[...]al desire
nostalgia for truth
==provide==> template for cultural idiomatic imagination

historical experience --> futile & enunciated through the orality of retelling (+ being capable of retelling)


historical justice has not been served in actual social reality ==> the horror scene bears the constant threat and possibility of repeating itself on the future

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

#idea
namaz gestures as alchemical ruse to open portals, kill enemies, transmute objects, and other specs

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

Naveeda chapter 1 mosque

mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state

old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
•channeling charity

oft repeated statement: Pakistan is a mosque [~= one has to learn to inhabit this place, aquire the right etiquette in sharing it]  (--> what it means to be Muslim in Pakistan)
•a place of assembly?
•a sacred place?

qabza, ghabze قبضه, violent seizure, forcible  possession
(depending on who you ask -->) Pakistan under ghabze by:
•the state
•venal religious figures
•unscrupulous lay muslims
•sectarian groups
•

“narratives of loss --> investment on self-betterment* (+ bettering of one's community) ~= striving

emergence of new independent mosques --> new property arrangements (+ admin + funding) --> growth of civil institutions

city bureaucracy of Islamabad ==Hull==> *uncivil politics* (سیاست غیرمدنی =/= civil society)


(like Tehran) Lahore = urban fabric palimpsest of:
•different eras of history
•political leadership
•social composition
•aesthetic styles
•modalities of social engineering
=/= dissolving the past into hypermodern

*postcolonial ~=> sectarian politics*

local mosque-related politics
سیاست محلی مسجدی


demographic change + population growth + strengthening of sectarian politics = ?


به طور قانونی غیرقانونی
legally illegal mosques
(illegal structures on land legally put aside for this purpose)

presence of bureaucrats within mosques in south Asia (since 19th century)

creating an ideal state by means of the mosque


loud zekr ذکر

mosque: (bearing) traces of the changing fortunes of its worshippers

qabza =/= voice: an individual's singular words and gestures arising from her embodiment *of hey maslak مسلک*


...civil servents
cultivating a modernist
cosmopolitan air
and their educated well-traveled
nuclear families


congregation (جماعت =/=? collective, community)
communal exchange
learning
contemplation

mosque employee hierarchy:
1. khatib خطیب the person who gives sermons during Friday prayers
2. imam امام the person who leads the give obligatory prayers during the day expect Friday
3. ghari قاری the person who had received enough training to render a pepper recitation of the quran
4. moazen موذن there person who gives the call to prayers, also responsible for cleaning the mosque


ghabze of mosque = expression of ambition (to found religious space) to forge the model Muslim community (beyond daily needs of worship)

***legal exercices & bureaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)


Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)


flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint


jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’


rumored
engineered
unfolding

sectarian geography of the city

mobilized in the form of bored policemen


prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar

gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam

*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)

•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world

neighborhood = ties + tensions

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

Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal

Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration

aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)


Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time

Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal

Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•public culture of Lahore

**synthetic mode of thought**
--> how South Asian intellectuals created zones of thought by assimilating the work of thinkers from different times and parts of the world to their own ==> (develop and sustain a) *cosmopolitanism* [that exceed the limits places on imagination by colonialism, nationalism]
(--in--> both locatedness and translocal ambitions --understand-->) *the openness and connectivity that characterizes the socal*


Iqbal's mode of self-experimentation: he put himself in relation to dynamic individuals and emergent movements and institutions to see how they sat with him and he with them
--Naveeda--> *experimentation does not require the creation of the new* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change


-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma


Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals

*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action


Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time


Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration

(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution: continual discharge of creative ideas (and tendencies) moving through a world of matter

[*]metaphysics: a technique to avoid “false problems”

Bergson's understanding of intellect: denying humans the experience of time as duration ==> Iqbal

how Iqbal rendered (Bergson's) vitalist philosophy (which denied teleology) acceptable to Islam (which strongly is based on teleology):
the idea of a forward-looking aspect to the intelligence permeanting life --> for a Muslim an “ought to be” stands in the forefront inflecting the present well before any final end

human-God copartnership --imply--> advancement of the self as the object of striving {the self arcs towards God and partners with God in order to advance}==> change in the world

“the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite”
(Iqbal)

Iqbal's striving:
•the end of one's striving is one's *next self*
•nonprogressive: one's next self could lay ahead, alongside of one, or in one's past
•not to part with their finitude too quickly (no fana dar hagh)


Iqbal's pholosophy -->? aesthetics of the self (~ creation of personality)
--(preoccupied with)--> *muslims crafting and tethering their subjectivity to the commentary world*

Iqbal's self-seeking individuals : actualize qualities attribited to God [(impersonal qualities:) majesty, beauty, grace] (to the best of one's ability) --Naveeda--> (individual impersonality) ***individuality marked by a certain impersonality*** : the more impersonal the qualify that is manifested the more unique one is
=/= [*]modern identity : right-bearing citizen in nation-state, a subject distinguished by the peculiarities of his or her own way of life or point of view or a specific interiority
#integration
=/= Cinderella's (aim and process of) individuation --Sina--> impersonal individuality
[Cinderella's shekayat شکایت]


Iqbal's nonintuitive pairings (=/= contradictions):
•experimentation / convection
•fidelity to one's past / seeking one's future
•prophetic guidance / human freedom
•reason / revelation
•teleology / open future
•duration / transcendence
•freedom / finitude
•individuality / impersonality
<-- elements are drawn to each other, mutual attraction (that does not detract from the plenitude of each)


(Sir Sayyid:) “religion = revelation + reason” --Iqbal--> affirmative picture of existence after revelation had ceased

Muslim thinking in need of biological renewal ==Iqbal==> revolutionary Muslim thinking
}--> a theory of human perception + intelligence + their place within the larger picture of natural evolution

-in order ot make islam political they have to reject the supernatural (miracles, keramat, etc.) ---> go to Corbin's critique


*striving to overcome the (so-called) sickness of modernity* --> (now in Europe artists want to become -->) *physician of moral community* (hakim al umat)


habits of Allah
•miracle
•


Iqbal --> the question is not of evidence (whether miracles did not did not happen), rather: whether belief in miracles is usefully to a community : miracles ==> intensify sense of supernatural ==> hold together --> society with *ideal nationality* (not territorial nationality)
}--Naveeda--> (Iqbal is saying that) just as Muslims needed to understand the capaciousness of nature (to be able to engage and value human striving), so too did they need to accord existence to the supernatural <-- quality of striving


Maududi's picture of aspiration
modern Muslim citizenry <--Maududi-- should be created by the state (the idea that state must mould every aspect of human life on consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform ==> *true Islam =/= muslim Islam*
~= Islam is perfect, muslims not


•Asad --> muslim self-transformation (self-directed changed) ==> perfect form of islam
•Maududi --> (Muslims who know themselves to be weak by constitution -->) one erect a state to install change in oneself ==> perfect form of islam
•Iqbal --> striving: individuation without individuality ~= potentiel without concrete ~= experimentation on self


producing the concrete environment within something to make it available to X : enabling =/= entailing

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

Naveeda chapter 3 law

Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]

Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice


munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)


(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered


Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer


something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)

khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims

(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation


institutionalizing blindness


Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference

striving =/= progress

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

Naveeda chapter 4 jinn


strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority

lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)


(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world

intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation

attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future

disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass

disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)

•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack


(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving

the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand for a state = demand for a society ~= demand for a self

how to read Pakistan's historical records shaped by the *aspiration to strive as Muslims*?


to effect experimentation <==
•disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
•

tradition and ethics of debate and disputation


Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by repressing the theological foundations of its concept and practice*

theology was always about worldly politics <--> religious transcendence }==> run analysis both ways:
•transcendental coming into play (in some instances)
•worldly life coming into play (in some instances) [immanent quality]

--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting

}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving

**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]


perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social


Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•

[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence


skepticism <--> aspiration

aspiration =/= clear vision of ends

Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)

(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)

in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]


discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)

Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health

Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”


Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦

jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim

*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass

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

(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*

becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant

Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice

...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie


Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits

singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist

state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (---> go to my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)

bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation


jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?

•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manuals
•folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterization of jinn

human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die

constantly evolving relationship between humans and jinns

from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil

the little mischievous nafs نفس that make up a self --> Muslim interiority (projects?)

...in the belief of jinns:
•complex arrangement of cultural memory
•political strategy
•mental illness
•individual subjectivity
•
--✕--> *Naveeda taking the existence of jinn for granted ==> (her effort) to learn more about the family that adopted them and their efforts at striving*

*taking the existence of X for granted ==to==> learn about the people who adopted X*


“Muslim children - how bring them up?” vol 3
(in Islam) child: bring without aghl عقل + ability to communicate with divine beings, without sin
--> always under the threat of being easily led astray

eight-year-old Maryam
-attuned to ways in which this world and the jinn world were mirrored and intertwined
-would look into the palm of her hand to see what the jinn would have her to see
-relayed the requests of human world to the jinn
-bringing forth advice, instruction, expression of desire (from the jinn)

relationship of ventriloquism (between Maryam and jinn)

there was an accepted contiguity of jinn and human selves & possibility of a plurality of voices in Maryam's mediation --> enjoin her family to attend closely to her words

coterminous
هم مرز، هم زمان
Ahmadi in Pakistan
each Muslim group claimed itself the truest of all <-- the idea that *to accept the X's claim to be Muslim = accept one's own annihilation as Muslim*
--Naveeda--> question the limits of contiguity of different forms of life (when copresence was tolerable? when copresence was made intolerable?)


imitato Muhammadi
emulating X (to experience X) --through--> passionate love and ecstatic identification with the X
(for example the prophet: seeing the prophet on one's mind's eye + imitating him)
•sufist approach: prophet is immanent in the world
•varied affective relations to the prophet:
◦ecstatic love
◦reverential love
◦respect
◦

jinns having a dynamic disruptive presence within the human world

Sunni Deobandi's belief that the prophet is alive in his grave in Medina ~= Shia's notion of the hidden imam


*several (competing) bodies of knowledge*

Naveeda --read--> Sahib taking cues --on--> prophet's example --from--> faceless voiceless jinn --with--> little child surving as its medium


-parental disappointment with sons
-children possible abandonment by their fathers
-wife's estrangement from her dying husband
--> ambiguities that undergrid lived relations

“Maryam rushed to greet him at the door of the house but then she fell back screening. apparently a thirty-feet-tall churail (witch) had followed Sahib from India. Sahib immediately dropped his bags at the doorstep and without pause rushed to the mosque to say his prayers. when he returned home, Maryam assured him that the witch had left him.”

