Tag: Language

Bow/CS: Life After New Media, Kember & Zylinska 2012

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Some useful references: see artists highlighted in chapter below

See  –  https://www.richardgalpin.co.uk – an excellent visual metaphor

See – http://www.ninasellars.com/?catID=30 Final section in chapter provides a useful analysis

Possible inclusion for CS: The compulsion to define photography in an essay (see CS A3 and early drafts fo DI&C essay) is not merely a means of identifying what the inquiry is about. It goes to the heart of the matter which is querying the ‘Cartesian habit of mind’ (Barad, 2007). This can be resolved by seeing ‘the cut’ for what it is – a way of making meaning out of the chaos and creating matter (material or discursive). I do this making words and categories, painting, sculpting – or by capturing photons when creating images – regardless of what I do with those photons thereafter i.e. add traces together to create movement or give the illusion of stillness  – a freeze. What happens thereafter is not is being explored in this instance. It’s complex though because the thing that I do to make order (cut) compels me to want to cut photography up into a hierarchical system.

Ultimately, it is not the material, equipment or medium which is being critiqued – but the mindset.

Backed up by the following which also helps to define the cut. Highlighted sentences from a critical chapter of Life After New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process by Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska (2012)

With Notes – 3 Cut! The Imperative of Photographic Mediation

Kember, S. and Zylinska, J. (2012) Life after new media: mediation as a vital process. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. At: http://topologicalmedialab.net/xinwei/classes/readings/KemberZylinska/LANM.pdf(Accessed 11/01/2020).

BOW A3: Text’s rewritten and placed in a suggested format

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ 2 Comments

I have spent the evening rewriting some of the texts and placing them into a book form – I’ve rejected the first ten or eleven I wrote but after that, they started to improve. -although still needed attention.

No doubt I will continue to write and make changes and add other writings. (Plus there are likely to be typos – editing straight into ID is not really ideal for me – I’ll have to transform to word and spell check later.)

I have not identified images to include but now that I can see an arc, I feel what is necessary will begin to emerge. I am interested in the Processing exercise I experimented with the other day using Tom’s First Film. (Not included any writing prompted by that in the collection below yet – will do later and then will see if it fits.) The possibility of corrupted, machine-informed collages might be just what is needed. Having put these texts into a format, I feel I can get on with that – I feel I have time and space ahead now (although received feedback from Matt for CSA3 which I need to write up and post too.). It would certainly fit the remit of ‘Chance’ to do things that way.

The theme of selfies seems to have emerged as significant which is hilarious given I stated quite clearly I was not interested in making a project about selfies in an earlier reflection.

This way of working feels completely counter to all I’ve been advised and learned the last few years… but it’s the way that’s led to something so I need to keep going. Saying that – it does feel emergent and informed and organic.

I have left space for images in the book as laid out  – I think space will be very important. But the order is not fixed, nor is the layout, or the texts included, or the size –  and there are no images (yes, I know, it’s a photography degree…) except for the ones I experimented with earlier. But I don’t think they are right at all.

And there is a bit of writing yet to be done – I have entered a heading on that page to show where it would go.

BOW A3

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: Notes on Posthuman Performativity by Karen Barad

~ Sarah-Jane Field ~ Leave a comment

Edit 2024: throughout I refer to Her/she. This is wrong. Barad is a they/them as far as I’m aware. I was not aware when making the notes originally. Please adjust accordingly as reading.

Following the previous two posts where I attempted to pinpoint what I have been exploring in one way or another, I have identified what seems like a perfect paper by Karen Barad called,

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

However, Barad’s rejection of language and signification in relation to ‘matter’ are in opposition to my own interest in language. This paper reflects so much I am interested in but devalues language in the process and gives higher value to other elements, in particular matter – although perhaps she is simply trying to even things out. Incidentally, Lupton refers to more-than-human rather than posthuman and I think I may prefer this adjustment.

  • I love this quote KB has at the top of the paper: “We are far too impressed by our own cleverness and self-consciousness. . . . We need to stop telling ourselves the same old anthropocentric bedtime stories.”
    —Steve Shaviro 1997 (However, I think the stories make an otherwise terrifying existence bearable – just about. People are foolish, immature, vain and silly –  how would we cope without our bedtime stories – I sense very little forgiveness or tolerance in some.)
  • “Language has been granted too much power” – starts Barad. This seems to be a rallying cry against Judo-Christian and therefore Western (paternalistic) doctrine which has been the foundation of our civilisation for centuries, i.e. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Gospel of John. The word is apparently – forgive the Wiki quote and I am aware I would need to dig deeper if included in an essay but it’s a useful start for this non-believer. “The phrase “the Word” (a translation of the Greek word “Logos”) is widely interpreted as referring to Jesus, as indicated in other verses later in the same chapter” Wiki.  The relationship between mythology and science tells me this is really crucial; universal cognition, matter, liveliness and life cycle of particles, superposition  – all of this could be interpreted via the story contained in that one line. The opening line of John also carries so much paternalistic fixedness which Sarah Lucas’ work God is Dad explores. If the word Jesus represents supposedly God’s flesh – is it not a metaphor for the manifestation of the emergence of matter?
  • “Language matters. Discourse matters. Culture matters. There is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter”, she says.

