User:Tisa/research log

&todo:

Interconnections between texts have to be somehow established. This is the backend. The front end, I imagine, will be the final written thesis (as a summary and a static articulation of the research process).

Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

reading annotations start at pg. 18 (check e-reader for earlier notes)

subchapter: A posthumanist account on material-discursive practices

• Discursive practices produce the objects and subjects of knowledge practices. Foucault: these conditions are immanent and historical, rather than transcendental and phenomenological. > actual historically situated social conditions that enables and constrain disciplinary knowledge such as speaking, writing, thinking, ...
• Bohr apparatuses that play a role in the material production of bodies and meanings. pg.19
• Bohr calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, word/world. pg.20
• Discursive practices are causal intra-actions - they enact local causal structures through which one "component" (the effect) of the phenomenon is marked by another "component" (the cause) in their differential articulation. Meaning is not a properly of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility. [...] Discursive practices are boundary-making practices that have no finality in the ongoing dynamic of agential intra-activity. pg.21
• Discursive practices and material phenomena do not stand in a relationship of externality to one another; rather, the material and the discursive are mutually implicated in the dynamic of intra-activity. pg. 22

//&link: Barad production of bodies,... To Foucault (body can be controlled+later: industrial revolution) and Mauss (techniques of the body).

• evolution of a human
• "All bodies, not merely "human" bodies, come to matter through the world's iterative intra-activity - its performativity. This is true not only on the surface or contours of the body but also of the body in the fullness of its physicality, including the very "atoms" of its being. Bodies are not objects with inherent boundaries and properties, they are material-discursive phenomena. "Human" bodies are not inherently different from "nonhuman" ones. What constitutes the "human" (and the "nonhuman") is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but nor is it a free-floating ideality. What is at issue is not some ill-defined process by which human-based linguistic practices manage to produce substantive bodies/bodily substances but rather a material dynamics of intra-activity: material apparatuses produce material phenomena through specific causal intra-actions, where "material" is always already material-discursive - that is what it means to matter. pg. 23/24

Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology

5 lectures from 1989 available here

Lecture #1

listened on: 24-9-20

• "Technology has built a house where we all live" - knowing about its secret passages and doors.
• "Technology changes social and individual relationships between us and forces us to look and redefine our notions of power an responsibility."
• "Technology is a system. ... It involves organization, procedure, symbols, equations, and most importantly mindset!"
• Technology > ways of doing something, as formalized practice. Dennis Balding says: There is tech for prayer, as well as for plowing, for controlling fear, as well as controlling flood.
• (example of the magnifying glass) development that leads to the right of the practitioners to exclusive practice practice of technology > professions are born. exclusifying the right to the tools, technology.
• practice defines content. technology of prayer. "laying down the practice precisely", otherwise the practice cannot be considered as prayer (even if felt).

• 2 ways of distinguishing:
  • work-related technology. making work easier.
  • control-related technology. more control over an operation. (prevalent)

• 2 forms of technological development (technology as practice) > they have very different specializations and divisions of labor, consequently: social and political implications. Interested not in what is being done, but HOW it is being done.
• "Understanding the real meaning - the social and political meaning of the division of labor and prescriptive tech is the most important step to understanding the real world of technology."

• • holistic technologies (craft, artisan controlling own process of work, real-time decisions while working, experience applied to unique situations, one-of-a-kind products. pottery for everyday use, pottery for religious rites = specialization by product = holistic tech, the doer is in the total control of the process)

• • prescriptive technologies = specialization by process. the making/doing is broken down in identifiable steps done by separate workers. division of labor (industrial revolution, large scale ... also ancient Romans and Chinese - casting bronze(example)).
    • The protocol. Discipline. Rules. Planning. Organization. Institution. Control. Command. You need the boss and people who obey the boss. = prescriptive tech = social innovation. Designs for compliance and discipline. Order and obedience.

People become aculturated to them. External control and internal compliance is considered as normal and necessary. It is the seed bed for orthodoxy. Formative influence on philosophy, political thought and government (China). Aculturation of population through prescriptive technologies. Beyond production of material things.

• Filling in an income tax form is an example of normalization of prescriptive tech. > Designs for compliance. on them rests the real world of tech that we live.
• We live in a culture of compliance, we are conditioned to accept orthodoxy as normal, there is only one way of doing it. Holistic tech supplemented by prescriptive.
• Think about the degree to which we are living under prescription. Smart building Adam & Eve - never see an apple. Prescriptive tech eliminate choice and eliminate the principle of choice. Social design for compliance. Eliminates any situation in which we can make principle decision.

non-stated, underlying models:

• growth model (giants are stupid, small humans are smart. one can promote growth, not control it. study, observe, cherish, try to provide conditions for growth. something is left to chance. context is essential.

• production model (dimensions are manipulated, production can be arranged in a way growth cannot. all essential parameters are externally controlled. input and output. producing the desired outcome. independent from context, variables are controlled. externalities, others people problem. context as irrelevant.

• We look at education as if it was production model, whereas learning is growing.
• We have no demography of machines! Increasing car population. The numbers could be generated, but there is no political will. No public discussion about birth control for cars. Why no discussion about that?

• Technology has to fit the values, not the values to technology. If we want to have a different technology, we need to have different values, concepts of justice. First come the values, and then the practice on how to impose them. (question about Chinas open door policy for incoming technology).

