[...]n 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)*

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

importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite

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

*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***


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

the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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

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 causes: construction of autobiography to the construction of national myth) [==> objectivity does not make sense in memory studies]
•it includes (not only that which cab be documented, it rather) includes an element of the subjective : how people feel about what happened in the past, how they reconstruct events of the past but also narratives =/= what happened in the past --Daston--> objectivity (among histories:)
◦cross-checking of sources
◦(19th century technique of) “reading against the grain”: try to discover, from the surviving sources, from what perspective they were written (what historical context they were embedded in) = “critical reading” from the stand point of all of one might say “the illusions of memory” which might cloud an objective impartial records of events (not accepting the narrative that place value in the source) [=/= my work on ajayeb]
◦securing evidence (---> go to archive) : intersection of objectivity with study of history

(since 17th century) memory has been essential to our conceptualization of what does it mean to have a self --> why we are so concerned with memory damage ceases (alzheimer, etc.)

husod3oqLds


many time when we define (say “what X is”), what we are doing is to how to make a term more precise, to make something *artificially operational*

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

*sciences of the archive*
depend on longed lived collections

(since 16th century, as we know it) modern science's epistemic goal: *predictive accuracy* =/= *to elevate certainty* (the case in medieval Latin Europe)

books (past discoveries) & instruments (future discoveries) interspersed --when--> they both belong to the same practice ==> library



(Goethe:) search nothing beyond the phenomena

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

Morris
movement of commerce's subject (=/= walking of the Parisian flaneur)
plaque's morbid sentimen --> evades the reduction of signs to mere reference

[*]public art: the art of a world bifurcated by capital --tending--> *monumentality: an exaggerated literality + excess of scale (incapable of irony)

(of image -->) textuality: something lurking off that bids us engage the ambiguity

metonym

critique: (analogy of) a movement toward the outside

a grammatical negative can never efface what it attempts to contradict
a call for judgment hides in the defensive gesture


criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law

new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself


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

ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being
•

([i am] learning with Morris) ethnography of crisis
-how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization
-how money's (total and totalizing) mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy (and eternal present-being)
-rhetorics of transparency and visibility (conceived in aesthetic domains)

(narcissistic act of) teletechnic encompassment


*spirit mediumship*
[auratic threshold of representation]
(the nationally renowned spirit medium) Chuchad, flamboyant media savvy
daguerreotypy: a demonic receiving device that had the capacity to retain and thereby diminish the photographed subject's substance
(in Thai) kaan thaay [taking, wasting] ruup [picture]
•Thai word for photography
•concomitant transformation and discharge
--✕--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]


(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity

communist occult practices
emasculating magic

phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch

mediums = state's other


[today]
•identification between the  local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•

mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self


[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)

(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics

simulacral space of the new mediascape

(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*

history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or there is no means of transmission = silence or white noise

Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without specification)

-what drew these people to this performance?
(seeking the) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked

acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience

broadcasting device = recording device

authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)

modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)


confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glossolalia غريبه گفتارى --> contemporary spirit possession performances ==> the truth of the spirits in the mass-mediatized world is not referential and certainly not universal --✕--> the truth of the spirits centers on questions about the difference between noise and information]
mediums embrace technology
mediumship proliferates
mediums and the media provide each other with metaphors
(mediums seek to escape the relationship altogether) in forms of ecstatic nonrepresentation or absolute renunciation


Chuchad cutting his tongue --> disavow disavowal
“[...]he rendered himself voiceless, and the only sounds he could make were those of exhalation and inhalation: sounds of the body as machine”
...the crowd gasped and then repeated --> confused awe & automatism

[a fable:] “Chuchad placed the tongue on a piece of white paper, and the blood quickly diffused into the fibers. For a moment it appeared as though the tongue was writing a blunt, indecipherable hieroglyph. Chuchad then held the paper to his mouth so it was covering his face and pressed the tongue back into its original place. This time, he seemed to be rewriting, or rather, writing in reverse, and the glyph was inscribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmission = the truth”
•[*]confession: a mode of accession or conformity to the message


in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between signifier and signified*

auxiliary hell جهنم کمکی

[a fable:] scrutiny ==> (meritorious beings:) people in question become miraculously equipped with memory

recorded on luminous jewel-encrusted gold tablets

quaint traditions عجیب و جالب
(i am learning from Morris how not to) reject the cosmology as a symptom of superstition or a relic of bygone times

ubiquity alone is inadequate to demonstrate relevance

(in the story of Yama) in the evildoer's case, speech is not the mere instrument of truth: it is both a symptom and a cause of sin

where the law rules ==>
•there is no difference between *object* and *sign*
•there is no difference between *speech* and *voice*

the language of truth (personified in the speechless child) =/= corruptions of human utterance : {truth's silent ideality =/= sin's “over-naming"}

mediumship's representational function: transmission of a referential truth + repeated registration of the mere technique of its transmission

