[...]e of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)
in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception
needing or not needing representation to understand relationality
(
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends 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?)
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 (
science, religion, and politics all three take for granted an image of nature.
(Peter
wanting to know with eyes-open
it was by way of intuition “that the mathematical world remains In contact with the real world; and even though pure mathematics could do without it, it is always necessary to come back to intuition to bridge the abyss which separates symbol from reality.”
(Dipesh
(history of nature?) the nature of history as a form of knowledge
(Croce essay 1893 history subsumed under the concept of art) Croce drew on the writings of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincare to argue that “the concepts of the natural sciences are human constructs elaborated for human purposes.” “when we peer into nature, we find only ourselves” we do not “understand ourselves best as part of the natural world” (is that not the image of Narcissus who looks into the nature and can only see himself
so as Roberts puts it “Croce proclaimed 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 made it.”
Croce's idealism “does not mean that rocks, for example, ‘don't exist’ without human beings to think about them. apart from human concern and language, they neither exist nor do not exist, since ‘exist’ is a human concept that has meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes” (not saying human symbolic system of thought)
man environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history of man's relation to his environment almost timeless and 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
vision of man “as a prisoner of climate” and not of man as the maker of it
is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom?
price we pay for the pursuit of freedom
politics
politics has never been based on reason alone. (it seems politics is something that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming)
Anthropocene 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 and species history.
as Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness of his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world.”
(Peter
“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century
the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from
each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal idiosyncrasies
this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer
the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its
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
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice
rejection of aesthetics (but what seduction exactly betrays? or what does it make accurate?)
average (is truth to nature?)
asceticism of noninterventionist objectivity
how scientists deployed mechanical means to police the artist
(for Martin Kusch - objectivity and historiography) truth-to-nature had its rationale in enlightenment sensationalist psychology, with its conception of the self as fragmented, passive, and excessively receptive.
eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen
what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance
(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)
personal equation
to produce reliable images
While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the
(Grashey's) police
scientific evidence
legal evidence
at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.
medico-legal concept of evidence
the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.
(Allan Poe
trompe l'oeil (new note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself
photographs did not carry a transparent meaning
once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.
extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs
(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”
graphical representation could cut across the artificial boundaries of natural language to reveal nature to all people,
they were the words of nature itself
the search for this rendition of objective representation was a moral as much as technical, quest.
morality of self-restraint
(for the scientific atlas makers of the later nineteenth century,) the machine aided where the will failed. (at once a powerful and polyvalent symbol,) the machine was fundamental to the very idea of mechanical objectivity.
the machine, in the form of new scientific instruments, embodied a positive ideal of the observer
(rhetoric of) wonder-working machine
the machine, (now in the form of techniques of mechanical reproduction,) held out the promise of images uncontaminated by interpretation.
...the scientists’ continuing claim to such judgment-free representation is testimony to the intensity of their longing for the perfect ‘pure’ image. in this context the machine stood for authenticity
one type of mechanical image, the photograph, became the emblem for all aspects of noninterventionist objectivity ... not because the photograph was necessarily truer to nature than hand-made images
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)
painstaking, humble, laborious (work)
moral virtuosity never exists without an appreciative audience
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
varieties of objectivity
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the
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
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
oaks were travelers and mixers
Botanical decolonization
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening wa[...]