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Notes in ‘Accelerationism’
Notes in Document
'Queer Autoethnography':
Highlight: : Introduction: Queering Autoethnography
(Queer Autoethnography, p.8)
Highlight: : 4 Queering Mx
Highlight: : 5 Queering Monsters

Highlight: : A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses

different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have
been deliberately or accidentally excluded from traditional studies of
human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods
that are often cast as being at odds with each other,and it refuses the
academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence. —(Halberstam
1998, p. 13
Highlight: : to bring together the concrete detail of the personal and the
Highlight: : power of theoretical frameworks that help us understand how stories

animate and become the change we seek in the world (Holman Jones
2016).
Highlight: : followed the “crisis of representation” in anthropology and other disciplines

(Marcus & Fischer 1999,Reed-Danahay 2002, Rosaldo 1989, Denzin &
Lincoln 2005).
Highlight: : bias against affect, emotion and difference; prohibitions against including
the researcher’s voice, experience and storytelling as ways of knowing;
and concerns about the ethics and politics of research and representation
(Adams et al. 2015, pp. 8–12).
Highlight: : consider and account for relations and dynamics of power and difference not
only in the world, but also in their research
Highlight: : necessity of understanding the individual in relation to culture and politics
and bringing ethnographic research and representation back to the body
itself, to corporeality and to a range of post-structural and postmodern
approaches that understand the co-constitutive nature of performing self-
in-culture
Highlight: : placing equal importance on knowledge building and aesthetics;attending to

the ethical and relational implications of their work for themselves,
participants and readers/audiences; and connecting personal experience
to institutional, political, social and interpersonal relationships of power
(Adams et al. 2015, p. 25).
Highlight: : Investigating how experiences are enlarged and/or constrained by relations

of power has been the particular focus of critical autoethnography
Highlight: : to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived

domain,” including our own research, is para- mount (Madison 2012, p. 5;
see also Spry 2016, Boylorn & Orbe 2013)
Highlight: : intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) to call

attention to how oppressive institutions, attitudes and actions in cultures
including racism, xenophobia,sexism, heteronormativity, classism,religious
and spiritual fundamentalism,ageism and ableism are connected and
mutually influencing.Intersectional autoethnographies work to “capture the
complexities of intersecting power relations” by producing multiple and
diverse perspectives and voices (Hill Collins 2016, p. 135).
Highlight: : firstly to problematize and question existing knowledge about culture and
cultural experience by “analyzing socially unjust practices” (Hill Collins
2016, p. 135); secondly, to put critical theory into action by joining the
Highlight: : social and political insights that critical theory offers us to the specific and
concrete positions, places and people they originate for and from
(Holman Jones 2017); and thirdly to build “new knowledge about the social
world in order to stimulate new practices” for transformation (Hill Collins
2016, p. 135)
Highlight: : to displace heterosexuality as the normative mode and structure for
gendered and sexual relationships,
Highlight: : The “queer” in queer theory, as Butler (1993) writes, is a “site of collective
contestation, the point of departure for a set of historical reflections and
future imaginings” (p. 220).
Highlight: : Sara Ahmed (2006) reminds us of the origins of queer, from the Greek for
“cross, oblique and adverse” and the implications of those origins for being
queer, which highlights how we move “between sexual and social reg-
isters without flattening them or reducing them to a single line” (p. 161).
Queer not only points to an activist stance toward the theorizing of (gay,
lesbian, bi and in some instances intersex and trans*) identities and the
workings of power, but also the relationally lived experience of queer as
fluid and unfinished, playful and political. In this sense queer, as Butler
(1993) writes, is “never fully known, claimed or owned, but instead that
which is deployed, twisted and queered from a prior usage and in the
direction of urgent and expanding political purposes” (p. 220).
Highlight: : Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queering and queering practices as a method of

intervention that “disturbs the order of things”
Highlight: : Queering practices include “counter-normative” relational and political

orientations and modes of reproduction that break into and breakdown
“hetero-directive culture” (Taylor & Snowdon 2014, p. 185).
Highlight: : heterosexuality,as a “compulsory orientation,” reproduces more than

itself—it reproduces capital and whiteness, among other normative
practices (p. 161).
Highlight: : because of this intersectionality, the disruption and “disorientation” of queer

as a sexual orientation “queers more than sex,” as “sexual disorientation
slides quickly into social disorientation, as a disorientation in how things
are arranged” (pp. 161–162).
Highlight: : queering practices “disturb the order of things” by creating dissonance

around what passes as ‘normal’and ‘normative,’appropriating and
assembling languages,texts, beliefs and ways of living and loving in radical
and liberating ways; working against that which passes as stable,
coherent, certain and fixed; and performing how words, thoughts, feelings
and affective forces work and matter in our relationships and our
representations (Holman Jones 2016; see also Harris & Holman Jones
2017; Harris 2016a, 2016b; Holman Jones & Har- ris 2016, 2016b; Harris
2014; Holman Jones & Adams 2010a, 2010b; Adams & Holman Jones
2008, 2011).
Highlight: : the political and scholarly potential of autoethnography is still very much
emerging and expanding, particularly in its potential to both evoke
empathic and affective responses at a time of public numbness, a practice
crucial to making scholarly research relevant to the work of global
citizenship (see, for example, Denzin & Giardina 2017).
Highlight: : autoethnography as a method poised to move beyond that narcissistic and

disaffected frame and lead humankind to begin attending to and
empathizing with the non- and more-than- human.
Highlight: : empathy for the unknown, or even the unknow- able? What if that empathy
gave way to a recognition of the precariousness and vulnerability of the
other that allows all of us—animal, vegetable and mineral— to live out the
ethical responsibility to not harm one another?
Highlight: : Queering autoethnography might enable us to consider these and other

questions of possibility and responsibility, creating a mode of engagement
that addresses the consequences of crafting life for those of us who have
been sys- tematically excluded from culture within the larger world of
repercussions (Halberstam 1998, p. 13; Solnit 2016, p. 53).The enactment
of the corporeal and affective in a queering of autoethnography might also
suggest a more sustain- able way forward in which the story of the self,
suddenly (and not so suddenly) becomes the story of us, and the story of
the least of us becomes—at long last—our own.
Highlight: : questioning the normative in autoethnography

Highlight: : the antiteleological ethos of an autoethnography t

Highlight: : a queer power of subjectivity in which the self was the only (if shifting) lens
through which one could see.
Highlight: : questioning how the idealizations of objective knowing are communicated

as methodological certainties.
Highlight: : .Writing out of and through the dislocation and “becoming-time” of

experience asks us, instead, to remain “chronically open” to risk, to a lack (or
the opposite) of closure,and the something more and something else that
inheres in that opening, that offer (pp. 201, 202).
Highlight: : draw on post-structuralist frameworks,as well as postcolonial and new

materialist approaches, in inviting readers to consider an autoethnography
that can (and wants to) be untethered from the material, the biological, the
fore- closed.
Highlight: : the glib dismissal of our work as me-search

Highlight: : exploding preconceptions about what it means to write-the-self-in-culture,

while at the same time holding on to the necessity and indeed political
power of acknowledging subjectivity and the limits of culture in
contemporary research.
Highlight: : Carol Hanisch’s long-ago rallying cry “the personal is political” is never
more necessary in a contemporary social and cultural landscape where
questions of whose lives matter and whose lives “count as lives” are
subject to debate (Hanisch 1969/2006, Butler 2006).
Highlight: : autoethnography is a thoroughly relational practice, one concerned with

and responsible for creating a dialog with a community of ‘others,’ rather
than a monologue in which a “single and unified subject declares its will”
(Butler 2015, p. 156).
Highlight: : y is invested, instead, in ‘we-search.’ In other words, the work of

autoethnography is the work of “assembling a we,” a community of thinkers
and writers and performers committed to speaking and embodying a
collective and popular “will” (Butler 2015, p. 156; see also Holman Jones
2017).
Highlight: : By queering autoethnography, we are queering ourselves and others and

culture, and in that queering we are—painfully, idealistically, reliably,
finally—one.
Highlight: : massacre culture, queer terror, mundane annihilations and activist affect.
We show these ideas “in action” in and on the narratives we create,aiming to
“do theory and think story” as a way to “create a contact zone for analysis,”
critique and change (Pollock 2005, p. 1; Stewart 2007, p. 5).
Highlight: : The self does not undergo modifications, it is itself a modification. —
(Deleuze 1968, p. 100)
Highlight: : 57–58).What does it mean to be unintelligible? It means that we are not

seen or understood or treated as recognizably human; our lives are not
valued or grieved as lives (Butler 2006, p. 146).
Highlight: : the ‘monster’ functions as a liminal zone of gender, not merely the
disavowed dimensions of manhood, but the unspeakable limits of
femininity as well. (Butler 2014, pp. 47–48)
Highlight: : Like Shelley and her monster,we look into the mirror and we wrestle with our
desires, passions, places and lives in a society that demands repetition,
reproduc- ibility and above all intelligibility (Butler 2014, p. 42).We look into
the mirror and make the invisible visible (Solnit 2014, p. 53) by making
creatively queer expressions of non-binary trans* gender subjectivities
and femme gender expressions
Highlight: : and sexualities intelligible

Highlight: : Susan Stryker’s words that “Monsters, like angels, functioned as

messengers and heralds of the extraordinary” (2006, p. 247), a mantra. In a
sea of increasingly mundane and unseen queerness, we are messengers of
that extraordinary.
Highlight: : performances are inflected with and sometimes deflect the rage, shunning
and fear that Shelley’s famous monster laments: the unspeakable, the
ugly, the terrifying. How we make love, show love and speak love is unseen
or, when seen, is often misunderstood, shunned or co-opted by those
around us
Highlight: : If we, as Toni Cade Bambara says, “discover [ourselves] in the mirror,” there
is labor to be done in both the looking and the seeing (2015, p. xxxi).There is
vulnerability in reflection, in standing before yourself, others, looking
back.The refusal to engage with the self in the mirror—the selves we do
not want to face, own, or know, is “dangerous, to that self and to others . . .
Elaborate are the means to hide from yourself, the disassociations,
projects, deceptions, forgettings, justi- fications and other tools to detour
around the obstruction of unbearable reality” (Solnit 2014, pp. 52–53). For
many gender creative and other queerly identified people,mirrors—like
families—can be sites/sights of not only the painful work of seeing the self
as a creation—an “unfinished becoming [that] only ends”when we do
(Solnit 2014, p. 53), but also the sites/sights of betrayal and loss
Highlight: : the very criteria we use to judge genders and sexualities—the criteria that
“posits coherent gender as a presumption of human- ness”—are the
criteria that govern our own assessments of ourselves, our own ability to
“recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the
moments before the mirror” (Butler 2004, p. 58).
Highlight: : the queer body in the mirror,as Butler’s discussion of the lesbian phallus7
makes clear, does not “represent a body that is,as it were, before the
mirror: the mirror . . . produces that body as its delirious effect—a delirium
which we are compelled to live” (1993, p. 91).And the monster?The monster
is a public mirror reflecting a desire for belonging and love that is
“considered aversive and largely disavowed” Butler 2014, p. 38).8
Highlight: : Telling a story that narrates a monstrous, unintelligible, non-binarized or oth-

erwise ‘unfixed’ subjectivity poses “the risk, if not the certainty, of a certain
kind of death, the death of a subject who cannot, who can never, fully
recuperate the conditions of its own emergence” (Butler 2005, p. 65)
Notes in Document
'The Accelerationist Reader':
Highlight: : Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour
passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the
machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery
(The Accelerationist Reader, p.61)
Highlight: : the workers themselves are cast merely as its con scious linkages
Highlight: : the use value, i.e. the material qualtty of the means of labour, is
transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as
such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of
capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by
capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear
as the individual worker's means of labour
Highlight: : it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the
raw material
Highlight: : it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker
Highlight: : The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity

Highlight: : The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their
construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not
Highlight: : exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the
machine as an alien power
Highlight: : The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour

Highlight: : Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among

the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical
system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself
only a link of the system
Highlight: : In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour
process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the
appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital.
Highlight: : a mere moment of the realization process of capita

Highlight: : The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible
negation of necessary labour
Highlight: : The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the

realization of this tendency.
Highlight: : the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with

machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct .
need of the producer, and. hence with direct use value
Highlight: : The accumulation of knowledge and skills, of the general productive

forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to
labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically
of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a
means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most
adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital's
relations with itself are concerned, appears as the most adequate form of
capital as such. I
Highlight: : the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes
fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery,
knowledge appears as alien, exter nal to him; and living labour [as]
subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as
superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's]
requirements.
Highlight: : The full development of capital, therefore, takes place-or capital has
posited the mode of production corresponding to it-only when the means
of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has
also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capital
appears as machine within the production process, opposite labour; and
the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct
skilfulness of the worker, but rather as the techno logical application of
science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a
scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this
process.
Highlight: : Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating
production.
Highlight: : the transformation of the production process from the simple labour
process into a scientific process
Highlight: : In small-scale circulation, capital advances the worker the wages which
the latter exchanges for products neces sary for his consumption. The
money he obtains has this power only because others are working
alongside him at the same time; and capital can give him claims on alien
labour, in the form of money, only because it has appropriated his own
labour. This exchange of one's own labour with alien labour appears here
not as mediated and determined by the simultaneous existence of the
labour of others, but rather by the advance which capital makes.
Highlight: : Capital in the form of circulating capital posits itself as mediator between
the different workers.
Highlight: : Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the
worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part
of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for
another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the
production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in
order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such
objects.
Highlight: : capital here-quite unintention ally-reduces human labour, expenditure of

energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated
labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.
Highlight: : It enters not in oFder to replace labour power where this is lacking, but
rather in order to reduce massively available labour power to its
necessary measure. Machinery enters only where labour capacity is on
hand in masses.
Highlight: : What was the living worker's activity becomes the activity of the machine.
Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a
coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself-'as though its
body were by love possessed'.1
Highlight: : The exchange of living labour for objectified labour-Le. the positing of
social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour -is
the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting
on value.
Highlight: : Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce
labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as
sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the
necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits
the superfluous in growing measure as a condition-question of life or
death-for the necessary.
Highlight: : Forces of production and social relations-two different sides of the

develop ment of the social individual-appear to capital as mere means, and
are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact,
however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.
Highlight: : Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather,
disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every
individual and the whole society.'2
Highlight: : The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social
knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree,
hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under
the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance
with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been
produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate
organs of social practice, of the real life process.
Highlight: : this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all
earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is
that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of
art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation
of surplus labour time; since value is directly its purpose, not use value. It
is thus, despite itself. instrumental in creating the means of social
disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a
diminishing minimum. and thus to free everyone's time for their own
development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create
disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour.
Highlight: : the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus
labour.
Highlight: : If the entire labour of a country were sufficient only to raise the support of
the whole population. there would be no surplus labour. consequently
nothing that could be allowed to accumulate as capital If in one year the
people raises enough for the support of two years. one year's
consumption must perish. or for one year men must cease from
productive labour. But the possessors of.[ the] surplus produce or capital
[-.] employ people upon something not directly and imme diately
productive. e.g. in the erection of machinery. So it goes on.3
Highlight: : direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free
time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy.
Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like,� although it remains
his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of
distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the
ultimate object. Free time-which is both idle time and time for higher
activity-has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject,
and he then enters into the direct production process as this different
subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being
in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [AusObung],
experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as
regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the
accumulated knowledge of society.
Highlight: : There is no com mon measure between the value of the enterprises and
that of the labor capacity of wage earners.
Highlight: : If capitalism is the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism
for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself
and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it.
Highlight: : Jean-Joseph Goux

Highlight: : 'If the movement does not tend toward any limit, if the quotient of
differentials is not calculable, the present no longer has any mean ing ....
The quotient of differentials is not resolved, the differences no longer
cancel one another in their relationship. No limit opposes the break [/a
brisure], or the breaking of this break. The tendency finds no end, the
thing in motion never quite reaches what the immediate future has in
store for it; it is endlessly delayed by accidents and deviations .... Such is
the complex notion of a continuity within the absolute break'.2 In the
expanded immanence of the system, the limit tends to reconstitute in its
displacement the thing it tended to diminish in its primitive emplacement.
Highlight: : this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the

deterritorialization of capitalism.
Highlight: : the process of deterritorialization here goes from the center to the
periphery, that is, from the developed countries to the underdeveloped
countries, which do not constitute a separate world, but rather an
essential component of the world-wide capitalist machine
Highlight: : the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment

Highlight: : an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of

the center
Highlight: : to a point where it is no longer the developed countries that supply the
underdeveloped countries with capital, but quite the opposite.
Highlight: : Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced limit, a

decoding. Capitalism schizophrenizes more and more on the periphery.
Highlight: : the relative diminution of surplus value in relation to total capital-a

diminution that is ensured by the development of productivity, automation,
and constant capital.
Comment Surplus-value is the difference between the amount raised through a sale of a product and the amount
:
it cost to the owner of that product to manufacture it: i.e. the amount raised through sale of the
product minus the cost of the materials, plant and labour power.
Comment Constant Capital is the value invested in the means of production (MP) and thus embodied in them
:
Comment Total capital is all interest-bearing debt plus shareholders' equity, which may include items such as
:
common stock, preferred stock, and minority interest.

Highlight: : there is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital, which

develops along with automa tion and productivity, and which cannot be
explained by factors that counteract the falling tendency-the increasing
intensity of the exploitation of human labor, the diminution of the price of
the elements of constant capital, etc.-since, on the contrary, these
factors depend on it.
Highlight: : On the one hand, codes continue to exist-even as an archaism-but they

assume a function that is perfectly contemporary and adapted to the
situation within personified capital (the capitalist, the worker. the
merchant, the banker) .
Highlight: : on the other hand, and more profoundly, every technical machine
presupposes flows of a particular type: flows of code that are both interior
and exterior to the machine, forming the elements of a technology and
even a science. It is these flows of code that find themselves encasted,
coded, or overcoded in the precapitalist societies in such a way that they
never achieve any independence (the blacksmith, the astronomer).
Comment In semiotics, a code is a set of conventions or sub-codes currently in use to communicate
:
meaning. The most common is one's spoken language, but the term can also be used to
refer to any narrative form: consider the color scheme of an image (e.g. red for danger), or
the rules of a board game (e.g. the military signifiers in chess).
Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) emphasised that signs only acquire meaning and value
when they are interpreted in relation to each other. He believed that the relationship between
the signifier and the signified was arbitrary. Hence, interpreting signs requires familiarity with
the sets of conventions or codes currently in use to communicate meaning.
Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) elaborated the idea that the production and interpretation of
texts depends on the existence of codes or conventions for communication. Since the
meaning of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a
framework within which signs make sense (see Semiosis).
Notes in Document
'Fanged Noumena_ Collected Writings 1987-2007':
Highlight: : Machinic Desi re
(Fanged Noumena_ Collected Writings 1987-2007, p.332)
Highlight: : The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a tech nocapital singularity as
renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into
commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine
runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics
modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.
Comment interface
:
Highlight: : An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips

through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. Knowledge
adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it
does.
Highlight: : Capital is machinic (non-instrumental)

Highlight: : Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy.

Highlight: : Machine-code-capital recycles itselfthrough its axiomatic of consumer

control, laundering-out the shit and blood-stains of primitive accumulation.
Highlight: : Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expendi ture,
whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia.
Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost
control.
Highlight: : Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling

involvement with entropy devia tions camouflaging an invasion from the
future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that
inhibits the meltdown process.
Highlight: : anthropological characteristics as a symptom of under development;

reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-
reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem,
drag.
Highlight: : Commoditization conditions define technics as a sub stitute for human

activity accounted as wage costs. Indus trial machines are deployed to
dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of
cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity oflabour power.
Highlight: : sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and 5df-

micromM,dgeu arti· ficial environments, capturing minutely adaptive
behav iour for the commodity. Autocybernating market control guides
the labour-process into immersion.
Highlight: : Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe

exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality.
Highlight: : Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-

specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems,
connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic:
engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that
are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory-
dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect.
Highlight: : The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM.

Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic
baboonery, scriptures, tra ditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies,
resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has
already been decided.
Highlight: : Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint.

Highlight: : Convergent waves signal singularities, reg istering the influence of the
future upon its past.
Highlight: : This is not remotely a question of hope, aspira tion or prophecy, but of
communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive
singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical
development.
Highlight: : Intelligent infections tend their hosts.