(Chuchad's) instrumental “writing”
(like Chuchad, many performance artists are today) inhabiting the era of ***technique's fetishization*** = (Heidegger's era of) technology

occult returning in the guise of transparency

nationalized discourse of modernity: (oppositional terms of) science =/= magic

redolent of... حاکی

when *observation* (propelled by desire =/=) become a form of *attention* (propelled by labor)

[Morris > Kittler on “discourse network” of Freud, Simmel, Rilke:] writing = an exhaustion that endlessly refused to end (=/= miniatures of meaning)
--> “writing is nothing beyond its materiality” and people who practice this act simply replace writing machine ==promis==> *mystical union of writing and delirium*

(from) actual magicality of script --to--> the representational capacity of inscription --to--> a deployment of writing in the mode of mathematics (bureaucratic list poetry)

incorporation of technologies of mass mediatization into the language (and performance of possession --by--> the discourses of lost tradition)

-what kind of mediation is (not simply the inscription of its technique, but) a renewed transmission of meaning?


**the fantasy of a return to meaning**


[Morris submits that] (direct marketing ~=) *pyramid schemes* are the economic counterpart of *mediumship*
= the mode of retailing in which the function of distribution and resale (and indeed the movement of capital) is masked in the *rhetoric of directness*
•[*]directness: withdrawal of an infrastructure of mediation into the person of the distributor + مستتر کردن occulting of technique in the very moment of display
•[*]pyramid scheme: a structure in which retailers recruit more retailers --> (mainly serves the interests of) multinational entities parading as local entrepeneurialism

grotesquely functionalized room

abandoning the ontology of mediumship (for...)
putatively unmediated truth (of...)


magic's metamorphosis entailes a repetition

([Morris analysis of Chuchad:] a medium becoming) a middleman disavowing the mediations that he performed in order to produce the illusion of value, or meaning, or truth
•working only in the repression of its own operations --> truth-effect of marketing

--> *the market can substitute for magic*, the media can be itself, the very nature of money (its abstractions and its generality) can compensate for the differences it effaces

*rhetoric of asian family*
occult network: networks that are not publicly disclosed
(in environments that are believed not to operate as an open economy --> economies are dominated not only by particular families but by the logic of family [exclusive and unassailable ties between small communities])
=/= rationalization of local economies, market liberalization,,
•anachronistic imaginary of transnational capitalism and the racialized family (of asian nations) --> idealized
•metaphorical ruse of kinship's discourse
•*neocolonial fantasy concealed in the dream of immediacy* --> Amway: theologically informed market liberalism--pursuing a noiseless world where feedback is impossible

confessional disclosures of new capital
rhetoric of transparency
mediumship's (enthralling) dramaturgy of disclosure

(Morris asking) what else is transparency in the massified world? a mediation so total that it has become invisible (?)

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

•to challange them
•to break with their own gesture
•to inherit from them

*Socrates --> alleged epistemo-sociological enquiry ([the tradition of] asking people what they know and how they think) --Savransky--> (hallmark of social sciences today:) *ethics of estrangement*: ‘becoming estranged’ from the realm of appearances made available by direct experience in order to ‘gain access’ to a realm of facts and causes**** ==Whitehead==> *bifurcation of nature*: a mode of understanding whereby experience only discloses that which is apparent, whereas the ‘relevant’ factors in the process of knowing the world must always lie, and be sought, somewhere else
*=/= Alice in Wonderland
*=/= Cinderella [--> harem girl, hallucinating with animals, not becoming a psycho (angry), arrested]
*=/= William James: inquiry is about **the way some people cultivate an expertise**, **how they hesitate**, **how they think**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for example)
◦*religious experience: to address his questions to the ones who know, the ones whose expertise could help him learn something new and often unexpected --> passionate, even if problematic, experience of living in a world where God matters*
◦*emotional experience: with theater actors, who know about creating, discriminating, disclosing, and sharing emotional experiences*

***from whom should we inherit our practices, and how?***

learning from Despret's *anachronism* (her field philosophy)
اشتباه در ترتیب حقیقی وقایع

(heritage of Socrates) form of epistemic and ethical bifurcation ==> search for hidden causes (underlying the conduct of actors)
Socrates's “you think you know, but actually, you don't know and you don't think” ==created==> ***[1]a device that inhabits thinking and produced only mental paralysis***

--✕--> (Despret:) investigators rarely ask the question of how the people they interview might be interested in the questions addressed to them

*relevance = adventure*
there are many examples of how a piece of abstract knowledge that looked like devoid of any imaginable consequences came to matter (acquired an importance nobody would contest)
-relevance may be lost in translation
*ecology of dynamic and fragile patterns of relevance, of modes of mattering for oneself and for others (Savransky)
[*]relevance: a sense that there is value beyond ourselves (something that is not ourselves, matters) --Stengers--> (daring to connect the) speculative + ethical + practical
(risk of) to renounce *knowledge as a right* + embrace *knowledge's achievement as an event*


