User:Tisa/research log

Read texts always with my work in mind, making parallels. The way to go about reading theory: Derive from my works, my thougths, make them central. Everything else and other is an extention, branching out. Necessary only as a contextualization, a point of reality check and reference, perhaps a source of inspiration.

xxxx

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).

Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari: 1000 Plateaus

translators' foreword

• "A Thousand Plateaus is conceived as an open system. It does not pretend to have the final word. The authors' hope, however, is that elements of it will stay with a certain number of its readers and will weave into the melody of their everyday lives."

• "[...] a plateau is reached when circumstances combine to bring n activity to a pitch of intensity that is not automatically dissipated in a climax. The heightening of energies is sustained long enough to leave a kind of afterimage of its dynamism that can be reactivated or injected into other activities, creating a fabric of intensive states between which any number of connecting routes could exist." pg. xii/xiii

• consistency = style = "a dynamic holding together or mode of composition" pg. xiii

• concept is not a brick, it is a toolbox. pg xiii

REF: Deleuze and Foucault: Intellectuals and power, pg. 208

&pg. 41

&chapter 11

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

adrienne maree brown: Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

• here, near this tiny portion of the massive ocean, that I began to realize how important emergent strategy, strategy for building complex patterns and systems of change through relatively small interactions, is to me—the potential scale of transformation that could come from movements intentionally practicing this adaptive, relational way of being, on our own and with others.
• Many of us have been and are becoming students of these systems of life, wondering if in fact we can unlock some crucial understanding about our own humanity if we pay closer attention to this place we are from, the bodies we are in.

Son[i]a #316. Jennifer Walshe

3-11-2020 listen here

• What is paratext?
• Composer-performer workshop at darmstadt
• Augusto boal - theatre exercises
• A new discipline - making a work stronger...
• warm up - importance
• Reading the bodies of musicians, blind auditions
• freeimprov unwritten rule - not using text
• Vocal extended techniques - imitating sounds that others make
• Brain prioritize vocal sounds over everything else
• Collection of thoughts, jokes, interesting spikes (shes making an AI out of it)

Tony Konrad, MC Schmidt

• Changing emotion - when people speak
• What people are talking about, how they say things.
• Truth is a thousand times more interesting than fiction

Arditi quartet

• Maybe now its the time to say things clearly!(not oblique, not confusing)

Steward Lee stand up routine technical ref

• Smuggling references/theory in there.. All packed in there, but not forces upon the audience. It is just there.
• Someone shouts a quote from a theoretical essay as if drunk.
• "My emotion are inappropriate for my size"

Louise bourgeois (documentary)

• Switching formats. Make a stupid PowerPoint. Get clear data out. Or a bbc presenter. Or a high guy.
• Obsession on the score. Not on the musicians - the people. Woodwind without breaths.

Extra level of instrumentation = people playing instruments!

• The history of the voice (her project)
• Leading workshops - being compassionate. Seeing other people and letting them known that they are seen!(rehearsals)... Extending compassion. Really seeing people. Not just the piece. It goes onto compassion outside of the room.
• Pushing yourself to the absolute limit. (black swan, whiplash). Dancers..... Working hard, opportunity to get into a new space.

Excavate, explore a space.

• Dignity & respect. People that choose to sit and listen and watch. Meet that respectfully, by being 100%.

Postinternet work - Jean mckju MC q. When internet becomes a part of an infrastructure.

• An epigram?
• Internet is not interesting anymore.
• What internet is doing to language, how language is shifting. How jokes are being made.
• What are you excited by now?
• Text scores being written archaically.
• Markup chain generators, Ai, neural networks.... Building new texts.

HP lovecraft

• Vc culture silicon valley
• Ai that will not pass the turing test, but will create art.(soon)
• Positive possible futures // fetishization of dystopia

Monica bijelska

• Uncanny valley voice
• wavenet algorythms
• How does it feel to be human that works with voice?
• Replicating the wavenet
• Research gives ideas.

46:40

...

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 and again 20-10-20

An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit

• "Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true." irony as a rethorical strategy and a political method. "At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg. pg. 1

The cyborg is a crutch that allows her to walk.

• Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction." pg. 1

• "Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility." pg. 1

• "the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion." pg. 1

• "modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence" pg. 1

• "By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics." pg. 2

• "In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics — the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other — the relation between Organism and machine has been a border war" pg. 2

• "the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths [...] in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the western sense." pg. 2

• "The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence." pg. 2

• "Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other." pg. 2

• Three crucial boundary/binary breakdowns.
• human & animal (human animality): "The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed" pg. 3
• animal-human (organism) & machine.
• "Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; 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.3

& Link to Dolar, thinking machines

• "Textualization' of everything in poststructuralist, postmodernist theory has been damned by Marxists and socialist feminists for its utopian disregard for the lived relations of domination that ground the 'play' of arbitrary reading." interpretation is lost. pg. 4

• "Who cyborgs will be is a radical question; the answers are a matter of survival. Both chimpanzees and artefacts have politics, so why shouldn't we?" pg. 4

• 3rd distinction: "the boundary between physical and non-physical"

• "Modern machines are quintessentially microelectronic devices: they are everywhere and they are invisible."

• "The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as preeminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles." pg. 4

• "The ubiquity and invisibility of cyborgs is precisely why these sunshine-belt machines are so deadly. They are as hard to see politically as materially. They are about consciousness — or its simulation." pg. 4

& Link to Franklin, smart humans and dumb giants.

• "Ultimately the 'hardest' science is about the realm of greatest boundary confusion, the realm of pure number, pure spirit, C3I, cryptography, and the preservation of potent secrets. The new machines are so clean and light. Their engineers are sun-worshippers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. The diseases evoked by these clean machines are 'no more' than the minuscule coding changes of an antigen in the immune system, 'no more' than the experience of stress." pg. 4/5

• "cyborg myth is about transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of needed political work." pg. 5

• Basically disrupting the binary articulations, intertwining them, forming them in cohesion, unision.

• "[...] the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance." pg. 5

• "a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies." pg. 5

• "a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate; in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling. [...] building a political form that acutally manages to hold together witches, engineers, elders, perverts, Christians, mothers, and Leninists long enough to disarm the state. [...] Affinity: related not by blood but by choice, the appeal of one chemical nuclear group for another" pg. 5

Fractured identities

25-9-20 and again 20-10-20

• "Consciousness of exclusion through naming is acute. Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic." pg. 5

• breaking down labels

• "And who counts as 'us' in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called 'us', and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity?" pg. 6

• "For me — and for many who share a similar historical location in white, professional middle-class, female, radical, North American, mid-adult bodies — the sources of a crisis in political identity are legion. The recent history for much of the US left and US feminism has been a response to this kind of crisis by endless splitting and searches for a new essential unity. But there has also been a growing recognition of another response through coalition — affinity, not identity." pg. 6

• Chela Sandoval coined "a hopeful model of political identity called 'oppositional consciousness', born of the skills for reading webs of power by those refused stable membership in the social categories of race, sex, or class." Women of color - "constructs a kind of postmodernist identity out of otherness, difference, and specificity. This postmodernist identity is fully political [...] Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation." pg. 6

• "Sandoval emphasizes the lack of any essential criterion for identifying who is a woman of colour. She notes that the definition of the group has been by conscious appropriation of negation." pg. 6

• taxonomies of feminism. The pattern repeats. > "learning how to craft a poetic/political unity without relying on a logic of appropriation, incorporation, and taxonomic identification." pg. 7

• "The theoretical and practical struggle against unity-through-domination or unity-through-incorporation ironically not only undermines the justifications for patriarchy, colonialism, humanism, positivism, essentialism, scientism, and other unlamented -isms, but all claims for an organic or natural standpoint. I think that radical and socialist/Marxistfeminisms have also undermined their/our own epistemological strategies and that this is a crucially valuable step in imagining possible unities. It remains to be seen whether all 'epistemologies' as Western political people have known them fail us in the task to build effective affinities." pg. 7

• labels and descriptors

• "It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. [...] We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted body. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our politics lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivete of innocence." pg. 7

• "What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective — and, ironically, socialist-feminist?" pg. 7

• "Cyborg feminists have to argue that 'we' do not want any more natural matrix of unity and that no construction is whole." pg. 8

