[...]es of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general


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

ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]

ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)

ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)

****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving voice to what my concern and interest is in artistic research environment)


the question of how to re-present others (their diverse practices) on good faith? <-- moral
~~> the bad idea of “good faith =/= bad faith” ==> assume a moral high ground that we have no reason to argue in favor of

altering oneself to good faith = altering oneself to the possibility of double vision

(in ethnography) good faith: writing generalizing stories that intervene, because of the partiality of research and analysis (not despite of it)
•good faith analysis: having faith in it being possible to write stories that are generative for *some of* the practices we study + for *some of* our peers

(stories --Verran-->) two moments of generalizing:
1. *onemany* form ==enable==> abstracting
2. *whole-parts* form ==bring==> a situating moment
~={ Star Wars apocalyptic stories (single vision) + lived social bodily realities = (Harawayian) many-headed monster }--> #Tehran index

ethnographic research is always embedded in multi-stakeholder situations

the Verran is proposing
=/= writing stories that narrate what collaborators hope to hear
=/= hardening the categories of the everyday

[*]generalization: (performative) ways of making and negotiating different realities

(Hinde -->) adequate story: objects that *find* audiences ~= *pointing to* (<-- performative) ~/= *pointing for* (<--Verran-- invite them to do work to see their own ontological commitments)
@apasa, research on performativity entailles when not to be performative

ethnographic story: re-performance / re-presentation of some here-now
•description: storytelling event


working indexically with an infinitely complex here-now

indexicality depends on posing a somewhere or something else that is real in a different manner ~= performativity


(Hacking:) we recognize the collective enactment of knowledge practices in devising re-presentations --Verran--> ethnographic story: (first ans foremost) making reality (=/= the idea that reality gives rise to re-presentations)

a generalization: a unified text, narrative, exemplifying and enacting a particular time and space --condense--> here-now
}--> recognizing how ethnographic stories deal with necessarily being just one of infinitely many possible stories of a herenow

(John Law:) ethnography: a method of assemblage : enactment of presence, manifest absence, and absence as otherness

#Tehran index
attending to indexes for herenow that embed two logics generalization: one-many & whole-parts
1. one kind of story embeds a logic of one-many generalization --> represents its here-now as an example of something in general [--> story = evidence base of a general statement about human, world, erc.]--Kwa--> *romantic*
3. one kind of story embeds a logic of whole-parts generalization --> presents its here-now by first building this world [--> story = an emergent entity on a vague whole]--Kwa--> *baroque*

20th century history of complexity theory

*romantic =/= baroque ways of doing complexity*
--Verran--> we should use both simultaneously ~= Haraway cyborg double vision

---> go to Latour's analysis of Ambassadors painting (~= illustration of an ethnographic story)
•technique of anamorphosis: invite the viewer to shift their perspective --> *they are invited to do the work of recognizing the alternative logics of generalization*
•agential instrumentality
•dual logic: ambassadors & skull
•skull/brownish object --signal--> a ‘viewer’ must ‘lean over’ in order to see the database (in Verran's example) as authoritative & as autonomous and *capable of making new kinds of knower* emerge (worker, storyteller, ethnographer)
-

my image assemblages are whole-part generalizations, one-many pictures, vague whole with emergent parts

#workshop on training two modes of generalization, use of drawing and image making, writing ethnographic stories


(artists typically make the mistake of making these two identical -->)
*indicator =/= outcome*
•indicator: for example you implement something
•outcome: a change in behavior (= accomplished indicator)

*one-many generalization*
x is one of many possible stories about X in general (--Latour--> purification:) spacetime specificities are transformed into general claims }--> abstracting
=/=
*whole-parts generalization*
x is a participant on an assemblage where all actors are somehow emerging parts --> one does not yet know what X is or may become (X remains a vague whole) (--Latour--> translation work:) working a number of herenows into the picture }--> situating

--> how to write (ethnographic) stories embedding the dual logic of generalization? = *how to arrive at a non-relativizing non-universalizing description that nevertheless works as a generalization?*
==constitute==> generalization: an irresolvable tension
<-- interventionist potentiel

narratives that allow both:
•information exchange (handling information correctly)
•unexpected cuts in information exchange (cutting the world)


what is gained in the interventionist potentiel [of stories; for example of the skull in Holbein's ambassadeur, magic database in Verran's ethnographic story]?
-enabling double vision

•the worker has to be equally magical about her own monitoring repertoires (apass cloud attitudes)
•to intervene the ideas of smooth and wellfunctioning development bureaucracy
•reflexivity: what the ethnographer sees as she is shifting her position and beginning to focus on a different (whole-parts) generalization [=/= simply a matter of being transparent about one's analytical choices]

(Sina:)
storytelling ~= bullshiting
storytelling ~= analytical social science

deflating claims (for example we have never been modern, etc.) do not afford possibilities for intervening


(why i use comparing stories in my lecture performances -->) the act of [*]comparing : a central aspect of seeking to contain the dual logic in one story --> (Strathern > Holbraad & Pedersen > Verran > ) peculiar intensification of the act of fieldwork


good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)

(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (biased)

lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work

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

Kwa

[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole

1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)

early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*

romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])


romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•

bestiary = baroque + romantic

*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*

(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society


(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]


metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•

Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)


German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•


World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects


Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole

romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation

Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)


Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems


Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models


1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]


Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria


Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems


Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)

local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)


Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small fluctuations (will be just large enough) to be critical
complexity ==> unstability
~~~~> chaos theory


(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]

turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic approach), but we have empirical certainty that they will appear

55BC --turbulence--> Lucretius’ De Rerum natura (philosophical poem on the nature of things)
(his basic metaphor of) nature: hydrodynamic flow of particles in free fall, in swirls, in vortexes
‘small cause ==> disproportional nonlinearity’ : ‘random collision of some falling atoms ==> constitution of world’
--Serres--> (Lucretius) heterodox tradition (=/= orthodoxe)


romantic & baroque are ***discourse =/= paradigm***
•discourse (available to draw from)
•paradigm (to succeed another paradigm) [<-- to be careful as an artist, the fantasy of genesis]

•since the 19th century romantic complexity had been the more orthodox discourse
•since 1975 baroque complexity became the focus of interest
}=/= new conception of reality

•romantic complexity --favor--> stable structural metaphors (self-correcting cybernetic machine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)


body = turbulent phenomena par excellence


*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject

the uncertainty (of the world) in the baroque case is ontological [=/= epistemological --> uncertainty is an effect of not knowing enough]

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

(i say in iran, instead of public jurnalism we need more) *public anthropology*

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

(Stenger > Stewart > vivid pragmatics ~=)
(McCormack > Stewart > radical) [*]empiricism: if you walk in the woods --encounter--> the unthinkable profusion of forms --> material-aesthetic registers of (mobile & immobile flickering of) is and was (=/= sensory details described)
•[*]description: accidental glimpse of what matters + what shifts its[...]