Sahib allowed the entry of jinn into his home without the armature of the average amil (who undergoes considerable pain and deprivation to be able to lay claim upon particular force, and undertake continental exercises of the body and mind to control it)
--risk--> potential disruption of the family
--abdicate--> his position of authority within his family --to--> attend to his daughter's words of guidance

*his turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])

from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter

pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself

in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound

--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self


in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control

(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?

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

Naveeda chapter 5 mulla


graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect

participation in change

(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality



Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties

large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]

skepticism shadows striving (?)


the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
•shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج


mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts

...everyday assertion that one's religiousity is superior to others


mulla = full-fledged maleficent persona


skepticism of daily existence
1. ...(they become skeptical) about his rationality and grounds for his beliefs
2. ...(at some point) anything could be said or believed about him
3. ...(he felt like) everyone around him had turned to animals
4. ...(he presumed) everyday life was one of illusion and appearances [---> go to kelile demne این همه سودا است، مجاز]
}--> actualize the potential for *skepticism that existed in the social fabric*
=/= chance encounter
=/= pervasive condition


figure of the mulla [~= collective fear + revulsion] --traverse--> the fragmented public culture of the city


[*]ulama: guardian, transmitter, interpreter of shari'a
+ specific claims of knowledge upon:
1. تفسیر tafsir (commentary upon the Quran)
2. فقه figh (jurisprudence)
3. حدیث hadis (sayings of the prophet)
4. کلام kalam (speculative theology)
+ (in Pakistan) personnel in mosque:
1. امام imam
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری ghari
4. موذن muezzin

mulla --derogatory--> one who is overzealous in upholding the letter of the shari'a
(+ additional connotation:)
•ignorant master [---> go to mulla nasruddin: religious master who gets by in life through hypocrisy and cunning + outsmarting those of noble birth and high cultivation]
•gabza agent (seizure of property)
•sodomizer (one who rapes men)
•a naive fool out of step with his time
•


colonial politics in south Asia --> British colonial administration in India see ulama as outdated, deliberately obscurantist, jahel ==> negative stereotype ----> post-colonial period

mullaism:
•Pakistani state --> fossilized state of knowledge on Islam
•Iqbal --> mullaism =/= freedom of ijtihad


(Talal Asad -->) Islamic diskursive tradition is grounded in *argument that anticipates resistance* in the form of doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding ==> it employs the force of reason to bring forth the *willing performance of a practice*
}==produce==> domain of orthodoxy (+ relations of power)


(for Naveeda) anxiety or skepticism ~= sign of aspiration for striving


labbaik: i am here (to follow your orders)

theatrical unteality

...animus lies in the world
[later he] identitues this animus with thr workings of iblis (satan)
...this is a city of whispers [waswasen], a city of mad possession [shar], a city of deviation [ilhad], a city of anxiety [tazadzud], a city of dispersion [intishar]

the ability to smell oneself --> to experience oneself as other


how public culture can ability skepticism as a pervasive condition


mulla jokes --> horror stories = fear + revulsion

(Freudian) eruptive quality of jokes --> joke erupts into everyday life as of from elsewhere

political cartoon: maximum effect through a minimum of details

(mulla) jokes, horror stories, political cartoons --Naveeda--> *exiling the foreignness within*


stories of:
1. mosque in an upscale shopping center
2. sexually predictory mulla
}--> (speaks of:)
1. the perception that there were places in Pakistan where vise was allowed to grow unchecked
2. the menace the ulama introduced into everyday life
}==> (the effect of:)
•keeping public attention upon possible sites and agents of corruption
•putting the everyday life into question (as to whether it was what it appeared to be)


political cartoons --imply-->
•Pakistanis are caught in someone else's game
•growing unfamiliarity of Pakistan


(charges of)
sinfulness
sexual voraciousness
cunning
gluttony
political ambition
worthlessness
corruption
self-destruction
--> continuous efforts to set the mulla outside of oneself (=/= everyday familiarity with the ulama)

***negative stories and cartoons --express--> various degrees of skeptical orientation to the world***
jokes --(descriptive density)--> full expression to skepticism
--{also in Iran}--> making (mulla) grotesquely other ==> inconcevable to imagine any points of relatedness (to mulla)



•scatological jokes
•reworking of official rhetoric for ludic effect
•exaggerated performance of power
}--Mbembe--> “relationship of conviviality with the realm of official power”

vulgarity ==long-term==> *zombification of official figures* (robbed of their humanity --> they cannot be apprehended except through their caricatures)

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


to loosen some terms carefully: memory, form, order,


[The arts of memory- Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author Carlo Severi. Translated by Matthew Carey - Severi - HAU- Journal of Ethnographic Theory]


memory as a domain of social life

archive
“order” constitutes a principle to engender other forms of knowledge

totem poles, simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group, were comprised of organized series
occupied with the transmission of ‘names’, but necessarily, paralleled by a form of logical power, implies sequential ordering of different forms of knowledge.

the “art of memory” applies different types of relationships or archival techniques that are not limited to mere numerical calculation: mnemonic, iconographic, and logical techniques.

provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering

in a measured rigorous way...

what characterizes the system

development of taxonomic principle
system endowed with a high degree of logical power

the idea of pure quantity, based on decimal numbers applicable to wide range of categories: people, objects, units of time or space, etc.

an “art of memory” possessed of rudimentary form of visual salience and an extremely complex ordering of representable knowledge

what matters are system's logical implications and not its visual manifestations

salience
(colors, shapes of knots, folds)

the qualitative categories (meant to be named)

(finding) the organizing principles

precisely calibrated
oriented space
(geometrically?)

what constitutes the logical poles of the vast spectrum of the projects in the archive (people, objects, units of time or space, etc.)

(concerning the archive) we can negotiate two types of knowledge: lists and narratives

to identify a series of key elements that allow us to rethink a wider chronology

textual archaeology - evaluates and decrypts, layer by layer

discovering (evidential) mnemonically oriented means of organizing traditional knowledge

(Montesinos's book:) “list of one hundred kings”

should we abandon the conventional terms of “narrative”
the term narrative used to describe mnemonically oriented lists of names..
narrative was just one of several different means of organizing knowledge..

graphical representation, capable of developing further degrees of complexity

“form”
recreate the ‘form’ (form : ‘state of organization of matter’)

within (this/a) variable system

“text” as sequences of cords

memorization (the creation of mnemonic relation) necessarily implies the modular organization of the knowledge it represents


constitutive dualism in many forms of the art of memory:
•order (Anordnung) and salience (Hervorspringen)
•expressivity (and power)
•encoding (Verschlüsselung) and evocation (Herbeirufen)

possible course between the twin rocks of writing: “social” and “arbitrary”

at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)

the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives

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

these all were technical or formal questions so far


memory is a way consistency maintains itself


civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections

is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)


the immemorial (in memorial)


have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological

who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)

should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.


we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)

arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview



hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?



Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”


(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation

data ontology



what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?

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

(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to forget is incapable of the concept of ‘general’
solitary and lucid spectator of [...] an intolerably precise world
not capable of thought
in order to sleep, he had to imagine a direction he would turn his face, made of homogeneous darkness
“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”

Borges ‘homogeneous darkness’ is what we as forgetful immortals afraid of to turn to?
maybe the directions we sleep into, orientation to the cosmos?!

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

is archive naturally and necessarily generated (out of regular form of activity)?

a (technologically implemented) beyond


the drive to animate and mobilize; and the drive to conserve, to fix, and so forth, are mutually constitutive for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics


to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about your own activity as a constructive activity 


depriving yourself of any tools to act
is archive a tool to act?


the agency of an archive..


“other ways” of composing?


marking its territory? how to make a map without giving way to the territory as an extension of the map?

["Angels Without Wings” A conversation between Bruno Latour and Anselm Franke]

the mechanical extension, Res extensa, the (descartian) extended thing, the visualizing technologies, technical drawings, has been so strong that the temptation so say “well, that's what the world is really like” is very great, especially when your foreground is all of the engineering talents and engineering skills that are necessary to assemble.



to attribute strangeness...
what ‘will’ you inherit?
you have little idea of what will you inherit
(other way of not thinking about your activity now)

*the question of future



[Ronell]

false remembrance, displaced memory, that actually repeatedly represses and disturbs ‘giving’

any remembrance involves forgetting
an official call for design an archive from khm also invoked that the institution is ready to forget, announces institutional forgetting, and disavows remembrance

remember includes the lost-member, bringing my member, the phalus (in English ‘member’ also means the male organ of copulation)


[Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Das Gedächtnis.” ‘Enzyklopädie Der Philosophischen Wissenschaften Im Grundrisse’ 1817. Web.]

Hegel makes a distinction of two modalities of memory:
(1) ‘Erinnerung’ (internalized memory, which is situated in the heart), (it could also be hallucinatory, might dependent on an interiority that isn't there!);
(2 and this one concerns archive) ‘Gedechnis’ (technological memory, a supplement or prosthetic device that reminds you. ==> it's mechanical, it's on the side of death and forgetting, a kind of memory that needs to be prompted) (to choose the technology of writing/archive the subject of memory is so screwed.)

***everything depends on the ways we remember!


[footnote on German memory]
[blackwellreference.com, entry: “memory, recollection and imagination"]
Plato's doctrine that all learning is the recollection (anamnésis) of things previously known but later forgotten casts a shadow over the idealists’ uses of Erinnerung.

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

is any act of remembrance also a traumatic experience? (Freudian take on memory) -- archive is so “not” traumatic therefore a tool of amnesia. (archive in digital age: the oblivion of availability --> media theory)
can we think of a non-traumatic gesture of socialization of memory? or memorial activity “has” to be violent in order to be remembered? (--> sublime) (like what Ali does, tattooing me, every time he tells me one of his stories of trauma)
like i said before, “who” wants to remember?