• "Marxian socialism is rooted in an analysis of wage labour which reveals class structure. The consequence of the wage relationship is systematic alienation, as the worker is dissociated from his (sic) product. Abstraction and illusion rule in knowledge, domination rules in practice. [...] Labour is the humanizing activity that makes man; labour is an ontological category permitting the knowledge of a subject, and so the knowledge of subjugation and alienation." pg. 8

• socialist-feminist ... "women's labour in the household and women's activity as mothers generally (that is, reproduction in the socialist-feminist sense), entered theory on the authority of analogy to the Marxian concept of labour. The unity of women here rests on an epistemology based on the ontological structure of labour." pg. 8

• MacKinnon's version of radical feminism "theory eliminates some of the difficulties built into humanist revolutionary subjects, but at the cost of radical reductionism."
• "Feminist practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not."
• "In the realm of knowledge, the result of sexual objectification is illusion and abstraction. However, a woman is not simply alienated from her product, but in a deep sense does not exist as a subject, or even potential subject, since she owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product."
• "If my complaint about socialist/Marxian standpoints is their unintended erasure of polyvocal, unassimilable, radical difference made visible in anti-colonial discourse and practice, MacKinnon's intentional erasure of all difference through the device of the 'essential' non-existence of women is not reassuring." pg. 9

• the problematic structures: "Each tried to annex other forms of domination by expanding its basic categories through analogy, simple listing, or addition. Embarrassed silence about race among white radical and socialist feminists was one major, devastating political consequence. History and polyvocality disappear into political taxonomies that try to establish genealogies." pg. 10

• "It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man — and so the essence of woman — breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex." pg. 10

• "Perhaps socialist feminists were not substantially guilty of producing essentialist theory that suppressed women's particularity and contradictory interests. I think we have been, at least through unreflective participation in the logics, languages, and practices of white humanism and through searching for a single ground of domination to secure our revolutionary voice." pg. 10

• "Some differences are playful; some are poles of world historical systems of domination. 'Epistemology' is about knowing the difference." pg. 10

The Informatics of Domination

• "I argue for a politics rooted in claims about fundamental changes in the nature of class, race, and gender in an emerging system of world order analogous in its novelty and scope to that created by industrial capitalism; we are living through a movement from an organic, industrial society to a polymorphous, information system--from all work to all play, a deadly game. Simultaneously material and ideological, the dichotomies may be expressed in the following chart of transitions from the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination" pg. 10

• "In relation to objects like biotic components, one must not think in terms of essential properties, but in terms of design, boundary constraints, rates of flows, systems logics, costs of lowering constraints." pg. 11

• "For liberals and radicals, the search for integrated social systems gives way to a new practice called 'experimental ethnography' in which an organic object dissipates in attention to the play of writing. At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural' architectures constrain system design." pg. 12

• "The entire universe of objects that can be known scientifically must be formulated as problems in communications engineering (for the managers) or theories of the text (for those who would resist). Both are cyborg semiologies." pg. 12

21-10-20

• "At the level of ideology, we see translations of racism and colonialism into languages of development and under-development, rates and constraints of modernization. Any objects or persons can be reasonably thought of in terms of disassembly and reassembly; no 'natural' architectures constrain system design." 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: "The privileged pathology affecting all kinds of components in this universe is stress — communications breakdown (Hogness, 1983)." pg. 12

• [...] organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse in 'the West' since Aristotle still ruled [...] have been cannibalized, or as Zoe Sofia (Sofoulis) might put it, they have been 'techno-digested'. The dichotomies between mind and body, animal and human, organism and machine, public and private, nature and culture, men and women, primitive and civilized are all in question ideologically." pg. 12

• "One important route for reconstructing socialist-feminist politics is through theory and practice addressed to the social relations of science and technology, including crucially the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imaginations. The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code." pg. 12

• "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 meanings. The boundary is permeable between tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other.Furthermore, communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move — the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears and all heterogeneity can be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange." pg. 13

