[...]br /> 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[...]