[...]
It is a self-defining system of signs referring to signs.
a quiet listener. we have yet no idea what is speak. how taking transforms the mind that talks. conditions of thinking in relation to talking, before or after the mouth that talks. thinking in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?
work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.
“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (kafka, test)
There is the suggestion here, as in Holderlin, that timidity might be a dialect of stupidity. (Finding no way of testing out of these subtle complicities, one falls asleep, exhausted by the distress of proving one's most minimal merit.) (Avital Ronell, The Veils of Servility)
According to Silvan Tomkins, “shame operates only after interest or enjoyment has been activated.”
as Sedgwick has argued, for some people, and most often queer subjects, “shame is simply the first, and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that ... has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.
the idea is that the performance that avows its performanceness acknowledges the difficulty of fitting into roles, finding identities, and managing a self, especially a self vulnerable to the effects of stigma.
is there a queerness in me and my performance? is shyness, they way i do it, queer?
turn the spectator to the reader.
does shame intertwines with queer?
this affect and mode of performance (which normative euro American culture would rather eradicate) can be queered, twisted and turned into endless artful enactments.
queer, as experimental linguistic representational and political artistic performance.
shameless in my shyness. (at the level of affect theory?)
shyness: looking otherwise and feeling differently
to act shamed of exactly that which he is excited. (is this a queer subject?)
queer is not isomorphic with gay or lesbian or any other fixed identity, rather, queerness undoes all identities into an endless multiplicity and unbecoming. (liquefaction of any solidification)
queer seems to hinge much more radically and explicitly on a person’s undertaking particular, performative acts of experimental self-perception on a filiations.
Indeed, the performativity of both queer and shame can be reiterated differently; the subject can disidentify from such interpolations and re-deploy the abjecting and/or disciplining of the terms in unforeseen ways, which Warhol did.
In surrender the head bends and meets the heart. The head that does not bend has no value, and the head that is stiff will have to bend sometime, either in surrender or in shame. The head that bends in surrender will never have to bend in shame. Shame accompanies arrogance. Shyness accompanies Love. See how children are endowed with shyness, that is natural. Shyness is inherent. Shame is inflicted by society and is acquired. Shame brings guilt and shyness adds to one? beauty. Retain your shyness and drop your shame. (?)
shame is simply the first and remains a permanent, structuring fact of identity: one that has its own, powerfully productive and powerfully social metaphoric possibilities.
deciding not to care how people thing (or feel?), because those are the things i don't want to change! (or i don't think i should want to change) (warhol)
what do i want to change? just having fun with my stuff. can i decide not to care what people think? shyness...
in shame i wish to continue to look (or talk, or make or perform) and be looked at (or spoken to or seen in my performing of myself), but i also do not wish to do so. (Silvan Tomkins)
i am embarrassed to show the shy singing.
chronically embarrassing my self. (Aula presentation, shy singing, ...)
on passivity, note for the reader: not to mistake it for endurance in this discourse. here we are talking about a philosophical term, in relation to the “being” and the “other”...
an architecture that tries to be modest, a performance that tries to be intimidating as much
as it can.
just in time shyness
what are the pitfalls and abysses of philosophical reflection on and with shyness?
what am i trying to shortcut?
was Socrates intruding in his punk philosopher, stopping people at back allies and perform philosophy. he doesn't hold back, he intrudes, tattooing the body of the other, questioning.
the problem of his project?
i am not shy in the work that i am trying to present publicly (?)
where am i shy?
posture of position or gesture
the moment you stand in front of the audience you stop being authentic.
when we listen to something very carefully and allow ourselves to be moved we can tune in ti=o the art work and absorb its methods. i have found myself moved when i allowed it, by the most childish and stupid works of arts.
open minded and eager to make connections
(jane jacob,) (1) community is spontaneous, the tissues of community are not something that can be planed, that they happen spontaneously. (2) and this only happens when you are at the local scale. so in this sense, design is suspect, because design is set to be post spontaneity.
find a way to think locally, and thinking about the city as a product of spontaneous interaction between people who are different. but the design can also make something that has a social character.
we perform an experiment to prove or disprove a hypothesis, we are working within a framework of a closed system, the original proposition governs our procedures and observations, at arriving at yes or no. but when performing the experiment we come across something unforeseen, or prompted by evidence to jump tracks and think about a different issue. then we are working within the framework of an open system. we move beyond yes or no to exploring something emergent, something whose elements was there but whose form was unknown to us. a fancy and careful way of saying “something new”, because it is new to our understanding.
William Empson
art results from overcrowding(?)
when one is responsive rather than assertive one can't imagine where one will end Up: thinking. this responsiveness is different than the state of being active or passive. a passivity that motivates and mobilizes the subject into places that are yet unknown to her/him.
Thinking, as Heidegger says, may be much the same as wandering. my lectures are like wandering.
someone who studies paradoxes, poetry and philosophy
(keeping what you know away from society, history and away from art, not to acknowledge what you have learn)
incompatibility between a particular love and a particular social arrangement for love.
when you play with others, not try to shine and not try to shy. (shyness is dangerous to society)
it is like being lynched by kukluksklan.
curios about somebody else rather than identifying with them.
i really learned how to work with people by learning how to keep people from killing each other in street.
if we are very sympathetic, saying “i know how you feel” is privileging solidarity: “we are all in this together”. but well we can't all be in this together in the same way, so what is it that we do together, despite this fact.
instead of the declaring voice “i believe this or that”, we can say “i would have though” or “perhaps” introducing a zone of ambiguity in people's relationship with each other you might get something social. subjunctive mood (konjuktiv) not only is to zusammenbinden the elements of semantic also to zusammenbinden the the people who are speaking in these terms.
cooperation is a rehearsal not a performance.
public real made of people who don't argue in behalf of their own interest but to think most disinterestedly.
my talks/works is about how we make sense of our environment, the network that we live in and the texts and discourses that we are reading and writing.
how shyness (even) look like? can we recognize it when we see it?
what is feeling comfortable in the presence of strangers? not verbally i mean, physically.
df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> being comfortable in the
presence of
difference. being physically comfortable in
presence of the people who are not like yourself.
the subjunctive is the language that the shy uses naturally, which is one of the necessary elements of cooperation. in contrast to subjunctive speech, there is declarative speech is a form of declaration invites submission, and it invites submission because somebody else defines for you clearly what something is about. there is almost an erotic of that, they really now what they are on about, they really know who they are, and you become a spectator to their definiteness. giving yourself up to somebody who seems more defined and more purposive.
cooperation in islam is not a personal experience, it is something that is encoded in very strict ritual. it is not an act of choice. cooperation is not a duty but a desire.
my talk is a fancy and careful way of responding to the voices of other. the ones that are sounding in my ear. (inslam, shakespear, math, that girl in enghelab square, etc.). i am not good at immediate reaction, so i respond with a delay and a lot of playfulness and black holes that come in to be of the part of this, by this relationship to the Other, that is manifesting itself through the language of the Other (islam)
In my performative practice, I seek a way to approach thinking about things that arrests my curiosity. It is a form of commitment to what comes forward and calls for thinking, an attention before what I do not know. My Talks are fancy and careful responding to that otherness, to the voice or face that speaks to you from somewhere that you cannot yet locate. This call could be from a sadistic super-ego inside or Shakespeare or kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat.
i am not just
intereste
d in my own foun
dational
metaphors.
is there an amateurishness at the
intersection of art an
d philosophy that i am
drawing
?
what is amateur
?
the fact that i am giving talks is very much relate
d to the
social culture aroun
d me, in Germany the culture has a taste to
listen an
d there is an
interest for speech. now i get it like in the case of warhol he is rethinking his surroun
ding culture which is
dominate
d at that time by pop, me
dia an
d celebrity. i am rethinking the aca
demia an
d philosophy that is in
relationship with the arts, my issues an
d interests are
different than warhol for that
matter. i am enthusiastic an
d extremely
intereste
d in the
material that i am working with, an
d at the same time overthrown by it an
d i believe in it, in the same way that maybe warhol believe
d in pop culture an
d business.
the nightmare after performance
df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> skill in art, performance, life, work
trauma, in the experience of the trauma, the source mixes, and articulate in metaphors and hubric signifiers.
relationship between older works and performances, the issue of skill and technology.
it took 60 years after the developments in tempering metal, for barnors to learn new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.
getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.
There is a half-remembered discussion of Sigmund Freud I read once in a book and which I have been paraphrasing regularly ever since. It said that for Freud dreams were a way of thinking by doing. You run, you cry, you kiss, you love, you cheat, you argue, you fall, you kill, you eat, you sing, you get lost, you travel back in time, you become somebody else – but you do it all in your head. You do it in your head and so it is thinking, just not a thinking we recognize as thinking. When I am dreaming I am composing thoughts in the way an artist composes a painting or a witch a potion – an assemblage made of bodies and places and actions. An embodied thinking, that is no less eloquent or extraordinary or transformative for being so.
...................................
...One can chat an
d gossip but it is forbi
dden to preach,
lecture or
instruct.”
Clau
dio Magris’ Micronismi
...................................
(butler)
the structure of a
ddress itself
although I
di
d not know in whose voice this person was speaking, whether the voice was his own or not, I
di
d feel that I was being a
ddresse
d.
To
respond to this a
ddress seems an important
obligation
during these times.
It is about a mo
de of
response that follows upon having been a
ddresse
d, a comportment towar
d the Other only after the Other has ma
de a
demand upon me, accuse
d me of a failing, or aske
d me to assume a
responsibility.
The structure of a
ddress is important for un
derstan
ding how moral
authority is intro
duce
d an
d sustaine
d if we accept not just that we a
ddress others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being a
ddresse
d, an
d something about our existence proves precarious when that a
ddress fails.
...the
demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...
We think of presi
dents as wiel
ding speech acts in willful ways, so when the
director of a university press, or the presi
dent of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, an
d to whom they are speaking, an
d with what intent.
...perhaps we shoul
d think more
seriously about the
relation between mo
des of a
ddress an
d moral
authority. (also one of the issues in to
day's performance art)
narration is always ju
dgment
affective
intervention
why shoul
d i
listen to you
?
because i have a voice!
visual culture has
different stran
d from
lecture culture. people are able to express themselves with
verbal signs long before they can
draw anything, using visual sign (picture
: a
drawing by
ds class="frds scrmbld">Hannods>).
verbal
language because of its easy every
day usage has become mun
dane an
d instrumental to
communication, visual sign
due to its learning curve an
d skillfulness belonge
d to the art
domain.