• "In communications sciences, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by looking at cybernetic (feedback-controlled) systems theories applied to telephone technology, computer design, weapons deployment, or data base construction and maintenance. In each case, solution to the key questions rests on a theory of language and control; the key operation is determining the rates, directions, and probabilities of flow of a quantity called information. The world is subdivided by boundaries differentially permeable to information. Information is just that kind of quantifiable element (unit, basis of unity) which allows universal translation, and so unhindered instrumental power (called effective communication). The biggest threat to such power is interruption of communication. Any system breakdown is a function of stress. The fundamentals of this technology can be condensed into the metaphor C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, the military's symbol for its operations theory. In modern biologies, the translation of the world into a problem in coding can be illustrated by molecular genetics, ecology, sociobiological evolutionary theory, and immunobiology. The organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out. Biotechnology, a writing technology, informs research broadly.14 In a sense, organisms have ceased to exist as objects of knowledge, giving way to biotic components, i.e., special kinds of information-processing devices. The analogous moves in ecology could be examined by probing the history and utility of the concept of the ecosystem. Immunobiology and associated medical practices are rich exemplars of the privilege of coding and recognition systems as objects of knowledge, as constructions of bodily reality for us. Biology here is a kind of cryptography." pg. 13

• "Communications technologies depend on electronics. Modern states, multinational corporations, military power, welfare state apparatuses, satellite systems, political processes, fabrication of our imaginations, labour-control systems, medical construc-tions of our bodies, commercial pornography, the international division of labour, and religious evangelism depend intimately upon electronics. Micro-electronics is the technical basis of simulacra; that is, of copies without originals." pg. 14

• "Communications sciences and biology are constructions of natural-technical objects of knowledge in which the difference between machine and organism is thoroughly blurred; mind, body, and tool are on very intimate terms." pg. 14

The 'homework economy' outside 'the home'

• videogames, individual competition, sci-fi: "More than our imaginations is militarized; and the other realities of electronic and nuclear warfare are inescapable." pg. 17

• "The new technologies affect the social relations of both sexuality and of reproduction, and not always in the same ways. The close ties of sexuality and instrumentality, of views of the body as a kind of private satisfaction- and utility-maximizing machine, are described nicely in sociobiological origin stories that stress a genetic calculus and explain the inevitable dialectic of domination of male and female gender roles. These sociobiological stories depend on a high-tech view of the body as a biotic component or cybernetic communications system. Among the many transformations of reproductive situations is the medical one, where women's bodies have boundaries newly permeable to both 'visualization' and 'intervention'." pg. 17

• "Sex, sexuality, and reproduction are central actors in high-tech myth systems structuring our imaginations of personal and social possibility." pg. 17

• "Another critical aspect of the social relations of the new technologies is the reformulation of expectations, culture, work, and reproduction for the large scientific and technical work-force. A major social and political danger is the formation of a strongly bimodal social structure, with the masses of women and men of all ethnic groups, but especially people of colour, confined to a homework economy, illiteracy of several varieties, and general redundancy and impotence, controlled by high-tech repressive apparatuses ranging from entertainment to surveillance and disappearance." pg. 17

• "What kind of constitutive role in the production of knowledge, imagination, and practice can new groups doing science have? How can these groups be allied with progressive social and political movements? What kind of political accountability can be constructed to the women together across the scientific-technical hierarchies separating us?..." pg. 18

Women in the integrated circuit

• "If it was ever possible ideologically to characterize women's lives by the distinction of public and private domains — suggested by images of the division of working-class life into factory and home, of bourgeois life into market and home, and of gender existence into personal and political realms — it is now a totally misleading ideology, even to show how both terms of these dichotomies construct each other in practice and in theory. I prefer a network ideological image, suggesting the profusion of spaces and identities and the permeability of boundaries in the personal body and in the body politic. 'Networking' is both a feminist practice and a multinational corporate strategy — weaving is for oppositional cyborgs." pg. 18

• "The only way to characterize the informatics of domination is as a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable." pg. 20

• "We do not need a totality in order to work well. The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams for a perfectly true language, of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one. In that sense, dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction. Perhaps, ironically, we can learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western logos." pg. 21

Cyborgs: a myth of political identity

• on rewriting: "Releasing the play of writing is deadly serious. The poetry and stories of US women of colour are repeatedly about writing, about access to the power to signify; but this time that power must be neither phallic nor innocent. Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other." pg. 22

