[...]n 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?
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///////// newer notes, saved in 11 September 2016 /////////
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[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.
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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
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[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
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(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
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[*] 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
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trauma: that which it won't tell its story =/= total recall
how can history tell?
history, a compensatory device?
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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) sit[...]