[...] 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 interested in my own foundational metaphors.
is there an amateurishness at the intersection of art and philosophy that i am drawing?
what is amateur?

the fact that i am giving talks is very much related to the social culture around me, in Germany the culture has a taste to listen and there is an interest for speech. now i get it like in the case of warhol he is rethinking his surrounding culture which is dominated at that time by pop, media and celebrity. i am rethinking the academia and philosophy that is in relationship with the arts, my issues and interests are different than warhol for that matter. i am enthusiastic and extremely interested in the material that i am working with, and at the same time overthrown by it and i believe in it, in the same way that maybe warhol believed in pop culture and business.

the nightmare after performance

the notion of 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 and gossip but it is forbidden to preach, lecture or instruct.”
Claudio Magris’ Micronismi

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(butler)

the structure of address itself

although I did not know in whose voice this person was speaking, whether the voice was his own or not, I did feel that I was being addressed.

To respond to this address seems an important obligation during these times.

It is about a mode of response that follows upon having been addressed, a comportment toward the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility.

The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.

...the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...

We think of presidents as wielding speech acts in willful ways, so when the director of a university press, or the president of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, and to whom they are speaking, and with what intent.

...perhaps we should think more seriously about the relation between modes of address and moral authority. (also one of the issues in today's performance art)


narration is always judgment
affective intervention


why should i listen to you?
because i have a voice!


visual culture has different strand 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 Hanno). verbal language because of its easy everyday usage has become mundane and instrumental to communication, visual sign due to its learning curve and skillfulness belonged to the art domain.

...................................

transitive verb constructions are the ones that require a direct object in order to complete the meaning and to be grammatical. Used in theater, between director and actor, by communicating with transitive verbs actors can perform the language of the director.


my work embodies and communicates a desire to read (and write) texts



[steiner]
in Greek mythology the poet and the seer are blind 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 word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and 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)

•Robots making Robots
•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, marigold

Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92

newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)

mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)

The shock of new media is as old as the hills

Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.

(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)

Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.

Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.

the conceiving mind over the perceiving body (vision/touch)
touching was considered “a cruder scanning at close range,” and seeing “a more subtle touching at a distance.”

for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of depth, and Condillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement and touch. The notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized 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)
•

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In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology

At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological eye)seems to be the central object of both philosophical pretension and selfcertainty, on the one hand, and cultural skepticism and the authenticitydestroying powers of the artificial, on the other hand. The camera--that vault or arched chamber, that judge's chamber--moved from elite Latin to the vulgar, democratic idiom in the nineteenth century only as a consequence of a new technology called photography, or “light-writing.” A camera became a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist, and sunny semiotic economy, an analogy to the seeing eye in brainy, knowing man, for whom body and mind are suspicious strangers, if also near neighbors in the head. Nonetheless, no matter how gussied up with digitalized optical powers, the camera has never lost its job to function as a judge's chamber, in camera, within which the facts of the world--indeed, the critters of the world--are assayed by the standard of the visually convincing and, at least as important, the visually new and exciting.
... first we have to plough through some very predictable semiotic road blocks that try to limit us to a cartoonish epistemology about visual self-evidence and the lifeworlds of human-animal-technology compounds.


Gilbert stresses that nothing makes itself in the biological world, but rather reciprocal induction within and between always-in-process critters ramifies through space and time on both large and small scales in cascades of inter- and intra-action. In embryology, Gilbert calls this “interspecies epigenesis."43 Gilbert writes: “I think that the ideas that Lynn [Margulis] and I have are very similar; it's just that she was focusing on adults and I want to extend the concept (as I think the science allows it to be fully extended) to embryos. I believe that the embryonic co-construction of the physical bodies has many more implications because it means that we were ‘never’ individuals”

caring: becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning


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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 the notion of 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 Geertz 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.” Geertz'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 Karin Demuth and her three years old boy--Hanno--, 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 the notion of 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 the assumption of 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

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Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)


the project investigates the way in which Seifee 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)

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Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriented ontology as social theory [insights of object-orientation mechanically applied to the social by Harman, “immaterialism"]
•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 understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human


(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology

(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely

object-oriented 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 example of 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 example of 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: realists who draw on contemporary advances in disciplines like geology, biology, mathematics and neurology to make the case that non-human reality is not a sub-set of human reality -->
•commitment to an object-oriented realism (~= 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 & subjective appeal***

(Moss) earth as making an appeal --Freud--> a demand for work
“when the attention of an experienced person is drawn to the child's state by this path of discharge, [the path of discharge] ... acquires a secondary function of the highest importance, that of cornmunicalion
--> initial helplessness of human beings is the primal source of all moral motives
(child's) creaming and kicking --> appeal (made by the earth) is a combination of demand + accusation


contemporary social theorists are turning towards objects
<==Bennett== object produce a ‘gestalt shift’ in perception
}==Tsing==> (amounts to) a political act <== (turning towards 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’
}----> acknowledge the importance of traditional *social theory* in identifying gross inequalities + advocate a posthuman relationism that moves *from critique to production* ==> *new and surprising connections between modes of existence* (for example)
•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 mode of listening for the nonhuman + simultaneously acknowledging the impossibility of fully hearing it --> impossible position ==expand==> our range of socialities, causalities, temporalities and ethics because it contains the **stubborn anthropomorphic residual** within any ‘new’ theory of society
--> (not infinite) co-constitution of the social + the extra-social (vaccines & markets, planetary systems & telescopes, catastrophes & laws, etc.)

feminist science studies *demand a normative responsibility* towards ontological inclusivity and humility

(now that there is no objective -->) interrogatives are object-makers

*strangeness (of nonhuman life) [acts as a guide] --> mobilising new prepositions of connection ==> to think differently about the social ==> new conceptions of society (as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mindbody, thing-power, odd kin, etc.)


parallels drawn between theories of evolution & 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 endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and 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 stemmed from profound and prolonged 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 and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality

(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and 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 endosymbiosis theory ==>
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)
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]
3. a way to think about temporalities (when a bacterium nestled into a simple cell, creating an intimacy that has lasted four billion years)
4. a template for unlikely intimacies

Harman's philosophical monologue on social theoretical practice (which might yet be remedied by actual dialogue with social theorists) ==> performative fallacy (<-- common in artist writing)

@apass****
(Campbell asking) why has object-oriented ontology become such a popular force in other disciplines?
<== complex interplay between sociological + logical factors
+ rise of *para-academia*

@artist (in proliferation of artist writing)
****speculation = the alibi for a doctrine that wishes to spare itself the trouble of justification****
--> we need closer attention to rationality as the basis of judgement when we talk about speculation
--> we need to be more informed by (sciences) when we stretch relations to our rational outposts, without ignoring their appeals

...................................

posthumanism --> any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, humanities --> (21st century) technology is the center of critical thought about culture and about nature

[*]posthumanism: a structure of feeling (sense of an era starts to be experienced in the social imagination --> social forms become more recognisable when we had some time to classify them, articulate them, theorize them)

(Williams > Campbell) structure of feeling
we can point to times in the past and say that as an X sensibility (they were romantics, enlightenment, postmodernism) =/= sensing here and now --> practical consciousness, a period 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 (--> that is why 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:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject

posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)


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 [for example “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**}@Chloe2

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 behaviour


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 =/=
1. the claim of (often monolithic) novelty of the historical moment in the west
2. that technology is a sterile instrument
3. that technology aids the human in his ascent to ever greater degrees of humanity


(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”
  }<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & 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*
 -t[...]