///

• Intuitive technology? Holistic technology examples in the 21st century?
• Rituals?
• power, bioplotics, discipline, punishment, ... (Link to Foucault?)

Lecture #2

Listened on 25-9-20

• human consequences in communications technology. misnomen: "noncommunication technology".
• "When human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general technical arrangements reduce or eliminate RECIPROCITY = some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication between parties." ... *physical distance between the parties - distorts the reciprocity. "Reciprocity was ruled out by design. The loss is a continuing of technologically executed inequality. It has very profound political and psychological consequences. Reciprocity is not feedback. Feedback is designed to improved specific processes. The purpose of it is to make things work. Feedback exists to improve the performance, but cannot alter the design."
• "Reciprocity is situationally based, a response to a situation - it is not designed into the system, it is not predictable. Reciprocal responses can alter the initial - can lead negotiation, response ..."
• Violence not objected to when depicted on tv (situation without reciprocity). People not feeling the need to intervene and not feeling bad for not intervening. Violence becomes enjoyable. What that does to people! Muscles that are not in use.
• Technologies that eliminate reciprocity diminish the sense of our common normality/commonality (?). No reciprocity > no need to listen, no need to understand or to accommodate.
• "Prescriptive technologies are social innovations, a feed bed for a culture of compliance. They require control, management, planning. An acculturation of society to external control, planning and fragmentation of work - as given and normal."
• Impact of tech on governance, power, control. Foucault, 18th century, before the machine age, a foundation for the industrial age/revolution. The origin of current patterns is in the history.
• "Physical and administrative infrastructures in the industrial revolution. Decisions are made in a technological mode, hard to influence through democratic/egalitarian decision-making (vs technical/technological decision-making)."
• Technologies are developed and used in a particular social and economic and political situations/contexts. //&Situatedness
• The nature of systems. "Technological systems" ... rather: thinking in a notion of a web of interactions. Seeing strings of the web, visualizing patterns and designs. Weaving: One can change patterns only at certain places and manners, if one does not want to risk the continuity of the whole fabric. "Re-weaving the web of life." There are other patterns, the patterns of technology are not fixed. Pattern changes > being clear about the structures, rules of the patterns that are there. Notion of planning! Prescriptive technologies require planning. "The structuring authority gains an enhanced power. No ruling class plans for their own demise. Structures that are put in the place enhance the existing powers."
• Michel Foucault - Discipline and Punish: notion of discipline enters the secular scene.
• Le Mettrie - Man a Machine: detailed analysis of the human body, looked upon as an intricate machine that could be understood, controlled and used. Foucault: The discovery of the human body as a machine and as an instrument of power ... Efficient operation of these machines. ... Disciplines of exercise, training, work = general prescriptions of dominance. "Political anatomy was born."
• timing of movement in schools, prisons, of soldiers (drill choreographies - a military unit is a machine at the command of the superior). Detailed labor discipline in workshops (prior to industrial revolution, a well-prepared soil).
• Factory system augments and extends these patterns of control. The machinery didn't create them, it enforced them. The outcome of this development is the breakdown of processes into small prescriptive steps. Extended into non-mechanical applications. Changed banking, schooling, prison. Are exercises of control. Required planning.
• "The industrial revolutions strongest dream: to plan with and for technology. A totally automated factory, a workplace without workers. Discussed already in the early 19th century."
• "Until the end of the 18th century the control and dominance was exercised by regarding human bodies as machines. In the 19th century the machines alone could be visualized as instruments of control. Machines appear more predictable and controllable than workers. [...] Planning against undesirable and unpredictable interventions. The resistance of the workers must be seen as a clearly understood threat to workers control and autonomy. Not resistance to technology, but the opposition to the division of labor and the loss of control."
• The LUDDITES. Its a question of WHO controls the innovation. They understood the distinction of work-related and control-related technologies.
• ///&Link to "easier life" by machines, What are the human costs?
• Robert Owen: Separating industrialization from capital accumulation (later: capitalism). Addressing control and government. He develops profit sharing, sharing of controls among workers.
• The exaggerated hopes and ideas of the beneficial effect of technologies. (then&then&now). What machines are going to do to moral and human development ...

• Physical and administrative infrastructures. Relationship between the state and industry/technology. Changes catalyzed by the need for large public infrastructures in order to develop and sustain the industrial enterprises.
• Support relationships between tech, public institutions, the government = a novelty. Transportation and distribution. Energy, information (from the point of its generation to the points of its use). Linking the public with the private spheres.
• "Political decisions in the garment of technological decisions." (The standards of electricity different in the US and elsewhere)
• Divisible benefits and costs vs indivisible benefits and costs.
• From common safety to individual criminality = fear of being caught and fined would be a way to enforce regulations. Driving, speeding. Technology.

Donna Haraway

Cyborg manifesto

21-9-20

"relation between Organism and machine has been a border war" pg. 2

Breaking down binaries/boundaries, intersections:

• animal "vs" human
  • "The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal disturbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange" pg. 4
• organism "vs" machine
  • "The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be hanuted, there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. [...] Machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, they could only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively and we ourselves frighteningly inert." pg.4

// & Link to Dolar, thinking machines

• physical "vs" non-physical
  • A matter of size. Sleek and unnoticeable contemporary tech.

