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E-book Neural Networks
This book is an exploration of the conjuncture of nature and artifice enacted in the figure of the neural network. In that project it joins a rich body of scholarship devoted to tracing the genealo-gies through which the biological and the technological have been variously constituted as opposites and as models for each other. As Haraway observes, however much the designed and engineered have achieved ascendancy within the modernist project, their touchstone remains the invocation of nature as their foundational referent. The case of the neural network is no exception, as an organic entity located in the body, and more specifically the brain, is linked to an iconic artifact associated with the manufacture of connections. As the neuron delineates an entity separable from its constitutive relations, the network restores those relations in the form of a generalizable structure. Through these paired moves the neural network is put to work in the service of a more longstanding figure, that of the universal/unmarked human (Wynter 2003).Disassembling the trope of the neural network enables its recon-textualization in specific technoscientific histories, imaginaries, and material practices. The cases that we consider make evident that the neural network serves not only as a consistent referent for the biological and cognitive sciences but also that, like all techno-scientific objects, its nature is not fixed nor its futures determined. Our common methodological strategy is to find ways of making the shape- shifting of the neural network evident through a study of key moments in which it is figured and made to work. That in turn reveals how the neuron, the network, and their constitutive relations are contingent on the wider projects— most obviously those of neuroscience and computational engineering, but also the larger sociocultural and politico- economic projects of the world—in which their agencies are enacted and enrolled.
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