(masculinity is written all over this anxiety-ridden remembrance --> re+member, bringing back the symbolically lost phallus: “member” means “the male organ of copulation” in English)

trauma makes available, brings back lost objects to the consciousness, in a psychoanalytical sense. is then the digital archive an absolute oblivion?

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

///////// newer notes, saved in 11 September 2016 /////////

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

[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]---> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)

memory/remember is sojourn


the importance of archive is today perhaps not in creating one but in reading them.
--how many archive we still need to read and probe and consider, with concepts or para-concepts that we thought we had a hold on.

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

being enfolded is often a strategy for survival (?, Marks)
(Akira Mizuta Lippit:) things are not saved by being archived (Borgesian nightmare)
histories for which the present is not ready --> what are those sites where histories slip into latency?

(how not?) ***to enter a culture from outside*** (problem of the prophet, both Moses and Freud) --> *everything depends on the ways we ‘bring’ things* [bringing monotheism, destruction, etc.] ~-> (social and material) milieu thinking (--> to think about Baten in Baten)

(art's will and the judgment of value that informs it...) Kunstwollen's desire to grow and travel

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

[Ariella Azoulay]

() the opposition between keeping and putting away, preservation and cancelation.

archive: the home of the dialectic of preservation and cancellation

...when fully lit and relatively flat

Derrida: (archive) “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”

archive's Foucauldian “space of appearance”

constructed as ex-territorial and as a receptacle (makhzan) for the past

archive is not a fortress external to our world, with us as its pilgrims

(the ontological performance of filling a document)

(a constellation, aimed at distancing and disturbing us)

collecting --> grouping
extracting --> sharing
cataloguing --> indexing and tagging

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

(for Freud:) trauma <~=> memory
(for Nietzsche:) “Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself.” ----> ‘ritual’ may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain?
(Bataille after Nietzsche:) ‘sacredness’: the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being

within the political art domain the “I feel your pain” has sympathetic currency. one is punished by drawing public attention to their pleasures
(I feel your pleasures =/=) “sense of pain” [an asset of the artist] ==establishes==> awareness of the existence of the body


processing is largely parallel, while, attention is largely serial

disciplines of the modern subject
(in artistic work the unsolved issue remians:) technniques for/of the external control

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

[*] which spaciotemporal vectors are embeded in the archive, as a modern feeling of arrow that thrusts forward differentiating past from the future, “archaic” from the “advanced”?

[*] archive produces a “yesterday”
a dangerous arrow of time that is constituted and announced
-how do we attend the histories of implication and attachment?

futurity [aghebat عاقبت, (even) akherat اخرت], the promis of the archive

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

trauma: that which it won't tell its story =/= total recall
how can history tell?
history, a compensatory device?

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

gist
جان کلام
مراد

[Geoffrey Bowker]
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/forget.html

Grand Historiographer, Sima Qin (1994 [ca 100BC]), writing of the burning of the books in 213BC, notes that the Chief Minister adviced the emperor that: Aall who possess literature such as the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools should get rid of it without penalty. If they have not got rid of it a full thirty days after the order has reached them, they should be branded and sent to do forced labor on the walls. there should be exemption for books concerned with medicine, pharmacy, divination by tortoise-shell and milfoil, the sowing of crops, and the planting of trees (31). In response to this, the Emperor ordered the famous burning of the books - to cite Qin: Athe First Emperor collected up and got rid of the Songs, the Documents, and the sayings of the hundred schools in order to make the people stupid and ensure that in all under Heaven there should be no rejection of the present by using the past. The clarification of laws and regulations and the settling of statutes and ordinances all stared with the First Emperor. He standardized documents.


(to think of) memory as a construction of the present

analyzing organizational memory
organizing analytical memory
memorizing organizational analysis
--> multifaceted stories open to interpretation =/= true/false facts

****remembering: an activity which carries with it its own context****

work on ajayeb and my ongoing commentary on archive and memory is part and parcel of the organizational theory

not to forget that:
•rediscovery is easier than remembering
•statistics --as--> filtering mechanism --as--> proactive forgetting
•forgetting ==> change of identity ['clean slate’ is very well known state to mysticism, --> clearance(=? is to take away useless theory) and origins in geometry - #Serres]

organizational forgetting --producing/maintaining--> classification systems ==> move from heterogeneous forms of memory operating within multiple frameworks [like ajayeb bestiaries] to the privileging of a form of memory (potential memory) operating within a well-defined information infrastructure subtended by classification systems. (Bowker)

if your work is an intermediary profession invisible and removed at the earliest opportunity from the official record, create a “[name of your practice]-ing interventions classification” (?!) --> a fascinating system that creates a standardized language for describing what is it that your practice does in different or difficult ways
other systems (to organize and critique your accumulation of experience):
•sensitive outcomes classification scheme
•diagnosis scheme
*sometimes what you do does not need to leave a trace, like nursing (in which your duty is to remember for others) [a professions without form ~~> nothing can be preserved, coding past knowledge and linking it to current practice---in the context of the hospital's sociotechnical system], or cleaning [doing everything that nobody else does], or storytelling [you have to go to a new country every day, going to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions

in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?

(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level

# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of bestiary writing to create such a science

(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control

(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?

-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations

(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work

...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)

the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass

(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system

...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories

* construction is always reconstruction *

artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically

classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)

Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi

pigeonholing of facts

how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?

“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”

do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory

we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]

infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs

“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)

classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it

[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system

the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)

(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S

today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,

______________


http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/records.html

we have learned from Foucault that different (medical) records, different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, body politic, and bodies of knowledge
@Olga

record is the story of the organizational infrastructure [@Marialena, Olga]

[Foucault on knowing in the practice of medicine:] cascade of inscriptions --> writing [--> totality of observers/observations ==> “true knowledge"] --> modern clinical gaze ==> pathological processes of individual bodies (=/= medicine of species: individual symptoms / medical knowledge, essential truth beneath the sensible individuality)

...a body which hides the essences of the disease --> production of the organizations which enact and treat it

How is the patient (or choreographic) body's specific geometry and its historicity created?
*body is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work

(Foucauldian) dispositif: a network within which the body acquires its specific ontology

(Latour < Bowker:) the record ‘mediates’ the relations that it organizes, the bodies that are configured through it

regarding record, we can be concerned with:
•practices of reading and writing which bring the record to life
•mapping the configurations the record helps bring into being

how the structuring of the record speaks to the structuring of the bodies (of the artists?) we investigate? (@Sofia, Olga)

record -->{
production of human bodies
organizational hierarchies
selective memories

_________


Ribes Bowker - Between Meaning and Machine.pdf

...in the wake of ontologies
in participating in knowledge projects, first we learn about ontologies and then learned how to create them
(we rarely “produce” knowledge, we always participate)

ontology: an information technology for representing specialized knowledge in order to:
•facilitate communication across disciplines
•share data
•enable collaboration

(am i) representing the knowledge of my communities (?) -- what does that mean?

*routinization* (is that which is at stake in ontologies) --?--> *apprehension*: orientation to the informational organization of ones field
(to attend the routinizations and apprehensions in one's own practice --> ontology building)
•my routines of reading, highlighting, writing, idiosyncratic talks, feedbacks, questions, silences,
--> (attend to the) transformative consequences of learning and traversing routines --[+]--> the practice and material tools that accompany the reworking of them {knowledge in informational terms, fables, etc.}--> problematic of inter-operability
--> (and asking) how a (broader) community's interests are at stake with this? {to engage and enrol that community through what activities?} #microworld

(my routines:) with confidence deliberately working with:
•interrupting stories with stories
•partial connection (and its performance)
•moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
•mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
•mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al makhlughat
•mobilizing anachronic apparatus --> mobilizing different timescales ==> mixing up what counts as “us” (=/= chronology [?==> belonging])
•remembering what one knows (and organizing, performing, reworking it)
•having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•

wild facts amenable (تابع) to formal representation (formal modeling)

routine: practically enacted, having no existence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work

[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different languages

uncertain activities of knowledge

(what i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community
[asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling? (the question i asked Sven, telling others ‘this or that is the language i am using.’) (i am using a language that is Harawayian, Ronellian, Sadrian)

______________


http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html

...it is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's cool memories of simulacra (1990)

at stake: day to day work of building classification system

things to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”

fact is a consequence
(Dewey)

(in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions) (& the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural *potential* memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}
artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)
(out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?

Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”

standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications

what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wider scope of reading: rhetorics, semiotics, objectivity, analysis, architecture,)
•historically creation of the infrastructure
•ubiquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature

*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard

where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]

residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous

what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply

we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world

“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)

compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بی‌قرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]


(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power

(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)

“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996

lingua franca of the medical insurance companies


actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)

science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards

‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]

when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur

(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’

common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)


(my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of ‘atomic-level’ data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)
-is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”

they draw from their secret[s]

a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory

social embeddedness of scientific truth

(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb

as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist

‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle

______________


against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”

***how we are creating different kinds of past (out of the information infrastructures that we build)?

(pointed out by Bowker) the whole notion of big data is coming from the invention of census (amar-giri آمارگیری) in late 18th century, as its predecessor in a genealogy of techniques of government. “big data is grown up around that idea of control” --> statistics: (etymologically) the science of the state*
“I” <== me + my data

heavily informated world

flashbulb memory*
‘what were you doing when #Bambi's mother got shot?’ people have vivid but 80% of the time wronge memories of that day --> we are good at creating certainty in memory, but not very good at recognizing the ways past is differently configured according to different kinds of *memory practice*

the eternal flame file type/format

the psychoanalyst of Tintin

active archiving is about the framing of the present, and not about the future record

*commemoration is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world

(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world


on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space

i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•

non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)

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

*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***


(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)

***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam

سازش
limits of “adaptation”

a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى

a looming future


“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”


Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life


those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]


fret ترش کردن

مزروعى arable lands


thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total social fact’, to think holistically about water [Caton & Orlove] =/= [Naveeda's] climate thinking --> that there is specificity that needs attending: rivers are major conduits هادى of ‘connectivity’ --> domain of localized interactions
-to take the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)

a sufficient sense of the river

(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”


in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images


Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects


[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)

umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)

[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)


...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity


absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property


Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facing country such as Bangladesh* --> Padma Nodir Majhi
•(film's anticipation of) how rumors and bad news come to unsettle existence, the rumor of climate change may do more to re-organize a social milieu than its actual binding reality --> Chitra Nodir Parey


*there is a “systematic undervaluation of involuntary loss of places and cultures [which] disguises real, experienced but subjective limits to adaptation [and integration*]” (Naveeda > Adger)


(people in interrelation to the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground


the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene


(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)

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

[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]

what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?

what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?

in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking

dictionary --> formal codification of language

regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling rules, grapheme نويسه [characters A, B, ...], morpheme واژک [smallest meaningful language unit]
--✕--> what are my articulatory shortcuts? (least effort needed)

-how internet press is aiding which minor languages in their struggle against majors?
-and which standards are rising there?
-and what are the hegemonizing effect of my ajayeb hypertext on language and energy? its conservative pressures (on literary imagination) --> my concern with farsi linguistic evolution and its contaminations with other languages

what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?