// & Link to Franklin, smart humans and dumb giants.

• fractured identities, breaking down labels

25-9-20

• joined kinship, multiplied perspectives pg. 5
• labor pg.8 (link to prescriptive technology, Ursula Franklin)
• The informatics of domination pg .10
• "technologies and scientific discourses can be partially understood as formalizations, i.e., as frozen moments, of the fluid social Interactions constituting them, but they should also be viewed as instruments for enforcing meaning. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relation and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other."
• ... All submitted to a disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange. pg. 12
• Theory of language and control - Communications science, cybernetic (feedback-control led) systems. Determining the rates, direction and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. Threat: interruption of Communications. "any system break down is a function of stress." pg. 14

From Cyborgs to Companion Species

lecture here

listened on: 24-9-20

• kin and kind
• kinship
• companion species - dogs and cyborgs
• species / companion - linguistic breakdown

Alternative to the various versions of post-humanism ... Coming to terms with multiple decenterings/wounds to narcissism that the ontological human had to suffer:

• Copernican wound = decentering earth (the narcissist) from the centre of the universe
• Darwinian wound = decentering of humanity from all organic life
• Freudian wound = decentering of consciousness - active agencies, active beings
• the synthetic wound = decentering the natural from the artificial

companion specisism - accomodates the four wounds to the ontological of the human. (machinic+organic+humanic)

run fast, bite hard

shut up and train

"there must be some molecular record of our touch in our codes of living that will leave traces in the world"

25:00

Marcel Mauss: The techniques of the body

Text here

Chapter One: The Notion of Techniques of the Body

25-9-20

• "A kind of revelation came to me in hospital. I was ill in New York. I wondered where previously I had seen girls walking as my nurses walked. I had the time to think about it. At last I realised that it was at the cinema. Returning to France, I noticed how common this gait was, especially in Paris ; the girls were French and they too were walking in this way. In fact, American walking fashions had begun to arrive over here, thanks to the cinema. This was an idea I could generalise. The positions of the arms and hands while walking form a social idiosyncracy, they are not simply a product of some purely individual, almost completely psychical arrangements and mechanisms." pg.3

• "Hence I have had this notion of the social nature of the 'habitus' for many years. Please note that I use the Latin word-it should be understood in France-habitus. The word translates infinitely better than 'habitude' (habit or custom), the 'exis', the 'acquired ability' and 'faculty' of Aristotle (who was a psychologist). It does not designate those metaphysical habitudes, that mysterious 'memory', the subjects of volumes or short and famous theses. These 'habits' do not just vary with individuals and their imitations, they vary especially between societies, educations, proprieties and fashions, prestiges. In them we should see the techniques and work of collective and individual practical reason rather than, in the ordinary way, merely the soul and its repetitive faculties." pg.4

• "Lastly, another series of facts impressed itself upon me. In all these elements of the art of using the human body, the facts of education were dominant. The notion of education could be superimposed on that of imitation. For there are particular children with very strong imitative faculties, others with very weak ones, but all of them go through the same education, such that we can understand the continuity of the concatenations. What takes place is a prestigious imitation. The child, the adult, imitates actions which have succeeded and which he has seen successfully performed by people in whom he has confidence and who have authority over him. The action is imposed from without, from above, even if it is an exclusively biological action, involving his body. The individual borrows the series of movements which constitute it from the action executed in front of him or with him by others." pg.4

• social+psychological+biological

• "[...] there is perhaps no 'natural way' for the adult. A fortiori when other technical facts intervene: to take ourselves, the fact that we wear shoes to walk transforms the positions of our feet: we feel it sure enough when we walk without them." pg.5

• description of a hunting ritual + "The relations between magical procedures and hunting techniques are clear, too universal to need stressing. The psychological phenomenon I am reporting at this moment is clearly only too easy to know and understand from the normal point of view of the sociologist. But what I want to get at now is the confidence, the psychological momentum that can be linked to an action which is primarily a fact of biological resistance, obtained thanks to some words and a magical object." pg. 5&6

• "I call technique an action which is effective and traditional (and you will see that in this it is no different from a magical, religious or symbolic action). It has to be effective and traditional. There is no technique and no transmission in the absence of tradition. This above all is what distinguishes man from the animals: the transmission of his techniques and very probably their oral transmission." pg.6

&&link to Walter J. Ong - Orality and Literacy

• "The body is man's first and most natural instrument. Or more accurately, not to speak of instruments, man's first and most natural technical object, and at the same time technical means, is his body." pg. 6

• "The constant adaptation to a physical, mechanical or chemical aim (e.g. when we drink) is pursued in a series of assembled actions, and assembled for the individual not by himself alone but by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies in it." pg.7

• "Here let us look for a moment at ourselves. Everything in us all is under command. I am a lecturer for you; you can tell it from my sitting posture and my voice, and you are listening to me seated and in silence. We have a set of permissible or impermissible, natural or unnatural attitudes. Thus we should attribute different values to the act of staring fixedly: a symbol of politeness in the army, and of rudeness in everyday life." pg.7

Situatedness.

