[...]sm
cosmetology of democratism
advanced capitalism: non-hierarchical transactions, horizontal decision-making
(business of) trading contexts
Western ethnocentrism
(1970s) “art played a vital role in the amassing of cultural resources, assimilation, and formation of national cultures” ==> “improving humankind” (the colonial definition of development)
*rhetoric of development ==shaped/shaping==> art*
•diverse group of global interlopers
•content-providing native informants
•regional mediators/specialists
•solvent-like multinational institutions
[cultural development:] art act adhesive for civil society --> good governance ==> dialogues (~= to create a new moral image of man)
-*conditionally inclusive vision of the international artworld: a politically legitimate place with pluralistic inter-institutional structures driven by economic liberalism, subsequently confirmed by the participation of civil society*
...a practice of dialogue between art and development, across geographies: banking on the coalition of ethno-nationalism and globalization, and promoting “indigenous” forms of capitalism, while avoiding the optics of exoticization }==>
•divides and controls localities
•contextual differences are distributed as needs and urgencies
•juridico-engineering structures (symbolized progress)
•cultural globalism with consumption at its core
•regions soused on the liberal democratic fantasy of salvation via harmonious, multilateral exchange
(we don't want dialogues, we need meaningful dialogues)
--Renan--> [to relocate the “struggle for exchange” in] monological circuits across the topographies of power and restitution =/= geographies of guilt and embarrassment


antagonistic knowledges (organise and rally actions and thoughts for resistance) --> changes how you are socialized


Robinson Crusoe
a miniature history of human development according to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)


Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)

(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation

using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe starts making Bible fals (فال انجیل opening the Bible to a random page and read a verse that he believed was addressed at him)
◦he makes list (pro & cons --> debit & credit [--> mentality of business studies] --Weber--> book-keeping: distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism)
◦
•Crusoe: true protagonist of the empire (--Joyce--> prototype of British colonialism, *mythology of colonialism* --Sina--> #fable of imperialism)
•(romantic notion of) nature: idyllic =/= (Crusoe) nature: unforgiving + sparse }<-- utopian =/= dystopian nature --> Lord of the Flies


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

(with Annemarie's help @apass)

*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions

judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards

difference
which differences exactly?
what are their interferences and their diffractions?
--> the surprises that come with finding “variations”

(stories about)
vessels & fluids
pain & technicians
patients & doctors
techniques & technologies

(bracketing the practices =/=) foregrounding the practices --> objects come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are manipulated ==> reality multiplies
=/= single passive object in the middle waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives (SK the elephant parable)

philosophy used to approach knowledge in an epistemological way (~ preconditions for acquiring true knowledge = Alex's question “what is artistic research”) =/= (Annemarie's) *knowledge = a matter of manipulation (=/= reference)* ==> ethnographic interest in knowledge practices (--to--> “what are artist researchers doing?”)


xxxxxxxx

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#project: to create a multidisciplinary knowledge program around the relationship between art, marketing and [?], highlighting the imbricated فلس فلس nature of [?] as tangible resources and knowledge

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

#project index Tehran theory: to think ethnographically about non-unilateral and non-static picture of aspiration in the context of contemporary Tehran eco-techno-culture
•archive question
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
◦monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokenization and verification of natural assets --> augment & utilize --?--> provoking our relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate


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

(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*

linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing

early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*

wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body

Geroulanos and Meyers (=/= Foucauldian) show “how particular kinds of injury emerged during World War I, and how such injuries found their place in the bodies and lifeworlds of wounded soldiers and doctors, and in the thinking and actions of theorists and policy makers.” (ethnography of the interwar period)
=/= proposing a counter-body or counter epistemology or resistance knowledge


“in this world, we do not play chess with eternal figures like the king and the fool; the figures are what the successive configurations of the chessboard make of them.” -Veyne

([*]integration:) taxonomy of disorder ==> administrative ends (an idea of entire system of organic functioning --> homeostasis = "the wisdom of the body” ==> theories of norms, normality, disintegration, catastrophe)
•the idea of a damaged world in need of meticulous care
•the idea of the injured body that seeks to stabilize itself

#integration
the interwoven data recovered from the study of systemic and functional aspects of the broken organism ==> totality ~ establishment of a nonliberal individualism (+ social welfare) ==> **society = an integrated and fragile whole in need of care**


today's integrative medicine --> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation


destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)

welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace

to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world

...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury

[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)


(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world

bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies

the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body biological and body politic
•object of direct experimentation


story of the human body (at once social & biological)

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

question of technology
--locational--> where does the technological take place?
(and when?)

