[...]+ 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
[...]