Category: Submission

CS A3: Tutor Feedback

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Full document: Sarah-Jane Field CS A3 Feedback Form

 Key points

  • What do I mean by photography? A perennial problem and one which I spent many words trying to address in DI&C drafts before abandoning. Will discuss below.
  • I am asked; without being patronising, will there be a type of glossary for some of the more unfamiliar words/phrases/concepts? (I have wondered about including a glossary for the tricky concepts in the indices as well as inc. Chapter 1 as planned – would this be acceptable?)
  • Choose the right examples, this is imperative – I agree.

Summary of written feedback:

You are beginning to bring together these complicated ideas into a coherent piece of writing that asks questions about the way that we perceive photography. Your sample text section is well written and is an indicator of a highly polished, informative and interesting piece of critical writing. Good, I’m pleased to read that.

  • Need to be clearer about what I am critiquing – formal traditional photography (inc. moving image)/ or am I including or omitting practice that moves beyond the frame? My big challenge is our language system – I am critiquing the habit of a Cartesian mind which seeks to separate these things in a world still dominated by it – which I think is particularly *exemplified in photography – the recording and fixing of photons (there is much more to say about this but not here). How I overcome the challenge in the essay is yet to be seen and I may not succeed. It may not even be possible because the language we use today, and how, may not allow for it. A friend studying at a much higher level than me recently said, we desperately need consciousness to evolve away from the Cartesian urge to isolate and separate. But it’s not going to happen overnight or even this century – however, lots of people seem to think it is taking place, beneath the surface all the time without our awareness, due to digital culture for good and bad – and having an impact on how we perceive everything, from photography to far beyond. (*See John Tagg’s Filing Cabinet talk 2011, Vimeo, which though hard to follow has useful references)
  • I agree with Matt’s point, the artist examples should clarify things. I was glad to be pointed towards Christian Boltanski and Alfredo Jarr. I have identified that Edgar Martins is exploring the relationship between photography and perception, and his work is heavily influenced by quantum-informed concepts. Lewis Bush’s Ways Of Seeing project may also be an excellent source.
  • Since submitting A2 I have identified further written work which will help to support the discussion – essays in Martins’ book on death and suicide and by Daniel Palmer, Associate Dean of Research and Innovation in the School of Art at RMIT University, Melbourne. I have also continued to read Barad’s work making sure I understand the ideas as best I can and can apply them to photographic theory.
  • ‘Is the quantum world view that you suggest closer to certain modes of photographic expression than others?’ I suspect traditional photography can and does express the emerging view I’m exploring but it presents challenges. I think our understanding of how meaning comes about through intra-action, relation, and context – between all elements including the presence of a conscious mind is what matters most. As Palmer writes and I agree, ‘Cartier-Bresson’s style of photography is still possible, still practised and celebrated, but its importance is marginal. [Because it represents the mechanistic world in which it came to the fore.] With the digital universe, other types of photography have become more culturally significant, ones which often involve a shift from the single moment of capture to the expanded moments of post-production.’ (2015) Expanded moments of post-production make us think of a continued, phenomenological process. A Cartier-Bresson ‘capture’ aims to kill the moment and stick it up on the wall. He did tell us he was a hunter. For Barad, and Bohr, reality is all phenomena. Others don’t buy this, I’m aware. But from a structural point of view – in a world underpinned by continuously lively data – the notion of phenomena is critically important.  Algorithms, code, intra-active materials express today’s process of making meaning. It’s important to state I do not think all things digital are the Holy Grail – far from it.  
    (Ref: Palmer, D. et al.(2014) ‘‘Lights, Camera, Algorithm: Digital Photography’s Algorithmic Conditions’ in Sean Cubitt, Daniel Palmer &; Nate Tkacz (eds.),’ In: Digital Light. Fibreculture Books. pp.144–62. At: https://www.academia.edu/30168558/_Lights_Camera_Algorithm_Digital_Photography_s_Algorithmic_Conditions_in_Sean_Cubitt_Daniel_Palmer_and_Nate_Tkacz_eds._Digital_Light_London_Fibreculture_Book_Series_Open_Humanities_Press_2015_144_62(Accessed 08/01/2020).)     
  • I am very interested in Matt’s inclusion of Jaar’s The Sound of Silence, not least of all because I lived in SA until I was 16, my mother was a journalist there in the 80s, her late husband knew Carter and his group of fellow photojournalists and the Bang Bang Club(2000) made me homesick and heartbroken for the people and country I knew – I read it a good while before studying with the OCA. In my own practice, text and its relationship to the image, our response to both forms, has been crucial since S&O when I exhibited a series of images and writings on the wall – giving both the same value. Since then, text has always played a role and at the moment my BOW includes just a single image and about ten pieces of writing – although I do currently plan to add more pictures. But the relationship between both forms is absolutely key. I will need to look at the work in more detail and think about your question – but it could be an excellent example. (This bullet point is sheer entanglement – but we might also call it serendipity or even an inevitable happy culmination of events/things/people/information.) https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2020/01/07/bow-a3-texts-rewritten-and-placed-in-a-suggested-format/
  • ‘I am not that familiar with Muholi’s work but can you be specific about how she manages to move away from the Cartesian view beyond questions around Colonialism (how important is colonialism to your argument?)’ Colonialism is crucial. Barad never stops mentioning it. Azoulay’s thesis in Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2019) is clearly influenced by similar ideas to Barad’s – the entangled activities of taking, extracting and destroying – in which photography’s history and practice are firmly ensconced (See my DI&C essay). In an article about her earlier book, The Civil Contract of Photography (2014) she discusses how the meaning of a colonial image of an African man, originally intended to show how ‘savage’ the man was, today expresses the savagery of the photographer and the dignity of the subject – context and relation are key to quantum concepts/philosophy as well as photography. (‘relata-within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions’ (Barad, 2017: 334)) I will need to make this clear in the introduction, and I suspect quotes from Azoulay will help. Muholi’s work might provide evidence of a non-Cartesian, transformative, lively, relational view of the world – at the very least her work rips apart the Colonial habit of white European men cataloguing black skin (and women).

Finally, after submitting A3, I came across a useful paragraph in Barad’s book which settled something for me, where she discusses how the quantum world is not a different world to the Newtonian one (of course). Newtonian physics describes the parochial space we inhabit. Quantum ideas go beyond that and describe the world we have not evolved to ‘see’. But our growing knowledge of it affects our understanding. The maths (according to every documentary you watch) is the most accurate description of reality we have today and that there has ever been. I will need to include this, I think. Plus, why I think this is all so very important for photographers/artists.

(See original tutor text at end of document)

 

CS/BOW Reflection: Long

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 5 Comments

I felt it would be useful for me to pause and consider where I am at this juncture, and where I came from in order to arrive here. The OCA has been an immensely useful container but the journey I’m on, the desire to understand something fundamental but hard to pinpoint began long before 2014. Perhaps as long ago as when I was a child watching how strangely the grown-ups behaved and wondering why. Or noticing how we (I) emulated others; accents, behaviours, tropes, and then absorbing these actions and making them ours (mine).

