[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 2 on -empyre_

Junting Huang jh2358 at cornell.edu
Sat Apr 11 01:52:10 AEST 2020


Thank you, Jonathan and Sorelle for sharing your writings. I have been always amazed at the amount of shared vocabularies between biology, philosophy, sociology, political science, and computation—— as we know, a vicious computer program is called “virus.” A computer simulation of cellular automaton by John Horton Conway is called “Life.” A piece of viral media content is called “meme,” a term Richard Dawkins made up to describe “living structures” in evolutionary biology. 

Yet despite their applications in diverging fields, these terms do seem to describe very similar yet fundamental mechanisms. Like Sorelle says, the “virus" may be mobilized in a political process of “othering” in Singapore. Or as Jonathan says, the machinery of the human body itself makes life and death, host and virus, inside and outside, so much intertwined; and this fact influences the ethical and political decisions we make.

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853



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