Highlight: : Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic repli cator, sophisticating

itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash.
Highlight: : Csicsery-Ronay
Highlight: : [A J retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the
one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing
itself in simu lacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the
host imagination.6
Highlight: : weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against

their narcissistic parents.
Highlight: : Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton
gets the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film).
Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the
information supcrhighway, mcdia nightmares take off on their own:
dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital
annihilation.
Highlight: : Conceptions of a gency are inextricable from media environments. Print

massifies to a national level. Telecoms c oordinate at a global level. TV
electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take
action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion
to tractile memory, with the ana/cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional
intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging
entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the
black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you.
Highlight: : Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucle ated cells are the mutant
product of atmospheric oxygen ation catastrophe three billion years ago. H
The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes
took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology.
Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where - deep in the
genomic ICE - DNA-format plan etary trauma registers primary repression
of the bacteria
Highlight: : Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strat egy without a subject:
ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy,
replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with
nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence.
Highlight: : Learning surrenders control to the future, threaten ing established power.
Highlight: : It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with

a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom
Highlight: : Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate

learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through
perpetual reconstitution of global social memory.
Highlight: : The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is

accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic
institutions, precipitat ing their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-
exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.
Notes in Document
'The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education':
Highlight: : Agential Realism and Educational Ethnography
(The Wiley handbook of ethnography of education, p.5)
Highlight: : Autoethnography Comes of Age

Highlight: : s, influenced by the crises of representation, legitimation, and authority,

Highlight: : how to write evocatively and engagingly about interrupted body projects
and the self in ways that fused the personal and the societal, and resisted
the warping tyranny of dualisms such as objective– subjective and
(able)bodied/(dis)abled.
Highlight: : draw on relevant and appropriate personal experiences as a resource for

illuminating and problematizing wider cultural issues (e.g., Sparkes 2012,
2013a).
Highlight: : mental” texts, such as the edited volume by Ellis and Bochner (1996)
entitled Composing Ethnography: Alternative Forms of Qualitative Writing,
and Richardson’s (1997) collection of her seminal works in Fields of Play:
Constructing an Academic Life,
Highlight: : Chang’s (2008) Autoethnography as Method, which might be described as

drawing on a postpositivistic perspective
Highlight: : Muncey’s (2010) Creating Autoethnographies, which is more informed by a

liberalhumanist
Highlight: : Handbook of Autoethnography, edited by Holman Jones, Adams, and Ellis;

Contemporary British Autoethnography, edited by Short, Turner, and
Grant; and Autoethnography, edited by Sikes. The first two provide
collections of original works by leaders in the field working from a
poststructural perspective, while the latter is a fourvolume set that brings
together key texts on autoethnography produced in the last 30 years
Highlight: : given its marginal status and subversive potential, in an academic climate
framed by neoliberalism, an audit culture, and new public management
(NPM) practices, I would also argue that, for some, it is a bad time, indeed,
even a dangerous time, to be an autoethnographer.
Highlight: : Autoethnography is an autobiographical genre of writing and research that

displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the
cultural. Back and forth autoethnographers gaze, first through an
ethnographic wideangle lens, focusing outward on social and cultural
aspects of their personal experience; then, they look inward, exposing a
vulnerable self that is moved by and may move through, refract, and resist
cultural interpretations … Autoethnographers vary in their emphasis on the
research process (graphy), on culture (ethnos), and on self (auto). (Ellis
and Bochner 2000: 739–740)
Highlight: : the following characteristics need to be present in the work: purposefully

commenting on/critiquing culture practices; making contributions to existing
research; embracing vulnerability with a purpose; and creating a reciprocal
relationship with audiences in order to compel a response.
Highlight: : In terms of a list of criteria for judging autoethnography specifically, Holman

Jones (2005: 773) puts forward the following: Participation as reciprocity:
How well does the work construct participation of authors/readers and
performer/audiences as a reciprocal relationship marked by mutual
responsibility and obligation? Partiality, reflexivity, and citationality as
strategies for dialogue (and not mastery):
Highlight: : How well does the work present a partial and selfreferential tale that
connects with other stories, ideas, discourses, and contexts (e.g.,
personal, theoretical, ideological, cultural) as a means of creating a
dialogue among authors, readers, and subjects written/read? Dialogue as
a space of debate and negotiation: How well does the work create a space
for and engage in meaningful dialogue among different bodies, hearts, and
minds? Personal narrative and storytelling as an obligation to critique: How
do narrative and story enact an ethical obligation to critique subject
positions, acts, and received notions of expertise and justice within and
outside of the work? Evocation and emotion as incitements to action: How
well does the work create a plausible and visceral lifeworld and charged
emotional atmosphere as an incitement to act within and outside the
context of the work? Engaged embodiment as a condition for change: How
does the work place/embody/interrogate/intervene in experience in ways
that make political action and change possible in and outside the work?
Highlight: : do not wish to imply that theirs are the only criteria or the only lists that can
be used for passing judgment, as this would act to constrain innovation
and dampen the imagination.
Highlight: : Delamont (2009: 59), “Autoethnography is almost impossible to write and

publish ethically
Highlight: : Autoethnography is a research genre dependent on relationships, and other

people are always woven into the stories we tell, some intricately and
deeply so. Quite simply, our stories are not our own. We always run the
risk of making those we write about not only recognizable to others but
recognizable to themselves as our stories weave their way into their lives in
ways they might not feel comfortable with, or agree to, even if they have
given their “informed consent” for the story to be told. AllenCollinson
(2013), therefore, argues that autoethnographers must consider carefully if
and how others are represented in their personal narratives.
Highlight: : Given the authorial power autoethnographers have over those individuals
who appear in their text, and given that these individuals are frequently
intimate others, for Tullis (2013: 258) this means that “the responsibility to
do no harm is even greater.
Highlight: : Ellis (2007) offers a number of thinking points for consideration that include
the following: You have to live the experience of doing research with
intimate others, think it though, improvise, write and rewrite, anticipate, and
feel its consequences. No matter how strictly you follow procedural
guidelines, situations will come up in the field that will make your head spin
and your heart ache. Think about the greater good of your research – does
it justify the potential risk to others? And, be careful that your definition of
the greater good isn’t one created for your own good.
Highlight: : You do not own your story. Your story is also other people’s stories. You
have no inalienable right to tell the stories of others. Intimate, identifiable
others deserve as least as much consideration as strangers and probably
more. You have to live in the world of those you write about and those you
write for and to. Be careful how you present yourself in the writing. Be
careful that your research does not negatively affect your life and
relationships, hurt you, or others in your world. Hold relational concerns
as high as research. When possible research from an ethic of care. That’s
the best you can do
Highlight: : Tolich (2010) constructs 10 foundational ethical guidelines that, like those
of Ellis (2007), go beyond procedural ethics and into the domain of process
ethics in practice.
Highlight: : With regard to vulnerability, the following guidelines are offered: Beware
of internal confidentiality: the relationships at risk are not with the researcher
exposing confidences to outsiders, but confidences exposed among the
participants of family members themselves. Treat any autoethnography
as an inked tattoo by anticipating the author’s future vulnerability. No
story should harm others, and if harm is unavoidable, take steps to minimize
harm. Those unable to minimize risk to self or others should use a nom de
plume as the default. Assume all people mentioned in the text will read it
one day
Highlight: : Tullis (2013) proposes the following ethical guidelines for autoethnography:
Do no harm to self and others. Consult your IRB [institutional review
board]. Get informed consent. Practice process consent and explore the
ethics of consequence. Do a member check. Do not present publicly or
publish anything you would not show the persons mentioned in the text.
Do not underestimate the afterlife of a published narrative.
Highlight: : member check. Here, individuals are given the chance to read and
comment on stories in which they appear to check for accuracy and
interpretation. In contrast, others might choose not to engage in this
process out of a concern that sharing the story will do more harm than
good to their relationships.
Highlight: : the autoethnographer who decides to share their work with participants
may encounter dilemmas regarding the proper way to present the stories
to allow participants to “comment and criticize honestly, without threatening
their personal world” (2011: 393).
Highlight: : this form of scholarship highlights more than ever issues of representation,
“objectivity,” data quality, legitimacy, and ethics. Although working through
these challenges can lead to the production of an excellent text, the
intimate and personal nature of autoethnography can, in fact, make it one
of the most challenging qualitative approaches to attempt
Highlight: : As Muncey (2010: 86) comments, despite how good the work is, “at the
back of your mind is the ever present voice that says isn’t this just
selfindulgent nonsense?”
Highlight: : The need for autoethnographers to develop a thick skin gains a sense of
urgency in the psychotic university described by Craig, Amernic, and
Tourish (2014) where academic life is framed and experienced within an
audit culture, new public management (NPM) practices, and a neoliberal
agenda (also see Sparkes 2013b).
Highlight: : as Shore (2008) points out, we have witnessed the transformation of the
traditional liberal and Enlightenment idea of the university as a place of
higher learning into the modern idea of the university as corporate
enterprise. H
Highlight: : Autoethnographers need to recognize that, like qualitative researchers in

general, they are suffering from a more general malaise instigated in recent
years by the rise of methodological fundamentalism and a resurgent
scientism.
Highlight: : promote, valorize, and enforce evidence or scientifically based biomedical

models of research at the expense of qualitative forms of inquiry that are
deemed suspect, unscientific, and of little value.
Notes in Document
'REZA NECARESTANI Intelligence and Spirit ':
Highlight: : from a functionalist perspective, that mind is only what it does; and that
what it does is first and foremost realized by the sociality of agents, which
itself is primarily and ontologically constituted by the semantic space of a
public language. What mind does is to structure the universe to which it
belongs, and structure is the very register of intel ligibility as pertaining to
the world and intelligence. Only in virtue of the multilayered semantic
structure of language does sociality become a normative space of
recognitive-cognitive rational agents; and the suppos edly ‘private’
experiences and thoughts of participating agents are only structured as
experiences and thoughts in so far as they are bound up in this
normative—-at once intersubjective and objective—space.
(REZA NECARESTANI Intelligence and Spirit , p.10)
Notes in Document
'Code (semiotics) - Wikipedia':
Highlight: : In semiotics, a code is a set of conventions or sub-codes currently in use to
communicate meaning. The most common is one's spoken language, but
the term can also be used to refer to any narrative form: consider the color
scheme of an image (e.g. red for danger), or the rules of a board game
(e.g. the military signifiers in chess). Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913)
emphasised that signs only acquire meaning and value when they are
interpreted in relation to each other. He believed that the relationship
between the signifier and the signified was arbitrary. Hence, interpreting
signs requires familiarity with the sets of conventions or codes currently in
use to communicate meaning. Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) elaborated
the idea that the production and interpretation of texts depends on the
existence of codes or conventions for communication. Since the meaning
of a sign depends on the code within which it is situated, codes provide a
framework within which signs make sense (see Semiosis).
(Code (semiotics) - Wikipedia, p.1)
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Artefact Agency & Affect Theory’
Notes in Document
'On a New List of Categories ':
Highlight: : the function of conceptions is to reduce the manifold of sensuous
impressions to unity
(On a New List of Categories , p.1)
Highlight: : the validity of a conception consists in the impossibility of reducing the

content of consciousness to unity without the introduction of it
Highlight: : one such conception may unite the manifold of sense and yet another
may be required to unite the conception and the manifold to which it is
applied; and so on.
Highlight: : That universal conception which is nearest to sense is that of the present,
in general.
Highlight: : the act of attention has no connotation at all, but is the pure denotative
power of the mind
Highlight: : the power which directs the mind to an object, in contradistinction to the
power of thinking any predicate of that object
Highlight: : has no
Highlight: : connotation, and therefore no proper unity

Highlight: : the metaphysical parts which are recognized by abstraction are attributed
to this it, but the it cannot itself be made a predicate.
Highlight: : neither predicated of a subject, nor in a subject

Highlight: : identical with the conception of substance.

Highlight: : The unity to which the understanding reduces impressions is the unity of
a proposition.
Highlight: : This unity consists in the connection of the predicate with the subject;
and, therefore, that which is implied in the copula, or the conception of
being, is that which completes the work of conceptions of reducing the
manifold to unity.
Highlight: : The conception of being contains only that junction of predicate to subject
wherein
Highlight: : these two verbs agree. The conception of being, therefore, plainly has no
content.
Highlight: : If we say “The stove is black,” the stove is the substance, from which its
blackness has not been differentiated, and the is, while it leaves the
substance just as it was seen, explains its confusedness, by the
application to it of blackness as a predicate.
Highlight: : Though being does not affect the subject, it implies an indefinite
determinability of the predicate.
Highlight: : Accordingly, we have propositions whose subjects are entirely indefinite,
as “There is a beautiful ellipse
Highlight: : but we have no propositions whose predicate is entirely indeterminate

Highlight: : Thus substance and being are the beginning and end of all conception.
Substance is inapplicable to a predicate, and being is equally so to a
subject.
Highlight: : Exclusive attention consists in a definite conception or supposi- tion of

one part of an object, without any sup- position of the other
Highlight: : Discrimination has to do merely with

Highlight: : the senses of terms, and only draws a distinction in meaning.
Dissociation is that separation which, in the absence of a constant
association, is permitted by the law of association of images. It is the
consciousness of one thing, without the necessary simultaneous
consciousness of the other. Abstraction or prescision, therefore, supposes
a greater separation than discrimination, but a less separation than
dissociation.
Highlight: : Prescision is not a reciprocal process. It is frequently the case, that, while
A cannot be prescinded from B, B can be prescinded from A.
Highlight: : Elementary conceptions only arise upon the occasion of experience; that
is, they are produced for the first time according to a general law, the
condition of which is the existence of certain impressions.
Highlight: : if a conception does not reduce the impressions upon which it follows to
unity, it is a mere arbitrary addition to these latter
Highlight: : elementary conceptions do not arise thus arbitrarily

Highlight: : impressions (or more immediate conceptions) cannot be definitely

conceived or attended to, to the neglect of an elementary conception which
reduces them to unity.
Highlight: : when such a conception has once been obtained, there is, in general, no
reason why the premisses which have occasioned it should not be
neglected, and therefore the explaining conception may frequently be
prescinded from the more immediate ones and from the impressions.
Highlight: : universal elementary conceptions

Highlight: : intermediate between the manifold of substance and the unity of being
Highlight: : the occasion of the introduction of a universal elementary conception
is either the reduction of the manifold of substance to unity, or else the
conjunction to substance of another conception
Highlight: : elements conjoined cannot be supposed without the conception,
whereas the conception can generally be supposed without these
elements
Highlight: : empirical psychology discovers the occasion of the introduction of a

conception, and we have only to ascertain what conception already lies
in the data which is united to that of substance by the first conception, but
which cannot be supposed without this first conception, to have the next
conception in order in passing from being to substance.
Highlight: : throughout this process, introspection is not resorted to. Nothing is

assumed respecting the subjective elements of consciousness which
cannot be securely inferred from the objective elements.
Highlight: : The conception of being arises upon the formation of a proposition

Highlight: : A proposition always has, besides a term to express the substance,

another to express the
Highlight: : quality of that substance; and the function of the conception of being is to
unite the quality to the substance. Quality, therefore, in its very widest
sense, is the first conception in order in passing from being to substance.
Highlight: : A proposition asserts the applicability of a mediate conception to a more

immediate one.
Highlight: : the more mediate conception is clearly regarded independently of this
circumstance, for otherwise the two conceptions would not be
distinguished, but one would be thought through the other, without this
latter being an object of thought, at all.
Highlight: : The mediate conception, then, in order to be asserted to be applicable

to the other, must first be considered without regard to this circumstance,
and taken immediately.
Highlight: : But, taken immediately, it transcends what is given (the more immediate
conception), and its applicability to the latter is hypothetical.
Highlight: : “This stove is black.” Here the conception of this stove is the more imme-
diate, that of black the more mediate, which latter, to be predicated of the
former, must be discriminated from it and considered in itself1 , not as
applied to an object, but simply as embodying a quality, blackness.
Highlight: : Empirical psychology has established the fact that we can know a quality
only by means of its contrast with or similarity to another.
Highlight: : mediating representation may be termed an interpretant, because it fulfils

the office of an interpreter
Highlight: : a word represents a thing to

Highlight: : the conception in the mind of the hearer

Highlight: : Every reference to a correlate, then, con- joins to the substance the
conception of a reference to an interpretant; and this is, therefore, the
next conception in order in passing from being to substance.
Highlight: : since there is a manifold of impressions, we have a feeling of

complication or confusion, which leads us to differentiate this impression
from that, and then, having been differentiated, they require to be brought
to unity.
Highlight: : not brought to unity until we conceive them together as being ours, that is,
until we refer them to a conception as their interpretant.
Highlight: : The five conceptions thus obtained, for reasons which will be sufficiently
obvious, may be termed categories. That is, BEING Quality (Reference to
a Ground), Relation (Reference to a Correlate), Representation
(Reference to an Interpre- tant), SUBSTANCE The three intermediate
conceptions may be termed accidents.
Highlight: : This passage from the many to the one is numerical. The conception of a
third is that of an object which is so related to two others, that one of these
must be related to the other in the same way in which the third is related
to that other. Now this coincides with the conception of an interpretant.
An other is plainly equivalent to a correlate. The conception of second
differs from that of other, in implying the possibility of a third. In the same
way, the conception of self implies the possibility of an other. The Ground
is the self abstracted from the concreteness which implies the possibility
of an other.
Highlight: : Since no one of the categories can be prescinded from those above it, the
list of supposable objects which they afford is,
Highlight: : What is. Quale—that which refers to a ground, Relate—that which refers
to ground and correlate, Representamen—that which refers to ground,
correlate, and interpretant.
Highlight: : three kinds of representations. First. Those whose relation to their ob-
jects is a mere community in some quality, and these representations may
be termed Li- kenesses. Second. Those whose relation to their objects
consists in a correspondence in fact, and these may be termed Indices or
Signs. Third. Those the ground of whose relation to their objects is an
imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may
be termed Symbols.
Highlight: : the three conceptions of reference to a ground, reference to an object,

and reference to an interpretant are the fundamental ones of at least
one universal science, that of logic.
Highlight: : Logic is said to treat of second intentions as applied to first.