...................................
transitive
verb constructions are the ones that require a
direct object in or
der to complete the meaning an
d to be grammatical. Use
d in theater, between
director an
d actor, by
communicating with
transitive
verbs actors can perform the
language of the
director.
my work embodies an
d communicates a
desire to
read (an
d write) texts
[steiner
]
in
Greek mythology the
poet an
d the seer are blin
d so that they may, by the antennae of speech, see further.
One thing is clear
: every
language-act has a temporal
determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a wor
d we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous
history. A text is embe
dde
d in
specific
historical time; it has what
linguists call a
diachronic structure. To
read fully is to restore all that one can of the imme
diacies of value an
d intent in which speech actually occurs.
The process of diachronic translation inside one’s own native tongue is so constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. Even substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.
...................................
(notes -
december 15, 2011)
•ds class="frds scrmbld"nttrm="Robin,Robot,Robert,Robocop">Robds>ots making ds class="frds scrmbld"nttrm="Robin,Robot,Robert,Robocop">Robds>ots
•what a robot wants (and how it wants it)
•cataloging computer generated stones smoke
•digital to digital convertor
•physical interaction (between a user and a media object, pressing a button, choosing a link, moving the body) versus psychological interaction (the psychological processes of filling-in, hypothesis forming, recall and identification, which are required for us to comprehend any text or image at all)
•Mechanical Monsters
•blown away roof
•Technology: the new nature
•-error and - horror(-terror)
•edge of the earth
•gold and dream, gold price and power law
•the story of the viewer
•fact and perspective (elucidation)
•love at first sight (digital)
•continual production of the new is what allows things to stay the same, (logic of the same)
•noise story
•the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium (McLuhan)
•The mediation of religion through buildings
•start with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, ma
rigol
d
ds class="frds scrmbld">Saeedds> 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi
: 88 57 27 92
newer me
dium may be ‘neste
d’ insi
de of an ol
der me
dium (or vice versa)
mental life (
memory,
imagination, fantasy,
dreaming, perception, cognition) is me
diate
d an
d is
embodie
d in the whole range of
material me
dia… we not only think about me
dia, we think in them (
Mitchell)
The shock of new me
dia is as ol
d as the hills
Franz Reuleux
describe
d this cor
relation: the more primitive the
technology, the less attune
d the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the
degree of play
-- the more perfecte
d the
technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the in
divi
dual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boun
daries between self an
d the
world remain labile an
d flui
d, (a state which is important not only for the
development of the
child, but with significant ramifications for human life an
d culture in general.)
Re
presentation is a
distinctive manner of
imagining the real, an
d is a fun
damental
phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre
distinguishes Re
presentations of space an
d Re
presentational spaces . ... Re
presentational spaces are “
directly live
d” through as
sociate
d images an
d symbols which overlay physical space, making
symbolic use of its objects.
the conceiving min
d over the perceiving bo
dy (vision/touch)
touching was consi
dere
d “a cru
der scanning at close range,” an
d seeing “a more subtle touching at a
distance.”
for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of
depth, an
d Con
dillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement an
d touch. The notion of vision as
[Ouch is a
dequate to a fiel
d of knowl
edge whose contents are organize
d as stable
positions within an extensive terrain.
•a technological gaze
•way of seeing (Derridean deconstructed)
•high-tech images
•artifact (cultural artifact, social)
•image of the or a body and its environment
•impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualization of scientific narratives and the aestheticization of information, all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology. (Norah Campbell)
•Everything said is said by an observe (Maturana and Varela)
•framing the world
•virtual gaze (Baudrillard)
•achieve absolute vision, while seeing nothing.
•very much as real; human and technological, both
•i say this as someone who thinks that we are part of this digital world, but we are not necessarily subject to its terms
•splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical
•the naration is not pure nor whole (why cyborg?)
•place of visibility (/ field of articulability)
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this
interconnection of
embodie
d being an
d environing
world, what happens in the
interface is what is important.
--Don
Ihde, Bo
dies in
Technology
At first glance, s
trappe
d to the bo
dy of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, an
d emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature vi
deo camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European
discussions about the camera luci
da an
d camera obscura, within
technoculture the camera (the
technological eye)seems to be the central object of both philosophical pretension an
d selfcertainty, on the one han
d, an
d cultural skepticism an
d the authenticity
destroying powers of the artificial, on the other han
d. The camera
--that vault or
arched chamber, that ju
dge's chamber
--move
d from elite Latin to the vulgar,
democratic i
diom in the nineteenth century only as a consequence of a new
technology calle
d photography, or “light-
writing.” A camera became a black-box with which to register pictures of the outsi
de
world in a re
presentational, menta
list, an
d sunny
semiotic economy, an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom bo
dy an
d min
d are suspicious str
angers, if also near neighbors in the hea
d. Nonetheless, no
matter how gussie
d up with
digitalize
d optical powers, the camera has never lost its job to function as a ju
dge's chamber, in camera, within which the facts of the
world--in
dee
d, the critters of the
world--are assaye
d by the stan
dar
d of the visually convincing an
d, at least as important, the visually new an
d exciting.
... first we have to plough through some very pre
dictable
semiotic roa
d blocks that try to limit us to a cartoonish
epistemology about visual self-evi
dence an
d the life
worlds of human-
animal-
technology compoun
ds.
Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological
world, but rather reciprocal in
duction within an
d between always-in-process critters ramifies through space an
d time on both large an
d small scales in casca
des of
inter- an
d intra-action. In embryology,
Gilbert calls this “
interspecies epigenesis."43
Gilbert writes
: “I think that the i
deas that Lynn
[Margulis] an
d I have are very similar; it's just that she was focusing on a
dults an
d I want to exten
d the concept (as I think the
science allows it to be fully exten
de
d) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bo
dies has many more implications because it means that we were ‘never’ in
divi
duals”
caring
: becoming subject to the unsettling
obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the en
d of the
day than at the beginning
//////////////
Nietzsche also said, at the very beginning of the second treatise of The Genealogy of Morals, that man is a promising animal, by which he meant, underlining those words, an animal that is permitted to make promises (das versprechen darf). Nature is said to have given itself the task of raising, bringing up, domesticating and “disciplining” (heranziichten) this animal that promises.
Microlandscapes:
the talk, also works df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> mirror stage and what does it mean for us and for the companien species that are entangled. what threads of meaning are taken apart by pulling on the thread of self reflection and self vision, what will gets account as nature for whom and when. the animal that is in charge of her own image is the representation of the universala man.
Appearance of eukaryotic cells around 2 billion years ago is probably the most significant event in the history of life on earth. It gave the creatures with DNA two important things: a nucleus that contained all the genetic materials and an interface to communicate with the world outside of the cell--a complex membrane--to talk with the materials alien to itself. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The argent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human animal, nonhumans, and computers is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, socio-political boundaries, and metaphor-representation.
Since antiquity, representation has been the foundational concept of aesthetics and semiotics. In the modern era, it has also become a crucial concept in political theory. In a discussion of law and ethnography, Clifford ds class="frds scrmbld">Geertds>z calls into question the Western distinction between matters of fact and matters of value. “Facts and law we have perhaps everywhere; their polarization we perhaps have not.” ds class="frds scrmbld">Geertds>z's hermeneutic approach leads him to focus on the relation between the grounding of norms and the representation of fact. Therefore, he concludes, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
The performance-talk is divided into three tangled narratives, one the social mode of traveling that includes the child--the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler--based on the real experience and a personal story in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with ds class="frds scrmbld">Karinds> Demuth and her three years old boy--ds class="frds scrmbld">Hannods>--, second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the worlds of other species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in an experience of walking in a tropical jungle with a computer in one hand and in the other hand the hand of the human child. The work deals with questions of the other-space that is mentally filled with projections and projects. The recording of the walking in the rain forest --as spatial and sensual experience-- is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new understanding of the locality of the walk. The noise and the randomness of the technical coloring the surface of the jungle provoke an aesthetic fascination, and an appropriation of the imposible image of the forest.
Traveling to the Amazon to experience its radical Otherness is a European tradition. It unintentional affirms the ideology of a “state of nature” that is prior to culture.
Lacan: i am led to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.
This developement is experienced as temporal dialectic that decisively projects the function of the individual into history. the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that i shall call orthhopaedic - and, lastly, to df class='thdf'>the | df class='thdf'>assumption of | df>df> the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.
Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949
...................................
Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)
the project investigates the way in which ds class="frds">Seifeeds> as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.)
...our ability to share the experience of the habits of the
world that we
discover. (
Kohn)
...................................
Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriente
d ontology as
social theory
[insights of object-orientation mechanically applie
d to the
social by Harman, “im
materialism"
]
•innovative adaptation of phenomenology
•critique of how objects have been failed by philosophy
•insistence upon an aesthetic attitude of investigation
--but
-->
•object-oriented social theory lacks the rigor and imaginative potential to envision the ontology of the social
•the way object-oriented ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negotiated, perceptual, political, agentic) value*** [social theory is fundamentally predicated on the socius --> social theory is about the association between things =/= homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's
*posthuman
relationism
*: another form that better un
derstan
ds the
abyssal point between the non-human an
d the human
(2007 conference) speculative realism
{antipathy to “human-centre
d” intellectual tra
ditions
} d>~d>=> object-oriente
d ontology
(objectivity
=/= obliqtivity)
Harman's im
materialism
: realism without
materialism
: objects can only ever be capture
d obliquely
object-oriente
d ontology's
development
:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic research):
◦aesthetic appreciation above the reduction of the phenomenon achieved by science --> “art (art criticism) is a style that gets us closer to the nature of objects” (+ bad df class='thdf'>example of | df> Clement Greenberg)
◦(to make the invisible deep conditions of objects perceivable) prioritize *allusive style* above *literal description*
•claims to post-phenomenological sovereignty
•over-mining approach to knowledge production =/= objects's surplus of reality
◦methodological approach which encounters objects as objects (=/= actor network theory's manner of focusing upon an object's effects) [+ bad df class='thdf'>example of | df> Dutch East India Company]--Campbell--> object-oriented social theory produces a rudimentary narrative with no discernible innovation on the level of:
◾objects --> the actors are recognisable companies, personalities, infrastructures
◾relations --> the major symbiotic moments are legal contracts, infrastructure and formative moments in a human's life
◾time --> there is standard chronology from birth to death, with emphasis on human-centric causes and effects
•“social theory = a mode of knowledge production” (=/= a decontextualised reflection of the world) ==> withdrawal: a psychological alibi, an aesthetic (=/= cognitive concept) ==stimulate==> an attitudinal response: humility [+ passivity?] in the face of overwhelming non-human existence [~ appeal ==produce==> a paternalistic-arrogant-instrumentalist attitude to the nonhuman =/= *appeal ==foster==> responsibility* (a norrnativity that withdrawal cannot) ---> go to Haraway + Campbell]
}=/= posthuman
relationism
: rea
lists who
draw on contemporary a
dvances in
disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics an
d neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a sub-set of human reality
-->
•commitment to an object-oriented realism (d>~d>= Harman)
•occupy an *anthropic* event horizon: their social analyses occur in the shifting, impossible ground hetween the human and the nonhuman (=/= Harman)
•dialectic of object **withdrawal + appeal** (=/= Harman's object withdrawal) ~ ***interaction between objective withdrawal d'>& subjective appeal***
(Moss) earth as making an appeal
--Freud--> a
demand for work
“when the attention of an experience
d person is
drawn to the
child's state by this path of
discharge,
[the path of
discharge
] ... acquires a secon
dary function of the highest importance, that of cornmunicalion
--> initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives
(
child's) creaming an
d kicking
--> appeal (ma
de by the earth) is a combination of
demand + accusation
contemporary
social theorists are turning towar
ds objects
<==Bennett
== object pro
duce a ‘
gestalt shift’ in perception
}==Tsing==> (amounts to) a political act
<== (turning towar
ds objects) requires us
:
•to re-divide the world
•to re-prioritise matler(s)
•to create different causalities
•to follow new agencies
•to produce new spacetimes
•to interrupt the ‘mind-lulling presence of common sense’
}----> acknowl
edge the importance of tra
ditional
*social theory
* in i
dentifying gross inequalities
+ a
dvocate a posthuman
relationism that moves
*from critique to pro
duction
* ==> *new an
d surprising connections between mo
des of existence
* (
df class='thdf'>for example | df>)
•did the typical American diet play any role in engendering the widespread susceptibility to the propaganda leading up to the invasion of Iraq?
•do sand storms make a difference to the spread of socalled sectarian violence?
•does mercury help enact autism?
•what if serious adoption practices for and by the elderly became common?
•what if nations that are worried about low birth rates (Denmark, Germany, Japan, Russia, white America, more) acknowledged that fear of immigrants is a big problem, and that racial purity projects and fantasies drive resurgent pronatalism?
posthuman
: a mo
de of
listening for the nonhuman
+ simultaneously acknowle
dging the impossibility of fully hearing it
--> impossible
position
==expan
d==> our range of
socialities,
causalities, temporalities an
d ethics because it contains the
**stubborn
anthropo
morphic resi
dual
** within any ‘new’ theory of
society
--> (not in
finite) co-constitution of the
social
+ the extra-
social (vaccines
d'>& markets, planetary
systems
d'>& telescopes, catastrophes
d'>& laws, etc.)
feminist
science stu
dies
*demand a normative
responsibility
* towar
ds
ontological in
clusivity an
d humility
(now that there is no objective
-->)
interrogatives are object-makers
*strangeness (of nonhuman life)
[acts as a gui
de
] --> mobilising new pre
positions of connection
==> to think
differently about the
social
==> new conceptions of
society (as planetmate, messmate,
natureculture, min
dbo
dy, thing-power, o
dd kin, etc.)
parallels
drawn between theories of evolution
d'>& theories of
social change
:
•Gould --> concept of punctuated equilibrium
•Serres --> ontology of the social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial en
do
symbiosis theory
<-- social theorists
deploy this in the search for accounts of how change an
d creativity o
riginate
}--> (bio-econornic context)
*symbiosis
* has long been recognise
d as a theory which
de
monstrates the co-constitution of the
social an
d the biological
=/= Darwinian
story of
: small variations, ran
dom mutation, long time scales,
natural selection, fitness an
d incremental
development
:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology
==> new organisms were often stemme
d from profoun
d an
d prolonge
d symbiotic
relationships that have proven
difficult to analyse
=/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political,
social an
d scientific con
ditions prece
de objects
: *objects
= boun
dary-work
*
--> differential spee
ds of change (su
dden an
d unlikely mixes
+ slow an
d causal)
--> deconstruction of in
divi
duality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-
social context
:)
**i
deological contest between in
divi
dualism an
d collectivism in political economy
<==> intellectual
development of
symbiosis theory
**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for
sociologies of
science
: *that
social
science
translates
science
* just as
science
translates “reality”
serial en
do
symbiosis theory
==>
d class="lstsrd">1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at the cataclysmic endings =/= catastrophic ending]
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. a way to think about temporalities (when a bacterium nestled into a simple cell, creating an intimacy that has lasted four billion years)
d>
d class="lstsrd">4. a template for unlikely intimacies
d>
Harman's philosophical monologue on
social theoretical practice (which might yet be reme
die
d by actual
dialogue with
social theorists)
==> performative fallacy (
<-- common in artist
writing)
@apass****
(
Campbell asking) why has object-oriente
d ontology become such a popular force in other
disciplines
?
<== complex
interplay between
sociological
+ logical factors
+ rise of
*para-aca
demia
*
@artist (in proliferation of artist
writing)
****speculation
= the alibi for a
doctrine that wishes to spare itself the trouble of justification
****
--> we nee
d closer attention to rationality as the basis of ju
dgement when we talk about speculation
--> we nee
d to be more informe
d by (
sciences) when we stretch
relations to our rational outposts, without ignoring their appeals
...................................
posthumanism
--> any
discursive or bo
dily con
figuration that
displaces the human, humanism, humanities
--> (21st century)
technology is the center of critical thought about culture an
d about
nature
[*]posthumanism
: a structure of feeling (sense of an era starts to be experience
d in the
social
imagination
--> social forms become more recognisable when we ha
d some time to classify them,
articulate them, theorize them)
(Williams >
Campbell) structure of feeling
we can point to times in the
past an
d say that as an X sensibility (they were romantics, enlightenment, post
modernism)
=/= sensing here an
d now
--> practical consciousness, a perio
d at an embryonic
stage, at the very
edge of
*semantic availability
*
what structure of feeling is forming in the contemporary western
world? --> posthumanism
(postbiological, postcorporal, cyborg existence, etc.)
to be human <--attack-- genomics, global finance, nature of social in virtual communities (telegram) ==> yet-to-be formalized paradigms of human experience
==> fracture the concept of legal self [legal theory (arbiter of human rights) --> concerned with what is to be human]
(taxonomies of the human species at its time -->) humanitas: legal term used in public in ancient Rome to distinguish Romans and Greeks from Barbarians
humans in persistent vegetative states
international trade of human organs
human genome project
xenotransplantation
technological unconscious
(tree of life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity
classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world
humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense
human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose
August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb
Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*
in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market
--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?
the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> df class='thdf'>that is why | df> it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
d class="lstsrd">1. information processor
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. cognitive subject
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. cultural subject
d>
posthuman mode:
d class="lstsrd">1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. to think about the ontology of technology
d>
d class="lstsrd">4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)
d>
20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)
robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution
(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans
(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer researchers are creating new concepts and figurations in order to expand the borders of waht constitutes life [df class='thdf'>for example | df> “living-product” metaphor]
(the problem of the) [ontological division of] consumer =/= world of objects ==> (ideological move -->) privileges human : it is understood by the human, because the human (the only source of analytical attention) is the only thing doing the consuming, having the experience, making the meaning
figuration: new ways of taking account of the world =/= anthropomorphism
--Haraway--> practices that create *knots* of material-semiotic actors {<-- art does that? art's sometimes unreal figurations =/= **interpretative consumer research makes the most realistic figurations of this century**}@ds class="frds scrmbld">ds class="frds scrmbld">Chloeds>2ds>
the metaphors of our time:
•becoming (=/= being) <-- a shift towards a *process metaphysics*
•
(Parsons + Maclaren)
items of disposal (do not fail to exists, but rather they) are *moved along* to other spaces or politics and become other things
•becoming a precious antique
•becoming a water blockage
•becoming a source of marine death
•becoming a materially precious thing (in another part of the world)
•
--> **how things actually move, how they transition between many states**
--> *object = data about the object =/= tangible thing* <-- (transition) from thinking of object as the primary reality --to--> perceicing the object as data in computatinoal environments
==?==> (change of the nature of object ==>) radical shift in theorizing consumer behavior
posthumanism
•a key term in contemporary western postindustrial era
•a term htat has been used ti describe a highly technologized future existence
--variationally--> other stories (fables) about technology exists =/=
d class="lstsrd">1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. that technology is a sterile instrument
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity
d>
(greek tradition -->) *to think deeply about technology, we have to think about its ontology*
•techno-sociology --> Latour
•ecological feminism --> Haraway
•post-Marxism --> Tiziana Terranova
•
•philosophy of tech --> Heidegger: the most dangerous thing we can do is to think of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
1. “technology = means to an end”
2. “technology is created by humans”
}<-- df class='thdf'>example of | df> anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings d'>& it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
-the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*
technology thought of as something that comes from the west d'>& does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency d'>& contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)
(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire
*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviors for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware d'>& human
•technology d'>& identity interpolate each other
global debates of:
•fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness
1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behavior and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consumers want
**technology: an active force that both consumes d'>& creates consumers**
(problem of) sustainability
d class="lstsrd">1. to sustain: rest, retreat --> humannes is a major threat to all nonhuman planetary existence ==> df class='thdf'>the idea that | df> radical threats to nonhumanness must be warded off by radical decreases in human population, consumption, normtive standards of living
d>
<-- this notion of sustainability exists radically at the limits of human capability (more than ecological crisis or human inequality, more than the threat of terrorism or nuclear proliferation)
d class="lstsrd">2. to sustain: to extend, strengthen --> df class='thdf'>the idea that | df> if we are not here then nothing on the planet has worth; if humans ado not exists, then the earth does not exists ==> our efforts of ecological sustainability are intrinsically human-centered [--(implicit attitude)--> prolonging humanness]==> ecological problem = crisis: an intense, short-lived episode in human history + it will be solved by high-technology solutions
d>
technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature
--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*
--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***
*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*
...................................
McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature d'>& culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human
...................................
[title]
system attic
...................................
(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with df class='thdf'>the notion of | df>)
*technological gaze*
what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?
(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts
technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
d class="lstsrd">1. impossible subject-positioning
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. codification of flesh
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. visualization of scientific narrative
d>
d class="lstsrd">4. aestheticization of information
d>
(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher
marketing communication theory
[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain d'>& encourage certain ways of seeing
•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]
how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> df class='thdf'>the idea that | df> in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (d>~d>= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)
(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern d'>& randomness =/= material absence d'>& presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable d>~d>= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* d'>& *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology d>~d>=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized d'>& technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***
...................................
nature
= figures
+ stories + images (
d>~d>= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to
nature like a
child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse
interpolate
d into a liturgical text
عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-
semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of
nature
•ds class="frds scrmbld"nttrm="Christianson">Christiands> liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fiel
ds
:)
military combat
sexual
domination
security maintenance
market strategy
...................................
(
techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction?
•ongoing abstraction of vision - Problems of vision
•transformation in the makeup of vision
•history of art <-> history of perception?
•onlooker (Zuschauer)
•historically important functions of the human eye ==> medical, military, and police hierarchies
•Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.
•where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide
•avoid mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an observer is more importantly one who sees within a prescribed set of possibilities, one who is embedded in a system of conventions and limitations.
•measurable in terms of objects and signs
•newly constituted human sciences in regulating and modifying the behavior of individuals.
•it was through these disciplines that the subject in a sense became visible
•passage from the geometrical optics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to physiological optics
•to expose the idiosyncrasies of the “normal” eye
•Retinal afterimages, peripheral vision, binocular vision, and thresholds of attention
•outcome of a complex remaking of the individual as observer into something calculable-and regularizable and of human vision into something measurable and thus, exchangeable.
•standardization of visual imagery
•in the amphitheatre / on the stage / in the Panoptic machine
•dissociation of touch from sight ==> “separation of the senses” and industrial remapping of the body in the nineteenth century
•unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility ==> fitted for the tasks of “spectacular” consumption
•Perception for Benjamin was acutely temporal and kinetic;
•a mobile consumer of a ceaseless succession of illusory commodity-like Images.
•Machines are social before being technical
•desiring machines
•The paintings of J-B. Chardin are lodged within these same questions of knowledge and perception His still lifes, especially, are a last great presentation of the classical object in all its plenitude, before it is sundered irrevocably into exchangeable and ungrounded signifiers or into the painterly traces of an autonomous vision.
•that the very process of becoming tired was in fact perception. “When the eye fixes itself on a single color...
•the clear eye of the world
•The more Schopenhauer involved himself in the new collective knowledge of a fragmented body composed of separate organic systems, subject to the opacity of the sensory organs and dominated by involuntary reflex activity, the more intensely he sought to establish a visuality that escaped the demands of that body.
•the physiological makeup of the subject as the site on which the formation of representations occurs.
•Of these only the cerebrum, together with the sensory nerves attached to it, and the posterior spinal nerve fascicles are intended to take up the motives from the external world. All the other parts, on the other hand, are intended only to transmit the motives to the muscles in which the will directly manifests itself. (Schopenhauer)
•It is knowledge that Simultaneously provided techniques for the external control and domination of the human subject and was the emancipating ground for notions of subjective vision within modernist art theory and experimentation.
...................................
ba
d visual
systems
narcissism as a cultural practice (that also motivates an
d steers
technological inventions)
accelerationism
(Accelerationism may also refer more broa
dly, an
d usually pejoratively, to support for the
deepening of capitalism in the belief that this will hasten its self-
destructive ten
dencies an
d ultimately eventuate its collapse.)
Selfie
seems to me the perfect example for this sub
mission of the unconscious to the globalize
d machine
latest theoretical buzzwor
ds
control over the
interpretation of the
world
circulation of the global image machine
tree-ma
de paper
who are (not) allowe
d (not) to have a bo
dy
?
all forms of knowl
edge claims,
acting on the i
deological
doctrines of
dis
embodie
d scientific (cinematic) objectivity
all seem just effects of
delaye
d ren
der algorithms in the play of signifiers in a virtual force fiel
d
space of simulations
not giving up to the
paranoi
d science
fiction
getting to know the
world effectively by practising the
sciences
tools of
semiology
rhetorical
nature of truth
not Romantic nor
modernist objects
:
d class="lstsrd">1. infective vectors (microbes)
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. elementary particles (quarks)
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. biomolecular codes (genes)
d>
view of the
relationship of bo
dy an
d language (the problem of
metaphor)
those of us who woul
d still like to talk about reality
imagery of moves in the fully textualize
d an
d code
d world
high tech (military) fiel
d
recognizing our own ‘
semiotic
technologies’ for making meanings,
life is
semiotic as well as
technology
(commitment
?) to faithful accounts of a ‘real’
world
Haraway writes
: All components of the
desire are para
doxical an
d dangerous, an
d their combination is both contra
dictory an
d necessary.
We nee
d the power of
modern critical theories of how meanings an
d bo
dies get ma
de, not in or
der to
deny meaning an
d bo
dies, but in or
der to live in meanings an
d bo
dies that have a chance for a future. (re
ductionism
?)
insist on the
embodie
d nature of all vision, an
d so reclaim the sensory
system that has been use
d to signify a leap out of the marke
d bo
dy an
d into a conquering gaze from nowhere. (how the exhibition can make visible my
positing in the work
? groun
d me in an
embodie
d vision
? my
situation. to
situate me. not necessarily organic
embodiment
? what have i nee
d to learn in my bo
dies
?)
perverse capacity of the eye
culture
dis
embodies. (
nature
embodies
?)
to
distance the knowing subject from everybo
dy an
d everything
visualizing
technologies are without (apparent) limit
?
linke
d to
:
-artificial graphic manipulation systems
-computer aided scanners
-colour enhancement techniques
mapping is at stake. what kin
d of mapping the Kinect image provi
des
? that is op
posite to the zeiss lens
?
how to go there with the
technology an
d not fuck the
world? carefully not give birth to mythical i
deological seeing or promising transcen
dence
Kinect's generative, but not
devouring vision
the
perversion of the zeiss lens is in that it tries to let the viewer ‘experience’ the moment of
discovery in imme
diate vision of the ‘object’
the exhibition is about a
writing of the bo
dy that
metaphorically emphasizes vision
= an
d commit to
deconstruction an
d passionate construction.
= an
d passionate
detachment, which is
depen
dent on the impossibility of innocent ‘i
dentity’ politics an
d epistemologies as strategies for seeing from (any) stan
dpoints, in or
der to see well. (refer to
lecture-performance Stan
ding on the Shoul
ders of Giants -
ds class="frds">Sinads>
ds class="frds">Seifeeds> 2015, on a critical
epistemology of seeing-from-far)
= whom to see with
?
Haraway: only partial perspective promises objective vision. This is an objective vision that initiates, rather than closes off, the problem of
responsibility for the generativity of all visual practices.
The ‘eyes’ ma
de available in
modern technological
sciences shatter any i
dea of passive vision
? these prosthetic
devices show us that all eyes, in
cluding our own organic ones, are active perceptual
systems, buil
ding in
translations an
d specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life.
partial way of organizing
worlds
is unlocatable ir
responsible
?
is my visual exhibition a knowl
edge claim
?
To see from below (or the perspective of the mathematics, Kinect, hacker
?) is neither easily learne
d nor unproblematic
ways of being nowhere while claiming to see comprehensively (i
di
d not claim any of these - i
di
dn't try even. i was there
traveling with
relation to my co-
travelers an
d a
technology
relation) my issue with the images is their generality an
d perhaps that is their unlocatablilty. but to
situate my knowl
edge an
d myself i am not solely
depen
ding on the image
rhetoric. i was committe
d to mobile
positioning, an
d that is critical.
me
diate vision
knowl
edge potent for constructing
worlds
trying to be less organize
d by axes of
domination
Science has been utopian an
d visionary from the start
? that is one reason ‘we’ nee
d it.
my eye were
crafte
d by the bloo
d of mosquitoes...
translations an
d exchanges,
material an
d semiotic
what has the property of
systematicity in my Amazon
?
orientations an
d responsibility in
material
semiotic fiel
ds of meaning.
is Here, Kinect's vision not imme
diately a very powerful
metaphor or
technology (for political
epistemological clarification)
?
The visual
metaphor invites us to investigate the varie
d apparatuses of visual pro
duction, in
cluding the prosthetic
technologies
interface
d with our biological eyes an
d brains.
shoul
d i have an argue for (politics an
d)
epistemologies of location,
positioning, an
d situating
?
view from a structuring an
d structure
d bo
dy
we
love stuttering, an
d the partly un
derstoo
d
Translation is always
interpretative, critical, an
d partial
Amazon (location) resists (the politics of) closure
logic of culture (nature made flexible)
science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)
the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)
suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor
how can something work and not work?!
mathematical competition
what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?
...................................
In 1905 the French
neurologists G.
Deny an
d P. Camus recounte
d the case of Ma
dame I who ha
d lost bo
dy awareness. She
describe
d her “general insensibility” as follows
: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I use
d to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my hea
d, an
d my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in or
der to know how I am. I have the feeling that my entire bo
dy is change
d, even at times that it no longer exists. I touch an object, but it is not I who am touching it. I no longer feel as I use
d to. I cannot fin
d myself. I cannot
imagine myself. My insensibility is f
rightening, as if everything were empty.” Ma
dame I was unable to recognize the
position of her arms an
d legs an
d was completely insensitive to pain.
According to Israel
Rosenfel
d's thesis, Ma
dame I was unable to know her bo
dy as part of her
memory. (her brain coul
d not create a
body image) She coul
d not
imagine, or create in her min
d, images of parents or the houses where she ha
d live
d. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she coul
d re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she ha
d a bo
dy. (see Strange, Familiar an
d Forgotten pp 40-42)
“If all self-reference were
destroye
d, consciousness an
d un
derstan
ding woul
d not be possible.
