[...]to overcome language --> is exaclty where the name politics ought to be reserve (Ranciere) (--> that is why i am doing political work [my work on: discordant objects of reference, misunderstanding, active deconstruction, etc. my ‘personal responsibility’ to insist on space of difficult translation])


unilateralism of an imposition: universality of human rights
(Keenan:) human rights = standardization of the rhetorics of claims we make on each other --therefore--> an open and undefined field of operation (and not some essence about humanity, nor law. Keenan is helping me not to think of human rights as an old fashioned, transcendental, essentialist, ontological discourse, grounding definitional basis, categorically an enemy's discourse)



military urban research (employing critical theory) --> use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’
-Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres --> a form of discourse between enemies
contemporary military theorists (in US TV series, re-conceptualizing the urban domain)
...military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by Artificial Intelligence, swarm intelligence, Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Foucault, Guy Debord, Bataille,


conflicted peace and peaceful conflict
competitive military buildup

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

Keenan on working with images politically --> *politics of exposure (or revelation ~-> forensic)*
(increasingly important dimension of political) *image-making*:
--more--> the event takes place in order to be photographed and reproduced and rebroadcast, transmitted and distributed, copied and viewed --> dissolution of the obvious political spaces =/=
--less--> making visible something that is otherwise hard to see (~= converting observation or visualization into knowledge in hopes that some kind of action will come about, based on the rational, reasonable, deliberate interpretation of those images) (<-- a lot of social justice activists, human rights organizations, and civil society practitioners are still working within this realm of the traditional image)

a bad (revelatory) theory of the (rational democratic) public sphere : “visual representation of things ==> known to a wider public ==> knowledge properly considered ==> wise decisions ==> actions”
=/= (a more properly) political moment of: inscribe images --within--> a narrative or a persuasive project --within--> a campaign that actually narrates them (captions them, makes them more available for some kind of political action) and doesn't just take for granted that their meaning follows automatically

the way performative dimension involves a kind of action that doesn't pass through the same cognitive circuits or the same process of knowing (in images)

•living by the image
•vulnerab[...]

[...]Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.


metazoan phyla : animal

history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways

Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing


*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)


(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

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

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it

thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21[...]

[...]

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

Hayles

(to take) a problem-based approach --> taking a problem and looking for solutions =/= investigating problematics (<-- humanities [and art])

what are the reward structures in artistic research? (the way a work is recognized and validated by the field)

postliteracy
the future of human & the future of writing are entwined
meaning = resistance
to be human = to resist techno-language

an informed scientific-literate and humanistically educated public ==> democracy

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

(mass media) cultural standing (and standard) of live performance
paradigm of televisual <--✕--> digital

(Auslander historicizing) liveness --> historical (=/= ontological)

ideology of authenticity (in live music)

at the level of cultural economy --> theatre (live performance) =/= mass media

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

[why is contemporary art so reluctant to describe our experience of digitized life? --Bishop-->] digital ~= code (inherently alien to human perception) --> a linguistic model

Guy Debord --> (*physical and the social were pitched against the virtual and the representational* ~ “subjective =/= technological” -->) social relations today are not mediated by monodirectional media imagery ==>
•favor intersubjective exchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening, conversation) with the aim of reinforcing a social bond fragmented by spectacle
•desire for face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of the Internet
•retro-craftiness
•fiddly collages
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen

reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)

paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected
subjective rationales
arbitrary systems (=/= established taxonomies)

vernacular forms of aggregation --> everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist (storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files, + porn)

analog in appearance + digital in structure

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

eschatos: furthest, last (in Greek)

theological anthropology --> the theory of the person


?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience

millenarian expectation
?how year 1000 was perceived

•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denounceme[...]

[...]standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

social media and exteriority

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

Sennett, “3rd world” SPeCo62Mz2Q : condition in which centralized space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”

*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}

3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•




the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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

*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
[...]

[...]t be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces

Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends

(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*

attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift
>

(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are made more directly responsible for their own efficient or profitable utilization


Foucault's society of discipline
Guy Debord's society of spectacle

(Guy Debord's) *spectacle: a development of a technology of separation*, [multiple strategies of isolation] --> (capitalism's restructuring of) society without community
+
(Foucault's) [production of] docile bodies ~{ body = political force }
+
(<== Weber's) inner isolation of individual [<==> capitalist modernity]

management of attention is masscultural forms has to do (less with the visual contents and much more) with a larger **strategy of the individual** }-->
spectacle:
[--✕--> looking at images]
----> (construction of conditions that) individuate, immobilize, separate subjects
br /> }==>
attention --> operation of noncoercive forms of power

(Crary:) optical/technological objects --> arrangement of bodies in space (--modernism--> techniques of separation)

television + personal computer --> anti-nomadic procedures (that fix and striate) ==> rendering bodies controllable and useful + simulation of choices and interactivity
--> (Williams: a technological and logic of) *mobile privatization*

(through the assessment of the works of Deleuze and Guattari, and now popular narratives) the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
-[...]

