[...]dividual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman
can we do without instrumentalization?
categories of killable--the question of how we kill
the question of one's-own-old-hat
regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling
for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [--> antinatural rejection of the sciences in feminist the agreement “that ‘nature’ is our enemy and that we must control our ‘natural’ bodies --> escalating logic of counterdomination] so her manifesto is all about that. biology is (a rich fabulous practice and) never innocent, and it is something that ‘we mean’. in the sense of ‘what do you mean?!'] [we are always telling knowledge stories that we need --> noninnocent]
(something is) boring =?=> (something is) wrong
why do i joke? it has to do with storytelling.
anything anybody tells me i tend to believe--what i learn from whores
working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way and not to drift into associations as fast as... -->
i can't finish the sentence until i can pay attention to what interrupts it. and if i syntactically require to come to the end of sentence, syntactically commits me to a position i don't hold. the technical requirement of clarity (and coherence--must learn how to do it). my [...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]ce/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)
ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)
i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies department, through a low-voice critical mildly blasphemic rant about imagination
(anthropology of non-experimental imagination in the islamicated worlds)
[there is a difference between **experimental imagination** and imagination]
we are at the edge of extinctions
many species and lives are migrating to “where” and nowheres, pushing to the oblivion.
my issue with the ‘timing of understanding’ --> i don't want to be understood by you, i want to be loved by you ==> messenger + message --> so how do i produce lovers? (=/= Don Juan's type of love) --> there is a genius in your everyday talks that transforms me and has nothing to do with understanding (with the information that i grasp)
(using Martha Kenney thinking:)
i am interested in crafting words, phrases, and languages that reworlds us. (reworlding is about reorienting us in the world differently. --> is that what i meant by changing the rhythm of somebody's story?) what is important for me is ***what words ‘do’ rather what words ‘point at.’*** --> if not evidence then ‘what’?! *****the magic of the right word*****
...................................
communicating knowledge is always also making it
(false: backstage making knowledge, finding truths, connections etc. and then all of this gonna be communicated by publication, teaching, exhibition, etc.)<br />
all the useful ideas i ever had, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging, and so on.
**trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge
(i don't make, i communicate)
...................................
from paf:
-lunching a counter-exotic movement toward the Book of Wonders: (1) postponing immediate information. (2) ...
•if everything is not exotic then nothing is.
•framing as ‘tool,’ every tool is and has power, and is built in a discourse of power. tools are not innocent, nor can we do without them. they make us. what would be an idea of the ‘worst tool’ you can work with? poetics for me? [to write-about =/= to write-with the Book of Wonders. to use a language-tool that produces the most ambiguities and most misunderstandings, but that is the only way, there is no tool that can prommis clarity. evey tool produces its own ‘clear'--for someone, for some purpose. these makings are all tool-specific: maki[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.1[...]ant to be loved by you ==> messenger + message --> so how do i produce lovers? (=/= Don Juan's type of love) --> there is a genius in your everyday talks that transforms me and has nothing to do with understanding (with the information that i grasp)
(using Martha Kenney thinking:)
i am interested in crafting words, phrases, and languages that reworlds us. (reworlding is about reorienting us in the world differently. --> is that what i meant by changing the rhythm of somebody's story?) what is important for me is ***what words ‘do’ rather what words ‘point at.’*** --> if not evidence then ‘what’?! *****the magic of the right word*****
...................................
communicating knowledge is always also making it
(false: backstage making knowledge, finding truths, connections etc. and then all of this gonna be communicated by publication, teaching, exhibition, etc.)
all the useful ideas i ever had, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging, and so on.
**trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge
(i don't make, i communicate)
...................................
from paf:
-lunching a counter-exotic movement toward the Book of Wonders: (1) postponing immediate information. (2) ...
•if everything is not exotic then nothing is.
•framing as ‘tool,’ every tool is and has power, and is built in a discourse of power. tools are not innocent, nor can we do without them. they make us. what would be an idea of the ‘worst tool’ you can work with? poetics for me? [to write-about =/= to write-with the Book of Wonders. to use a language-tool that produces the most ambiguities and most misunderstandings, but that is the only way, there is no tool that can prommis clarity. evey tool produces its own ‘clear'--for someone, for some purpose. these makings are all tool-specific: making dichotomies, making similarities, making diferences, stc.]
•how far your research can host an encounter with alterity? and how this encounter can help you undo your prommises of communication, positionality, and conceptual buildings? weave new worldling entanglements with the problem--not to solve it, but stay with it. dissolve essential differences between dichitomies such as: knowledge and expression (or ‘knowledge’ and the ‘communication of knowledge’), experimental and ethical, joke and seriousness, interiority and exteriority, mysterious and clear, uncovering and veiling. produce creative impossibilities that do not resolve to bionary answers easily, that unstable possitionality for good, that open for forms of consiounesses to experience thoughts which differ from itself. to think and entertain both particularities and generalities (of logic, ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc.) encounter can be both infinitly singular and general. that is a form of suggestive work that can deal with the specific as well. (think about ‘chicken’ as an anstract i[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.1[...]ong many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.
critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”
affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people
(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
/>
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In this situation, the political task is to return to the linguistic battlefield. It won't be possible to do things differently if we do not start talking differently. The most urgent imperative is a language inventiveness.”
(atomism)
-constant and precarious self-management of molecular projects in a horizon-lessn-less future
-artists in the operation of self-making ourselves
#the image i made for Sohrevardi; allegory of Sohrevardi; the image's discursive architecture and its diverse inventiveness; (being careful with being) seductive in staging diversity; --> “an ecology of monologues”? (Renan);
-“The monologue is a linguistic space freed from negotiation.” [...] “Now, it seems that everything could be solved by the universal application of mediation, participation, collaboration processes [etc.] without realizing that this entails the strengthening of the social cohesion model that becomes universally inclusive.” [...] “The monologue, in this perspective, is a form of silence, a way of disappearing. One way to cease-to-be when we are forced to be.” (Peran)
how can i stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.
“An artwork executed from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensit[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]obilization?”
“we are left with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”
do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research
i want to *give connections*
...................................
#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]
#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front of the line, the hojum of enemy, of friend, of information, also includes the plural form of ‘hajm’ (حجم)
#seminar on the history of translation
archaeology, interpretation, spaces of difficult translation, reading out of time, technology and transformational studies, semiotics, poetry, writing,
...................................
#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text by creating intensity and my own partial perspective
-the elephant parable (against it)
-objectivity (disembodied view from nowhere)
-neutrality (biologically insane)
-marked people (my own story)
-situatedness of the situated
-The cyborg is a figure in which situatedness makes possible adventures with the beyond.
-globalization-as-situatedness: global is precisely space/place/time/situation
-the figure of the so-called scientist gathered around certain metaphors since the begining of the 17th cebtury, namely ‘objectivity’ and all its related adjectives: neutrality, perspective, universality, disembodiment (for certain race and sex), etc.
-metaphors create perspectives [the view that looks at blind men looking at the elephant]
-situatedness is different than ‘positionality’: a way of systematic error correction
-(resolving) specificity of vision --> scientific objectivity (is achievable)
-Haraway expresses her informed dissatisfaction with (the metaphysical substrate that supports) ‘social constrctivism’ and ‘traditional realism’ --> representationalist belief in the power of the words to mirror preexisting phenomena. they both believe that scientific knowledge (in its representational formats: theoretical concepts,[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.2[...] of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency
[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]
...................................
@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/readings/manovich_database.pdf]
what is for Anouk ‘information’? and what is for her the relationship between information, knowledge, interface, and perceptable?
for her what is the relationship between ‘information’ and ‘infinite’? (infinite as the universe of all possible images)
...................................
*Pierre's ‘rights of nerves’ --> “talking to everybody”
[rights of nerves: you are promted to do what you do out of disgust, outrage, fear, or driven by anxiety, you don't know why, you are compelled towards an object or project or thing or unthing]
*Seba: for him “narrative =/= complex” (the question of “complexity's situatedness”) for him: “multiple perspectives ==> coherency (=/= bi-rabt بی ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)
(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)
...................................
my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,
...................................
the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:<[...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...]inancial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)
speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]rs trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]
Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art --> objective science + universal morality + law ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-fulfilling and self-justifying observing subject
...................................
(Freud's) ego: the record of abandoned object cathexes
(cathexes ~= electrical charge; the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object)
...................................
(15.02.2017) three objects from apass:
-complaint
-evidence
-monologue
...................................
on futurity; in SF capital (Mark Fisher) the information (somewhere between cybernetic futurism and “New Economy”) is a direct generator of economic value ==> ‘the information about the future’ circulates as as increasingly important commodity* (Eshun)
SF: engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present --✕--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)
@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-in her criticism of “eurocentrism” how are afrofuturism and arabfuturism located? (curatorial) let's invite them as her allies in Hansaring Studio.
countermemorial mediated practices
...................................
خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)
(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
[...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.1[...]nes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer
(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe
***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)
history of the idea of nature
‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?
(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)
technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?
the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process
asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage
war of “disqual[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...]r />
being invaded by inappropriate others [in histories of Iranian modes of intersubjectivity: ‘being invaded by the appropriate other’ ~=? being of Tasavof, #slave manifesto, let me know if you want me to kill your master.]
(in the 1999 film Matrix we see the image of the ‘strengthening the will’ of the human community in the face of the nunhuman machine others: Matrix ==> “us”)
(Matrix's) narative logic of an internal strength being posited as responsible for recovery, survival, and moving forward of the human race. (@Maarten, displacements of weakness and strength)
values that garantee survival
technologies that garantee survival
--> they become moral
those who____
speak (against) the “truth” of the world, cause the “ruin” of the world
...................................
say your name before talking
it's a Q and A, a lecture
--> it is a violent day
asking for your name is intrusive enough, even before asking where you come from [--> #estizah]
(learning from Heidegger:) abbreviation is already an effect of technology
case of Germany specially
and persian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage
[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> basirat بصیرت ==> ta'amol تأمل (modalities of meditation and speculation)
(in psychoanalysis) anxiety =/= fear
(in capitalism) anxiety --> boredom ==> capital
(in settler white colonialism) anxiety ==> safty
(in Ahmed) anxiety --> approach to objects
(in Ahmed) fear/anxiety ==> effect of “that which I am not”
(ghol قول, gharar قرار, gharardad قرارداد [~ that which is promised by the ghol], ghovate ghalb قوت قلب) contracts also come to reassure, otherwise we might be in the radically open space of psychosis.
***contracts, they disambiguate the space***
{+} (pointed out by Derrida:) “contract” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally [...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.7[...]ny kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)
Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless
*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)
#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computersputers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.5[...]ces of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth
*“demonstration” coined by science
...................................
(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails [...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]ts and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...] century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•
(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)
‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*
issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
◾our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,
[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوعها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconn[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.4[...]object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized
Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)
...................................
pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries
bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی
(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)
motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws
what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?
“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”
to think about X = to change X
we change the subject
we get some info: there are 5 people in the room. but when we bring that information into thought (because of how we feel and of our believes ==>) we start to bend the 5 to 6 or to 50 --> a try to change the reality =/= thinking in calm condition using science, information, conversation
...................................
bipolar --> mood disorder --> relationship of the self with emotions
borderline --> personality disorder --> relationship of the self with the world (of subjects)
narcissist --> personality disorder --> relationship of the ego with the world
...................................
people who grew up in iran and former soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder
(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما
(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation
[...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.6[...] --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?
there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world
(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)
during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!
on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)
(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?
the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons
“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11[...]lity/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)
stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****
Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)
•[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final
Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”
(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information
myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.1[...], efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)
•[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final
Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”
(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information
myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality
[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression
‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity
[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations
“anxiety as cause”
[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]
a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the spa[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.1[...]
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)
stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”
*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)
what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?
origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master
the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies
which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being
(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions
/>
what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their w[...]
(26)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...]minished humanity)
(Anand, van Dooren, Naveeda wondering) how in certain geographies disappearance of species seems not to give the people a moment's pause
* what_ gives a pause ?
*species self-perpetuation is sometimes with:
•biological reproduction
•becoming
•transfiguration
•rebirth
•symbolic dispersal
•resynthesis
•
sunnat to kill (فى نفسه intrinsically evil) snakes (=/= jinn snake in Anand research/stories of saint animals)
straw, chaff, rice, wheat, lentils,
ماشوره، کاه، بوريا
سبوس
گندم
عدس
the gift of death for the animals:
•عید Eid, God in sacrifice, release from hardship and burden; blithe disposal of animal; euthanize
•چشمزخم evil eye or witchcraft as the cause of animal's death, if they are lost through illness, theft, or accident
bonanza
anthrax
euthanize
inoculate
cagey
•canny حيله گر کمرو
•showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion
بو
-treating smell as indicating an unsettled situation
-inadvertent stench of dead bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal practices
*odors introduce terror or the terror of the uncontained within the social* (Neveeda > Siegel 1983)
double-edgeed prospect
common curse
“in the riparian contextm land forms and breaks with regular irregularity” [--> #entropy]
shifting its course, the river inducts new affectees into how to live (this way)
-there is a manner in which life proceeds--instead of feeling in step with it one begins to feel out of sync***
#start a geographic learning, riparian thought; thinking by rivers (& not countries)
_->{.\_,;,_/;-=,/
rural cosmology
cosmology of modern science
human conception: flirtation with the failure to arrive
#two moveis:
•Exodus: Riddly Scott + Creation Bible + Big Bang + extinction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)
the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical
soil: earth rendered in the scientific register
“The alluvial sediments that come in the waters of the Jamuna river either bec[...]
(27)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.5[...]the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
--0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling
...................................
my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?
topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writ[...]
(28)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]lities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)
“layers of locals and globals”
[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities
-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with
***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}
(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)
(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information
assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*
technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...
(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation
Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”
when zoomorphic figures are present...
ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]
museum studies
(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
[...]
(29)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.9[...] of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
--> there is no interior space to the body (~ there is no there/beyond to the body,) just an invisible body
#work on an exposure of work with tey-ol-arz with other interested artists
in Tehran, maybe in my parents house, informal space for opening a discussion in Farsi-English
(involve Pierre? where to get money?)
*campus: (a place where) new kinds of conversations are being invented in stabilized and social forms (sometimes departments, sometimes just research clusters)
i need to make that kind of mini-scale of quasi-organization between Tehran and Brussels: workshops, episodic and travel-mediated knots of practice
**(Alberti 2013 argues that) anything in the immediate, intimate vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb
‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)
pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)
de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberately partially subjectivized, semi-potent in their potential to know and be known
the intensely subjectivized pots --> *impede activity and enable knowledge*
•convince
•avtivate
-
•persuade
•communicate
•establish
eyes wide open: inability to see the invisible
*to see is to be seen*
buried pots, relational bodies firmly in place, teaches the dead to see properly, to maintain a perspective (Albeti)
[title]
(with Alberti) trap-thinking for ajayeb storytelling --> to make capable of knowing different things, invoking, quoting, reciting, cit[...]
(30)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.7[...]ing] ***how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]
...................................
قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذرهبین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه
heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی
...................................
(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials of language* (Lyn Hejinian)
Doty
all we see is slippery, nuanced, elusive
***“the world is wily, and doesn't want to be caught”*** (Susan Mitchell)
perception is simultaneous and layered
(elements of the) sensorium: continuous, comples response to things perpetually delivered by the senses, the encompassing sphere that is such a large part of our subjectivity
we are englobed entirely (by the reports of our senses) --> a seamless weft of ‘information’(=/= the data the senses offer)
dark, suggestive blur of shapes and colors
what we can take in is a partial rendering of the world
[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”
(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥
“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”
Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once
*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood
...terms commensurate with the clamoring world
(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **
Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death
(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them
***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to [...]
(31)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.5[...]speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)
...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism
rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and ca[...]
(32)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]old women whispers behind me --> i do what i am told = i do exactly what i want to do
anthropologist = i cannot directly “see” the demon or the spirit [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there
(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life
[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of the “native”
(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life
[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense
[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* -[...]
(33)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.6[...]stituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, encounter/friction between different styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}
[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> a kind of *antagonistic trial* (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen
[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*
the picture of researcher's humanity (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation
**the imaginative results of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’
*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th century onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]
[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)
acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses
*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were n[...]
(34)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.9[...]site of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity.”
-Sennett
(for Aristotle:) city = synoikismos(= coming together of people from diverse family tribes--each *oikos* having its own history, allegiances, property, family gods)
[some my german friends are making us all poor in not recognizing this, that similar people cannot bring a city into existence. city obliges people to think about and deal with others who have different
loyalties to (linguistic differences). Germany, lacking direct experience of others, because of lesser colonial encounters in its history, falls back on fearful fantasies with the new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]
(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate
attitudes
actual behaviour
[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition
rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice
in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic
...................................
what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)
(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion
Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez
#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an or[...]
(35)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.8[...]isceral and optical experience of immersion...
•makes us profoundly aware of our bodies in space
•producing a disorienting visuality
*refracted vision = textured light*
refraction = corporal جسمى + carnal (جسمانى marked by the appetites and passions of the body) ==> effective stimulation
osmotic space
amniotic
eroded
bad boundaries
concretions
immersive medusa or jellies transducingly
snaky tresses of the mythical gorgon
more-ness of sensation
destroyed, transformed, conserved
jelly scatters
diffracting cilia and fluible mesoglea
metamorphosing diffraction patterns
multiple sensory registers temper the apparatus of seeing: sound, tactility, movement, proximity
immersion ==convey==> the experience of being totally inside a world, a state of mind, cultural and historical forms, and intellectual rumination =/= unreality or reality
==> cohabitation =/= representation
tactile visuality
fingery eyes
relies on textured proximity rather than objective distance
the visual apparatus is the touching body
[*]art: sensual movement of perceptual information (across media and bodies)
transduction:
(at an energetic transduction site: one form of organized energy asymmetrically converted into another kind of energy)
•transmission of messages through various media and the ways those messages become mis/translated into sense and sensation
•transmitted information reformatted and transformed through devices, forces, and processes, and then broadcast to other sensorial subjects... (---> go to my ajayeb-e pit story)
#telegram's zoological corruption =/= State, science
matter owes a debt to its own means of revelation: light
(Hayward's) [*]captivation: extraction of rhythm, pulse, color, texture ==> resonate for alternative purposes buth within the conditions of the frame
the (zoo's or aquarium's) display: motabolizes, creates, releases sensation into the world ==> environment of intense involvement --> familiar orderings are affectively transposed, altered, refigured
jellies --> surrealist white shapes
i am not sure -->
(Desmond's) identification: the beautification of ‘drifters'[spending most of their time motionless with their tentacles extended over ten feet, netting the waters for food] makes cross-species identification impossible --> [*]identification: seeing familiarity in other organisms = a map for empathy and critical engagement* (=/= objectification of radically different organisms) : “transmutation of non-identification into aestheticization” ==> observer gawks بى خيال نگاه کردن and marvels at dissimilarity ==> making difference a marketable feature [--> [...]