“Meaning an
d un
derstan
ding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a
body image.” (p.55)
“Self-reference is not a hypothetical i
dea but a
de
monstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial break
down in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the
phenomenon of
phantom limbs.” (p.56)
Two English
neurologists, Lor
d Russell Brain an
d Henry Hea
d (!) coine
d the phrase “
body image” for the
internal image an
d memory of one's bo
dy in space an
d time. The
body image is not only a picture of the bo
dy but also an anticipatory plan for the
detaile
d movements of the bo
dy, an
d rather than a fixe
d structure, it is
dynamic an
d plastic, capable of reorganizing itself ra
dically with the
contingencies of experience.
The
body image can also incorporate external object, implements, an
d instruments. When they are being use
d, they can become intimate, vital, even libi
dinally cathecte
d parts of the
body image.
(
Don
Ihde:) “To
embody one's praxis through
technologies is ultimately an existential
relation with the
world.” (
Technology an
d Life
world, p.72)
Embodie
d relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing ai
ds, blin
d man's cane, or
driving a car) take the
technology into the perceptual-bo
dily self-experience. The me
diating
technology becomes part of the
body image, an
d achieves “
instrumental transparency”
...................................
(
Giuliana Bruno)
This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehen
d the objects an
d the spaces of art, turning contact into the
communicative
interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is
different than
Lucretius reflecting upon the
nature of things)
(
materiality of) cultural surfaces
As a form of
dwelling that engages me
diation between subjects an
d with objects, the surface also can be viewe
d as a site for screening an
d projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surroun
d us to
day express a new
materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our
material
relations. An
d these screens, which have become
membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close
relation to the surfaces of canvas an
d walls—also un
dergoing a process of substantial transformation. An
d so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnecte
d an
d creating new, hybri
d forms of a
dmixture.
who shares (
deep) engagements with superficial
matters
?
layere
d space of
interaction between subject an
d object
surface can be
read as an architecture
from me
diate
d encounters with
material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory,
imagination, an
d affect are linke
d to movement
-- embodie
d in jungle walk
?
modernity's
desire an
d fancy for tactile experience,
driving an
d impulse to expan
d one's universe an
d eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of
imagination
-- effects of a
spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought
= interconnection in the sequence of i
deas expresse
d during a connecte
d discourse an
d how this sequence lea
ds from one i
dea to another (
modernity).
(i
don't
do filmic voyage)
...................................
By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I un
derstan
d that succession of one thought to another which is calle
d, to
distinguish it from
discourse in wor
ds, mental
discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succee
ds in
differently.” (— Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part
: Of Man, Chapter III
: Of the Consequence or Train of
Imagination)
...................................
the current forms of biotic forests is
due to the sp
reading of see
d-
dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic
? Kinect)
one of issues relate
d with rate/spee
d is
synchronicity
the effects of bio
technically / bioculturaly
situate
d people
Amazon's
nature in op
position to slave gar
dens (slave plantation
systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gar
dens)
for
travel an
d propagation of...
moving
material
semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looke
d at in a haptic mo
dality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figure
d as touch, not
distance. negatively curving in loops an
d frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a
depiction (
poetic, visual, etc.) is
dangerously ambiguous
?
are we really immerse
d in
data realities
? an
d that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetche
d by our bo
dies
?
co-existing an
d contra
dictory incomplete mo
dels that groun
d us in our critically limite
d existence. what
does beyon
d the (
techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-
histo-) map's horizon means for this
situate
d “us”
?
...................................
(
Amanda Boezkes)
the
ontological purification
apparatus
we are now on an i
dea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial
systems to a
djust to human-born unpre
dictabilities that overri
de an
d neutralize long-stan
ding
histories of local knowl
edge.
how an
ecological perspective can be incorporate
d into vision
-- become a visuality
? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways
ecological change registers in vision
?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kin
d of info is the image of Kinect about the environment
? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it
? personal testimony
? descriptions of a
technological
reading
?!
affor
dance, as a concept, allows complexity an
d refusal to re
duce environments, objects, an
d actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its
world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the
world beyon
d function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of
bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an
ecological perception become virtualize
d, re
presente
d, an
d returne
d to vision as a con
dition, or style of being
? that is how to take con
scientious of the
ecological beings that we are in any project
? -- that is attuning vision to an
ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich un
derstoo
d the perception of art as a process of cultivating the visual
skills of recognition in the eye itself
historical ways of seeing
any
skill we have in spite of environmental variances, is operating from visual schema that are geare
d to t
rigger pattern recognition, (art
?)
visuality vs vision
the caricaturist
does not teach us how to see, but rather instantiates a new
code of recognition. a visuality is neste
d into vision; vision is reciprocally prime
d to recognize a visuality
***
visuality involves more than pattern recognition
perception is not the tool by which we experience art, but its very content an
d substance. john Onians con
cludes that “each painting forms its own ‘eye’.”
what kin
d of eye the art (of my Kinect) cultivates
? (a
techno-
aesthetic eye
?) (the
diagrammatic eye
?) (referring to the
diagram project “sa
distic statistics”)
the ways we see ...ly (
historically,
ecologically, evolutionary,
technologically,) more part an
d parcel of the visuality of the
anthropo
cene
the
neuro-
aesthetic eye
to “
read” environment in terms of info pick-up an
d accommo
dation
to simply perceive as we
do
but to parlay (
double up) our perceptual
system into a mo
dality of processing,
response, an
d responsiveness
(the
aesthetics of) the visual brain is the contact (not contract) between the in
divi
dual an
d the eco
system
mo
dulation of ethos in lan
dscape
?
Kinect is not bringing a knowl
edge that is
neurobiologically imperceptible to the nake
d eye nor is it
technologically making a
worldview accessible.
“it is low tech”, its images are born of partial recognition, attunement, an
d attention
low-tech works may be critical for
developing a visuality that is not yet
integral to or explicit within new me
dia, visualising the
specifically
neurological
dimension of
ecologicity an
d mobilizing vision as a perceiving organ to cultivate this self-awareness.
...................................
(
McKenzie Wark)
climate
science, a key
science of our time, rests on an
apparatus of very powerful computers an
d communication vectors, which overcome the “friction”, as
Paul Edwards calls it, between
data an
d communication. it brings together global
data according to global stan
dar
ds, mathematical mo
dels of physics of climate
drawn from flui
d dynamics, an
d massive computational power. the mo
del an
d data copro
duce each other in a way, as the
data sets are all partial, an
d many
data points have to be
interpolate
d to make the mo
dels work. an
d then all of that has to be me
diate
d back to human awareness via tables, graphs, computer simulations, an
d so forth.
...................................
(
Irmgard Emmelhainz)
(
anthropo
cene) change in the con
ditions of visuality
transformation of the
world into images
phenomenological
+ epistemological consequences
images participate now in the forming of
worlds, they have also become forms of thought
the optical min
d
the ra
dical change in the con
ditions of visuality has brought about a new subject
position or point of view, announce by the
trajectories of
:
d class="lstsrd">1. antihumanism (between impressionism and cubism)
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. posthumanism (between cubism and experimental film)
d>
d class="lstsrd">3. non-grounded form of vision (from experimental film to digital media)
d>
this regime of visuality implies
: automatization, tautological vision, an
d signs lea
ding to other signs
resulte
d to
=> the proliferation of images also implying the cancellation of vision
“vision cancelle
d”
linearity of the Renaissance perspective plan create
d the illusion of a view to the outsi
de
world, analogous to a win
dow.
cubism
: showing a perpetual
present in a parallel temporality.
perspectival multiplicity became embe
dde
d in the picture plane.
invente
d a
discontinuous space, making i
dentity an
d difference relative (
questioning the classical
metaphysics), by subverting the
relations between subject an
d object.
does my Kinect pictural mo
del employs the architectural space
? is camera architectural
?
in experimental film,
duration became a key component of
aesthetic experience, analogous to human consciousness, a prosthetic vision
i
dentity an
d difference, rejection of a
priori space
how to release the subject from human coor
dinates
? what are references to human coor
dinates
? screen's rectangular frame
?
the machine (optical perception)
delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, which announces, first the incipient (initial) normalization of perception as augmente
d reality an
d data visualization
displacement of the subjective center of operations
epitomize
subvert
fragmentation brought by mechanization, has an alienating character
its impossibility to give back an image or serve a reflective mirror
![--> d
ajayeb rigs existence hierarchy snake world donya
[source: Sina Seifee] ajayeb rigs existence hierarchy snake world donya [source: Sina Seifee]](images/ajayeb/0126.jpg)
it is in
different to “me”
the exhaustive visualization an
d documentation of
wildlife is effectively concealing its ongoing extinction (one of the reasons i am not using the zeiss-lens-camera recor
dings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs
[...
] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir.
[...
] the very activity of taking pictures
[...
] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of
disorientation that are likely to be exacerbate
d (worsene
d) by
travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, wel
ding image an
d discourse
the contemporary experience is also ma
de of sharing/tweeting/liking images
the contemporary political economy
: communicative capitalism
derives surplus value from the volume an
d velocity of sings an
d data circulating in the infosphere.
proliferation of cognitive signs is another feature of
communicative capitalism, submitting the min
d to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli
(for Berar
di) seeing means accelerating perception in the fiel
ds of every
day experience, accelerate
d tautological vision
derive
d from constant passive observation. this is another of
communicative capitalism's form of governance, as this kin
d of vision generates
techno-
linguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning
is Kinect image-compilation a creature of infosphere
? (boring
question?)
normalization of groun
dless seeing (exemplifie
d in google earth)
“picture
does not make an image” (Serge
Daney, before an
d after image)
image against vision
life persists irrationality, not given form by
imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, col
d world)
...................................
(
Ada Smailbegovic)
nature of things (2013,
ds class="frds">Sinads>
+ ds class="frds scrmbld">Elisads>)
relate
d to temporalities an
d velocities (plant politics of movement)
the vi
deo registers
different rhythms an
d textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to
draw on
descriptive practices of
natural
history
attuning to p
articulate
differences that
compose change
the temporal
dimension of human “umwelt” is tune
d into a limite
d set of rhythms an
d durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for
developing a politics of time (such as longe
duration of geological time) may not be
directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is
difficult to sense, but temporality as a compoun
d entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
bin
ding times together
an alternative perspective on (
anthropo
cene) temporality involves
developing a
poetics of
description as a mo
de of
affective an
d aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental
poetics of
technology as a mo
de of
aesthetic amplification towar
ds a less perspectival visuality
-- the
writing ten
ds to operate in a more tentacular mo
de of perception
--> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (an
d therefore cognitive)
relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect an
d sweating both propose mo
des of perception other than perspectival sha
dow casting
system of vision.