(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing

my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity


(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)

(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?

my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages


my Rigs... :
•local restrictions of wach word
•the tendency of words to occur next to each other their degree of crystallization

[for my hypertext] (Zellig Harris:) the constraints or demands that words place on one another are transmitted as socially obligatory information [as physical information, the kind measured in bits, not the semantic information used in dictionary definitions.]

socially obligatory ‘information’-[as ‘physical information’ (kind measured in bits) =/= semantic information (used in dictionary definitions)] ==(transmits)==> constraints or demands that words place on one another

(my hypertext ajayeb is an) “informational niche”
[and what about the matter of ‘actual use’?]
ajayeb.net “rules”: a set of normative combinatorial constraints
recursive application of existing constraints ==> new patterns

*process of language: from optimal to obligatory*
(in respect of history: obligatory meanings of Attar, and so on)
--> in my work this flow is reversed: from obligatory (meanings of Attar or ajayeb) to optimal. that is perhaps why sometimes people say that they don't understand me or that I am wonge.
-memory is the matter of statistical fact: (core) meaning ~= “selection”

***the fate of my contribution depends on and is determined by my position in the communicative network


pidgin دست وپا شکسته ومخلوط : creative adaptations
ajayeb.net is a pidgin?
*pidginization: any process of reduction or simplification of linguistic resources {"=/=”, “=”, “==>”, “-->"}

my ajayeb writing:
step 1: redundent simplification of linguistic resources [--> creoles نژاد مخلوط: that segment of a continuum of variation which exhibits the maximum divergence from the standard but which is still connected to other portions of the meshwork (Farsi+English)]
step 2: reenriching itself with features eliminated during step 1 ~ recomplexification of creoles }==(how?!)==>
step 3: diversifying the number and type of uses it can be put to

double articulation: a sorting operation that yields a homogeneous distribution of elements and a consolidation operation that defines more or less permanent structural linkages between sorted materials.
if and when the materials on which a sorting device operates acquire the ability to replicate with variation, a new abstract machine emerges, in the form of a blind probe head capable of exploring a space of possible forms


ajayeb's (specialist) jargon <-- what intensified them? --> ? tech, colonialism, schooling,


what i am trying to do with ajayeb, in making this hypertext, is to connect its syntactical constructions to fresh reservoirs of linguistic resources ***

with ajayeb.net i am learning to resist the hierarchical weight of “received pronunciations” and official criteria of correctness of “ajayeb”

my Rigs, equipped with “knobs”: controlling parameters whose intensity defines the dynamical state of the structure-generating process


my work on ajayeb is an inquiry (or critique) in the ways we represent the world to ourselves [--> organizing objective referents and label-concepts] <--> a homogenizing social critique?

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

what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive” ?

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

[Yates]

in the ages before printing a trained memory was vitally important; and the manipulation of images in memory must always to some extent involve the psyche as a whole

** mnemotechnical side of the art is always present **

Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses

occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition

the history of memory

the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images

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

the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve

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

knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting

create + share + dispute knowledge

(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways

axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information

including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•

unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process


(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]


wikis of all sorts

(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science

vigor and growing utility

“distance matters”
(Olson)


commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats


data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)

hierachically organized forms of credentialing

in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models

(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time

(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change


knowledge of past climates


@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career


(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fieldwork -->? my #amazon
•“instrumenting ocean” supplanting traditions of the oceanographic cruise [in the last 20 years new sensor grids have come to cover the oceans, land, sky and space] -->? my #ajayeb's is concerned with thinking “beyond the *instrumental languages of utility and function*, which tend to cast knowledge infrastructures as *neutral instruments* whose positive and negative effects lie solely in the way they are operationalized and used”

*consequences of change are rarely socially, culturally, or economically neutral*


collectives
assemblages
configurations

try to tell yourself a “technology only” or “social only” story of knowledge infrastructure (and you will find it impossible)
(Brunton's) spam --> co-evolution of technical systems, communities, and social norms

knowledge infrastructures ==carry==> significant distributional consequences --> advancing the interests of some and actively damaging the prospects of others

(ways of producing “raw” date) davulated by “data sharing”:
•*labor-intensive* collecting practices
•site-specific expertise required
}--> long-standing craft traditions

once-vast secretarial ranks (of large organizations) [a British nostalgia for bureaucratic hierarchy fantasized and franchized by Harry Potter]


ajayeb's 13th century's “technologies” for “virtual” witnessing


--imbalance in the structure and distribution of our knowledge--
overrepresentation of research on “charismatic megafauna” (cuddly pandas, expenssive human-like chimps, tigers, hallucinogenic plants, etc.)


*dark continent fallacy*: ignorance (~ non-knowledge) = absence of knowledge : a site, phenomenon, or set of questions that we haven't yet been able or thought to investigate, as: ‘darkness = absence of light’ (--> Star Trek idea of frontier) --@!%--> the relationship between knowledge and non-knowledge may not be as simple or innocent as that

new (forms of) knowledge infrastructures (--> new ways of knowing) ==>
•new questions thinkable --> whole classes of questions, phenomena and forms of knowledge may be lost or rendered unthinkable
•new maps to known territories --> reshape the geography itself
•rework existing (stocks of) knowledge
•reorder our sense of value and structure in the world
•*write new ontologies over old ones* (--> my interest in working with ajayeb)
•embed social norms

knowledge infrastructure ~= sociology of knowledge
= robust internetworks of people, artifacts, and institutions* (--> to attend kno.infs. as wholes, rather than focusing only on their most rapidly evolving elements; #ontology. and attending to the social relations both created and broken) [#to attend to Tehran's new digitally mediated social norms of negative ditributional consequences of change]
any effective sociology of knowledge ought to provide some account of its opposite: the accidental and systematic --> means by which non-knowledge is produced and maintained
**(Robert Proctor's) agnotology: the systematic study of ignorance** [+ Irvin Schick: unknowledge =/= ignorance --> socially constructed lack of knowledge : a conscious absence of socially pertinent knowledge, for example ‘terra incognita --> Western political and economic attention --> enabling colonialism...]

institutional elements of knowledge infrastructure:
•universities
•libraries
•scientific societies
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases


internet-supported citizen science

the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification


standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation


#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)


(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)


***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work

-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline

-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences

-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)

cyberscholarship

#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*

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

[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]

(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•

the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present

(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system

(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram

Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past


(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past


tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive


“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)

built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture


(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*

synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate

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

idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast مست] =/= “polites” ~ police [~=? mohtaseb محتسب (--from--> احتساب, شمارنده, بشمارآورنده)])
-syn- (“with”)


کرم + حلیه
hile + karam

سجده شوریده

خام کن پخته تدبیرها

اول او اول بی ابتداست
آخر او آخر بی‌انتهاست

کار فلک بود گره در گره


(expelled from the temple of science) the collector and the classifier --> to grosser objects that we can taste, touch, accumulate

the master of ceremonies to a cage of tigers

Bowker on Charles Lyell

Buckland: (generally speaking) all things on earth can be seen at once objects and archives:
•as objects: they function in the world
•as archives: they maintain traces of their own past

a rock:
•object of lithosphere
•document of its history (striation: past glaciation; strata: complex stories of deposition + radioactive isotopes; journy through the mantle; etc.)


earth: a variable legible palimpsest

(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs

bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system

(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time

[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]


time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time

industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time

information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)

(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)


watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)

“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)

}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)

(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)

*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”


fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”

•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator


chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity

working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)

machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs


Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer


ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo


arguments about rates of change = about facts of change

eternal, unchanging present


train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian world of abstract qualities size, shape, quanity, motion
==> space out of the window of a moving train: a new kind of geographical representation, abstract and regular


(a problem in management:) “time had conspired with capital to annihilate space
@Sana

[a ‘second nature’ being created] railway (+ telegraph) ==> commodification + communication

in our trip to Rivage with Marialena we were in terested in signs in the built landscape, the “second nature” in the nature of Rivage, which were “concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made farming possible”

a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and histories
a heterogeneous collection of lives and spaces

why translation must be a monopoly (according to railway):
you need centralized bureaucracy and effective monopoly in order to operate with efficiency [...] you could not have every train running on its own (loca) time ==> (Bahn railway map =) a representation that permit efficient operation --> *an absolute time and annihilated space*

(industrialization -->) railway/railroads --> basic accounting techniques used by American business enterprise (into the 20th century)
==> infrastructural technology: organizational form (accounting techniques, reports, etc.) synchronized with its own impact on the world (regularizing it) providing both a ***material and metaphorical implusion*** (to order its forms of inquiry/activity)


@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities

increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science


systematizers

nested series of regions

synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientation course, “that is why refugees are coming here"]


fable: history as the tale of struggle (~ liberty against fatality)

