[...]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 government intrusion (paternalism, library: robust civilizing apparatuses, an ideal philanthropic gift)...
--Calvert--> **libraries are potent resources with vast possibilities for creating the worlds we inhabit** -->[*]library: (collectively produced ~ both collectively funded and collected from many sources) vibrant sites of knowledge generation + of power (for those who generate knowledge through libraries in turn diffuse this knowledge through other places and other people)

without a robust definition of power ==Calvert==> librarians have been unable to see or articulate how libraries have been in the service of disciplining subjugating power (a power that is productive not just for readers but of readers)

..weak appeals to market freedom

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

service-dominant logic = an enframing act --> a way of framing the world (which like all logics) chooses what to include and what to exclude from its frame of investigation and theory --Campbell--> how it enframes the world

marketing history --> (delineated between) “material (raw) resources =/= immaterial (dynamic) resources”

resources-assets-capabilities

(in math)
operand: passive objects that are manipulated (3, 5)
operator: specific actions that act upon operands (+, x)

importance of the operand resource
-the relative role of operand resources began to shift in the late 20th century as humans began to realize that skills and knowledge were the most important types of resources

operand resource: (raw material and land) an act is performed on them =/= operant resource: (technologies, knowledge, skill) those employed to act on operand resources
}--> a conceptual separation with roots in Greek philosophy:
•Plato: “material embodiment = distraction to true knowledge”
•Descartes: privileging of mental life over physical matter
==> we inherit this style of philosophy (in the west) that values formal abstract objectless thinking as the standard canonical way of knowing the world

--> *information age*:
•endorses the pre-eminence of the immaterial and disembodies (mind, skill, mental life) over the material and embodied (brute matter, physicality)
•celebrate a *culture of demateriality*
•
=/= object oriented philosophy:
•Heidegger's theory of tool-being
•Latour's displacement of the human proposed by the actor-network theory
•Merleau-Ponty's sensual phenomenology
•

(continental philosophy + analytical philosophy in West -->) **philosophies of access** to the world : they assume that the human-world gap is the privileged site of all rigorous philosophy
interest in human access to objects [--> correlationism: if things exists, they do so only for us] =/=? interest in objects


(in marketing literature)
•operant resources:
human        sophisticated
cultural     strategic
active       dynamic
agentic      immaterial
specialized  intelligent
relational   primary
*infinite*
--link--> to notions of progrss and achievement in contemporary society

•operand resources:
inhuman     machine-like
basic       stuff
functional  physical
inanimate   raw
inert       less important
secondary   lesser
tangible    subordinate
*finite*


service-dominant logic {
•operant --> infinite --> human's skill
•operand --> finite --> world's material

service-dominant logic ==> a cut (“=/=”) --> operant resources will take these sluggish raw inherently secondary materials and act on them to whisk them into something valuable
--Barad--> every act of observation makes a “cut” in what is otherwise an indissolubly unauflösbare entangled natural-cultural universe : *every new way of observation cuts open new logics ==> undermines what is known + what can be known*


[*]operand resources: resources which require action to create benefit
--✕--> crucial scenarios where operand resources (forests, sea beds, topsoil) require the opposite of action (unused or underused) in order to create or maintain (their intrinsic) value

*value-in-use: somthing is assessed according to the use a consumer has for it

*value-in-underuse --> (tourism's) deserted beaches, unspoiled countryside, uninhabited ruins
for example brand management implicitly leverages the concept of *value-in-underuse*
brands are often valuable for the very fact that they are underused : when their use is confined to small communities, enabling them to maintain their cultural capital (exclusivity or authenticity)

*vlaue-in-context: value is conceived as something that is collectively co-created by multiple actors
for example in service-dominant logic an operant resource like *brand vlaue* is one which is externally-based and dynamically determined in the context (cannot be own by a single actor) --> *consumers might co-derive affective cognitive social value in creating the brand but economic value that accrues as a result belongs entirely to the brand's shareholders* [--> issue with fandom]
for example *affective value*: when vlaue lies in the general sentiment of a networked group of actors

(in marketing's theory of value creation) the *role of the consumer* in the value creation process is now explicitly recognized and articulated (incorporated) through compelling concepts such as cocreation, coproduction, *prosumerism* [an individual who both consumes & produces]
@apass collaborative environments