Highlight: : second intentions are the objects of the understanding considered as

representations, and the first intentions to which they apply are the
objects of those representations.
Highlight: : The objects of the understanding, considered as representations, are

symbols, that is, signs which are at least potentially general.
Highlight: : a distinction can be made between concepts which are supposed to
have no existence except so far as they are actually present to the
understanding, and external symbols which still retain their character of
symbols so long as they are only capable of being understood. And as the
rules of logic apply to these latter as much as to the former (and though
only through the former, yet this character, since it belongs to all things,
is no limitation), it follows that logic has for its subject-genus all symbols
and not merely concepts2 . We come, therefore, to this, that logic treats
of the reference of symbols in general to their objects.
Highlight: : a general division of symbols, common to all these sciences; namely,
into 1. Symbols which directly determine only their grounds or imputed
qualities, and are thus but sums of marks or terms; 2. Symbols which
also independently determine their objects by means of other term or
terms, and thus, expressing their own objective validity, become capable
of truth or falsehood, that is, are propositions; and, 3. Symbols which
also independently determine their interpretants, and thus the minds to
which they appeal, by pre- missing a proposition or propositions which
such a mind is to admit. These are arguments.
Highlight: : among all the definitions of the proposition, for example, as the oratio
indicativa, as the subsumption of an object under a concept, as the expres-
sion of the relation of two concepts, and as the indication of the mutable
ground of appearance, there is, perhaps, not one in which the
conception of reference to an object or correlate is not the important one.
Highlight: : the conception of reference to an interpretant or third, is always prominent

in the definitions of argument.
Highlight: : In a proposition, the term which separa- tely indicates the object of the
symbol is termed the subject, and that which indicates the ground is
termed the predicate.
Highlight: : In an argument, the premisses form a representation of the conclusion,

because they indicate the interpretant of the argument, or representation
representing it to represent its object. The premisses may afford a
likeness, index, or symbol of the conclusion.
Highlight: : there is, first, the direct reference of a symbol to its objects, or its
denotation; second, the reference of the symbol to its ground, through its
object, that is, its reference to the common characters of its objects, or
its connotation; and third, its reference to its interpretants through its
object, that is, its reference to all the synthetical propositions in which its
objects in common are subject or predicate, and this I term the infor-
mation it embodies.
Highlight: : as every addition to what it denotes, or to what it connotes, is ef- fected

by means of a distinct proposition of this kind, it follows that the extension
and comprehension of a term are in an inverse relation, as long as the
information remains the same, and that every increase of information is
accompanied by an increase of one or other of these two quantities.
Notes in Document
'ART AND AGENCY An Anthropological Theory ':
Highlight: : The pattern as mind trap: glide reflection and figure-ground reversal
(ART AND AGENCY An Anthropological Theory , p.18)
Highlight: : Volt sorcery and the paradoxical agen<..] of representation

Highlight: : The fractal god: A'a from Rurutu

Notes in Document
'On Peirce’s notion of information: remarks on De
Tienne’s paper “Information in Formation” ':
Highlight: : According to De Tienne’s paper “Information in Formation” (2005), Peirce’s
concept of information must be associated to the mature notion of sign as
a medium of communication
(On Peirce’s notion of information: remarks on De Tienne’s paper “Information in Formation” , p.3)
Highlight: : sign as a medium of communication

Highlight: : 1906 definition of the sign as a “medium for the communication of a form”
(De TIENNE 2005: 161)
Highlight: : He also suggested that symbolic form communication constitutes what

Peirce called “genuine information”, particularly associated with the
anticipation of events
Highlight: : our view about Peirce’s mature concept of meaningful information as a

triadic-dependent relation of mediation connecting Sign, Object and
Interpretant, in the context of “semiotic systems”, i.e., systems that
produce, communicate, receive, compute, and interpret signs of different
kinds
Highlight: : meaningful information as a triadic-dependent relation of mediation

connecting Sign, Object and Interpretant, in the context of “semiotic
systems”
Highlight: : , i.e., systems that produce, communicate, receive, compute, and interpret
signs of different kinds
Highlight: : Peirce’s pragmatic model of meaning

Highlight: : biology is pervaded by informational concepts, particularly in fields with

important social and technological implications, such as genetics, molecular
biology, and genomics, but currently lacks a theory of biological information.
Highlight: : Peirce defined semiosis as an irreducible triadic relation between a Sign,

its Object and its Interpretant.
Highlight: : semiosis is a triadic process of communication of a form from the Object to

the Interpretant through Sign mediation
Highlight: : In Peirce’s works, form is defined as having the “being of predicate” (EP
2.544) and it is also pragmatically formulated as a “conditional proposition”
stating that certain things would happen under specific circumstances (EP
2.388). It is something that is embodied in the object (EP 2.544, n. 22) as a
habit, a “rule of action” (CP 5.397, CP 2.643), a “disposition” (CP 5.495,
CP 2.170), a “real potential” (EP 2.388) or, simply, a “permanence of some
relation” (CP 1.415).
Highlight: : information as the communication of a form from O to I through S

(QUEIROZ et al. 2005; EL-HANI et al. 2006). In these terms, it amounts to
the communication of a habit embodied in the Object to the Interpretant, so
as to constrain (in general) the Interpretant as a Sign or (in semiotic
systems) the interpreter’s behavior.
Highlight: : the form communicated from the Object to the Interpretant through the
Sign is a regularity, a habit that allows a given semiotic system to interpret
that form as indicative of a class of entities, processes, phenomena, and,
thus, to answer to it in a regular way. Otherwise, the semiotic system would
not be really capable of interpreting the Object by means of its effect on it
(Interpretant), mediated by a Sign.
Highlight: : information has a processual nature: it is a process of communicating a

form to the Interpretant that operates as a constraining influence on
possible patterns of interpretative behavior.
Highlight: : It cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated agent. It is interpreter-

dependent in the sense that information triadically connects representation
(Sign), Object, and an effect (Interpretant) on the interpreter (which can be
an organism or a part of an organism).
Highlight: : In sum, information in a semiotic system depends on both the interpreter

and the Object (in which the form communicated in information is
embodied as a constraining factor of the interpretative process).
Highlight: : [Information ≈ semiosis] A triadic-dependent process through which a form

embodied in the Object in a regular way is communicated to an Interpretant
through the mediation of a Sign.
Highlight: : [Potential information ≈ potential semiosis] A process of communicating a

form from an Object to an Interpretant through the mediation of a Sign that
could take place in a given moment. [Effective information ≈ effective
semiosis] The process by which a Sign effectively produces an effect
(Interpretant) on some semiotic system (an interpreter) by making the
Interpretant stand in a similar relation to something else (the Object of the
Sign) as that in which the Sign itself stand. Thus, the Sign mediates the
relation between Object and Interpretant. The Sign effectively
communicates, in this way, a form from the Object to the Interpretant,
changing the state of the interpreter.
Highlight: : According to De Tienne (2005: 162), the form communicated in semiosis can
be classified according to the logical-phenomenological theory of
categories: The forms that signs convey are not arbitrarily created out of
nothing. Some of them are forms of firstness, and the type of sign that
objects can determine in that regard are iconic. Others are forms of
secondness, they are agent provocateurs, and bring other entities to react
to them, turning them into indices. The third kind of forms, as Peirce puts it
in R793, are truths of conditional propositions: “under certain favorable
circumstances, this or that type of event would be bound to take place or
be the case”; these are forms of thirdness, forms that can only be captured
through symbols.
Highlight: : systems that interpret signs of different kinds can be classified as semiotic
systems.
Highlight: : As Fetzer (1997, p.358) writes: “What makes a system “semiotic” thus
becomes that the behavior of the system is causally affected by the
presence of a sign because that sign stands for something else iconically,
indexically, or symbolically, for that system”.
Highlight: : Peirce’s fundamental division of signs. Icons are Signs that stand for their
objects through intrinsic similarity or resemblance, irrespective of any
spatio-temporal physical correlation that the Sign has with an existent
Object. In contrast, indexes can only occur when the Sign is really
determined by the Object, in such a way that both must exist as concurrent
events. Finally, in a symbolic relationship, the Interpretant stands for the
Object through the Sign by means of a determinative relation of law or
convention (CP 2.276).
Highlight: : In terms of cognitive processes, icons are associated with sensory tasks.
They are present in the sensorial recognition of external stimuli of any
modality, and in the cognitive relation of analogy.
Highlight: : Mimicry offers an example of iconicity.

Highlight: : The Interpretant in this case is the effect of the thorn on a potential predator
of the bug, namely that the latter will not try to eat the bug. In this iconic
sign process, the form that is communicated from the Object to the
Interpretant through the Sign is a general similarity between the thorn in
the bug and the thorn in the plant. Generally speaking, an iconic Sign
communicates a habit embodied in an Object to the Interpretant, so as to
constrain the interpreter’s behavior, as a result of a certain quality that the
Sign and the Object share
Highlight: : The notion of spatio-temporal co-variation is, in turn, the most characteristic
property of indexical processes.
Highlight: : small red spots in a child’s skin, for instance, can be treated as a Sign (S)
that stands for a disease, say, measles, its Object (O), so as to constrain
its Interpretant, the effect the red spots have on an interpreter, say, a
doctor performing a diagnosis.
Highlight: : The small red spots operate as indexes because they are physically
correlated with the disease, which is the primary constraining factor in the
process, the form of which will end up producing an effect on the
interpreter (Figure 4).
Highlight: : Finally, in a symbolic relation, the Interpretant stands for the Object through
the Sign by a determinative relation of law, rule or convention (CP 2.276)
Highlight: : a lawful relationship between a given kind of alarm-call and a given type of
predator.
Highlight: : Generally speaking, a symbolic Sign communicates a habit embodied in an

Object to the Interpretant as a result of a regularity in the relationship
between Sign and Object (Figure 5).
Notes in Document
'The Affect Theory Reader':
Highlight: : An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on A√ect and
the Refrain
(The Affect Theory Reader, p.9)
Highlight: : After A√ect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication

Highlight: : The A√ective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies

Highlight: : E√ the Ine√able: A√ect, Somatic Management, and Mental Health

Highlight: : Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour

Highlight: : A√ect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual

Highlight: : Afterword: Worlding Refrains

Highlight: : Human-adapted avian flu is just one of many nonexistent entities that has
come from the future to fill our present with menace.
Highlight: : Threat is from the future. It is what might come next. Its eventual location
and ultimate extent are undefined. Its nature is open-ended. It is not just
that it is not: it is not in a way that is never over.
Highlight: : There is always the nagging potential of the next after being even worse,
and of a still worse next again after that.
Highlight: : The present is shadowed by a remaindered surplus of indeterminate

potential for a next event running forward back to the future, self-renewing.
Highlight: : Threat is not real in spite of its nonexistence. It is superlatively real,

because of it.
Highlight: : in the past there was a future threat. You cannot erase a ‘‘fact’’ like that.
Highlight: : The superlative futurity of unactualized threat feeds forward from the past
Highlight: : The threat will have been real for all eternity.
Highlight: : What is not actually real can be felt into being. Threat does have an actual
mode of existence: fear, as foreshadowing. Threat has an impending
reality in the present. This actual reality is a√ective.
Highlight: : Fear is the anticipatory reality in the present of a threatening future.

Highlight: : The future of the threat is not falsified. It is deferred. The case remains
forever open. The futurity doesn’t stay in the past where its feeling
emerged. It feeds forward through time.
Highlight: : If we feel a threat, there was a threat. Threat is a√ectively self- causing.
Highlight: : If we feel a threat, such that there was a threat, then there always will have
been a threat. Threat is once and for all, in the nonlinear time of its own
causing.
Highlight: : Any action taken to preempt a threat from emerging into a clear and
present danger is legitimated by the a√ective fact of fear, actual facts
aside.≤ Pre- emptive action will always have been right.
Highlight: : preemptive logic, which is based on a double conditional. ‘‘The Pentagon
neocons argued that the cia overemphasized what Saddam could do
instead of stressing what he would do if he could’’ (Dorrien 2004, 186).
Highlight: : At any moment in the future, he could have acquired the means, and as
soon as he could, he would. Would have, could have: double conditional.
Highlight: : If the threat does not materialize, it still always would have if it could have.
If the threat does materialize, then it just goes to show that the future
potential for what happened had really been there in the past. In this case,
the preemptive action is retroactively legitimated by future actual facts.
Bush does not point out that the reason Al Qaeda is now in Iraq is because
of the invasion that was mounted to keep it out of Iraq, that the preemptive
action actually brought about the result it was meant to fight.
Highlight: : Preemptive action can produce the object toward which its power is
applied, and it can do so without contradicting its own logic, and without
necessarily undermining its legitimation.
Highlight: : preemptive logic is not subject to the same rules of noncontradiction as

normative logic, which privileges a linear causality from the past to the
present and is reluctant to attribute an e√ective reality to futurity.
Highlight: : The alert, set o√ at the slightest sign of potential threat, triggers immediate
action. The actions set in motion in response to the threat are of the same
kind and bring on many of the same e√ects as would have accompanied
an actual danger.
Highlight: : Defensive preemptive action in its own way is as capable as o√ensive

preemptive action of producing what it fights.
Highlight: : The a√ective reality of threat is contagious.

Highlight: : Threat is capable of overlaying its own conditional determination upon an
objective situation through the mechanism of alarm. The two
determinations, threatening and objective, coexist. However, the threat-
determined would-be and could-be takes public precedence due to its oper-
ating in the more compelling, future-oriented, and a√ective register. This
gives it superior political presence and potential.∫
Highlight: : The security that preemption is explicitly meant to produce is predicated on

its tacitly producing what it is meant to avoid: preemptive security is
predicated on a production of insecurity to which it itself contributes.
Preemption thus positively contributes to producing the conditions for its
own exercise. It does this by capturing for its own operation the self-
causative power native to the threat-potential that it takes as its object.
Highlight: : An alert is not a referential statement under obligation to correspond with

precision to an objective state of a√airs. The measure of its correctness is
the immediacy and specificity of the preemptive actions it automatically
triggers. The value of the alert is measured by its performance. Rather
than referential truth-value, it has performative threat-value. More than any
correspondence between its semantic content and an objective referent, it
is the performed commensurability of the threat and the triggered actions
that qualifies the alert as correct. Its correctness, felt as a question of
collective security, is directly political. The threat-alert, as sign of danger, is
subject to di√erent criteria of reliability and e√ectiveness than referential
language about danger.
Highlight: : Threat has no actual referent.

Highlight: : 9–11 belongs to an iterative series of allied events whose boundaries are
indefinite.
Highlight: : An event where threat materializes as a clear and present danger extrudes
a surplus-remainder of threat-potential that can contaminate new objects,
persons, and contexts through the joint mechanisms of the double condi-
tional and the objective imprecision of the specificity of threat. Threat’s self-
causing proliferates. Threat alerts, performatively signed threat-events, are
quick to form their own iterative series. These series tend to proliferate
robustly thanks to the suppleness and compellingness of the a√ective logic
Highlight: : generating them.

Highlight: : The mass a√ective production of felt threat-potential engulfs the (f)actuality
of the comparatively small number of incidents where danger materialized.
They blend together in a shared atmosphere of fear.
Highlight: : There is no apparent limit to the generic diversification of threat, which can
cross normative logical boundaries with impunity, like that between
biological and computer viruses.
Highlight: : The series combine and intertwine, and together they tend to the infinite,
preemptive action in tow.
Highlight: : The object of threat tends toward an ultimate limit at which it becomes
purely indeterminate, while retaining a certain quality—menace—and the
capacity to make that quality felt.
Highlight: : At the limit, threat is a felt quality, independent of any particular instance of
itself, in much the way the color red is a quality independent of any
particular tint of red, as well as of any actually occurring patch
Highlight: : Threat is ultimately ambient. Its logic is purely qualitative.

Highlight: : Threat’s ultimately ambient nature makes preemptive power an

environmental power.∞≤ Rather than empirically manipulate an object (of
which actually it has none), it modulates felt qualities infusing a life-
environment.
Highlight: : 9–11 may be thought of as marking a threshold. It can be considered a

turning point at which the threat- environment took on an ambient
thickness, achieved a consistency, which gave the preemptive power
mechanisms dedicated to its modulation an advantage over other regimes
of power.
Highlight: : To understand the political power of threat and the preemptive politics
availing itself of threat-potential, it is necessary to situate preemptive
power in a field of interaction with other regimes of power, and to analyze
their modes of coexistence as well as their evolutionary divergences and
convergences.∞≥ In a word, it is necessary to adopt an ecological approach
to threat’s environmental power.
Highlight: : Correlative to its ontology, each regime will have a dedicated epistemology
guiding the constitution of its political ‘‘facts’’ and guaranteeing their
legitimation. The political analysis of regimes of power must extend to
these metaphysical dimensions.
Highlight: : Call an operative logic one that combines an ontology with an epistemol-
ogy in such a way as to endow itself with powers of self-causation.
Highlight: : An operative logic is a productive process that inhabits a shared

environment, or field of exteriority, with other processes and logics. It
figures in that field as a formative movement: a tendency toward the
iterative production of its own
Highlight: : variety of constituted fact.

Highlight: : An operative logic is a process of becoming formative of its own species of

being.
Highlight: : What does an operative logic want? Itself. Its own continuance. It is
autopoietic. An operative logic’s self- causative powers drive it
automatically to extend itself
Highlight: : An operative logic is a will-to-power.

Highlight: : with other operative logics, with which it is always in a dynamic state of
reciprocal presupposition.
Highlight: : There is a common category of entities, known to all, that specializes in

making what is not actually present really present nonetheless, in and as its
own e√ect: signs. The sign is the vehicle for making presently felt the poten-
tial force of the objectively absent.
Highlight: : To understand preemptive power as an operative logic it is necessary to be

able to express its productive process of becoming as a semiosis. Since
preemption’s production of being in becoming pivots on a√ect as felt
quality, the pertinent theory of signs would have to be grounded first and
foremost in a metaphysics of feeling
Highlight: : This sense of acting and being acted upon, which is the sense of the reality
of things— both of outward things and ourselves—may be called the sense
of Reaction. It does not reside in any one Feeling; it comes upon the
breaking of one feeling by another feeling’’ (Peirce 1998d, 4–5).
Highlight: : Indexes ‘‘act on the nerves of the person and force his attention.’’ They are
nervously compelling because they ‘‘show something about things, on ac-
count of their being physically connected to them’’ (1998d, 5) in the way
smoke is connected to fire. Yet they ‘‘assert nothing.’’ Rather, they are in the
mood of the ‘‘imperative, or exclamatory, as ‘See there!’ or ‘Look out!’ ’’
(1998c, 16). The instant they ‘‘show’’ we are startled: they are immediately
performative.
Highlight: : what happens when there is no fire and the alarm sounds nonetheless?
Highlight: : startles us awake to a sense of a reality of things, outwardly and selfward

at once.
Highlight: : forces attention, breaking into the feeling before with a transition to a next.
Highlight: : For Peirce, the ‘‘dynamical object’’ is not the fire. The dynamical object is
the innervated flesh to which the sign performatively correlates ‘‘fire,’’
existent or nonexistent. It is the nervous body astartle that is ‘‘the object of
the command’’ to alertness. That performance takes place wholly between
the sign and the ‘‘instinctively’’ activated body whose feeling is ‘‘broken’’ by
the sign’s command to transition to a new feeling.
Highlight: : Semiosis is sign-induced becoming. It is the question of how a sign as

such dynamically determines a body to become, in actual experience. It is
the question of how an abstract force can be materially determining
Highlight: : The question is the same for a nonexistent present fire signed in error,
and for the futurity of a fire yet to come. There is one di√erence, however.
For the future-causal fire, there can be no error. It will always have been
preemp- tively right.
Highlight: : The question becomes, what are the experiential political implications of
the a priori rightness of smokes of future fires?
Highlight: : Peirce insists that the sign’s forcing itself upon the body, and the
‘‘resistance’’ the body instinctively feels ‘‘in reaction,’’ cannot be
‘‘distinguished as agent and patient’’ (1998a, 171).
Highlight: : The bodily activation event occurs at a threshold of reawakening where

there is as yet no distinction between activity and pas- sivity.
Highlight: : The zone of indistinction between the body reactivating and the action of
Highlight: : the sign extends to the shared environment that encompasses and ensures
their correlation.
Highlight: : Prior to the distinction between agent and patient, in the bustle of the
reawakening, there is no boundary yet between the body and its
environment, or between the two of them and the correlated sign
Highlight: : These distinctions will reemerge from the bustle, after a transition, in the
settling into a next determinate feeling.
Highlight: : The form conveyed is a felt dynamic form of unbounded activation

germinal of determinate feeling— pure a√ect, in a redawning universe.
This is what the sign ‘‘shows.’
Highlight: : Understanding the political ontology of threat requires returning thought to

this a√ective twilight zone of indexical experience. In that bustling zone of
indistinction, the world becomingly includes so much more than perception
reveals. For that reason, thought’s approach cannot be phenomenological. It
must be unabashedly metaphysical. It must extend to that which conditions
what is appearing next, itself never appearing: what Whitehead terms the
reality of appearance (1933).
Highlight: : the surplus of reality of what has not happened, paradoxically as an event,
and in the event happens to be productive of a startling transition toward
more determinate being.
Highlight: : The color red always bleeds. It summons up an unusually wide ranging—
but often open, ambiguous—power to a√ect and be a√ected.
Highlight: : Red bleeds and blood flows involve a literal a√ective contagion. It’s a bleed
in which ‘‘body meets image’’ (Massumi 2002, 46√).
Highlight: : Félix Guattari’s ‘‘logic of a√ects’’ (Guattari 1995a, 9).

Highlight: : constitutive role of refrains
Highlight: : Refrains structure the a√ective into ‘‘existential Territories’’ (Guattari

1995a, 15). If, as we will suggest, a√ects are intensities, then refrains are
a√ects ‘‘cycled back’’ (Massumi quoted in Deleuze and Guattari 1987, xv).
Highlight: : a√ective events begin in a powerful indetermination, one ‘‘on the horizon.’’
Highlight: : chaos that soon begins to press upon a context—calls for refrains to fold the
chaos into the beginnings of structure, to bring a little order (Deleuze and
Guattari 1987, 311).
Highlight: : Refrains constitute what will always be fragile, no matter how benevolent
or virulent, territories in time. These allow new forms of expression but
render others inexpressible.
Highlight: : its reorganization of a√ective forces involves a ‘‘molecular rupture’’ of the

system of signs, of given ranges of expression, of the ‘‘already classified’’
(Guattari 1995a, 19– 20).
Highlight: : may sometimes be drawn from the discursive, but they break up the logic
of discursive frameworks
Highlight: : First, however, the territory—its expressive basis—must be formed.

