[...] 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)[...]