(glorious) race into the future


temps
•time
•weather


(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)

syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra

senility kohulat


**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor


“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time


1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body terrestrial (much as political events affected the body politic)
(Lyell + Buchez + Michelet ==>) (reconfigured the world from) a *tapestry of tales*[~= ajayeb] --to--> random access memory/archive [RAM]****

isotropic spatiotemporal analysis

glitterati
glitter + literati
(framed people: made fashionable and beautiful)


Lyell's time:
1- time: passive container --> attempt to give a chronology to the history of the earth, to trace its origin or deny that there is any evidence that it has origin
2- time: process --> attempt to pick out certain types of changes that are invariably associated with the history of the earth at any age [--> RAM] and are thus in a sense a feature of time itself


Bowker reading consistant patterning in Lyell's writing, finds that in his work in each disparate quotes that Bowker cites:
•the part: (is take as) varying, liable to be created or destroyed
•(=/=) the whole: immutable and eternal (just like Buchez's society)
}--> fable of ‘nature as a whole’
[==asserting==> that no hybrid had ever achieved a permanent niche on earth]**
that nature keeps a check on the whole process by organizing flora and fauna into “nations”
[==asserting==> nothing can survive long outside its nation]** (=/= cyborg)

“cycle” of years <--> a region
a climatic great year <--> earth over time
“revolutions” of the earth's surface <--> species change

industrial revolution, reaching its peak as Lyell was writing
--> the stillness, the ***ineluctable equilibrium between creation and destruction*** (=/= other facts available to Lyell's contemporaries)

(fable, a powerful myth still stalking our collective discourse today:) that human time was going faster now than it ever had in the past --to--> give humanity a privileged position within the geological record
(a different time for geology)


**[clockwork mechanism]

how geology in the 19th century shaped our contemporary ideas of database
-(earth is an archivist, but a bad one, it is up to the geologist to pull together information -->{ earth creates false records --> humands create false records through mudging the earth's annals with mules, hybrids, and monsters --✕--> geologist can read between the lines ==> true record of stasis)
the earth's archival technology + efficient use of information technology

astronomy was in the 19th century the science of regularity : all the apparent perturbations in the earth's orbit were reckoned to be embedded in cycles of varying duration --> universe = effectively clockwork mechanism

(for an archivist [~ Lyell]:) earth = special kind of clock, an *hourglass*

(astronomy + geology -->) (a contemplation of) the regular clockwork mechanism that seemed to govern both the heavens and the earth [+ Babbage: judged that human history was in its underlying tendency equally regular] ==> ***first and second nature converge onto a timeless present and an anisotropic flow of time***

*anisotropic: having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. (wood is stronger along the grain than across it, or anisotropic filtering in computer graphic rendering at oblique viewing angles)
-varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement. (electron scattering is anisotropic) ~-> palindromic time

*isotropic: having a physical property which has the same value when measured in different directions. not varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement


(my project:) **picture of earth sciences**
(--> stories of macrocosm in Olearius)

picture of earth in 1830s:
earth itself as a kind of large information storage device not a very efficient one, but still remarkable -->> the inefficiencies of the storage device could be mitigated (as Beaumont and Lyell pointed out) by redundencies in the recording process -->> these redundencies could be perceived through efficient use of the new transport infrastructure (steamboat, train, etc.) -->> then geology would converge with astronomy in calling forth a historical time as regular and perfect as that of the clockwork solar system (hymned as an accurate clock)
}-->
“archival process ~= a natural technology” --> from natural to ideal: archive being mediated by technology marked by clockwork regularity
==> “earth = clock” (associated with the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*


census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state

statistical thinking


(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic


idea of the ‘book of nature’

(Lyell's logic) --> we humans have access only to a limited and random grammar of the ‘book of nature’ ==> *burden of proof* lies with those with thier set of *past causes* to explain the past
[!!]

Lyell's geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events (=/= ajayeb)
(his work revolving around an understanding of archives)

Lyell's “economy of nature”
principle of division of labor into the profession of geology + into the economy of nature }==> cumulative reports in a stateless present (=/= situated knowledges) ==> calculus of regularity out of apparent chaos and old time


true language of geology

(from a) groundwork --> contemplation of more general questions --> complicated results -->{ indefinite lapse of ages --> the existing causes of change


(?Marialena contributing to) earth's archive

scriptural authority (=/= rigor)


halcyon future
ایام خوب گذشته ayam-e khub-e gozashte/ayande


when the center of calculation is in place, there is no need to move

past --> knowledge developed catastrophically, and analysis were framed in terms of catastrophes
present --> knowledge develops uniformly and analysis are framed in terms of continual steady change


Buchez --> science would be the agent that converged both human and natural history onto isomorphic time*** [fantasy of Star Trek]

symmetry between the past of the geological discipline and of the earth


[title]
Freud's penis

inscription of records onto skin


the changes humanity has brought are (not of physical but of a) moral nature

strange tale! --> it is the bestial part of humanity fitting into the economy of nature, whereas civilized humanity operates in a different dimension to nature ==> creating the temporary appearance of an anomaly in “nature's book”


[title]
*the time of the good record keeper*

time of God


sybarites (an urbanite addicted to luxury and pleasures of the senses)
sycophants (=/= a public informer)


incalculable, irrational past seems to Lyell full of noise and cacophony irregularity


memory ensconced in books (~ filtered memory, rational memory, part of the archive with its very clear point of origin in printing) freed us from instict and brutality [---> go to TED talk ‘big history’ by David Christian, fable of printed record and progress of humanity tale]
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor

Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature


information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied


information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past


“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)

heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]


...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]


indifinite space as filled with worlds...


colossi

earthquakes
floods
storms

tranquil variations


“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present


[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)

moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena

the metronomic story
the mnemonic story


***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)


new memory practices
•***lie at the heart of our ways of knowing (both ourselves and the world)***
•they skew our available ontological space

it seems our contemporary memory practice is highly prosaic [~ german?] (=/= baroque)


[***mythological dimensions of new memory practices:] (*there is a compelling connection between the information revolution as an economic fact and as a statement about the nature of universe:)
19th century rationalization + bureaucracy (==> dramatic new information-processing and communication technologies) ==> today's institutions = **to oppose entropy** @apass
DNA ~= global economy --> nature of existence & new technology synchronized
(--> a history of science as successive decentralization of human) ==> ***eschatological (base of) information revolution*** : every material structure or energy flow (@Ali's pot carrier) could be used/seen to carry information
--> (mediated in 19th century:)
nature of the universe --to--> nature of humanity --to--> organization of economy

information mythology [~ “information” can travel anywhere and be made up of anything ~ “everything is information"] = interface between the social and natural worlds
}==> ‘a general statement about the nature of information' = 'a general statement about the nature of the universe’
(Bowker:) the new memory modality was at root an economic process of ordering social and natural space and time so that “objective” information can circulate freely [==> democracy, science]
==> package the world + make it deterministic
--✕--> (we must) make information historical (again)*

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

Avital's work has concerned itself [...] with the fact that technology is irremissible. Mary Shelley projected this view of technology with her massive, monumental, commemorative work on the technobody, which was the nameless monster. The problem with (or opening for) technology is that no one is or can stay behind the wheel, finally, and no one is in charge. And the way she has tried to route and circuit the thinking of technology--indeed, in a posthumanist frame--exposes the extent to which it belongs to the domain of testing.

the contiguous neighborhoods of broken experience and rerouted memory

the myths of liveness

[my] problem with television[/news] is that it exists in trauma
-trauma undermines experience and yet acts as its tremendous retainer
*trauma: a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others

the black-box of talking survival

Robocop: highly complex cyborg (who came equipped with memory traces, superego, id, and--ever displacing the ego--a crypt)

court's frame-by-frame analysis of video --> recording and human memory @Ali

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

which ‘well-defined terms,’ *qualities of persistence*, object repository, and identifier resolvers am i using in ajayeb.net?
the performance of digital objects (and identifiers) (not treated as a simple binary property)
*(to retrieve) human- and machine-readable information*

persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)

[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality

which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update


[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **

“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?

(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)

(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux

*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier

finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite

content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء


found in the wild

found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software

how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?

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

[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]

(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم  کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*

*people-centric work* (like library science and education)

quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”


to open up some of the ‘literature of’


(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition

difficult to commodify
difficult to describe

not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*

Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*

market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest

“our idealized notion of competition as a generator of innovation black-boxes a host of processes for competition, including unfair practices, externalizing costs, marketing, deception, and deskilling.”

(our idealized notion of:){ competition ==> innovation }--black-boxes--> (a host of) processes for competition:
•unfair practices
•externalizing costs
•marketing
•deception
•deskilling
•

individualistic and social Darwinist overtones

[*]inovation: a form of wishful thinking that aims to bring about the desired transformations without the associated costs in time and human effort (Suchman & Bishop)
(‘labor-intensive artistic work’: noninovative creative work; deepen the density of curiosity;)

capitalism continuously applies new technology designed to fragment and deskill labor, so that labor becomes cheaper and subject to greater control (Wajcman)

(sometimes) obsolescence is created through minor redesigns of consumer commodities

“let's sell more” ~-> undesirable consequences for human rights, global trade in rare metals, and toxic waste disposal

[*]technological determinism and optimism: the belief that the present social arrangements and technologies were the inevitable byproducts of historical developement, and that any problems entailed in our technologies and their production processes can be eliminated with further technological innovations

competetiveness and the technological *savvy* implicit in innovation are themselves markers of contemporary masculinity --> “the enduring force of the identification between technology and manliness is not an inherent biological sex difference. it is instead the result of the historical and cultural construction of gender” (Wajcman)

a big part of the problem is that women's technological labor (=/= ghost busters) is culturally invisible --(Katie King in her research on writing technologies argues)--> (a metonymy:) when technologies are reduced to singular, stable, self-contained devices [~ Star Wars] =/= assemblages
[dichotomy of “enforcement =/= destruction” Star Wars either or: if you are not destroying it you are enforcing it]

problems that cannot be conceptualized in terms of measures and endpoints, or which involve holistic, qualitative solutions, will be at a disadvantage for selection

(Cowan shows) the developement of new household tachnologies did not free women from the domestic shpere. rather, it allowed women to enter the paid labor force while leaving the gendered division of labor in the home untouched.