[consumer research]
recognizing the ways in which consumers and consumption are both productive and value-adding

Holbrook's topology of consumer value
value is active = when it entails physical or mental manipulation of an object
value is reactive = when things are done by a product to the consumer (objects act on consumers to create value)


xxxxxx

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

Hayles

(to take) a problem-based approach --> taking a problem and looking for solutions =/= investigating problematics (<-- humanities [and art])

what are the reward structures in artistic research? (the way a work is recognized and validated by the field)

postliteracy
the future of human & the future of writing are entwined
meaning = resistance
to be human = to resist techno-language

an informed scientific-literate and humanistically educated public ==> democracy

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

(mass media) cultural standing (and standard) of live performance
paradigm of televisual <--✕--> digital

(Auslander historicizing) liveness --> historical (=/= ontological)

ideology of authenticity (in live music)

at the level of cultural economy --> theatre (live performance) =/= mass media

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

[why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? --Bishop-->] digital ~= code (inherently alien to human perception) --> a linguistic model

Guy Debord --> (*physical and the social were pitched against the virtual and the representational* ~ “subjective =/= technological” -->) social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery ==>
•favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation) with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle
•desire for face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of the Internet
•retro-craftiness
•fiddly collages
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen

reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)

paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected
subjective rationales
arbitrary systems (=/= established taxonomies)

vernacular forms of aggregation --> everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist (storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files, + porn)

analog in appearance + digital in structure

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

eschatos: furthest, last (in Greek)

theological anthropology --> the theory of the person


?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience

millenarian expectation
?how year 1000 was perceived

•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denouncement of sacred history


medieval = fear + passion (+ expectation) ==> eschatological imagination

escapology: significance of immanent (catastrophic) future history

calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis

discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse

•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope

unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]

apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog

mystical response
spasmodic irrationality

the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)

deathbed demons
hell in art
religious anxiety
mechanism of social control

(from) collective --to--> individual
(from) temporal --to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self

(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self

purgatory: in-between time and space

afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person

somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)

the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages

eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)

}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•


medical eschatology

eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming

Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impoverish)

(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->

purgation

purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•

{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***

torment: individual glimpse of the end


Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate

suffering: means of salvation (of we join the agony of Chris on the cross)
pain in this life : inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are indication of the approach of death

an era of exile --promise--> a new exodus from human failure and corruption


[title]
beautitude

Bernard's heaven

painted embodiedness of the blessed (<-- problematic + powerful)

out of time heaven in which the soul is already body-shaped --> somatomorphic selves before judgement


apocalyptic moment --> self-referentiality: when the author reflects on the limits of their knowledge and expression

(all) eschatological texts (poems) in some way reflect their status as fiction --assert--> their nature as mediating and contingent


xxxxxx


Trans-ing xeno- unsettles the oversimplified Others necessary for the production of stratification and disallowance, without in the process destroying difference and the ethics of encounter.

the ontological primacy of centers in general
the refracted image

myths of belonging as an anthropocentric narrative, one is worthy of personhood if she is placed in home.
[in the political and fantasy practices of the most inheritors of traditions of white (or not-white, the actual color is not the point) settler colonialism and its ecologies, the introducing species--including ourselves--are always bad --> the extraordinary practice of disavowal (of the ‘creatures of the empire’ #Haraway) --> inheriting the notion of ‘belonging’ and ‘not-belonging’ (in this tradition) disavowal is almost the only way you can “keep” belonging. and one of the ways you practice disavowal and belonging is to exterminate the other (feral pigs, etc.) who “really” don't belong.]
•(which) *practices of belonging* (are not part of (whose?) dreaming?) --> they always turn up in family stories {feral =/= pest}
•how various kinds of species can and cannot get on together?
•who should be killed and lived-with?
•(who exists only under the) categories that come from the cunning of recognition [categories of the traditional, of the subsistence food (ma'ash معاش), of the enacting of a culture in view of tourist public,]
•managed belongingness