(36)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.6[...]membering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]
how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals
*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*
ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals
when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]
Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviours appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end
moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help
asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*
(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relationship crafted into intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being
lead cow (the one who trusts the breeder, and one the herd trusts, usually is in the front) =/= dominant cow (in the hierarchy of the herd, is found in the middle of the herd)
a theme in animal technicians
paying attention to animals = being able to feel the limits that animals ask us to take into account (more than questions of well-being)
[many times] *work often leaves no evidence behind* (=/= publishing)
@apass
[...]
(38)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...]'artist's original interiority']
-*- what does ‘meaningful’ means? -*-
scientists aim to find new methods to focus on those behaviors that are most meaningful to the animals themselves
•Shirly Strum --> I tried to let the baboons themselves “tell” me what was ‘important’ (-how a tree can tell you what is important to them?) -with the baboonss: nothing made them believe that she could be a baboon, so she decided after a while that she could try to urinate while staying among the baboons ==> surprise (=/= trying not to disturb the baboons with her body) --> her body (style, gender, smell, look, anime, etc.) made her enter into relationships with the animals in a new mode, **as a living person (like them) she creates with them an embodied proximity** (==> embodied affinities) [<-- Jassem is very good at it. this happens as well in apass research environment between artists]
---> go to Cinderella taking shower with her birds in the attic {urine, noise, surprise}
•Mark Bekoff --> empathy: possibility of sharing feelings involves mirror neurons (“I can feel the animals”) ~= (an experiment to incorporate) *to embody literally*
+ (Burghardt's) use of *critical anthropomorphism* (=/= Walt Disney) use of various forms of information (natural history, perception, behavioural description, autism, Cinderella, etc.)
•Temple Grandin (expert in factory plants for slaughter systems) --> *empathy without pathos* (for her and the animals) [*]world: a swirling mass of tiny details ~ [animal: autistic savant ~= special form of genius]--> a little plastic water bottle lying harmlessly, a shiny reflection, a yellow jacket hanging on a fence, all those turn out to be in their world *wrong details* (“I think the way animals think”) --> ****animals are visual thinkers**** {*you have to see in details*_ <-- how my work changed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*
}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature
(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see[...]
(39)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.5[...]l someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later
informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms
which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)
devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)
Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence
“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter
animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed
anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?
can we speak of a quality of death?
(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations
culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice
life =/= zoo =/= bios
...................................
retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present
retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment
ironic consumption...
... =/= how adults might perceive the political context
[...]
(40)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.8[...]ract notions
*anger ==reveals==> world*
anger ==> makes you ungly ==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]
...................................
postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network
Imre
western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history
two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)
literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past
-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*
***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once
television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]
historical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present
in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present
national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)
television as a massive archaeological site
polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing
(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media
(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium
communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past
{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]
(1990s foll[...]
(41)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.9[...]f the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•
(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence
(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”
...................................
collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood
global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)
one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)
(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}
zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding &[...]
(42)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]/>
}==> **our incommensurability is understood only at the level of epistemological difference**
-when i was iran, we were interested in the western ontologies, their universal theories of matter. people didn't recognize western philosophy as a cultural perspective or different epistemology, but as ontology. this is relation unfortunately is not reciprocal ---> go to Star Trek
-when you read other people's theories of matter, you don't do epistemological inquiry (~= anthropology)
***foreclosed =/= privileged***
tendencies in archeological theorizing:
1. *foreclosure: other peoples’ worlds are avoided, delegated to non-theory, to exotic finger-painting on the surface of matter (=/= what general theories are made of) --> appropriated through absent presence
2. *privileging: other people's worlds are privileged, given serious consideration (alterity is initially embraced) --> appropriated through assimilation
◽in a grand synthesizing theory of matter (~ an enframing mechanism that holds the other enframings within a space of intelligibility) the ethnographic material serves a buttressing tole: indigenous theories resurface as heuristics of analogies for specific cases
ethnographic information is crucial to recognizing the alterity of the past
(Alberti concerned with) how the indigene occupies textual space in Ingold: indigenous words appear in key moments in Ingold's text to seal an argument, or provoke an idea (at the level of analogy)
--Bakhtin--> monologism disguised as dialogism : a single voice playing many parts
analogical thinking:
--Thomas--> (interpretive) open ourselves to the difference of the past
--Alberti--> (appropriative) relies on representationalist logic; using analogies interpretively to the types of past we construct
(Viveires's) *controlled equivocation*
we compare mistaken aaken assumptions on both sides
***interpretation =/= multivocality (polyphony)***
@apass: what other textual strategies can we develop other than polyphonic (multiculturalism at the level of text)?
[!we should say no to] general thing theory : tendency to produce overviews, universal accounts of the material world
•phenomenological world of essences that are revealed
•ecological world of affordances that are at hand
•some social world of false transcendence
-
...................................
mirror
ayene
pieces of metal that soldiers put on the back and legs
چارآینه
جفای فلک آینه گون ==> self (of the poet)
فلک falak --> ayene-gun --> jafa
دل del --> sang --> transforms stone to blood
آینه اسکندری ayene eskandari (was it a telescope? to inform/spy)
ارسطو به فسون و اع[...]
(43)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.7[...]tion---some species complexity while others simplify
cities as real transformers of matter and energy
cities are open or dissipative (esraf اسراف) systems, with matter-energy flowing in and out continuously
(in autocatalytic loops) the trigger-flow interactions: interlocks a series of separately reproductive systems into a single interactive reproductive system
antimarket ---money--> mining regions ==> intensified coa extraction ==> iron production ---> [steam] mechanical energy ---> cotton textiles ---> flow of profits ===money==> experimentation with coal, iron, steam
skill / know-how = catalytic info
(info capable of bringing together and amplifying flow of energy and materials)
economies of agglomeration (anbashtegi انباشتگی)
the law of diminishing returns (bazdeh nozuli بازده نزولی)
a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. (image)
illumination --> coal gas
motorization --> steam
knowledge is an input of production which exacts high transaction costs. only where patents are perfectly enforceable will information be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.
at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.
automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge
(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)
the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions
the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures
are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?
future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.
[...]
[...]
(44)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.5[...]on with coal, iron, steam
skill / know-how = catalytic info
(info capable of bringing together and amplifying flow of energy and materials)
economies of agglomeration (anbashtegi انباشتگی)
the law of diminishing returns (bazdeh nozuli بازده نزولی)
a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. (image)
illumination --> coal gas
motorization --> steam
knowledge is an input of production which exacts high transaction costs. only where patents are perfectly enforceable will information be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.
at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.
automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge
(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)
the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions
the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures
are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?
future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.
[...]
...................................
the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms
(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality
living creatures and their inorganic counterparts
(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”
biomass = circulation of flesh
plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars[...]
(45)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.5[...]ation be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.
at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.
automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge
(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)
the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions
the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures
are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?
future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.
[...]
...................................
the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms
(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality
living creatures and their inorganic counterparts
(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”
biomass = circulation of flesh
plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars
in a sense “higher” animals are just fancy decorations in an ecosystem
(decorative large predators)
ecosystem = succession of plant assemblages ==> stable states ==> climax
ecosystem = a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.
continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}
[...]
(46)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.6[...]"replicators” created constructs out of flesh and bone ---> then how did ‘self’ emerged in this?
(layers)
genotype .../.../.../.../... phenotype
| | |
info coded | self organizing | adaptive traits
into genes | processes (stable) | of a plant / animal
human gene is variable du to: {1-ecosystem 2-taboos}
(ancient) migrations : vehicle for the mechanism of evolution that today is producing the greatest evolutionary effect, allowing the incorporation of new genes into established gene pools, enhancing intrapopulation and reducing interpopulation variability.
[leas normative and binding] to other cultures <-- culture --> to the same culture [central to society]
strata = reproductive niche
(niche : adjusted timing and quality)
hierarchy building = {-homogenization (by a sorting process) -consolidation (through coding into legal, religious, and other formal regulations)}
limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.)
--> for example soil loss, due to careless exploitation of the forests’ resources has been a constant threat to urban centers throughout history. most urban civilization were able to pass their genes for only seventy generations before they ran out of soil ---> although some material and energy flows can be “socialized” (submitted to cultural control), in practice many are not.
(my interest and work on hayula is about:) the creative morphologies that have always resided outside the (west versus east) homoestatic text of the self and other
...................................
contemporary US film bestiary <==
•EC comics --> popular weird fantasy, horror science fiction
•creepy magazine
•the twilight zone --> horror, science fiction, suspense, comedy
•film noir --> flawed character hero <== german expressinonist cinematography
•cryptozoology (adventure)
...................................
division's of life
-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology
biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)
gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiologic[...]
(48)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.7[...]
intraorganismic genetic transfers
*health = matter of maintaining an ecology =/= matter of defending a unity*
[*]body: ornately elaborated mosaic of microbes in various states of symbiosis
the fiction of the self
**self is not only corporal but corporate**
-Sagan
telescopic technologies ==> Earth as a living entity ~= gaia: (a species of noble lie) biosphere behaives as a body
-temperature, pH and the distribution of reactive gases have remained extraordinarily stable for hundreds of millions of years
animal body --> exposed to natural selection =/= living Earth
•gaian worldview
•animism
•native Americanism
•deep ecologism
--> inhabits the responsive tissues of a planet-sized complex organism
--threatening--> into the muck of planetary personification New Age joy [---> go to the latest godzilla film industrial apologetics and ecological satanism --> tales of human accountability]
--> *biocentrism* [of our time 2019] ~=> noble fictions
cross-disciplinary science
mythopoetic
atmospheric chemistry
earth: organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun
-Lovelock
--depending--> on the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization
gaia <== narrative integration of cosmology and morality (<-- can we do without it?)
eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bod-ies made from reproducing eukaryotes
(three billion years ago, the oldest type of sex on the planet:)
bacterial omnisexuality --> promiscuous: not delimiting sexual exchanges with species barriers (+ it needs intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so)
--> lateral transfer
omnisexuality: a means of genetically “locking” together once-diverse groups (of prokaryotes)
bacterial crowding ==> life on earth
endosymbiosis: one organism swallow another without digesting it ==> origin of new species [<=/= gradual accumulation of mutations]
cancer <== rampant multiplication of the occasionally vampiric mitochondria
bacteria's bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species falsjfies their character as a unique life form
Sagan
this zoological “I” [is open to radical revision?]
model of zoocentrism: encased self
(?what are ajayeb) bestiary's aesthetic model of a difference (=/=? zoocentric model)
--Burgess--> interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living form ==> artist
as an organism's connections to the external envimnment grow, that environment becomes its body [=/= Sina]
snail
sn[...]
(49)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.9[...]general.)
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
the conceiving mind over the perceiving body (vision/touch)
touching was considered “a cruder scanning at close range,” and seeing “a more subtle touching at a distance.”
for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of depth, and Condillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement and touch. The notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain.
•a technological gaze
•way of seeing (Derridean deconstructed)
•high-tech images
•artifact (cultural artifact, social)
•image of the or a body and its environment
•impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualization of scientific narratives and the aestheticization of information, all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology. (Norah Campbell)
•Everything said is said by an observe (Maturana and Varela)
•framing the world
•virtual gaze (Baudrillard)
•achieve absolute vision, while seeing nothing.
•very much as real; human and technological, both
•i say this as someone who thinks that we are part of this digital world, but we are not necessarily subject to its terms
•splicing of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical
•the naration is not pure nor whole (why cyborg?)
•place of visibility (/ field of articulability)
•it is an aesthetic dream, dream of ismorphism between the discursive object and the visible object
•exteriorization of the body (relation between face / hand / tool )
•The “exact meeting place” of form, matter, tool, and hand is the touch(Henri Focillon)
•
////////////////////////
In this interconnection of embodied being and environing world, what happens in the interface is what is important.
--Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology
At first glance, strapped to the body of critters such as green turtles in Shark Bay, off Western Australia, humpback whales in the waters off southeast Alaska, and emperor penguins in Antarctica, a nifty miniature video camera is the central protagonist. Since the first overwrought seventeenth-century European discussions about the camera lucida and camera obscura, within technoculture the camera (the technological eye)seems to be the c[...]
(50)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%45.8[...]e social as parasitism
•Hayles --> translation of epigenesis and technogenesis
•
{phenomenon of serial endosymbiosis theory <-- social theorists deploy this in the search for accounts of how change and creativity originate}--> (bio-econornic context) *symbiosis* has long been recognised as a theory which demonstrates the co-constitution of the social and the biological
=/= Darwinian story of: small variations, random mutation, long time scales, natural selection, fitness and incremental development:
•complexity derived by brute mechanical climbing from the base already built by the efforts of earlier climbing
•unit of change: the gene, or individual organism, the zoocentric, ‘big like us’ epistemic culture of both science and social science (=/= weird worldings of protists, archea, eukaryotes [Wertheim])
bacteriology ==> new organisms were often stemmed from profound and prolonged symbiotic relationships that have proven difficult to analyse =/= discrete
•traits are inherited outside of sexual dissemination (digestion, infection, donation, other complex forms of partnerning) --> consortia: amorphous symbiotic complexes (metabolic energetic networks) =/= organism: anatomically bounded objects (systems of information and exchange)
}==Margulis==> focus on how perceptual, political, social and scientific conditions precede objects: *objects = boundary-work*
--> differential speeds of change (sudden and unlikely mixes + slow and causal)
--> deconstruction of individuality
(co-constitutive bio-econornic-political-social context:)
**ideological contest between individualism and collectivism in political economy <==> intellectual development of symbiosis theory**
•socialist and anarchist concept of mutuellisme in the mid 1800
•Hobbesian-Malthusian-Darwinian bio-economic concept of struggle for existence in zero-sum games of all-against-all
•Kropotkin's symbiosis as evidence for the benefit of global cooperation towards the common good, the division of labour, protection of elements and interdependent organisation
•evolutionary theory used to champion individualism and the social policies of laissez faire
Campbell --> what Harman misses is the elementary starting point for sociologies of science: *that social science translates science* just as science translates “reality”
serial endosymbiosis theory ==>
1. no theory of social change is going to be value-free (endosymbiosis is a process that is always already highly charged with rich metaphor, entailing a ‘host’ that is in an ‘exchange,’ ‘relation’ or ‘merger’ with a ‘guest’ --> a form of ‘living together’ that becomes ‘close’ over time)
2. extraordinary range and nature of these relations can act as strategies for other worldings (other ways of being with each other) --> important normative function [at the cataclysmic[...]
(52)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.5[...]audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secular, scientific, liberal way of thinking about the world
humanism = a belief in progress (implicitly conceived as a technological instrumental profit-oriented) + technological masery over nature + ‘human =/= animal’ + therapeutic approach to scientific inquiry }<-- a 19th century anachronism --> deeply ingrained in contemporary self-consciousness and everyday common sense
human: hero of liberty <-- french in origin, political in purpose
August Comte --> the universe can only e understood when the scientific exploration of phenomena was separated from supernatural superstition =/= ajayeb
Campbell making the case --> humanism needs to be deconstructed (not in a blithe نرم وملایم postmodern discursive way, rather) the definitions of what it means to be human are of life-changing importance --> humanism's supposed universality and transparency masks the fact that it is *an inherited western relatively recent philosophical perspective of the world*
in consumer research --> human: culturally inflected, psychosocial producer of + produced by the market =/= human: a disembodied information-processor with a rationalistic indentity and a computatinoal approach to the market
--Campbell--> how can interpretative consumer research benefit from a perspective which acknowledges this ideology of humanism?
the term posthuman has been used to describe anything which extends human capcity --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cult[...]
(53)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...] --ironically--> something as ubiquitous banal ancient and human as *tool-use* could itself be described as posthuman (Hayles, Stiegler, Wills) ==> **posthuman is as ancient as the human itself** }--> [*]posthuman: (a radical recognition that) technological = *originary logic* + *ethical sensibility* (= a stepping-out [=/= coming-after] of the enclosure of what is only important and necessary to the human)
•a concept that draws attention to the cracks that have always existed in the water-light descriptions of the human
•the ethical and radical realisation that the human only comes into existence by the work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject
posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)
20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)
robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution
(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans
(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and fl[...]
(54)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...] work of (organic + technological) nonhuman others
cyborg --> associated with liberatory modes of identity
**technology deconstructs everyday human experience of agency, free will, choice, self** @apass
21st century --> technology is the center of critical thought about culture and nature (--> that is why it became organically part of my ajayeb research)--> *to think about technology in a manner which reflects its ubiquity, its deeper symbolic and aesthetic dimensions, the way in which it can radically chnage humanness and human-centered approaches
(humanistic epistemology ==>) mode of the human:
1. information processor
2. cognitive subject
3. cultural subject
posthuman mode:
1. to widen the temporal range of research (deep future, deep past)
2. take the form of an ethical inquiry (where the human is no longer the center of the world)
3. to think about the ontology of technology
4. the relationship of the human and the nonhuman (sustainability)
20th century --> gene
21st century --> posthuman (postgenetic metaphors)
robotic revolution + biotechnology revolution > agricultural revolution + industrial revolution + information revolution
(consumer research started to develop an outlook that) things are just as complex and social as people
•brand: entities that talk to and interact with other brands, entities that form relationships with humans
(lives that seem to exist in on the edges of simple humanist life:)
•*massive* life of market
•*excessive* life of the brnad image
•*virtual* life of Facebook
•
consumer research focuses on the ontological and epistemological givens of only the consumer
(Turkle theorizing) how consumers change through their relationship with the nonhuman
•children view certain objects in the world around them as having degrees of aliveness
•children who have grown up with computers do not experience a dichotomy between biological and computatinoal processes
•playing with a toy like transformers, the toy shifs from being machines to being robots to being animals --learning--> fluid boundaries between mechanism and flesh
•(the ontological stickiness of the) [*]computer: a mind that is not yet a mind, inanimate yet interactive, it does not think yet neither is it external to thought
(Menser + Aronowitz) television: a complex object constituted by and related to many fields (solid-state physics, politics, etc.)
Latour...
}--> (such way of theorizing ==> precondition of) an era where radically mew technologies produce entities as indefinable complex global (as the Human Genome project) biofuel supply-chains or climate change models [--> also cryptocurrencies, blockchain]
}--Campbell--> consumer rese[...]
(55)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.7[...]nk of technology as something neutral --> we often make two ***intuitive ideological jumps of reason*** when we think of technology:
1. “technology = means to an end”
2. “technology is created by humans”
}<-- example of anthropological truth (about technology) ~ it is a truth as it appears to human beings & it is an *instrumental truth: truth aimed at getting things done or making things work* =/= [*]technology: the mode by which realities are brought into existence in the world (hervorbringen) {unconcealing ==> a concealment of another reality}= (process of) *poiesis = bring out + conceal*
-the greek word *techne = technology + art* derived from the term episteme (the ways in which one can know reality) ==> ****technology: a type of epistemology, a way of knowing****
}==Heidegger==> *technology needs to be understood beyond its instrumentalist humanist history* --Campbell--> *seeing technology historically as an ancient phenomenon*
technology thought of as something that comes from the west & does something to other people in other placers <-- a framework (even well-intentioned) that denies both agency & contemporaneity to the ‘other’
(-McQuire)
(we are told that)
•the era we exist in is the “information age”
•the world is “networked”
•marheting is “service-dominant”
--Campbell--> what realities do the terms “information” “network” “service-dominant” create, unconceal, conceal?