(makes me throw up -->) large literature of self-determination theory (~ showing people are more creative and happy when their work allows them to be autonomous, related, and competent) + reward systems cultivating competitive environments
[*]autonomy: self-willing, volitional, being an agent in the action =/= being a “pawn”

spheres where processes and outcomes have been the name of the game (in feminized fields of education and librarianship)

labs (such as laser developement) that require collaboration with other labs

trading zones: a metaphor for understanding how cooperation between researchers enables new scientific paradigms --> Galison

*the development of this or that research looks like a continuous trajectory, but the trajectory was actually discontinuous and ruptured. that fact that we have invented or discovered something makes that developement seem inevitable, but things could always have turned out some other way* --> Cowan > Calvert

competition is not a guarantor of innovation, our cultural belief in it can obscure other explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected


[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]

successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis


**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)

every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies

librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies

librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive


(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling

deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation

an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”

education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•course curriculum --> course content
•teaching --> delivery
*video technologies + internet ==> face-to-face interpersonal relating to be captured and reused --> new depths of commodification
*internet technologies can be used to provide rigorous, asynchronous learning and mentorship, or they can be used to decrease labor costs, but they cannot do much of both simultaneously(? --> question @apass)


Calvert: [...however,] for competition--[or any good/bad object we are working on] to be a useful strategy, it has to happen in a larger context of cooperation and collaboration
(for example the notion of “future” has to happen in a larger context in which different futurities for diverse communities is thinkable)


method <=={
+ sensitivity to the historical moment (multiculturalism, extreme changes in the meaning of ‘global,’ etc.)
+ an assemblage of tools that are ready to hand (theoretically driven, are pleasant and effective to use, etc.)
+ embody an ethical commitment to -->
◦emic: the values and meanings of those who are being studied
◦etic: within a way to explore the conventions, standards and infrastructures that both constrain and enable their experiences


Leigh Star
•qualitative methods
•lateral thinking
•poetics of infrastructure
•[*]boundary objects: examines assemblages of humans and things, and how things that exist in more than one community of practice are used in performing cooperative work


the role of practical knowledge in organizational life

sensitivity of an ethnomethodological orientation

(apass's) intellectual capital (is not centered in their official document repositories and databases, rather is in the largely undocumented ideas, insights, and know-how of its members: Lilia, Pierre, Nicolas, Joke, Steven, Michele,)

exigencies of work

****much of knowledge often remains embodied in the practice
commonly shared through conversations and stories among small circles of colleagues and work groups --> local vernacular --convert--> other forms ==> other members of the organization can understand & *act upon* together

Sina --> richer comprehension of socially organised work practice into the process of engineering technological systems

Calvert --> her work is about the enduring qualities of the book and how its resistance to commodification enables this thing we call a public library.
she is interested in developing library-appropriate research methods for thinking critically about old and new technologies
-we naturalize the way technological infrastructures make ethical decisions for us =/= producing methods/ethic that allows librarians to mandate characteristics in developing technologies which both preserve librarians’ prerogatives to make (necessary visible) ethical judgment calls <-- Calvert
جعبه--"containers” continue to dictate the name of the game (for the immensely diverse patronage of the public library)

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

bilingualism
different languages (farsi and arabic in ajayeb) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience

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

[Ahmed]

(complaint ~=) diversity-work = data-collection

we learn about the damage we cause, of how causes are understood as damage

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

my old background (in computer sciences):
•www.joelonsoftware.com (Joel Spolsky runs a company which sells bug databases, “FogBugz”)
•wiki.c2.com
•“Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs”


computational process

abstract beings (processes*) manipulate other abstract things (data*)
--> a pattern of rules (program*)

programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations


distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data

means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units


modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation

(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions

object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model

object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function

stream: delayed (infinite) list

stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation


random: statistical properties of uniform distribution


object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model



Building Abstractions with Data

how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)

building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language

data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’


versioning
garbage collection

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

the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”


Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]

***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*

categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without

each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes

(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation [--✕--> Anand's jinn temporality and genealogy of human memory]

mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)

“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)

locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason

crossing of cultures

*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*

(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)

media ~= knwoledge form

in media arts studies i learn to ask which cruicual material limitations have been radically eased in a digital era --> impulse to hoard/share + constant tension with the epistemological work of categorization and classification (--> database) + (ongoing) feminization of the field

the library and information science knowledge --> intense expertise required to enact it =/=!? art expertise (a category of works that are expertise-free)

(gift of Marx, Foucault, Lorde, Haraway, Leigh Star in) *understanding subjugated epistemologies*

(Lorde) master's tool dismantle the master's house? = can the technologies and epistemologies that have been used to organize thinking about the world in one way succesfully uproot that way?

“recovering multivocality”

رسوب
*enact residuality
*residual (of transformations [--> sometimes wiping away previous techniques for dividing and describing, and substituting another set of categories that don't easily map to the first ==> eliminating the residuum of the old order --> case of ajayeb? --> can we make overlaps and hybridities of old/new categories? ~ *residual categories*: affective-epistemic content that often go unclassified. Calvert: *affect* is too thin, too subjective to calcify into a category. it abundantly uses its categories in a way that offers a kaleidoscopic shuffling and reshuffling of the items***)])
*residuum

categories overlapping, non-hierarchical (“animal” + “livestock”, etc.)

truthiness
melting pot
actions (filled with verbs)
nouns (both living and nonliving entities)

*score of recognizable historical era*

using:
•filmic techniques (animation, montage, time lapse)
•affective techniques (sarcasm, intimacy)


how can we address aspects of apass's exceptionalism?
(with its things: characters, colors, doings, values)
*historical/cultural specificities of apass*


enlightenment inheritances:
•quest for universality
•


apparent seamlessness and universality with the veneer روکش of helpfulness ==> purity, deny multivocality, hide the residuum produced, and exclude hybridity
--> (pulling the carpet of familiarity out from under users:)
to replace ‘familiar generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)

(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections

labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)

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

[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]

c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage

discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)

face (slider) --> object monster

(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]

s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)

discourse =/= valorizing information

Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”

*Apologue*

research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual


internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’

(slider: marking everything)

semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers


feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data


#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list

*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements

*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)

*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.


PRACTICAL:

we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants

we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers

(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)

i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar

(i will describe them later)

and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’

each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values

slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers

ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/luminous effect (of mixture)


and also:
•to address (in a longer term) how apass performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
•to address (in a longer term) historical/cultural specificities of apass
•to address aspects of apass's exceptionalism (its characters, colors, doings, values)



REPORT:

Geert
zoom / biger picture
perform a zoom
Geert and Michael knowledge zoom-level
Geert's strech-work
which cheats
vulgar: direct, =/= suffisticated, =/= nice(in a classical sense), =/= institutional code [--> a cheat], everyday, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)

Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
zoom is tooooo wide, megacategories, “fermentation” is a different zoom level
cheat --> perception/intention, value of non-doing ?, ‘order is cheat’, ritual ==> heal/cope
vulgar: ritual of popular knowledge, =/= social acceptence, communicating emotional needs, guilt on behalf of the vulgars,
suggested topology: skew (with 4 axioms: negativity, positivity, passivity, ritual)

Caterina
sticky: difiicult to remove categories, dirty, quality of trape, almost negative, like honey as an intermediary sticky for other objects to become sticky
zoom: Latina candition macro, ass rincles micro, herself, change of lens is what matters not the zoom level, the macro of the term culture itself
cheat: against the rule of community/aggreement, always cheating the system, against the game, bad relation to the game, lazy relation, faking?
vulgar: ordinary, insultive, perjurative, of the “people”, (Geert:) a marking always coming from above, what television does: non-actual + spectacle, (Elen:) immoral, not original, not elegant, thinking in terms of the ‘same’, group forming, non-individual, twards mass formation,
suggested topology: nest

Eszter
polarized lense
confusion / being confused is ‘cheating’
stickiness absent
suggested topology: nest (with two branches: naive & political leader)

Goda
nothing sticks anymore therefor we go to swamp to stick to relevant objects
swamp as archive (refuge from the capitalist) =/=? cheat
constructing ‘bad example’ (?) --> role model
zooming in losers of capitalism
X-ray kind of lens into the opacity of swamp
(her) treasures in the swamp [--> epistemological buried objects]
criticizing how capitalism zooms for her irrelevant objects
buffoon --> vulgar
suggested topology: skew (the skew is a plain around the edges, gets deeper in the middle, and a narrow way up in the center: the exit)

Elen
presence of the working of subconscious ==provokes==> etymology
very sticki “hell yea!"s
affirmative, sometimes technical knowledge
something sold (“self”) with something morphic on it (“apparition” or ‘surat’ in farsi)
suggested topology: ramp

Hoda
cheat: sharp radical formation, playing ambiguity
totalizing vision lense (“if then all...”)
“because i asked i could feel”
anti-psychological
suggested topology: ramp

Katinka
makeover slider
vulgar: makeover show, e-bay
statements not touching her, something else is sticki object: sympathy?
slider: stack
suggested topology: ramp (makeover)

Nassia
stick: something bodily, heat, sweat, property of objects
zoom is the opposit of body
gaze inside + anatomy
cheating: on people negative / on systems positive
suggested topology: ramp

Laura
osmotic = french kiss
administered (by machine) body
the good example
beauty is invested in...
the (unchanging) core of the cuttle-fish
popular = vulgar
suggested topology: skew (regimented floor plan)

Maurice
cheat --> joker, fool
cute: getting off the leash of institution
bear blurs what...
“but I am just...”
bribe economy --> honest and human
suggested topology: nest

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

[title]
archives of open desire

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

#drawing exercises in built environment (with Sizek + Mathews https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1542-methods-for-many-anthropocenes-with-andrew-s-mathews)
1. pick a charismatic building/statue/object on your built environment, and draw a form of it, inviting to identify details of the object that reveal aspects of its history or use today
2. compare drawings and use the drawings to tell stories about the object and its use or importance to life in that environment
3. invite to reflect on the ways that drawing infrastructure can reveal processes at multiple temporal and spatial scales

discussion questions/writing response questions:
•Which features of the structure stood out, and what do these suggest about the processes of its creation and use?
•How has its infrastructure changed over time, and how are these changes evidenced in the built form itself?
•How does your structure relate to others in its immediate vicinity, and in what ways do relationships between structures help reveal social relations?
•What traces of past events are embedded in infrastructure or its memories, and how can we render these traces present?