[title]
(ego engineering)


***[2]device of anonymity (“to protect people”) ==> distributes expertise, and builds induces performs an asymmetry of roles
•the imperative of deontology
•(can be) a regime of insult

“you, the refugees” --> an anonymous mass marked with **an identity that they had not chosen, and from which they cannot invent themselves**

risk of disclosing
risk of separating
risk of isolating
risk of making people talk while silencing
risk of stealing the words
risk of of drawing the words out from the speaker
risk of retying the secret to its etymology [secretus: to separate, to isolate]


(what we like to think about in apass) to reflect on what anonymity can produce in other research situations
[instead of asking “what the body does/produces?” =/= what Sina's body does for the spider in his room? what Ninja Turtles body does for Iron Man? what anonymous refugee body does for Xiri? what Jane Fonda body does for Laura? etc.]

***anonymity ==> identity***
(the position of “subject” in an investigation is created by erasing the name)
•“feel free to say anything you want” or “speak without fear" = your words will have no consequences
•they are always at risk of putting people in situations where they are unlikely to be interesting & unlikely to be interested

Despret's interview where an exchange really meant something =/= Mette's notion of nothing means anymore except the absurd gesture that announces meaninglessness of itself


inquiry = experience & experimentation, *testing & putting into continuity an ensemble of experiences*
Kimiavi in his film The Garden of Stones, his subject by the very fact that they are now part of the conditions of the environment in relation to which investigator develops skills, desires, knowledge or science
|
*inquiry: set of transformations that the very process of inquiry imposes, concrete and existential transformations for the objects studied just as much as the inquiring subject --> (Kimiavi's) logic of creative experimentation =/= logic of logic of discovery
|
*creative dimension (of every fieldwork):
•(it may) take the form of a device that sparks the creation of thoughts
•(it may) transform the relationship between the enquirer and the one she is addressing
•(it may) disclose some dimensions of the situation that were not visible or felt
•(it may) completely redefine what people actually docile
•


positivist sociological approach: to discover a reality already given, already stabilized + procedures asserting this stability + questions wanting to be neutral + a large and distributed sample + a modest investigator: who disappears behind the strength of the data (Haraway)


[*]inquiry: studies what it creates while studying it, and the changes it provokes (<-- we know this in art, @apass)

-can i no longer develop knowledge behind the back of those that i have questioned (my mother...)?

apass, #feedback
it is up to them to make the connection between what they think and what determines their particular way of thinking


summoning =/= mimesis (@Marialena)


@Pierre (from) critical analysis --to--> pragmatism
***we do not think or act “because” of social determination, but rather “with” them*** ~= better Cinderella (learning pragmatism from Cinderella: how to think and act with the evil sisters?)


amateur: the one who develops an expertise, a love, a taste [--Stengers--> dare to taste =/= dare to know]
Leibniz addressed his inquiries to the ones who know, because they have cultivated a particular relationship (of the amateur) with the very issue he wanted to learn about (=/= to address inquiries to the ones who know by virtue of being a mere authority)
•Leibniz proposed that woman should be addressed about the most important problem, that of the love (appropriate to give God) [...] because they are competent in the matter
•Leibniz = the master of abstraction --made--> [*]abstraction = a politeness of thought**♥, [*]politeness = a constraint on creation**
•****(why ask women about love? because) [*]woman: the ones who refuse letting a duty to ‘speak truth’****
--> a real interest in thinking about and with love (=/= “school of love”)

when you do *field philosophy* --Despret--> [*]field: a field-to-be, a milieu, a collective, a situation =/= field as something that preexists our inquiry

(how in apass i did field philosophy and field inquiry --> i made many times) situation-becoming-a-field (where you can learn something) needed:
•imagination
•tact
•daring
•opportunism
•humour
•

Despret > Claverie on pilgrimage with the Virgin of Medjugorje
she offered to those whom she addressed the most unexpected mode of response
she became interested in the very sophisticated way they think
(=/= social scientist's need to determinate the causes of something [designates it as an anomaly ==> impoverishing the object of study] --> asking “why people believe?” or “how can we explain such an odd thing as people believing in a supernatural being?”)
(she explored and learned with people how they think -->) ****how they take care of what matters for them with thoughts**** --> takes the form (in the pilgrims experience) of [*]hesitation: a sign that identifies that thought is occuring & this thought is taking care of something that matters [---> go to Attar Tazkirat al-Awliya]
forms of hesitation:
•openly contradictory alteration of positions
•a critical position (the apparition is not there)
•a position of belief
•using semantics or syntactic devices that introduce ambivalence
--> Claverie learns to hesitate with them
--Stengers--> ecological practice: a practice that takes into account the fact that the inquiry participates in the ‘milieu’ of those it addresses --> *the practicioner is herself taking care of what matters with thoughts and learns to create (what Despret would call) the relevant *milieu of thought*



