[...] 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)
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--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 ro[...]