==> questions of:
-what is the consumer?
-the nature of consumer consciousness, knowledge, desire
*far from being a neutral uncomplicated relationship, consumers develop strategic behaviours for *coping with technology* that is paradoxial + fantastical + ideological + multidimensional
(-Konzinets)
•DIY technologies: forms of competence redefined + redistributed between hardware & human
•technology & identity interpolate each other
her
global debates of:
•fear of genetic determination
•nature of consciousness --> similarities and differences between computation and human being
•
--> intimately concerned with the status of humanness
1990s theories of gift-giving, possession, labour, self-concept =/= *cyber consumer* --> circulation of desire and commodities in environments that are so highly mediated and technological that it begins to generate behaviour and situations that are quite foreign to existing thinking about that markets are and what consumers want
**technology: an active force that both consumes & creates consumers**
(problem of) sustainability
1. to sustain: rest, retreat --> humannes is a major threat to all nonhuman planetary existence ==> the idea that radical threats to nonhumanness must be warded off by radical decreases in human population, consumption, normtive standards of living
<--[...]
(56)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.9[...]
technology has co-evolved with being throughout billions of years --Hayles--> (myriad profound subtle ways) to make nature
--paradox--> *it is “human nature” to use technology + technology changes “human nature”*
--Campbell--> ***while not everything is technical, everything is technological***
*posthuman stance (strategically oriented towards deep future, pays attention to the lives of nonhuman others) gets ontological with technology*
...................................
McQuire
defining the technological --activate--> the border between nature & culture = (the heart of) what it means to be human
...................................
[title]
system attic
...................................
(in my work with apass digital designs, i have been trying to negotiate with the notion of)
*technological gaze*
what new modes of subjectivity are filtered through technological gaze?
(?how) high-tech images are cultural artifacts
technological gaze's method to put its meaning together:
1. impossible subject-positioning
2. codification of flesh
3. visualization of scientific narrative
4. aestheticization of information
(Maturana + Varela) everything said is said by an observer =/= philosopher
marketing communication theory
[*]gaze: (a technical term for) the ways we visually consume images of people and places + the ways images are constructed to entertain & encourage certain ways of seeing
•(using psychoanalysis) Mulvey's gaze: the way in which the camera acts as the eyes and ears of the spectator, presenting ways of framing the world (power-laden + not neutral position) ==> certain understanding of the world is assumed
•Shroeder --> gaze signifies a psychological relationship of power --> the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]
how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality w[...]
(58)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47[...], technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)
(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively pr[...]
(59)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.1[...] + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized & technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***
...................................
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy
...................................
(techniques of the observer - september 9, 2012)
•What is the relation between the dematerialized digital imagery of the present and the so-called age of mechanical reproduction?
•ongoing abstraction of vision - Problems of vision
•transformation in the makeup of vision
•history of art <-> history of perception?
•onlooker (Zuschauer)
•historically important functions of the human eye ==> medical, military, and police hierarchies
•Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.
•where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide
•avoid mystifying it by recourse to technological explanations (this was my mistake!)
•an[...]
(64)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.2[...]br />
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological perspective can be incorporated into vision -- become a visuality? -- mobilization of visuality
how an artwork may account for the ways ecological change registers in vision?
geo-aesthetics
information is not energy-specific (Gibson)
theory of affordance : information pick-up process --> threshold between the sense-system of organism and the invariance of the environment
an experience of an observer that is not a property of the observer, it is invariant and relational.
that is, it acknowledges that objective information about an environmental system can be obtained both in spite and because of perceptual change. in this respect an indigenous knowledge is not simply an order of cultural perspective, they are rather a form of objective testimony, by the people who are attuned to the environment's invariant structure. they are not simply a traditional or local “point of view.”
in this sense what kind of info is the image of Kinect about the environment? it is not objective info nor culture, what is it? personal testimony? descriptions of a technological reading?!
affordance, as a concept, allows complexity and refusal to reduce environments, objects, and actions to the basic function they may have to the perceiver in her/his/its world -- it permits a level (horizon) of consciousness of the world beyond function.
how a beetle may rest on the retina of bird's eye like pieces of puzzle fitting together
facts of environment
to what extent can an ecological perception become virtualized, represented, and returned to vision as a condition, or style of being? that is how to take conscientious of the ecological beings that we are in any project? -- that is attuning vision to an ecological reality
E. h. Gombrich understood the perception of art as a process o[...]
(65)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.8[...]he zeiss-lens-camera recordings)
(for Susan Sontag) taking photographs [...] is a way of certifying experience, also a way of refusing it - by limiting experience to a search for the photographic, by converting experience to a souvenir. [...] the very activity of taking pictures [...] assuages (erleichtern) general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated (worsened) by travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, welding image and discourse
the contemporary experience is also made of sharing/tweeting/liking images
the contemporary political economy: communicative capitalism derives surplus value from the volume and velocity of sings and data circulating in the infosphere.
proliferation of cognitive signs is another feature of communicative capitalism, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli
(for Berardi) seeing means accelerating perception in the fields of everyday experience, accelerated tautological vision derived from constant passive observation. this is another of communicative capitalism's form of governance, as this kind of vision generates techno-linguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning
is Kinect image-compilation a creature of infosphere? (boring question?)
normalization of groundless seeing (exemplified in google earth)
“picture does not make an image” (Serge Daney, before and after image)
image against vision
life persists irrationality, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, cold world)
...................................
(Ada Smailbegovic)
nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
related to temporalities and velocities (plant politics of movement)
the video registers different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change
the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
binding times together
an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in[...]
(68)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.1[...]he audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.
(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.
scientific evidence
legal evidence
at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.
medico-legal concept of evidence
the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.
(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”
trompe l'oeil (new note)
in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself
photographs did not carry a transparent meaning
once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own
in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)
=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity
testimony to objectivity
rejection of subjective temptation
sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)
The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of pictorial objectivity took many forms. As we have argued, pictures (properly constructed) served as talismanic guards against frauds and system builders, aesthetes and idealizers.
extending the mystique of the visual to the dense symbolic presentation of functions and graphs
inscription instruments
(Marey, method grafique) “the graphical method translates all these changes in the activity of forces into an arresting form that one could call the language of the phenomena themselves, as it is superior to all other modes of expression.”
graphical [...]
(69)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.7[...]San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)
...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)
(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)
fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note: surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence to destroy his imagined enemy. Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being.
The multitudinous existence of child has left comparatively few archives.
...the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
intercourse and discourse
feminine use of subjunctive, in European languages, give a characteristic vibrato to material facts and relations. ... They multiply the facets of reality, they strengthen the adjective to allow it an alternative nominal status.
...obtuse resistant fabric of the world
in every known culture, men have accused women of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality.
The chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech, is older than fairy-tales.
...men's delight in women's voice when their register is sweet and low.
the change in men's voice, the crowding o[...]
(70)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.4[...]/>
drawing a square on sand, i evoke an idea, i eliminate the empirical, dematerialise reasoning
(what is rematerialised reasoning? aesthetic form..?)
the inevitable fact of the historical existence of mathematics
(math's historicity)
(a different word for every yesterday)
...................................
... one had a discourse which often concluded either with the cosmos in general or with the organic life in particular.
19th century
negentropic islands in entropic sea, pockets of order in rising entropy, crystal depositions sunk in ashes, diamond in the rough
organism = meaning + direction
organism combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, etc
it is old, mortal, and transmiter of new cycle
تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
to niki mikono dar dejle andaz...
(organism?) is a quasi stable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instance, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else where.
Man is one at high temperatures
from the information point of view there is a tremendous background noise
the noise of a complex to which a receptor is linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudian slip,
exploits of signs,
exploits of energy,
(ajayeb is defined by its resistance to metaphors in a system of language)
r />
یک کلاغ چهل کلاغ yek kalagh chel kalagh is precisely noise in a transmission system along a given circuit from one element to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain,[...]
(71)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]s linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudian slip,
exploits of signs,
exploits of energy,
(ajayeb is defined by its resistance to metaphors in a system of language)
یک کلاغ چهل کلاغ yek kalagh chel kalagh is precisely noise in a transmission system along a given circuit from one element to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language,guage, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being
...................................
Auguste Comte says: in light of previous experience we must acknowledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.
Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary
operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from p[...]
(74)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]e the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being
...................................
Auguste Comte says: in light of previous experience we must acknowledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.
Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary
operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)
the length my body cannot reach, sun, horizon, the far side of the river
greek idea of theorize: see
sight: by “placing” measurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone
inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision
the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing
the eye is a witness of covering-over
to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler
(we are with this) at the realm of the accessible[...]
(76)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]peration of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)
the length my body cannot reach, sun, horizon, the far side of the river
greek idea of theorize: see
sight: by “placing” measurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone
inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision
the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing
the eye is a witness of covering-over
to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler
(we are with this) at the realm of the accessible (=/= metaphysics?)
in the realm of inaccessible, vision must take care of displacement
The goal is either civil or astronomical
civil =/=? astronomical
to ask the object in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest.
Thales stops time to measure space
time freeze in order to perceive
eternity of mathematical figure
how geometry came to the Greeks?
•a practical genesis: build a reduced model, have a notion of module, bring the distant to the immediate.
•a senatorial genesis: organize a visual representation of that which defies physical contact.
•a civil or epistemological genesis: take astronomy as a starting point, reverse the question of the gnomon.
•a genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
exchange of the stable and the variant
in a culture with oral tradition, story takes the place of schema, and theater equates intuition.
In Thales story, the schema is the invariant of the tale instead of the tale being the origin of the schema. To teach the theorem is to tell the pseudo-myth of the origin =/= mythical tales being the dramatization of content
Thales theorem is itself anecdotal in relation to the invariable concept that it expresses its own genre: that of similarity***
from a practice he gets another practice
which messages, and how, answers and questions was covered over the centuries by the scenography of shadow-light opposition?
Descartes story: perspectival geometry, theory of shadows.
Plato's story: the sun of the same, the other and empirical object, cast shadow on shaded surface, similarity, the cave of representation.
The tales of origin? --> origin of a technology? Of an optics? Of a geometry?
<[...]
(77)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.4[...]language emerges? is it a textual ventilator? or things are threatening to fixate?]
how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)
to tabulate
ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate
towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods
(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)
cruel hallucinations
laws criss-cross the world
...for i am a slave of science
the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)
extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being
drops of knowledge
physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-
(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics
the infinite cylinder of parallel colel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body
(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances, conventions,
struggles with nature, alliances,
downhills, slopes,
content, norms, results,
the model and theory are both necessitarians
(how can this be explained materially?)
(what is the opposite of ‘people’?)
“physics”: the global contract (=/= global conflict; promise of physics), the general scheme [...]
(78)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.6[...]on
parallel paths
pseudo returns
“Time itself would be nothing without objects situated in space [...] the clock that Lucretius placed right in the middle of nature cannot mark Newtonian time; as the clock is the totality of things, between their birth and death, it marks a Bergsonian, that is, thermodynamic, time--an irreversible and irrevocable time, marked like the endless flow of atoms, flowing, running, crumbling, (coulant, courant, croulant) toward their downfall and death. Things have weight: they fall, seeking their peaceful rest. Fluid, they flow; hot, they cool off. Downfall, death, dispersal; breaks, dichotomies, atoms. Atomic flow is residual : the background of being, white noise. This world set adrift never to return is bestrewn, here and there, at indefinet times and in indefinet places, with pockets, where vortices are born in pseudo returns. Clocks appear with these objects [=/= the universal absolute time standing outside contingency of everything else], spiraling, shifting clocks which from their moment of birth begin to mark the time of death. The Lucretian world is globally entropic, but negatively entropic in certain swirling pockets. Conjunction is negative entropy; the complex thus formed counts the quantity of information set adrift. The event which barely occurs and almost immediately disintegrates minimally resists the irreversible flow, carrying little information. Newtonian time, which is reversible, marks resistance to the irrevocable. It is absent from these sorts of physics, and that is why our forefathers were unable to imagine that Lucretian physics ever existed, with the possible exception of Bergson, who thrived on it. Irreversible time is the master here : the physics of things resists it in spots, but in the flow of the drift; history follows, barely a ripple in the flow. History flows around physics.” (Serres - Hermes p.116)
...events are all of the socio-political order
(if science or physics or episteme classifies things, what classifies physics?)
what classifies what?
Question of epidemiology
slave: material object
master: spatial object
Serres: Lucretius: dichotomies are symptoms of better-connected material things
•history symptom of nature
•time symptom of symptoms
“Mars is only an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit
a penis captive
(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable links, (and projections of the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”
that which disappears fr[...]
(79)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51[...]h - پروانه)
(‘schmettern’ in German: v. smash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.
Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه
Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)
(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,
•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor
resistance-fight / ideological dictator
/>
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire
ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)
what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion
to endure the direct
epistemic fear
I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past century
(mystic war:)
the decadent view of the obliterated
(swallowing partial glances of the)
“extinction of society”
drinking it
these signals of vanishing are forms of training?
a formula of continuation?
ancient models of defense****
مکانیزم دفاعی
other mature forms of defenses:
•sublimation
•pro◦projection: a characteristic that one perceives in oneself but seems unacceptable is instead attributed to another person, denial in attribution [still popular Feuerbach's idea of “religion = projection”, “God = outward projection of a human's inward nature” informing secular anthropological explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner and are made consciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants [...]
(81)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]gical explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner and are made consciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•
•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
-[...]
(82)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.5[...]r />
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•
•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect
*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, [...]
(83)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.5[...]am/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)
[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)
a mapping is going on
his cognitive defend system is down (=/= ‘rend’ رند)
رند =? idiot [~=? the one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]
and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises
San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no sweet device that should supposed to suspend hostility, there is no magic flute in San'an story
why am I taking so many detours? whether this is describable at all
discursive formations
the teacher vs. trainer
the teacher that asks for your interiority**** (love?) any kind of transfers of emotional funds. or other economies of approval
Attar, the great and complicated poet
also my own attachments to certain formations
what kinds of poetic bodies Attar sacrifices?
what cognitive back-up system he uses?
and so on
(the students) cannot cognize (San'an's program)
forecloser, foreclosing you
توقيف
distribution of value, action, and non-action in San'an
to discover San'an where it dwells, what kinds of figures and disfigurations it is responsible for, and what else does it mask culturally?
we also add on cultural anthropological tracks to see which cultures or groups-psychologies practice San'an's teachings and in the service of what--what kind of will to power. because rarely something is practiced and it is not in service of some sort of buffing off a self or something.
[...]
(84)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]iteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together
to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge خلع
3. the most invested --> possession ~~> *stealth* (to invade it) --> trespasser خفيه
4. the most around/above/upon --> engulfing ~~> *hunger* (to eat it) --> glutton دله
the entire worlds are disponsable
to salivate and gorge on what is most detested
the torment of overlapping, of absolute possession and absolute dispossession
unreal
surrealism
anti-realism
hyper-realism
irrealism
inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape
deceptive and insidious facades
taken astray and stranded amid false omens
the misinformation of the world's existence
the minor syndicate versus the drone
stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch
always in a dual hermeneutics of suspicion and discovery
drinking from the fool's gold of confusion ill-advising codes
the sectarian's remedy:
vulgarization requires vulgarity
response to disgrace is to enter the disgrace
to inflict the profane occurence and encourage the contamination of language and sign
into the stint of atrocity
to go barefoot and dismembered
sectarian appears before the maker:
in blemished and tattered from
(to prove hardship)
xxxxx 254
...................................
one must fear those who say “we”
Mohaghegh's writing reminds of Avital
...following it into its lower webs of imagination
sect: an insider-outsider formation
*the sect redefines*
life, secrecy, ritual, fanaticism, martyrdom
(in a fragmented age -->) sectarianism = apocalyptic writing + insurgent practice ["+” : a lethal combination] ==> ***an abstract idea + its immediate execution (within the world)*** ["+” : collapsing the boundary between the emergence of the two]
**(its other names:)
•underground movements
•secret societies
•forbidden associations
•cult gathering
•*artistic circles*
•urgan gangs
•rebel cadres کادر
•terrorist units
•
**(its forms:) they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface:
-[...]
(85)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.1[...]>
(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy
(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]
Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)
earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)
a sunless place
mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)
night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman
(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend
learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper
language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky
Bronze Age eschatologies
queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions
dark thoughts
evanescing moon
...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky
thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)
*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن
***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***
Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali
...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him
(tactics of the willed unknown)
inspiration <--> madness
horoscope <--> puppetry
sensitivity to lower-grade intimation ==> gaining of subtle lunatic powers (in the arts as well[...]
(86)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.6[...]that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
/>
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
age-graded sequences of children's religious books books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion [...]
(87)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•
seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions [...]
(88)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...]regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings
Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind
favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]
it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable inseparable from our bodily forms (=/= “mind =/= body”)
modern theories of emotion:
•universalism <-- sentimental desire to believe in the essential community of all human beings + appeal of neuroscientific inquiries into the biological bases of emotions + certain linguistics theories [--> for example (the fable of universal emotion) *fear in the face of the enemy* transcends time and space]
•social constructivism <-- 80s sociology and cultural studies
using clinical data for humanistic arguments <-- problematic and unpersuasive
*******generation of new knowledge --approached-->
humanistic method (also applies to art?) --> authoritative: establishing control over the previous scholarship in the fiel[...]
(89)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.7[...]sor + accepts the situation by not distinguishing belief =/= behavior }--> *guilt*
2. antimimetic: victim identifies with fellow victims + might imitate the aggressor only as a survival mechanism ==> preserve a sense of self + keep the atrocities external to herself ==> ‘victim =/= perpetrator’ that can be held in memory without losing one's sense of self and victimhood }--> (awareness of being observed by others in one's abject state of victimhood ==>) *shame*
Leys --> (problem of shift from guilt to) shame: deprives one from agency and responsibility
=/= muslim-majority society (use of shame in critical ways)
**performative ~=/& constructed nature of emotions**
-in my youth in iran (middle class) the context of singing together آواز in small gatherings was a context of expressing emotions within groups (a form of *networked living*) that give voice to specific emotion (grief, sadness, love, heartache, etc.)
[i always felt outside of it]
public expression of feelings --associate--> weakness & sexuality
==> everyday life denial of emotions (of jealousy, desire, heartache)
(sociologically)
*something is performed = something cannot be addressed informally* }<-- for example emotions
sharm
sharmamdegi
haya
aberu
gheirat
nang
namus
--> emotion words for honor and shame (shared between pakistan and iran, used with meanings that overlap and inconsistent)
honor selfsubsistent male
honor related to women
notions of virtue
notions of shyness
gheirat غیرت : an emotional alarm system [for one's personal image (aberu آبرو), family, religion, country]
gheirat specifies one's appropriate reactions to the particular acts of the other --> in the form of emotions: anger, hatred, jealousy
(Elias’ problematic and useful definition of) [*]affect: perceivable measurable describable effect of emotional events and experiences, what is felt + what is emoted at an individual and collective level, (enacted + perceived) ‘happening’ of the human experience (=/= undefined protoevent)
affect: a way in which one knows an experience is occurring + a way in which one reacts to an experience ==shape==> future human experience
1. enactment (performativity) of emotion is inseparable from its experience
2. emotions, enjoying words, emotion events cannot be comprehended apart from the sociopolitical context in which they occur (emotion act ~/?= emotion evoked)
somatic activity (crying) ==make==> emotions (sadness)
(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers <[...]
