Scientific Americans

Acknowledgements

List of illustrations

Introduction

1. Popular Science, Evolution and Global Information Management

1.1 Reconstructing the social and scientific

1.2 Scientific and cultural narratives of expansion

1.3 Information and control systems

1.4 Historicizing science

2. Dirty Naturalism and the Regime of Thermodynamic Self-Organization

2.1 Social regulation and the power of art

2.2 Self-organization and energy flows

2.3 Ecocriticism and thermodynamics

2.4 Social work and moral parasites

3. The Ecology of Empire

3.1 The Call of the Wild and the national frontier

3.2 Wild Fang and the ideology of domestication

3.3 The multiplicity of animal bodies

3.4 Ghosts of American Citizens

3.5 Where to draw the line? Biological kinship and legal discourse

4. After the Flood: Performance and Nation

4.1 Managing life

4.2 Business morality and Western water policy

4.3 ‘Constitutional restlessness’ and ‘something not ourselves’

4.4 Systems of art: perception and communication

4.5 Pure fiction

5. The Miseducation of Henry Adams: Fantasies of Race, Citizenship and Biological Dynamos

5.1 Evolution as historical process

5.2 Thermodynamics and citizenship

5.3 The new American as techno-subject

5.4 Beyond evolution: information, control and paranoia

5.5 ‘The Rule of Phase Applied to History’

5.6 ‘A Letter to American Teachers of History’

Conclusion

Henry Adams: ecocritic?

‘Cyborg politics’ and the technoscientific regime

The American System and global debt

Biopolitics and posthuman life: the call of Jack London

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index