This will be a long post and is for my benefit rather than anyone else’s – it feels necessary and important to get these thoughts outside my head as a part of a process in relation to CS and BOW.  And also, that it should be more conversational as opposed to confined by the rigours of academia although the habit to identify quotes is strong nowadays. Ruth (previous CS tutor) had suggested experimenting with form for CS and so I won’t rule out including sections of this, or developing it, if down the line that seems like a route I would like to take.

I started making notes for this blog yesterday as I marched along the street, sweaty because it was very mild and I was dressed for the artic, muttering to myself about what exactly it is I am exploring here in this work; I began to formulate a narrative that linked my life with the theories and ideas I am looking at.

Right now, I think it always starts with digitisation. I am fascinated by the revolution we are currently living through, by the assumptions people make about it. About where it comes from, what it’s doing, why we’ve contrived to arrive at this point (without volition – is that possible? Or is contrived the wrong word?)

Groups used to be smaller. For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in manageable extended families. Across cultures, there were some basic similarities. Nikolas Christakis covers these in his book Blueprint (2019). He talks about a social suite, which ‘includes individuality, love, friendship, co-operation, learning and so on’.

He also talks about the dyadic nature of humans. I really like this. It’s a word I came across when I was reading about babies and their primary carers. In the baby literature, it implies living in this secondary invisible placenta; it contains mother and child. Both are deeply connected within and even shielded from something outside the dyad. Not all mothers experience this. And modern culture seems to makes it challenging for genuinely dyadic relationships. Some people suggest the high numbers of post-natal depression are related to this failure to connect – and I suspect there is some truth to that although it can also be down to a lack of support, which is of course, another connection with other mothers/parents/helpers – or allo-parents, a term used by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, a socio-anthropologist who writes about mothers.

I was lucky. I did experience a deep connection with all of my children. During my divorce, I seemed to be able to protect my youngest in this little bubble from all the toxicity outside of it. It also taught me that symbolic language isn’t always necessary  (I should have been far more consciously and intellectually aware of this given my acting training)- that we can communicate without it, even while we are asleep. And that has been very important throughout this course. I’ve learned that symbolic language is a distancer. It helps us to distance ourselves from ourselves, never mind anyone or anything else. “Use your words” is a constant refrain to toddlers who prefer to lash out when angry. We ‘otherise’ ourselves, remove something and in the process de-intensify it – be it rage or love – through the use of symbolic language whether it’s written down or simply spoken. We send our thoughts out into the world with language; a little bit of ourselves leaves our bodies and lands elsewhere. It can land as a caress or a weapon and it has an effect but, while wounding with words can be devastating and the cause a chain of fatal events, it removes us from direct violence. Again, Christakis discusses this, as does Richard Wrangham in his book The Goodness Paradox (2019)

A little bit of us – a thought that gets heard is something that can affect others.

In a dyad between a mother and child, something else is going on. Physical reactions take place that don’t need words, not even as thoughts. A baby wakes in one room and your breasts start leaking in another. The prickly sensation of your milk ducts filling up is what alerts you and you check in to see your infant’s beaming face  – and they seem to have known you were on your way. I’m painting an idyllic picture  – it’s not always like this, obviously. And some women and babies have a really terrible time. There is so much in modern culture which gets in the way of the connecting behaviours that evolved to help us survive. But somehow most mothers (although not all) and also fathers overcome the many, many obstacles. When your child falls over, a jolting sensation takes place in your own body as if you too have fallen. The theory suggests mirror neurons are responsible, which apparently exist in all primates (and beyond no doubt). It happens with other relationships too but it’s very noticeable in parent/child pairs.

Christakis discusses the hyperdyadic nature of the human species. In other words, we are all connected, that is how we operate. Hegel talked about collective consciousness.  Edward O’ Wilson has spent a lifetime investigating the hive and applying it to human behaviour. Social contagion or mimetics are other words to describe this phenomenon. Despite sounding so modern, it seems plain as day to me that we are networked creatures and always have been. Christakis’s earlier book is indeed titled Connected (2009). These connections mean that ideas spread around cultures and groups even when there has been no physical contact. Wilson discusses this strange ability seen throughout history when inventions take place in more than one place at the same time.

The Internet is a response to a lack of connection, perhaps in particular relation to population growth. As groups got larger, we stopped being connected. Social fragmentation, evident in the artwork of the early 20th century is one expression of this loss of connection between people and in relation to how reality felt. We humans then ingeniously came up with a way to address that. We dug down into reality and found a way to emulate it. Despite its relative technological advancement our code is still a crude copy. And there is a problem. The code we use to make these connections is a language. It underpins all the forms and media that we see on our screens, which is also another layer of language. So inherent and embedded in the anatomy of the Internet is a process of distancing. What’s even more difficult, as my lovely and intelligent friend rages about often, the people writing the code are very frequently a certain type. “They are the nerds!” she states angrily. “The people who aren’t naturally social, who don’t understand relationships, who are on the spectrum and can’t communicate. The ones who don’t have any empathy!” This is blatant stereotyping but the people writing the code are aware there is a problem. They know they need to write empathy into the code. They know this. However, for now, empathy is missing and the fact the whole thing is structured on language which is itself a distancing process means there is a structural problem which we may never be able to overcome, although I have faith in humanity

We can be optimistic because while we have collectively tried to re-connect using digital technology, which emulates natural linkages, today we’ve not even begun to see just how powerful our technology will be. This is both frightening and exhilarating. Once quantum computing moves out of its infancy we will not only emulate ‘hyperdyadicness’ (not a real word, I know), we will reach a point where simulation and nature are interchangeable. There are many, many foreseeable and unforeseeable problems but we will go on an incredible journey as our clever people look for the solutions.

We have begun the process though. So far it has wrought terrible consequences in the form of nuclear war. But what we’ve lost over time as language developed and civilisation grew is currently being rediscovered through quantum science and systems theory (which is interdisciplinary – don’t underestimate how crucial that is). People often see similarities between Eastern philosophies and the newer sciences. But I am wary of spouting racist claptrap. However, it is well documented that the Dalai Lama is interested in quantum mechanics and Luisi and Capra (2007) devote a carefully written chapter to the relationship between spirituality and science.

Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway (2007) deals with the philosophy of quantum science. She cannot stress the importance of entanglement enough. She explains how ideology and world-views are embedded in the apparatus’ and the framing of our experiments and subsequent related objects and behaviours. This embedding is also explored in Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012).  The ideology is in the apparatus and photographers (all except experimental ones) are flunkies or to use his word, functionaries  – they ‘are inside their apparatus and bound up with it’ (loc 2086).

What stops us from seeing this is our ‘Cartesian habit of mind’ (Barad, 2007). Both Systems Theory and quantum science urge us to move away from the strictures of a Newtonian/Cartesian worldview where isolated objects exist in a void universe and nothing is connected or relational. Entanglement has been lost in our understanding of reality and we are working our way back to incorporating it now. But there is a long way to go and it’s on the fringes of society – although arguments to suggest it is becoming embodied through our interactions with digital data.

