[...]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
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.”
(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
“straight photography” is above all a signature of a particular scene, a specific and localized representation only awkwardly adaptable to a mosaic composition from different individuals (Zeiss-lens-camera images)
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)
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