drawings has to do with the incompleteness of knowing and representing
indeterminacy at ‘the same time’

(?in which locations you can get a good) human response to:
•slow processes (soil, geology, plant form)
•fast processes (plant seasonal behavior, weather, human responses to all of these things)

*drawing as structured wondering/wandering*

use of the *dramatic* as method --> to entertain multiple worldviews
to maintain irreducible complexity and to recenter historical processes as central to understanding contemporary politics
(history and drama)
-facts as enacted and performed before audiences (--> tradition in science and technology)

**knowledge is always performed, staged, and enacted** <== my work on ajayeb

how to tell the dramatic stories

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

notes from Sofia's seminar on documentation

the questions i brought home with Kobe:

the ontological relationships between law and art, who protects who? what protects protection? --> which material discursive practices make the ontological boundaries of “protection”? (specially today investigating this term is more urgent in a world saturated with toxic vocabularies of security.) the figure of protection transforms the subjects of knowledge and knowability --> look at how the judge was talking about art

(question of) the production of subjectivity (of the judge himself as an active knowing agent and the dead-master as the phantasmatic place-holder of meaning)
this is related to: (question of) responsibility and individuality --> influences and efforts of the work. two interesting moments of genesis occurred:
1- in the court “his work” (Beuys) was mysteriously created
2- also when Olga got a phone call from the ministry of culture, “her work” was mysteriously created
--> both the court and the phone call are mystic producers of the subjectivity of the artist dead or alive [#this needs more investigation]

(question of) the production of significance and difference
look at the speech-acts of the judge in the case of Beuys. which nuances of difference are generated, estated, established, and propagated? we can study every syllable of the judge's speech-act. the judge goes from one fable to another: fables of significance, fables of influence, fables of impression, etc.

boundary-making practices in our shared struggling world
the idea that art “starts” and “stops” somewhere
zeroing the artworks ecosystem

when is the moment (or how the moment can be marked) that the judge becomes able to say “OK, I don't know.” or “I am opinionated about this art. Let's bring an expert.”
and beyond that, I am wondering, like that judge, when myself standing in front of an artwork (or any work) how i am able to say “I have an opinion, or, I don't know”, “i need expertise in order to look at this”?

questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,



with Vincent

(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work

(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?

(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address

who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design

design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?

(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness

the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?

Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?



with Olga

regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports

for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)

what is the feeling of the document?

*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?

putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names

-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers

(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers

indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled

how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)

questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,



Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]

what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?

is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?

why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)

is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?

document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,



Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world

the question of the metaphors of the body

manuality
manual understanders

for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning

placement, world, Dasein, fall

in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?

she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?

ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors

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

Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness


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

to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual

the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)

vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)

the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney


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

Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)

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

*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are system-ing (=/= a method of communication in emergent systems, mechanically defined as “indirect coordination” self-organizing termites and ants or flash mobs or political action)
@apass: how do you provide different *undisciplined ways of envisioning* new kinds of environments, artifacts and practices? (entangle design, science, fact and fiction, boundary objects, system-ing, [*]design: ***making things that tell stories*** [=/= telling stories])
(my encounters with) ajayeb's vibrating particularism
[*]website, talksite: play, trial and error, permutation and mistakes (none of it innocent or exemplary @ERG's website) ==> *cognitive reassembly*
-->{relations between developers and users to create and work out a technical interface ==> communicative tangle}
transmedia story (with its origins commercial and suspect, often entangled with social critique and social panic ~= conditions of making knowledge today; we knowingly or without reflection, gather and pin together such stories across media...)
-you can't take *citation pools* for granted
-how we will take what each other says
companion gatherings (do not exactly cohere or consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive and political circumstances (in and as their very moments of unknowing, when ethical and moral sortings are properly in flux)
(with) Bateson's negative sensitivities to systems, and with Katies King, I keep discovering just how literal is our many being-ness in multiply embedded sorts of biomic sympoiesis

{[*]lecture: feeling-in-the-mouth system, (the word-as-world inhabited by) alternate and overlapping peoples, memories, attunements, citation pools, histories, communities of practice, knowledges, ocean and freshwater “edges"}
{?can i propose (Katie King and Sandoval's) “oppositional consciousness” instead of (Mouffe's) “agonistic pluralism"}

responses, abilities, infrastructures, distributed embodiments,

[*]traumas: intensities crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths

(Bateson > Leigh Star > Katie King) *transcontextual* (transcontextual circumstances: moving from one context to another, one world to another, one set of knowledges to another) ==> [*]boundary objects: workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious)--local, supralocaling, and global in material topologies in which spacetimenatureculture may be mixed, developmental yet transtemporal, (they don't create boundaries) *they work to keep boundaries from getting in the way of collaboration* [~=? sleep-walking: ignore or even miss that there are boundaries about, or honor boundaries = differences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]

****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of injustice unfold, enfold]

‘to feel family and parent memories as our own’ --> a skill that intertwines historical and personal biography (sometimes trauma) as a feature of *memory encoding*

[*]autopoiesis: a notion, a theory of cellular organization, that makes a fold in history --> reformulating an orientation into an ‘experimental epistemology’

*memoir animated word-worlds worm-holed* (~= my lecture-performances, Katie King's talksites --> speculations gathering with stigmergy, recursive paradox, and a sympoiesis of boundary objects)

#my project: redesigning ajayeb's “writings” among dispersed, diffracted, and emergent methods of attention
-to redesign “aboutness” (as nonrepresentational : recursive relational agency of/about reciprocities in worldly processes)
-to redesign fiction of writing (khipu)
-to redesign @apass archive --> records of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs (instead of abstractions layered up), sometimes as agencies, sometimes as (in Sandoval's terms) oppositional and differential consciousness, (boundary objects) storing and performing our details and affects and memories

punitive parsimonies of explanation:
•over-simplications of complex systems
•pressures for social critique
•to travel as social panic
•retreat to political loyalties (<== confusion overwhelm cognitive schema)
•retreat to political belonging in search of trust
•

(more boundary objects:) many sorting apparatus reframings at varying grains of detail each savoring textures of disciplinary and other precisions amid noncoherent and materializing logics
(constitutive, agential) **cuts are connections**
-to minimize damage and maximize flourishing

differential details --in--> “us” --in--> Bateson's living patterns --in--> starfish's invertebrate radial symmetry --in--> redwood cloning timelines --in--> recursive epigenesis --in--> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...



[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading of power's formation require it --> that's how i became more iranian in Europe)
•differential: instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different

اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate change, global restructuring, ]
-humans are often precariously enduring on the planet
(Cuban Missile Crisis...)
-when urgencies (become too predictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions

with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it

-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)

(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects

the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus

workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play

to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on

(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•

(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things

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

what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says

(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?

home = domination + domestication + love


Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture

SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)

Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly literal
Joanna, the author of the book, Joanna Russ (in a shimmering joking literalization has enfolded into her own story)


my ajayeb studies --> *cultural studies: how cultural products are part of cultural processes* (=/= what makes an art work good) --> getting around the term “art”
-mysteries, romance novels, movies, (bestiaries,) all of them deeply commercial forms of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects

fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses

*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)

Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•

like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others

Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice

Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans

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

wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King

zoo spelled backwards

http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web

the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)


approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system

links of how *shared interdependent transsex* [shared rearrangement of sex and re/production] is unfolding
-responding to this rearrangement not through fear of the eco-catastrophic assumptions

*shared interdependent* =/= dependence, independence

prefix -sphere =/= -scape
bioscape --> life and energies (not necessarily “alive”) in relation to an imperfect spherical earth, but also its relations to multiple other possible planes, elements, assemblages, and processes (beyond the biosphere)
(jetscapes, oilscapes, foodscapes, microwavescapes, surveillancescapes, mountainscapes, sunscapes, waterscapes, etc.) -Kier


you could love in a goose's world ==> you are *goosomorphous* (~ producing a goose body & being produced yourself by a new identity --> a not-attributing anthropomorphic love)--> *anthropomorphic: to add new definitions to what it is to be a human being*
[*]anthropo-zoo-genetic practice: practice of domestication, by adding new meanings to X, and new identities that provide these new meanings
“Lorenz is articulated by the setting he created. The setting is articulating new ways of talking, new ways of being human with nonhuman, human with goose, goose with human...” -Despret

de-passion knowledge ==> a world ‘without us’ ==> a world without ‘them’

*impoverished: a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures --Despret--> **a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world**


•autological subject: discourses, practices, and fantasies about self-making, self-sovereignty, and the value of individual freedom associated with the Enlightenment project of contractual constitutional democracies
Sven, Maarten,
Isabel for whom sex is disseminated
•genealogical society: discourses, practices, and fantasies about various social constraints and psychic assaults on the autological subject by various kinds of inheritances


“liberation denied, liberation achieved” -->
•both visions dependent upon an all-or-nothing approach to social change
•both visions dependent on vision and an unexamined allegiance to the concept of change
...at the self-proclaimed centers of freedom
--Katie--> *how do we know social change when we see it?*

when ‘eye candy’ begins to describe a range of visually induced consumer pleasures

theoretical apparatus:
space-plus-time (space + time) =/= spacetime
-the additive understanding of “+” pictures time and space as two geometric planes that intersect =/= ‘spacetime’ there is no need to explain how they come together, because nothing stands between them

“a woman's survival depends upon calling people into classification”
“...hair-trigger judgments about gender lead to romance as well as lethal exchange.”

