Stephen Dougherty
Biographic Data
| ID | 642896 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephen Dougherty |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephen |
| FAMILY NAME | Dougherty |
| SIGNATURE | DOUGHERTY S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Volda University College |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 8 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Plasticity at the Dawn of Deep Learning
This article explores Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concepts presented in her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing and their unexpected relevance to the emergence of deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Malabou diagnoses the eclipse of traditional writing and deconstruction, replacing it with the concept of plasticity, a transformative and adaptive capacity. The article examines how Malabou’s ideas prefigure the development of la…
Olaf Stapledon's Thwarted Cosmopolitics in Last and First Men and Star Maker
In this essay I argue that Olaf Stapledon's speculative writing in Last and First Men and Star Maker is deeply informed by a thwarted cosmopolitics. The dream visions of science fiction to come in these novels are born of the failure of a cosmopolitan idealism. In his profound devotion to the cause of attempted cosmopolitanism, as we might put it, and in his rich imagining of what happens right before it goes wrong, Stapledon is a very Kantian sp…
Let the Light Shine Through
Messages from the Stars: 2001: A Space Odyssey and His Master’s Voice
In many respects, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and His Master’s Voice (1968) could not be more different. Kubrick/Clarke’s mystical and affirmational visions of space exploration and humankind’s technological evolution are decisively countered by Lem’s downbeat tale about failed communication with the aliens. Rather than conventional first-contact stories, these texts are more specifically about the impact of messages received from outer space, w…
Liu Cixin, Arthur C. Clarke, and “Repositioning”
This essay investigates the work of the contemporary Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin in the context of his relation to the British sf icon Arthur C. Clarke. Liu identifies himself as a great fan of Golden Age Anglo-American sf, and I argue that Liu is no more original, no more distinctively “local” a writer, than when he is channeling the ghosts of his Anglo-American forebears, especially Arthur C. Clarke. My aim is to consider the relat…
History in a Minor Key
386 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Stephen Dougherty History in a Minor Key Ben Carver. Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii+292 pp. $109.99 hc, $84.99 ebk. Ben Carver’s Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the byways of the historical imagination at a time when the study of history was presumably tu…
The Life in Death of Psychoanalysis
This essay examines how philosopher Catherine Malabou's concept of destructive plasticity impacts the situation of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My argument is that Malabou envisions the life in death of psychoanalysis in its relation to neuroscience, where psychoanalysis's new beginnings are won at the price of its near total doctrinal destruction
Radio, the Genome, and Greg Bear's Biological Fiction
The Machine in the Garden in the 21st Century
In this essay I will suggest Leo Marx’s debt to a style of thinking about technology which cuts against the grain of the liberal humanism and liberal progressive ideology that informs his writing. This style of thinking, associated with the word technicity, underscores the intimacy of our relation to technology. The Machine in the Garden insists that technology is a crucial aspect of our human nature—it encourages us to see that nature is insepar…
Hybrid Banks
Leibniz Time
Adam Roberts's Alien Invasion
The Dangerous Rays of the Future: Democracy, Media, Science Fiction
The Self Is a Reader, The Reader a Time Traveler
Embodiment and Technicity in Geoff Ryman's Air
Post‐Deconstruction and the Rhetorics of Touch
Discourses of touch have become important discursive sites around which questions concerning the body, its materiality, and its place in the sphere of cultural analysis are currently arrayed — the powers of touch that we postulate influence our understanding of the limits and capacities of both our bodies and the technologies through which we extend our bodily touch. What is at stake in the contestation of touch, then, are really questions about …
Computing the Unconscious
This essay examines the unconscious as modeled by cognitive science and compares it to the psychoanalytic unconscious. In making this comparison, the author underscores the important but usually overlooked fact that computational psychology and psychoanalytic theory are both varieties of posthumanism. He argues that if posthumanism is to advance a vision for our future that is no longer fixated on a normative image of the human, then its own norm…