Heidegger --> (latecomers were) addicted to technology
“under what conditions we could arrive at a free relation to technology?”

Heidegger problem with addicted --> *addiction is content with what is merely available* (it never surpasses this limit) =/= anxiety


Avital focus on the *chemical prosthesis*

in war, drugs become another piece of equipment --> taking the pill: technologizing oneself into the war machine

heroin comes from heroisch

technically calibrated culture

drug --> hallucinated exteriority

electronic/drug culture --> (Nancy + Blanchot's) désœuvrement: without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs


how the *prosthetic subject* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality

the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce

there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another type of drug (religion, patriotism, oil, TV)

history of narcotica ~= history of culture

[*]intoxication: (names) a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear --> mnemonic apparatus

“you have something in you that must be killed” ==> ambivalent stimulant/tranquilizer

body proper regains its corruptible organic status
self-medication and vitamins become the occupation of every singularity

drugs explore fractal interiorities (=/= seeking an exterior transcendental dimension)

renunciation چشم پوشی، ترک، کناره گیری، قطع علاقه
(addict = nonrenouncer)

virtual reality
cyberprojections

(Dasein's) dependency: a state in which anxiety is still bound

*mimetic poisoning* (of pharmacodependency associated with literature, as sedative, as cure, as escape, etc.) --?--> relationship to law

(our French heritage --> Flaubert: “a thinker should have neither religion nor fatherland nor even any social conviction”) *thinking = radically rupturing*

drugs forced decision upon the subject --> de Quincey

opium: the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom (+ encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance)


war against pain

higher forms of drug


*(like any good parasite) drugs travel both inside and out of the boundaries of a narcissistically defended politics* ==producing==> a lexicon of body control and a private property of self

drug's virtual and fugitive patterns
they have a secret communications network with the internalized order


Madame Bovary = clinic of phantasms


everything said about technology can be applied to drugs: acceleration, speed, inertia, the third interval

drug/medicine ==>
•deaden the pain
•separate from a poisonous maternal flux
...
•hallucinated plenitude
•pure communication ~= transcendental telepathy

(have in mind that) any substance can function as a drug


“It wasn't clear then whether the body was private property or not, whether the authorities could legislate zoning ordinances, or whether pleasure and liberty were values freely exercised upon a coded body.”
-Avital


my work over the etymology of the signifier --> moon index
(i shoot up trash fiction)


(Freud) *pain is imperious* متکبر

(failing) to meet the requirements of an authentic alterity
(we are) into forgetting and the simulacrum (=/= truth)
•hallucinator: the creature of the simulacrum (par excellence)
(trafficking in) abstract forms of forgetting

the poor
the body-broken
the racially hallucinated other


chemical prosthesis (mushroom or plant) responds to a fundamental structure

drug addict --> a mystical transport going nowhere
drug addict offers her body to the production of hallucination, vision, or trance
--> going nowhere fast


being exposed to existence = placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains --> addictive = artificial, beside oneself


drugs --linked-to--> a mode of departing, to desocialization [without the assurance of arriving anywhere] (~= activity of writing) =/= production of real value


...movement of the simulacrum without address (or, in another idiom, without purpose, point)

Nietzsche was the first philosopher who --Avital-->
1. to think with his body
2. to put out the call for a supramoral imperative


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

we are implicated inscribed disarticulated and reresignifed by technological prosthesis
there is no outside to technology
there is no off switch to technology
wonderological tracks of technology

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

how much nature has to change before our descendants cease to be human?
about when in the course of evolution our ancestors became human?
(unanswerable good questions)

if the human is not the one consuming, who is?

animals consume
(numinous agentic status of) dead consumer

human aspects of consumption: learning, decision making, reason, perception, ethics, agency, desire and choice --arise--> *between humans and intelligent machines*

[*]posthuman: a move that seeks to locate being, or aliveness, or meaning in the not-quite-human-as-we-know-it

(humanist) epistemology: how we investigate and describe the world
(humanist) ontology: how we understand what constitutes life and objecthood

