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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)
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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

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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 h[...]