(90)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.1[...]of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy
khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must explore theoretical alternatives to the concept of force: consent, contract, Singh's bipolar theory of force and contract, varying ideas of the “magic” of the state, Foucault's governmentality --> contemporary anthropology of the state, we examine varying pictures of state incapacity
•requirements: willingness to engage challenging concepts and texts, weekly online comment, class presentations and participation
•aims: a final essay: to make a coherent argument drawing on anthropological and theoretical literatures on state power
•axis: i work with Singh: that “there is no one correct answer we hope that students will come away with a better sense of the paradoxical coordinates of power such as violence and welfare, central to the making and unmaking of global modernity”
•reading: we will gradually build up towards the more difficult texts and ideas.
•note: You will not necessarily receive a better grade for any external research or new information you bring in but on how well you relate to the texts and ideas we have discussed in class. two student presentations. often a quieter, more considered response will be more highly valued.
[Singh seeks to signal] a wider range of forces (of which “repression” sarkub سرکوب would be one) and forms of contract (modes of give and take that are not exactly captured by the idea of “compassion” rahm رحم) [=/= VOA or BBC's dangerous notion of “informing” iranians’ political awareness]
-these two forms exist as potential tendencies of power, two forms among others that **power over life may take**
*tendencies* are not static or ahistorical [- Foad's “tendencies” (to destiny)] --> tendencies may morph and take new shapes --> they can also turn toxic when they are disappointed --> we oscillate from redemption to catastrophe =/= [this is the kind of political act/project we need:] “with Mitra and Varuna (~ region of structural-potential tendencies) we are not giving up hope, but the project becomes more specific: to track the particular degrees of force (many of which may be morally objectionable) and the modes of contract that are available in a polity” -Singh
...gestured to tendencies of thought
@iranian friends
to inhabit Mitra and Varuna is to not give up all political hopes and criticism (=/= dialectical political logic ==> a final purifying battle [~ Mehdi's totall earthquake offering a “higher” synthesis to his Tehran in a destructive scenario])
*** the locus of disappointment (& hope) [for iranian] ***
a concept can:
•shift or reverse the locus of our hopes and[...]
(91)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.8[...] />
there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world
--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}
Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics
(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)
we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]
(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivi[...]
(92)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.7[...]of the present by using the past. The clarification of laws and regulations and the settling of statutes and ordinances all stared with the First Emperor. He standardized documents.
(to think of) memory as a construction of the present
analyzing organizational memory
organizing analytical memory
memorizing organizational analysis
--> multifaceted stories open to interpretation =/= true/false facts
****remembering: an activity which carries with it its own context****
work on ajayeb and my ongoing commentary on archive and memory is part and parcel of the organizational theory
not to forget that:
•rediscovery is easier than remembering
•statistics --as--> filtering mechanism --as--> proactive forgetting
•forgetting ==> change of identity ['clean slate’ is very well known state to mysticism, --> clearance(=? is to take away useless theory) and origins in geometry - #Serres]
organizational forgetting --producing/maintaining--> classification systems ==> move from heterogeneous forms of memory operating within multiple frameworks [like ajayeb bestiaries] to the privileging of a form of memory (potential memory) operating within a well-defined information infrastructure subtended by classification systems. (Bowker)
if your work is an intermediary profession invisible and removed at the earliest opportunity from the official record, create a “[name of your practice]-ing interventions classification” (?!) --> a fascinating system that creates a standardized language for describing what is it that your practice does in different or difficult ways
other systems (to organize and critique your accumulation of experience):
•sensitive outcomes classification scheme
•diagnosis scheme
*sometimes what you do does not need to leave a trace, like nursing (in which your duty is to remember for others) [a professions without form ~~> nothing can be preserved, coding past knowledge and linking it to current practice---in the context of the hospital's sociotechnical system], or cleaning [doing everything that nobody else does], or storytelling [you have to go to a new country every day, going to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions
in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?
(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level
# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am produ[...]
(93)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.5[...] to a foreign zones], or certain kinds of performances [@Arianna --> the intensity, focus, and complexity of care], [going from being expert to novice], and many times not codable into discrete units of work practice to be carried out on specific occasions
in my hypertext writing, am i trying to enable myself to talk about my work in a language that computers could understand?
(do we need?) to get at (and maintain?) the deep structure of the one's situation
--> transformational grammar
--> bring intuitive decision-making to a conscious level
# the issue of the validity or not of ajayeb's knowledge is entirely orthogonal to my purpose. I am producing an anatomy of what it has meant in the case of bestiary writing to create such a science
(my issue with) [*]strategy: a way of managing a past that threatens to grow out of control
(in working with bestiaries my research question:) what could provide for a good ordering of memory?
-(which professions act as) distributed memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations
(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work
...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)
the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass
(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> s[...]
(94)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.6[...]k complex representations
(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work
...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)
the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass
(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system
...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do s[...]
(99)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.6[...]fication systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories
* construction is always reconstruction *
artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distributio[...]
(102)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...]emorization the world scientifically
classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
Bowker > Matsuda > Edouard Claparede's experiment (1907) of having a stranger rush into the classroom, do something outrageous, and then have students describe what happened --> “that the past--even of a simple event--was less a record than a sort of taxonomy. Not perceptions, but categorization of familiar types was the major function of memory”
#bambi
pigeonholing of facts
how apass as an organizations is coding for artistic research within the framework of their memory systems?
“There is no room on the [filling] form to write an essay on race identity politics.”
do we need to develop and standardize my discipline-specific nomenclature (in our research microworld) in order to name without ambiguity? --> redefinition of disciplinary boundaries --> shaping of your work so that its future practice converges on potential memory
we murder, they note
they draw from their secret[s]
infrastructure-thinking: Ajayeb Network-Making Minimum Data Set
in ajayeb's literature the very information infrastructure itself (should let be or) is in flux ==> discourses make strange connections between themselves
-in ajayeb the infrastructure assumes the position of every node --> reworked in my #Rigs
“...we are afloat in a sea of multiple, fractured causalities each demanding their own classification systems--and their own apparatus of record collection.” (Bowker)
classification (systems): a warrant and a tool for forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly[...]
(103)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.7[...]forgetting, and operating the distribution of this forgetting (in space of scientific memory.)
it tells you what to forget (for example the religious and metaphysical,) and how to forget it
[the formation (training) of artists covers up the formation (production) of artistic knowledge]
-the social story of science is excluded from the organization of the sciences, and held outside of it =/= situated knowledge
-a natural hierarchy of sciences is offered: every discipline needs to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/records.html
we have learned from Foucault that different (medical) records, different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, body politic, and bodies of knowledge
@Olga
record is the story of the organizational infrastructure [@Marialena, Olga]
[Foucault on knowing in the practice of medicine:] cascade of inscriptions --> writing [--> totality of observers/observations ==> “true knowledge"] --> modern clinical gaze ==> pathological processes of individual bodies (=/= medicine of species: individual symptoms / medical knowledge, essential truth beneath the sensible individuality)
...a body which hides the essences of the disease --> production of the organizations which enact and treat it
How is the patient (or choreographic) body's specific geometry and its historicity created?
*body is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work
(Foucauldian) dispositif: a network within which the body acquires its spe[...]
(104)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...]ces of the disease --> production of the organizations which enact and treat it
How is the patient (or choreographic) body's specific geometry and its historicity created?
*body is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work
(Foucauldian) dispositif: a network within which the body acquires its specific ontology
(Latour < Bowker:) the record ‘mediates’ the relations that it organizes, the bodies that are configured through it
regarding record, we can be concerned with:
•practices of reading and writing which bring the record to life
•mapping the configurations the record helps bring into being
how the structuring of the record speaks to the structuring of the bodies (of the artists?) we investigate? (@Sofia, Olga)
record -->{
production of human bodies
organizational hierarchies
selective memories
_________
Ribes Bowker - Between Meaning and Machine.pdf
...in the wake of ontologies
in participating in knowledge projects, first we learn about ontologies and then learned how to create them
(we rarely “produce” knowledge, we always participate)
ontology: an information technology for representing specialized knowledge in order to:
•facilitate communication across disciplines
•share data
•enable collaboration
(am i) representing the knowledge of my communities (?) -- what does that mean?
*routinization* (is that which is at stake in ontologies) --?--> *apprehension*: orientation to the informational organization of ones field
(to attend the routinizations and apprehensions in one's own practice --> ontology building)
•my routines of reading, highlighting, writing, idiosyncratic talks, feedbacks, questions, silences,
--> (attend to the) transformative consequences of learning and travd traversing routines --[+]--> the practice and material tools that accompany the reworking of them {knowledge in informational terms, fables, etc.}--> problematic of inter-operability
--> (and asking) how a (broader) community's interests are at stake with this? {to engage and enrol that community through what activities?} #microworld
(my routines:) with confidence deliberately working with:
•interrupting stories with stories
•partial connection (and its performance)
•moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
•mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
•mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al makhlughat
•mobilizing anachronic apparatus --> mobilizing different timescales ==> mixing up what counts as “us” (=/= chronology [[...]
(105)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.9[...] to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”
fact is a consequence
(Dewey)
(in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions) (& the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural *potential* memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}
artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)
(out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?
Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”
standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications
what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wider scope of reading: rhetorics, semiotics, objectivity, analysis, architecture,)
•historically creation of the infrastructure
•ubiquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature
*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes [...]
(108)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67[...]s changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard
where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]
residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous
what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply
we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world
“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]
(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing[...]
(109)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.1[...]ength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards
‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]
when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur
(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’
common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)
(my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of ‘atomic-level’ data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)
-is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”
they draw from their secret[s]
a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory
social embeddedness of scientific truth
(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb
as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist
‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle
______________
against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”
***how we are creating different kinds of past (out of the information infrastructures that we build)?
(pointed out by Bowker) the whole notion of big data is coming from the invention of census (amar-giri آمارگیری) in late 18th century, as its predecessor in a genealogy of techniques of government. “bi[...]
(110)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.2[...]-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”
they draw from their secret[s]
a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory
social embeddedness of scientific truth
(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb
as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist
‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle
______________
against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”
***how we are creating different kinds of past (out of the information infrastructures that we build)?
(pointed out by Bowker) the whole notion of big data is coming from the invention of census (amar-giri آمارگیری) in late 18th century, as its predecessor in a genealogy of techniques of government. “big data is grown up around that idea of control” --> statistics: (etymologically) the science of the state*
“I” <== me + my data
heavily informated world
flashbulb memory*
‘what were you doing when #Bambi's mother got shot?’ people have vivid but 80% of the time wronge memories of that day --> we are good at creating certainty in memory, but not very good at recognizing the ways past is differently configured according to different kinds of *memory practice*
the eternal flame file type/format
the psychoanalyst of Tintin
active archiving is about the framing of the present, and not about the future record
*commemoration is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world
(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world
on way or another, databa[...]
(111)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.3[...]ions with other languages
what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?
(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing
my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity
(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)
(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?
my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages
>
my Rigs... :
•local restrictions of wach word
•the tendency of words to occur next to each other their degree of crystallization
[for my hypertext] (Zellig Harris:) the constraints or demands that words place on one another are transmitted as socially obligatory information [as physical information, the kind measured in bits, not the semantic information used in dictionary definitions.]
socially obligatory ‘information’-[as ‘physical information’ (kind measured in bits) =/= semantic information (used in dictionary definitions)] ==(transmits)==> constraints or demands that words place on one another
(my hypertext ajayeb is an) “informational niche”
[and what about the matter of ‘actual use’?]
ajayeb.net “rules”: a set of normative combinatorial constraints
recursive application of existing constraints ==> new patterns
*process of language: from optimal to obligatory*
(in respect of history:story: obligatory meanings of Attar, and so on)
--> in my work this flow is reversed: from obligatory (meanings of Attar or ajayeb) to optimal. that is perhaps why sometimes people say that they don't understand me or that I am wonge.
-memory is the matter of statistical fact: (core) meaning ~= “selection”
***the fate of my contribution depends on and is determined by my position in the communicative network
pidgin دست وپا شکسته ومخلوط : creative adaptations
ajayeb.net is a pidgin?
*pidginization: any process of reduction or simplification of linguistic resources {"=/=”, “=”, “==>”, “-->"}
my ajayeb writing:
step 1: redundent simplification of linguistic resources [--> creoles نژاد مخلوط: that segment of a continuum of variation which exhibits the maximum divergence from the standard but which is still connected to other portions of the meshwork (Farsi+English)]
step[...]
(113)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.6[...]sent **
Mnemosyne, said the Greeks, is the mother of the Muses
occult memory systems <== Renaissance Hermetic tradition --?--> lullism (lullaby? Hoda) <--✕-- rhetoric tradition
the history of memory
the problems of the mental image, of the activation of images, of the grasp of reality through images
...................................
the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve
...................................
knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting
create + share + dispute knowledge
(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways
axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information
including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•
unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/
eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”
(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net
infrastructure =/= system
infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process
(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowl[...]
(120)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.8[...]it and compensation/
eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”
(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net
infrastructure =/= system
infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process
(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]
wikis of all sorts
(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science
vigor and growing utility
“distance matters”
(Olson)
commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats
data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)
hierachically organized forms of credentialing
in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models
(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time
(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change
knowledge of past climates
@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organizatio[...]
(121)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.9[...] up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==> narrative ideal presen
•
the time that the institution of the sciences create:
1- the time of the experiment/field study: going back billions of years, quantum units of time, tree rings; peat mosses; fossil seeds;
2- the time of the scientific enterprise, historiographical stances shared among sets of disciplines
3- the law of nature: the past which scientists create can be read as an eternal present
(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system
(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram
Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past
(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past
tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive
“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)
built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural landscapes] trails in memory terms, because it is not our own personal memory that is being engraved--it is the collective memory of our culture
(my favorite) specialized archival technology (~= memory practice): list*
synchronization in the 14th century, where information provided the ‘coin’ which allowed multiple endeavors--social and natural, along a (different) material substrate
...................................
idio + sync
-idio- (“private,” “one's own,” not capable of engaging in the public sphere, for Athenians: concerned exclusively with private (--> a natural state of ignorance that all persons are born into) (private soldier with no skills?) [~=? mast مست] =/= “polites” ~ police [~=? mohtaseb محتسب (--from--> احتساب, شمارنده, بشمارآورنده)])
-syn- (“with”)
کرم + حلیه
hile + karam
سجده شو[...]
(122)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.2[...]esent
(total recall:) memory as a metaphor needed by a ‘handicapped’ observer who cannot see a complete system
(same technique was used in Gulf War, Ali's production of consensus by flat) encephalogram
Ehsan's transmission sub rosa of information: stories and practices from his wild, discontinuous, ever-changing past
(Lyell's geology of earth:) working from the position that there was no sign of the origin of the earth, nor any portent of its end--what we have access to is a set of records in the landscape which leave the impression of massive upheaval and discontinuity in the past
tools to think past =/=? tools of (our own) archive
“most groups [...] engrave their form in some way upon the soil and retrieve their collective remembrances within the spatial framework thus defined” (Halbwachs 1968 > Bowker)
built: we often don't think of such [reworked natural [...]
(123)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.2[...]work*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (o[...]
(124)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.4[...]andard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities
increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science
systematizers
nested series of regions
synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientation course, “that is why refugees are coming here"]
fable: history as the tale of struggle (~ liberty against fatality)
(glorious) race into the future
temps
•time
•weather
(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)
syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra
senility kohulat
**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor
“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time
1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body terrestrial (much as political events affected the body politic)
(Lyell + Buchez + Michelet ==>) (reconfigured the world from) a *tapestry of tales*[~= ajayeb] --to--> random access memory/archive [RAM]****
isotropic spatiotemporal analysis
glitterati
glitter + literati
(framed people: made fashionable and beautiful)
Lyell's time:
1- time[...]
(126)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.6[...]ying, liable to be created or destroyed
•(=/=) the whole: immutable and eternal (just like Buchez's society)
}--> fable of ‘nature as a whole’
[==asserting==> that no hybrid had ever achieved a permanent niche on earth]**
that nature keeps a check on the whole process by organizing flora and fauna into “nations”
[==asserting==> nothing can survive long outside its nation]** (=/= cyborg)
“cycle” of years <--> a region
a climatic great year <--> earth over time
“revolutions” of the earth's surface <--> species change
industrial revolution, reaching its peak as Lyell was writing
--> the stillness, the ***ineluctable equilibrium between creation and destruction*** (=/= other facts available to Lyell's contemporaries)
(fable, a powerful myth still stalking our collective discourse today:) that human time was going faster now than it ever had in the past --to--> give humanity a privileged position within the geological record
(a different time for geology)
**[clockwork mechanism]
how geology in the 19th century shaped our contemporary ideas of database
-(earth is an archivist, but a bad one, it is up to the geologist to pull together information -->{ earth creates false records --> humands create false records through mudging the earth's annals with mules, hybrids, and monsters --✕--> geologist can read between the lines ==> true record of stasis)
the earth's archival technology + efficient use of information technology
astronomy was in the 19th century the science of regularity : all the apparent perturbations in the earth's orbit were reckoned to be embedded in cycles of varying duration --> universe = effectively clockwork mechanism
(for an archivist [~ Lyell]:) earth = special kind of clock, an *hourglass*
(astronomy + geology -->) (a contemplation of) the regular clockwork mechanism that seemed to govern both the heavens and the earth [+ Babbage: judged that human history was in its underlying tendency equally regular] ==> ***first and second nature converge onto a timeless present and an anisotropic flow of time***
*anisotropic: having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. (wood is stronger along the grain than across it, or anisotropic filtering in computer graphic rendering at oblique viewing angles)
-varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement. (electron scattering is anisotropic) ~-> palindromic time
*isotropic: having a physical property which has the same value when measured in different directions. not varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement
(my project:) **picture of earth sciences**
(--> stories of macrocosm in Olearius)
picture of earth in 1830s:
earth itself as a [...]
(127)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.7[...] orbit were reckoned to be embedded in cycles of varying duration --> universe = effectively clockwork mechanism
(for an archivist [~ Lyell]:) earth = special kind of clock, an *hourglass*
(astronomy + geology -->) (a contemplation of) the regular clockwork mechanism that seemed to govern both the heavens and the earth [+ Babbage: judged that human history was in its underlying tendency equally regular] ==> ***first and second nature converge onto a timeless present and an anisotropic flow of time***
*anisotropic: having a physical property which has a different value when measured in different directions. (wood is stronger along the grain than across it, or anisotropic filtering in computer graphic rendering at oblique viewing angles)
-varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement. (electron scattering is anisotropic) ~-> palindromic time
*isotropic: having a physical property which has the same value when measured in different directions. not varying in magnitude according to the direction of measurement
(my project:) **picture of earth sciences**
(--> stories of macrocosm in Olearius)
picture of earth in 1830s:
earth itself as a kind of large information storage device not a very efficient one, but still remarkable -->> the inefficiencies of the storage device could be mitigated (as Beaumont and Lyell pointed out) by redundencies in the recording process -->> these redundencies could be perceived through efficient use of the new transport infrastructure (steamboat, train, etc.) -->> then geology would converge with astronomy in calling forth a historical time as regular and perfect as that of the clockwork solar system (hymned as an accurate clock)
}-->
“archival process ~= a natural technology” --> from natural to ideal: archive being mediated by technology marked by clockwork regularity
==> “earth = clock” (associated with the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*
census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state
statistical thinking
(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic
idea of the ‘book of nature’
([...]
