[...]al terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity
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Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania
female fetishism --> lesbianism
fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)
[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure
Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)
sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality
fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pay” for his desire by facing the oedipal prohibition (give up the mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerable as sexual objects + saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual}
[*]fetish: (a substitute for or) *a talisman of the phallus*
(most significant one in the child's erotic life -->) mother's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority
fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own
disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)
negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression
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Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari
problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity
*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes
appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X
problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others
our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)
Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)
rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges
four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)
Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved
[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices
[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)
from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage
Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)
(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*
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(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}
Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another
erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?
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Chen on animacy
animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways
[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns
change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)
animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character
animating principle [--> rigging]
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Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)
Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology
...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)
Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***
*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication
“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts
(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)
matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle
(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability
Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)
Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*
interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and emergent shaping between humans + technologies + animals --> knowledge is “situated” and particular, not “transcendentally” true ==> putative symmetry between the human & nonhuman
bestiality (interrelational, sin?) is embedded in what has to appear to us today as an antiquated or surpassed stability
•(Merleau-Ponty + Ihde) embodiment is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated + embodied]
•(Pickering) cybernetic (self-organizing set) is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated]
---> go to Galison's Einstein
(the old notion that) ***phenomenology is primarily descriptive =/= prescriptive
[ethicalization of knowledge, in Iran, in artists reading choices based on gender, etc. turning research into applied ethics]
•contemporary ethics of a cosmopolitan pluricultural tolerant sort
•absolutisms of politically incarnated groups had to transform absolute beliefs into “private” ones (taken off the streets and battlegrounds) <--now-- returning!
****technologies are multistable: having unpredictable side-effects and embeddable in different ways in different cultures****
[technology + embodied -->] abstract philosophical reflects + mundane work practices
to incarnate a material agency-ethic --> are also multistable: can belong to any number of contexts
...to recognizes that X plays an important role in defining Y-ic meaning
Merleau-Ponty's implicit body is a sort of sports body (active and transparent in action) --Iris--> fringe awareness of wearing glasses in sports activities
visualization of phantom limbs
hermeneutic-cultural body
embodiment through technologies
Andy Clark Natural Born Cyborgs
echnology of telepresence
the measurement of time ==> changes in human existence
the idea of *science = intervention + grasping*
•grasping ==> active dimension of acquiring knowledge is a genuinely contstructive activity (=/= a representational task of trying to represent external structures)
--> experiment & instruments (==> how theoretical entities come to be proven as real)
◦experimental-manipulative realism (Hacking)
◦modelistic constructive realism (Giere)
◦instrumental realism (Ihde)
[*]performance: conception + production + witnessing of material events, the experience of which is meaning generating in that these events give us back more than what we put into them
(Crease > Ihde)
experimentation need to be both:
•[*]hermeneutical: who experimental intentions and practices arise and evolve out of and already existing involvement with, and understanding of a concrete situation
•[*]phenomenology: (taking its point of departure from what is called embodiment) the experiences of a unified being, which cannot be understood apart from concrete human experience
philosopher --> values experts --> (fit into various) applied ethics contexts
Ihde rejecting a normativity that is predetermined by a dystopian/utopian cast
“let the things speak for themselves” (after they have been critically interrogated)
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Galison
(employing) kinesthetic-tactile body experiences in Einstein's Gedanken-experimenten --> notions of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration
perceptual experience in relative train movement
clock watching in different space-time particularities
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
Einstein's special relativity --> begins with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion
Einstein's rethinking of *distant simultaneity* (part philosophy & part physics)
-judgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”
electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force
1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines
piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military
means of consistent calibration
🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)
electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements
}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, [...]