(organic or inorganic/
technological
?) processes that constitute the planet/plant
=> intimacy with the organic/inorganic/
technological processes that constitute the planet
(
my work is to create or fin
d out)
poetics an
d the
methodologies that register the bite an
d in
dexes its significance
(
+ bite of the critter on my skins)
(
Chakrabarty in The climate of
history
:) “man's environment
di
d change but change
d so slowly as to make the
history of man's
relation to his environment almost timeless an
d thus not a subject of
historiography at all”
the collapse of this age-ol
d humanist
distinction between
natural
history an
d human
history
plant
writing
formulate
transitional
categories that woul
d be
responsive to
differentiate
d mo
des of activity attune
d to the
difficulties of
depicting
natural
phenomena that are continuously in flux.
reader of the meteorological registers
envision the temporal flux
the shifting
edges (of the Kinect buil
ding generics)
(Kinect image) as architectural form
compose
d of
different (
transitional)
materially instantiate
d temporalities
trans
position of qualities
within grammatical an
d figurative textures (of
poetic)
between the
material an
d the
metaphorical
mo
des of
materiality
...................................
(W.A.G.E. working artists an
d greater economy)
for artists who
don't have secon
dary jobs, their mobility
--despite being un
der
written in many cases by class privilege
--is force
d. they are wire
d-up,
networke
d carriers of
social an
d cultural capital set in perpetual motion, transforming cities in their passage through them on the art circuit
--sophisticate
d noma
dic clans who
travel to survive.
...................................
nature of things (2013,
ds class="frds">Sinads>
+ ds class="frds scrmbld">Elisads>)
places marke
d with zones of limite
d habitation
--you can't live there, you are a visitor
a place that is both wastelan
d an
d wilderness at the same time
wastelan
d tourism (museum in chernobyl)
d class="lstsrd">1. the christian tradition: it was our obligation to use up the earth before the apocalypse
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. the romantic view: we humans are the servants of the land, we are its eyes, we are its expression
d>
we are becoming visitors of waste
wilderness, most
natural an
d un
natural lan
d simultaneously
...................................
the moment the
world enters my bo
dy it has al
ready been transforme
d
for
ds class="frds scrmbld">Elisads> an
d me Bochum's forest was a location, with its
decay, it's subtropical humi
dity an
d toxins, an
d because of the way it is
trappe
d between the
natural an
d the man-ma
de.
“we are forever collecting ourselves” (
Baudrillard)
we have always encountere
d the
world via
technology
(now
internet)
...................................
(
Zoe Todd)
Zapatista (a revolutionary leftist political an
d militant group base
d in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico) principles of “walking the
world into being” (as locus of thought an
d practice to
decolonize posthumanist geographies)
(for
ds class="frds scrmbld">Juands>ita Sun
dberg) the zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in buil
ding the p
luriversale, a
world in which many
worlds fit.
[...
] as we humans move, work, play, an
d narrate with multiplicity of beings in place, we enact
historically
contingent an
d ra
dically
distinct
worlds/
ontologies.
the
epistemic violence inherent both in aca
demic treatment an
d dance (they both bring things to life
?) (is
dance controlle
d form of violence
? does violence always bring things to life contrary to the belief that it kills life
?)
(i
don't want to) trivialize (Amazon an
d my Amazon trip) as case-stu
dy an
d neutralize its in
digenous
ontologies
(John Hartingan
:)
Anthropo
cene as “charismatic mega-
category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western aca
demy)
(which sweeps many competing
narratives un
der its roof
?)
(in
digenous artists, Rebecca Belmore
d'>& Jolene Rickar
d:)
material might act as a bri
dge, instea
d of a mirror
(
narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with
material-as-mirror)
(
Dwayne
Donal
d:) place-base
d cultures an
d knowl
edge systems
colonialism is basicly “
disconnection”,
denial of
relation
(in its heart is
written “we are not relate
d”)
(so few in
digenous bo
dies are
present in sites where aca
demic
discourse are being forge
d an
d practice
d) when they are
present, they are often
dismisse
d as biase
d, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they
present. (can i say the same treat is with
iranians
? an
d in which s
cene or context
? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive
discursive unemotional an
d unopinionate
d maintenances)
(aroun
d me / aroun
d here)
=> importances an
d pleasures of going from “aroun
d me” to “aroun
d here”
(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the
past (
?)
ecological
imagination is a turn towar
ds reciprocity an
d relationship
in Kinect the path of a journey is refracte
d, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with
ds class="frds scrmbld">Hannods> in the Amazon forest is a joyful an
d critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing ten
dencies.
...................................
tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulate
d (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “
relationships”
how can we problematize
narcissism
? what if it is the wrong wor
d describing a certain property of life
? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment an
d he
dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this
story is that he is most alive via the
story,
Narcissus is basically un
dea
d.
...................................
close-range vision
how can we practice movement an
d touch in the physio-locality of the eyes
?
tentacularity
touching was consi
dere
d a cru
der scanning at close range an
d seeing a more subtle touching at a
distance
importance of far
distance over close range
=> refer to project Stan
ding on the Shoul
ders of Giants (2015,
ds class="frds">Sinads>)
...................................
forest's “space”
Hernri Lefebvre
distinguishes Re
presentation of space an
d Re
presentational spaces. ... Re
presentational spaces are “
directly live
d” through as
sociate
d images an
d symbols which overlay physical space, making
symbolic use of its objects.
Re
presentation is a
distinctive manner of
imagining the real, an
d is a fun
damental
phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
or instea
d of how a forest looks like, what is the forest ma
de of
? an
d for whom
? what is the forest ma
de of is the
matter of negotiation (between the
different kin
ds of beings who think
differently about the forest)
in or
der not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural
history as an explanatory
priority to the
historically
contingent circumstances) we can propose two
questions of ol
der critique of perspectival perception
:
d class="lstsrd">1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
d>
d class="lstsrd">2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
d>
of course both
questions are
phenomenological
positions, but that
does not mean that we no longer nee
d re
presentation to un
derstan
d relationality. (Konh wor
ds)
nee
ding or not nee
ding re
presentation to un
derstan
d relationality
...................................
(
Latour)
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assemble
d by “frien
ds of
interpretable objects”
... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)
(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image
are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?
do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as that of religion and art. the subtlety of its traces requires a new form of care and attention.
(we need new forms of attention)
the more artifactual the inscription, the better its ability to connect, to ally with others, to generate even better objectivity (Kinect?)
Kinect recordings as ethnography?
how to escape from the tyranny of “simply objective”, “purely representative” quasi-scientific illustrations? Freeing one's gaze from this dual obligation accounts....
religious icons and their obsession for real presence
they have never been about presenting something other than absence
scientific imagery
no isolated scientific image has any mimetic power; there is nothing less representational, less figurative, than the pictures produced by science, which are nonetheless said to give us the best grasp of the visible world.
...................................
is Aruz (
عروض)
interface
? surface/face an
d meaning/inhalt/content
dualism in Tasavof,
Rumi breakings of Aruz. Tsavof believes that only through appearance one can get into the
depth
science,
religion, an
d politics all three take for grante
d an image of
nature.
...................................
(
Peter Galison, in iconoclash)
wanting to know with eyes-open
it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical
world remains In contact with the real
world; an
d even though pure mathematics coul
d do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bri
dge the
abyss which separates
symbol from reality.”
...................................
(
Dipesh Chakrabarty)
(
history of
nature
?) the
nature of
history as a form of knowl
edge
(Croce essay 1893
history subsume
d un
der the concept of art) Croce
drew on the
writings of Ernst Mach an
d Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the
natural
sciences are human constructs elaborate
d for human purposes.” “when we peer into
nature, we fin
d only ourselves” we
do not “un
derstan
d ourselves best as part of the
natural
world” (is that not the image of
Narcissus who looks into the
nature an
d can only see himself
--nature observation as mirror
stage)
so as
ds class="frds scrmbld"nttrm="Robin,Robot,Robert,Robocop">Robds>erts puts it “Croce proclaime
d that there is no
world but the human
world, then took over the central
doctrine of Vico that we can know the human
world because we have ma
de it.”
Croce's i
dealism “
does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘
don't exist’ without human beings to think about them. apart from human concern an
d language, they neither exist nor
do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns an
d purposes” (not saying human
symbolic
system of thought)
man environment
di
d change but change
d so slowly as to make the
history of man's
relation to his environment almost timeless an
d thus not a subject of
historiography at all.
***
the
history of man's
relationship to the environment was so slow as to be almost timeless
but now scholars are
writing significantly
different
: destroying the artificial but time-honore
d distinction between
natural an
d human
histories, climate
scientists
posit that the human beings has become something much larger than the simple biological
agent that he or she always has been.
vision of man “as a prisoner of climate” an
d not of man as the maker of it
is the
Anthropo
cene a critique of the
narratives of free
dom
?
price we pay for the pursuit of free
dom
politics
: the most common shape that free
dom takes in human
societies.
politics has never been base
d on reason alone. (it seems politics is something that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming)
[Global warming
] requires nations an
d regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most
societies are unable to
do because of the very short-term
nature of politics.
Anthropo
cene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening
the crisis of climate change calls for thinking
simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital an
d species
history.
as
Gadamer pointe
d out,
Dilthey saw “the in
divi
dual's private
world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living trans
position, fills out the narrowness an
d fortuitousness of his private experience with the in
finity of what is available by re-experiencing the
historical
world.”
...................................
