[...]br /> assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded

Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory

perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content

recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us


(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic

archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)

archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses

(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts


the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description

kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied

to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst

the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)

metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality


(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things

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

Alberti
Ingold

correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process

(archeology: a science of correspondence)

Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)

artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice

artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials

archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)

archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**

anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)

[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks

craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)


•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work


art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology

producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*

*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery

Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]


craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]

questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present

(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•

...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new

(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?

both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)


art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings

learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things


undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)

disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)

historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them


(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]

--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)


[*]concept: fragment of past world

maker + material ==emerge==> concept

-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?


understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?

•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•


-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart


coalescing of language & concept & ...


[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality

to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession

[*]art: risk of something new

archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)

my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*

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

(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }

-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)

Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity

possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject

==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)

[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject

“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house”

(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone

-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his rendition of objectification is insufficient and not specified (in which discipline by who and when how ---> go to Barad)
-[in contemporary performance art: “becoming animal” --> a modality of narcissistic ego-formation]

“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”

perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is

(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent relational universe ==> everything is primary fact (-then how would Viveiros de Castro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)

multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature

(different specificity of) bodies ==> perspectives

[*]affect: dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique ==> [*]body: assemblage of affects (ways of being) that constitute a habitus, bundle of affects and capacities

**humanity: a moral condition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]

(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)

spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)

(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance

the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism

(culture: modern name for Spirit)

integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators

integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis

(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined


transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention

*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*

poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (transformation/exchange/transfer model of action ==> subjectification: question of ‘what is/has changed?’)


story of “we had to steal fire from a divine father”
(god forbid the origin of our abilities be animal or queer)


mythology: a discourse on the given, the innate
myth: that which must be taken for granted


affinity and alliance --> exchange (amerindian)
parenthood --> creation/production (modern western)
-the “exchange” (=/= “parenthood”) that Viveiros de Castro talks about fits seamlessly with capitalism's free exchange of knowledge

warrior/shaman/artist --> conductors of perspectives


relative
relational

enmity: full-blown social relationship, extreme exchange

schema of difference

(Amazonian cosmology:) generic attributive proposition = cannibal proposition
==> self: gift of the other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)

**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**

we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces

-question for Viveiros de Castro: what would be then the “exchange” between Amerindian perspectivism and Western naturalism? (not only that “we” should learn from Amerindian perspectivism but) what they can learn from us?

European ontology: unextended thought and extended matter (--> Iron Man)
going from questions of representation --to--> questions of ontology
simplification of ontology (--> objects pacified and silenced) ==> complication of epistemology (--> subjects proliferate and chatter) [--> “discursive practices” and “politics of knowledge” are results of that pacification?]

***someone must be wrong, something has to be explained*** (<--?-- we have never been modern, they has ever been primitive)

(Viveiros de Castro)
formerly, savages mistook (their) representations for (our) reality; now, we mistake (our) representations for (other people's) reality. rumor has it we have even be mistaking (our) representations for (our) reality when we “occidentalize”


*culturalism, relativism, textualism --> reduces reality to representation
*cognitivism, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology --> reduces representation to reality

it has been obvious (for more than seventy-five years) that at the heart of the matter, there is no stuff; only form, only relation

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

“ajayeb” a term i use inclusively to examine a living and nonliving ‘historical site’ / ‘heritage web’ in order to learn/talk/speculate about what counts as writing ~= writing technologies ==> production of knowledges

(Katie King's) bits of pastpresent, a tool for scale making
~(Weston's) time claims
[*pastpresent: decline epistemologically charged purifications that devout complaints of “presentism” mandate]

-in my research (willing and required to become a beginner) i am asking: why past and present are so easy to separate?
(~~--> how our vision of past and future creates our present?)
==> directions, spinning dynamics,

in a sense my work on ajayeb is a critique of “presentism"[= overvaluing historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production (of “ours”). (for example the “future” story)]
-->? speculative presentisms (Dinshaw's queer historiography)

*globalization: “that travelogue of distributed, heterogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called the global” (Haraway)
~= processes responsible for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge practices*** --> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories

(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals

my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***

Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives

my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*


the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimenting
◽speculating
◽trying to find evidence for various pastpresents


TV camera: like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands (Kopkins)

TV documentry's “distributed agencies”: neither [director and screenwriter] can claim priority without wraping a description of these productive processes, and neither can make the TV product without the essential interaction of many people's hands, minds, tools, skills, tasks, objects, and infrastructures --> these distributed agencies (with problems and possibilities) are also necessary in art research ([Katie King:] and in scholarly knowledge production), (building, creating, constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensative to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies اقتضا, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command; Latour)
‘industrial model of distributed production’ <--> ‘a version of the responsibilities and pleasures of professional and intellectual autonomy’
-TV shows are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us”: we are the viewers mentally enacting [~ playing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, tr[...]