(129)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.8[...]the triumph of industrial society, because it ran like clockwork [---> go to german pünktlich punctuality]) --> industrial time writen into Lyell's geology: two methods of factory production *the division of labor* and the *parceling up of time into regular units* are both writen into time that Lyell created for the new discipline of geology
--> factory & geology were the precisely the same problem: *organization of time*
census
statistical record-keeping, a central technology for a modern state
statistical thinking
(this is Lyell in Bowker's research on memory practices in sciences:)
through a linguistic metaphor, Lyell endeavored to explain the apparent asymmetry between past and present. this metaphor brings out the peculiar centrality of humanity in Lyell's geology and thus the centrality of human society to his problematic
idea of the ‘book of nature’
(Lyell's logic) --> we humans have access only to a limited and random grammar of the ‘book of nature’ ==> *burden of proof* lies with those with thier set of *past causes* to explain the past
[!!]
Lyell's geology is a kind of bookkeeping device that allows the storage of vast amounts of information by sorting them into a kind of filing cabinet of different kinds of events (=/= ajayeb)
(his work revolving around an understanding of archives)
Lyell's “economy of nature”
principle of division of labor into the profession of geology + into the economy of nature }==> cumulative reports in a stateless present (=/= situated knowledges) ==> calculus of regularity out of apparent chaos and old time
true language of geology
(from a) groundwork --> contemplation of more general questions --> complicated results -->{ indefinite lapse of ages --> the existing causes of change
(?Marialena contributing to) earth's archive
scriptural authority (=/= rigor)
halcyon future
ایام خوب گذشته ayam-e khub-e gozashte/ayande
when the center of calculation is in place, there is no need to move
past --> knowledge developed catastrophically, and analysis were framed in terms of catastrophes
present --> knowledge develops uniformly and analysis are framed in terms of continual steady change
Buchez --> science would be the agent that converged both human and natural history onto isomorphic time*** [fantasy of Star Trek]
symmetry between the past of the geological discipline and of the earth
[title]
Freud's penis
inscription of records onto skin
the changes humanity has brought are (not of physical but of a) moral nature
strange tale! --> it is the bestial part of humanity fitting into [...]
(130)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.8[...]o skin
the changes humanity has brought are (not of physical but of a) moral nature
strange tale! --> it is the bestial part of humanity fitting into the economy of nature, whereas civilized humanity operates in a different dimension to nature ==> creating the temporary appearance of an anomaly in “nature's book”
[title]
*the time of the good record keeper*
time of God
sybarites (an urbanite addicted to luxury and pleasures of the senses)
sycophants (=/= a public informer)
incalculable, irrational past seems to Lyell full of noise and cacophony irregularity
memory ensconced in books (~ filtered memory, rational memory, part of the archive with its very clear point of origin in printing) freed us from instict and brutality [---> go to TED talk ‘big history’ by David Christian, fable of printed record and progress of humanity tale]
/>
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor
Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature
information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied
information explosion of the early 19th century + new + new ways of describing the past
“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)
heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]
...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]
indifinite space as filled with worlds...
colossi
earthquakes
floods
storms
tranquil variations
“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present
[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)
moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an [...]
(131)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.9[...]ve[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena
the metronomic story
the mnemonic story
***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)
new memory practices
•***lie at the heart of our ways of knowing (both ourselves and the world)***
•they skew our available ontological space
it seems our contemporary memory practice is highly prosaic [~ german?] (=/= baroque)
[***mythological dimensions of new memory practices:] (*there is a compelling connection between the information revolution as an economic fact and as a statement about the nature of universe:)
19th century rationalization + bureaucracy (==> dramatic new information-processing and communication technologies) ==> today's institutions = **to oppose entropy** @apass
DNA ~= global economy --> nature of existence & new technology synchronized
(--> a history of science as successive decentralization of human) ==> ***eschatological (base of) information revolution*** : every material structure or energy flow (@Ali's pot carrier) could be used/seen to carry information
--> (mediated in 19th century:)
nature of the universe --to--> nature of humanity --to--> organization of economy
information mythology [~ “information” can travel anywhere and be made up of anything ~ “everything is information"] = interface between the social and natural worlds
}==> ‘a general statement about the nature of information' = 'a general statement about the nature of the universe’
(Bowker:) the new memory modality was at root an economic process of ordering social and natural space and time so that “objective” information can circulate freely [==> democracy, science]
==> package the world + make it deterministic
--✕--> (we must) make information historical (again)*
...................................
Avital's work has concerned itself [...] with the fact that technology is irremissible. Mary Shelley projected this view of technology with her massive, monumental, commemorative work on the technobody, which was the nameless monster. The problem with (or opening for) technology is that no one is or c[...]
(134)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69[...]one is or can stay behind the wheel, finally, and no one is in charge. And the way she has tried to route and circuit the thinking of technology--indeed, in a posthumanist frame--exposes the extent to which it belongs to the domain of testing.
the contiguous neighborhoods of broken experience and rerouted memory
the myths of liveness
[my] problem with television[/news] is that it exists in trauma
-trauma undermines experience and yet acts as its tremendous retainer
*trauma: a memory that one cannot integrate into one's own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others
the black-box of talking survival
Robocop: highly complex cyborg (who came equipped with memory traces, superego, id, and--ever displacing the ego--a crypt)
court's frame-by-frame analysis of video --> recording and human memory @Ali
...................................
which ‘well-defined terms,’ *qualities of persistence*, object repository, and identifier resolvers am i using in ajayeb.net?
the performance of digital objects (and identifiers) (not treated as a simple binary property)
*(to retrieve) human- and machine-readable information*
persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)
[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality
which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update
[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothingothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **
“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?
(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)
(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are[...]
(144)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.1[...]e presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء
found in the wild
found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software
how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?
...................................
[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]
(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*
*people-centric work* (like library science and education)
quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”
to open up some of the ‘literature of’
(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition
difficult to commodify
difficult to describe
not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions not intended to be prescriptive) --> *to historicize and denaturalize concepts (of competition, innovation,,)*
Bowker + Leigh Star > Calvert: *things perceived as real are real in their consequences*
market competitiveness has a plethora[~ excess, افراط ,ازدياد] of measures --✕--> profit: the seller-centric proxy measure of consumer interest
“our idealized notion of competition as a generato[...]
(145)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]er explanations for innovation --> for example (Wylie showing:) (archaeology's enshrined belief that) male-centered hunting activities dominated prehistoric caloric intakes ==✕==> other hypotheses for the transition to agriculture --✕--> women's leading role in the development of agriculture--arguably the most significant innovation in human history--could finally be detected
[bids for status by denying the feminized and second class aspects of library work] --> ***the labor of care is at the core of library work*** --> *teaching, like technology, is always a relationship, and that relationship is undergrided by the labor of care* (--> affective labor is literally vital to the successful delivery of other kinds of services)***
the ways women are called on to manage their and other's feelings <--✕--> technology is positioned in out culture as rational and precise and therefore (masculine and) unemotional [--> look at the film Lucy]
successful education and mentorship depend on this skill, which, like household labor, is difficult to account for in “competitive” economic analysis
**articulation work**
the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly --> Leigh Star
(my work begins in) information systems may leave gaps in work processes that require real-time adjustments, or ‘articulation work,’ to complete the processes
(my research: through ajayeb i have been busy with learning to “make friends” with both technologies and theories)
every system is an assemblage --> Calvert applying Haraway's insight and think of technologies as significant prostheses ==> [*]librarianship: a work that (primarily) hooks up people with their technologies
librarians articulate technologies --> they help people adapt technologies
librarian's articulation work is both technological and affective =/= competitive
(in techno-capital) supressing labor costs ==> deskilling
deskilling and de-professionalization under the intertwined guises of competitiveness and innovation
an example of deskilling:
-Haraway: “to be feminized means to be made extremely vulnerable; able to be disassembled, reassembled, exploited as a reserve labor force, seen less as workers than as servers; subjected to time arrangements on and off the paid job that make a mockery of a limited work day; leading to an existence that always borders on being obscene, out of place, and reducible to sex. deskilling is an old strategy newly applicable to formerly privileged workers.”
education has been difficult to comodify, and remains labor intensive =/= innovations in online education ==> creating inroads in the deskilling and commodification of teaching labor:
•course curriculum --> course content
•teaching --> delivery
*video technologies + internet ==> face-to-face interpe[...]
(146)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.4[...]attern of rules (program*)
programming: *metalinguistic abstraction* [--> engineering design] : building a mini-language to express a problem, using a fixed computer programming language (on a given hardware) to construct a new language that enables describing (and hence to think) the problem --> using:
•primitives means of combination
•primitives means of abstraction
--> representation of data and control (<~~ individual bits of storage and primitive machine instructions)
+ using the given hardware to erect systems/utilities for the efficient implementation of resource-limited computations
distinction between “passive” data and “active” processes =/= Lisp
(procedures and data are just abstractions, they are not really distinct) --> programming language should have methods for combining and abstracting procedures and data
means of abstraction: by which compound elements can be named and manipulated as units
modularity --> localized part of the system
<== perception of the system
•objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects --> concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
•streamous: information that flow in the system --> delayed evaluation
(for example) a bank account: has state in that the answer to the question “Can I withdraw $100?” depends upon the history of deposit and withdrawal transactions
object decomposed into computational objects (each with their own time-varying local state variables) --> model
object programming: model real-world objects with local state by computational objects with local variables --> identify time variation in the real world with time variation in the computer --> implement the time variation of the states of the model objects in the computer with assignments to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation
random: statistical properties of uniform distribution
object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model
Building Abstractions with Data
how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)
building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language
data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts o[...]
(147)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.7[...](infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation
random: statistical properties of uniform distribution
object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model
Building Abstractions with Data
how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)
building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language
data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’
versioning
garbage collection
...................................
the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”
Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]
***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*
categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without
each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes
(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation [--✕--> Anand's jinn temporality and genealogy of human memory]
mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)
“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)
locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason
crossing of cultures
*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*
(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)
media ~= knwoledge form
in media arts studies i learn to ask which cruicual material limitations have been radically ease[...]
(148)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.7[...]ty and genealogy of human memory]
mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)
“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)
locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason
crossing of cultures
*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*
(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)
media ~= knwoledge form
in media arts studies i learn to ask which cruicual material limitations have been radically eased in a digital era --> impulse to hoard/share + constant tension with the epistemological work of categorization and classification (--> database) + (ongoing) feminization of the field
the library and information science knowledge --> intense expertise required to enact it =/=!? art expertise (a category of works that are expertise-free)
(gift of Marx, Foucault, Lorde, Haraway, Leigh Star in) *understanding subjugated epistemologies*
(Lorde) master's tool dismantle the master's house? = can the technologies and epistemologies that have been used to organize thinking about the world in one way succesfully uproot that way?
“recovering multivocality”
رسوب
*enact residuality
*residual (of transformations [--> sometimes wiping away previous techniques for dividing and describing, and substituting another set of categories that don't easily map to the first ==> eliminating the residuum of the old order --> case of ajayeb? --> can we make overlaps and hybridities of old/new categories? ~ *residual categories*: affective-epistemic content that often go unclassified. Calvert: *affect* is too thin, too subjective to calcify into a category. it abundantly uses its categories in a way that offers a kaleidoscopic shuffling and reshuffling of the items***)])
*residuum
categories overlapping, non-hierarchical (“animal” + “livestock”, etc.)
truthiness
melting pot
actions (filled with verbs)
nouns (both living and nonliving entities)
*score of recognizable historical era*
using:
•filmic techniques (animation, montage, time lapse)
•affective techniques (sarcasm, intimacy)
how can we address aspects of apass's exceptionalism?
(with its things: characters, colors, doings, values)
[...]
(149)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.8[...]r generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)
(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections
labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)
...................................
[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]
c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage
discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)
face (slider) --> object monster
(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]
s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)
discourse =/= valorizing information
Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”
*Apologue*
research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual
internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’
(slider: marking everything)
semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*[...]
(150)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.9[...]lesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•
TERMINOLOGY:
*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly
*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”
*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies
*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)
*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)
(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list
*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements
*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)
*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.
PRACTICAL:
we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants
we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers
(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)
i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar
(i will describe them later)
and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew
[...]
(151)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...]erences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]
****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of injustice unfold, enfold]
‘to feel family and parent memories as our own’ --> a skill that intertwines historical and personal biography (sometimes trauma) as a feature of *memory encoding*
[*]autopoiesis: a notion, a theory of cellular organization, that makes a fold in history --> reformulating an orientation into an ‘experimental epistemology’
*memoir animated word-worlds worm-holed* (~= my lecture-performances, Katie King's talksites --> speculations gathering with stigmergy, recursive paradox, and a sympoiesis of boundary objects)
#my project: redesigning ajayeb's “writings” among dispersed, diffracted, and emergent methods of attention
-to redesign “aboutness” (as nonrepresentational : recursive relational agency of/about reciprocities in worldly processes)
-to redesign fiction of writing (khipu)
-to redesign @apass archive --> records of how things have happened, with whom, when, with what informational needs (instead of abstractions layered up), sometimes as agencies, sometimes as (in Sandoval's terms) oppositional and differential consciousness, (boundary objects) storing and performing our details and affects and memories
punitive parsimonies of explanation:
•over-simplications of complex systems
•pressures for social critique
•to travel as social panic
•retreat to political loyalties (<== confusion overwhelm cognitive schema)
•retreat to political belonging in search of trust
•
(more boundary objects:) many sorting apparatus reframings at varying grains of detail each savoring textures of disciplinary and other precisions amid noncoherent and materializing logics
(constitutive, agential) **cuts are connections**
-to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
differential details --in--> “us” --in--> Bateson's living patterns --in--> starfish's invertebrate radial symmetry --in--> redwood cloning timelines --in--> recursive epigenesis --in--> mechanism and structure in a segmenting egg --in--> human affiliations of power and state and love...
[*]differential consciousness: systems justice sensitive to multiple contexts, *politics of attachment*
@apass's environment (mix of communities of justice and of practice):
belief and disbelief, memberships and belongings, triggered and assembled
****to commit to a well-defined structure of identity for one hour, day, week, month, year**** (=/= Manning)
+ transform that identity according to the requisites of another oppositional ideological tactic (if reading [...]
(152)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.8[...] of entertainment and often produced in complicated technical collaborations [--> and that's what makes them interesting (=/= simple single authorships)]
-genre, formula, (style, fashion,) are intrinsic to the ways these products are produced and the ways they are enjoyed
genre --> subtle shifts possible across many repetitions (=/= something that happens only one time)
premodern literary forms (bestiary) --> structural variations + their pleasurable effects
fandom (collectivities of fans): venues in which high intensities of engagement and collaboration occur --> social and collaborative, (writing) reengineered with various apparatus, [pre-internet Trekkers:]
•...audio tape each episode and listen to the voices over and over in my bed at night, until I had the dialog memorized
•wrote long letters about each episode several times a week, coast to coast, analyzing each in great detail, and writing out particularly memorable bits of repartee
•
--> SF media fandoms (=/= SF literary fandoms), first really organized around Star Trek in the late 60s, early 70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses
*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)
Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•
like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others
Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut[...]
(153)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71[...]iate commercial products for their own informal uses
*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)
Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•
like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others
Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice
Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans
...................................
wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King
zoo spelled backwards
http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web
the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)
approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system
links of how *shared interdependent transsex* [shared rearrangement of sex and re/production] is unfolding
-responding to this rearrangement not through fear of [...]
(154)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.1[...]d billabongs
difference between these relational forms:
the first thing we need to know about a number is whether:
•it takes the one/many form (potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many) [cardinal number --> conserve value]
•the whole/parts form (having plurality contained within a unity) [ordinal number --> conserve order]
(in) shape-shifting between:
one/many form
whole/parts form
symbolic/indexical mode of semiosis
indexical/iconic mode of semiosis
}--> number works in inventive ways
thousands of Australians regularly attending their streams with bottles, thermometers, and pH meters, peering at tiny creatures they have scooped up with a net, trying to identify what they are and count their numbers
(the slogan) “you can't sustain what you haven't measured”
numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers --also--> contribute to constituting water as commodity, expanding possibilities for ‘doing business with water’
cordon sanitaire --> consistency must be quantifiable
two databases, separate institutions and websites, is counter-productive in a project assembling and disseminating information on the state of the nation's water resources?
@apass
...................................
patterns of behavior
forms of style
--emerge--> ?
(Rai researching the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones in India helps me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns
perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake
each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•
an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station
(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy
[...]
(155)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.4[...]ssibilities for ‘doing business with water’
cordon sanitaire --> consistency must be quantifiable
two databases, separate institutions and websites, is counter-productive in a project assembling and disseminating information on the state of the nation's water resources?
@apass
...................................
patterns of behavior
forms of style
--emerge--> ?
(Rai researching the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones in India helps me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns
perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake
each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•
an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station
(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy
all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets
photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject
a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies
like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy
my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore
(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)
[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it
...................................
Ticineto Clough
[...]
(156)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.4[...]ation =) intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces, below and above human perception**
[*]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)
(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing
(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)
}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*
sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi
*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)
control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)
[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)
[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics
[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)
(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: [...]
(157)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.5[...]the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi
*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)
control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)
[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)
[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics
[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)
(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new forms of distraction, new forms of habit, new forms of practice
*politics of intervention: a matter of entering in the middle in order to *modulate* ~= (Rai's) counter-actualization (~= criticism): moving down from the extended, back to the intensive or potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)
media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications
to give criticism more specificity and width
measure and media technologies
...................................
(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblage[...]
(158)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.6[...] potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)
media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications
to give criticism more specificity and width
measure and media technologies
...................................
(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblages of affect, matter, policy, culture, biology, perception, value, force, sensibilities, practices, and discourses
-sensorial, algorithmic, material, and territorial makeshift infrastructures enabling digital cultures in India today
cultures of pirated workarounds (jugaad) in digital technologies
emergent digital cultures
stratified data
*hacking empiricism: a self-reflective practice of linking a problem to both its ecology of sense and sensation and to its processes and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways
ecologies of workaround practices
...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation
...nodes of algorithmic capital
traverse and exceed
islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India
marketing and hacking of digital cultures
social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability
**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies
heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)
Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****
entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)
-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & co[...]
(159)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.6[...]oppression (?)
reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry
#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)
integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies
ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium
variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?
(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities
preemptive
proleptic
prophetic
(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds
(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit
(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment
(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****
(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices
...................................
origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance industry (==> operating our lives by technologies of information and computing)
[we can live with it differently]
logic of progress is not the issue, logic of acceleration is the problem
(idea of) frictionless economy ==> must go fas[...]