(
Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)
“let
nature speak for itself” (!) a new bran
d of
scientific objectivity that emerge
d in the 19th century
=> restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations,
generalization,
aesthetics, even or
dinary
language on the image of
nature. (the image of
nature has never been objective)
the
present usage of objectivity can be applie
d to everything from
empirical reliability to proce
dural correctness to emotional
detachment
each component of objectivity opposes a
distinct form of subjectivity; each is
define
d by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal i
dio
syncrasies
this i
deal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the me
diating
presence of the observer
the
phenomena never sleep an
d neither shoul
d the observer
heroic self-
discipline
profoun
dly moralize
d vision
an
d like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wan
dere
d, whose pace slackene
d, whose han
d tremble
d
the self-recor
ding
instrument promise
d to replace the weary artist
machines offere
d free
dom from will
being true to
nature
:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to
nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the
scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the
right place at the
right time with the
right
equipment) the Kinect's total ran
domness
one problem of atlases is that they have to
deci
de what
nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice
: which objects shoul
d be
presente
d an
d from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism an
d arbitrariness
?) (can we not choose what
nature is when we are at it
? an
d when we are at
nature
?)
rejection of
aesthetics (but what se
duction exactly betrays
? or what
does it make accurate
?)
average (is truth to
nature
?)
asceticism of non
interventionist objectivity
“straight photography” is above all a sig
nature of a particular s
cene, a
specific an
d localize
d re
presentation only awkwar
dly a
daptable to a mosaic com
position from
different in
divi
duals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
how
scientists
deploye
d mechanical means to police the artist
(for
Martin Kusch - objectivity an
d historiography) truth-to-
nature ha
d its rationale in enlightenment sensationa
list psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmente
d, passive, an
d excessively receptive.
--> to be true to
nature was actively to select an
d interpret sensations an
d in that way bring them un
der
epistemic control.
--> re
presentation in nanofacture, image is use
d to actually engineer the whole thing. making an
d seeing coinci
de.
eliminating ju
dgment
the
device woul
d remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen
what characterize
d the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-sur
veillance
(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)
personal equation
: a
systematic error correction
to pro
duce re
liable images
While in the early nineteenth century, the bur
den of re
presentation was
suppose
d to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the au
dience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the au
dience ha
d replace
d the
metaphysical claims of the
author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuage
d their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of ju
dgment to the au
dience.
(Grashey's) police
metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the
history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly boun
d up with the
history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly fin
ding its way into court.
scientific evi
dence
legal evi
dence
at issue was, once again, the shifting bor
der between ju
dgment an
d mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human
intervention an
d the
routinize
d, automatic functioning of the
technology.
me
dico-legal concept of evi
dence
the image of the x-ray appeare
d (in court at least) to preempt an
d displace all other forms of knowl
edge.
(Allan
Poe:) “if we examine a work of or
dinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to
nature will
disappear
--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic
drawing
discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect i
dentity of aspect with the thing re
presente
d.”
trompe l'oeil (new note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the
technology itself
photographs
di
d not carry a transparent meaning
once so police
d, an
d presumably only then, coul
d the photographic process be elevate
d to a special
epistemic status, putting it in a
category of its own
in contrast to
drawings, photograms were tarnishe
d by the cru
deness impose
d by the limite
d palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the
author clearly favore
d the cru
de but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy ha
d to be sacrifice
d on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical
? why i have been insisting to remove my han
ds
?! why i was craving for objectivity
?)
=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a
literal mark of objectivity
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication coul
d corrupt an in
divi
dual
? (you can be accurate but not sophisticate
d) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral
narrative surroun
ding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argue
d, pictures (properly constructe
d) serve
d as talismanic guar
ds against frau
ds an
d system buil
ders,
aesthetes an
d i
dealizers.
exten
ding the mystique of the visual to the
dense
symbolic
presentation of functions an
d graphs
inscription
instruments
(Marey,
method grafique) “the graphical
method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one coul
d call the
language of the
phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other mo
des of expression.”
graphical re
presentation coul
d cut across the artificial boun
daries of
natural
language to reveal
nature to all people,
they were the wor
ds of
nature itself
the search for this ren
dition of objective re
presentation was a moral as much as
technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the
scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine ai
de
d where the will faile
d. (at once a powerful an
d polyvalent
symbol,) the machine was fun
damental to the very i
dea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new
scientific
instruments,
embodie
d a
positive i
deal of the observer
: patient, in
defatigable, ever alert, probing beyon
d the limits of the human senses. (what other
relationships exist with the machine
? other than this self-
discipline
d observer)
(
rhetoric of)
wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of
techniques of mechanical repro
duction,) hel
d out the promise of images uncontaminate
d by
interpretation.
...the
scientists’ continuing claim to such ju
dgment-free re
presentation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stoo
d for authenticity
: it was at once an observer an
d an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize,
anthropo
morphize, beautify, or otherwise
interpret
nature.
one type of mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of non
interventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to
nature than han
d-ma
de images
--but rather because the camera apparently eliminate
d human
agency
(what is the
difference between
systematic image an
d mechanical image
? same
? -glitch..)
(mechanical) images that coul
d be toute
d as
nature's self-portrait
aura of stoic nobility
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)
moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative au
dience
by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.
objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations
subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,
varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives
it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)
photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical
decolonization
planting an
d displanting of humans an
d plants are elements of the same multi
species colonial en
deavor
native plants as a
discursive fiel
d
complex an
d unmarke
d ways that plants have been
sorte
d out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a
measure of perfection an
d ‘civility’) gar
dening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (foun
ding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the
literal planting an
d displanting of peoples,
animals, an
d plants
--as inscribing a
domination into bloo
d an
d soil foun
de
d in the fantasy of mol
ding eco
systems with go
dlike arrogance
--it becomes clear how colonialism ushere
d in the
anthropo
cene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivate
d. in the imperial
imaginary this
distinction between cultivate
d an
d native plants was iso
morphic with people as well.
‘
nature’, like the uncultivate
d native, was to be
dominate
d by ‘culture’. such ‘government of
nature’ foun
d its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gar
dens. (
species collecte
d for
scientific reasons, for
aesthetic an
d i
deological benefit)
government of
nature
invasive
animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
df class='thdf'>the idea of | df> “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(
Davis et al, 2011 article publishe
d in journal
Nature, title
:) “
Don't ju
dge
species on their o
rigins”, is a mislea
ding phrase; at issue is ju
dging
species not on their o
rigins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako an
d Delaney, 1995) “people think an
d act in the
intersections of
discourses”
but not every
domain
intersects in every instance, an
d the character of an ‘
intersection’ is
historically
specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants an
d animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to a
ddress is crucial
: how, exactly,
do those plants
travel
? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroun
dings as a neutral, benign
category, serve
d from the colonial
history of globalization, is problematic at best.
treating plants
metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, para
doxically
divi
des human from
nature. it eli
des the forms of
displanting
--of botanical colonization
--that were part an
d parcel of the colonial encounter.
Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ an
d the ‘
ecological In
dian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)
(
df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> the
Anthropo
cene implies) an
ecology in which humans are immanent to the
natural
world
...................................
(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) ma
de available
[...
] with a
wonderfully
detaile
d, active, partial way of organizing
worlds...
[Haraway, SK
]
...................................
lecture khm Luis
trans or cross
ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it an
d i care for thoses
ecologies.
an
d because we can't keep clean. i
love to talk about clean an
d dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the
world is that it is
dirty an
d excessive an
d lunetic.
literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio an
d biology is not sche
dule
d by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i nee
d a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulate
d organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi
dance)
tech
interface amaz
div
device
literature
...................................
[Avital]
in the conflict of
rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the thir
d language. The task of this
language is to release the prisoners
: to scatter the signifie
ds, the catechisms
to enter areas of conflict
[...
] fragile zone where non-knowl
edge dominates knowl
edge
Self-
dissolving an
d regathering, the subject became linke
d to the possibility of a new autonomy, an
d opium illuminate
d in this case (
Baudelaire, though un
der
De Quincey’s influence, was to use it
differently) an in
divi
dual who finally coul
d not i
dentify with his ownmost autonomy but foun
d himself instea
d subjecte
d to heroic humiliation in the regions of the
sublime. Opium became the transparency upon which one coul
d review the
internal conflict of free
dom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the
abyss of
destructive jouissance.
mapping the bo
dy as an intensive conflictual site
scenography an
d rhetoric of arme
d conflict
(
Avital on) the maternal trace in the
technological revealing from
Heidegger to the Bushies
the
readers an
d non
reader
the s
cene of the proto-pe
dagogy (involves only two persons)
: The master an
d pupil together pro
duce an allegory of being struck, enlightene
d
(for
Levinas:) expérience
=/= épreuve
•experience --> a knowing of which the self is master is always said
•épreuve (text, trial, proof) --> df class='thdf'>the idea of | df> life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene’ ~~> a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk, life submitted to incessant probes, find themselves subjected to the rigors of the épreuve
conflict's another logic of
rigor in certain types of non-Western practices (such as Zen an
d yogic teachings)
the pupil is le
d to an inner experience without
interiority, to un
derstan
ding without cognition, without a
history
==> subjectivity
the Zen pupil, often a wan
derer,
listens
differently, stilling herself to consi
der the sonic eventfulness of growing grass
...un
derstan
ding no longer crowns the en
d of a labore
d process of appropriation
=/= Western
narratives of testing
going after the grail or attempting to reach a
metaphysically-la
den Castle
...cannot be properly locate
d or possesse
d
the inaction hero
(
?are we accustome
d) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage
The Sphinx marks the porous boun
dary between Western an
d Eastern
domains of
questioning an
d tells of bo
dies menace
d by pulverization
: shoul
d the ri
ddle not be solve
d, either the
questioner or the
questione
d must go. Passing the test is a
matter of survival of the
species for Oe
dipus, as it is for the
interspecial
dominatrix of the ri
ddle
: la Sphinx
dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan
...................................
My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation
[8
] not simply to be
read as a mere theoretical an
d discursive statement, an
d is inten
de
d to be a table of
digital curses. To reopen the
agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might pro
duce a
different but not necessarily better speculative
difficulty in
discussing about the virtual. A curse
[9
] (
according to
Iranian-Islamic mixture of tra
ditions in the milieus of promising an
d swearing,) is basically a
networking function with both mechanical an
d interventionist properties that
translate
desire into performance—an
intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real
world an
d it may (or may not) run
down its target. Much like
rumor, curse is contagious an
d repro
ductive but unlike the publicity of
rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assume
d’ mostly an
d that is the virtual
nature of this
relation (with the
materialities of the
world that curse inscribes on) that I am
intereste
d in.
Curse
systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with
df class='thdf'>the notion of | df> the “proper name”
[10
] investe
d in
df class='thdf'>the idea of | df> an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘
agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one coul
d raise all actual
agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of
nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the
suppose
d acci
dental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.