In Jean Genet's portrayal of dusk (quoted by Minh-ha 1996:101-102), he captures the ambiguity of this transitional time in the expression ‘entre chien et loup,’ between dog and wolf, that is, a time of day when one cannot be distinguished from the other, and he also describes it as ‘the hour of metamorphoses when people ‘half hope, half fear’ that a dog will become a wolf’ (our emphasis). This quotation exemplifies the ambiguously ‘unheimlich,’ [...]


security is never secure enough


Jesus knocks at your heart's door


(history's or pig's) happy ending


absence of ambivalence (in animals)

conditions of admission ---> artistic, sexual, natural *selections*
tickets to power-holding cliques that control the resources


phantoms of non-destruction
or
phantoms of ‘constructed adequately’


pausing dogs
mixed messages
who is wanted for dinner?
the moment when the message is finally received --> tech, magic, ethic, morph

poetic historiography

pivotal reading of ancient Greece --- out of day-dream fantasy


[Rickels]
*beauty is interested in action
(pure) beauty re-lingering on primary narcissism, that's why beauty must be administrated, in proper doses.

(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations

if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way



[Ingraham]
the house, passed over in history, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to “instrumentalize” architectural [or art] theory according to a particular building
material given a structure

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

Q & A ?, interactivity, swarovski party, servants and robots interacting with foreign bodies --> feeling at home? excited... --> disco without bouncers and borders without border check, spaces you can seamlessly in and out, labyrinthine

i am generating some vocabularies
parsite and parasitical, not all of them are predatory like the wolf



(Karen Barad)
With all mirroring practices, biomimcry has built-in optics on the geometry of distance from what which is other.


(Irigaray)
surprise (to be new): not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known
our attention to that which is not yet (en)coded

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

(something to consider, regarding the pigs and wolf story, also an interest for performances that happen in closed space;) there is a standard account that says ‘interiors’ and ‘interiority’ are linked, that the articulation of interior physical space enabled the development of certain kind of (initially bourgeois European) sense of subjective life--as something sheltered and enclosed.
=/= interiority (subjectivity) is linked to the exterior [Sennett]

O-- still in the 15th century (when sex and sleeping was not veiled under curtains) there was no correlation between the notion of privacy and the interior
O-- in the mid 18th century (among European bourgeoisie) a new ideal of domesticity appeared which dictates a new interior space --> separate room separate functions, segregation of domestic activities
O-- Rousseau: in the shelter of private domestic space subjectivity is set free (--> a different kind of subjectivity (one which guards the self, something to be protected from the outside) is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space) [this is not merely architectural, it is also something about the clothing people wore: wearing different clothes in family or in the realm of strangers. houses became warmer]

(Simmel's) “urban subjectivity”: street physical over-stimulation ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside

(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

social media and exteriority

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

Sennett, “3rd world” SPeCo62Mz2Q : condition in which centralized space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”

*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}

3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•




the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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

*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)

for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight

•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•

historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception

*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility

atemporal nature of perception

? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex

(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming

(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation by external agencies***

interrelated problem of perception and modernization

Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption

general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention

optical verisimilitude

attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded

how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche

sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)

complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary

reality maintenance

aftershocks of apperception

failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissociation) became linked in the 19th century with pathological psychosis
this label (of pathological disintegration) was evidence of a shift in the relation of the subject to a visual field
*synthesis
•for Bergson: bind with creative forces of memory
•for Dilthey: creative forms of fusion specific to human imagination
•for Nietzsche: endlessly creative and metamorphic and not constitutive of truth


the rise of psychological explanation within epistemology


Kant saw perception crowding in upon the soul

for Külpe attention was the very condition of thinking, consciousness not in the mercy of external impressions

the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl

(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descartes

in 18th century:
-‘unified’ operation of mental life
-force of a sensation
-an effect of an event external to the subject
--✕-->
in 19th century, attention: an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed content of consciousness


running in the park, a motif of selfhood, of individual freedom, finality of the possibility of soul from the enduring experience of active, willed effort in relation to the body
==> moi: a repository of self-initiated (mental physical) activity and free will
-running in park/city: a priori believe in the self
-your experience is yours

•attention
•judgement
•memory
•perception
•mediation

apperception --> nature of intuition --> (a mobile and dynamic) conception of will --> motor activity