(161)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.3[...] the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds
(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit
(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment
(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****
(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices
...................................
origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance industry (==> operating our lives by technologies of information and computing)
[we can live with it differently]
logic of progress is not the issue, logic of acceleration is the problem
(idea of) frictionless economy ==> must go faster and faster
discourse of stasis =/= how to explore change?
not preserving endangered species, but preserving the possibility of change
desks are information technologies
Bowker > Sina: every critical work (today) must include the centrality of data (and calculation) in our lives
(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --> my interest in Olearius]<br />
...................................
(Cameron's image of) Terminator: relentless unidirectional progress [that you can't negotiate with] (~= modernity) ==> destruction of cultures and communities --> destroy ourselves
how to live with Terminator = how to live with modernity --> postmodernity
(in the film the Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)
absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with
its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal
(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of[...]
(162)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.3[...]he) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked
acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience
broadcasting device = recording device
authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)
modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)
confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glossolalia غريبه گفتارى --> contemporary spirit possession performances ==> the truth of the spirits in the mass-mediatized world is not referential and certainly not universal --✕--> the truth of the spirits centers on questions about the difference between noise and information]
mediums embrace technology
mediumship proliferates
mediums and the media provide each other with metaphors
(mediums seek to escape the relationship altogether) in forms of ecstatic nonrepresentation or absolute renunciation
Chuchad cutting his tongue --> disavow disavowal
“[...]he rendered himself voiceless, and the only sounds he could make were those of exhalation and inhalation: sounds of the body as machine”
...the crowd gasped and then repeated --> confused awe & automatism
[a fable:] “Chuchad placed the tongue on a piece of white paper, and the blood quickly diffused into the fibers. For a moment it appeared as though the tongue was writing a blunt, indecipherable hieroglyph. Chuchad then held the paper to his mouth so it was covering his face and pressed the tongue back into its original place. This time, he seemed to be rewriting, or rather, writing in reverse, and the glyph was inscribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmission = the truth”
•[*]confession: a mode of accession or conformity to the message
in Buddhism of premodern cosmologies --> a domain of natural signification where there is *a pure identity between s[...]
(164)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.9[...] wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•
to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth
*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently
(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper
Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored
...................................
scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence
new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning
document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?
bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)
early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography
[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*
objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*
document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*
1951
document: evidence in support of a fact
any physical or symbiotic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon
--> viewed with access to evidence
=/= (concerned with) text
document =/= ajayeb's text object [--> pop-up book]
(object) (document?)
star in the sky no
photo of star yes
stone in river no
stone in museum yes
an[...]
(165)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.7[...]has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have to be made into documents)
4. there is a phenomenological position (the object is perceived to be a document)
indexicality: *the quality of having been placed in an organized, meaningful relationship with other evidence --> gives an object its documentary status* [<-- for who and why is this useful?]
modernist mentality:
•scientific management
•standardization
•bibliographic control
--as--> complementary and mutually reinforcing bases for achieving progress
spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character
1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)
cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience
artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object
semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals
[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope
**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn
...................................
Calvert
technobibliocapital
librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)
will to knowledge --manifest--> in[...]
(167)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.8[...]er's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital document?
--Buckland--> becomes more problematic, unless we remember the path of reasoning underlying the largely forgotten discussions of Otlet's objects and Briet's antelope
**documenting the antelope** =/= ajayeb
antelope: Ethiopian word for the elusive unicorn
...................................
Calvert
technobibliocapital
librarians cannot hope to really change how people seek knowledge in libraries (they are not *information awareness office* ~= news agency)
will to knowledge --manifest--> in a massive electronic data processing project
[*]library science: a set of practices for producing knowledge in subjects --> *producing subjects through knowledge production*
patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space
enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection
technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient
technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]
(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides
(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*
**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)
new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely acc[...]
(168)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.9[...]oduction*
patron: certain kinds of subjects (=/= citizen), consumers with an abiding market rationality and an interest in individualist private space
enmeshed in practices of classification, circulation, collection
technology + libraries + capital
•capital: social, political, economic, and other relationships crystallized in things, including books and libraries
•biblio: libraries, books, knowledge
•techno: technologies (both silicon-based and not) that make producing, storing, and reproducing knowledge possible and efficient
technology and capital shaping library practices [and animation of animal practices? --> emphasize animal geography]
(legacy of bibliography and book collecting) 1930 --> library practice centered on the development of bibliographic standards emphasizing procedures for identifying and indexing authors and tides
(21st century) democracy of texts, collaboration with autodidacticism and public education, is now giving itself over to the *circulation of commodities*
**the subjects produced through 21st century librarianship are customers and consumers** (who seeks content =/= knowledge)
new librarian --> new freedom of information --> free market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)
libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)
(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of[...]
(169)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.9[...]ree market (in the form of atomized particles of “microcontent” allowing free-floating information to be freely accessed via computers and networks, without the censorious mediation of embodied librarians)
libraries --> techniques for ordering (~-> discourse of standardization)
(shifting) ways the library has operated alongside the state as a disciplinary & ideological apparatus
•18th century --> national library
•19th century --> new techniques for ordering, discourse of standardization and order (in the library) + searching and retrieval external to the mind of the librarian
•19th century --> [emerging understanding of the role of literacy in worker self improvement ==>] public library <==> a project of nation, citizenship, democracy, self-betterment, universal education + concurrent with a serious reconstitution of hierarchies of access to books
•late 19th century --> paternalist financial auspices of Andrew Carnegie (who funded 1689 library buildings) for the explicit objective of the self-education of
workers and immigrants --purpose--> acculturation and assimilation
•Paul Otlet --> universal decimal classification 1899
•late 20th century --> dreams of intelligent computers and objectivized information science : (from) library school --to--> school of information management systems
•
}--> *schematization efforts* --> (20th century) library science (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X
•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
[...]
(171)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.9[...]cience (continue producing itself) as a cooperative venture of flourishing information [triumphant rationalism]
•standardization
•automation
•propagate
•expand
(in the name of) democratization & civil rights
library ==contribute==> to the civic sphere:
•providing the information
•providing *behaviors* necessary for appropriate citizenship
library ==> classification system (DDC) --> general knowledge organization tool
late 20th century neo-liberal rationality ==intensify==>
•moral directive for self-betterment (as workers)
•reorienting the relation of subjects (toward the state and the social) as one of consumership
+ shift in the definition of knowledge
technobibliocapital --> (new era of) ordering texts & subjects
[*appreciative =/= affirmative* <-- learning from Calvert, we can be appreciative but not affirmative]
[to be critical =] ****not to:
•dismiss X (by thinking of it as) composed entirely of domination [<-- @apass, Pierre] ~= to laud something as a timeless ideal
•evoke a sense of relief that we have X that are free (of power relations, freely available to all, and filled with free-flowing information)
}--> historical + present + future-looking formulations of X
•reverence for libraries of long gone days...
•accolades مراسم اعطای منصب شوالیه for librarians as heroes...
•libraries as the saviors of the people...
•as just another manifestation of government intrusion (paternalism, library: robust civilizing apparatuses, an ideal philanthropic gift)...
--Calvert--> **libraries are potent resources with vast possibilities for creating the worlds we inhabit** -->[*]library: (collectively produced ~ both collectively funded and collected from many sources) vibrant sites of knowledge generation + of power (for those who generate knowledge through libraries in turn diffuse this knowledge through other places and other people)
without a robust definition of power ==Calvert==> librarians have been unable to see or articulate how libraries have been in the service of disciplining subjugating power (a power that is productive not just for readers but of readers)
..weak appeals to market freedom
...................................
service-dominant logic = an enframing act --> a way of framing the world (which like all logics) chooses what to include and what to exclude from its frame of investigation and theory --Campbell--> how it enframes the world
marketing history --> (delineated between) “material (raw) resources =/= immaterial (dynamic) resources”
resources-assets-capabilities
(in math)
operand: passive objects that are manipulated (3, 5)
operator: specific actions that act upon opera[...]
(175)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74[...]t --> a way of framing the world (which like all logics) chooses what to include and what to exclude from its frame of investigation and theory --Campbell--> how it enframes the world
marketing history --> (delineated between) “material (raw) resources =/= immaterial (dynamic) resources”
resources-assets-capabilities
(in math)
operand: passive objects that are manipulated (3, 5)
operator: specific actions that act upon operands (+, x)
importance of the operand resource
-the relative role of operand resources began to shift in the late 20th century as humans began to realize that skills and knowledge were the most important types of resources
operand resource: (raw material and land) an act is performed on them =/= operant resource: (technologies, knowledge, skill) those employed to act on operand resources
}--> a conceptual separation with roots in Greek philosophy:
•Plato: “material embodiment = distraction to true knowledge”
•Descartes: privileging of mental life over physical matter
==> we inherit this style of philosophy (in the west) that values formal abstract objectless thinking as the standard canonical way of knowing the world
--> *information age*:
•endorses the pre-eminence of the immaterial and disembodies (mind, skill, mental life) over the material and embodied (brute matter, physicality)
•celebrate a *culture of demateriality*
•
=/= object oriented philosophy:
•Heidegger's theory of tool-being
•Latour's displacement of the human proposed by the actor-network theory
•Merleau-Ponty's sensual phenomenology
•
(continental philosophy + analytical philosophy in West -->) **philosophies of access** to the world : they assume that the human-world gap is the privileged site of all rigorous philosophy
interest in human access to objects [--> correlationism: if things exists, they do so only for us] =/=? interest in objects
(in marketing literature)
•operant resources:
human sophisticated
cultural strategic
active dynamic
agentic immaterial
specialized intelligent
relational primary
*infinite*
--link--> to notions of progrss and achievement in contemporary society
•operand resources:
inhuman machine-like
basic stuff
functional physical
inanimate raw
inert less important
secondary lesser
tangible subordinate
*finite*
service-dominant logic {
•operant --> infinite --> human's skill
•operand --> finite --> world's material
service-dominant logic ==> a cut (“=/=”) --> operant resources will take these sluggish raw inherently secondary materials and act on them to whisk them [...]
(176)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.1[...]a different kind of subjectivity (one which guards the self, something to be protected from the outside) is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space) [this is not merely architectural, it is also something about the clothing people wore: wearing different clothes in family or in the realm of strangers. houses became warmer]
(Simmel's) “urban subjectivity”: street physical over-stimulation ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside
(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the 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 ==> intens[...]
(177)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.7[...]ransformation of physiology and psychology in the 19th century, development of electrophysiology --> cultural history of electricity)
behaviour with a historical structure: a behaviour articulated in terms of socially determined norms and is part of the formation of a modern technological milieu
1879, Wundt's psychology laboratory in Leipzig, one of the practical and discursive spaces within modernity in which human beings “problematized what they are.” Foucault/
(Wundt's account defined attention [= will] as one of the highest integrative functions [---> go to #integrative in Sennett], its essential role in producing an effective unity of consciousness)
part of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction
conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning [...]
(178)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.1[...]t of the cultural logic of capitalism demands that we accept as natural switching our attention rapidly from one thing to another --> (capitalism as a) regime of reciprocal attentiveness and distraction
conceptualizer of a new economic and social space based on the quantification and distribution of energy:
•Wener von Siemens
•Lord Kelvin: globalization of telegraphic communication and subsequently in the commodification and marketing of electric power (in England) [telegraph: a world of anonymous, decontextualized information; moved history into the background and amplified the instant and simultaneous present/person]
•Edison: transition to centralised corporate capitalism (in late 19th century): his role in the emergence of a new system of quantification and distribution, a system for transmission and reception as abstract processes, ways in which a space of consumption and circulation could be dynamized/activated --> social field of individual subjects could be arranged into increasingly separate and specialized units (of consumption)
“Edison was a holistic conceptualizer and determined solver of the problems associated with the growth of systems” (Crary > Hughes)
Edison is paradigmatic: *the indistinction between information and visual images, and the making of quantifiable and abstract flow into the object of attentive consumption. his grasp of some of the systemic features of capitalism (in 1880s and 1890s) underscores the abstract nature of the products he “invented”. his work is inseparable from the continual manufacturer of new needs and the consequent restructuring of the network of relations in which such products would be consumed* --> other participants in the same historical project of perpetual rationalization and modernization: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andrew Grove, etc.
(kinetoscope and phonograph logic:) the structuring of perceptual experience in terms of a solitary rather than a collective subject --> today's computer screen as the primary vehicle for the distribution and consumption (of electronic commodities)
(late 20th century) management of attention <-- capacity of an observer to adjust to continual repatterning of the ways in which a sensory world can be consumed
@Hoda
ADD
dubious classification of an attentive deficit disorder --> durability of attention (posed as [implicitly] natural function) as a normative category of institutional power
-social construction of illness
-now ADD is not linked to any weakness of the will
-in adults: any economic shortcoming or social insecurity is now understandable in terms of a failure to apply oneself attentively to the ideologically determined standards of performance and “achievement”
--> in a culture that is so relentlessly founded on a short attention span, on the logic of the nonsequitur, on perceptual overload, on the general[...]
(179)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.1[...] thought) singling out a contemplative object], “the power by which thought at one time is connected with and made to relate to thought at another time”
--✕--> *firstness: self-immediacy, absolute presence (before synthesis and differentiation) ~ nonreferenciality (=/= perception, attention consumed/constituted in time ~= continuous quantity = *secondness)
using a more act-oriented term “thought” instead of “consciousness”
dissociation
anaesthesia
hallucination
multiple selves
--James--> temporal model of mind: ‘stream’
(=/= scenic model of mind)
[this was part of a larger institutional field in which scientific psychology generally was abandoning ‘elemental’ conceptions of consciousness in favour of operational or functional models]
==> observer: an artist confronted with the primordial chaos of sensation --> (ethics of) overlapping common choices (made of autonomous subjects [--> you can see James seeking to lessen the shock of recent works in science and psychology for an American middle-class readership])
(William James:) irreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization
my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate
emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher
attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary
Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold
by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence
(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness
hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses
focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object
sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorg[...]
(180)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.6[...]of the individual** }-->
spectacle:
[--✕--> looking at images]
----> (construction of conditions that) individuate, immobilize, separate subjects
}==>
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:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)
-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, television, cyberspace)
-my audience felt an uncomfortable sense of their own inattentiveness (in my performances of the experience of dissociation, of temporality incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow). what is they are asking me is to give a stream of heterogeneous stimuli --> ****how temporality is inhabited****
to diffuse (societies of spectacle) into (a single) integrated society of spectacle (==> separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals)
(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]
[...]
(181)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.8[...]ry > Guattari)
-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)
indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication
fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization
study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad
{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repressionr />
“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)
subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}
(the state of) the seated woman
[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries[...]
(182)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76[...]al value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition within 20th century spectacular culture) ~~-->[preparing for the perceptual logic of high capitalism:] it was not the attentive subject who identified form from a larger background, but rather the reverse, that “good” form had the capacity to produce attentiveness in a subject
(Gestalt theory was a dream of:)
the reciprocal affirmation of the unity of the individual subject & the unified object of perception
[--> bisect visual filed into: significant “figure” and insignificant “background"]
impression ادراک/برداشت =/= inference استنباط/استنتاج
(Peirce:) color is not an impression, but an inference
(the last kind of) “natural” sign available to a visual artist
Seurat (like many others around that time) was testing the limits and possibilities of an observer attentive to a heterogeneity and simultaneity of sensory data
[specifically:] how an irreducible plurality of luminous information could be organized and perceived coherently ... rearranged and made exchangeable
@Laura: *designated bodies* (are never permanent[!!?])
-is she actually busy with destiny and destined bodies? (for Laura:) design = destiny
-is she going to redesignate? how can she not? if she believes that the designated bodies are already on a fixed destiny or destination
[designate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]
early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]
1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: p[...]
(184)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.8[...]dback loops --> *state of equilibrium* that i wanted to achieve in the painting not symbolically)
(i prefer *pseudo solidarity*)
emergence of aggregates
manifestations of complexities
(this is happening in)
late 19th century is also the age of attempting to validate a relatively stable and domesticated image of the dynamism and destructiveness of capital
modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)
anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and feedback (=/= solidarity) }--> thermodynamic framework
anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)
anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim
(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness
(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation
“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”
Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**
(what is my “sociology” in my works?)
{ great social catastr[...]
(185)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.1[...]revealed truth) [or that there is a or no central truth...?]
which allusions ground the abstract truth of the image in a certain reality?
(----David Rosand's) Raphael: theological truth <--> axiomatic geometry (~ congruence of simple structures) --> divinity of the circle
supernatural status of the form, reaffirmed by gold (<-- an archaic and discounseled technique) ==> *put ‘form’ beyond the reach of pictorial illusion and beyond the realm of nature*
*pictorial truth sometimes lies in the painter's choice in working on the surface* (acknowledging the powerful claims of the axis of the field and the determining control of its shape, recognizing the dialectic of circle and square, the signifying tension between picture plane and orthogonal recession, etc.) --> in the case of Raphael: theology becomes a commentary on painting : pictorial structure (directly semiotic and not mimetic) = meaning
(always?) *faithfuls need their originals*
in Helmholtz's 1856 comprehensive account of human vision, the eye emerges *empathically embedded in the thinness and opacity of the body*
eye (=/= a marvelous apparatus) : an apparatus with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in is processing of visual information --> entoptical phenomenon --James--> subjective optical sensation: example of selective attention excludes from consciousness sensations that are *nonreferential* (= irrelevant to the knowledge about the world)
(~= Ernst Mach's sight phantasms)
arborescent vocabulary of the scientific literature on the eye in the 1880s
*new diagram of the eye: photoreceptors in the human eye are placed at the back of retina, behind the blood vessels (that literally intervene seeing) --Seurat--> inseparable mix of an abstract mathematically constructed & a physiological perception more subjectivity determined, “domain of vision has been integrated Iin the field of desire” (ire” (Lacan), “phantasmatic events that occur on the surface of the bodies” (Crary)
=/= older diagram of the eye: the ideal unobstructed functioning of camera obscura --> ‘scene of representation’
‘dream of immediacy’ --to--> (Seurat's refusal of scenography ==> nondisclosure ~) fantasy of a theatre without representation
Rousseau's affirmation of *political self-sovereignty* in the ‘festival’: a stage which presents nothing to the sight --Derrida--> a place where the spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be seer or voyeur *** (<-- what i learned from Phill) ==> presence will be full as the intimacy of a self-presence, as the sentiment of self-proximity, of self-sameness
Lyotard: theatrically fold --> a box closed upon itself --> only those to appear on the stage which come from what will be known as the ‘exterior’
*zero: the sign of the empty center, the place where everything is supposed t[...]
