[...]ence

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

[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 [...]