The problem with arbitrary lines around isolated objects is that it too often engenders a simplistic, black and white of view of the world. (And that is being kind.) This can be seen across disciplines and in photography it is endemic. Photography which claims so loudly to be a ‘caller out of injustices’ seems in fact to reinforces unhelpful mentalities, undermines any attempts to move away from hierarchical thinking, narrows down meaning, oversimplifies complex issues, attracts monism, flattens nuances, strips away context and relationships. Still photography in particular entrenches all of that. It isolates and insists on objects in a void. It suggests the opposite of a ‘dynamic and shifting entangling of relationships’ (Barad, 2007: 35) no matter how hard people point out – and writers such as Ariella Azoulay have done -– that history and the objects we construct are forever subject to re-examination, are alive with possibility and liveliness.

There is something inherently unavoidable and entrenched, in particular in still and analogue photography. I look at the ontology of a photograph and see that at its core, still and moving image are one and the same thing. We may intervene and add lots of frames together or else we isolate a single frame but they are both an agential cut (a Baradian term which I will explain more fully in my extended essay and in BOW). It’s the isolating that causes problems.

I find it hard that people fail to appreciate intra-relatedness. My interactions with a secondary school shocked and enraged me too as my child was being so badly affected by their entrenched position in an out-dated reality, in a constructed and ludicrous simulation of the past that is no longer relevant and entirely inappropriate to its surroundings, and that they seemed utterly oblivious to emergent changes to the world or else angrily against them. This is especially unhelpful for young people who have grown up with the problematised Internet which, despite its many issues engenders a networked view of reality. It is frustrating beyond belief that so many want to drill down into detail so tiny, they leave no room and can only focus on single issues, which they hope will somehow communicate something greater, rather than simply isolating themselves and their ideas in the void. It astounds me how this habit of monism fails us but is still so prevalent and is taught in schools and colleges and universities; but then I recall the citation which I begin CS A2 (draft) with by Capra and Luigi: ‘It [this habit I’ve described] derives from the fact most people in our modern society, and especially large institutions, subscribe to the concepts of an outdated worldview, a perception of reality inadequate for dealing with our overpopulated, globally interconnected world.’ (2014) Inadequate is the key term here. Inadequate. This old way of seeing and being will not serve us going forward. That is not to say we should forget history. We can’t. Because in an intra-related world the past is enmeshed with the future and the present. We must, as Azoulay (2019) recommends, re-evaluate our Cartesian linear view of time.

In my work I am, like the child who watched and noticed the adults and my friends all copying each other, performing roles, connecting. We have always done this. The Internet makes it visible. It somehow speeds the process up (See Virilio (2008) on speed and technology). The breaks are no longer in place. But we will write them into the code again. In the meantime, I do believe we need to find ways to communicate and explore intra-relatedness. We must challenge linear understanding, flat thinking, monism. Not everyone I value or follow agrees that there are no objects, that process supersedes things. However, we have lived with that myopic view for so long in the West and it has taken us to a very dangerous place. And so it behooves anyone who has the capability of addressing and deconstructing it to do so.

CS & BOW: Research Critique of Barad

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

 

Looking for a critique of Barad’s work I have come across this which confirms some of my concerns and questions, although rather more acerbically than I might have done. It begins with the following which made me laugh – humour in an academic paper, good! I do wonder if there is an element of peevishness in the article – will wait and see:

‘In Artful, her collection of critical essays, Smith (2013: 41) reminds us of a childhood game designed to break the boredom of long car journeys – ‘Ten points to the person who can see the Forth Road bridge’ – and points to its direct suitability to the situation of the academic conference: ‘Ten points to the first person who hears someone say the words Walter Benjamin.’ In recent years, it has been possible to play a version of this game substituting ‘Karen Barad’ for ‘Walter Benjamin’. If we add in bonus points for a cluster of terms taken from her book Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007) – especially ‘entanglement’, ‘diffraction’, ‘intra-action’ and ‘agential realism’ – then a fine game of ‘Barad Bingo’ can be had far and wide across the humanities and social sciences: from conferences on ruins, animal ethics and informational infrastructures to journal articles on lifelong learning (Edwards, 2010), bullying in schools (S ̄ndergaarda, 2012) and feminist theories of fashion (Parkins, 2008).’ (Hollins, et al, 2017)

 

Hollin, G, Forysth, I, Giraud, G et al. (1 more author) (2017) (Dis)entangling Barad: Materialisms and ethics. Social Studies of Science, 47 (6). pp. 918-941. ISSN 0306-3127

Click to access Disentangling%20Barad%20-%20version%20for%20repositories.pdf

Will report back with further notes – but good to see some counterpoints

  • What is it about Barad’s work that appeals to ‘now’ – which the authors admit is pressing today. “What is more, and as evidenced below (Figure 1), the influence of Barad’s work continues to grow, with the above outputs receiving significant year-on-year increases in citation counts. And this brings us to an important point: While Barad’s project spans twenty years, it is evidently of this moment.” (3)
  • ‘Questions are raised, however, about the applicability of concepts originating in the quantum realm and what is lost when they ‘jump scales’ and are used in order to grasp macro-sociological concerns.’ Barad herself actually warns against this kind of simplistic scaling up and claims to avoid analogy (5)Re second-mentioned concern is scaleability  – again dealt with by Barad – rather than scaling up, it seems to me she is suggesting implications at micro-level affect out thinking and even though the macro world is govenred by different rules, knowledge about more flexibity and possibility can nevertheless affect us, so not sure about this but I have only read first two chapters so will wait and see: “It does, however, mean that the issue of scale is particularly pertinent for those seeking to draw upon Barad’s work, and worth dwelling on.” (8)
  • ‘Making matter matter, or, in search of lost realness‘ compare section heading to Foster Return fo the Real (6)

  • ‘We conclude the article by arguing that in much of the literature drawing upon Barad there is a focus upon diffraction and entanglement and that this has come at the expense of considerations of complementarity and necessary exclusion. We suggest, however, that it is the radical potential of an ethics of exclusion which is perhaps most vital to those continuing to use Barad’s work.’ (5)

