[...]ething that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.

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.”

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(Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)

“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)

the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment

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 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 randomness

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)


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.
--> to be true to nature was actively to select and interpret sensations and in that way bring them under epistemic control.
--> representation in nanofacture, image is used to actually engineer the whole thing. making and seeing coincide.


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: a systematic error correction


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 metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.


(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.

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:) “if we examine a work of ordinary 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 identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

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?)

=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of 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

inscription instruments

(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: patient, indefatigable, ever alert, probing beyond the limits of the human senses. (what other relationships exist with the machine? other than this self-disciplined 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: it was at once an observer and an artist, miraculously free from the inner temptation to theorize, anthropomorphize, beautify, or otherwise interpret nature.

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--but rather because the camera apparently eliminated human agency
(what is the difference between systematic image and mechanical image? same? -glitch..)

(mechanical) images that could be touted as nature's self-portrait

aura of stoic nobility
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: 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

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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

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(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization

planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor

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 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’ (founding a colony)

once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene

native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.

‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological 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)


the idea of “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 published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.

(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.


treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.

Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)

(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world

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(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]

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lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature

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[Avital]

in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms

to enter areas of conflict [...] fragile zone where non-knowledge dominates knowledge

Self-dissolving and regathering, the subject became linked to the possibility of a new autonomy, and opium illuminated in this case (Baudelaire, though under De Quincey’s influence, was to use it differently) an individual who finally could not identify with his ownmost autonomy but found himself instead subjected to heroic humiliation in the regions of the sublime. Opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.

mapping the body as an intensive conflictual site

scenography and rhetoric of armed conflict

(Avital on) the maternal trace in the technological revealing from Heidegger to the Bushies


the readers and nonreader

the scene of the proto-pedagogy (involves only two persons): The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened


(for Levinas:) expérience =/= épreuve
•experience --> a knowing of which the self is master is always said
•épreuve (text, trial, proof) --> the idea of 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 and yogic teachings)

the pupil is led to an inner experience without interiority, to understanding without cognition, without a history ==> subjectivity

the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass

...understanding no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing



going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle

...cannot be properly located or possessed

the inaction hero


(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage

The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan

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My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended 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 produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive 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 ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.


Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could 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 supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of the random traveler who casts a gaze in another world of virtual and visual agency, and emphasises the randomness and hideousness of looking. The transaction between the eyes in the evil eye goes both ways to posses both the beholders. The target of the evil eye is always missed[ar] due to the internal conflict of perception and will. The intersection of visions is feared and programmed in the modalities of material talisman and culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful and 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, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, 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 and separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.

...the itinerary traces the transmission, transformation, and 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 towards a new epistemology.

World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.

Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.

Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.

Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.

..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.

..temporal and 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 landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
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 told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness

in what sense does unperformed music exist?

The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.

When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.

One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.

What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition

silence knows no history...?

...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.

“Tense Past”

..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?

The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.

My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’...  different perspectives can co-exist and blur

the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story

i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.

We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’

übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.

Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.

Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)

...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)

(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)

fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his [...]