• "The tools are often stories, retold stories, versions that reverse and displace the hierarchical dualisms of naturalized identities. In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse. The phallogocentric origin stories most crucial for feminist cyborgs are built into the literal technologies — technologies that write the world, biotechnology and microelectronics — that have recently textualized our bodies as code problems on the grid of C3I. Feminist cyborg stories have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control." pg. 22

• "Writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. That is why cyborg politics insist on noise and advocate pollution, rejoicing in the illegitimate fusions of animal and machine" pg. 23

&link to paranodality (Mejias)

• "With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile 'masculine' separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize 'oneself' as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche." pg. 23

• "This is not just literary deconstruction, but liminal transformation. Every, story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics — rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. In this plot women are imagined either better or worse off, but all agree they have less selfhood, weaker individuation, more fusion to the oral, to Mother, less at stake in masculine autonomy. But there is another route to having less at stake in masculine autonomy, a route that does not pass through Woman, Primitive, Zero, the Mirror Stage and its imaginary. It passes through women and other present-tense, illegitimate cyborgs, not of Woman born, who refuse the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life. These cyborgs are the people who refuse to disappear on cue, no matter how many times a 'western' commentator remarks on the sad passing of another primitive, another organic group done in by 'Western' technology, by writing. These real-life cyborgs are actively rewriting the texts of their bodies and societies. Survival is the stakes in this play of readings." pg. 24

• "To recapitulate, certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals — in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/ made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man." pg. 24

• "High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and who is made in the relation between human and machine. It is not clear what is mind and what body in machines that resolve into coding practices. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse (for example, biology) and in daily practice (for example, the homework economy in the integrated circuit), we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic." pg. 24

• "One consequence is that our sense of connection to our tools is heightened. The trance state experienced by many computer users has become a staple of science-fiction film and cultural jokes." pg. 24

• "From the seventeenth century untill now, machines could be animated — given ghostly souls to make them speak or move or to account for their orderly development and mental capacities. Or organisms could be mechan-ized — reduced to body understood as resource of mind. These machine/ organism relationships are obsolete, unnecessary. For us, in imagination and in other practice, machines can be prosthetic devices, intimate components, friendly selves." pg. 25

• "There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; andfemale embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric exten-sions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth." pg. 26/27

• "Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination — in order to act potently." pg. 27

• salamander: "We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender." pg. 27

• "Cyborg imagery can help express two crucial arguments in this essay: first, the production of universal, totalizing theory is a major mistake that misses most of reality, probably always, but certainly now; and second, taking responsibility for the social relations of science and technology means refusing an anti-science metaphysics, a demonology of technology, and so means embracing the skillful task of reconstructing the boundaries of daily life, in partial connection with others, in communication with all of our parts. It is not just that science and technology are possible means of great human satisfaction, as well as a matrix of complex dominations. Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves. This is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia. It is an imagination of a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits of the supersavers of the new right. It means both building and destroying machines, identities, categories, relationships, space stories. Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess." pg. 27

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

Chapter 9: The outside of networks as a method of acting in the world

here

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

Simon Yulli: All Problems of Notation Will Be Solved By the Masses

text here

&&read

Boris Groys: The Loneliness of the Project

text here

&&read

Italo Calvino: Cybernetics and Ghosts

text here &&read

Roland Barthes: From work to text

8-11-20 pg. 155-164 (book: Image Music Text)

• interdisciplinarity as a network
• "It is indeed as though the interdisciplinarity which is today held up as a prime value in research cannot be accomplished by the simple confrontation of specialist branches of knowledge. " pg. 155
• "Over against the tradi-tional notion of the work, for long - and still - conceived of in a, so to speak, Newtonian way, there is now the require-ment of a new object, obtained by the sliding or overturning of former categories. That object is the Text." pg. 156
• propositions of the Text: "they concern method, genres, signs, plurality, filiation, reading and pleasure." "the text is a metodological field" " the Text is experienced only in an activity of production. " "the text cannot stop; its constitutive movement is that of cutting across (a work, several works)." "the Text is that which goes to the limit of the rules of enunciation (rationality, reada-bility, etc.)." pg. 157

