[...]gical + 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 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]

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

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(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 matter in a moment of recognizable though unnamed and partial significance

tonal differences
a spark of color
a modulation in tempo
half-patterned expressivity
--of--> a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter

when a tree is “charged and transfigured” by a violent sunset
Stewart + Dillard

a thing becomes a call to word

(Harman:) objects themselves, like voices or forms of writing, have style

Stewart > Dillard's causal logic of bizarre but categorical predation:
a small frog perched precariously on a lily pad in a pond, its back end already strangely slumped in the water. Then it suddenly deflates
its skin “ruck, and rumple, and fall’ and then “formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like blight scum on top of the water”
--suggest--> its style
=/= exempla of a generality
=/= embodiments of something

*points of precision* in moments, scenes, forms, and states of matter

an image synesthetically remembered --> engineered bridges of the purely social or thee purely natural imagine a flatly describable world composed of fully present states of being

...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page

description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizing

remainders

(distributed gap between residents’ reports and police determinations:) [examples of semi-events (half-witnessed):]
•a dangerous-looking animal moving about on a man's property turned out to be a black plastic trash bag blowing in the wind
•threatening graffiti on a lawn were markings made by phone company employees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)

[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)

(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)


A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?

([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground

(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered

harshly half-formed world

germinal aesthetics

channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*

the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses

(to sharpen) realist attention to things


[*]life: ontological entertainment

unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere

gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)


“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”


writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]

*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*

a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things

the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours

demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the energy of small things...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...


(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication

learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice


(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]

shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique

so ordinary and problematic

so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century

also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty

to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”

i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.

•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•


readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-


in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material
[...]