Search results for ""author wendy wheeler""

In this ground-breaking synthesis of evolutionary and cultural theory, Wendy Wheeler draws on the new field of complex adaptive systems and biosemiotics in order to argue that - far from being opposed to nature - culture is the way that nature has evolved in human beings. Her argument is that these evolutionary processes reveal the fundamental sociality of human creatures, and she thus rejects the selfish individualism that is implied both in the biological reductionism of much recent evolutionary psychology, and in the philosophies of neoliberalism. She shows, instead, that the complex structures of biosemiotic evolution have always involved a creativity which is born from the difficult but productive phenomenological encounter between the Self and its Others; and she argues that this creativity, in both the sciences and the humanities, is fundamental to human progress. In this major contribution to both cultural studies and ecocriticism, Wheeler shows how complexity and biosemiotics forge the link between nature and culture, and provide a new and better understanding of how 'the whole human creature' operates as both social and biological being.

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Following her successful book "A New Modernity?", which looked at ways in which we could rethink Enlightenment values to include more of the world of the emotions and the body, in this volume Wendy Wheeler gathers together essays which explore the complex nature of the contemporary "self", which - as she argues - is the starting point for politics. Wheeler's contributors show that looking creatively and imaginatively across the different disciplines, art, literature, science, psychology - one can see the emergence of new ideas about the nature of politics, and of the human beings which are the subject of politics. In particular, one can see the poverty of much contemporary political discourse, which tends to lose sight of human beings in its focus on managerialism, efficiency and a rather narrowly defined realism. By rethinking fundamental questions about the nature of political subjects, we can begin to develop a new and more humane politics. The book has a historical section which looks at ways in which ideas about the self have been both shaped by past political cultures and reflected in them. The contemporary section includes essays on psychoanalysis, crowd psychology, modernization, colonialism, political poetry, complexity theory, emotional literacy, ethics, masculinity and computer prosthetics. Wheeler's trawling of the disciplines in her quest for a new politics has resulted in an original and illuminating series of reflections on new ways of "doing politics".

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