19th century:
attention = will
character = unity
attention ==> mind --{attention is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for the control of passions and emotions
--> powerful accounts of the nature of human subjectivity


practical or knowledge world of objects (the berlin naturkunde museum)

attention became part of the dense network of institutional discourses/practices around which “the truth of perception was organised and structured”
not part of a “regime of power” rather part of a space in which new conditions of subjectivity were articulated

19th century reconceptualization of attention: inevitable fragmentation of a visual field, an activity of exclusion, of rendering parts of a perceptual field unperceived ==>
1. attention as expression of the conscious will of an autonomous subject, as free choice, part of that subject's self-constituting freedom
2. attention as a function of biologically determined instinct, shaped our lived relation to environment
3. attentive subject could be produced and managed through the knowledge and control of external procedures of stimulation: technologies of attraction [--> formative component of a modernized mass visual culture (in the West): strategies of engaging an attentive spectator: comedians smirking at the camera, gesturing conjurers in magic film --> a cinema that displays its visibility, rupturing a self-enclosed fictional world for a chance to solicit the attention of the spectator; Gunning 1990]

Hegel's understanding of attention as “the beginning of education”

(rationalizing possibilities of) psychometrics
a site of quantification
==> subjective operations of repression and anesthetization ~~--> Freud

the model of an attentive human observer
compatible with technical conditions, insignificant “interior” faculty, a set of effects that could be measured externally
(technological transformation of physiology and psychology in the 19th century, development of electrophysiology --> cultural history of electricity)


behaviour with a historical structure: a behaviour articulated in terms of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu

1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)


part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction


conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.

(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)

(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda


ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the generalized ethic of “getting ahead,” on the celebration of aggressiveness, (Crary poses that it is nonsensical to pathologize attention in this culture, a double bind, in which the individual is caught between subjective dislocations of modernization and imperative for institutional discipline and productivity)


(Miller @Zoumana) ...the unconscious as part of a system in which ‘automatic’ behaviour was reciprocally intertwined with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.

Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes


(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)

institutional discourse
techniques of the subject

attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis


observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception


unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition

community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception


eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master

(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’

co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,

@apass, work on attention is so interesting because it is part of the history of modality of contemplation about processes and activities of the body


the neo-Kantian legacy of a disinterested aesthetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action (=/= instinctive reactions to sensible objects and their accompanying emotions ~= animal)}--> a bad fable
modernist art: *timeless perception* [formal conditions of the possibility of vision, pure form operates as a principle of structure, Krauss outlines how temporality is excluded] =/= mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening [the object bounded by its contours, spurred/hated by modernism]


whenever we try to look at or listen to one thing for too long the attention (containing within itself the conditions for its own disintegration) inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down[<-- a game i used to play as a child, playing with attention and distraction, mutating myself into a state of trance or autohypnosis, absorbed, diverted, nebulous =/= socially adaptive subject] --> *perceptual identity* (of its object) begins to deteriorate (& paralysis of will?) [_that is why in spectacle visual regimes the duration of perception must be regulated in short intervals]

attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation


(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and its persian history

perception is a dream

(an account of) [*]modernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganization
==> a “decay” in the capacity for perception [<-- to be careful in working for ajayeb not to romanticize (elitist and regressive fantasy of communal relations in) premodern modalities of looking/listening as richer, deeper, or more valuable :
modern urban life as “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” =/= premodern's “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase"]

(sensory mental schema)


understanding of distraction within a larger deterioration of experience

-distraction (not as a product of decay or anthropy, rather) as a mean to overcome bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival of the lost ideal of artistic absorption in work now exiled to the margins of mechanized and routinized world
•Rodin: gazing of the handworker
-
}--> “reception in a state of distraction”, (<== absorption is psychologically grounded perception) =/= Crary arguing that attention and distraction ceaselessly flowing into one another on the same continuum (of social field)



[tales of understanding]-*
•what are the cognites of ‘contemplation’ (in german or farsi)?
the theological resonances of this latinate word --> contemplation: viewing/considering with continued attention; going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground


(to oppose) contemporary modes of distraction
modern forms of interiority, absorption, psychic isolation