(186)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.7[...]commodified : an imaginary deletion of all that is unbearable in collective and individual experience
in Corridor Crew the perceptual selectivity of the CG hackers sustains efficiency of animation tools + tangled social and psychic machinery of sublimation
(?do i have) agoraphobia --> Simmel
(destructive transformation of) *modernization always preserve and carry over nonsynchronous components of past moments*
Crary, Lefebvre
Piranesi's etching of Rone = foctive and atmospheric prison
Freud's description of piazza: patchwork texture of screens and flashing signs (formless field of attraction @Foad, Sina; multidimensional field of stimuli, urban space: “a theater of memory and a theater of prophecy”) =/= Piranesian dissolution of the axial city (organized views around a coherent even if mobile subjective orientation)
Freud's technique of attention: gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit
‘evenly suspended attention’ (giving equal notice to everything, 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 deinf 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 [...]
(187)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.8[...]ing signs (formless field of attraction @Foad, Sina; multidimensional field of stimuli, urban space: “a theater of memory and a theater of prophecy”) =/= Piranesian dissolution of the axial city (organized views around a coherent even if mobile subjective orientation)
Freud's technique of attention: gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit
‘evenly suspended attention’ (giving equal notice to everything, 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
[...]
(188)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.8[...]ing = appropriating” ==> knowing is impossible)
medieval theorist [& my bestiary research] --Bynum--> wonder: (admiratio) cognitive, nonappropriative, perspectival, particular, (not merely a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered
‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder
telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)
scholarship on (early modern age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative & appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar
}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theologi[...]
(189)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9[...]infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which the behavior was performed as well as expectations about the effects. Sensorimotor schemas are central to Jean Piaget's explanation of infant development.
[http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_463]
(motions, gestures:)
purposeful =/=? communicative
(Marks on) Invisibility, Legibility (khanayi خوانایی), and Aniconism (that the artist should or must avoid depictions of human beings or icons; an art that refuses to unfold its code, asserting that relationships need not be interpreted--a view developed in the conservative Sunni thought of the later Abbasid caliphate)
(عقل سرخ aghl-e sorkh --> Ulf Langheinrich's works)
the ways ambiguity stimulates imagination
“rubied mind-body”
(...ruined main body)
sense-perceptibles: images, etc. --> matter that is processed by information --> in new media (as Gilbert Simondon put it,) ‘form’ arises almost symptomatically from a ground modulated by information processes
a new level of invisibility--though not immateriality: information
cognitive attention as information to be processed =/=? sensuous material to be experienced --> is this a shift (predicted by Deleuze) from visual to information culture? (--> Trevor Paglen's works characterizes arts of the information age in general---image is the trace, effect, or document.)
the perceptible =/= the legible
aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”
enfold & unfold
(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes
you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...
(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*
wood grain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)
(what is thought's powerlessn[...]
(190)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.2[...]eptible =/= the legible
aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”
enfold & unfold
(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes
you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...
(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*
wood grain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)
(what is thought's powerlessness at the heart of digital new media?)
calligraphy --(interface)--> Qur'an --(interface)--> the divine
(Gregory Bateson:) information = "the difference that makes a difference”
(@Anouk)
“in Islamic art and new media art, we have two triadic models in which the infinite is mediated to perception by some kind of information.”
worship !~/=>? transcendence
(Who can say what people are really experiencing when, in the course of worship, they gaze at a dome, kneel on a carpet, or let an allegorical painting dazzle their senses? -Marks)
(Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that) “every body of thought has its own plane of immanence, an unthought against which it struggles to give rise to new concepts”, still, they dismiss Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic “philosophy” as prephilosophical(!)
intellectual struggle ~= jahd جهد, ejtehad اجتهاد (Averroes) ==> to bring new concepts into the world
yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}
mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter
-Avicenna: all existence is contingent; God = 'the uncaused’
(Avicenna's conception of) the nonentity (or antimatter) as the virtual double of every existent ~= (Deleuze and Guattari's) conc[...]
(196)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.3[...]concepts into the world
yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}
mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter
-Avicenna: all existence is contingent; God = 'the uncaused’
(Avicenna's conception of) the nonentity (or antimatter) as the virtual double of every existent ~= (Deleuze and Guattari's) concepts of the virtual and the actual
(Avicenna:) God ==> existence/nonexistence
(Deleuze:) existence <==> nonexistence; (mirror each other?)
virtual (حق hagh ~ truth) <--> actual (حقیقت haghighat ~ reality)
hierarchy of nonexistent things
not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)
-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold
فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)
yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies
the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”
ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him
*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.
[logical death]
(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary[...]
(198)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.4[...]irtual and the actual
(Avicenna:) God ==> existence/nonexistence
(Deleuze:) existence <==> nonexistence; (mirror each other?)
virtual (حق hagh ~ truth) <--> actual (حقیقت haghighat ~ reality)
hierarchy of nonexistent things
not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)
-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold
فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)
yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies
the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”
ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him
*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.
[logical death]
(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary information culture*
([aspects of] ‘enfoldment’ instead of ‘narrative’ @Seba)
(relying on the thoughts and calculations of many thinkers:) ‘deeply enfolded’ instead of ‘complexity’ (~=? ‘the obscured social world’ @Seba)
.finding the direction of Mecca in a complex network of signifiers --> the local value of the work of science or narratology / Islamic culture of astrological experimentation ----> logical depth and enfoldedness index Baten باطن
-(living in a time of animosity,) is Seba wanting to democratize Baten?
descriptive encounters with objects
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)
how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?
my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this[...]
(201)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.4[...]ng awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)
yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies
the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”
ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him
*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.
[logical death]
(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary information culture*
([aspects of] ‘enfoldment’ instead of ‘narrative’ @Seba)
(relying on the thoughts and calculations of many thinkers:) ‘deeply enfolded’ instead of ‘complexity’ (~=? ‘the obscured social world’ @Seba)
.finding the direction of Mecca in a complex network of signifiers --> the local value of the work of science or narratology / Islamic culture of astrological experimentation ----> logical depth and enfoldedness index Baten باطن
-(living in a time of animosity,) is Seba wanting to democratize Baten?
descriptive encounters with objects
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)
how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?
my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know what is lost
**chaotic loss --> to process through a host of errors and phantasms
what is the carrier bag theory of infinite?
عجایب --> (ajayeb's) inexplicable historical objects that suddenly turn up and refuse to be accounted for “fossils” (--> rupture =/= fold: history is deeply enfolded)
[which histories objects of ajayeb enfold and unfold?]
the origin is always complex
(how to) invert the judgment of value that informs us
piecemeal fabrication from alien forms =/= essential secret in hist[...]
(202)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.4[...]ls” (--> rupture =/= fold: history is deeply enfolded)
[which histories objects of ajayeb enfold and unfold?]
the origin is always complex
(how to) invert the judgment of value that informs us
piecemeal fabrication from alien forms =/= essential secret in history
positivism (esbat-gara اثبات گرا) =/= speculation
transhistorical claims about Islamic art--its ahistorical approach to Islam can contribute to Orientalism, (Nasr's spirituality) =/= to situate Islamic art within the history of ideas of its period, portrayal of a cultural worldview when they succeed (Marks)
Interpreting a cultural artifact for what it might have meant for the people of a past time is always an imposition--(to give preference to certain meanings at the expense of others)
(Marks’) existential phenomenology : one's own experience, sensory and mental, is used as a basis for analysis (to investigate), but does not assume this experience can be generalized.
code: a writing that is executable : a writing whose very nature is to carry out an action
“We are at a point where the Islamic heritage latent in Western modernism can usefully inform efforts to make information culture meaningful and responsive” -Marks
(Marks notion of) “Islamic art” --> unity (tohid توحید) of sorts --> unity of the code ==> multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity
“networks are the haptic space of our age”
qualities of latency
(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality
...................................
*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•
hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories
anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry
...................................
Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیا[...]
(203)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.5[...]ody image through primary narcissim (in terms of Oedipus complex)
•body image also incorporate external objects (implements and instruments --> intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body) ~--> the “detachable” parts of the body: urine, faeces, saliva, sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin--all retain something of the cathexis and value of a body
-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions
the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]
“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty
(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and his awareness can shift....The supposedly separate realms of the subjective and objective are actually only poles of attention.” (The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception)
sensuality is co-making
rituals and technologies are links between bodies and societies
(social) techniques for the inscription of locality into bodies
technology as an exteriorization of the functions of the body?
CG stands for:
•computer graphics
•computer games
•creature generator
•categorial grammar --> “==>”, “=/=”, etc
•conceptual graphs --> graph-based knowledge representation and reasoning model
•computational geometry --> geo-info-sys design
•*computational gesture* --> extracorporeal material culture
•
•(complete governance, chaotic God, commanding general, common ground, center of gravity,)
•
the well-equipped invalid (--> embodiment, Virilio)
(Foucault's radical exploration of:) body = (subject to the effects of) rhetoric of technical reason
techniques of punishment (, a “political technology”) : “an art of unbearable sensations” --to--> “an economy of suspended rights”
Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in ot[...]
(204)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.5[...]into a street style sensation through sheer force of will
***practice of distinction*** (--> you have to make it appear that other people are more interested in you than you are in them)
...take someone’s photo, post it online, appropriate their social capital, then ditch them and move on (a game played throughout the fashion industry) <-- constant and well-managed visibility
(the misleading idea of) “style ==> to be picked out of a crowd” [style, that little something extra as vague and indeterminate as Weberian charisma that most people simply do not possess]
-the fashion photographer's eye: the affective instrument through which the photographers feels what she sees (intuitive, embodied, automatic, as a style radar)
street style star <== the right people like you
-what is new in new moment of public viewing? can we have a public moment (exhibition, etc.) and concider glamor and fashion and modernity coinciding with technology and digital platforms?
(for me still the inner thoughts and public life are not blured, that is why i cannot post so quick online)
why use design as a template for reworking ethnography?
*the design process is generally oriented toward transforming (or cooking) “raw” information into “useful knowledge,” a guided mutation of “mere ideas” into “workable concepts” or a “feasible design” that then becomes an “object” (in all possible meanings of the term) in the world*
design: techniques for “working out” and “working through”
charrette شارت
a balance between structure and flexibility
1. active deconstruction: (to arrive at collaboratively, of the work's otherwise obscured underlying composition) to focus on:
•ethnographic specifics
•theoretical frameworks
•(writing) style
•how arguments are constructed
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
3. reconstruction: (dedicated to innovation)
to develop a “rapid prototype” for a new ethnographic/research form, method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much abo[...]
(207)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.1[...]/>
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
3. reconstruction: (dedicated to innovation)
to develop a “rapid prototype” for a new ethnographic/research form, method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on
developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials
slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text
https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”
•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.
...................................
“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time
...................................
many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”
juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose
an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and [...]
(208)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.1[...]rily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”
juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose
an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*
positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)
-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]
she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...
personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)
(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)
(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]
(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer
(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)
images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family
for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*
[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direc[...]
(209)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.2[...]rosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology
•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*
(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb
[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synesthetically (visual or tactile) organized and represented
postural schema وضعى
postural model (of the body): a three-dimensional image that both registers and organizes the information provided by the senses regarding:
•the subject's body
•the subject's location in space (~ its posture)
•the subject's relation to other objects
--> body image registers *current* sensation also preserves a *record of past* impressions
the *body schema* is plastic, kinesthetically and synergetically organized sensations
= physiological dispositions + physiological processes
Schilder's model of body image
social and interpersonal attachments and investments, as well as libidinal energy, from a major part of one's self-image and conception of the body (--Grosz--> more amenable to the kind of sociohistorical and cultural analysis of the body feminists are interested in)
*body schema: experience of the “unity of the body” (self-appearance of the body), an anticipatory plan of (future) action in which a knowledge of the body's current position and capacities for action must be registered, perception + mental pictures + representations
*image of the human body = the picture of our own body which we form in our mind
--Freud--> somatic compliance: the organic body's amenability تمايل to psychical takeover, (impelled by the organic disturbance) psychological processes take over and *adopt the biological disturbance as their own and utilize it to epress psychical whishes and significances* (both conscious and unconscious)
whenever difficulty occurs regarding the recognition of different parts of the body (or the position of the body) it occurs not only in the subject's self-perception but also always in the perception of other's bodies as well (<-- is that[...]
(210)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.7[...] />
[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]
(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer
is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing
a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.
an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators
When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.
(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)
A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.
*locational imaging*
As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or anticipated memory in dialogue with the names, places, and forms on the map[...]
(Olearius drawings and frontispieces) establishes a geography, manufactured from cartographic elements
When a geography is given a sense of identification, of difference, doubt, a discerning gaze, or a critical reverie [the people, animals, subjects in the map cannot see how they are being mapped]
(how certain places are made to become the) simulacra of others*
perspective, visual style, narrative economy, scale, [...], the stakes of mimesis, and reception
r />
story about the demise of nation and its cartographer:
(Dreamtigers by J. L. Borges)
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am g[...]
(211)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90[...]iscover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories
geographic literature
the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space
new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer
theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity
the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness
mimes the construction (of a world)
contemporary politics of statecraft
...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?
ingenieur du moi
medium engineers
imaginary space, nation, selfhood
*** the self-possessed individual ***
(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)
living conditions of vocal exchange
visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify
a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it
isolario: illustrating the islands o[...]
(212)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.3[...] from a passive role to that of an engaged traveler who moves through the time and space of a given body of words, images, and sensation --passage-into--> vital and marginal areas where imagination, fact, history, and self are combined
plastic and lexical attributes
confused pictorial and lexical properties
[*]pictogram: alphabetical shapes + bodily form + memory of a seemingly archaic past of confusion and violence + +
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus [word puzzle representing form of pictures or symbols; (Latin: “by things”) a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, for example H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥
*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized
a childhood experience
the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and h and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place
signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary
authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature
Conley argues that: the individual who comes to be named as such can only do so when he or she gains the required illusion of having a real place in the world or, failing that, of experiencing movement in space and language that redeems the labor of living
cartography
•compass for verbal plotting
•turning the reader's gaze toward a productive consideration of its visible form
--*-- the dialogue and its dialogic echoes --*--
statecraft: fortification, centralization, extensive rebuilding (of national bor[...]
(213)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.6[...]
ways of reading and focusing rhetorical analysis
...................................
[Brancaforte]
word + image
art + science
visual + discursive
the reality that he [Olearius] has experienced
Conley: “the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble [por harf پرحرف], copious, emphatic, printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words”
questions of
•authorship
•political power
•intellectual influence
Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea
“we were about a gun-shot's distance”
in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion
a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time
proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description?[...]
(214)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.9[...]r />
Olearius's methodology is that of a comparatist
he juxtaposes (the customs and social structures of the people he meets with those of his native land)
Olearius's trip ==> production of (superior maps)
Olearius ==> maps
Qazwini ==> lists
Sa'di ==> de-vice
Olearius's The Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung includes large, detailed, fold-out maps describing...
as well our technique in our work, with Sana
-our work/contribution includes placing maps and figures with the flux of discourse (=/= Olearius)
description of (the Persian) “natives” and their “nature” --> a codification of his human hosts
traditional western stereotypes regarding exotic eroticism
Shah Safi's banquet (sur سور) corresponds fully to a European's notion of what an oriental feast should entail
he marks the poles of Persian culture: as the site, on the one hand, of voluptuous, erotic encounters, and of unnatural cruelty and despotism on the other hand --> meant for the moral edification/codification of its western readers. (readers were taught about different countries + taught to be better European persons [with proper differences])
Baroque's excess of information
(as Pierre also noted in my style of language)
Beschreibung
*** the customs of the observed peoples ***
-->(language of pictorial representation emphasized)
temporal displacements [in his frames pictures]
inscriptions, conveying a sense of movement
scorpion bites Olearius (“Ich vom Scorpion gestochen” --> oriental danger) --> specimen scorpion (--> immobilized and tamed) --> back in the Kunstkammer --> Duke's cabinet of curiosities (--> on display)
["his” experience =/= Sa'di's technologies of writing]
Olearius + Hakwirdi --> Golestan of Sa'di
Sa'di's influence on German baroque literature:
•Grimmelshausen (Simplicissimus)
•Lohenstein (Ibrahim Bassa and Ibrahim Sultan)
•Gryphius (Catherina von Georgien)
•Montesquieu (Letters Persanes)
•Goethe (West-östlicher Divan)
Jens from Kiel library, like Olearius, is appointed court librarian, by state/Duke, given the task of cataloging and expanding the ducal/official collection, and developing the Duke's Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer
Gotterffische Kunstkammer --> “Wunderbuch” (book of wonders), with its insistence on the concepts of writing + drawing
Olearius's genre of frontispiece, his engraved title pages --follow--> Norbert: kluger Vater or fleissiger Praeceptor
clever father / industrious preceptor مرشد مربى #Pir [--> “our common father in heaven"], wants to introduce his children and students to something in arts or sciences, “make them understand” by means of his mouth + pen :
*analogy/[...]
(215)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.3[...]res in niches flanking the archway]
Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius
Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision
“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”
‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union
symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)
the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time
“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”
his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*
horn of plenty
cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
>
astrilized
*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments
christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith
a group of international admirers
**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Mannerist strapwork, grotesque, garlands, allegorical personifications; in scenes representing the original reason why humans need to wear clothing
•(Norbert when he uses “we” in his language) --> *author*: active, nude, individual with his scissors, not dressed for battle, who will actively clothe the other figures ... [in frontispiece to Hans Weigel's Trachtenbuch the personifications of the non-Europeans are all prepared for battle] (male warriors in female continents [continents are usually represented by female figures, derived from biblical and classical sources such as Roman coins]) {Amerindian's headdress once was removed from its original ethnographic context, “decontextualized,” and then “recontextualized in a different setting --> europeans might have thought that it was a skirt. the reverse is the story of shalite شلیته?}
mid 16th century also saw the development of the periodical newssheet (adapted from broadside)
consisting of image and text--work together in order to provide meaning f[...]
(216)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.6[...]orking in Germany)
“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an ambiguous term, it could stand for either Sa'di or the text of the Golestan, or Hakwirdi, but this “Persians” is to be “let inside, wearing a German coat,” Olearius's body is charged with teaching “the Persian to speak German” (--> integration)
other translations of Golestan:
•Andre du Ryer
•Johan Ochsenbach
•Georg Gentius
*Golestan
taut and well-translated epigrams
end-rhyme poems
a ‘treasury’ of rhetorical and poetical motifs
a voluminous index of sayings
-*short and astute speeches* (ایجاز ijaz ناقلا naghola)
*the genre of aphorism* = "apophthegma” (concise saying --> fit for advice, --> emblem)
(clever and) *sharp* ==> memorable
practical advice for individuals (members of the bourgeois, merchants) who wanted to climb the social ladder and learn *how to behave at court*
Golestan was considered a rich sourch of (such) “oriental wisdom”
(why Olearius is so into Sa'di's Golestan:) the aphorisms try to convey mental images or pictures [...] the apophthegma are the verbal equivalent of the images of the frontispiece --Brancaforte--> both genres try to convey a great deal of information in a condensed form (verbal or pictorial) [--> this is also why i am into Olearius and Sa'di #baroque]
(frontispiece + Golestan's) architectural framework --serving--> organizing structure; formal entrance to the scene
[]
relation to the soverign in Sa'di
in Golestan, the tales speak of the love or affection between a man and a young male. however, in the introduction to his translation, Olearius notes that he has subsituted the term “girl, lover, person, or human being” for “youth,” so that it will not offend young people who read the book --> (resisting the) jocular moralistic-didactic use of the momoerotic motif a much deeper understanding of Sufi terminology and motivation than one can expect from a 17th century translator
Olearius normalizes the discourse (of sufi) for fear of offending the sensibilities of his reading public
angelic piety
Englische Frömmigkeit
...................................
the lionskin story
lion symbolizing the element of fire as well as purification
astrological relationship between lion and sun, in the image of Mithras, entwined by snake, symbolizing the path of the sun
mithraic influences survived into the islamic era as well, and became even more prevalent with the safavid dynasty --> lion imagery became strongly associated with Ali, the fist imam in twelver shi'ism
cosmic imagery and forms of address
the persian sun/lion symbol becomes intelligible for a european audience, when it is represented as a symbol of royalty
the lionskin, in Olearius's title, [...]