performing habitus idea

Chapter Two: Principles of the Classification of Techniques of the Body

30-9-20

• sexual division of techniques of the body (and not just sexual division of labour): Here he states (on the example of closing a fist, punching) the weakness and difference between genders. Arguable.
• Variations of techniques of the body with age: Example of loosing the ability to squat. pg. 7/8

• "A certain form of the tendons and even of the

bones is simply the result of certain forms of posture and repose." pg. 8

• Classifications of techniques of the body according to efficiency (results of training). "Training, like the assembly of a machine, is the search for, the acquisition of an efficiency. Here it is a human efficiency. These techniques are thus human norms of human training. These procedures that we apply to animals men voluntarily apply to themselves and to their children." pg. 8

• "dexterity": "[...] the adaptation of all their well-co-ordinated movements to a goal, who are practised, who 'know what they are up to'. The English notions of 'craft' or 'cleverness' (skill, presence of mind and habit combined) imply competence at something. Once again we are clearly in the technical domain." pg. 9

• Transmission of the form of the techniques: example of pious Muslim using only the right hand. "To know why

he does not make a certain gesture and does make a certain other gesture neither the physiology nor the psychology of motor asymmetry in man is enough, it is also necessary to know the traditions which impose it."

• Studying the: the modes of life, the modes, the tonus, the 'matter', the 'manners', the 'way'. pg. 9

Chapter Three: A Biographical List of the Techniques of the Body

• Techniques of birth and obstetrics: "There are techniques of giving birth, both on the mother's part and on that of her helpers, of holding the baby, cutting and tying the umbilical cord, caring for the mother, caring for the child." pg. 10

• Techniques of Infancy: carrying, weaning, use of the cradle.

• Techniques of adolescence: the initiation. pg. 10

• Techniques of adult life
  • Techniques of sleep.
  • Techniques of rest (suspension of activity)
  • Techniques of activity, of movement: Movements of the whole body: climbing; trampling; walking. running. dancing. jumping. climbing. descent. swimming. forceful movements (pushing, pulling, lifting, throwing) - acquired technique. holding. pg. 15
  • Techniques of care for the body (rubbing, washing, soaping, coughing, spitting).
  • Consumption techniques (eating, drinking).
  • Techniques of reproduction.

...

Chapter four: General Considerations

• "[...] we are everywhere faced with physio-psycho-sociological assemblages of series of actions. These actions are more or less habitual and more or less ancient in the life of the individual and the history of the society." pg. 16
• "In every society, everyone knows and has to know and learn what he has to do in all conditions. Naturally, social life is not exempt from stupidity and abnormalities. Error may be a principle." pg. 16
• "[...] example and order, that is the principle. Hence there is a strong sociological causality in all these facts." pg. 16
• "[...] since these are movements of the body, this all

presupposes an enormous biological and physiological apparatus. [...] But in general they are governed by education, and at least by the circumstances of life in common, of contact. [...] there are two big questions on the agenda for psychology: the question of individual capacities, of technical orientation, and the question of salient features, of bio-typology [...]" > psychotechnics. pg. 17

• biologico-sociological phenomena. "the basic education in all these techniques consists of an adaptation of the body to their use. For example, the great tests of stoicism, etc., which constitute initiation for the majority of mankind, have as their aim to teach composure, resistance, seriousness, presence of mind, dignity, etc." pg. 17
• Composure: "a retarding mechanism, a mechanism inhibiting disorderly movements; this retardation subsequently allows a co-ordinated response of coordinated movements setting off in the direction of a chosen goal. This resistance to emotional seizure is something fundamental in social and mental life. I t separates out, it even classifies the so-called primitive societies; according to whether they display more brutal, unreflected, unconscious reactions or on the contrary more isolated, precise actions governed by a clear consciousness." pg. 17
• "It is thanks to society that there is an intervention of consciousness. It is not thanks to unconsciousness that there is an intervention of society. It is thanks to society that there is the certainty of pre-prepared

movements, domination of the conscious over emotion and unconsciousness." pg. 17

• breathing techniques ...

&check Wimhof

Ulises Ali Mejias: Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World

Introduction

• "A network, defined manually, is a system of linked elements or nodes. While a network can be used to describe any study natural as well as social phenomena (everything from cells to transnational corporations), what is relevant here is the use of networks to describe - and give shape to - social systems linked by digital technologies. For our present purposes, then, any and all kinds of electronic technological systems will simply be referred to as "the digital network". We can broadly define a digital network as a composite of human and technological actors (the nodes) linked together by social and physical ties (the links) that allow for the transfer of information among some or all of these actors." pg. xii

&paranodality (Mejias, later in the text)

• "[...] digital information and communication technologies (fb) act as templates for organizing sociality, for building social networks. They arrange individuals into social structures, actively shaping how they interact with the world. But during the process of assembling a community, not every type of participant or every kind of participation is supported by the technology. While some things can be assimilated or rendered in terms that can be understood by the network, others cannot. As participation in social and civic life becomes increasingly mediated by digital networks, we are confronted by a series of disquieting questions: What does the digital network include [...], what does it leave out? How does the networks' logic shape the way we look at the world? At what point does the exclusion carried out by the digital network make it necessary to question its logic and even dismantle it, and to what end exactly?" pg. xii