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

Verran in her work with Yoruba (West African) and Yolngu (Aboriginal Australian)

=/= thinking of numbers used in enumerating the real world as helping us to work relation ==> numbers (and mathematical objects) as cognitive tools
elements of schooling --> learning to use mathematical tools

*can number be considered as an inventive frontier in social, cultural, political and moral life?* --Verran--> *number = materialized relations*, enumerated materiality

people having kin relations
people are relations (in an embodied sense + semiotic in the sense of expressing a formal relation [for example wife/husband])

example:
•in river water --> taking numbers as semiotic = to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality
•in working markets --> numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode

--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways

Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist account of number
Iranian accounr of number

(Verran's rhetoric --> the term) semiotic (an opaque term, both vague and highly technical) + material modifies

(Verran not refering to) [*]semiotic: the summoning up the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce's philosophy and its offspring, american pragmatism.

the paradox of worlds as already/always meaningful, recognizing that doing worlds as knowable (whether by science or by trading) or for that matter through Yoruba, or Yolngu knowledge traditions --involves--> engaging with the world as it is here and now --accepts--> *studying ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ as complex clots of signs and collective actions*

--Peirce--> numbers can be:
•iconic (icons are deeply coconstitutive with clots of collective actions that generate entities)
•indexical
•symbolic (symbols and their objects enact a relation of supervenience امر غير مترقبه, objects are accepted as affecting and effecting their signs but not vice-versa)
--> degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life
--Verran--> ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs

(depending on) how one understands ethnography ==> names work as icons, indexes, or symbols

removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive

numbers as working indexically or symbolically --> for examine: are being used to represent the ecological health of Australia's creeks and rivers, lakes and billabongs


difference between these relational forms:
the first thing we need to know about a number is whether:
•it takes the one/many form (potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many) [cardinal number --> conserve value]
•the whole/parts form (having plurality contained within a unity) [ordinal number --> conserve order]

(in) shape-shifting between:
one/many form
whole/parts form
symbolic/indexical mode of semiosis
indexical/iconic mode of semiosis
}--> number works in inventive ways


thousands of Australians regularly attending their streams with bottles, thermometers, and pH meters, peering at tiny creatures they have scooped up with a net, trying to identify what they are and count their numbers

(the slogan) “you can't sustain what you haven't measured”

numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers --also--> contribute to constituting water as commodity, expanding possibilities for ‘doing business with water’


cordon sanitaire --> consistency must be quantifiable
two databases, separate institutions and websites, is counter-productive in a project assembling and disseminating information on the state of the nation's water resources?
@apass

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

patterns of behavior
forms of style
--emerge--> ?

(Rai researching the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones in India helps me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns

perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake

each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•

an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station


(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy

all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets

photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject


a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies


like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy

my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore

(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)

[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it

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

Ticineto Clough

media technological developements ==> (often and perhaps necessarily) put the transformation of being and the transformation of knowing out of sync with one another

why Hollywood concerns me:
•reconceptualization of labor from the cinematic mode of production to the affective mode
•the colossal projection of cinema as a guarantor of a culturally uniform memory

relevant for artists too (they cannot ignore this) --> to rethink the ontological grounds of knowing [and representation] (in the wake of) deprivileging or decentering human perception and cognition (and reconcider these artistic tools and episteme:) sensation, affect, matter, energy

*digital media technology is being redefined in terms of a subtraction of human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling* @apass

(media understood in terms of) *nonanthropocentric affect* --> affect = transition, gateway, passages between dimensions ==> ‘everything = media’ (~ entities can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities)
affect --> [*]media: contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus

**mediation = modulation = (vibration =) intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces, below and above human perception**

[*]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)

(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing

(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)

}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*


sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi


*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)

control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)

[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)

[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics

[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)

(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new forms of distraction, new forms of habit, new forms of practice
*politics of intervention: a matter of entering in the middle in order to *modulate* ~= (Rai's) counter-actualization (~= criticism): moving down from the extended, back to the intensive or potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)

media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications

to give criticism more specificity and width

measure and media technologies

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

(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblages of affect, matter, policy, culture, biology, perception, value, force, sensibilities, practices, and discourses
-sensorial, algorithmic, material, and territorial makeshift infrastructures enabling digital cultures in India today

cultures of pirated workarounds (jugaad) in digital technologies
emergent digital cultures

stratified data

*hacking empiricism: a self-reflective practice of linking a problem to both its ecology of sense and sensation and to its processes and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways

ecologies of workaround practices

...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation

...nodes of algorithmic capital

traverse and exceed

islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India

marketing and hacking of digital cultures


social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability

**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies

heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)

Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****

entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)

-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures

(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)

negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)

the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*

Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures

strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity

(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism

interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought

collective practices of habituation

([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages

transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia

(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously

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

*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*

(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a few index of evaluation for such practice:)
•*how well it learns and models how to be affected or moved*
•*how well it opens up unexpected elements of one's own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing world*
•(what are) *its possibilities for immersive play among sensations and platforms amid media technologies*
•(what are) *its ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-organization across ecologies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]

transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, logic, linguistic, histories and evolution of communication, ethology, biophysics, cybernetics, natural history + game industry, fine arts design, education, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***

culture industries


questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana


Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)

double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> such *double bind patterning = (becomes experienced as) “reality”*

***they all deal with (some edges of) double bind:
•religious practices
•entertainment
•game design
•learning
•

intolerable conditions ==> creativities

(when crucial context markers distinguishing [one from another] become unrecognizable, contradictory, or fraudulant ==>) “abusive practices ~= challenging practices”
--> (terror & possibility are on the edge in double bind experience =) ***transcontextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)

“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”


(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*


[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)

playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]

-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)


(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions

tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition

*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*

in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?

@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•

elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)

an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره

odor kit
a device organized in a careful pallete of small differences
learning to be affected --entails--> a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of

body parts are progressively acquired --> world counter-parts are being registered in a new way (= my ajayeb studies)
*acquiring a body: a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world [---> go to Captain Marvel 2019 film]


what sort of project of multiplicity is transdisciplinarity?
what sort of double consciousness might it array in which political economies?

(Bateson's) distributed being = we don't end at our skin

***what does it mean to say to any particular group of people that we do not end at our skin?!***
what sort of boundary object is this “skin”?

(Keeling > Katie) a book is a wormhole --into--> transdisciplinary universe
*lyricism of surplus*
“the end of the world... work with me”

agencies of valorization (of pricing, of valuing, of mobilizing labor) : political economy of acquiring body parts from the skin's edge

*agencies of capital: worldly processes of economic systems articulating and distributed among, but not reproducing the powers of the state, or of community, family, or nation*

+ other agencies:
•sensory-motor apparatus and affectivities
•thinkings and memory-images distributed across people and media

(sometimes) layered double-bind systems ==> numbing out

queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production


phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute

national agendas for innovation and economic positioning

which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...

intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*

(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust

(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material was this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail

[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”


objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value

critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)

wir
(Katie --> one must wonder) who is being evoked by this ‘we’
to what extent this ‘we’ functions to interpellate the reader into a community that shares a common horizon? (@Sven and Chloe bookshop)
which side, which knowledge world, in what spacetime are ‘we’ on, inside and outside of, bonding and othering?

*tacit forgetting* =/= resolution
**what sorts of boundary objects value irritation?** @Leo
(my irritation in apass with tacit knowledge, spiritualism, Vivero, Manning, process philosophy,,,)

Katie accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attributed to somebody”


attention (in time) -->
•narrow the range of possibility of -ism(s)
•alter the grain of detail ==> *differential focus*


ajayeb.net: an intellectual infrastructure assemblaged and stacked (extensively scaled, intensely scoped) =/= disciplinized archives of references (a knowing that linkages exist and can be assumed and must be consciously made explicit as “new”)
•my “=/=” set the focus of lens unsed in examining --> alter the grain of detail (deliberately and dismissingly) --> a “we” is needed --to--> pull back --to--> include alternate knowledge worlds
ajayeb.net/bibli: bird's-eye view of the bibliographic growth

mobility and detachability of “nots” provoking frission

@ERG's new website: what if the worlding here needs to scope and scale along ranges of detail, indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?

routinized rhetoric about feminism

apparatus: open-ended practices

****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****

neutrality (<-- moral commitment) =/= relativism: forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority

(learning from Katie) my technique in ajayeb study --> i brazenly detach words from their original context and mobilize then all together for my own irritating purposes [...] i both reduce and add to the complexity (of globals and locals)
**(my play:) double or multiple consciousness ==> [*]ajayeb: growing boundary objects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies

ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium

variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?


(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities

preemptive
proleptic
prophetic

(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds


(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit

(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment

(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****

(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices

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origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance industry (==> operating our lives by technologies of information and computing)
[we can live with it differently]
logic of progress is not the issue, logic of acceleration is the problem
(idea of) frictionless economy ==> must go faster and faster
discourse of stasis =/= how to explore change?
not preserving endangered species, but preserving the possibility of change

desks are information technologies

Bowker > Sina: every critical work (today) must include the centrality of data (and calculation) in our lives

(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --> my interest in Olearius]

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(Cameron's image of) Terminator: relentless unidirectional progress [that you can't negotiate with] (~= modernity) ==> destruction of cultures and communities --> destroy ourselves

how to live with Terminator = how to live with modernity --> postmodernity
(in the film the Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)

absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with

its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal

(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)

modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts

modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity

--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology


(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]

(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse


(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness

--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same

(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
+
much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism

-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?

religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)

[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***

(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very expression of] (Griffin's) postmodernism : a new relationship with the past (and the future) <-- postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism

[the strive for a new ‘enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity

(Falk's) Disneyland postmodernism:
•abstract affirmation of a holistic harmonious future
•homogenized uniformity (based on a colonizing logic and westernization of the globe)
•reinterpret science and natural reality as confirmatory of a spiritual grounding for human
•holistic possibilities of encompassing conflict
•***postmodernism as an expression of the privileged status of the West***


*greek gnosis is the Terminator in its guise of mystic* (which provided the Enlightenment with its springboard and modernity with its mission to subjugate non-western cultures)

arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)

new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus


*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*

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importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite

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*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*

inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)

SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science

all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)


[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)


{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft

**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why

(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has been enlisted emotionally, politically, communally,,, (in various cau[...]