[...]ost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
•internal movement of its text


artisanal craft


(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity


(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)

(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*

attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord


for the hysteric: objects are too present --> excess of presence make representation impossible
(for Deleuze history of painting has been about warding off hysteria*)


organization of perceptual binding and synthesis (taking place while Monet was working)


determined by
different libidinal setup
other category of perceptual dispersion
potential site of fixation


Freud (+ Klinger) --> inseparability of attention from dream process & aesthetic production

(Freud is testing) psychical energy = mobile attention

***observer = a kinetic seeing body set in movement*** (to glide along undeterminated social and durational trajectories)

place: that ordinary anxiety, the expectancy, the sublimated precariousness of a modernizing urban world in which the individual is adrift on a smoothed-out surface devoid of any markers

*origins of aesthetic sentiments*
of skating --> movement of the body pleasurable to self and associated with the consciousness of gracefulnes, as in skating: movement of a kind that bring many muscles into harmonious action and strain none
(Spencer, Principles of Psychology)


*the facts of the case
Sachverhalten
the detective, collector, consumer, and the fetishist (are same figures)
--> idea fixe
--> pathological disorders of attentiveness
[according to Freud] when attention isolates a particular content from a larger cognitive field, the act of dissociation can be the initiation of a productive process
[---> go to[...]

[...]rain fascinates the other
•“fashion's suggestibility”: half-conscious observation and mere physical proximity produce a functional social homogeneity
•“fascination”: a genuine neurosis, a kind of polarization of love and faith  --> effects of obedience and imitation
•“attention”: transformation of sensation by effort and desire --> the desire for an increase in personal believe
•“plateau”: a flexible figure for natural, social, and statistical processes and events (including desire) [--?--> Deleuze and Guattari's plateau]

Le Bon:
“social = a particular modality of perception,” as a specific social arrangement that conditions the limits of perceptual experience
(modern) crowd: a viewing machine capable of generating “collective hallucinations,” a place for consumption of illusion, (with a “psychological unity” that occupies spatially remote locations,)
•“observation”: a cognitive model predicated on workable notion of objective reality (a classical epistemological model) that begins to corrode within a field saturated by illusion, hallucination, and whole industries of simulation
-individual subsumed in crowd is incapable of observation --> modern spectacular culture (to be articulated 7 decades later by Guy Debord

the crowd (in Le Bon) is a generalized site on which the accumulated dread and hope associated in the 19th century with social insurrection collapse into am abstract countless mass onto which dream imaginary of any sort can be projected
-Crary

19th century ‘crowd psychology’ assumption that attention has no necessary connection to objective optical observation of the world --> *crowd: drift toward a more primitive order of consciousness*
-withdrawal from surroundings and refocusing on some real or symbolic figure
--> theatrical configuration: means for controlling crowds --> (La Bon's) image of theater exceeding its older place within models of mimetic relation --to--> new effects of subjectification


Wagner's volkish homogeneity --> uniform modes of perception and response --> (problem of) community formation

Wagner's optical metaphor (community could see itself reflected in the mirror of tragedy) of theatrical existence --> *sense of vision serves to reinforce one's place within the social whole*
[--> when i look at Brussels from the 14th floor...]

Wagner's cultural program for social reintegration and his belief in the transformative effects of the collective experience of music drama preformed and produced as a ritual communal event

(typical 19th century --> debates about the effects of mass culture --articulated--> “distraction =/= self-conscious contemplative perception” -->) Wagner's deploying the pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptua[...]

[...]thing, everything in low-level focus without the risk of schizophrenic overload) --define--> **a state of receptivity in the analyst that eill be commensurate with the spoken free association of the patient** --> dealing with a stream of information that has no evident structure or coherence + extracting from that disjunct texture (artwork, chaotic syntax of dreams, indecipherable present,) some interpretive clarity (feedback)

Freud + Cezzaine --> design a countermodel of attentiveness that surmounts an ***inhibition of the peripheral*** (=/= notion of selection ~=> finding out what one already knows)

****diffuse attention =/= critical attention**** (a faculty in which the observer is led to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them)


(at the turn of the century) experience: compulsory consumption of information


(from) the experience of deindividualtion (in piazza) --to--> a more controllable form of loneliness (bedroom)


[this] plural hybrid space of Roman square (Crary on Freud's representation) ~= a spectacle society : a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves (either creativity or reactively) =/= (Guy Debord's) seamless regime of separation, ominous collective mobilization

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

Deleuze and Guattari's Varuna and Mitra --> lacking a mythology of conflict (=/= Singh's analysis)
forming a milieu of interiority --> double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum

State's operates by:
•seizes (immediate, magical capture)
•binds (preventing all combat --> presupposing a juridical integration of war)

“chess (pieces are coded) = a game of State”
chess: an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, pure strategy =/= Go: pure semiology
(what is game's form of interiority)

nonsubjectified machine assemblage

...returning from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army

magical-despotic State (@Eszter)


Genghis Khan didn't understand the phenomenon of the city --> war machine: a pure form of exteriority

magic violence
military institution

Deleuze and Guattari: State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution

machine: ontology of production

State thinkers:
•Goethe
•Hegel
•Euclid (finding a foundation for the enterprise) --> logos: the law over the nomos (from Proto-Indo-European nem-: distribute)-->{Euclidian space: a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction}
•A[...]