• "While not unproblematic, the conceptual grouping of all digital networks into a discussion of THE network is, I believe, timely and necessary. Modern contributions to social theory, science and technology studies, and even critical theory (rhizomatic thinking) have shown us that networks are plural, fluid, and overlapping: we do not belong to a single network, but to a variety of them, and our participation in them is variegated and complex." pg. xiii

• Isolating the network as a single epistemic form > in order to critique. "Identifying the common characteristics of networks and common forms of violence found across all forms of networked participation." > "strategy meant to clarify the relationship between capitalism and the architecture of digital networks across a variety of instances, to facilitate, in short, a structural critique or UNMAPPING the network. pg. xiii

1-10-20

• "We have gained a lot by looking at the world as a plurality of networks. But we are starting to lose something in terms of identifying common characteristics and, more important, common forms of violence found across all forms of networked participation. [...] clarify the relationship between capitalism and the architecture of digital networks [...] to facilitate a structural critique of unmapping the network." pg. xiii

• bringing humanity closer? digital divide. great economic success of wwcorporations that brought us the information revolution. changing the world, redefining the way we communicate, lifestyles depend on them. pg. xiv

• "[...] digital networks are revolutionizing the way we commerce, domestic and foreign politics, socioeconomic development, and education work." To question their power.

• "Jacques Ellul proposed that whereas "primitive man" was socially determined by taboos, rites, and rules, the technological phenomenon represents the most dangerous form of determinism in the modern age. Our tools shape our ways of acting, knowing, and being in the world, but some of their influence can unfold without our consent or even awareness, and this determinism is particularly dangerous. Thus to Ellul technology occupies today the place rites and rules did before modernity, both because they direct our actions and because they frequently go unquestioned. Without even realizing it, we become slaves not so much to the technology, but to the assumptions about what they are for, what they do for us, and so on." pg. xiv/xv

&REF: Jacques Ellul, The technological Society

• overview of the chapters pg. xv, xvi, xvii

Part One: Thinking the network

The Network as method for organizing the world

• "[...]digital network forms a part of a capitalist order that reproduced inequality through participation and how this participation exhibits a hegemonic and consensual nature." pg. 3

• [...] creation of inequality while increasing participation, through strategies that include the commodification of social labor, the privatization of social spaces, the surveillance of dissenters." pg. 3

• "Inequality is a part of the natural order of networks, particularly those exhibiting a preferential attachment process. The outcome of this process - whether we are talking about networks of proteins, citations or web links - is that the rivh nodes in those networks tend to get richer." pg. 4

• "[...] the network has become the dominant operating logic of late capitalism. Michael Hardt and Anotonio Negri (Empire) write that "in the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organizational model of production, transforming the forms of cooperation and communication within each productive site and among productive sites".

• "digital enclosure" (Mark Andrejevic - iSpy): "economic gap between those who own the means of production (the digital networks) VS those who sell their labor for access to those means (labor=participation in the network that generates user information that "becomes the property of private companies that can store, aggregate, sort and sell the information to others (form of a database or a cybernetic commodity)". pg. 5

• "the commodification of the social (functions)" [...] "The hegemony of networks [...] participation is presented as a fait accompli, in the absence of options and alternatives (gmail at universities), and as a naturalized form of commodification in which social acts (sending an email) is almost invisibly transformed into a revenue-creating opportunity for a corporation" pg. 6,7

• "The fact of the matter is that inequality in the digital network is not experienced as coercive or unpleasant. To the contrary, because it appeals to our egos by allowing us to express ourselves, participation in digital networks is creative and pleasurable. Everyone feels welcomed because there is a place in the network for everyone and everything. The inequalities that the network creates are overlooked by most users because the network is perceived as a better provider of opportunities and equality than the alternatives (social institutions or the state, for instance)." pg. 8

• "The network thus represents a form of hegemony a system of rule in which a minority can rule over a majority not by brute force or deception but through consensus. From a Gramscian perspective, hegemonic power is predicated on a harmonious relationship between unequal social classes achieved through the formation of a popular discourse of inclusion: political accommodation of the underprivileged allows the ruling class to maintain its privileges by seeming to represent the interests of the ruled. In the context of digital networks, the trope of “total inclusion” establishes hegemony by promoting the idea that the consensual acceptance of the terms of use (which spell out precisely the way in which we are to be ruled) is rewarded by the opportunity to have a presence in the network on the same terms enjoyed by everyone else. The illusory sense of empowerment is further reinforced by the idea that there is no ruling body in the network. This is true to the extent that there is often no centralized authority in most networks. But we could say that the ruler in networks is network logic itself, which specifies the parameters for interaction." pg. 8

• "The network, in short, can only function if members passively adhere to its logic, not if they are actively engaged in questioning it. Hence there is a need to begin to unmap the network, to transcend its determinism through whatever strategies we might devise: obstruction of its growth, disassembling of its parts, localization of its processes, intensification of its virtualities; hence there is a need, in other words, to resist a logic that can only think in terms of nodes." pg. 8/9

• "While the technological phenomenon is a powerful social determinant, it is also true that humans are responsible for creating and determining technology in the frst place. Thus it is probably more exact to say that humans and technologies codetermine each other." pg. 9