Beat Vision: What Americans Don't See On the Road
Jack Kerouac's classic travelogue On the Road is a book about "America." The automobile-enhanced freedom enjoyed by the characters in the novel has been celebrated for decades, and it has been more critically interrogated in recent years. In this essay I want to reji-ame the question of the politics of mobility in On the Road as an. ecological issue. In order to do so, I shall read the novel not only within the context of the rise of the awomobi/…
On Media and Modules
On Media and Modules Stephen Dougherty Review of: Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Cognitive Fictions is a sophisticated and fascinating book that asks difficult questions about the place of literature and the literary artist in the age of digitized mass media. The answers Joseph Tabbi provides are equally difficult, although the reader’s trouble on this score will depend in part on whether or not he or she …
On Genetic Programs and Feedback Networks
On Genetic Programs and Feedback Networks Stephen Dougherty (bio) Whatever we choose to call it—posthuman, postmodern, millennial, global, hypermaterialist—the condition of our present epoch is chiefly characterized by the redefinition of the world as information. We are constituted as subjects according to the places we occupy within the information flows of capital, labor, and goods. We are "informed" by the practices according to which we cons…
The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel
It is a paradox that the ascendance of biology and biomedicine in the pantheon of sciences has led to the debiologization of the human body. Yet in the last fifty years, many life scientists have gone from thinking of the body as an organic and holistic unit, understood in functionalist terms, to thinking of the body as a technological com- munications system. 1 As Donna Haraway has charted in a series of seminal essays, life science is becoming …
The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel
It is a paradox that the ascendance of biology and biomedicine in the pantheon of sciences has led to the debiologization of the human body. Yet in the last fifty years, many life scientists have gone from thinking of the body as an organic and holistic unit, understood in functionalist terms, to thinking of the body as a technological com- munications system. 1 As Donna Haraway has charted in a series of seminal essays, life science is becoming …
Embodiment and Technicity in Geoff Ryman's Air
Computing the Unconscious
This essay examines the unconscious as modeled by cognitive science and compares it to the psychoanalytic unconscious. In making this comparison, the author underscores the important but usually overlooked fact that computational psychology and psychoanalytic theory are both varieties of posthumanism. He argues that if posthumanism is to advance a vision for our future that is no longer fixated on a normative image of the human, then its own norm…
The Biopolitics of the Killer Virus Novel
It is a paradox that the ascendance of biology and biomedicine in the pantheon of sciences has led to the debiologization of the human body. Yet in the last fifty years, many life scientists have gone from thinking of the body as an organic and holistic unit, understood in functionalist terms, to thinking of the body as a technological com- munications system. 1 As Donna Haraway has charted in a series of seminal essays, life science is becoming …
On Media and Modules
On Media and Modules Stephen Dougherty Review of: Tabbi, Joseph, Cognitive Fictions. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Cognitive Fictions is a sophisticated and fascinating book that asks difficult questions about the place of literature and the literary artist in the age of digitized mass media. The answers Joseph Tabbi provides are equally difficult, although the reader’s trouble on this score will depend in part on whether or not he or she …
On Genetic Programs and Feedback Networks
On Genetic Programs and Feedback Networks Stephen Dougherty (bio) Whatever we choose to call it—posthuman, postmodern, millennial, global, hypermaterialist—the condition of our present epoch is chiefly characterized by the redefinition of the world as information. We are constituted as subjects according to the places we occupy within the information flows of capital, labor, and goods. We are "informed" by the practices according to which we cons…
Beat Vision: What Americans Don't See On the Road
Jack Kerouac's classic travelogue On the Road is a book about "America." The automobile-enhanced freedom enjoyed by the characters in the novel has been celebrated for decades, and it has been more critically interrogated in recent years. In this essay I want to reji-ame the question of the politics of mobility in On the Road as an. ecological issue. In order to do so, I shall read the novel not only within the context of the rise of the awomobi/…