  • ‘Re my own comments on peevishness: ‘Does the process by which ‘matter comes to matter’ in Barad’s thesis matter? When we call upon Barad to help secure an argument, how can we be sure that we are not suffering from a new case of physics envy – of the quantum variety?” (6)
  • ‘There are two entirely concordant consequences to this continuity between physics and social theory. First, Barad’s realism promises to firm up the ‘beneath’, to put it in Foucauldian terms, of knowledge (Lather, 2010) by offering ‘the weight of realism’ as ‘ballast’ against too much postmodernism (Barad, 2007: 43).”Objects, entities and phenomena are demonstrably instantiated in and by material practices, produced performatively in concrete situations and thus – crucially – can anchor political actions. This approach carries distinct ethical implications, on which we focus shortly.’ (8)
  • ‘Despite the obvious utility of diffraction, the section concludes with some thoughts on the possible merits of rescuing reflection.’ (11) see rest of section
  • I like this criticism:
    ‘In a recent article, Paxson and Helmreich (2013: 169) argued that:
    ‘[New materialism] is productive because it can shake thinking away from the certainties of social determinism, as exampled, canonically, in the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge – and because it can show that phenomena emerge in practice. But it is also risky, because new materialist tactics often veer towards universalizing metaphysical claims about the nature of ‘matter’ as such and also, at times, take scientific truth claims about the world at face value – a move that we consider a step backwards for STS.’ (13)
  • ‘The key terms within this passage – intra-action, agential separability, exteriority-within – all indicate that for Barad the separations between words, things, and knowers are real enough but these separations are effects of particular engagements with the world (p. 138). This is the crux of Barad’s agential realism.’ (16) Key for me too  – and can be applied to cameras and visual recording systems (some of which do not rely on sight or emulation of sight)
  • Barad’s understanding of the apparatus, then, is more expansive than in a ‘typical’ methods section, more-than-human in its composition, and emergent through practice. There are clear affinities here with actor-network theory (e.g. Latour, 1987: 162) Something for me to investigate further (17)
  • ‘Perhaps, we might speculate, for theorists whose bread and butter it is to consider the nonhuman and their relations with humans and other nonhumans, Barad’s considerations are neither seismic nor entirely novel.’ (17)
  • re tools – and thinking about cameras/visualising tools: ‘The stick cannot usefully serve as an instrument of observation if one is intent on observing it. The line between subject and object is not fixed, but once a cut is made (i.e., a particular practice is being enacted), the identification is not arbitrary but in fact materially specified and determined (Barad, 2007: 154-155). (18)
  • NBNBNB: Not only is cutting a boundary-making practice (p. 148), it is a process over which there is a degree of control. Thus, for Barad, boundaries are not only real but there is a degree of responsibility for their creation, the worlds that are made, and those that are excluded (p. 243). (18)
  • This emphasis on separability, exteriority and constitutive exclusion is a significant part of what makes Barad’s work distinct and important. It is also the part of Barad’s scholarship that is most frequently lost in the re-telling. (18)
  • ‘The concept of complementarity makes clear that, for Barad, when one apparatus instantiates a particular world another is necessarily excluded.’ (18) (At the risk of sounding slightly belittling and not meaning to, in popular culture, this is explored by Phillip Pullman  – pulverized and aneathetised by the BBC)
  • ‘We argue that the ways with which Barad’s approach has been engaged have resulted in an over-emphasis on questions of entanglement. In contrast, we suggest that the ‘radical potential’ of agential realism is in drawing attention to what is excluded from particular entanglements.’ (19)
  • A useful list of more-than-human writers: ‘Barad’s intra-active conception of the world offers a specific understanding of relationality that goes beyond earlier conceptualizations of hybridity (Haraway, 1992; Latour, 1993), a term which suggests relations shape pre-existing entities (Lorimer, 2015: 24). Yet, aside from offering a neat neologism that makes its difference from interaction explicit, on a superficial level, intra-active conceptions of the world do not appear to be wholly novel. Approaches that have considered the ‘mangle of practice’ (Pickering, 2010) such as posthumanism (Castree and Nash, 2004; Hayles, 1999; Wolfe, 2010), actor-network theory (Latour, 2005; Mol, 2003), non- representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010), vital-materialist approaches (Bennett, 2009), engagements with cosmopolitics (Stengers, 1997, 2010, 2011; also Hinchcliffe et al., 2003), or object-oriented ontology (Bogost, 2011; Harman, 2012), all stress the agency of more-than- human entities and make clear that the human is shaped through encounters with other agencies.’ And add Deborah Lupton to this re Data Selves (2019)
  • The clearest description of performative for me yet – ‘Barad’s understanding of reality as enacted rather than pre-given similarly troubles pre-defined ethical hierarchies such as human/animal, subject/object, and nature/culture, as a way of thinking about the world.’ (19)
  • ‘Barad could thus be situated as part of a longer lineage of work that has collapsed the ontological and epistemological and turned attention to the performative composition of reality (e.g. Mol, 2002; Star, 1992).’ (I thinkI still need to figure out why this is not constructivist  – see the sentence about performative being not entirely or much at all re volition-) (20)
  • ‘We question the ease with which Barad’s work has ‘jumped’ between diverse scales and urged that attention be paid to frictions between scales, and what may be lost precisely because it is not scalable’ (23) Hayles (1999) seems to answer this when she describes the way we instantiate our movements and actions while we use computers – the technology for these computers often emerge from a range of inte-related sciences and technologies where quantum mechanics plays a significant part – See loc 698 and then Chapter 3 on how information became so important to theorists and scientists via the Macy conferences – how this conversation which informed military and computer sciences and ‘infected’ reality

  • Hard not to disagree with the following or any other form of information which becomes a holy grail and therefore dogma spouted by dogmatic, excluding followers. ‘Despite seeing a number of potentials in agential realism, however, it is important to caution against uncritically extolling the value of this approach. As Willey (2016: 993) powerfully argues, it is dangerous to position new materialism as a radical break from feminist, postcolonial STS (see also Sundberg, 2014), and uncritically valorizing agential realism can lend strength to this trap.’

 

BOW & CS Notes: Meeting the Universe Halfway, K.Barad, 2007 (Intro & Chpt. 1)

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

This book is vast and complex so I think I might try to make notes as I go. Although there is a risk in reading it that I will be carried away in unhelpful albeit exciting directions, I think it is worth taking because as I move through it I am beginning to have specific ideas about what I’m aiming to explore – and it’s very much linked to ‘seeing’. In DI&C A3 (2019) I began to explore the tendency for photography (both academic and more popular forms) to engage in hierarchical thinking, despite the fact that individuals within it often make great claims about using photography to interrogate society. This results in photography reinforcing rather than dismantling segregation of various forms.

Equipment and output are (perhaps catastrophically?) ‘entangled’ with the history and uses that engendered photography’s invention. I quoted Ariella Azoulay’s blog posts Unlearning the Origins of Photography (2018) which I now see are influenced by the same undoing of a Cartesian mindset that exists in Barad’s writing. I will also need to revisit Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography (2012) as the ‘apparatus’ – i.e. the social and economic machine in which the camera exists seems relevant.