&link to intra-action

• "[...] before the network was merely a metaphor to describe society, now it has become a technological model or template for organizing it. [...] also the emergence of the network as an episteme, a system for organizing knowledge about the world. [...] the network model and the network episteme serve two different functions: whereas the model is used to design and build actual networks, the episteme allows us to understand the “networked” world, to see everything in terms of networks, and to apply network logic even to things that are not networks. [...] It becomes, first, a technological template for organizing the social; and second, it becomes an episteme or a way to understand and access reality. This episteme not only is facilitated by the technology but also transcends it, becoming a knowledge structure, a way of seeing the world as composed of nodes and links." pg. 9

• metaphor > model > episteme

• nodocentrism: inside vs outside

• "Manuel Castells (The rise of the network society) writes:"The topology defined by networks determines that the distance (or intensity and frequency of interaction) between two points (or social positions) is shorter (or more frequent, or more intense) if both points are nodes in a network than if they do not belong to the same network. On the other hand, within a given network, flows have no distance, or the same distance, between nodes. Thus, distance (physical, social, economic, political, cultural) for a given point or position varies between zero (for any node in the same network) and infinite (for any point external to the network)."" pg. 10

• "Nodocentrism means that while networks are extremely effcient at establishing links between nodes, they embody a bias against knowledge of— and engagement with— anything that is not a node in the same network." pg. 10

• "[...] nodes can only see other nodes. [...] It is an epistemology based on the exclusive reality of the node. It privileges nodes while discriminating against what is not a node— the invisible, the Other." pg. 10

• "The assumption behind the discourse of the [bridging of the] digital divide is that one side, technologically advanced and accomplished, must help the other side, technologically underdeveloped or retarded, to catch up." pg. 11

• example of nodocentrism: "Nodocentrism is at work in accidents caused by following inaccurate Global Positioning System (GPS) instructions, as when the GPS device tells its user to drive into incoming traffic or a body of water. By relying on the simulated reality of the digital network over the reality of the terrain, humans give precedence to the actuality of the node." pg. 11

• "Embodying the organizing logic of the network is part of what we already do, perhaps without even realizing it, and it is the divide between the networked and nonnetworked parts of our identity (the included and excluded parts) that we have to become sensitive to." pg. 13

• [...] our inability to imagine an outside [of the network episteme]." pg. 13

• "[...] to reorganize our intimate ways of thinking. If unmapping is unthinking, it should require no special tools or skills but the mind. The present goal of unmapping the network, therefore, is to give the mind the tools to envision how the network has shaped and molded us, to explain how the network has determined us, and more important, to raise the possibility of alternatives— to ask how we can determine it." pg. 14

• "Perhaps this intellectual exercise is a good enough start, considering that network logic points to a crisis of imagination, specifcally, to a crisis of how we imagine ourselves as individuals in a community. Defining the self in relation to the collective requires an investment of multiple desires or affects that converge in the act of imagining a community. In other words, community can be said to be the intersection (whether benign or violent) of affects that start as imagined and, through the process of communication, crystallize into social practices. [...] In one way, networks open up new ways for individuals to communicate affectively, giving way to new forms of community and participation. But as has already been suggested, the network determines those forms of community according to specific interests. We might be fascinated by the digital network as a new form of imagined community, but we need to ask: Whose imagined community? [...] If hegemonic power is inscribed in networked communities, we need to ask what the network template leaves for us to imagine, which is why the network template represents, to paraphrase Chatterjee, a colonization of our collective power to imagine community." pg. 14

• "The digital network is a ready- made image into which we can pour our hopes for social unity and connectivity." pg. 14

• "The digital network signifies the aestheticization of the social, a means for the masses to contemplate a simulation of themselves and express themselves through this simulation. But it also represents an arena of restricted or diminished opportunities for meaningful political and social action. [...] Interestingly, for Benjamin the aestheticization of the political involved the masses accepting reproduction (what we would call simulation) in lieu of the “uniqueness of every reality.” [...] Public intellectuals (media gurus, academics, etc.) who advocate that digital networks are being used to empower the public are only undermining our potential to free ourselves from the hypnotic hold of this aestheticized form of sociality. This is why there is a need to theorize how new imagined communities can be different from the template-based communities of the digital network." pg. 15

• "At the same time, any alternative would have to organize itself in order to survive, and that form of organization would probably look and act just like a network. While I am attempting to critique the network as a digital template for sociality, I also recognize that the network, as an organizational form, can be useful. If the only way the excluded can unsettle network hegemony is to first organize themselves into a networked multitude that eventually rejects, subverts, or disinvests itself from network templates, so be it." pg. 15

• "Digital networks map unto a social domain what was before unimaginable, reorganizing the possible. They are the result of previous social models as well as new, emerging ones. This actualization of the virtual unveils new associations, new ways in which things that were not linked before are now related, and also in which other things are now excluded or forgotten." pg. 16

• "Thus while this is a book about thinking and unthinking networks, it is also a book about alterity and othering — about the way we imagine and engage difference. Specifically, it is about the ethics of othering." pg. 16

• (Shanon-Hartley theorem) + "Noise, in network terms, is nonnodal— it is not simply a meaningless sound but a sound that does not conform to the harmonies of the network. The project of disrupting or unmapping the network and encountering its outsides is one that goes from trying to solve the problem of communicating in the presence of noise to one that sees noise as communicating presence, the presence of the Other." pg. 16

