published_or_final_version / abstract / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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Thèse--Paris. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 388-400). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:NR51773

Socrates articulated it best, "Speak, so I may see you." Indeed, language represents an invisible probe into the mind. It is the medium through which we express our deepest thoughts, our aspirations, our views, our feelings, our inner reality. From the beginning of artificial intelligence, researchers have sought to impart human like understanding to machines. As much of our language represents a form of self expression, capturing thoughts, beliefs, evaluations, opinions, and emotions which are not available for scrutiny by an outside observer, in the field of natural language, research involving these aspects has crystallized under the name of subjectivity and sentiment analysis. While subjectivity classification labels text as either subjective or objective, sentiment classification further divides subjective text into either positive, negative or neutral. In this thesis, I investigate techniques of generating tools and resources for subjectivity analysis that do not rely on an existing natural language processing infrastructure in a given language. This constraint is motivated by the fact that the vast majority of human languages are scarce from an electronic point of view: they lack basic tools such as part-of-speech taggers, parsers, or basic resources such as electronic text, annotated corpora or lexica. This severely limits the implementation of techniques on par with those developed for English, and by applying methods that are lighter in the usage of text processing infrastructure, we are able to conduct multilingual subjectivity research in these languages as well. Since my aim is also to minimize the amount of manual work required to develop lexica or corpora in these languages, the techniques proposed employ a lever approach, where English often acts as the donor language (the fulcrum in a lever) and allows through a relatively minimal amount of effort to establish preliminary subjectivity research in a target language.

This treatise will focus on a critical examination of Gavin Hood’s South African Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi (2006), in the interest of exploring how the mass media creates a problematic configuration of the subject, in virtue of its valorization of the continued discursive colonization of Africans (identified broadly in geographical rather than racial terms). That is, within the narrative of the film, the protagonist, after engaging in a crime spree, gives himself over to the state authorities and emotively confesses to his transgressions. Importantly, this dramatic confession is represented as a triumph of the human spirit – in the form of an autonomous rehabilitation on the part of the criminal. However, if one understands the protagonist as a subject constituted by what Foucault terms the discursive regimes of disciplinary/bio-power, what emerges into conspicuity is that the protagonist’s actions rather than being the result of his growing maturity and concomitant augmenting ‘humanity’ are the consequence of a set of discursive imperatives which render him docile and prostrate. Arguably, what this serves to represent, and, indeed, propagate, is more of a superimposition of Western cultural discourses on African subjects, and less of a negotiation with such discourses by such subjects. The treatise aims to provide a theoretical solution to the negation of alternative modes of being by disciplinary/bio-power imperatives inextricable from neo-liberal subjectivity. However, in its attempts to encourage cultural negotiation between North and South, the treatise will avoid simplistic, ‘orthodox’, Marxist solutions and will instead critically contend with the theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and their perspectives on how radical democracy can be achieved.

Recent research in human genetics has sparked popular interest in genetic explanations for all human phenomena. In turn, bioethicists have been busy responding to their own call for stringent guidelines for the use of genetic information. But bioethicists in general fail to attend to deeper considerations of the nature of scientific knowledge and its role in the transformation of human subjectivity. For this reason, bioethicists are accessories after the fact to that transformation, and hence in order to study that change we must displace bioethical analyses of the Human Genome Project --that is, displace virtually all of the literature on the HGP. In this thesis, I offer a different and more radical interpretation of the role of scientific knowledge in altering our conception of what it is to be a human being. Physicians, genetic counsellors, and other experts in our gene culture offer fundamentally questionable and yet practically unquestioned genetic explanations of who and what we really are. These genetic experts, by virtue of their prestigious position in our economy of knowledge, impute needs only they can satisfy, impart a vocabulary only they are invited (and certified) to understand, and draw us into new networks of administration and control at the subcellular level. Drawing on the work of Duden, Foucault, Illich, and Poerksen, I argue that our attraction to technoscientific understandings of our "essence" is dangerous and disabling, and I sketch a strategy of resistance. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

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