So here are some bullet points notes for now:

  • Begins with an analysis of Frayn’s play Copenhagen (first performance 1998) (rave reviews and repeated runs across the globe) which she says is beautifully written but flawed – then goes on to say why, effectively lumping it alongside a ‘plethora of popular accounts that have sacrificed rigor (sic) for the sake of accessibility, entertainment, and if one is honest, the chance to garner the authority of science to underwrite one’s favourite view’ (6) I can imagine Frayne taking umbrage with this as it potentially says films such as Marvel’s Into the Spiderverse (2018) for instance which also uses a backdrop of multiple universes and fluid realities for its well-worn but nevertheless entertaining narrative structure are no different to his intellectual production. (I’ve not seen the play but really love Into the Spiderverse, incidentally…)
  • re the play, ‘we are left wandering aimlessly […with] only an empty feeling that quantum theory is somehow at once a manifestation of the mystery that keeps us alive and a cruel joke that deprives us of life’s meaning’ (17)
  • However, Neils Bohr, in particular, has called into question ‘an entire tradition in the history of Western metaphysics: the belief that the world is populated with individual things with their own set of determinate properties. The lesson that Bohr takes from quantum physics  is very deep and profound: there aren’t little things wandering aimlessly in the void that possess the complete set of properties Newtonian physics assumes’ […] “Which properties become determinate is not governed by the desires or the will of the experimenter but rather by the specificity of the experimental apparatus.”
  • ‘the very nature of intentionality needs to be rethought’ (22) i.e. we can assume nothing in isolation and the network/schema/surrounding landscape in which an intention emerges is always intra-dependent. (I will get to the use of intra-rather than inter shortly)
  • ‘intentions are not pre-existing determinate mental states of individual human beings’ & intentionality “might better be understood as attributable to a complex network of human and nonhuman [cameras for instance and the companies that make them] agents, including historically specific sets of material conditions that exceed the traditional notion of the individual’. (23)
  • ‘an entangled state of agencies’ (23)
  • She avoids analogies  – especially between people and particles and I will do well to heed her warning against doing so – reductive and simplistic
  • is interested in ‘conditions for the possibility of objectivity, the nature of measurement, the nature of nature and meaning making, and the relationship between discursive practices and the material world’  (24) This is where I am having some issues. First of all, because I had to get my head around ‘discursive practices’ as opposed to discursive writing – the latter is a description of a type of writing that flits from one subject to another and is a pejorative term (my writing!)  The former is a complex Foucaldian term which is very difficult to comprehend… discourse-related performative actions in human behaviour in which power-relations are played out. The most useful description is as follows: 

‘The discursive practice approach is grounded in four insights concerning discourse. One is the affirmation that social realities are linguistically/discursively constructed. The second is the appreciation of the context-bound nature of discourse. The third is the idea of discourse as social action. The fourth is the understanding that meaning is negotiated in interaction, rather than being present once-and-for-all in our utterances.’ From http://voidnetwork.gr/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Discursive-practice.pdf

My problem – and this runs throughout the Barad and New Materialism material I’ve read (still reading, still trying to understand and a way to go) is that, while I appreciate that language has been given more attention than material/matter as Barad argues in debates about power – language and verbal action are in my understanding material and that distinction between the two is what prevents people up from valuing digital language (code, digital photography) which they see as non-material and therefore less worthy (in art especially). (See Lupton, 2019, How data came to matter (79)) The other thing is, assemblages and intra-actions which include discursive practices, as well as matter, don’t exist in isolation which is the base of her world view (which also tallies with systemic theories as far as I can see – again, based on very basic knowledge). I am aware I have not yet got the gist of Barad’s arguments about matter so – watch this space  – I might get it eventually.

  • diffractive approach  – this suits my way of thinking and I wholeheartedly agree. One of the issues with photography writing in some instances is that it seems to have tunnel vision and excludes all else at times leading to phrases such as ‘photography changes everything’ which I briefly dismantled in DI&CA3. Photography then ends up being seen as a holy grail in some people’s minds when in fact it is one mechanism amongst many that contribute to meaning – and the flat, still, decisive moment kind might just be the most irrelevant and in Elkin’s terms ‘boring’ example of reality out there nowadays. (2011) Again, Lupton’s explanation of a diffractive approach, which refers to Barad, is useful. (29)
  • ‘a diffractive methodology is respectful of the entanglement of ideas and other materials [ideas = materials] in ways that reflexive methodologies are not (29)
  • agential realism – recognises agents both human and non-human that exists in and acknowledge the real but eschew both anti-realism/constructivism as well as realist insisters “a philosophical framework that […] entails a rethinking of fundamental concepts that support such binary thinking, including the notions of matter, discourse, causality, agency, power, identity, embodiment, objectivity, space, and time’ (26) – See page 48 for more inc. ‘representationalism is so deeply entrenched in Western culture that has taken on a common-sense appeal’ (48) What’s the alternative? Describe/how does photography reinforce this and can it help to critique it, if so how? – performative approaches
  • central – ‘matter as a dynamic and shifting entanglement of relations rather than a property of things’ (35)
  • Bohr: ‘we are part of that nature that we seek to understand’. ‘part of the phenomena we describe’ (26)
  • NBNBNBNB ‘Performative approaches call into question the basic premises of representationalism’ (28)
    ‘representationalism in the belief in the ontological distinction between representation and that which they purport to represent’ (46) [I think revisit Rubenstein’s crit of Freid – Failure to Engage for more on this]
    ‘ther are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities – representations and entities to be represented’ (46)
    ‘Performative approaches call into question representationalism’s claim that there are representations, on the one hand, and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other, and focus inquiry on the practices or performances of representing’ (49) Knowledge comes from ‘direct material engagement’ (49)
    See page 50 for Realism without Representation – where does all this tally with Hoffman’s theory in which our only access to the world is via representation alone. His representation is wholly constructed, it does not accurately describe the real but fulfills our needs for existing within it – therefore it is our real because its the only one we have.
    ‘Theorists who adopt a performative approach are often quick to point out performativity is not the same as performance, and to merely talk of performance does not make an approach performative’ (60)
  • Intraction – 33. ‘The neologism signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies’ – a good deal of photography-related critical theory seems not to recognise this mutuality. ‘the primary ontological unit is not independent objects with independently determinate boundaries and properties but rather what Bohr terms phenomena. ‘The shift from the metaphysics of things to phenomena makes an enormous difference in understanding the nature of science and ontological, epistemological and ethical issues more generally’. (33)
  • ‘realism is often saddled with essentialism’ (55)
  • ‘theorising and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of the phenomena produced’ (56)
  • builds on ‘Foucault’s critique of representationalism and Bulter’s gender performativity’  – ‘gender is not an attribute of individuals’ (57) This would apply to poverty, class distinction, ‘race’, sexuality  – all emerge as ‘a doing’ – performing
  • ‘what is at stake in this dynamic conception of matter is an unsettling of natures presumed fixity and hence an opening up of the possibilities for change’ (64)

See Fred Ritchin’s final chapter After Photography (2010) as a possible intro into finding ways to use digital photography to bring these quantum influenced ideas into the discourse beyond scientific circles.