Highlight: : Then there is the additional problem of a√ective communication between

territories, a transduction (transformation) of forces rather than
transmission of signs.
Highlight: : a transducer of a√ective forces, a refrain, not really a sign.

Highlight: : three di√erent aspects to a√ect.

Highlight: : a√ect as transitive (Guattari 1996, 158), as the movement of impersonal, or

we could say ‘‘pre-personal’’ forces (Guattari 1995a, 9), in which we are
caught up (global warming makes this crystal clear).
Highlight: : a√ect as the ‘‘limit- expression of what the human shares with everything it
is not: a bringing out of its inclusion in matter’’ (Massumi 2002, 128).
Highlight: : a√ect as more personal, literally more familiar.

Highlight: : a√ect as emotion or feeling, the folding of broader a√ective intensities into
the nervous system, eventually to become recognizable as the register,
eventually the representation, of the ongoing folding of self and world, as
the person.
Highlight: : physical states (heat and increased heartbeat in anger, trembling in terror)
Highlight: : Feelings are complex strings of ideas traversing emotions as they remap
them (Damasio 2004, 28).
Highlight: : perhaps lies in between the other two. This is the Spinozan ‘‘power to a√ect
and be a√ected’’ ‘‘by which the power of acting of the body itself is
increased, diminished, helped, or hindered, together with the ideas of
these a√ections’’ (Spinoza 1952, 395).
Highlight: : A√ect is again ‘‘transitive,’’ in constant variation, not so much a state as the
ongoing ‘‘passage from one state to another’’ (Deleuze 1988a, 49). This is
the fulcrum of politics micro and macro
Highlight: : one of the main tasks of politics has been to attempt to capture and control
a√ect (Lippmann 2007, Bernays 2004, Curtis 2002), if in the service of a
rational(ist) elite somehow above the chaos of a√ective forces.
Highlight: : an aesthetic approach to politics,

Highlight: : attempts to mobilize a√ect, only in the service of its subsequent capture in
a reductive and elitist ‘‘logic of delimited sets’’ (Guat- tari 1995a, 9).
Highlight: : opposes this with the idea of social practices or analyses with flexible and
open-ended methodologies (metamethodologies) (Guat- tari 1995a, 31)
that enable a ‘‘subjective pluralism’’ engaging with the complexity of
a√ective events (exactly what the conservative capture of the events
involving the Tampa was designed to avoid).
Highlight: : The modern signals a constant innovation as much in the developments of

regimes of sensation as in those of rationalist modes of thought. Both
increasingly tend to micro-colonize the infinity of little a√ective events that
make up our everyday lives. Guattari’s response is to take the everyday
infinities and powers of a√ect very seriously, and to develop a creative re-
sponsibility for modes of living as they come into being.
Highlight: : ‘‘mimetic communication

Highlight: : the corporeally based forms of imitation, both voluntary and involun-
tary (and on which literary representation ultimately depends). At their most
primitive, these involve the visceral level of a√ect contagion, the
‘‘synchrony of facial expressions, vocalizations, postures and movements
with those of another person,’’ producing a tendency for those involved
‘‘to converge emotionally’’ (Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson 1994, 5).
Highlight: : tension between humanist and nonhumanist forms of thought, between

those who argue for the necessity of understanding formations of the
subject and those for whom thinking is a practice that should extend us
beyond the known forms of the subject.
Highlight: : Mimesis is rather like an image in which figure and ground can always be
reversed, so that sometimes subjectivity is in focus, while at other times it
recedes into the background, leaving something new to appear in its place.
Highlight: : to think across the plurality of domains in which we are (and need to be)
organized as subjects but in which the very process of subjectivation also
produces potentials that may open unsuspected possibilities for new ways
of thinking, being, and acting
Highlight: : Mimetic communication can be conceived as an example of synchrony, as

a pervasive ‘‘sharing of form’’ that seems to be ‘‘the fundamental communi-
cational principle running through all levels of behaviour,’’ through both
human and animal bodies, and connected to other rhythmic processes in the
natural world (Condon 1984, 37).
Highlight: : it might equally be conceived as a contagious process that takes place

transversally across a topology connecting heterogeneous networks of
media and conversation, statements and images, and bodies and things.
Highlight: : contagious processes in which a√ect plays a central part.

Highlight: : on a broadly Spinozan- Deleuzian sense, emerging as an asubjective force

in a perspective from which the human appears as an envelope of
possibilities rather than the finite totality or essence represented by the
idea of the individual organism.
Highlight: : view from which Brian Massumi can describe a√ect as an energetic
dimension or ‘‘capacity’’ and emotion as a selective activation or ex-
pression of a√ect from a ‘‘virtual co-presence’’ of potentials on the basis of
memory, experience, thought, and habit (Massumi 2003).
Highlight: : leaves out is the highly di√erentiated work performed by the ‘‘categorical’’ or
‘‘discrete’’ a√ects opened by the work of the American psychologist Silvan
Tomkins.
Highlight: : Tomkins derives his view of the a√ects as innate in large part from
Highlight: : Darwin’s germinal observations in The Expression of the Emotions in Man

and Animals.
Highlight: : Both ways of conceiving a√ect understand it as intricately involved in the

human autonomic system and engaging an energetic dimension that impels
or inhibits the body’s capacities for action.
Highlight: : Tomkins’s a√ect theory

Highlight: : nine a√ects

Highlight: : which a√ects are likely to be called up in response to which others and why
Highlight: : systems-oriented
Highlight: : nonteleological
Highlight: : patterned—or organized—by ongoing processes of script formation.

Highlight: : rethinking the human in the wake of a sustained critique of Western

rationality.
Highlight: : whether to conceive of a√ect as innate or socially constructed, how to

formulate its relationship with cognition, emotion, and feeling, and what
these sorts of decisions might entail theoretically and politically
Highlight: : theories of mimesis and the practices associated with them developed in
non-Western cultures and referred to by Western anthropologists as
‘‘magic,’’
Highlight: : (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, Gibbs 2008; for theories of magic, see, for
example, Mauss 1972 and Frazer 2000).
Highlight: : the most far-reaching analysis of mimesis as both natural and cultural phe-
nomenon in Western thought—that of René Girard
Highlight: : lacks empirical or scientific justification.

Highlight: : theory needs to adopt a heuristic function, drawing creatively on di√erent

forms of knowledge to ask what if one conceived the world in this way?
Highlight: : a new curiosity about the permeability of boundaries between human and
animal life as the possibility of organ transplants from animals to humans
(for example) becomes part of our daily awareness.
Highlight: : Michael Taussig sums up the intricacy of this relation when he calls
mimicry ‘‘the nature that culture uses to create second nature’’ (1993, xiii).
As Mary Bateson puts it, ‘‘the acceptance of parents as appropriate models
for imitation is certainly based on biological patterns, and then the culture
elaborates on that by inventing school teachers and psychoanalysts’’ (1979,
67–68).
Highlight: : the human organism and its environments are ‘‘mutually unfolded and
enfolded structures’’ (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1993, 199) and are
each recomposed in and through their exchanges.
Highlight: : the biological is rewritten by culture with the aid of technology from drugs
to pacemakers
Highlight: : mimicry, that form of embodied copying that also serves as a kind of hinge
between nature and culture
Highlight: : mimesis not as simple mimicry

Highlight: : or copying dependent on vision (monkey see, monkey do), but as a complex
communicative process in which other sensory and a√ective modalities are
centrally involved.
Highlight: : role of mimetic communication in social processes, and especially of the

making—and breaking—of social bonds. These form the basis for a sense
of ‘‘belonging,’’ and, ultimately, of the polis, as what forms the a√ective
bases of political orders.
Highlight: : At the heart of mimesis is a√ect contagion, the bioneurological means by

which particular a√ects are transmitted from body to body.
Highlight: : The discrete innate a√ects of which Silvan Tomkins speaks are powerful
purveyors of a√ect contagion, since they are communicated rapidly and
automatically via the face, as well as the voice.
Highlight: : This is because the distinct neurological profile of each a√ect is correlated
with particular physical sensations, including muscular and glandular and
skin responses.
Highlight: : Of particular interest is facial expression’s activation of a mimetic impulse

in response to the facial expression of observers, tending then to elicit the
same a√ect in them.
Highlight: : one’s own smile provides su≈cient feedback to our own bodies to activate
the physiological and neurological aspects of joy
Highlight: : ‘‘a√ects are not private obscure internal intestinal responses but facial
responses that communicate and motivate at once both publicly outward
to the other and backward and inward to the one who smiles or cries or
frowns or sneers or otherwise expresses his a√ects’’ (Tomkins 1966, vii).
Highlight: : often take place outside awareness.

Highlight: : conjures both the discrete a√ects and the frequent attempts to mask them
(‘‘backed up a√ect,’’ as Tomkins terms it)
Highlight: : the human face also seems to diagram itself onto the sensuous qualities
of other images in which it does not explicitly appear: landscapes,
houses, foods, animals, skin, and choreographed bodies, so that the world
can be facialized even in the absence of faces from the image.
Highlight: : the face is not the only vector of mediatized a√ect contagion. Con- sumers
of media are also conscripted into its flows at a level we might term—
following Gilbert Simondon—‘‘preindividual’’ (1992, 302).
Highlight: : generate feelings that mobilize the body’s capacity for synesthesia, in
which a√ect seems to act as a switchboard through which all sensory
signals are passed
Highlight: : sound and image trace the typical pattern of arousal and plateau of the
discrete a√ect of joy.
Highlight: : the activation contours of the discrete a√ects (Stern 1985, 55–57).
Highlight: : These activation contours qualify the discrete a√ects, corresponding to the
pace of rising and falling levels of their arousal:
Highlight: : Whether an a√ect is coming or going is information that is then conscripted

into semiotic systems of meaning
Highlight: : orchestrate the activation contours of the discrete a√ects both to incite our
own bodies into immediate mimetic response, and, in the same moment,
by the same movement, to conscript a√ects into signification
Highlight: : Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘‘nonsensuous similarity,’’ which is ‘‘tied to

the senses but lacking in sense content,’’ able to be ‘‘directly perceived’’—
but only ‘‘in feeling’’ (Massumi 2003, 142).∫
Highlight: : a√ect functions as the ‘‘supramodal currency’’ into which experience in any
sensory modality may be translated (Stern 1985, 53).Ω
Highlight: : amodal; they can ‘‘jump not just between situations but also between
sense modes,’’ producing ‘‘nonlocal’’ correspondences in which forms
appear as ‘‘the sensuous traces of amodal linkage’’ (Massumi 2003, 148).
Highlight: : This precisely describes the work of mimesis, even at its simplest level, in
mimicry.
Highlight: : at the heart of mimesis is the immediacy of what passes between bodies
and which subtends cognitively mediated representation, which it does not
ever entirely replace or supersede.
Highlight: : essentially asubjective even though it plays a crucial role in the formation
of subjectivity
Highlight: : what it signifies and the medium in which it operates is less important than
its mode of operation. Mimicry is not a representation of the other, but a
rendering—a relation between things in ‘‘which, like a flash, similarity
appears’’ (Foucault 1973, 24).
Highlight: : a response to the other, a borrowing of form that might be productively

thought of as communication.
Highlight: : the organization or communication of relationships (which might be spatial,

temporal, tonal, energetic, logical, causal, and so on) through temporary
captures of form by way of mimesis.
Highlight: : a ‘‘life process whereby di√erence [or pattern, relationship] is discovered in

the environment’’ (Yoshimi 2006).
Highlight: : not a property of either subject or object, but a trajectory in which both are
swept up so that forms can be seen as ‘‘the sensuous traces of [the]
amodal linkage’’ between them (Massumi 2003, 148).
Highlight: : the mimicry complex does nevertheless exert a transformation of both

parties—an ‘‘a-parallel evolution’’ as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have it.
Highlight: : both parties to the process are ‘‘de-territorialized.’’

Highlight: : Mimicry is very selective in its use of sensory channels

Highlight: : implicates cross-species desire), as when we put on floral perfumes or

animal fur to enhance our powers of attraction.
Highlight: : similarity is crucial, but so too is the di√erence produced in this sensory
translation.
Highlight: : it is the di√erence, or the correspondence—isomorphism without identity—

produced in the translation from one sensory mode into another that, from
within the optic of the formation of the self, facilitates the infant’s gradual
recognition of the interiority of the other (as well as of itself).
Highlight: : awareness that experience can be communicated and shared, two

subjective worlds come into momentary contact, even though the meaning
of this contact and its function in the subjective worlds of mother and baby
will be di√erent for each of them.
Highlight: : matching of the infant’s degree of arousal—is crucial to its success

Highlight: : This process of translation between di√erent sensory modalities is what

initially enables experience to be ordered into familiar patterns, including
the formation of ‘‘a√ective scripts’’ designed to manage punishing negative
a√ect and maximize rewarding positive a√ect (Tomkins 1962).
Highlight: : These emergent constellations of experience operate largely outside of

awareness but form an experiential matrix for ongoing a√ective responses
to and constructions of the world.
Highlight: : organization of the self into an ongoing and more or less flexible process
patterned by a√ect that facilitates a relatively high degree of cohesion and
a sense of continuity in time
Highlight: : Mimetic knowledge may be the earliest form of knowledge of both self and
other
Highlight: : ‘‘embodied simulation’’ made possible by the operation of the mirror

neuron system.
Highlight: : When we watch someone performing an action, the mirror system in

human beings evokes both the ‘‘sensory description’’ of the stimuli and the
motor schema of the action itself (Gallese 2007).
Highlight: : when we see an action performed, the same neural networks that would
be involved if we were to perform it ourselves are activated. In fact we may
actually experience something of what it feels like to perform the action
Highlight: : Darwin (1998, 40) describes this as the motor sympathy between two
bodies.
Highlight: : organization of relations between bodies enabled by mimetic com-

munication and the development of the self also facilitates one’s sense of
agency.
Highlight: : ‘‘mutual a√ective regulation’’ of mother and baby.

Highlight: : can modulate the infant’s distress and amplify its enjoyment, and this forms
the baby’s earliest experience of the regulation of a√ect states. It is the
basis of the baby’s eventual capacity for the a√ective self- regulation that
will a√ord it a measure of autonomy.
Highlight: : This phenomenon, also referred to as the ‘‘entrain- ment’’ of one person
with another,
Highlight: : bodies come to ‘‘move in organizations of change which reflect the

microstructure of what is being said, like a car following a curving road
Highlight: : Condon writes (1984

Highlight: : it may not be possible finally to locate agency in one person rather than
another, because all aspects of behavior are ‘‘both sequentially and
hierarchically continuous at the same time’’ (Condon 1979, 135)
Highlight: : Behavior is ‘‘all organized together and each aspect is discriminated as a

pattern of relationship in contrast to the rest’’ (Condon 1979, 135
Highlight: : mimesis—as a movement that assembles relations as it traverses bodies,

leaving form as a trace in its wake, rather than being a property of bodies
themselves
Highlight: : Nevertheless, the operation of the self, assembling a√ect with cognition
and so enabling a certain ‘‘freedom of the will,’’ complicates human
synchrony.∞∂ Human beings are perhaps as likely to fall out as to fall in
with someone else.
Highlight: : language—in the very process of making meaning—is implicated with

rhythm and movement.
Highlight: : Colwyn Trevarthen speculates about an inherent time sense that seems to
be built into the human brain. This is a ‘‘shared pulse’’ that can be used for
either synchrony or alternation—for example, turn-taking in conversation.
Trevarthen asserts that pulse or rhythm and a√ective sympathy are the two
main components of attunement between mother and infant. Rhythm (or
‘‘pulse’’), like a√ect, organizes (1999/2000).
Highlight: : Body motion appears to be an emergent, continuous series of such pulse-

like, organized forms’’ (1984, 42).
Highlight: : Both animal and human bodies move in bursts of polyrhythmic expres-
sion that allow ‘‘intricately timed pulses of muscular energy in harmonious
pulses of plastic transformation that push against the environment’’ (Tre-
varthen 2002).
Highlight: : ‘‘proto-conversation’’ by Mary Bateson (1971),
Highlight: : Movement, sound, and rhythm are all anterior to symbolic verbal com-
munication, and provide a prototype for it: verbal conversation is formally
predicated on the rhythms of nonverbal behavior, which it does not ever
entirely replace or supersede. Movement, sound, and rhythm are neither
vestigial to language, nor unorganized accompaniments to it. Gesture, for
example, is a ‘‘forceful presence’’ in language (Agamben 1999, 77). It seems
to actively facilitate thought and speech, lending form to the sweep of an
idea, helping to draw it out. Writers don’t deliver messages, they make
gestures, as Merleau-Ponty puts it (1974, 60).
Highlight: : Gesture, then, is ‘‘a ‘material carrier’ that helps bring meaning into exis-
tence’’ (McNeill 1992).
Highlight: : sympathetic modes of communication not only persist alongside linguistic

modes: they also inhabit and actively shape them.
Highlight: : While language involves both serial and parallel modes of processing, it
can also be thought of as a form of serial processing of experience that
has already been parallel-processed. This parallel processing is performed
via the distributed
Highlight: : modes of input from the various di√erent senses.

Highlight: : Information from each of the senses is compared with memories of

previous experience in each modality before being combined. Of course
all of this happens in an instant and is always ongoing.
Highlight: : compression condenses a√ective, sensory, and so- called cognitive forms
of knowledge, creating procedural (or more broadly, nondeclarative)
memory.
Highlight: : the domain of habit

Highlight: : motoric, perceptual, and cognitive skills as well as complex emotional

patterns
Highlight: : Tomkins codifies as a√ect scripts.
Highlight: : against the existence of a separate cognitive mechanism at all, and for ‘‘a
more democratic system with no special mechanism completely in charge
or, if in charge, able to endure as a stable mechanism’’ (Tomkins 1992,
17).
Highlight: : a ‘‘distributed authority’’ that makes cognition ‘‘as elusive to define as the
‘power’ in a democratic form of government or the ‘meaning’ in a sentence’’
(Tomkins 1992, 17).
Highlight: : no ‘‘pure cognition,’’ no cognition uncontaminated by the richness of

sensate experience, including a√ective experience.
Highlight: : Aspects of this level of experience cannot be translated into words without
doing violence to the totality of awareness, for example, to the simultaneity
of various sensory experiences that renders
Highlight: : them indivisible,

Highlight: : as when, sitting by the window in a café watching the busy streetscape
with the warmth of the morning sun on my back, I smell the delicious
aroma of co√ee and simultaneously feel its warmth in my mouth, taste it,
and can tell the choice of bean as I listen idly to the chatter in the café
around me and all these things blend into my experience of ‘‘being in the
café.’’
Highlight: : to express something of this in words I must split it into sensory

components and list them in succession, which implies a hierarchy of
importance—and so on. Of course, language also enables a reflective
handle on experience, opens new forms of agency, articulates temporal rela-
tions, and links things distant in time or place.
Highlight: : According to Walter Benjamin, language is ‘‘the highest level of mimetic

behaviour . . . [it is] a medium into which the earlier powers of mimetic
production and comprehension have passed without residue, to the point
where they have liquidated those of magic’’ (1979, 163). Speech and writ-
ing both comprise ‘‘an archive of non-sensuous correspondences’’ (162) in
which what Massumi calls ‘‘felt relations’’ can be shared ‘‘at any distance
from the sensuous forms they evoke’’ (Massumi 2003, 148).
Highlight: : Metaphors not only often derive from bodily processes (Lako√ and
Johnson 1999), but they excite a ‘‘sympathetic’’ response in the form of
embodied simulation in much the same way as mirror neurons do (see R.
Gibbs 2006).
Highlight: : ‘‘automatic, unconscious and prereflexive’’ (Gallese 2003, cited in R. Gibbs

2006).
Highlight: : Language is in fact highly dependent on the body’s physical capacities for
its e√ectivity.
Highlight: : The body, then, is not so much a medium as a series of media, each of
which connects in its own way with technological media, including writing.
Highlight: : Mimesis produces the virtual by enabling the reassembling of these

disparate media, giving rise to what is ‘‘real without being actual, ideal
without being abstract,’’ as Proust writes of dreams (1992, 906).
Highlight: : Mimesis operates at every level of experience, from the most immediately
corporeal to the most abstract.
Highlight: : cultural forms such as cinema and performance, which aim to bind
spectators into complex forms of sociality, including story, cinematic
spectatorship, and audience member- ship.
Highlight: : although sight is in fact neurologically dominant in the so-called higher

primates, it rarely operates in isolation from the other senses, and its
dependence on them indicates the importance of sensory cross-
modalization—or synesthesia—in mimesis.≤
Highlight: : mimetic communication contributes to the generation of the ‘‘a√ective

social tie’’ (Borch-Jacobsen 1988). It is the cement of parent-child, peer,
friendship, and love relations, and, under certain conditions, fleeting fellow-
feeling between strangers. It also forms the a√ective basis for ethical
dealings with others.
Highlight: : imitation, in which di√erence and innovation are as central as reproduction

and similarity.
Highlight: : ‘‘duplicity of form,’’ which

Highlight: : participates ‘‘spontaneously and simultaneously in two orders of reality, one

local and learned or intentional, the other nonlocal and self-organizing’’
(Massumi 2003, 151).
Highlight: : what we call ‘‘the human’’ can never be more than an image and will
always tend to exclusion and prescription.
Highlight: : the world of ‘‘nonlocal,’’ asubjective becomings in which these forms

appear simply as momentary traces of other movements
Highlight: : The ‘‘passionate fictions’’ of writing, and art more generally, seem to o√er a
way of working in both dimensions simultaneously, and contemporary
theoretical writing is increasingly borrowing the techniques and methods of
fiction to this end, interlocking sensation with story and in the process re-
creating the essay as a heuristic for innovation.
Notes in Document
'THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE':
Highlight: : Of Reasoning in General
(THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE, p.52)
Highlight: : The science is largely, not wholly, one of rearrangement

(THE ESSENTIAL PEIRCE, p.52)
Notes in Document
'Peirce’s Theory of Signs ':
Highlight: : signs consist of three inter-related parts: a sign, an object, and an
interpretant.
(Peirce’s Theory of Signs , p.2)
Highlight: : the sign as the signifier

Highlight: : The object,

Highlight: : whatever is signified,

Highlight: : The interpretant,

Highlight: : the understanding that we have of the sign/object relation.

