t want to be a part of it, for the most part. But here we are. This is what extinction feels like. And we are doing it to ourselves. #autocolonialism

Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. This happens not in decades, but in years. #talesofthelatehuman

We are bound for it to be this way. We lead with our own complicity in all of it. This is the human, of late.

We are the extinction event.

(Make of this word and brain salad what you will. Words fail me.)

Note to A and E, 3/12/20

A thought. Please indulge me.

CRISPR is derived from a bacterial mechanism that provides immunity from viruses by using RNA to cut and paste snippets of the viral attacker into the genetic code of the bacterium itself.

There are large scale endeavors to use genetic editing strategies to engineer responses to actual viruses. The arguments for expediency and exigency abound.

That these things come into our knowledge and come into technoscientific existence so quickly —seemingly all at once—- makes my brain hurt.

This is all happening so fast, my friends. Much of it in less than a decade. And even that short time scale seems to be compacting upon itself.

PostScript Sat March 15

But what we never seem to understand is that just because we have power doesn’t mean we are in control. Which, I am convinced, speeds up the process of humans attempting to colonize, cum synthesize, cum automate their individual AND aggregate activities. Whether we can admit it or not, synthetic biology is already here. A crisis like this will only expedite acknowledging the  transformation of current and subsequent Homo sapiens genetics, before, during and after ‘expression’.

A species expands asymptotically, no longer what it thought it was, unbecoming in media res.

Or so I tell myself. #talesofthelatehuman

AcceleRants

Accelerators and accelerants, recombinant and chaotic. Synthetic life emerges from this bacterial animal which, having colonized everything, learns to colonize anew. It grows, it devours, it blooms, it dies. But not without giving birth to other forms of life, intentionally and otherwise. The Xenobots arrive.

 

Language is leaving us…

I’ve lost interest in maintaining anything other than spoken voice—presence. Writing seems like failure.

The rate of extraction of our linguistic domains, written and spoken, feels like extinction to me. Nothing else. Those at the top, we apex predators, best flee the earth or hack our own genomes and biomes to give ourselves, up and over, to other possible worlds, living and dead. We at the top are the most precarious of all. This is what I like to call autocolonialism. (“We do it to ourselves, we do.”) Naming it, defining it, giving it shape and form in language seems to do nothing more than extract further the value of whatever resistance might be articulated, rendered, voiced. I feel as though language is leaving us.

“It wears him out”

For students at the Albertus Universität in Königsberg, anthropology was likely to be their first, if not only, exposure to Kant’s thought”

“If we now ask whether the human species can be considered a good or a bad race (it can be called a race only when one thinks of it as a species of rational beings on earth, compared to those rational beings on other planets, sprung as a multitude of creatures from one demiurge), then I must confess that there is not much to boast about. Nevertheless, anyone who considers human behavior not only in ancient history, but also in recent history will often be tempted to coincide with Timon’s misanthropic judgment, but far more often and more to the point, he will coincide with Momus, and find foolishness rather than evil the most striking characteristic of our species. But, since foolishness combined with traces of evil (when it is called madness) cannot be ignored in the moral physiognomy of our species, it is obvious from the concealment of a good part of our thoughts, which every clever person deems essential, that everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely. This behavior betrays the tendency of our species to be evil-minded toward one another.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)

Naked news, fake-d news, or “something else entirely”?

“Was a story selected for its statistical prominence among news organs, or because a personalization algorithm picked it out for us? If the selection was based on statistics, then which statistics—the number of mentions of the story, the authority of the news outlets promoting it, or something else entirely?” Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)

I’m thinking, erm, something else entirely. #agnotology #talesofthelatehuman