Think Zizek has critiqued Barad and will need to find it and see what he has to say… :-/ Been comparing what I recall of A Systemic View of Life 

Azoulay, A. (2018) Ariella Azoulay – Unlearning Decisive Moments of Photography. [online blog/forum] At: http://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/authors/10605_ariella_azoulay (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Field, S. (2019) The Democratisation of Form, OCA Digital Image and Culture A3. [Essay]: WordPress. At: https://sjfdiculture.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/assignment-3-democratisation-of-form-submission-1.pdf (Accessed 15/11/2019).

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) Directed by Persichetti, B. et al. Sony.
Frayn, M. (1998) Copenhagen. London: Methuen Drama.
Ritchin, F. (2010) After Photography. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.

CS: A2 Tutor Feedback

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Scroll to the bottom for PDF link or read additional notes first:

I had an extremely useful and relatively long tutorial with a new CS tutor after my previous tutor resigned from the OCA. As is usual with me, I submitted knowing there was still much to do but I reach a point where it’s helpful to get it the work off my hands and receive constructive, meaningful feedback even though I know things are still quite murky.

I have read significantly more since finishing the draft I handed in and am continuing to do so, refining and zoning in on the one hand, but also delving further into such a rich and fantastically difficult/confusing vein of knowledge on the other – that I am still in a thinking place.

I think I mentioned elsewhere that Matt advised me to write my plan/research question (A3) then return to A2 to strip out the unnecessary stuff and focus more on the key topic, not that I know yet what that is, but I am getting a clearer idea. For a while, I thought it was performativity which I have been busy investigating and how that relates to representation and ultimately photography/moving image. I still think that is the case but I keep thinking about boundaries and the collapse of them – also representation,  – a lot of the creative writing I am doing over on Sketchbook is tackling the issues I’m thinking about but in a more instinctive way than one might do so academically. I think that is a better way of working for me. I write, then read what I have and out of that I begin to see what my concerns are.

As far as performativity goes, it seems to have two paths leading to it (Lloyd, 2015) – one theatrical and the other sociological (Austin). One is about acting – playing the role of being a person in the scheme of things, and one is about reaching potential or expectations (or not) i.e. this hoover is not performing as well as advertised; to be a female non-subject one must live up to certain expectations – the  performativity of being a ‘girl’ / ‘women’ = e.g. taking care of one’s looks/physique, acquiescing (don’t be too bolshy or difficult  – that is underperforming  – think Kate in The Taming of the Shrew), having a certain a maternal aura, kind, gentle, quiet when necessary etc. Some women perform ‘well’ (like a hoover – they match up to requirements) others, myself included, ‘fail’ to. I think that is the very basic difference between the two versions of performativity and that needs to go into my Lit Review. Then there is theatricality – dismissed by the modernists and many more besides (Fried, 2008/1967) – especially nowadays when it’s de rigueur to be slapdash or else anti-commodified, or to give the impression of being so even when not.

I need to figure out how to tie (or if I must) this in with photography being ‘boring’ (Elkins, 2011 – and many more, including me.) Incidentally, I don’t necessarily dislike any of those anti -things, and really like them at times. However, I have noticed I can be far more ‘mundane and every day -ish in my writing than I can be in my photography.

I have yet to really get anywhere near to grips with Barad’s use of performativity at the quantum level but I have just ordered her Meeting the Universe Half Way, and I think there will be plenty of direct passages that can help me with my research there.

I am also wondering if I should have a glossary – is that allowed? There are some tricky words that I don’t want to spend too long explaining  – or waste too many words explaining unless it is necessary – I need to find out if this is considered acceptable or not.

Here is the feedback which I wrote up following the tutorial. A2 CS Feedback Form

 

BOW/CS A3: Research/Sketches, Reality Evolution, perception

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

According to Donald Hoffman’s theory which I have discussed several times (Literature review ),  we did not evolve to see reality as it truly is, as has been argued. Rather, we evolved to see the sort of reality we need to see to for ‘optimal fitness’. We perceive far less than there actually is because to see it all would be unhelpful. What’s more, according to Hoffman, the objects we see, including space and time are like desktop icons – constructed objects that represent the goal we are either after or trying to avoid. As hard as this is to understand, and Hoffman admits he may very well be wrong but that his theory makes the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness approachable, his idea sits well with many of the other theories I have been reading about since I picked up The Ego Trip by Julian Baggini (2011) (when I began UVC) followed by a raft of other books exploring similar themes.

I have been trying to express and understand these subjects in my writing, and looking at and photographing objects and phenomena in the world. The photoshopped images below are attempts to explore these ways of thinking about the world.

Fred Ritchin’s After Photography (2009) has some good sentences which I will introduce into my Lit Review and no doubt take forward into the essay.

 

“…some quantum theorists, foremost amongst them, Neils Bhor and Heisenberg himself, argued that fundamental reality is essentially indeterminate, that there is no clear fixed, underlying ‘something’ to our daily existence that can ever be known. Everything about reality is and remains a matter of probabilities […] We have tried to use the photograph to concretize the probabilities (isn’t that what the “decisive moment” is all about?), reassuring us that reality is more solid than what our theories tell us.” (180)

In Data Selves (2019) Deborah Lupton quotes Kember and Zylinska (2012) to describe how photography is an “agential cut” aimed at imposing “meaning and order” and “delimiting choices” (29). As Ritchin says an alternative “may be too disconcerting, if not terrifying.” (ibid)  As he describes, digital technology and photography in particular “can begin to be receptive to the oddities described by newer theories” [quantum and consciousness related]. (177) Superpositions, endless possibilities, entanglement, for instance, can all be alluded to using malleable data either as a process or a representation (which if one takes Hoffman’s idea on board are completely intra-related in any case).

Some sketches – I wonder if these would benefit from more contemporary mixes (a bit like Flowers for Donald). Still a bit Guardian headline pics for my liking :

 

IMG_9765iiilow-
Isle of White – windswept hilltop
Landscape with Bridge - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Similar to above but layered with an anonymous 17th-century pencil landscape downloaded from Google Art and supplied by the Metropolitan Museum of Art

 

 

Windswept tree  – shaped by the elements – differentiation reduced by processing decisions.

 

(See Orpheus story – trees to this day in shape of dance to his music)

 

Hoffman, D. D. (2019) The case against reality: how evolution hid the truth from our eyes. London: Allen Lane.

Lupton, D. (2019) Data selves: more-than-human perspectives. Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA: Polity.
Landscape with Bridge – Anonymous, Italian, 17th century (s.d.) At: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/landscape-with-bridge-anonymous-italian-17th-century/EwHp9J9QWhanmw (Accessed 10/11/2019).

Baggini, J. (2011) The Ego Trick. [Kindle edition] London: Granta Books.

BOW: A2 Tutor Feedback

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 1 Comment

feedback-sarah-janefield_tr_2-bow

I have had useful feedback from Ruth about the work I submitted. Attached are her thoughts and my responses, some of which we discussed in our meeting and some of which were written only (from both of us).