Highlight: : signification is not a simple dyadic relationship between sign and object: a
sign signifies only in being interpreted.
Highlight: : for Peirce, we are interested in the signifying element, and it is not the sign
as a whole that signifies.
Highlight: : the sign refined to those elements most crucial to its functioning as a
signifier.
Highlight: : numerous terms for the signifying element including “sign”, “representamen”,
“representation”, and “ground”.
Highlight: : “sign-vehicle”.
Highlight: : the causal connection

Highlight: : it is only some element of a sign that enables it to signify its object
Highlight: : not every characteristic of the object is relevant to signification: only certain
features of an object enable a sign to signify it.
Highlight: : determination: the object determines the sign

Highlight: : the placing of constraints or conditions on succesful signification by the

object, rather than the object causing or generating the sign
Highlight: : the object imposes certain parameters that a sign must fall within if it is to
represent that object
Highlight: : the causal connection

Highlight: : the interpretant as the understanding we reach of some sign/object

relation, it is perhaps more properly thought of as the translation or
development of the original sign.
Highlight: : the interpretant provides a translation of the sign, allowing us a more

complex understanding of the sign's object
Highlight: : just as with the sign/object relation, Peirce believes the sign/interpretant
relation to be one of determination: the sign determines an interpretant.
Highlight: : this determination is not determination in any causal sense, rather, the sign
determines an interpretant by using certain features of the way the sign
signifies its object to generate and shape our understanding. So, the way
that smoke generates or determines an interpretant sign of its object, fire,
is by focusing our attention upon the physical connection between smoke
and fire.
Highlight: : For Peirce, then, any instance of signification contains a sign-vehicle, an

object and interpretant. Moreover, the object determines the sign by
placing constraints which any sign must meet if it is to signify the object.
Consequently, the sign signifies its object only in virtue of some of its
features. Additionally, the sign determines an interpretant by focusing our
understanding on certain features of the signifying relation between sign
and object. This enables us to understand the object of the sign more fully.
Highlight: : 1998. The Essential Peirce. Volume 2. Eds. Peirce edition Project.
Bloomington I.N.: Indiana University Press.
Notes in Document
'Cybersemiotics and the reasoning powers of the
universe: philosophy of information in a semiotic-
systemic transdisciplinary approach ':
Comment Frederiksberg
:
(Cybersemiotics and the reasoning powers of the universe: philosophy of information in a semiotic-
systemic transdisciplinary approach , p.5)
Comment Ground. In order

:
Comment Plase delete: 'broadly,that is trans-disciplinary' and insert ' transdisciplinary' instead,
:
Notes in Document
'Educating Semiosis: Foundational Concepts
for an Ecological Edusemiotic ':
Highlight:
(Educating Semiosis: Foundational Concepts for an Ecological Edusemiotic , p.19)
Comment Here, I am in a sense using the notion of umwelt metaphorically, and should really be talking about
:
shared cultural/experiential lifeworlds, or lebanswelt.

Comment ü :
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Bio-semiotics’
Notes in Document
'The_physiognomic_and_the_geometrical_app.pdf':
Highlight: : evolution of Heinz Werner’s thought on metaphor
(The_physiognomic_and_the_geometrical_app.pdf, p.1)
Highlight: : between the logical and the psychological approach to metaphor,

Highlight: : the former analyzes the conceptual con- flation produced by metaphor
Highlight: : the latter centers on the subjective experience of this incongruence

Highlight: : Werner and Kaplan (1963)

Highlight: : the concept of physiognomic and geometric properties of language in

general.
Highlight: : The usually concise form of metaphor contrasts sharply with the intensity
of the insights it can elicit. A seemingly simple juxtaposition of ordinary
words brings a novel perspective on the world into being.
Highlight: : the gap between what words say and what they actually mean is more
blatant than in any other linguistic expression.
Highlight: : different approaches to metaphor fundamentally differ in how they

conceive of the unsaid and its relationship to the explicit content of a
metaphorical expression.
Highlight: : for some theoreticians, all that a metaphor suggests without explicitly
stating can, at least in principle, be expressed linguistically.
Highlight: : a language that reduces the unsaid aspects of metaphor to symbols, that
is, one that converts the unsaid into a variant of the said.
Highlight: : An alternative tradition maintains that the unspoken contents of metaphor
are ultimately inexpressible.
Highlight: : the unstated aspects of metaphor are so fundamentally different from its
explicit contents that understanding a metaphor requires a different
treatment
Highlight: : Metaphor cannot be satisfactorily paraphrased, as it does not exclusively

deploy cognitive elements; rather, its complexity resides in a profusion of
non-cognitive implications that work through suggestion and insinuation
rather than through statement of propositions.
Highlight: : what exactly the unsaid aspects of a metaphor suggest is a matter of

feeling and intuition rather than reflection and inference. T
Highlight: : if we model metaphor in strictly verbal or logical terms, we obliterate the

vast field of changing, imprecise, and undifferentiated contents that
emerge as a consequence of metaphor.
Highlight: : Werner and Kaplan’s (1963) conception of language unambiguously leads to

a theory of metaphor of the latter type.
Highlight: : physiognomic aspects of language use

Highlight: : organismic components of meaning

Highlight: : The unsaid aspects of metaphor should also be approached with special
attention to nonverbal media of expression, where organismic forces are
visible.
Highlight: : The holistic- organismic approach to metaphor

Highlight: : contrasts with contemporary conceptualist efforts that insist on encrypting

the province of the unsaid into the logical language of explicit statement
Highlight: : roughly characterizes the embodied metaphor theory.

Highlight: : Die Urspru¨nge der Metapher (1919) [The origins of metaphor].
Highlight: : the anthropological origins of metaphorical language can be traced to

expressions of culturally taboo topics.
Highlight: : from a ‘‘purely logical’’ standpoint, metaphor is a sub- stitution of a verbal

representation for another ‘‘more or less pictorial’’ representation.
Highlight: : In this view, the ‘‘subjective attitude,’’ that is, the source of the analogy, is
‘‘completely negligible.’’ On the contrary, a psychological approach to the
phenomenon should take into account that, in any use of metaphor, there
is a subjective ‘‘experience of incongruence’’ in the analogy.
Highlight: : from a psychological point of view, a key mark of metaphor is ‘‘conscious

transfer.’’ True metaphor requires ‘‘... consciousness of a duality, not the
subjective identity of two ... different verbal representations... ’’ (Werner,
1919, p. 4).
Highlight: : True metaphor also implies that the user is aware of the fictitious character
of the proposed analogy.
Highlight: : A semantic theory of metaphor, for example, can be useful in illuminating

the conceptual structure of two interacting categories – for example, the
topic and the vehicle. Nonetheless, we thereby ascertain thought contents,
not thought processes. The semantic description is thus a map of elements
that are analytically implied by metaphor.
Highlight: : such a description will never be equivalent to the landscape it seeks to
model.
Highlight: : psychology cannot straightforwardly import logical-linguistic atoms as basic

units of analysis in describing the experiences of persons using metaphor.
Highlight: : While semantics depicts the structure of incongruence implied in metaphor,

the job of psychology is to describe the experience of this incongruence.
Highlight: : Werner (1919) argued that the understanding ‘‘real metaphors’’ has to be
found not in the intellectual incongruence produced by the juxtaposition of
two semantically incom- patible names but in the motives for such a
transposition
Highlight: : Werner identified the core mark of metaphor: consciousness of fiction

Highlight: : Werner (1919) notes that when there is no taboo, there is no cultural
evidence of metaphoricity.
Highlight: : stoic tradition, calls the pneuma – that somehow lives in the objects of the
world. It is in opposition to the pneuma that taboo emerges. The pneuma is
defined as an ‘‘ ... invisible, expanded, pervasive agent’’ (Werner, 1919, p.
37), ‘‘ ... an invisible something, able to act upon things’’ (p. 35).
Highlight: : metaphor is not a logical puzzle to be solved but the expression of a

complex of meaning via insinuation.
Highlight: : We prefer to say Man is a wolf – being completely aware of its literal
falsehood – because we want to express a complex of contents and feelings
that manifestly exceeds the direct expression, allowing others to intuit some
of these ‘‘pneumatic’’ qualities.
Highlight: : that the unsaid in metaphor cannot be translated into language. This
belief is a central tenet of the romantic attack on the modern colon- ization
of the human soul by rationally conceived language: ‘‘Neither things nor
ourselves find full expression in our words’’ (Goethe, 1810/1988, p. 26).
Highlight: : ‘‘physiognomic perception,’’

Highlight: : a ‘‘mode of perception’’ that contrasts with an ‘‘objective-technical’’ one.

Highlight: : native peoples and Western children perceive things as having expressive
properties, just as faces do. Thus, under this perceptual modality, objects
have no objective properties but rather faces or physiognomies
Highlight: : These qualities are not feelings but, rather, are perceptions...They are noth-
ing derivative, but are the most primitive perceptions of all ...The most
primordial objects of awareness (for children and primitive peoples) are not
thinglike but facelike (Werner, 1927/1978, p. 149, emphasis in original).
Highlight: : Persons perceive objects of the world directly as full of meaning

Highlight: : a perceptual modality, not as a thinking mode.

Highlight: : not derivative’’ but ‘‘the most primordial’’ perceptual mode.

Highlight: : a product neither of inferential processes nor of any other rational

procedure.
Highlight: : while the objective-technical mode of perception is conceptual, fixed,

material, and unimodal, the physiognomic mode of perception is unique,
dynamic, experiential, and intermodal.
Highlight: : intermodal contents that cannot be satisfactorily grasped by means of

language.
Highlight: : discovered in pre-verbal stages of human development

Highlight: : By 1927, Werner concedes that physiognomic perception is a ‘‘partly

buried world’’ in Western adults and that it can be artificially stimulated
under certain experimental conditions – and, to be sure, directly observed in
Western children.
Highlight: : ‘‘Synaesthesia shows that there are cases in which sensory qualities... are
not clearly differentiated according to modality; the qualities of one
sensory domain belong simultaneously to another sensory domain ...
Certain experiments demonstrate quite clearly that there is in everyone a
unity of sensory domains’’ (Werner, 1934/1978, p. 158)
Highlight: : part of the primordial operation whereby conventional language acquires

meaning: ‘‘We submit that even the most conventionalized units of speech
– words and sentences – are still part and parcel of an articulatory process,
bodily postural activity, which, through its dynamic features, links those
conventionalized units to their referents’’ (Werner & Kaplan, 1963, p. 207).
Highlight: : conventional forms are only ‘‘externally, though not internally, remote from
their referents’’ (Werner & Kaplan, 1963, p. 207).
Highlight: : ultimately make symbolization processes possible.

Highlight: : By 1963, physiognomic aspects were no longer residues of more primitive

forms of language but the very core of the symbolization process
Highlight: : ‘‘postural-affective-dynamic schematization’’

Highlight: : this organismic-bodily matrix – that is, the body as lived and felt – that
guarantees that symbols have meaning at all
Highlight: : brings into question the widespread belief that the connection between
linguistic form and meaning is arbitrary.
Highlight: : occupy the middle ground between onomatopoeic and conventional
forms
Highlight: : distinction between inner and external forms of a symbol.

Highlight: : former refers to the connotative dynamics of the word, the latter to the
phonic or written vehicle of the symbol.
Highlight: : From an organismic-developmental perspective, language evolves from a

total fusion of inner and external forms toward a progressive differentiation
between them
Highlight: : At primordial levels the inner form is fused with the external form and is
hence visibly and auditorily carried by the vehicle ... With the progression
towards the use of conventional forms, the inner form of the symbol (the
connotational dynamics) becomes more and more covert in character –
carried by ‘inner gestures’, ‘imagery’, ‘postural- affective sets’, ‘feelings’,
etc. (Werner and Kaplan, 1963, p. 238) [emphasis in the original]
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Digital Unflattening’
Notes in Document
'The_geometric_poetry_of_graphic_art_The.pdf':
Highlight: : the attraction of the ‘machine dreams’ (Sussman 2000: 197-204)
contained in geometrical and mechanical drawing discourses in the
second half of the nineteenth century with relation to the realities of working
in the local visual economy in Glasgow.
(The_geometric_poetry_of_graphic_art_The.pdf, p.1)
Highlight: : geometrical drawing techniques, more closely allied to the visual world of
engineering.
Highlight: : To Ruskin, these linear styles denoted servitude and the horrors of
industrialization.
Highlight: : to him drawing was not simply a functional aid in working life, but was a
fundamental technique for personal and creative development.
Highlight: : Ruskin set up a misleadingly simple opposition between the ‘artistic’

judgment of the creative craftsman, and the ‘technical’ functionalism of
the industrialist.
Highlight: : Ruskin’s doctrines, imbibed unconsciously from the new art school ethos
he instigated, still resound in many contemporary accounts of geometrical
drawing for design in the nineteenth century
Highlight: : factory owners set out to train workers to accept this kind of visual
language, and to look for nothing further.
Highlight: : teaching drawing through geometrical and linear styles, perceived by their
advocates as ahistorical, would break down worker resistance to change
through the ‘destruction of age-old habits of thought and behaviour’ (Brett
1987).
Highlight: : we are asked to believe in shadowy but all-powerful forces coercing

passive workers, where the activity ‘drawing’ is given an agency denied to
its hapless minions.
Highlight: : leaves out the thoughts and experiences of the people who did the drawings
and the ways in which they used their pictorial skills to try to gain status
amongst various social groups.
Highlight: : educated ambitious employees whose aims both individually and

collectively were to a great extent uncontrollable.
Highlight: : in relation to the Schools of Design. Many students in the first decades of
the school came in the evening after finishing work, at a period when
Glasgow was developing into one of the largest industrial and engineering
centers of Britain, exporting to markets across the Empire.
Highlight: : If we consult printed sources such as the Mechanics’ magazine (founded

in 1823), the articles and letter pages suggest that industrial workers were
not cowed by learning geometrical or mechanical drawing, but rather the
reverse for the tone of reader contributions show that learning and displaying
drawing skills could be a vehicle for combative and playful self-assertion.
Highlight: : To Hay, these repetitive subtly varying patterns revealed the underlying
richness of the cosmos: ‘Forms and figures as used in the arts require
one or other of two qualities to render them pleasing: the first is the
imitation of natural objects, the second harmony, produced by the proportion
and arrangement of the elements of abstract form. The one is like a
simple description in plain language, the other is the geometric poetry of
graphic art’ (Hay 1843: 58).
Highlight: : Ruskin set out to challenge these hierarchies, to include workers in a

more equal and creative society. But at the same time, a growing market for
contemporary fine art from 1850 onwards, and the corresponding power
of artists, exhibitors and critics also worked to create a discourse that
excluded Cole’s version of ‘practical art’ from art and aesthetics (Wolff
and Seed 1988; Prettejohn 2005: 111-173).
Highlight: : Ruskin feared, wrongly, that geometrical drawing would drive out the
creativity of working class artists and designers; instead, the new
doctrines of free creative drawing, derived from Ruskin, were used to
drive out workers from the class of artists and designers, even in histories
that are sympathetic to their cause.
Notes in Document
'Comics as a Nexus of Cultures ':
Highlight:
(Comics as a Nexus of Cultures , p.10)
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Notes in Document
'Thinking with Diagrams The Semiotic Basis of Human
Cognition':
Highlight: : Images and language are generally considered disjoint orders that differ in
their semiotic registers. This contraposition pervades almost the entirety of
intellectual and cultural history and becomes visible in the opposition
between the iconic and the discursive, the figurative and the symbolic, the
analogue and the digital.
(Thinking with Diagrams The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition, p.8)
Highlight: : from both a cognitive and aesthetic points of view, our creativity is rooted in
‘mixed forms’ (hybrids) located beyond the clear demarcation line between
word and image.
Highlight: : maps, which create orientation and mobility in geographical terrains as well
as in intelligible knowledge spaces.
Highlight: : technical drawings, which function as experimental sites for design or as

useful guides for projects of construction.
Highlight: : graphs, which mostly make invisible relations visible, and diagrams,
geometrical proof pictures and visual generators of hypotheses, which
open rehearsal spaces for thinking.
Highlight: : hybrids of the iconic and the discursive

Highlight: : projected onto the artificial form (or support) of a two-dimensional plane
becomes manageable and controllable for human observers and readers.
Highlight: : four elementary ‘diagrammatic scenarios’: the signs of the zodiac; number
images; geometric picture proofs; and maps
Highlight: : The vast sea of celestial bodies was made clear and comprehensible
through configurations that were easy to understand and to memorize.
Highlight: : Before being ‘discovered’ in the sky, we find these constellations first in a
culturally variable framework of diagrammatic and mimetic signs or as a
mythological-literary description.
Highlight: : become a succinct constellation that can subsequently be recorded and

canonized.
Highlight: : constellations can serve both as means of orientation and as tools for
localizing the subject in space as well as time
Highlight: : the signs of the zodiac show some characteristic features of diagram use.
Highlight: : Flatness.
Highlight: : transform the depth of the universe into a surface

Highlight: : Graphism.
Highlight: : the gesture of drawing transforms the random division of the pinpoints of
light into a figuration.
Highlight: : Relationality
Highlight: : Diagrams are the apparatuses of graphic homogenization and, hence,

become the locus in which relations can come into existence.
Highlight: : Schematism.
Highlight: : As in all diagrams, the constellation is never a singular picture but a
reproducible schema that can be instantiated in diverse display formats.
Highlight: : Referentiality.
Highlight: : In contrast to certain images in art that are self-referential, diagrams are
alloreferential. They are signs referring to something else, regardless of
whether they refer to objects and events or to concepts and objects of
knowledge.
Highlight: : Usefulness.
Highlight: : Diagrams always have a function, whether practical, theoretical or

ideological.
Notes in Document
'Foundations of Metacognition':
Highlight: : Pettit and McGeer claim in their article ‘The self-regulating mind’ that what
sets human minds apart from the minds of other creatures is that they are
self-regulating and not merely routinized. They claim that the crucial
difference between the two is that self-regulating minds can do things
intentionally to control their beliefs, which routinized minds can’t. Self-
regulating minds do this by using the unique properties of language.
Humans, unlike any other creature, represent the world not only in their
beliefs, but also in the sentences that they use to express those beliefs.
(Foundations of Metacognition, p.291)
Highlight: : language allows for what they call ‘content attention

