The Replaceability Paradigm: Replacement and Irreplaceability from Dante to DeepDream (Culture & Conflict, 26)

✍ Scribed by Niall Martin (editor), Ilios Willemars (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 263
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The trope of humans being ‘replaced’ by ‘AI’ is one of the most familiar examples of the rhetoric of replaceability. Not only have questions about what is unique and what is replaceable gained momentum in digital culture, but notions of ‘fungibility’ have emerged in many other contexts as well such as ecology, management theory, and, more sinisterly, in racist and conspiracist thinking. This volume argues that there is a ‘replaceability paradigm’ at work throughout the culture of modernity, from the European Renaissance, through Freudian psychoanalysis, Chinese science fiction and postcolonial theory, all the way to neural network programs such as Google’s DeepDream. This collection will be of interest to anybody engaged with the conceptual architecture of contemporary culture, whether through film, literature, or new digital media.

✦ Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contents
Preamble: Why Replacement?
Introduction: Replaceability and the Politics of the Paradigm
Signs and Semiotics
Ir/Replaceability, Il/Literacy and the Decolonization of the Alphabet: The Lessons of Arrival
Environmental Pareidolia: Computer Vision and the Replacement of the Unpredictable
‘What If?’: Reading Replacing in/as (Contemporary, Chinese, Science) Fiction
Subject to Replacement
Old Soles and Rotting Bananas: How to Grieve what we Replace?
The Ir/Replaceability of the Witness-Perpetrator in Salomé Lamas’s No Man’s Land
The Ir/Replaceable and “Walking in the Rays of a Beautiful Sun”: Dante Alighieri’s and Aimé Césaire’s Deployments of the Solar
From Stage to Screen: A Feminist Aesthetic Approach to Samuel Beckett’s Not I on Television
Psyche and Sacrifice
Puppets and People, from Kleist to Stelarc
A Poetics of Ersatz: Ersatzbildung in Freud and Hoffmann
Sacrificial Animals and their Placeholders: Symbolic Irreplaceability in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Das Gespräch über Gedichte”
Coda
Modernity’s Irreplaceability: Data, Derivatives, and the Fungibility of the Flesh
About the Contributors
Index