Ben Dawson

Vita

Ben Dawson studied English in Durham and London. He has taught Romantic poetry and critical theory at the University of London (Queen Mary’s and Birkbeck). His PhD, at the London Consortium (Birkbeck, ICA, Architectural Association, Science Museum, and Tate), interprets the trajectory of idealism from Kant to Hegel in interrelation with certain experimental practices in the emerging science of biology, and considers some of the cultural implications of Applied German Idealism. His wider interests are in the articulations between a Christian/post-Christian spirit of ‘anti-legalism’—the long tradition of campaign against dogma and institution—and the scientific and social systems characteristic of modernity. These concerns centre on the intersections of experimental, governmental, and poetic paradigms during the Romantic period.

ICI-Project

The Human Laboratory: Experimental Systems and the Emergence of Anthropolarity, 1790-1810
This research adopts the multistable figure as a potential model for the complex relationship (either of ‘unmediated exposure’ or of ‘mediated antagonism’) between two co-existing aspects of human subjectivity in modern society. Taking the dawn of bioscience in the 1790s as the crucible of a particular knowledge/power configuration that continues to determine the present, the project develops a new concept, ‘anthropolarity’, to explicate the bifurcation and instrumentalization of ‘humanity’ within the mode of epistemic production dominant in capitalist society: experimental systems. It draws on the work of Latour and Rheinberger, while developing the genealogical analyses of Foucault and Agamben, to elaborate the co-evolution of an experimentalization of knowledge and a governmentalization of power in modern society. The project combines empirical investigations of laboratory life circa 1800 with theoretical analysis of the relations between self-organizing systems (Hegel, Luhmann) and real abstraction (Sohn-Rethel). The aim is to expose a split and perhaps a tension, particularly discernible at this time, between the substance and function of the living human subject.