The Privatization of Social Life

9-10-20

• "[...] for Benjamin the aestheticization of the political involved the masses accepting reproduction (simulation) in lieu of the" uniqueness of every reality." likewise, today's networked masses are encouraged to express themselves in a simulated social sphere that contributes to the reproduction of inequality." pg 15

• "Hegemonic rule depends on widespread consensus, which in network terms means all nodes subscribe to the same protocols and accept the same models of social participation." pg 15

• Noise as communicating presence pg 16/17

• Communicative capitalism (Jodi Dean) = "the materialization of ideas of inclusion and participation in information, entertainment, and communication technologies in ways that capture resistance and intensity global capitalism. In Communicative capitalism everyone has the tools and opportunities to express an opinion." pg. 21

• "... Network is made the dominant episteme or model of organizing social realities. This is accomplished by the application of a nodocentric filter to social formulations, which renders all human interaction in terms of network dynamics. Under this nodocentric view, the goal is to assign to everything its place in the network. Thus to be anything other than a node is to be invisible, nonexistent." pg 21

• ... The technologies of communicative capitalism... Increase inequality through commodification, the transformation of social activity into a commodity that can be bought or sold." pg 22

• "Commodification is a concept from Marxist theory that refers to the process of taking something that is outside of the market (something without commercial value) and bringing it into the market, turning it into a commercial transaction." pg. 22

• Such as: privatization, commercialization, the socialization of labor (women's labor in industrialized nationale for example).

• "while it is not easy to establish parallels between the commodification of women's labor and the commodification of sociality in digital network, some analogies can be drawn in regard to how both forms of commodification can be experienced as alienating and dehumanizing in certain aspects, while at the same time empowering and liberating in others." pg 23

• dual processuality/double affordances pg. 24

"In other words, the commodifcation of the social in digital networks, the process whereby our social lives are subordinated to the logic of nodocentrism, can both open and close productive forms of sociality that challenge capitalism. One way to talk about these contradictory effects is to talk about the dual processuality, or double affordances, of networks. As Jan van Dijk observes, networks make two sets of outcomes possible at one and the same time: a scale expansion accompanied by a scale reduction, more freedom of a certain kind but more control of another, more openness at one level but more constraints at another, and so on. Alexander Galloway describes a similar tension between two opposite but complementary dynamics that play out in the protocol or code of digital networks: one that “radically distributes” control and another that “focuses control into rigidly defned hierarchies.” (footnote 11: "Galloway, Protocol, 50. The author argues that “at the same time that it is distributed and omnidirectional, the digital network is hegemonic by nature; that is, digital networks are structured on a negotiated dominance of certain flows over other flows” (75).") The double affordances in digital networks make possible dual processes to be present at once, which is why the commodifcation of the social might look very differently depending on which angle one is looking at it from."

• Playbor (labor+play). "But while it is a play, its not an unconstrained, free-form type of play, the kind that is chaotic and u planned, full of possibilities. Rather, it is a rational izmed game, standardized and institutionalized, that contributes in very specific ways to a capitalist social order." pg 25 (also true for art)

• "Participation is thus both a form of violence and a form of pleasure. More than a desire, participation is an urge, a form of coercion imposed by the system. This logic is internalized, rationalized, and naturalized.

Participation in the network is a template for being social, for belonging. It is perceived as socially rewarding. It gives the illusion of making us more social. In the disciplinary societies of the nineteenth century, the self was actively molded into conformity by institutions external to the body, like the factory or the school. The participatory culture of the digital network has more in common with the society of control, where the desire to conform emerges from within the body. By setting the parameters for inclusion, the network episteme perfectly expresses this new architecture of power. No external institutions are required to enforce this episteme because it is affirmed through our personal use of technology, establishing the network as the main template for organizing and understanding the real. pg. 25

&Not society of the spectacle, but society of control (=?) &Foucault (discipline and punish)

• "The capacity for collective action, community building, and mobilization are unprecedented. But the move towards increasingly personalized media and one-to-one marketing may encourage self-obsession, instant gratification and impulsive behaviors." pg 27

• "All forms of participation are allowed, as long as they submit to the organizing logic of the network" pg 27

• "much is at stake over who gets to define what the model of information processing look like." pg 28

• Changing cognitive makeup

&REF: Article: is Google making us stupid? Nicolas carr

&REF: Jay rosen: The people formerly known as audience

• "you don't control production on the new platform, which isn't one-way. There's a new Balance of power between you and us" pg 31

• The idealistic discourse of digitalism. pg 31

• Net neutrality pg 34

• Digital networks as models of organizing the social

Albert Camus: The Myth of Sisyphus

• "In a man's attachment to life there is something stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's judgement is as good as the mind's and the body shrinks from annihilation. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead." pg. 6

Muanis Sinanovic: Kaj je radikalni center?

here (SI)

25-9-20

"Meja med avtoritarnostjo in egalitarnostjo, svobodo in disciplinarnostjo, menoj in drugim je tanjša, kot si želimo priznati. Gre še za vprašanje tehnologije – ali zmoremo visoko tehnologijo uporabiti kot orodje ali pa bomo mi še naprej njeno orodje. Seveda je nemogoče, da nas raba orodij ne bi oblikovala. Ključno ni zavzeti tehnofobno stališče, učinke tehnologije poskušati popolnoma obvladati, se pretvarjati, da jo zmoremo zasužnjiti, temveč se naučiti z njo vzpostaviti odnos kot z orodjem, se naučiti z njo živeti tako, da nas bo dvigala, ne pa, da nas bo zasužnjila."