Main points –

  • stick to working on my own for the moment. I agreed and had reached that conclusion already. As interested as I am in collaboration because a) I used to act so was used to that way of working – although have found working on my own more productive and the autonomy more satisfying b) I am interested in the collapse of boundaries and boundaries between selves is one aspect of that – from a personal point of view, establishing and maintaining my own boundaries is something I have needed to do and so I have resolved, for now at any rate, to do that.
  • If I were to write down what the book I submitted was about in two sentences how would I do it? I am not yet sure but I know I am looking at nebulous boundaries, a lack of certainty and a move away from ‘fixedness’ in today’s world.
  • The writing I included was written after several weeks of watching the stars and listening to stories wondering why on earth humans are so hubristic and nuts about our egos since all you have to do is look up and see how insignificant we are. A favourite line from Measure for Measure which I have referred to before is;
    “…man, proud man,
    Dress’d in a little brief authority,
    Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d—
    His glassy essence—like an angry ape
    Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
    As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens,
    Would all themselves laugh mortal.”Measure For Measure Act 2, scene 2, 114–123 
  • My own more direct version is here.
  • Keep writing, keep taking images. I am doing so. I must say that the text I wrote about the mummies took a summer of being in Italy and having relatively little to distract me. Normal life is frustratingly less conducive but I am doing what I can.
  • Look at photobooks and similar themes.

 

CS & Bow: Research notes, Daniel Rubinstein, Failure to Engage 2017

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

www.danielrubinstein.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Failure-to-Engage.pdf

This article by Daniel Rubinstein confirms my recognition of Freid’s conservativism and does a super job of helping me to more fully comprehend some of the ideas in Barad’s essay. Beneath the argument about theatricality and anti-theatricality, it explores the changing nature of being and knowledge – or ontology and epistemology, as expressed via quantum sciences and philosophies, namely Barad (2003), Lupton (2019), Rovelli (2017), Capra (2014) – leading to what Barad terms “Onto-epistem-ology”[which is] —the study of practices of knowing in being—is probably a better way to think about the kind of understandings that are needed to come to terms with how specific intra-actions matter.” (2003: 829) (See Rovelli and Kant in the previous blog.)

However, Barad argues against what she calls representationalism, which is; “the belief in the ontological distinction between representations and that which they purport to represent; in particular, that which is represented is held to be independent of all practices of representing. That is, there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented” (804) If you can overcome this and see “representationalism as a Cartesian by-product—a particularly inconspicuous consequence of the Cartesian division between “internal” and “external” that breaks along the line of the knowing subject.” (Rouse, 1996: 209, Barad, 2003:805) then the arguments made be Fried begin to disintegrate. As – “it is possible to develop coherent philosophical positions that deny that there are representations on the one hand and ontologically separate entities awaiting representation on the other” (807) relying instead on emergence. And ff you see theatre as a laboratory (not just Growtowski’s but the entire history of it) then perhaps Fried’s entire argument collapses – although I am not sure Rubinstein gets there with this.

Some quotes below and perhaps an occasional note:

  • by way of identifying the dualist oppositions and the ideological investments that establish the ontological significance of this text. (44)
  • Fried is not criticising the work of certain artists, but devising a universal method for distinguishing true art from ‘objecthood’, based on the assumption that (Fried’s) consciousness can distinguish physical reality from art (44) (religiosity)
  • this rejection leads him to adopt a conception of art that is hierarchical, analytical and traditionalist (45)
  • contemporary philosophical thought that studies theatricality as part of the logocentric apparatus inherited from the Renaissance (45)
  • The conception of ‘objecthood’ in contemporary art can be traced to Duchamp’s readymades which he created by selecting, modifying and rectifying mass-produced objects (46)
  • this opposition between the image and the real has its roots in Platonism, where the sensible world is produced as a copy of the world of ideas, and it is the task of reason to overcome the errors of the copy in order to arrive at the truth (46) Far more simply explained here than in Barad’s essay
  • The touchstone for this distinction is whether the image declares itself to be an image (the fable of the cave is told as a fable) or whether the image pretends not to be one, disguising itself as an object (47)
  • Plato’s demand for ‘primary distinction’ between images and models is motivated by the moral need to protect the idea of truth from the dangerous world of simulacra. (47) In CS A2, I argue the shadows on the wall of the attic are the actual real  – what looks like the simulacra is just as real as the flesh and blood version watching the slides – although more likely they exist together, both real, both valuable (see Jung – dream world equal to waking world) 
  • The artworks that Fried designates as ‘theatrical’ seem to have a common denominator: they strive to take over the real, to immerse and to overwhelm us by replacing the real with a readymade and truth with simulacrum until we are no longer able to distinguish the artwork from the real, the referent from the sign, and the subject from the object. (48)
  • Critical opposition to theatricality will not get one very far, as opposition itself is a theatrical requisite (49)
  • Quote Fried, “The Platonic division of the cave, which is effectively the theatrical division between a real outside and an inside simulating this outside … The thing stands for something else, and it is less than what it represents. In order that it be what it is, there has been a lack of being. What is given to us, insofar as it is not similitude itself, is deficient in force. The theatricality of representation implies this deficiency, this depression. (pp. 68, 71, emphases in original)” (49) See Barad and her refusal of representation being something that acts as a sign for something previous and original. (50)
  • Here the antinomy to the ‘theatrical cube’ is being revealed not as anti- theatricality, but as an infinite movement of surfaces that continuously self- replicate and morph into each other (50)
  • If the origin of theatre is in negation, and if its operation is representational, then the deeper reason Fried can speak of a ‘war’ between theatricality and real art becomes clear. (51)
  • Anti-theatricality, in other words, implies that in order to be meaningful, accessible and ‘true’, the artwork has to inhabit some form of transcendental negation, or excluded middle or some other form of metaphysical ground (51)
  • by arguing against the dualism of theatricality and for the monism of ‘real’ art, he is unable to move beyond the very dualism he is trying to unsettle as his thought is chained to the common-sense notion that representation is a natural, ordinary, everyday occurrence (52)
  • The deeper structure of Fried’s argument is that true knowledge can transcend mere appearances and grasp their underlying presence. As Luce Irigaray (1985[1974]) has shown, this framework is based on the notion of a stable subject that comprehends – like Rodin’s Thinker – a world that is also stable and unchanging. (53)
  • Freid’s description of Caro’s sculptures are ‘performative’ therefore theatrical (53) They are also elitist and come about due to a his privileged and educated position. 
  • according to Fried, the greatest danger: under the auspice of theatre, art loses its spiritual, sensual and theological dimension. When art is stripped of its mystical, spiritual powers, of its direct link with experience through the unmediated connection with life, all that remains is the theatre: a pale re-enactment of the mysteries of the sacrificial ritual. (53) This is a bizarre argument given theatre’s roots are deeply embedded in the spiritual and mystical, and was born out of attempts to commune with the gods (the universe).
  • Putting the object first will not work because the opposition between art and non-art is itself the product of an ideology that asserts that there is a real world that can be taken up and represented as an image (53) which Barad argues against using quantum knowledge. 