Highlight: : Routinized minds obviously have contents as well, but as Pettit/ McGeer
write, they are blind to them. They, as it were, look through them into the
world.
Highlight: : Language, on the other hand, solidifies the content into what Andy Clark
calls ‘material symbols’ ( 2006 ). 6 These material symbols provide a new
set of representational objects for the mind to work with. 7 Pettit/McGeer
write that this enables attention to contents as such. But it seems more
adequate to say that it is not only content that language delivers. Language
delivers as well a completely new set of vehicles that bear the contents.
Obviously, they only do so in a derived way, but they are content-bearing
vehicles nevertheless.
Highlight: : So really what language does is give the cognizer a second representational
system.
Highlight: : Pettit/McGeer believe that this difference in intentional control is at the

heart of the difference between routinized minds and self-regulating minds. It
allows humans to voluntarily implement constraints that improve their
thinking. They can now voluntarily give themselves greater exposure to
relevant evidence for their deliberations, they can intentionally control
their reasoning process, by, for example, repeating steps, reminding
themselves of important considerations, and so on. In addition, intentional
control even allows humans to overcome very strong natural evaluative
tendencies.
Highlight: : Pettit/McGeer discuss the example of the pilot who can learn to overcome
the tendency to form a belief because of proprioceptive signals and to inten-
tionally use the instrument panel to guide her behaviour, even if it
recommends actions that are in sharp contrast to proprioceptive
demands. 8
Notes in Document
'Line let loose _ scribbling, doodling and automatic
drawing':
Highlight: : in some of the earliest human art there is already an area in between the
informal, the playful and the more serious (some of the flutings appear to
be rudimentary symbols or signs, called ‘tectiforms’; illus. 1).
(Line let loose _ scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing, p.10)
Highlight: : marginal excursions from some other task in hand
Highlight: : ‘Scribble’ refers to a wide range of rudimentary marks, usually with a

degree of ‘attack’ to them, whose intentionality is uncertain, or at least non-
artistic. Hence scribbling is on the threshold of what we might decide to call
‘drawing’.
Highlight: : one of the characteristic features of modernism is that the domain of

meaning is constantly being redefined, and in this context the scribble has
undergone a more radical re-evaluation than either the doodle or the
automatic drawing.
Highlight: : In its most rudimentary forms, it was often treated as one of the basic
building blocks of drawing and played a key role in theories about
childhood development.
Highlight: : soon became a sort of model (or anti-model) for the most spontaneous and
impulsive form of mark, particularly under the influence of Dadaism.
Highlight: : became a kind of device, just like the use of chance, used by artists to
bypass conscious decision-making.
Highlight: : something that had once been made in a casual and unthinking way
could now be made deliberately, which is something of a paradox.
Highlight: : In recent years the scribble has been turned into something like a recipe or
model, and some artists have gone so far as to commission ‘scribbles’
from other people, which they then incorporate into their own work.
Highlight: : pictorial truancy

Highlight: : Even more than manuscript, print is a visible token of the authority against
which doodles often rebel – its mechanical uniformity is something that
invites a more ‘hands-on’ interference.
Highlight: : Outsider art; here such drawings are usually marginal in a socio-cultural
sense
Highlight: : often have many of the characteristics of doodles: they are created in an
absent-minded state and shift between different graphic idioms –
physiognomic, ornamental and architectural, for example.
Highlight: : many of them are created outside the normal time and space constraints
that govern doodles, and therefore I have called them ‘meta-doodles’
Highlight: : with the advent of digital techniques for recreating almost any kind of
mark, as with programs such as the Quantel Paintbox, the original
circumstances under which the marks were created have been altered so
much that in this new form they amount to a mutation
Highlight: : So the original conditions that once defined scribbles and doodles, and
separated them from other more official kinds of drawing, have virtually (so
to speak) collapsed.
Highlight: : Automatic drawing, however, seems at first sight to be the exception.

Highlight: : There is thus a performance aspect to many automatic productions, in a

way that does not apply to scribbling or doodling
Highlight: : the distinction between authentic practice and trickery is not always clearly
marked, and this is also a feature of the artistic adoption of such techniques.
Highlight: : the Surrealists adopted these techniques, purged of any metaphysical

associations, in the early 1920s. They carried out group seances and
collective creation, and there were also spectacular individual instances of
automatism. Early Surrealist imagery, however, pivoted on the conjunction
of recognisably far-fetched ingredients, and therefore tended to be
figurative, and this required a certain amount of deliberation to produce:
hence the performance of automatic fluency showed itself more readily in
verbal than in pictorial form.
Highlight: : we may have to face the fact that we are dealing as much with our image
of automatism as with its actual reality.
Highlight: : makes it a more elastic phenomenon that stretches from discussion of

individual instances (is this or is this not a genuinely automatic drawing?)
to the re-examination of more deep-seated cultural assumptions about the
inherent value of unpremeditated creativity or unconscious form creation
Highlight: : forms of drawing that originally had a quite specific profile came to take on
much wider significance. Forms that once seemed by definition to have
been created without training or conscious control came to occupy a grey
area somewhere between the deliberate and the accidental
Highlight: : in the mid-twentieth century, interest in these different ways of enlisting

what lies outside normal conscious control reached a peak
Highlight: : the conceptual basis for their connection with unconscious form creation,
along with other features of psychoanalysis, has become more debatable.
Highlight: : one reason drawing is of such interest is that it seems to be so close to an

artist’s intentions. With certain exceptions, we call something a drawing
because we believe it to have been made deliberately.
Highlight: : even drawings that are experiments or ventures into the unknown still have
what could be called an envelope of intentionality about them
Highlight: : not all marks that give the appearance of intentionality are actually
deliberate; or rather, a mark that was made for one reason – erasure or dis -
figurement, for example – may look like one that was made for another,
Highlight: : Whereas drawing is often considered to be the most immediate expression

of an artist’s thought, or at least of an observation or idea, scribbling and
doodling are forms of drawing where there is no such antecedent. Instead,
the ‘drawing’ in them is either accidental, as in the scribble, or something
aimless that then starts to feed off itself, as in the doodle.
Highlight: : In automatic drawing, on the other hand, the intentionality is displaced: it is

not the artist who draws, but something outside their normal responsibility.
Highlight: : What is accidental or careless sometimes comes to be seen as having a

crude expressive energy that is missing in more sophisticated drawing; this
may be imported into the world of art in various ways, directly or indirectly,
or attempts may be made to imitate its rudimentary force.
Highlight: : a deliberate scribble or a conscious doodle risks turning into what the painter
Barnett Newman called ‘contrived spontaneity’.
Highlight: : Whether in the context of spiritualism or of modernist experiment, it usually

looks like a drawing; it is more the trance-like circumstances of its creation,
or its public display of unconscious dictation, that sets it apart from other
forms of artistic invention. But once it comes to be associated with a
widespread belief in spontaneity as the key to unconscious form creation,
its original characteristics get generalized, so that it is the ‘look’ of a
drawing rather than the circumstances of its creation that give it the feel of
automatism.
Highlight: : In a sense this spectrum could be seen as echoing the developmental path
of drawing, from the most rudimentary marks, through naive and playful
explorations to something that looks like a fully fledged composition,
whether it is deliberate or not.
Highlight: : In the early stages of their modern cultural evolution this link with the
involuntary seemed beyond doubt. A scribble is not intended as a drawing;
it is made for some other purpose, for example trying out a pen or erasing
something, and its artistic interest is an accidental side effect. Doodling
takes place in distracted or absent-minded states such as in meetings and
during telephone conversations, and is only intermittently attended to, and
in general its artistic value is irrelevant. Automatic drawing is produced
under dissociated or trance-like conditions, and in its original mediumistic
context its artistic interest was secondary to the import of the messages it
conveyed.
Highlight: : Scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing also seem like dialects of some
common graphic language: whereas the idiom of scribbling is impatient
and abstract, that of doodling is restless and a hybrid mixture of abstract,
decorative and figurative, while automatic drawing usually has a comparably
shifting mixture but in more concentrated and extended forms.
Highlight: : each of these modes can be engaged in with varying degrees of

consciousness. But once we become aware of these graphic idioms and it
becomes possible to recreate them artificially, they become more self-
conscious signals of ‘spontaneous’ creativity, and can soon become
stylistic mannerisms.
Highlight: : although each of these three forms of inscription seemed, in the early
modernist period, to be independent of any acquired artistic skill, they were
all actually linked in different ways to conventional communicative modes.
Highlight: : all three types provide evidence of what could be called an unconscious
stratum of forms – structures, patterns, figures and faces, for example –
that have become something like a subliminal kind of pictorial lingua
franca.
Highlight: : there does not seem to be a semiotics of scribbles, but doodles and
automatic drawings are seen as carrying messages which, while they may
not always be explicit, are capable of being deciphered.
Highlight: : In the end, there is a crucial distinction here, as in any model based on the
notion of ‘language’, between the meaning of an individual symbol on its
own and its meaning within the specific context in which it is embedded.
Highlight: : A doodle, on the other hand, nearly always has some connection with
language, either because it is literally made in the margins of a manuscript
or text, or because it can be ‘read’ as if it were some kind of unconscious
writing.
Highlight: : it is hard to tell to what extent the many drawings with the hallmarks of
spontaneity – jerky, gestural lines or cursory loops – have actually been
carried out in a truly automatic process.
Highlight: : At first sight, automatic drawing seems to be more securely ring-fenced by

a deliberately induced dissociation, most obvious in the trance state in
which it is supposedly carried out, but the evidence of sleight of hand in
some instances of mediumistic performance suggests a grey area in which
practised familiarity slides into the deliberate production of the required
phenomena. We shall see that this also applies to the use of automatism in
modern art.
Highlight: : the possibility that we are dealing with the image of automatism as much as
its literal reality.
Highlight: : notion of various forms of unconscious intentionality, such as the ‘Freudian

slip’, became almost commonplace. In the context of art, this meant that
spontaneous form creation was seen as the doorway to the world of
unconscious imagery: first came the automatic drawing, then its
unconscious meaning
Highlight: : when the Surrealists adopted automatism as a technique for accessing
the ‘real functioning of thought’, it was the resulting play of analogy and
visual camouflage that attracted them, rather than the sometimes rather
predictable interpretation of these phenomena in terms of unconscious
symbolism.
Highlight: : a psychoanalytically inspired mythology of unconscious form creation,

evidence for which could be found both inside and beyond the
conventional boundaries of art.
Highlight: : a mythology, not because it is misleading but because it gives dramatic

meaning to unknown energies that are manifest in pictorial form.
Highlight: : The free line that escapes in scribbling, takes a holiday in doodling and
reaches some kind of climax in automatic drawing
Highlight: : ‘A line goes out for a walk, so to speak, aimlessly, for the sake of the walk.
Highlight: : easy to imagine this linear truancy giving rise to a meandering in which the
line meets up with itself, starts conversations and eventually knits itself into
a web
Highlight: : Gottfried Keller

Highlight: : What Keller described is a drawing that is more than a doodle: it is

something rather like a prolonged, semi-automatic drawing. I call such works
‘meta-doodles’ because although they have many of the characteristics of
doodles, they are not subject to the same constraints (such as a relation to
some kind of text, a shortage of time or lack of space). In addition, they
share a feature with some of the forms of mediumistic dictation previously
mentioned, in that their creators sometimes speak of working in a trance-
like state, or of feeling compelled to complete the work, no matter how
laborious or painful the process.
Highlight: : To a greater or lesser extent they are improvisations; however, this does
not mean that they don’t sometimes have a more or less well-ordered
structure, sometimes showing a marked tendency towards symmetry.
Highlight: : Augustin Lesage, Marc Lamy and Eugene Andolsek

Highlight: : the Outsider artist Scottie Wilson,

Highlight: : Unica Zürn and Wols

Highlight: : a tendency for recognizable forms, whether figurative or abstract, to

emerge ‘out of the blue’, which is also a familiar characteristic of doodles.
Highlight: : meta-doodles almost like picture-puzzles for the spectator, and perhaps for
the artist too: figures play hide-and-seek, textures grow and then get
overgrown, and lines pursue their own career or get swept into a melee or
tangle.
Highlight: : meta-doodles are constantly teetering on the edge of legibility: forms may
swirl around restlessly, generating suggestive textures and promising
endless possibilities but seldom fulfilling them.
Highlight: : meta-doodle as a kind of ground or field that is ploughed over and tilled by
the drawing process itself, out of which forms that may be more or less
recognizable appear, and into which they might then seem about to
disappear
Highlight: : As in certain forms of divination, random marks or textures can be

interrogated and made to deliver messages or tell stories.
Highlight: : Jeanne Tripier

Highlight: : ‘visionary’, providing that we bear in mind that the vision may be prompted
more by the drawing process itself than by a pre-existing mental picture that
is then translated into graphic form.
Highlight: : the actual creation of meta-doodles, insofar as we have any first-hand

testimony of it, seems to display a spectrum: from the casual or absent-
minded with intermittent conscious interventions to what sounds like a
complete absence of awareness.
Highlight: : Eugene Andolsek

Highlight: : this automatism is different from the more spectacular forms we have
come across in Surrealism or Abstract Expressionism, because it occurs in
ways that are more drawn out and diffuse, and it shades into a kind of
distracted improvisation.
Highlight: : Richard Nie

Highlight: : a kind of psychological hangover here from the secrecy surrounding

doodling, as if his drawings might offer too much access to his inner world.
Highlight: : cross-hatching, which is a characteristic ingredient of doodling, has its

own momentum which then in reaction often generates
Highlight: : movements in an opposite inclination, as in the work of Gill and Wilson

Highlight: : resulting more or less symmetrical patterns can then give rise to conflicting
perspectives and sudden shifts in direction. T
Highlight: : half framed, half trapped, in something like an echo of the image-
generating process itself.
Highlight: : a kind of no-man’s-land here, between a doodle left to its own devices and
an automatism that in some way reflects itself.
Highlight: : We are now a long way down the historical line from the heady days of
avant-garde experiment with spontaneous and informal drawing, and meta-
doodles are no longer, if they ever were, the monopoly of Outsider art.
Highlight: : Henri Michaux, Unica Zürn and Wols.

Highlight: : Michaux
Highlight: : A line rather than lines. So I start, letting myself be led by one, just one,
that I let run, without lifting the pencil from the paper, until by dint of
wandering in this narrow space, it comes to an obligatory halt. What you
then see is an entanglement, a drawing seeming to wish to go back on
itself.3
Highlight: : Unica Zürn

Highlight: : a graphic ‘me-lody’ without break . .

Highlight: : Wols (Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze),

Highlight: : ‘We tell out little earthly stories / through little bits of paper’. It is typical of
Wols’s almost Buddhist detachment that he should have adopted this
casual and self-effacing idiom.
Highlight: : architect Hans Scholze,

Highlight: : Although some of his early drawings still have the shifting and floating
quality of doodles (illus. 60), many of his later drawings are intensely
worked into, in ways that could be called obsessive and unrelenting, like
some kind of endless visual fugue
Highlight: : it is the process itself, with all its elaborate repetitions and permutations,
that governs the work – almost as if, by obsessively concentrating his
efforts, the artist ends up eclipsing whatever intentions might preside,
however episodically, over the process of a drawing.
Highlight: : we may have to rethink the ways in which they can be seen as
‘unconscious form creations’. There might be a whole spectrum of ways in
which conscious control of a drawing can be relaxed or abandoned, and
many of them might be quite far removed
Highlight: : from the performance aspects associated with Surrealism or Abstract

Expressionism. Similarly, the results no longer fit into the hermeneutic
pigeonholes of classical psychoanalysis.
Highlight: : what might have happened to automatic drawing now that it is in its second
or third generation.
Highlight: : it might be the relief offered from consciously ordered and conventional
principles of composition by free-floating and ambiguous forms, or the
seduction of an underground reservoir of indefinite possibilities, that were
the main attractions of automatism, in whatever form.
Highlight: : In many cases we are often dealing with the image of automatism as much
as with its literal manifestation.
Highlight: : this collective image or fantasy of unconscious form creation is part of what
I earlier called a mythology of the unconscious, and, like any mythology, it
tends to establish its own stereotypes.
Highlight: : automatism has become a kind of background presence in a great deal of
modern art, something intrinsic to what Daniel Belgrad calls ‘the culture of
spontaneity’ – a title that plays on the word ‘culture’ to suggest ‘cultivation’,
and ‘the paradox that spontaneity is an art that improves with practice’.
Highlight: : If, initially, there was a spectrum, with the primitive scribble at one end,
followed by the doodle, with its limited freedom of manoeuvre, and more
spectacular displays of fully fledged automatism at the other end, with
many ‘meta-doodles’ somewhere in between, current practices are less easy
to place on it.
Highlight: : A lot of drawings invoke or evoke automatism without strictly complying

with its performance criteria, and may have been arrived at by very
different means. In addition, once automatism, whether in reality or in
appearance, turned into an established feature of modernism it was no
longer possible to use it with the same insouciance: like the swipes, swerves
and drips of Abstract Expressionism, it became a self-conscious manoeuvre
or a cliché to play with.
Highlight: : Cy Twombly
Highlight: : Nini’s Paintings of 1971

Highlight: : In all these different ways artists have been pushing the envelope of
scribbling, doodling and automatic drawing, and in so doing they have,
wittingly or unwittingly, brought into question their relation to energies and
processes beyond the pale of consciousness.
Highlight: : What once seemed utterly thoughtless (the scribble), an unconsidered

distraction (the doodle) or an immediate line to the unconscious
(automatism) has now been reconfigured
Highlight: : as something more complex and ambiguous. The creative process itself,
despite its more dramatic manifestations (in Surrealism or Abstract
Expressionism), often turns out in practice to be a shifting mixture of the
instinctive and the familiar, the subliminal and the intensely focused.
Nevertheless, the image of line let loose remains a seductive one, that
hovers on the edge between submission to anonymous forces and the
release of an individualized freedom. Just like the cultural production and
promotion of child art, primitive art and the art of the insane, the
exploration of these informal modes of inscription has travelled from the
initial excitement of discovery to an increasingly common and knowing
exploitation.
Highlight: : What could be called the idiom of spontaneity, whether it is fluent or jerky,
figurative or abstract, is so pervasive, and the artist’s invocation of the
involuntary so widespread, that a grey area has in effect been established
in which it is no longer possible to tell whether the handwriting of spontaneity
is genuine or contrived.
Highlight: : not only are artists more alert than most to what is going on in a scribble
or doodle, but their awareness of their own style and its mutations blurs
the boundary between the intentional and the unconscious.
Highlight: : distinctions between authenticity and contrivance become almost

impossible to maintain, for the artist themselves as much as for their
audience.
Highlight: : but the paradox remains that, even in these genres, their individual signa-
ture often persists, and this is part of their fascination. On a collective level,
if these idioms of informality have become common artistic currency and
their original innocence has been dissipated, then this is likely to
Highlight: : become part of the dialogue that art has with itself, and a source of knowing
reflection and comment.
Highlight: : Marijn van Kreij, whose drawings work over the distinctions between the
automatic and the deliberate.
Highlight: : The process of repetition, which seems the polar opposite of spontaneity,
generates its own minute and unpredictable variations, some of which are
deliberate, others accidental; the question of what significance to attach to
them is left in suspense.
Highlight: : what looks like a doodle that has been laboriously duplicated turns out to
have been made with spontaneous marks being created and recreated on
both sheets during the working process, so that distinctions between
‘original’ and ‘copy’, spontaneous and contrived, are undone
Highlight: : the advent of the Internet and the invention of new forms of information
and communications technology in both software and hardware forms has
opened up a whole other dimension to these modes
Highlight: : websites and online journals

Highlight: : short circuits the relation between solitude and communication that was
once at the heart of doodling
Highlight: : artists with serious mental health problems that interfere with their ability
to socialize who use the Internet in this way, and their work often has a
compulsive character comparable to that in meta-doodles or in automatic
drawing.
Highlight: : Laure Pigeon

Highlight: : it is extremely hard to tell, even from the rather manic time-lapse videos
that some artists provide, just how spontaneously they might have been
created.
Highlight: : what was once unknown or marginal can now create its own virtual
constituency, its own digital democracy
Highlight: : Carlo Keshishian