"V zadnjem obdobju sem se večkrat oklical za radikalnega centralista. S tem se nekoliko posmehujem ideji o radikalnem centru kot domovanju trdega jedra neoliberalizma. Vendar mislim na to, da se rešitev ne nahaja v nobeni od prevladujočih političnih smeri, da se sploh ne nahaja v politiki, temveč v metafizičnem središču sveta. Pogled tja prinaša tako radikalno skepso kot afirmacijo življenja. Gre za novo skepso, ki prihaja po razsvetljenski, v času, ko se ta razrašča v fanatizem. Potrebno je vzgojiti nove instinkte, iz katerih podo vzniknile nove politične ideje. Veličina politične ideje ni v tem, koliko si obeta spremeniti svet. Izraža se v pomirjenosti na obrazu njenega nosilca. Na pragmatični ravni to pomeni tako distanco kot posluževanje razbitih ostankov obeh ideologij, ko lahko služita nekemu globjemu občutju, občutju ljubezni. Človek, navdan z ljubeznijo, ni hipi, objemalec dreves ali verski fanatik s čudno žarečimi očmi. Je normalen človek. Normalen človek se ne boji. Pripravljen se je prepustiti toku svojega zgodovinskega trenutka, ker zna v njem plavati. Če v vodi panično čofotamo, se bomo potopili. Če se pomirimo in v globini svojega duha-telesa začutimo to tanko mejo med nami in vodo, če v praksi dojamemo svoj odnos z njo, se obdržimo nad gladino. Vsak študent filozofije pozna pomen grškega izraza krisis – obrat, trenutek odločitve."

Mazuir Rafal: The dao of improvisation=

22-9-20

• (mentions Henri Bergson "bergsonian intuition/intuitive cognition" & Stockhausen "intuitive music" and Cardew "free improvisation")

• "You cannot see improvised music through 'what' to play, but rather through 'how' to play."

//& Link to Franklin, she says the same about technology and its implications!

• "... free and intuitive improvisation is a kind of action strategy and as many artists presumed over the centuries, is in fact an exceptionally effective strategy, allowing extraordinary creative actions, results of which can exceed our expectations (or even go far beyond our ability to understand)."

• "... it should be considered a way of action, and a way of action that is not related to any specific stylistic (this particular feature was called 'non-idiomatic' by Derek Bailey)."

• "... The changes, related to the processual thinking of the world and to the belief in non – existence of static objects together with the belief in constant movement in the subatomic world. Acceptance (or, at least, not radical rejection) of Bergson’s thesis on the change being the basis of reality and exploring the experiences of culture, for which Yiqing -The Book of changes- is an essential writing, seems just natural in the attempt to formulate a philosophical strategy of free improvisation."

• state of the "transparent mind"

• weiwuwei action without action

• ..."When one's wisdom does not think of the right or the wrong (of a question under discussion), that shows the suitability of the mind (for the question)."

Florian Cramer: Autonomy and Space - Hans Haacke's systems aesthetics

here

• "Haacke's manifesto: "make something, which experiences, reacts to its environment, changes, is nonstable ... make something indeterminate, which always looks different, the shape of which cannot be predicted precisely ... make something which cannot "perform" wihtout the assistance of its environment ...""

• "A ‘sculpture’ that physically reacts to its environment is no longer to be regarded as an object. [It is a process; see point 1 - F.C.] The range of outside factors affecting it, as well as its own radius of action, reaches beyond the space it occupies [beyond art as the institutional context; point 4, F.C.]. It thus merges with the environment in a relationship that is better understood as a”system’ of interdependent processes."

• "These processes evolve without the viewer’s empathy. [They are not perceived like classical art works, they do not aim for a psychological effect, point 3] He becomes a witness. A system is not imagined, it is real." 15

• "It is real and not symbolic; and despite its indeterminacy and openness, it remains stable, regulating itself through a metabolism."

&link to Radada

• General Systems Theory

• systems theory departs from Aristotle’s observation that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.18

• General Systems Theory thus promotes a holistic approach to science, rejecting the atomistic, specialized disciplines and methods of modern sciences.

• General Systems Theory regards every phenomenon as a system and investigates its organization instead of its single parts by describing relations, hierarchies and interactions of parts within a system.20

• As opposed to cybernetics, which investigates interaction in human-machine systems, and systems analysis, which looks for practical solutions of structural problems, General Systems Theory is an interdisciplinary all-purpose discipline whose scope includes hard sciences as well as social sciences and humanities.21

• According to General Systems Theory, a system can be principally investigated and classified as natural or cultural, dynamic or static, indeterminate or deterministic, temporal or fixed, complex or simple, stable or unstable, autonomous or dependent, open or closed;22 the same criteria and polarities that I described above as being constitutive for Haacke’s “real-time systems”.

• For Bertalanffy, all organisms are open systems, since they change their components and interact with their environment

...

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events

• 27-9-20, Read'n'Repair @Varia
• 22-9-20, Radio Live Xtravaganza @Worm