Edited 01/09/2009 to correct the spelling of Rubinstein’s name

Barad, K. (2003) ‘Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter                    Comes to Matter’ In: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3) pp.801–831. At: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/345321 (Accessed 30/10/2019).
Capra, F. and Luisi, P. L. (2014) The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision. (1 edition) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality is not what it seems: the journey to quantum gravity. London: Penguin
Rubinstein, D. (2017) ‘Failure to Engage: Art Criticism in the Age of Simulacrum’ In: Journal of Visual Culture 16 (1) pp.43–55. At: https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412917690970 (Accessed 30/10/2019).

CS & BOW: Notes following online presentation with Dr. Ariadne Xenou 24/10/19

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

It was good to hear someone say don’t separate CS & BOW. Students keep saying, you don’t need to connect CS to BOW and I can’t for the life of me understand why you wouldn’t connect them or why you’d want to disconnect them either. I have actually been thinking about these reflections which are are usually relevant for both and wondering how to rearrange the menu system as both modules become more and more interconnected.

It was also useful to think CS A3 as a research document setting out my plans and suggested research question – which I have yet to identify.

The other useful thing that came out of the session for me was thinking about overarching topics I’ve been investigating since the end of UVC, and how I can put those into some kind of tangible form. Here is an attempt to pin down some of these very big themes and links to relevant subtopics.

Inside Outedness

From my Sketchbook blog:

For millennia, language was on the outside. We could, in retrospect, usually see it. On walls, in caves, then tablets, scrolls and eventually in books. [Lately on advertising hoarding and signs telling us how fast we can drive, where we can park, if we play, enter, stay out, smoke, shop, make noise, and of course, what we can buy, how much better we will be if we buy whatever it is.]

Today, as many but not all are aware, it [language] somehow exists more and more on the inside [but not the inside of us as it did before emerging – although I think it is generally thought of as outside – rather the inside of machines and devices]. And in places it can’t be seen.

This means we often have no idea what’s being said. We are less able to read the signs [Or even see them]. Vast dynamic archives of language exist – somewhere – affecting everything. We know they are there. But they’re invisible. We see the flimsy surface only.

It’s true, in the past archives tended to be secreted, were often sacred, and contained as well as emanated power.

Very few would have had access.

It’s just that today the whole world is one big archive. And it’s hard to imagine how anyone escapes. [Could do with expanding the final thought.]

Random notes for a short story #12

Derrida’s Archive Fever, University of Chicago Press; Reprint edition (19 Sept. 2017)(The first chapter may be useful here)

Chapter 7, Turning Reality Inside Out and Right Side Out: Boundary Work in the Mid Sixties of Philip K. Dick, Hayles, K. (1999) How we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

 

When I was a child a boy in my class used to turn his eyelids out. It revolted me. The other boys found it hilarious. I hated seeing him do it. It hurt to look at and to think about, and still does. Seeing my reaction, he did it all the more to taunt me. 

 

 

Gossip & Performance

I believe these aspects of our existence are inter-related. From my BOW A2 assignment:

As part of my on-going research into language, culture and reality, I’d been reading Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox (2019) and books by Nicholas Christakis who wrote Connected (2009) which is about social networks (in general, not just digital ones.)

Wrangham’s book centres around the idea that human beings evolved with an ability to temper their immediate aggression, while simultaneously developing a propensity for calm, rationally-considered, pre-planned violence. Humans also became hyper-co-operative; today collaboration is part of our DNA. Wrangham suggests these trends are underwritten by our ability to talk to and about each other, and that we have an ever-present unconscious fear someone might be watching, gossiping, and planning to do away with us if we don’t conform. Gossip allows us to conjure up stories, deny and blame others, and plan punishment for anyone deemed a deviant. Wrangham’s theory along with Christakis’ ideas about connection sit at the centre of my contribution to the project. (2019a)

Performance grows out of the knowledge we will be seen and so we must ‘act’ the part in order to be accepted, to survive in the group. However, as Karen Barad tells us – entanglement is critical and without it perhaps nothing at all emerges. Her description changes my understanding of the conscious agent which I wrote about CS A2 – assuming a notion which I accepted in books about systems. However, Barad says something which fundamentally changes the underlying nature of performance and I’m still trying to get my ehad around it: ““A phenomenon is a specific intra-action of an ‘object’; and the ‘measuring agencies’; the object and the measuring agencies emerge from, rather than precede, the intra-action that produces them.” (Barad, 2007, p. 128). From Sauzet, 2018 – https://newmaterialism.eu/almanac/p/phenomena-agential-realism.html Accessed 21/10/2019 From https://sjflevel3.photo.blog/2019/10/21/bow-cs-notes-research-karen-barad/

Today we appear to perform for ourselves and the manifestation of such is available for all to see on social media. But there are also more private performances which people don’t necessarily share widely (although some do) which emerges from tracking devices. See Lupton’s Data Selves book.

Langauge

At the beginning of Self & Other I wrote about Léopold Szondi. After reading The Body & the Archive by Allan Sekula I was reminded about his thoughts on language. I said, “Szondi was also I believe interested in those ‘in-between spaces’ I’m so keen to find out more about. “language is a ‘social fact’. It is the glue that holds society together; through ‘language a child becomes integrated with a social community,’ and ‘it serves to maintain social interaction’. Since dialogue is the primary vehicle of interpersonal relations – what Szondi calls the sphere of the between -it lords it over traditional theatre” (Holmberg, 1996; 67).”

Notes: The Body and the Archive Allan Sekula

I am interested in the changing nature of language, the structural implications of a language which is coded and incomprehensible to most of us. Flusser’s thoughts on the ease with which we use devices compared to the complex nature of them which bypasses most of us may be useful to revisit.

Flusser, V. (2012) Towards a philosophy of photography. London: Reaktion Books.

Data Selves by Deborah Lupton also contains useful content about language and its relationship to new materialism. “In new materialism, the poststructuralist emphasis on language, discourse, and symbolic representation is enhanced by a turn towards the material: particularly human embodied practices and interactions with objects, space and place.” (2019: 15) However, she also writes a great deal about how data (language) manifests as those things – so although data seems immaterial, “things that are generated in and through material devices (smartphones, computers, sensors), stored in material archives (data repositories), materialised in a range of formats that invite human sensory responses and have material effects on human bodies (documenting and having recursive effects on human flesh” (19).

I need to revisit Barthes’ Myth Today (1957) https://uvcsjf.wordpress.com/2016/07/18/notes-project-3-3-myth-is-a-type-of-speech/

I suspect Karen Barad’s ideas are going to be important. And I suspect they will inform all three of these key themes. I need to investigate further before adding them here. However, I think I have identified three key topics: Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performance and Language. I wonder if the latter is the umbrella under which Inside Outedness, Gossip & Performance exist.  And the term assemblage which I’ve talked about quite a lot lately is not a theme but rather a structural reality, and our modern form of assemblages are what’s resulting in inside outedness. How I bring any of this into a semi-coherent work yet is anyone’s guess a this time!