• "the Text tries to place itself very exactly behind the limit of the doxa (is not general opinion - constitutive of our democratic societies and powerfully aided by mass communications - denned by its limits, the energy with which it excludes, its censorshipl). Taking the word literally, it may be said that the Text is always paradoxical."
• paranodality, paradox:
• para- : "a prefix appearing in loanwords from Greek, most often attached to verbs and verbal derivatives, with the meanings “at or to one side of, beside, side by side” (parabola; paragraph; parallel; paralysis), “beyond, past, by” (paradox; paragogue); by extension from these senses, this prefix came to designate objects or activities auxiliary to or derivative of that denoted by the base word (parody; paronomasia), and hence abnormal or defective (paranoia), a sense now common in modern scientific coinages (parageusia; paralexia). As an English prefix, para-1 may have any of these senses; it is also productive in the naming of occupational roles considered ancillary or subsidiary to roles requiring more training, or of a higher status, on such models as paramedical and paraprofessional: paralegal; paralibrarian; parapolice." pg. 158
• the work is a sign (two modes of attribution to the signified: evident>philology or secret/to be sought out > hermeneutics, interpretation.
• "The logic regulating the Text is not comprehensive (define 'what the work means') but METONYMIC; the activity of associations, contiguities, carryings-over coincides with a liberation of symbolic energy (lacking it, man would die)" pg. 158
• "The Text is plural. Which is not simply to say that it has several meanings, but that it accomplishes the very plural of meaning: an irreducible (and not merely an accept-able) plural. The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an inter-pretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemi-nation. The plural of the Text depends, that is, not on the ambiguity of its contents but on what might be called the stereographic plurality of its weave of signifiers (etymologic-ally, the text is a tissue, a woven fabric). The reader of the Text may be compared to someone at a loose end (someone slackened off from any imaginary); this passably empty subject strolls - it is what happened to the author of these lines, then it was that he had a vivid idea of the Text - on the side of a valley, a oued flowing down below {oued is there to bear witness to a certain feeling of unfamiliarity); what he perceives is multiple, irreducible, coming from a disconnected, heterogeneous variety of substances and perspectives: lights, colours, vegetation, heat, air, slender explosions of noises, scant cries of birds, children's voices from over on the other side, passages, gestures, clothes of inhabitants near or far away. All these incidents are half-identifiable: they come from codes which are known but their combination is unique, founds the stroll in a difference repeatable only as difference. So the Text: it can be it only in its difference (which does not mean its individuality), its reading is semelfactive (this rendering illusory any inductive-deductive science of texts - no 'grammar' of the text) and nevertheless woven entirely with citations, refer-ences, echoes, cultural languages ( what language is not?), antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the 'sources', the 'influences' of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas." pg. 159/160

• "the metaphor of the Text separates from that of the work: the latter refers to the image of an organism which grows by vital expansion, by 'development' (a word which is significantly ambiguous, at once biological and rhetorical); the metaphor of the Text is that of the network; if the Text extends itself, it is as a result of a combinatory systematic (an image, moreover, close to current biological conceptions of the living being). Hence no vital 'respect' is due to the Text: it can be broken (which is just what the Middle Ages did with two nevertheless authoritative texts - Holy Scripture and Aristotle); it can be read without the guarantee of its father, the restitution of the inter-text paradoxically abolishing any legacy. It is not that the Author may not 'come back' in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a 'guest'."

• music+text: "The history of music (as a practice, not as an 'art') does indeed parallel that of the Text fairly closely: there was a period when practising amateurs were numerous (at least within the confines of a certain class) and 'playing' and 'listening' formed a scarcely differentiated activity; then two roles appeared in succession, first that of the performer, the interpreter to whom the bourgeois public (though still itself able to play a little - the whole history of the piano) delegated its playing, then that of the (passive) amateur, who listens to music without being able to play (the gramophone record takes the place of the piano). We know that today post-serial music has radically altered the role of the 'interpreter', who is called on to be in some sort the co-author of the score, completing it rather than giving it 'expression'. The Text is very much a score of this new kind: it asks of the reader a practical collaboration. [...] The reduction of reading to a consumption is clearly responsible for the boredom' experienced by many in the face of the modern ('unreadable') text, the avant-garde film or painting: to be bored means that one cannot produce the text, open it out, set it going." pg. 162/163
• final approach to text: pleasure.

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

...

conversations

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events

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