But, and I know Barad is about addressing an imbalance  – Language IS matter. Even if only focused on linguistics – and then only spoken, i.e. no text: breathe is expelled as part of the breathing process: we interrupt its journey out of the body with our epiglottis, and then our tongue, teeth, skull cavities, cheeks, etc help to form the breathe (material) into something shaped despite its apparent ephemerality. Add some vibrations with the help of your vocal nodes and you have sound. Plosives, implosives, glottal stops all contribute to making the breath and vibrations into a shaped sound that is then carried as/on a wave and interacts with the eardrum; and might also be understood in conjunction with sight and touch and smell  – all forming a material interaction with whoever is listening even if the only one hearing is the same person who made the sound in the first place. The shaped breath/sound vibrations’ impact in the world may not be so ephemeral. The impact may indeed be long-lasting and extremely powerful, causing a definitive reaction visible in the material world.

I do not know enough about her ideas yet, but if the term assemblage which Lupton used so frequently emerges from Barad’s theories or related ones, then surely language is one of many emergent elements. The rejection feels like an understandable response to logocentrism and also the theories of structuralism which were dominated (as so much was/is) by men and misogynistic, racist, colonialist attitudes and beliefs, but I wonder if it risks chucking the ‘baby out with the bathwater’.

I find myself agreeing with so much Barad says and her highly educated ability to link quantum science to the humanities would have been so helpful when I wrote the essay for DI&C. Ariella Azoulay’s analysis of history which I referenced seems very much influenced by the same thought processes.

  • When I explained what underlies all my work to the first CS tutor, I said, I am driven by the desire to figure out why people say things which bare no relation to what they actually mean or intend even when they have no idea that may be the case. i.e. “John is a feminist and he tells everyone who will listen that he is one. Even so, John demands to know why his wife has not packed his cufflinks, or why she failed to wash his jeans because, in John’s mind, he’s the one earning the money and therefore it is not unfair to expect his wife to fulfill these domestic duties. John believes in feminism but says things like “No wife of mine will …. (insert things wives ‘shouldn’t’ be seen doing) ” John moans about his wife to his male friends when they are doing the same. When questioned about it, John insists it’s just banter. John cheats on his wife and lies to her and believes that’s just how men are. It doesn’t prevent him from being a feminist. John’s wife tells him he’s verbally abusive. John thinks this is ridiculous – because, he tells his wife, “You’re lucky to be with me.  I’m a feminist and always have been. I would never hurt you. You’ve got no idea what other men do to their wives. Because John is a feminist, he cannot see why any of the above is anti-feminist.” Is John lying on purpose, does he really believe he is a feminist? Or does he know that’s the ‘right’ thing to be in his world but the role of Husband is so entrenched and deeply embedded that he simply can’t see outside the reality that he has constructed or that has been constructed as the landscape in which he exists? Perhaps this is an extreme example but it is one which represents how language is tied up with constant performance, and to dismiss it or devalue it feels strange. Even though, I can see we also need to value other elements of reality.
  • Architecture – the most obvious ‘matter’ – is a language – in semiotics, it might be referred to as a text just as a film or photograph or a book can be.
  • “The belief that grammatical categories reflect the underlying structure of the world is a continuing seductive habit of mind worth questioning. Indeed, the representationalist belief in the power of words to mirror preexisting phenomena is the metaphysical substrate that supports social constructivist, as well as traditional realist, beliefs.” I’ve highlighted the phrase I think is critical – if words aren’t mirroring pre-existing phenomena but rather emergent creating and being the phenomena as they do then does this problem over overvaluing the word in favour of all else go away? I can’t help thinking about Hoffman’s book where he suggests we exist in an interface and that we recognise ‘things’ but these work along the same line as desktop icons. In Hoffman’s theory representation is really important even though its an illusion. (Hoffman’s book does have some extraordinary and surprising misogynistic thinking in it which I am still trying to figure out).
  • Barad makes no apologies about using language herself, which can at times separate her ideas from people without PhDs in physics or gender or critical studies trying to understand what she is saying. At a very basic level, she is saying the very nature of reality cannot be isolated from the knowing about it and being it; that both being and knowing are undergoing seismic reconfigurations upending everything we have thought for thousands of years. (This reconfiguration is taking place throughout our world as the technology we use is founded on the principles and science that began the transformation – and is involved in a feedback loop – we are instantiating (Hayles, 1999)) the technology, no longer expecting things to be present or absent but instead to be patterned, assembled, having come into being as intra-active relational phenomena. (Icons on our desktop, web pages, animated objects that appear to react and interact). Carlo Rovelli who writes specifically for non-physics-, critical theory- etc. PhDs, says, “Kant was perhaps right when he affirmed that the subject of knowledge and its object are inseparable” (169)

Having read the whole paper, I am yet to fully get my head around what Barad means by performative  –given that is what the paper aims to explain, I feel a bit daft but its such a dense paper, for the central point becomes lost (having looked again -see next post – I’m pretty sure she means quantum events and processes). I am also slightly in the dark about the use of the word discursive/nondiscursive and need to understand that. Diffraction I get – perhaps it is similar.

