Benjamin 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 (Birkbeck, 2012) develops a correlation and interaction between the philosophical trajectory from late Kant to early Hegel and a structural transformation of experimental practices essential to the emergence of 'biology'. His wider interests are in the articulations between a Christian/post-Christian ‘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 in the Romantic period.

Salvation through Experiment: Autobiographical Research Machine 1800

This project examines the relation, in various experimental doctrines (Experimentallehren) around 1800, of meditative/‘first-personal’ and demonstrative/impersonal perspectives. The guiding hypothesis is that if ‘research’ (which Heidegger correctly grasped as the essence of what is still called science) is comprehended in this way as a bipolar ‘machine’ in which ascetic-liturgical and demonstrative-doctrinal schemas intersect and struggle, what may come to light is an intricate entanglement (perhaps even a more-or-less secret solidarity) between soteriological and epistemological economies in the modern age.

ICI Project (2010-12)

Cognition/Volition: Two Figures of the Human in the Age of Experimental Systems

This research adopted the multistable figure as a potential model for the complex relationship (more an unmediated exposure than a 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 attempted critically to reconstruct a bifurcation and 'instrumentalization' of the human subject within the mode of epistemic production dominant in capitalist society: experimental systems. It drew 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. Combining empirical investigations of 18th-century laboratory life with theoretical analysis of self-organization (drawing particularly on Hegel), the aim was to expose a split and a tension, especially discernible at this time, between the substance and function of the living human subject.