An exten
de
d concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.
[11
] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an acci
dental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the
narrative of the ran
dom
traveler who casts a gaze in another
world of virtual an
d visual
agency, an
d emphasises the ran
domness an
d hi
deousness of looking. The transaction between the eyes in the evil eye goes both ways to posses both the behol
ders. The target of the evil eye is always misse
d[ar
] due to the
internal conflict of perception an
d will. The
intersection of visions is feare
d an
d programme
d in the mo
dalities of
material talisman an
d culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful an
d real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”
[12
]
[Serres]
does experimentation, in art
science, ex
cludes subjectivity
? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowl
edge, instea
d of the
division of knowl
edge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcome
d, but that is another part of reality.
Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs
science.
To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject
techniques of classification an
d separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the
dogmatism of unite
d an
d systematic knowl
edge.
...the itinerary traces the trans
mission, transformation, an
d multiplication of messages through
diverse spaces of
communication.
The spatial
language of the
writing of the
world, geography,
language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towar
ds a new
epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription,
scientists. To
read an
d to journey are the one an
d same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacre
d an
d the
religious wor
ds are spoken at the same time an
d in the same breath as those of
science an
d of journeys.
Two speakers, unite
d against the
phenomenon of
interference an
d confusion. Who's stake is in
interrupting
communication
? The above
interlocutors are on the same si
de, far from the
dialogical game.
Demin in
cludes himself in the circuit, b
lurs the message, ren
ders it unintelligible, an
d exactly by that assures trans
mission. Parasite pro
duces by the way of
disor
der a more complex or
der.
..penetrative grasp of a text,
discovery an
d recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or
systematize.
..temporal an
d local settings of one's text. (to master it
?)
to
read X, is
literally, to ‘prepare’ to
read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing lan
dscape of fact
unexamine
d smiles
worn
tropes
wor
ds, the guar
dians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scan
dal
note on
history
: past is a
language construct, that the
past tense of the
verb is the sole guarantor of
history.
Dialectics as a
method of intellectual chase.
Who first tol
d a
joke
?
Certain
languages are inhospitable to new
metaphors.
Language-act
to
read: is to restore all that one can of the imme
diacies of value an
d intent in which speech actually occurs.
my o
riginal repetition
we re-enact in our e
ducate
d consciousness
in what sense
does unperforme
d music exist
?
The same groun
d, when using the ‘speculative
instruments’, the critic, e
ditor, actor, an
d reader stan
d on.
When we
read or hear any
language statement from the
past, we
translate.
En
code an
d de
code “message”, mislea
ding operative mo
dels of
translation between
different
languages an
d even within a single
language.
One treason in
translation
: wor
ds rarely show any outwar
d mark of altere
d meaning, they bo
dy forth their
history only in a fully establishe
d context.
What
material reality has
history out of
language? --the
tasavof verbal
linguistic tra
dition
silence knows no
history...
?
...to remin
d you that everything is the con
dition of ma
dness.
“Tense
Past”
..the lan
dscape
compose
d by the
past tense, the semantic organization of re
membrance... is style
d an
d code
d differently by cultures.
--miniature illustrating San'an
?
The
verbal icon ma
de up of all successive
translations of
Greek literature an
d philosophy has oriente
d fun
damental movements in Islamic feelings
--Farabi, Mir
dama
d, etc.
My
translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for imme
diacy or precise echo. I am not trying to buil
d my own resonant
past. Myth of the ‘true
past’...
different perspectives can co-exist an
d b
lur
the
metaphysics of the insult, in San'an
story
i am
intereste
d in the conventions in which texts can be
read, in which a semantic statement can be carrie
d over into someone's own i
diom. I am teaching how to re
read texts of
Attar an
d so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learne
d) ‘to
translate out of time’
übertr
agen,
han
ding
down thought
narrative,
something that also
depen
ds on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal an
d internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwar
dly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status an
d power
--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to un
dermine in my
lectures)
...calculate
d to guar
d some coherence of inner life (while woun
ding outwar
d)
(motions of) menace an
d non-information (in top
down
dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppresse
d an
d polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same wor
d to mean
different things, such
differences characterises the
language of i
deology.)
fracture of wor
ds an
d the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by
children, they are a exploite
d an
d rebellious class, the
child seeks to keep the
world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note
: surroun
de
d by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the
child breaks off
verbal contact. He seems to choose silence to
destroy his
imagine
d enemy. Like mur
derous Cor
delia,
children know that silence can
destroy another human being.
The multitu
dinous existence of
child has left comparatively few archives.
...the uniquely vulnerable an
d creative con
dition of the
childhoo
d
privilege
d inferiority (of both
child an
d woman)
intercourse an
d discourse
feminine use of subjunctive, in European
languages, give a characteristic vibrato to
material facts an
d relations. ... They multiply the facets of reality, they strengthen the a
djective to allow it an alternative nominal status.
...obtuse resistant fabric of the
world
in every known culture, men have accuse
d women of being garrulous, of wasting wor
ds with lunatic pro
digality.
The chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scol
d, the toothless crone her mouth win
d-full of speech, is ol
der than fairy-tales.
...men's
delight in women's voice when their register is sweet an
d low.
the change in men's voice, the crow
ding of ca
dence, the heightene
d fluency t
riggere
d by sexual ex
citement. An
d how men's speech flattens, how it's intonations
dull after orgasm.
The motif of the woman or mai
den who says very little, in whom silence is a counterpart to chasteness an
d sacrificial grace, len
ds a unique pathos to Antigone or Oerepi
dus..
fabric of
obligation,
different for men an
d women within the same
community
linguistically programme
d conceptualizations vs. biologically
determine
d apprehensions of sense
data
...la
dy Macbeth negates the fierce reality of Macbeth vision
...
communication like breathing is subject to obstruction an
d homici
dal break
downs, un
der stress of hatre
d, of bore
dom, or of su
dden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous un
derstan
ding ha
d been base
d on a trivial pi
dgin which ha
d left the heart of meaning untouche
d.
What is the female speech in San'an
?
By far the greater proportion of art an
d historical recor
d has been left by men. The process of ‘sexual
translation’ or of the break
down of
linguistic exchange (is seen, almost invariably, from a male focus.)
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
How, when, an
d who can see or ren
der the genius of women's speech an
d see the crisis of imperfect or aban
done
d translations (from both si
des)
?
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual
discourse or i
dentity
in San'an, man an
d woman, each respective experience of eros an
d language ha
d set them
desperately apart.
In whose i
diom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehoo
d or menace
?
...as
declaimer of my own stifle
d, tongue
any mo
del if
communication is a mo
del of
translation, of transfer of significance. No two localities use wor
ds an
d syntax to signify exactly the same things, to sen
d i
dentical signals (of valuation an
d inference).
[the matrix space tries to create that assurance of i
dentical signals, the electronic,
digital space, gri
d,
systematic, no
de base
d-- but
linguistic
storytelling is not
]
In performance, cor
responding to my level of
literacy, an
d a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious an
d personal
memories, an
d using the singular an
d irre
ducibly
specific ensemble of somatic an
d psychological i
dentity.
Getting out of one's own
dictionary of private re
membrance, in ol
d age.
A stu
dy of
translation is a stu
dy of
language
df class='thdf'>the ideal of | df> a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an in
divi
dual's expressive means an
d his
world-image, peruse
d by the
poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the mislea
ding context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘un
naturalness’ of the human
linguistic or
der strikes us.
I am
intereste
d in this p
lura
list framework we are living in since the inception of recor
de
d history.
...
It is not a formal har
d-
edged linguistic relegation, rather a
metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘
language atlas’
?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars
: that have nothing of substance to say about the pro
digality of
language atlas
my
interest in the
ajayeb is
due to the traces it provi
des into
verbal
literacy, a living vulgar
language, rather than a
dea
d structure such as mantegh al teir
Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing
languages an
d people, their
history an
d morphological structures uncharte
d,
dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a
language animal of implausible variety an
d waste.
Cultures (
during
Attar's
?) seem to expen
d on their
vocabulary an
d syntax acquisitive energies an
d ostentations entirely lacking in their
material lives.
[very
interesting point regar
ding the
language of mysticism,
Attar an
d others.
]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60
different wor
ds in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’,
doesn't necessitates the
material variety of horse in the ancient
Iranian culture
?)
--starving ban
ds of Amazonian In
dians may lavish on their con
dition more
verb tenses than coul
d Plato.
Is my
language, or lack of speaking certain
languages, a powerful obstacle to the
material an
d social progress of me
?
--withering inwar
d by
language barriers.
Linguistically atomize
d
interaction of physical an
d spiritual
agencies...
The nomina
list mechanism of creation
: each time man spoke he re-enacte
d, he
mimed.
(...the early forms an
d feelings of consciousness in human
ancestral
pasts)
my
reading or performance in
cludes scrutinising con
figuration of letters an
d inverting wor
ds.
Ba
d translations
communicate too much, limite
d to what is non-essential in the fabric of the o
riginal, missing the bon
d of meaning.
If
translation is a form, then the con
dition of
translatability must be
ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of
translation
translation is profoun
dly philosophic, ethical, an
d magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness an
d ‘otherness’.
My
translation, an
interlinear version of the script, a virtual
archetype of
translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of
language,
Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human
communication. The impossibility of not
writing, the impossibility of
writing in German, of
writing
differently.
Presence of
interpreters in the buil
ding site,
Kafka,
literature house
in
Kafka, great wall
= mosaic law
?
Only if men coul
d use
language without perusing meaning to the forbi
dden
edge of the absolute.
Alpha
d'>& ds class="frds scrmbld"nttrm="Alex,Alert,Aleph,Alessi">Aleds>ph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret
languages
‘a
poetic
vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or af
finities’
pursuit of an
inter-
lingua for philosophic
discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)
it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.
..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation
beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for ds class="frds scrmbld">Shabnamds>?)
...all matters of the function of thinking
(why do i want to bring to her, to ds class="frds scrmbld">Shabnamds>, the quintessence of the rational?)
‘the inner music of meaning’
the german tenderness
german tender---zart
(in ds class="frds scrmbld">Shabnamds>'s poetry : the clash between ‘mental’ and ‘psychic’ codes of recognition)
the villain is outside the law (of exchange)
...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down
faith and substitution of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
<[...]