==Campbell==> help consumer research:
1. expand the range of temporal reference (look into the future of how consumption will look like)
**assumption of the future: the future will be a post-consumption existence**
2. expand the range of physical reference (extraplanetary consumption: what the ***consumption of place*** means; embryonic consumption sites: store your child's cord blood stem cells)
3. interrogation of the roots of humanism (social sciences)


today:
robotic revolution
biotechnology revolution


*posthuman: ideological account of the future of the human species in annexation with info-bio-technologies =/= *posthumanism: (speculative philosophy + material reality) critique of the discourse and epistemologies of *humanism:
•belief in progress
•technological mastery over nature,
•separation of human and animal kingdom
•therapeutic approach to human behavior
•secular approach to scientific inquiry
*humanism = epistemology: a way of investigating the world that is consonant with our human intuition--understand--> life as comprising essentially animate or inanimate, self or other, human or nonhuman** [=/= set of diverse beliefs]

horror of surgically implanted biomedical enhancement --> (persistence of the) inviolability of the body as the seat of identity <-- a classic humanist assumption

posthumanism
•speculative philosophy + material reality
•abstract philosophy + empirical science
•ancient + futuristic
•exotic + specialized (telesurgery, amorphous computing) + banal + ubiquitous (automobility, eyeglasses)
•
--> apocalyptic era (intelligent machine takeover)
--> ecological ethics (human not the most important form of life on earth)

***attempt to overcome humanness is an age-old human tendency***

what constitutes life
•women --> Schiebinger
•slaves --> Douzinas
•computer viruses --> Parikka
•cellular automata --> Delanda
•bacteria --> Haraway
•swarms -->Thacker
•


*brand = living system* (--> distinguish themselves from environment, exclude from it what is not, feedback communication with environment, self replicate, evolve, ) =/= cultural product
@Femke


(Campbell arguing that) the human and the posthuman are (ways to describe the forces that are) already present in the human condition:

1.
computation of life
mid 19th century weaving technologies ==> logic of computation ==ontology==> “universe = giant computer” : attempting to uncover what life itself is through a better understanding and appreciation of the power and seeming omnipresence of computational logic
•a discourse [~ a way of talking about the world] (and not only a claim that people make)
--> an example of how dominant technologies are not just instruments but models (through which the world is understood)
‘clockwork universe’ was the model for the last four millennia: clockwork-like essence of cosmos + state + body (=/= romanticism, galvanism, mesmerism, quantum mechanics)
}==>
•consumer as computer/computational (consumer as information processor, consumer as automatic subject =/= psychological agent) <== science of cybernetics, automaticity, feedback
•information (a new powerful substance in mid 20th century), “raw data ==> decisions, models, theories”, a specialized value-free term (=/= fact, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment) --> second half of 20th century: information began to assume a deep and proved privileges place (in politics, cultural imaginary), to informationalize consumer objects:
◦jeans as “intelligent denim” --> “vector graphics and pixelation as there expression of your individuality” (Jack & Jones)
◦cream as “pro-retinal A nanosomes and Par-Elasty” (L'Oreal)
•

2.
laborization of life
growing sophistication of the previously simple and straightforward categories of aliveness and deadness (<== technologies since the 1970s: stem cell engineering, in vitro fertilization, genomics, virtual surgery, biomaterial engineering)
}==>
•make the range of what constitutes ‘alive’ larger and more complex
•stage the interpenetration of the machinic and the organic
(in the future it will be the) marketers as the most influential groups in re-drawing categories of existence and deciding what is animate or inanimate, natural or technical (not scientists or philosophers)
[***classical marketing strategies: positioning, communication]
==> paradoxes in consumption (for example stem cell engineered meat appears as both identical and radically different from its predecessors) --> postethical consumption models (categorized as vegetarian? how marketing re-enchant food without appeal to a myth of pastoral origin?)
--> commentary consumption acts: organic food market, natural healthcare market

3.
miniaturization of life
“fast, cheap, and out of control”
autonomous (=/= central, god-like)
}==>
•technology is no more locatable within a machine (a consciousness that envelopes the world) --> dispersed: (a logic of) technology as environment [diffused] =/= tool [discrete]
internet of things : digitally enabled objects share and respond to information
1980s --> processing (of information, microprocessor)
1990s --> networking (world wide web)
2000s --> sensing and controlling
“my consumption patterns worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process

4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago

5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)

dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness

--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future

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

[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**

(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•

how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***

(one of [...]