Below are some useful quotations which I may refer back to in any future writing:

there are assumed to be two distinct and independent kinds of entities—representations and entities to be represented.

The fact that representationalism has come under suspicion in the domain of science studies is less well known but of no less significance

where they differ is on the question of referent, whether scientific knowledge represents things in the world as they really are (i.e., “Nature”) or “objects” that are the product of social activities (i.e., “Culture”), but both groups subscribe to representationalism.

Having read Hoffman’s book, I came to a different conclusion – representation matters because it’s all we have. It’s the illusion with which we exist, and therefore how it functions and manifests is critical. Even if it cannot represent a place before representation as no such place exists – representation represents our parochial and myopic situation. 

anthropological philosophy, representations were unproblematic prior to Democritus: “the word ‘real’ first meant just unqualified likeness” (142).

The presumption that we can know what we mean, or what our verbal performances say, more readily than we can know the objects those sayings are about is a Cartesian legacy, a linguistic variation on Descartes’ insistence that we have a direct and privileged access to the contents of our thoughts that we lack towards the “external” world. (1996, 209) I do not think we know what we mean – I think people have no idea what they mean. The stories we tell ourselves are the only comfort we have in an otherwise terrifying universe where there is no meaning. 

Indeed, 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.

In this article, I propose a specifically posthumanist notion of performativity—one that incorporates important material and discursive, social and scientific, human and nonhuman, and natural and cultural factors. A posthumanist account calls into question the givenness of the differential categories of “human” and “nonhuman,” examining the practices through which these differential 9

boundaries are stabilized and destabilized. Donna Haraway’s scholarly
opus—from primates to cyborgs to companion species—epitomizes this point.

Foucault – – – “show how the deployments of power are directly connected to the body—to bodies, functions, physiological processes, sensations, and pleasures; far from the body having to be effaced, what is needed is to make it visible through an analysis in which the biological and the historical are not consecutive to one another . . . but are bound together in an increasingly complex fashion in accordance with the development of the modern technologies of power that take life as their objective. Hence, I do not envision a “history of mentalities” that would take account of bodies only through the manner in which they have been perceived and given meaning and value; but a “his- tory of bodies” and the manner in which what is most material and most vital in them has been invested. (1980a, 151–52)

a diffraction grating for reading important insights from feminist and queer studies and science studies through one another while simultaneously proposing a materialist and posthumanist reworking of the notion of performativity. This entails a reworking of the familiar notions of discursive practices, materialization, agency, and causality, among others.

On an agential realist account, it is once again possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and the theoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while at the same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play in the intertwined practices of knowing and becoming.

Physicist Niels Bohr won the Nobel Prize for his quantum model of the atom, which marks the beginning of his seminal contributions to the development of the quantum theory.

were inseparable for him) poses a radical challenge not only to Newtonian physics but also to Cartesian epistemology and its representationalist triadic structure of words, knowers, and things

This account refuses the representationalist fixation on “words” and “things” and the problematic of their relationality, advocating instead a causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world (i.e., discursive practices/(con)figurations rather than “words”) and specific material phenomena (i.e., relations rather than “things”). This causal relationship between the apparatuses of bodily production and the phenomena produced is one of “agential intra-action.”

Therefore, according to Bohr, the primary epistemological unit is not
independent objects with inherent boundaries and properties but rather
phenomena.

relata do not preexist relations; rather, relata- within-phenomena emerge through specific intra-actions.

The notion of agential separability is of fundamental importance, for in the absence of a classical ontological condition of exteriority between observer and observed it provides the condition for the possibility of objectivity.

In my further elaboration of Bohr’s insights, apparatuses are not mere static arrangements in the world, but rather apparatuses are dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted. Apparatuses have no inherent “outside” boundary. This indeterminacy of the “outside” boundary represents the impossibility of closure—the ongoing intra-activity in the iterative reconfiguring of the apparatus of bodily production

This ongoing flow of agency through which “part” of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another “part” of the world and through which local causal structures, boundaries, and properties are stabilized and destabilized does not take place in space and time but in the making of spacetime itself.

Temporality and spatiality emerge in this processual

they enact a local cut that produces “objects” of particular knowledge practices within the particular phenomena produced.

, or meanings apart from their mutual intra-actions, Bohr offers a new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms of object/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world.

Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility. I

What constitutes the “human” (and the “nonhuman”) is not a fixed or pregiven notion, but nor is it a free-floating ideality

Nature is neither a passive surface awaiting the mark of culture nor the end product of cultural performances.

matter is not a fixed essence; rather, matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing but a doing, a congealing of agency

” are not outside observers of the world. Nor are we simply located at particular places in the world; rather, we are part of the world in its ongoing intra-activity.

Click to access barad_posthumanist-performativity.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_1:1

 

 

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!