[...]her material human bodies. it is forged in a social somewhere.
...photographed on the right sidewalks at the right times by the right photographers
-persistent logic of image accumulation and circulation
-photographer’s exceptional status: the ‘decisive moment
-making yourself into a street style sensation through sheer force of will
***practice of distinction*** (--> you have to make it appear that other people are more interested in you than you are in them)
...take someone’s photo, post it online, appropriate their social capital, then ditch them and move on (a game played throughout the fashion industry) <-- constant and well-managed visibility
(the misleading idea of) “style ==> to be picked out of a crowd” [style, that little something extra as vague and indeterminate as Weberian charisma that most people simply do not possess]
-the fashion photographer's eye: the affective instrument through which the photographers feels what she sees (intuitive, embodied, automatic, as a style radar)
street style star <== the right people like you
-what is new in new moment of public viewing? can we have a public moment (exhibition, etc.) and concider glamor and fashion and modernity coinciding with technology and digital platforms?
(for me still the inner thoughts and public life are not blured, that is why i cannot post so quick online)



why use design as a template for reworking ethnography?
*the design process is generally oriented toward transforming (or cooking) “raw” information into “useful knowledge,” a guided mutation of “mere ideas” into “workable concepts” or a “feasible design” that then becomes an “object” (in all possible meanings of the term) in the world*
design: techniques for “working out” and “working through”


charrette شارت
a balance between structure and flexibility
1. active deconstruction: (to arrive at collaboratively, of the work's otherwise obscured underlying composition) to focus on:
•ethnographic specifics
•theoretical frameworks
•(writing) style
•how arguments are constructed
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
3. reconstruction: (dedicated to innovation)
to develop a “rapid prototype” for a new ethnographic/research form, method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using  pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on

developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials

slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text

https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”

•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.


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

“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time

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

many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”

juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose

an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*

positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)

-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]

she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...

personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)

(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)

(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]

(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer

(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)

images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family

for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*

[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)

stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them

(Foucault's notion of) power = effective immobilization of the social body

(the idea of) woman immobilized (turned to stone) by the power of the gaze

*medusa* had the power to turn to stone all who came within her purview (...is she the one who can turn stone back to person?)
to petrify, a producer of figures

Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)

medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:

Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive

(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life

(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)

Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)

[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope

artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator


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

Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)

apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگردان

Kruger & Calderwood --Archer--> searing critique of gender identity and the ways that gendered stereotypes capture the body within a tight weave of politics and ideology

[*]medusa effect: a critical gesture located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)

Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits

find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”

[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes

flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’

(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]

*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance

(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)


•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance

stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*

***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)

[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”

(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”

the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)

(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood



spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)

[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production

using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire

“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)

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

phantom limb Grosz

(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to y[...]