Matrix world: “consumer victim =/= resistant hacker fighter” and nothing else

if you are a student of ghosts --> you are competent in sensing the taste of ghosts

{ancestors ate too much salt ==> descendants desire water}--> *intersubjective nature of remembering*
-[Despret > Kwon] true human desires are not those of an isolated individual. it is the individual who feels the desire, whereas the origin of the desirem, like the spirit's phantom salt, may be with someone else, for it is in the presence of this other that the water becomes salty --> ***the desire to remember can be a desire that rises somewhere between the past and the present***
-agencement: the act of commemoration responds to a desire, so one cannot choose whether it emanates from the one who is remembered or the one who takes charge of remembering --> the desire to be remembered & the desire to remember hold together [=/= giving ontological priority to the imagination of the living]


what can i learn from Tehran's bestiary, from my mother, from unusual old iranian fables, from telegram animals?
•let myself be instructed by the events that my inquiry creates
•let myself be called by the enigma that will guide me inmy understanding of events
*to be instructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits


****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”

riddle: key + guide

(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings

trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you

what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]

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

to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness

[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with


plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of whole categories of players (in systemic encounters)
2. radical substitution, whole domains (plant life, animal life, human labor system in interaction with animals and plants and microbs) are substituted
==> radical break of connection to place
==> release of numbers : value added processes based on the management of numbers

to look at the planetary shape of some of our problems

-scene = condition of...
scenography --> ‘scene’ is a visual spatial way of thinking about what makes the ‘condition’ of something

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

(Calvert on The Nature of Difference book @Quinsy)

rise of population genomics
•efforts like Human Genome project --> refusing to afford a genetic basis for race categories
•tools to identify “deep ancestry” (indicating a geographic origin in prehistory)

postracial politics

recreational genomics --mutating--> “race” out of 19th century concept of “blood quantum” that imperfectly signals complex tribal relatedness and membership

(purchasers of) **genome = book of life** ==> racialized and medicalized subjects

*mutated racial discourses*

renaissance of race categories

science has the authority to establish truth claims that scholars in the humanities must reckon with
humanities scholars may avoid a scientific debate because:
1- they feel out of their depths interpreting scientific data
2- they resist scientific authority in response to well-documented instances of scientific exploration of people of color
3- they may have surrendered to science the work of settling matters of fact, keeping hermeneutics and textual matters for themselves


science and technology studies --> *tracing objects through the practices and discourses that produce them as settled matters of fact, made, but not made up*

(tracking) social and legal arrangements ==producing==> race


***science is coded as the interpreter of nature in western discourse*** --> that is why i have to study science in my research on bestiaries


Hammond + Herzig on how scientific practices across disciplines describe and create what thereby becomes *naturalized difference* (=/= describing the nature of difference itself)

(learn from Hammond + Herzig -->)
source material --> organize & comment --sustain--> argument
+ questions that point the reader to discoursive moves and modes of attention of the author (=/= Quinsy's ملانقطى pedantic exploration of racism)

(politically correcting the popular understanding of race =/=) to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. [asking readers] to track the rise and permutation of various features of the argument
[asking Captain America --anatomical-->] “in what larger political, economic, and social contexts might ears, noses, index fingers, or brains hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?”


some wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•


to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth

*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently

(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper


Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored

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

scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence

new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning

document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?

bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)

early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography

[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*

objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*

document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*

1951
document: evidence in support of a fact
any physical or symbiotic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon
--> viewed with access to evidence
=/= (concerned with) text

document =/= ajayeb's text object [--> pop-up book]

(object)    (document?)
star in the sky    no
photo of star    yes
stone in river    no
stone in museum    yes
animal in wild    no
animal in zoo    yes


Briet's rules for determining when an object has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have to be made into documents)
4. there is a phenomenological position (the object is perceived to be a document)

indexicality: *the quality of having been placed in an organized, meaningful relationship with other evidence --> gives an object its documentary status* [<-- for who and why is this useful?]


modernist mentality:
•scientific management
•standardization
•bibliographic control
--as--> complementary and mutually reinforcing bases for achieving progress

spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character

1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)

cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience

artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object

semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals


[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***


Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)

object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)

what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope


**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn

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

Calvert
technobibliocapital

librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)

will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project

[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*

patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space

enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection

technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient

technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]

(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides

(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*

**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)

new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)

libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)

(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand

(in the name of) democratization & civil rights

library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship

library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool

late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge

technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects

[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X

•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestation of governme[...]