Computing the Unconscious
This essay examines the unconscious as modeled by cognitive science and compares it to the psychoanalytic unconscious. In making this comparison, the author underscores the important but usually overlooked fact that computational psychology and psychoanalytic theory are both varieties of posthumanism. He argues that if posthumanism is to advance a vision for our future that is no longer fixated on a normative image of the human, then its own norm…
Post‐Deconstruction and the Rhetorics of Touch
Discourses of touch have become important discursive sites around which questions concerning the body, its materiality, and its place in the sphere of cultural analysis are currently arrayed — the powers of touch that we postulate influence our understanding of the limits and capacities of both our bodies and the technologies through which we extend our bodily touch. What is at stake in the contestation of touch, then, are really questions about …
Embodiment and Technicity in Geoff Ryman's Air
The Dangerous Rays of the Future: Democracy, Media, Science Fiction
The Self Is a Reader, The Reader a Time Traveler
Hybrid Banks
Leibniz Time
Adam Roberts's Alien Invasion
Radio, the Genome, and Greg Bear's Biological Fiction
The Machine in the Garden in the 21st Century
In this essay I will suggest Leo Marx’s debt to a style of thinking about technology which cuts against the grain of the liberal humanism and liberal progressive ideology that informs his writing. This style of thinking, associated with the word technicity, underscores the intimacy of our relation to technology. The Machine in the Garden insists that technology is a crucial aspect of our human nature—it encourages us to see that nature is insepar…
Liu Cixin, Arthur C. Clarke, and “Repositioning”
This essay investigates the work of the contemporary Chinese science-fiction writer Liu Cixin in the context of his relation to the British sf icon Arthur C. Clarke. Liu identifies himself as a great fan of Golden Age Anglo-American sf, and I argue that Liu is no more original, no more distinctively “local” a writer, than when he is channeling the ghosts of his Anglo-American forebears, especially Arthur C. Clarke. My aim is to consider the relat…
History in a Minor Key
386 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 46 (2019) Stephen Dougherty History in a Minor Key Ben Carver. Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature: Untimely Meditations in Britain, France, and America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xviii+292 pp. $109.99 hc, $84.99 ebk. Ben Carver’s Alternate Histories and Nineteenth-Century Literature examines the byways of the historical imagination at a time when the study of history was presumably tu…
The Life in Death of Psychoanalysis
This essay examines how philosopher Catherine Malabou's concept of destructive plasticity impacts the situation of contemporary psychoanalytic theory. My argument is that Malabou envisions the life in death of psychoanalysis in its relation to neuroscience, where psychoanalysis's new beginnings are won at the price of its near total doctrinal destruction
Messages from the Stars: 2001: A Space Odyssey and His Master’s Voice
In many respects, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and His Master’s Voice (1968) could not be more different. Kubrick/Clarke’s mystical and affirmational visions of space exploration and humankind’s technological evolution are decisively countered by Lem’s downbeat tale about failed communication with the aliens. Rather than conventional first-contact stories, these texts are more specifically about the impact of messages received from outer space, w…
Olaf Stapledon's Thwarted Cosmopolitics in Last and First Men and Star Maker
In this essay I argue that Olaf Stapledon's speculative writing in Last and First Men and Star Maker is deeply informed by a thwarted cosmopolitics. The dream visions of science fiction to come in these novels are born of the failure of a cosmopolitan idealism. In his profound devotion to the cause of attempted cosmopolitanism, as we might put it, and in his rich imagining of what happens right before it goes wrong, Stapledon is a very Kantian sp…
Let the Light Shine Through
Plasticity at the Dawn of Deep Learning
This article explores Catherine Malabou’s philosophical concepts presented in her book Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing and their unexpected relevance to the emergence of deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Malabou diagnoses the eclipse of traditional writing and deconstruction, replacing it with the concept of plasticity, a transformative and adaptive capacity. The article examines how Malabou’s ideas prefigure the development of la…
Art (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Law (8 works) · Political science (8 works) · History (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Aesthetics (5 works) · Epistemology (5 works) · Literature (5 works)