Riegl's dream of a world in which art would be inseparable from an imaginary democratic harmony of individual and community (=/= harem)

collective attention (central attentive mass audience, 1900) : cinema

rational attention: attention linked to thought, one's telescope on object

(for Nietzsche:) attention: possibility of an absorption ==> forgetting --> life-affirmative }--> “focusing on the present moment”

final virtue of modern man: *presence of mind* --Nietzsche--> necessary part of the (cosmopolitan) individual's functioning within a modern world of economic facts and qualities --> ready at response to the machine, affinity with the technical, athletic political (#integration tale)
--> the (serious) modern soul is directed towards the news, focusing on the present, to employ the moment (#presentism #past-studies)
•fable of “to be at the present moment”
•fable of “to adapt yourself”

perceptual acceleration of modernized social field (work + leisure) ==> new *cosmopolitan individual* (who receives signals from many fars and nears, equipped to ‘attend’ to messages and participate in their circulation ☆ #facebook? --> diffuse anxiety of the other-directed person : gyroscope --> radar)

Arendt:
modernity: fabricating rendered meaningless =/= contemplation: beholding the truth

‘life = being’ ==> ‘contemplation = truth’


Heidegger --> characterization of Greek's primordial self-disclosing look ==> makes presence possible + glaring predatory look --of--> modern subjects = objects of conquest


dystopian story: a promising outburst (always of human) activity [such as science or exploration or artificial intelligence, etc.] that leads in the most deadlines sterile passivity [such as alien predation, industrialisation of mind, global contamination, etc.]
(theatricalization of scientific mistake in the Handmaid TV series: scientific human progress failing ==> abolishing the distinction between private and public consciousness }<-- optics of narcissistic scepticism <== psychological shock of the temporality of process)


19th century: Schopenhauer's early grasp of the link between attention and perceptual disintegration
(for Schopenhauer: [cognitive chaos of] cultural modernity:) temporality ==> subjective anguish


[title]
the timing of intellect

(how come usually intellect does not have time? leaps out of time)


(chaotic successiveness of) perceptions are rendered intellectually coherent --(Schopenhauer)--> (unmotivated movement of the) will holds them together ~= body: will's most immediate objectified form
}==> (modernism's) looking: a purified perception suspended from time and the body's economy


telegram, Facebook
extremely heterogeneous mixture of fragments of representations of every kind constantly crossing one another
-ceaseless pulsing and animations of the body --> temporality of the bodies in Tehran
--✕--> possibility of subjective reflection (in a Cartesian sense) & association of discrete elements


distraction <--suggesting--> sublimation


(from Descartes to Kant) consciousness/cogito = ground of knowledge and certitude (= self-present subject) --✕--> (Schopenhauer recognizing) ending the unquestioned foundational priority of consciousness ==> attention (emerges as a problem)


broken attention
(idea for video documentation: a lagging mirror attached in front of the camera's lenses)



(a fable)

looking out the window
perceive a landscape
light of consciousness
distribute over the landscape
then i try
to apprehend a single tree branch
the consciousness that the rest of the landscape was deployed then fades
diminishes into associational debris
into disappearance of representations

real nexus of psychic life
permeated colored enlivened feelings
distribution of feelings
the gradual unfolding
efforts of attention
are forms of volitional activity
impulsive energy to individual imagery
permit them to fade away
therefore, the tree branch, the window, is a process

Dilthey


in Peirce:
[*]attention = anti-optical act of selection [=/= (in traditional epistemological thought) singling out a contemplative object], “the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time”
--✕--> *firstness: self-immediacy, absolute presence (before synthesis and differentiation) ~ nonreferenciality (=/= perception, attention consumed/constituted in time ~= continuous quantity = *secondness)


using a more act-oriented term “thought” instead of “consciousness”

dissociation
anaesthesia
hallucination
multiple selves
--James--> temporal model of mind: ‘stream’
(=/= scenic model of mind)
[this was part of a larger institutional field in which scientific psychology generally was abandoning ‘elemental’ conceptions of consciousness in favour of operational or functional models]
==> observer: an artist confronted with the primordial chaos of sensation --> (ethics of) overlapping common choices (made of autonomous subjects [--> you can see James seeking to lessen the shock of recent works in science and psychology for an American middle-class readership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization



my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate


emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher



attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary

Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold

by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence


(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness

hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses

focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object

sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness


Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that ther[...]