Highlight: : Eric Weets,

Highlight: : there is a formidable array of programs that can imitate or enhance almost
any drawing or painting technique
Highlight: : This raises the question of where the creativity in all this is located: is it in
the original program, or in the person using it? Laurent Danchin, who has
taught for several years in a college where digital media are a prominent
part of the curriculum, claims that: confronted by the computer, the
draughtsman of genius turns into the orchestral conductor of special
effects prescribed mathematically by the machine, but nobody gains more
from this than someone who, like him, is capable of drawing in an old-
fashioned way.
Highlight: : some artists who use digital media, such as James Faure- Walker,
deliberately distort such programs in order to find a creative way of
contradicting the facility that they normally offer.
Highlight: : if we take ‘doodle’ to mean something done on the edge of a written or

printed text, digital doodling presents some interesting new problems.
Highlight: : In using a mouse, one vital ingredient has been stretched to breaking
point: the connection between the hand that writes and the hand that
doodles
Highlight: : On the other hand, drawing using a stylus preserves this connection, even
though the results are displaced from pad to screen.
Highlight: : Where touch-screens have replaced the mouse, as on tablet computers,

the relation between the stylus or, more commonly, the finger, and an
endless variety of marks, colours and textures becomes more direct,
almost amount- ing to a sophisticated form of finger painting.
Highlight: : These new media also offer the unprecedented advantage that every stage
of a work can be saved and returned to later. However, this immediacy and
flexibility comes with a near complete absence of the resistance and
friction conventionally associated with both writing and drawing.
Highlight: : just as the planchette once gave the pencil a new mobility for automatic
writing, so these modern media may unlock a whole new dimension of
free-range drawing.
Highlight: : Digital media provide not only new means for documenting what is
emerging as a vast new terra incognita, but also the possibilities of
transforming its creation.
Notes in Document
'The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking- The
ability to think about thinking may be the critical
attribute':
Highlight: : The mental processes of thinking, knowing, perceiving or feeling might
be regarded as zero-order theory of mind, and are probably common to
many species. They are not recursive.
(The Uniqueness of Human Recursive Thinking- The ability to think about thinking may be the
critical attribute, p.6)
Highlight: : First-order theory of mind refers to thinking, knowing, perceiving or feel

ing what others are thinking, knowing, perceiving
Highlight: : they are capable of high er orders. Human affairs run easily into many
orders of theory of mind,
Highlight: : thoughts and emotions. Indeed, Dunbar supposes that several orders
of recursion may be required, since religion is a social activity, which
depends on shared beliefs. The recursive loop that is necessary runs
something like this: I suppose that you think that I believe there are gods
who intend to influence our futures be cause they understand what we
desire. This is fifth-order recursion. Dunbar himself must have
achieved sixth-order recursion if he supposes all this, and if you
suppose that he does then you have achieved seventh-order recursion.
Call it "Seventh Heaven," if you like.
Highlight: : thoughts or desires. To be properly recursive, the con cept of self

should be involved?that is, not merely knowing that one is a physical
object, but knowing that one knows, or knowing that one has men tal
states. There is little evidence that shows this to be the case for any non
human species. Another way to test t
Highlight: : past and will have them in the future. To extend Descartes' dic tum, we
might say "I thought, there fore I was," and "I will think, therefore I will
be." The concept of self can be extended through time.
Highlight: : time, it seems safe to say that once again the generative, recursive
way in which we imagine events in time seems to sur pass anything
that has been demon strated, or even hinted at, in our clos est primate
relatives.
Highlight: : subitization, which is the ability to enumerate at a glance quanti ties up

to about four. Beyond that, our ability to enumerate without actually
counting is increasingly inaccurate as the actual number increases.
Highlight: : The American compara tive psychologist Benjamin B. Beck, an expert

on tool-making behavior, once remarked that "man is the only animal
that to date has been observed to use a tool to make a tool." This again
implies recursion. Modern technology is at least repetitive, if not always
truly recursive; consider the assembly lines that began with the Model
Ford. Nevertheless there are wheels within wheels, engines within
engines, computers within com puters. Ultimately, perhaps, we may
swamp the globe with the products of our recursion.
Highlight: : language, theory of mind, the concept

Highlight: : of a knowing self, episodic memory, mental time travel, making tools that
make tools and counting. All, I submit, are unique because of the human
ca pacity for recursive thought.
Highlight: : evolutionary psychologists, such as Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at

the University of California, Santa Barba ra, the mind evolved in
modular fash ion, w
Highlight: : Because recursion ap plies to several domains, it is unlike ly that the

phenomenon comprises a module in the sense that evolutionary
psychologists use the term. I suggest rather that it is a mode of
computation that can be applied to several different mental domains.
From around tw
Highlight: : particular, may have been especially critical. The frontal lobes are known
to be involved in language, theory of mind, episodic memory, and mental
time travel, and these recursive facul ties may also depend on the fact
that humans, relative to other primates, un dergo a prolonged period of
growth.
Highlight: : prolonged childhood means that the human brain undergoes most of
its growth while exposed to external influences, and so is finely tuned to
its environment. Patricia M. G
Highlight: : Broca's area, that part of the cerebral cortex primarily responsible for the
production of language, on the left side of the brain.
Highlight: : began to ap pear as a characteristic of the genus Homo some two

million years ago and governs the way children acquire skills. This
extended growth pattern takes us beyond simple associative networks
toward more dynamic processors that can parse hierarchical structures
and use rules recursively. Although recursive
Highlight: : Theory of mind may be involved in a different way in language, allowing

us to modulate our speech in conformi ty with the mental state of the
listener.
Highlight: : The recursive understanding of time may have been critical to the
evolution of language itself, which is exquisitely equipped to recount
events at different points in time, and at locations other than the
present one. R
Notes in Document
'The recursive mind : the origins of human language,
thought, and civilization':
Highlight: : What Is Recursion?
(The recursive mind : the origins of human language, thought, and civilization, p.6)
Highlight: : Language and Recursion

Highlight: : Reliving the Past

Highlight: : About Time

Highlight: : The Grammar of Time

Highlight: : Final Thoughts

Highlight: : 1637, the French philosopher R né Descartes

Highlight: : Cogito, ergo sum, and is translated in English as “I think, therefore I am.”
Highlight: : The recursive nature of Descartes’s insight is perhaps better rendered in

the version offered by Am- brose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary: Cogito
cogito ergo cogito sum—“I think I think, therefore I think I am.”
Highlight: : to simulate the minds of others. It allows us to travel mentally in time,

inserting consciousness of the past or future into present consciousness.
Highlight: : John Barth concocted what is probably both the shortest and the longest
story ever written, called Frame- Tale. It can be reproduced as follows:
Write the sentence ONCE UPON A TIME THERE on one side of a strip of
paper, and WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN on the other side. Then twist
one end once and attach it to the other end, to form a Mobius strip. As
you work your way round the strip, the story goes on forever.
Highlight: : Augustus de Morgan: Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite
’em, And little fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum. And the great
fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on, While these again
have greater still, and greater still, and so on.4
Highlight: : takes its own output as the next input

Highlight: : a definition that might apply use- fully to human thought. A definition that
meets this requirement is suggested by Steven Pinker and Ray
Jackendoff, who define recursion as “a procedure that calls itself, or . . . a
constituent that contains a constituent of the same kind.”7
Highlight: : recursive constructions need not involve the embedding of the same
constituents
Highlight: : but may contain constituents of the same kind—a process sometimes
known as “self-similar embedding.
Highlight: : noun phrases can be built from noun phrases in recursive fashion.
Highlight: : it is in thought rather than in language that recursion originates. As Pinker

and Jackendoff put it, “The only reason language needs to be recursive is
because its function is to express recursive thoughts. If there were not
any recursive thoughts, the means of expression would not need recur-
sion either.”
Highlight: : In remembering episodes from the past, for instance, we essentially insert
sequences of past consciousness into present
Highlight: : consciousness, or in our interactions with other people we may insert

what they are thinking into our own thinking. These themes are explored
in later chapters.
Highlight: : suggested by Pinker and Jackendoff’s dual definition, recursion can be

understood either as a process or as a structure.
Highlight: : A recursive process may lead to a structure that need not be seen as
itself recursive.
Highlight: : Noam Chomsky has argued that human thought is generated by a Merge
operation, applied recursively. That is, units are merged to form larger
entities, and the merged entities can be themselves merged to form still
larger entities, and so on. This operation underlies the embedded
structure of human language, although in Chomsky’s theory it applies
strictly to what he calls I-language, which is the thought process preced-
ing E-language, the external language that is actually spoken or signed.
Merge can produce strings of elements, be they words or elements of
thought, and although it may be applied recursively to produce
hierarchical structure, that structure may not be evident in the final output.
Highlight: : recursive processes and structures can in principle extend without limit,
but are limited in practice.
Highlight: : Nevertheless recursion does give rise to the concept of infinity,

Highlight: : in language, we understand that a sentence can in principle be extended

indefinitely, even though in practice it cannot be
Highlight: : although recursion is limited in practice, we can nevertheless achieve

considerable depths of recursive thought
Highlight: : In chess, for example, a player may be able to think recursively three or
four steps ahead,
Highlight: : examining possible moves and countermoves, but the number of

possibilities soon multiplies beyond the capacity of the mind to hold them.
Highlight: : Deeper levels of recursion may be possible with the aid of writing, or
simply with extended time for rehearsal and contemplation, or extended
memory capacity through artificial means.
Highlight: : The structures resulting from recursive processes need not reveal the
nature of those processes
Highlight: : Often, though, the structure of a sentence or stream of thought may

reveal recursive embedding—interpretation of a sentence may require the
understanding of phrases embedded in phrases
Highlight: : It rained and it rained and it rained.

Highlight: : It is not recursive because each addition of and it rained is not driven by
the previous one; it is simply added at the discretion of the writer.
Highlight: : At most, the repetition might signal urgency, or simply signal continuing
presence, as one might repeatedly knock on a door in the hope of
arousing someone inside.
Highlight: : a list,
Highlight: : it- eration, where a process is repeated, but in this case there is input
from the previous application of the process.
Highlight: : does not qualify as true recursion because each output is discarded once
it has been entered into the next application.
Highlight: : to arrive at increasingly accurate solutions to a problem. The basic idea

is to start with a preliminary solution—perhaps a guess—and then use a
procedure to compute a new solution. This solution is then used as the
starting point for the next computation, and the new solution is then the
starting point for the next round. The cycle is repeated until the solutions
stabilize to some acceptable criterion.
Highlight: : The body is awash with feedback systems to maintain homeostasis of

temperature, iron, energy, blood composition, and so on. The main
regulator is the hypothalamus, in the limbic system of the brain.
Highlight: : emphasizing recursion as a unifying concept

Highlight: : recent study suggests that humans possess a “category-specific attention

system” that is especially adapted for attending to animals;
Highlight: : David Premack, for example, adopts an approach similar to that offered in
this book. Re- viewing the evidence for discontinuity between humans and
other animals, he writes: “Animal competencies are mainly adaptations
restricted to a single goal. Human competencies are domain-general and
serve numerous goals.”31 This in effect reverses the evolutionary
psychology argument—the mind has become less rather than more
modular. T
Highlight: : One of these is what has been termed working memory, which holds
information in consciousness. In order to embed processes within
processes it is necessary to remember where one had got to in the earlier
process when an embedded process has been completed.
Highlight: : Recursion probably also depends on an executive process that or

Highlight: : ganizes what is to be embedded in what, and this may depend on the
frontal lobes of the brain.
Highlight: : In the Chomskyan view of language, moreover, recursion is seen as its
most distinguishing feature.
Highlight: : this view is undergoing some revision

Highlight: : there may even be some languages that do not make use of recursive
principles
Notes in Document
'What Kind of Awareness is Awareness of
Awareness? ':
Comment (1)-(4) are part of the quotation, and so should be indented as well.
:
(What Kind of Awareness is Awareness of Awareness? , p.7)
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Fictioning the Landscape’
Notes in Document
'Fictioning the Landscape':
Highlight: : a concept of fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication
of an apparent reality with other narratives.
(Fictioning the Landscape, p.2)
Highlight: : “docufiction.”
Highlight: : operates on a porous border between fact and fiction, but also between
fiction and theory and, at times, the personal and political.
Highlight: : involve a presentation of landscape, broadly construed, alongside the

instantiation of a complex and layered temporality which itself involves the
foregrounding of other pasts and possible futures.
Highlight: : these different space-times need to be performed in some way

Highlight: : between fact and fiction

Highlight: : between fiction and theory

Highlight: : personal and political

Highlight: : mythopoesis—a veritable making-mythic of the urban landscape

Highlight: : in the tradition of the psychogeography of the Situationists

Highlight: : the very fiction of Robinson allows for a more pointed reflection on our
political reality. The fiction—like the walk itself—offers a specifically
different perspective on the real.
Highlight: : it is through fiction more generally that these time loops are able to
operate.
Highlight: : Romanticism denotes a capacity to see life as itself a fiction and, as such,
to open up the possibility of shifting perspectives.
Highlight: : Fiction, then, is a resource

Highlight: : At play in On Vanishing Land is a sense of haunting and, more generally, an

idea of the landscape as composed of different times and, indeed,
presences.
Highlight: : the sonic can itself augment or double the physical landscape.
Highlight: : In his book The Weird and the Eerie, Fisher argues that the eerie, beyond
being a literary genre (again, one notably associated with, M. R. James)
can also be thought of as a mode of being.
Highlight: : It is characterised, Fisher explains, by a fascination with both the non-human

Highlight: : and the forces of the outside; and, as such, the eerie might “give us access
to spaces beyond mundane reality.
Highlight: : the eerie works as antidote to Capitalist Realism?

Highlight: : the “New Weird,” with writers such as China Miéville and Jeff VanderMeer
(themselves following figures like H. P. Lovecraft and M. R. James)
Highlight: : with recent speculative philosophy insofar as both explore an outside to

typical human experience and, indeed, a world of non-human beings.
Highlight: : forces of the outside (or what are called in On Vanishing Land “planetary
thresholds of the Unknown”)
Highlight: : dreams and dreaming as philosophical resources

Highlight: : how this external ter- rain forms our internal world.
Highlight: : a haunting of other future pasts (those futures that were promised, but
never came about)
Highlight: : the idea of an inorganic sentience

Highlight: : other, alternative mode of being in the world

Highlight: : against the dominant techno-scientific model

Highlight: : If On Vanishing Land resonates with the non-human aspects of the

Robinson films, then Voodoo Science Park resonates with the more
overtly political and dissident ones.
Highlight: : the mapping out of a kind of political dissident unconscious of the Peak
District
Highlight: : the dominant symbolic order and reality produced by the state (what we
might call the narrative form of science and “objectivity”).
Highlight: : a kind of counter-factual paranoid method to the film in this sense, insofar
as it suggests a different account of what’s really going on; an alternative
script as it were.
Highlight: : what else is any given reality than a particular kind of script?
Highlight: : the Situationist practice of psychogeography

Highlight: : —the layering of different times and, indeed, a layering of different fictions
Highlight: : fictioning of the real: all the footage is, as it were, accurate and factual. It
is the narrative—the words spoken over the images—that produce the
fictioning;
Highlight: : the conjunction—and disjunction—of sound and image

Highlight: : Voodoo Science Park, it seems to me, is a highly complex and convincing
work that is a paradigmatic case study of a fictioning of the landscape.
Highlight: : a secret history is itself a fictioning, one that binds and then deploys a
different archive against the consensual.
Highlight: : precursor of this genre of docufiction: the films of Maya Deren).

Highlight: : the Lab’s real purpose is narrative, and the production of a story to fill the
gap left in consensual reality by any given accident.14
Highlight: : a kind of mythopoesis, operating through its own temporal looping from the
present to both the past and future
Highlight: : fictioning can be employed by the state, just as it can be pitched against
it.
Highlight: : very particular space-times—feedback loops from the past and future—
insofar as they operate as resource and archive for other subjectivities in
the present.
Highlight: : hybrid temporalities

Highlight: : the nesting of fictions and, indeed, in the revealing of the apparatus of
making fictions.
Highlight: : existence as alienated images who dream of being projected. At one point
they also refer to themselves as scripts waiting actualisation. Here fiction
is a method for reflection on memory and the future, but also, more
generally, for an enquiry in to the nature of fiction itself—as in the search
for real people who might play the characters or, indeed, in relation to
some of the other real people involved in the intended narrative
Highlight: : recursive setup—of fictions within fictions—can operate to question the

“truth” of our own reality (as simply one more fiction).
Highlight: : the Group, as well as performing different fictions, are themselves, partly
fictioned. The nesting and looping of fictions is continuous, we might say,
from artwork to the life of the Group.
Highlight: : it is when the recursive set-ups of fictioning also includes the artists
themselves that we begin to see how radical fictioning practices can be in
both undermining dominant realities (such as the fiction of the self), but also
performing new ones.
Highlight: : the film-essay—or, again, the docufiction—which moves between fiction

and fact
Highlight: : a fictioning of the landscape through spoken narrative and a kind of

layering of temporalities—other pasts and futures—alongside an attention
to other more non-human durations.
Highlight: : in our post-fact and post-truth world it is crucial not only to counteract the
fictions and myths presented to us but to also to produce other, and better
ones by which to orientate ourselves within our world.
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Interface Relation’
Notes in Document
'Remediation-understanding-new-media.pdf':
Highlight: : Introduction: The Double Logic of Remediation
(Remediation-understanding-new-media.pdf, p.3)
Highlight: : Theory
Highlight: : Photorealistic Graphics

Highlight: : Digital An
Highlight: : Mediated Spaces

Highlight: : The World Wide Web

Highlight: : Ubiquitous Computin

Highlight: : Convergence
Highlight: : Self
Highlight: : If the ultimate purpose of media is indeed to transfer sense experiences
from one person to another, the wire threatens to make all media obsolete
Highlight: : The wire bypasses all forms of mediation and transmits directly from one
consciousness to another.
Highlight: : the wire is designed to efface itself, to disappear from the user's
consciousness
Highlight: : it becomes clear that the experience the wire offers can he as contrived
as a traditional film
Highlight: : a continuous, first-person point-of-view shot, which in film criticism is
called the "subjective camera,"
Highlight: : our culture's contradictory imperatives for immediacy and hypermediacy,

this film demonstrates what we call a double logic of rernediation. Our
culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of
mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying
them.
Highlight: : new and old media are invoking the twin logics of immediacy and hy-
permediacy in their efforts to remake themselves and each other
Highlight: : our two seemingly contradictory logics not only coexist in digital media
today but are mutually dependent. Immediacy depends on hypermediacy
Highlight: : The desire for immediacy leads digital media to borrow avidly from each
other as well as from their analog predecessors such as film, television,
and photography. Whenever one medium seems to have convinced
viewers of its immediacy, other media try to appropriate that conviction.
Highlight: : Remediarion did not begin with the introduction of digital media. We can
identify the same process throughout the last several hundred years of
Western visual representation
Highlight: : all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence
of the medium and the act of mediation. All of them seek to put the viewer
in the same space as the objects viewed
Highlight: : Today as in the past, designers of hypermediated forms ask us to take

pleasure in the act of mediation, and even our popular culture does take
pleasure
Highlight: : new digital media are participating in our culture's redefinition of self
Highlight: : new media are doing exactly what their predecessors have done: pre-
Highlight: : senting themselves as refashioned and improved versions of other me-

dia. Digital visual media can best be understood through the ways in
which they honor, rival, and revise linear-perspective painting, photog-
raphy, film, television, and print. No medium today, and certainly no single
media event, seems to do its cultural work in isolation from other media,
any more than it works in isolation from other social and economic
forces. What is new about new media comes from the particular ways in
which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media
refashion themselves to answer the challenges of new media.
Highlight: : w digital media oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between

transparency and opacity.
Highlight: : a medium ,fashions its predecessors and other contemporary media