(217)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.8[...]erson, or human being” for “youth,” so that it will not offend young people who read the book --> (resisting the) jocular moralistic-didactic use of the momoerotic motif a much deeper understanding of Sufi terminology and motivation than one can expect from a 17th century translator
Olearius normalizes the discourse (of sufi) for fear of offending the sensibilities of his reading public
angelic piety
Englische Frömmigkeit
...................................
the lionskin story
lion symbolizing the element of fire as well as purification
astrological relationship between lion and sun, in the image of Mithras, entwined by snake, symbolizing the path of the sun
mithraic influences survived into the islamic era as well, and became even more prevalent with the safavid dynasty --> lion imagery became strongly associated with Ali, the fist imam in twelver shi'ism
cosmic imagery and forms of address
the persian sun/lion symbol becomes intelligible for a european audience, when it is represented as a symbol of royalty
the lionskin, in Olearius's title, Persianischer Rosenthal
the animal's interior surface contains the writing, which provides the information about Persian society
Finn and Jake (given to wanderlust and creative risk) in Adventure Time --> “more powerful through spoils”
(this tradition goes back to Hercules, trophy, skin of the beast,)
“slain and flayed, exposed to the European audience, the lion/skin serves as a background on which the German author inscribes the story[/history]” (Brancaforte)
[Brancaforte studying] the early modern European frontispieces that were associated with the Orient
...superfluity of details mannered and cluttered with unread decorative motifs set in an unreadable space
[16th century frontispiece; my work is sometimes like that]
=/= (Rubin's title pages:) portrayed in an intelligible space, imbued with dramatic light effects, with a sense of movement, monumental architecture with three-dimensional figures moving in a readable illusionistic space
‘stretched-out animal skin with the head in the top center’ --> Rubin's artistic vocabulary [--> followed in today way of layout]
lion = saint's attribute --transformed--> medium for writing
--> (underscoring the) significance of **trophy**: subjugating a wild dangerous animal and then displaying it proudly for all to admire
Olearius's choice of lionskin:
1- dramatic visual introduction (to Golestan)
2- piques the reader's interest in the work
3- stands for dangerous exotic land (Persia) that has been symbolically tamed and displayed for the Western viewer
4- material of writing + material being written about
deictic
the rigor mortis o[...]
(218)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.8[...]/>
mapping so became the business of the state and cartography is early nationalized
-global empire building
-preservation of the nation-state
-local assertion of individual property rights
}--> in each of these contexts the dimensions of polity and territory were fused in images which were part of the intellectual apparatus of power **
individual niches [on] architectural plinth
in Newe Landesbeschreibung: “in the beginning of the world, God created everything at once, with his clever/intelligent finger, using measure, weight and number ... because God is not a God of disorder, but wants everything to proceed in a proper manner and with the proper differentiation.” (translated in Vision of Persia, p.123)
illustrious predecessors
through their patronage and linked to the noble art of geography
the map is framed by scale bars (the cartouche [of title] rests on a kind of architectural base in which a scale bar is contained)***
(graticules, more details,)
typography plays a role in emphasizing (novelty?)
geographical purview (meydan-e did, چشم رس، ميدان ديد) of the rulers
map and approval
different layers of information in the map: by looking at it all at once, it is difficult to comprehend the entire story that the author/artist are trying to tell. by examining individual visual elements in the map, and then linking them to the text, one can trace the different narratives extant--manifest and latent--in the work (Brancaforte on Olearius cartographic work)
(this visual rhetoric is also what i am using in my storytellings) (i also need to be careful with my collages: (not?) to map out creations that are totalities much greater than its author's own appreciation or conscious knowledge of them; to emerge an often confused and paradoxical but signatory “self” in the liminal/marginal areas of the page)
•“the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble (por-harf پرحرف، روان، سليس، چرب و نرم، خوش زبان), copious (mofasal مفصل), emphatic (mo'akad تاکيد شده), printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)
grid, superimposed on the map
a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; tr[...]
(219)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92[...] about changing perceptions of the world
about Marco Polo
Gabriel: Marco Polo did not have the influence on geography that one might have expected [...] he had no corresponding education, had been unable to make astronomical observation, and the results of these thrown-together maps was complete chaos [!]
the shape-shifting Caspian sea
*** Tabula Asiae ***
Olearius's travel account also seeks to be encyclopedic
...describe and judges the deviations from the European norm
common
barbarous
destruction of the body itself
Munster's final judgment:
“[Perisans] do not speak much and are more apt to act than to speak. they like the uncleanness or lust of the body; they are measured in their eating habits; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans
discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence
a book of others
the ways it fashions received information
“Ortelius's innovation in the science of cartography is that he attends less to the “big picture” of the world than to putting together an illustrated summery of possibly infinite number of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)
[]
Blue Map of Persia
influence of Ptolemy on the early islamic cartographers, in the time of Ma'mun
the notion of the inhabitable world being divided into seven horizontal bands called ‘climata’ or agalim/aghalim/ اقلیم(a geographical model derived probably from Persia)
*encircling ocean* surrounded the known world, and that usually have south at the top, probably to emphasize the importance of Mecca
system of Climes
(book of) notification: tanbih تنبیه
...pioneer on the road toward a (geographically) correct picture of Persia
_Persienbild_
...................................
“drawn from life”
the imagery and allegorical figures found on the frontispiece are learned signifiers belonging to a visual world that reflects and prefigures the verbal description that forms the body of the work
Olearius designs a brilliant visual program
visual table of contents
his nascent (dar tavalod درحال تولد) nationalist feelings
he translates both:
•the literature of the Persian poet
•the visual code of the land (he has visited)
traces of the author within the map
signs of the hidden power relation
depiction o[...]
(220)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.2[...]n in ...
deep inextricability of religious and secular discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and sexual bodies and practices (Wetzel)
...................................
Saadia Toor
() within the neo-Orientalist discourse [~= liberal modernity as embodied by ‘the West’ and Barbarism as connoted by Islam] ‘the Muslim’ enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic (with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]
organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, in popular support for the Global War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam
a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews
liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women
when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality
‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter
(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic
part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]
return them to the ‘chardivari’
(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patriarchal structures from families to n[...]
(221)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.7[...]iality
things that come into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, habits
what it means to meet the world:
(Stewart) *as a nearing* [=/= raw material for exploitation]
(Heidegger) as the ringing between composing subjects and objects
(McCormack) felt as ways of going on in the world
(Deleuze) as increases and decreases, brightening and darkening
() in a cartography distributed across a field of intensities and durations
[=/= rush to incorporate them into a representational order of political or moral significance]
...................................
[*]epistemology = stories of knowledge from before that somehow we are still living with now (#fable)
Geroulanos -->{ Ardrey --to--> Kubrick's african genesis : “weapon fathered man”
technology + prehistory (in postwar period)
“tool ==> man"}
knowing images
epistemic image : knowledge-based pictorial gestures (in my work without) --> organization + collecting + demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> searchable**)
(Apianus's early modern cognitive horizon -->) eye: another organ used to calibrate settings
activated eye --> new empirical pursuits
my epistemic images : work of an image fetishist
bestiary: animal character diagnosis
[horses]
(from) genre of taking care of the animal: veterinary --to--> chiromancy: profiling of the animal conditioned through the serial nature of list (==> control)
...................................
Brancaforte
readings of the apparatuses framing Olearius's books
tradition of representing Persia in the West (Xenophon and Herodotus)
narrative elements of Olearius’ works remain largely unexamined
Brentjes
elm naghli (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli (rationality)
(science) elm in Iran <== (10th century written in Persian:) limits of the world [hodud al-alam] + pharmacological medicine + (translated ~= adaptations of) astrology
10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences
rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna
روضة المنجمین
rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium
book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the [...]
(222)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.1[...]e-many pictures, vague whole with emergent parts
#workshop on training two modes of generalization, use of drawing and image making, writing ethnographic stories
(artists typically make the mistake of making these two identical -->)
*indicator =/= outcome*
•indicator: for example you implement something
•outcome: a change in behavior (= accomplished indicator)
*one-many generalization*
x is one of many possible stories about X in general (--Latour--> purification:) spacetime specificities are transformed into general claims }--> abstracting
=/=
*whole-parts generalization*
x is a participant on an assemblage where all actors are somehow emerging parts --> one does not yet know what X is or may become (X remains a vague whole) (--Latour--> translation work:) working a number of herenows into the picture }--> situating
--> how to write (ethnographic) stories embedding the dual logic of generalization? = *how to arrive at a non-relativizing non-universalizing description that nevertheless works as a generalization?*
==constitute==> generalization: an irresolvable tension
<-- interventionist potentiel
narratives that allow both:
•information exchange (handling information correctly)
•unexpected cuts in information exchange (cutting the world)
what is gained in the interventionist potentiel [of stories; for example of the skull in Holbein's ambassadeur, magic database in Verran's ethnographic story]?
-enabling double vision
•the worker has to be equally magical about her own monitoring repertoires (apass cloud attitudes)
•to intervene the ideas of smooth and wellfunctioning development bureaucracy
•reflexivity: what the ethnographer sees as she is shifting her position and beginning to focus on a different (whole-parts) generalization [=/= simply a matter of being transparent about one's analytical choices]
(Sina:)
storytelling ~= bullshiting
storytelling ~= analytical social science
deflating claims (for example we have never been modern, etc.) do not afford possibilities for intervening
(why i use comparing stories in my lecture performances -->) the act of [*]comparing : a central aspect of seeking to contain the dual logic in one story --> (Strathern > Holbraad & Pedersen > Verran > ) peculiar intensification of the act of fieldwork
good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)
(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (bi[...]
(223)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.4[...]interactions and consistencies amongst stubborn, messy and dynamic assemblages of spaces, representations, things and consumers
knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)
[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity to represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about @constantvzw
(Winthereik and Verran)
in the case of data streaming: what are the people, objects, texts and practices that constitute processes of assembling?
-in our research let's not prioritize either people or things in advance ==> unexpected sources of influence in markets and consumer cultures @Foad
-to map together material/technological as well as linguistic aspects of consumer culture: narratives, phenomenological techniques, etc.
-consumers ‘become’ during consumption
*[?why become interested in] consumption/markets: hybrid networks of narratives, objects, devices and practices (that [it seems] are necessary to create conditions for any ‘human’ action)*
(still use other more old-fashioned research techniques: depth interviews [Xiri], phenomenological methods [], hermeneutic analysis [Sina], etc.)
-(how to account for) tech-mediated flows of information and knowledge that pass through the massive assemblages of the Internet
-majority of interactions are technology-to-technology and system-to-system interactions
this assemblage-thinking is against[?]:
•Virilio's way of ‘questioning technology'--for him: “to be a subject or to be subjected, that is the question.” he sees crisis in the temporal dimensions of the present moment: the lack of a future-oriented longer time-frame connects “real time”, pollution, and economic inequalities. All of them result from a lack of shared responsibility for the future. (<-- noted by Hubert); or: “The now immaterial environment is connected to the “terminal” body of men and women with interactive prostheses who become the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid.”
•Guattari's machinic (=/= simple construction partes extra partes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing himself into the war machine (hero on heroin) --> technically calibrated culture
‘chemical prosthesis’ (a technology of the human) has been part of man-m[...]
(226)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.4[...]her affable lilies”
(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims
--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation
social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism
understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality
inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)
service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people
Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans
objects withdraw infinitely from humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?
Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology
[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”
Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle
[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationi[...]
(227)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.7[...]--> “existentially significant activities are no longer possible ==> the loss of meaning” (=/= Cinderella)
[*]frame, framing: enfold audiences into an enclosure that is conceptually accessible
for example
•*ecological modernization* : a frame for climate change that seems to enclose the grreatest number of diverse stakeholders --- uses carbon as a way to engage diverse stakeholders, a centrifugal locus that is calculable, non-political, scientific ==> presents opportunities for innovation }--Campbell--> short-term strategy: a reification process that transforms climate change into “the carbon problem” ==> production of carbon markets that ironically serve as creative new modes of accumulation <-- reifies ecological maladaptation
•*catastrophic framing* of climate change --> backfires, moomerang effects, causing audiences to disbelieve the entire message
•*frame-bridging* --> when two issues ostensibly different are linked in complementariness in the same sphere as the concept in question (for example emphasizing the religious and moral dimensions of climate change ==> environment central to faith
•*emotional framing* --> we are suffering from a deficiency of *emotional knowledge* about climate change (=/= deficit of information) ==> locus of problem moves to the psychological affective realm ==> elevation of the problem to an existential threat or trauma --> (climate change becomes a factor in *identity formation*) we become more ecological in our cognition behaviour, affect
◦managers in organizations perform complex ‘affect-based’ work to translate the broader social emotions of climate change into the *local emotional landscape* ==establish==> new norms ==> alter the emotional salience of climate change (in the workplace) [<-- 26/06/2021 this has become the dominant framing in artistic research environments @apass, Pierre, Chloe2]
*(successful) frames: work through the integration of the phenomenon into a reality that is manageable* (=/= Campbell)
focus on the sustainability of discourses that are imaginable and thinkable and connectable with people's existing world =/= focus on the reality of the moving target
‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles
discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective action dilemma, common property dilemma, non-commitment =/= responsibility, transnational commons dilemma, historical versus new emitters, fossil fuel lobby and corporate power }--response-->{ develop techniques for mo[...]
(228)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.1[...]imes you don't have a voice in dialogue --> you need a space where you can do a monologue
*monological circuits* (Renan) --> monologue: you take the conversation out of value making (from a neoliberal logic)
(problem of) discourse = a sophisticated capital in arts (that is easily distributed and circulated)
-appoint [yourself] as institution =/= alternative art organization --> don't contribute to marginalizing yourself as alternative
research organization =/= magazine
Renan http://temporaryartreview.com/the-infantilization-of-local-contexts/
artworld's cynical consumption of the global periphery
international worship of dialogue
unified complicity
transnational capital of in-group favoritism
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 individuali[...]
(229)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.9[...]uter 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[...]
(230)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.6[...]g, 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 conten[...]
(234)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.7[...]so's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals
****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)
sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which advertising today visualizes software, the environment, nanotechnology as seemingly *undeconstructible & transparent* will be staple examples in classroom curricula
(the most obvious and immediate way of conceptualizing) advertising: a system that creates signs with the purpose of communicating meaning =/= Campbell
discipline of marketing --support--> investigation of image consumption
early models of advertising (--> **how we understand the philosophy of what information and communication are**)
•1949 Bell Laboratories --> information: universalized component of any system that communicated =/= “information” as rather poetic and sipritual term (at home in philosophy =/= engineering) --advertising--> hierarchy of effects: cognitive --to--> affective --to--> behavioral [--> informationalize and measure aspects of advertising]
(to understand) *information theory of communication as a reflection of larger scientific and philosophical aims of the time*
***information theory of communication ==>
•providing codified models that predict response
•enframe communication within a logic of relative effectiveness or ineffectiveness
}=/= my lectures
brand memories
brand equity
boundary between advertising and everyday life
[Campbell =/=]
the idea that qualitative advertising research has a managerialist axiology
a priori assumption of “advertising = information communication” (=/= people incorporate advertising so that it functions as a *social glue* within groups)
(vernacular specter of advertising)
spectacular vernacular of social fabric
site of investigation:
1. site of consumption = reception (the field of meaning from a consumer's perspective)
2. site of production = processes involved in making ads (favoured in media studies and ethnographic approaches to advertising)
3. site of the image: analysis of the meaning of the image itself (independent of intention and reception) are the most powerful way to show what images include and exclude (drawing influence pri[...]
(236)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]le] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic
aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic
#workshop make an ad for apass
advertising trend
1. information: (from) traditional forms of print & television --to--> intensification and hybridization in oblique ways + through new media (adver-gaming, twitter-piccing, virtual-worlding, Corridor Crew's product placement)
2. persuasion: [as a rhetorical force] (from) information-heavy selling --to--> dramatic persuasion
3. entertainment: communication through entertainment =/= information, persuasion
•(from) staging products in films --to--> embedding of brands so deeply into the fabric of the film's narrative as object-actors that propel the plot
(Corridor Crew's unobtrusive embedding of branded goods and services in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)
brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]
*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]
ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site
(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and pu[...]
(243)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.3[...]rvices in storytelling, hybrid both staging and embedding)
brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]
*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]
ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site
(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward [...]
(246)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.3[...]t, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are essentially consumers of symbols
•consumption culture = construction of symbolic environment
}==> tourism as the largest industry in the world (translate your culture images into marketable products ~= consumer fetishes) --> *global culturalism*
[manipulation of symbols]
(from) ethical issue (modern) --to--> stylistic issue (phenomenological, postmodern)
[*]globalization: (create fragmented heterogenized market -->) serve the locals with global universal signs
--> transnational: a highly symbolic communication system that is timeless, contextless, diffused in space, located anonymously, with no known history
marketing is the first institution that adapt to postmodernism
...................................
consumer (--impulse--> “i want”) =/= citizen (“we need”)
Sunstein
consumer sovereignty (matters of personal taste, “are they getting what they want?”, ‘freedom: satisfaction of private preferences’, ) =/= political sovereignty (*government by discussion* + reason-giving in the public domain <-- many/most citizens should have a range of common experiences =/= filtering of information, customizing information to fit)
**unplanned unanticipated encounters <-- central to democracy**
(pseudo-democratic) participation interactivity : invitation to participate in one's own manipulation by providing increasingly detailed information about personal preferences (Andrejevic, noted by Hubert)
...................................
*misattunement:
--Stern--> a parental technique for modifying the behaviour (+ affective experience) of the child
--Ahmed--> being out of synch with a world (“of whiteness” that aims to be in harmony)
*attunement: a technique for occupying space
---> go to #integration {for Ahmed: becoming a citizen (= nationalism) ~= the work of attunement =/= stranger: the body we are not with}
clumsiness: being in the way of yourself (to lack the coordination to coordinate yourself with yourself)
--registers--> as the loss of a possibility
(in art, performed clumsiness as strategically antagonistic?)
(Ahmed's) emotional work: closing the gap between ‘how one does feel’ and ‘how one should feel’ <-- a labour (when) is successful, it disappears as labour
how flight attendants (and teachers?) become responsible for collective moods --Hochschild--> ability to preserve the mood of a situation requires working not only on feelings, but drawing on tactic knowledge about how moods are shaped
(bad mood of a shopkeeper in Brussels...)
*histories that linger as mood*
diversity work --involves-->
•the effort to minimize differences so that thos[...]
(247)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.9