Interview with Samantha Frost, ‘Attentive Body’: Epigenetic Processes and Self-formative Subjectivity
Image: Samantha Frost. Source: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Published online first in Body & Society, July 22, 2021.
Abstract
The interview is a follow-up from Samantha Frost’s article, ‘The Attentive Body’ in Body & Society 26(4). Tomoko Tamari invites Frost to explore her interest in ‘biocultural creatures’, with its focus on ‘bodies’ responsive self-transformation’ in epigenetic processes, and unfolds Peirce’s account of the index for understanding meaning-making in biological processes. Tamari also introduces Katherine Hayles’s notion of ‘cognitive nonconscious’ to raise the question of the possible theoretical and mechanical similarities/discrepancies between epigenetic processes in organisms and the meaning-making process in computational systems. Drawing on Jacob von Uexkull’s notion of ‘umwelt’ and introducing Yoshimi Kawade’s remarks on a living being’s subjective orientation in environments, a further question about ‘intention’ and ‘subjectivity’ enables Frost to further unpack her notion of ‘the attentive self’ and discuss its relation to ‘intentionality’ and ‘referentiality’ in epigenetic processes. Finally, Samantha Frost mentions her current projects on the connection between ‘attention-as-responsive-self-transformation’ and ‘mode-of-living-as-form-of-live’.
Samantha Frost is Professor in the Department of Political Science, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. While publishing a range of work on Thomas Hobbes’s materialism, Frost also co-edited with Diana Coole New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke University Press, 2010) and authored Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human (Duke University Press, 2016). From 2016 to 2019, she was the Faculty Fellow directing the IPRH-Mellon Biohumanities Research Initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by the Illinois Humanities Research Institute. Currently, Frost is a Mellon Collaborative Fellow at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, collaborating with artists Amber Ginsburg and Sara Black on a project called ’Untidy Objects’. In addition to composing a manuscript tentatively called Attentive Bodies, she is collaborating with historians Renisa Mawani and Antoinette Burton on a scholarly collection called Biocultural Empires.
Tomoko Tamari is a senior lecturer in Sociology at the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, University of London. She is managing editor of Body & Society and has published ‘Body Image and Prosthetic Aesthetics’ (Body & Society 23(1), 2017). She is currently working on the following areas: body image and disability, human perception and the moving image, probiotics and immunity.