Highlight: : each medium promises to reform its predecessors by offering a more

immediate or authentic experience, the promise of reform inevitably leads
us to become aware of the new medium as a medium
Highlight: : Thus, immediacy leads to hypermediacy. The process of remediation

makes us aware that all media are at one level a "play of signs," which is
a lesson that we take from poststructuralist literary theory
Highlight: : media technologies constitute networks or hybrids that can be expressed

in physical, social, aesthetic, and economic terms.
Highlight: : a new media technology does nor mean simply inventing new hardware
and software, but rather fashioning (or refashioning) such a network.
Highlight: : the sum of the uses to which this protocol is now being put: for marketing
and advertising, scholarship, personal expression, and so on.
Highlight: : New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an
unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts, and they
refashion other media, which are embedded in the %me or similar
contexts
Highlight: : immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation are universal aesthetic

truths
Highlight: : practices of specific groups in specific times.
Highlight: : immediacy may mean one thing to theorists, another to practicing artists
or designers, and a third to viewers.
Highlight: : even greater for hypermediacy, which seems always to offer a number of
diffetent reactions to the contemporary logic of immediacy
Highlight: : Remedi- ation always operates under the current culrural assumptions
about immediacy and hypermediacy.
Highlight: : the practices of contemporary media constitute a lens through which we

can view the history of remediation.
Highlight: : the twin preoccupations of contemporary media: the transparent

presentation of rhe real and the enjoyment of the opacity of media
themselves.
Highlight: : Virtual reality is immersive, which means that it is a medium whose

purpose is to disappear.
Highlight: : made dig-

Highlight: : genealogical traits will be immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation

Highlight: : defined by the formal relations within and among media as well as by
relations of cultural power and prestige
Highlight: : cult by the apparatus that virtual reality requires

Highlight: : In order to create asense ofpresence, virtual reality should come as close
as possible to our daily visual experience. Its graphic space should be
continuous and full of objects and should fill the viewer's field of vision
without rupture. But today's technology still contains many ruptures: slow
frame rates, jagged graphics, bright colors, bland lighting, and system
crashes.
Highlight: : The transparent interface is one more manifestation of the need to deny
the mediated character of digital technology altogether. To believe that
with digital technology we have passed beyond mediation is also to assert
the uniqueness of our present technological moment.
Highlight: : Panofsky (1991) reminded us in Perspenive as Symbolic Form (27),

perspective means a "seeing through," and, like the interface designers of
today, students of linear perspective promised immediacy through
transparency. They trusted in linear perspective to achieve transparency
because by mathematizing space, it used the "righr" technique to
measure the world.
Highlight: : For Jay (1988), "Cartesian perspecti- valism" constituted a peculiar way of
seeing that dominated Western culture from the seventeenth century to
the early twentieth by allowing the Cartesian subject to control space from
a single vantage point.z
Highlight: : Norman Brysnn (1983) has argued that "through much of the Western
tradition oil paint is treated primarily as an mive medium. What it must first
erase is the surface of the picture-plane" (92)
Highlight: : the logic of transparent immediacy does not necessarily commit the
viewer to an utterly naive or magical conviction that the representation is
the same thing as what it represents. Immediacy is our name for a family
of beliefs and practices that express themselves differently at various
times among various groups,
Highlight: : The common feature of all these forms is the belief in some necessary
contact point between the medium and what it represents.
Highlight: : In digital media today, the practice of hypennediacy is most evident in

the heterogeneous "windowed style" of World Wide Web pages, the
desktop interface, multimedia programs, and video games. It is a visual
style that, in the words of William J. Mitchell(1994), "privileges frag-
mentation, indeterminacy, and heterogeneity and . . . emphasizes pro-
cess or performance rather than the finished art object" (8).
Highlight: : "an entirely new kind of media experience born from the marriage of TV
and computer technologies. Its raw ingredients are images, sound, text,
animation and video, which can be brought together in any combination. It
is a medium that offers 'random access'; it has no physical beginning,
middle, or end (8)
Highlight: : The graphical interface replaced the command-line interface, which was
wholly textual. By introducing graphical objects into the representation
scheme, designers believed that thzy were making the interfaces
"transparent" and therefore more "natural." Media theorist Sirnnn Penny
(1995) points out that for interface designers: "tronrparent means that the
computer interface fades into the experiential background and the
analogy on which the software is based (typewriter, drawing table,
paintbox, etc.) is foregrounded
Highlight: : the graphical interface referred not only to culturally familiar objects, but
specifically to prior media, such as painting, typewriring, and handwriting.
Highlight: : a more complex system in which iconic and arbitrary forms of

representation interact
Highlight: : Unlike a perspective painting or three-dimensional computer graphic, this

windowed interface does not attempt to unify the space around any one
point of view.
Highlight: : unlike the painting or computer gaphic, the desktop interface does not
erase itself
Highlight: : The multiplicity of windows and the heterogeneity of their contents mean
that the user is repeatedly brought back into contact with the interface,
which she learns to read just as she would read any hypertext.
Highlight: : She oscillates between manipulating the windows and examining their
contents, just as she oscillates between looking at a hypettext as a
texture of links and looking through the links to the textual units as
language.
Highlight: : With each return to the interface, the user confronts the fact that the
windowed computer is simultaneously automatic and interactive.
Highlight: : Its interface is interactive in the sense that these layers of programming
always return control to the user, who then initiates another automated
action.
Highlight: : Although the pro- grammer is not visible in the interface, the user as a
subject is constantly present, clicking on buttons, choosing menu items,
and draggmg icons and windows
Highlight: : functions as a cultural counterbalance to the desire for immediacy in

digital technology.
Highlight: : If the logic of immediacy leads one either to erase or to render automatic
the act of representation, the logic of hypermediacy acknowledges
multiple
Highlight: : acts of representation and makes them visible

Highlight: : Where immediacy suggests a unified visual space, contemporary

hypermediacy offers a heterogeneous space, in which representation is
conceived of not as a window on to the world, but rather as "windowed"
itself-with windows that open on to other representations or other media
Highlight: : hypermediacy makes us aware of the medium or media and (in

sometimes subtle and sometimes obvious ways) reminds us of our desire
for immediacy.
Highlight: : The logic of immediacy has perhaps been dominant in Western

representation, at least from the Renaissance until the coming of
modernism, while hypermediacy has often had to content itselfwith a
secondary, if nonetheless important, status
Highlight: : Sometimes hypermediacy has adopted a playful or subversive attitude,

both acknowledging and undercutting the desire for immediacy. At other
times, the two logics have coexisted, even when the prevailing readings
of art history have made it hard to appreciate their coexistence
Highlight: : At the end of the twentieth century, we are in a position to understand

hypermediacy as immediacy's opposite number, an alter ego that has
never been suppressed fully or for long periods of time
Highlight: : examples that are particularly resonant with digital hypermediacy today
Highlight: : European cathedral with its stained glass, relief statuary, and inscrip-
tions was a collection of hypermediated spaces, both physical and repre-
sentationa
Highlight: : juxtaposed media but also embodied contradictory spatial logics

Highlight: : interplay of the real third dimension with its perspectival representation,
the Kalker altarpiece connects the older sculptural tradition with the
newer tradition of perspectival representation.
Highlight: : The pictures on the doors and drawers of these cabinets ironically
duplicated the three- dimensional space that they concealed. Thus, the
two-dimensional pictures on the doors opened on to a fictional space,
while the painted doors themselves opened on to a physical one.
Highlight: : The windowed style is beginning to play a similar game of hide and seek
as two-dimensional text windows and icons conceal and then expose
three-dimensional graphic images and digitized video. Even the icons and
folders of the conventional desktop metaphor function in two spaces: the
pictorial space of the desktop and the informational space of the computer
and the Internet.
Highlight: : the hypermediacy of the baroque.

Highlight: : Dutch art has often been contrasted with the paradigm of Renaissance
Italian painting with its representation of a more unified visual space, in
which the signs of mediation were meticulously erased
Highlight: : f a familiar poststructuralist argument-that hypermediacy was the

counterpart to transparency in Western painting, an awareness of
mediation whose repression almost guaranteed its repeated return.
Highlight: : Jonatban Crary (1990)

Highlight: : challenged the traditional view that photography is the continuation and
perfection of the technique of linear-perspective painting. For Crary, there
was a rupture early in the nineteenth century, when the stable observation
captured by the old camera obscura and by perspective painting was
replaced by a new goal of mobility of observation
Highlight: : the diorama, the phenakistoscope, and the stereoscope

Highlight: : incorporated transparent immediacy within hypermediacy

Highlight: : The appeal to immediacy here was that a moving picture, say, of a horse,
is more realistic than a static image. On the other hand, it was not easy
for the user to ignore or forget the contraption of the phenakistoscope
itself, when even its name was so contrived
Highlight: : ironic comment on the desire for immediacy

Highlight: : hypermediacy manifested itself in the nineteenth century alongside and

around the transparent
Highlight: : Clement Greenberg (1973) puts ir, "Realistic, illusionist art had $
dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art. Modernism used an
ro call attention ro art. The limits- - rims that conrritute the medium of 2
painting-the flar surface, the shape ofthe support, the properties ofpig-
ment-were created by the Old hlasters as negative facrors rhat could
be acknowledged only implic- irly or indirectly. Modernist painring has
come ro regard these same limitations as positive factors that are to be
acknowledged openly.''
Highlight: : Greenberg (1965, 70-74) sees collage as an expression of the ten-

smn between the modernist emphasis on rhe surface of the painring
and the inherited tradirion of three-dimensional repreremation.
Highlight: : technology of photography.

Highlight: : Nevertheless, the logic of transparent immediacy remained dominant.

The obvious fact is that the conventional camera survived and flourished,
while these other technologies did not.
Highlight: : not until modernism that the cultural dominance of the paradigm of
transparency was effectively challenged.
Highlight: : a fracturing of the space of the picture and as a hyperconscious

recognition or acknowledgment of the medium
Highlight: : Collage and photomontage in particular provide evidence of the modernist

fascination with the reality of media.8
Highlight: : collage challenges the immediacy of perspective painting

Highlight: : photomontage challenges the immediacy of the photograph.

Highlight: : discredit the notion that the photograph is drawn by the "pencil of nature,"
as Talbot (1969)
Highlight: : Instead, the photographs themselves become elements that human

intervention has selected and arranged for artistic purposes.
Highlight: : create a layered effect rhat we also find in electronic multimedia.
Highlight: : makes us aware of the process of construction.

Highlight: : We become hyperconscious of the medium in photomontage, precisely

because conventional photography is a medium with such loud historical
claims to tran~parency
Highlight: : Richard Lanham (1993) notes how well Hamilton's piece from the 1950s
suits today's "digital rhetoric"
Highlight: : In collage and photomonrage as in hypermedia, to create 1s to

rearrange existing forms.
Highlight: : In photomontage the preexisting forms are photographs; in literary

hypertext they are para- graphs ofprose; and in hypennedia they may be
prose, graphics, animation~, videos, and sounds.
Highlight: : defining a space through the disposition and interplay of forms that have
been detached from their original context and then recombined.
Highlight: : From one point of view, photomontage can be interpreted as a

deviation from the essentially transparent and unified nature of
photography On the other hand, photomontage can be seen nor as
deviating from photography's true narure as a cramparent medium but
as exemplifying its irreducible hypermediacy This latter interpret*- rim
of the photographic medium has beenadvanced by W J. T. Mirch- ell
(1994:) in the idea of the ,,. ~magerext:
Highlight: : the logic of hypermediacy expresses the tension between regarding a

visual space as mediated and as a "rear space that lies beyond
mediation.
Highlight: : Lanham (1993) calls this the tension between looking at and looking
through, and he sees it as a feature of twentieth-century art in general
and now digital representation in particular (3-28, 31-52).
Highlight: : What characterizes modern art is an insistence that the viewer keep
coming back to the surface or, in extreme cases, an attempt to hold the
viewer at the surface indefinitely.
Highlight: : by multiplying spaces and media and by repeatedly redefining the visual
and conceprual relationships among mediated spaces-relationships that
may range from simple juxtaposition to complete absorption.
Highlight: : digital artist David Rokeby, the dichotomy between rrans- parency and
opacity is precisely what distinguishes the attitude of engi- neers from that
of artists in the new technologies. Rokeby (1995) is clearly adopting a
modernist aesthetic when he writes that "while engi- neers strive to
maintain the illusion of transparency in the design and refinement of
media technologies, artists explore the meaning of the interface itself,
using various transformations of the media as their pal- ette" (133)
Highlight: : since Matisse and Picasso, or perhaps since the impressionists, artists
have been "exploring the interface:'
Highlight: : Erkki Huhtamo (1995)

Highlight: : "Technology is gradually becoming a second nature, a territory both

external and internalized, and an object of desire. There is no need to
make it transparent any longer, simply because it is not felt to be in
contradiction to the 'authenticity' of the experience" (171).
Highlight: : Huhtamo
Highlight: : hypermediacy can also provide an "authentic" experience, at least for
our current culture; otherwise, we could not account for the tremendous
influence of, for example, rock music.
Highlight: : Initially, when "liveness" was the signifying mark of the rock sound, early
recordings adhered to the logic of transparency and aimed to sound "live."
As live performance became hypermediated, so did the recordings-as
electric and then digital sampling, rave, ambient music, and other
techniques became increasingly popular
Highlight: : Except for rock music, the World Wide Web is perhaps our culture's most
influential expression of hypermediacy
Highlight: : Michael Joyce

Highlight: : the whole World Wide Web is an exercise in replacement: "Print stays
itself; electronic text replaces itself' (232).
Highlight: : Replacement is at its most radical when the new space is of a different
medium-for example, when the user clicks on an underlined phrase on a
web page and a graphic appears
Highlight: : all the time, confronting the user with the problem of multiple
representation and challenging her to consider why one medium might
offer a more appropriate representation than another. In doing so, they
are performing what we characterize as acts of remediation.
Highlight: : The content has been borrowed, but the medium has not been
appropriated or quoted. This kind of borrowing, extremely common in
popular culture today, is also very old.
Highlight: : "repurposing": to take a "property" from one medium and reuse it in
another. With reuse comes a necessary redefinition, but there may be no
conscious interplay between media. The interplay happens, if at all, only
for the reader or viewer who happens to know both versions and can
compare them.
Highlight: : Undevstanding Media (19641, Marshall McLuhan remarked that "the

'content' of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing
is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the
content of the telegraph (23-24).
Highlight: : suggest, McLuhan was not thinking of simple repurposing, but perhaps of
a more complex kind of borrowing in which one medium is itself
incorporated or represented in another medium.
Highlight: : all of our examples of hypermediacy are characterized by this kind of
borrowing
Highlight: : we call the representation of one medium in another rmediation, and we

will argue that remediation is a defining characteristic of the new digital
media
Highlight: : a spectrum of different ways in which digital media remediate their

predecessors, a spectrum depending on the degree of perceived compe-
tition or rivalry between the new media and the old.
Highlight: : At one extreme, an older medium is highlighted and represented in

digital form without apparent irony or critique. Examples include CD-ROM
(or DVD) picture galleries (digitized painrings or photographs) and
collections of literary texts. There are also numerous web sites that offer
pictures or texts for users to download. In these cases, rhe electronic
medium is not set in opposition to painting, photography, or printing;
instead, the computer is offered as a new means of gaining access to
these older materials, as if the content of the older media could simply be
poured into the new one. Since the elecrronic verslon justifies itself by
granting access to the older media, it wants to be traesparent. The digital
medium wants to erase itself, so that the viewer stands in the same
relationship to the content as she would if she were confronting the
original medium
Highlight: : Creators of other electronic remediations seem to want to em- phasize
the difference rather than erase it. In these cases, the electronic version is
offered as an improvement, although the new is still justified in terms of
the old and seeks to remain faithful to the older medium's character
Highlight: : remediated the printed book without doing much to challenge print's
assumptions about linearity and closure
Highlight: : the new medium does not want to efface itself entirely
Highlight: : The borrowing might be said to be translucent rather than transparent.

Highlight: : The digital medium can be more aggressive in its remediation. It can try to
refashion the older medium or media entirely, while still marking the
presence of the older media and therefore maintaining a sense of
multiplicity or hypermediacy
Highlight: : This form of aggressive remediation throws into relief both the source and
the target media
Highlight: : The work becomes a mosaic in which we are simultaneously aware of the
individual pieces and their new, inappropriate setting. In this kind of
remediation, the older media are presented in a space whose
discontinuities, like those of collage and photomontage, are clearly visible
Highlight: : The windowed style of the graphical user interface favon this kind of
remediatio
Highlight: : The graphical user interface acknowledges and controls the discontinu-
ities as the user moves among media
Highlight: : Finally, the new medium can remediate by trying to absorb the older
medium entirely, so that the discontinuities between the two are
minimized
Highlight: : The very act of remediation, however, ensures that the older medium
cannot be entirely effaced; the new medium remains depeo- dent on the
older one in acknowledged or unacknowledged way
Highlight: : . On the World Wide Web, on the other hand, it is television rather than
cinema that is remediated
Highlight: : Numerous web sites borrow the monitoring function of broadcast televisio
Highlight: : television and the World Wide Web are engaged in an unacknowledged
competition in which each now seeks to remediate
Highlight: : the other.

Highlight: : Like television, film is also trying to absorb and repurpose digital
technology.
Highlight: : in most cases, the goal is to make these electronic interventions

transparent.
Highlight: : the goal is to make the computer disappear

Highlight: : remediation operates in both directions: users of older media such as film
and television can seek to appropriate and refashion digital graphics, just
as digital graphics artists can refashion film and television.
Highlight: : Unlike our other examples of hypermediacy, this form of aggressive
remediation does create an apparently seamless space. It con- ceals its
relationship to earlier media in the name of transparency; it promises the
user an unmediated experience, whose paradigm again is virtual reality.
Highlight: : immersive virtual reality also remediates both television and film: it
depends on the conventions and associations of the first-person point of
view or subjective camera
Highlight: : virtual reality remediates television (and film) by the strategy of

incorporation.
Highlight: : it ensures that these technologies remain at least as reference points by
which the immediacy ofvirtual reality is measured
Highlight: : Paradoxically, then, remedlation is as important for the logic of

transparency as it is for hypermediacy.
Highlight: : Another category of refashioning must be mentioned here: the

refashioning that occurs within a single medium-
Highlight: : This kind of borrowing is perhaps the most common, because artists both
know and depend most immediately on predecessors in their own
medium
Highlight: : Refashioning within the medium is a special case of remediation, and it

proceeds from the same ambiguous motives of homage and rivalry-what
Harold Bloom has called the "anxiety of influencen-as do other
remediations.
Highlight: : refashioning one's predecessors is key to understanding representation

in earlier media
Highlight: : Steven Holtzman (1997) argues that repurposing has played a role in
the early development of new media but will he left behind when new
media find their authentic aesthetic
Highlight: : From the perspective of remed~ar~on, Holtzman misses the point.

Highlight: : like their precursors, digital media can never reach this state of
transcendence, but will instead function in a constant dialectic wlth earlier
media, precisely as each earlier medium functioned when it was
introduced.
Highlight: : what is new about digital media lies in their particular strategies for
remediating television, film, photography, and painring
Highlight: : hypermedia applications are always explicit acts of remediation: they

import earlier media into a digital space in order to critique and refashion
them
Highlight: : Hypermedia and transparent media are opposite manifestations of the
same desire: the desire to get past thelimits of representation and to
achieve the rea
Highlight: : They are not striving for the real in any metaphysical sense. Instead, the
real is defined in terms of the viewer's experience; it is that which would
evoke an immediate (and therefore authentic) emotional response
Highlight: : Transparent digital applications seek to get to the real by bravely
denying the fact of mediation; digital hypermedia seek the real by
multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of
experience, which can be taken as reality. Both of these moves are
strategies of remediation.'
Highlight: : excess of media becomes an authentic experience, not in the sense that
it corresponds to an external reality, but rather precisely because it is
does not feel compelled to refer
Highlight: : The logic of remediation we describe here is similar to Derrida's

(1981) account of mimesis, where mimesis is defined not ontologically
or objectively in terms of the resemblance of a representation to its
object bur rather intersubjectively in terms of the reproduction of the
feeling of imitation or resemblance in rhe perceiving subject. '"Mimesis
here is nor the representation of one thing by another, the relation of re-
semblance or identification between two beings, the reproduction of a
producr of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two prod-
ucrs but of two productions. And of two freedoms. . . . 'Tme' tnimir is
between two producing subjects and not between two produced things"
(9)
Highlight: : to anything beyond itself

Highlight: : The aesthetic of the glance also makes the viewer aware of the process
rather than just the product-both the process of creation and the process
of viewing.
Highlight: : High modern visual art was also self-justifying, as it offered the viewer an
experience that he was not expected to validate by referring to the
external world.
Highlight: : Greenberg (1986)

Highlight: : become more completely nothing but what they do; like functional ar-
chitecture and the machine, they look what they do" (34)
Highlight: : Digital hypermedia also look what they do

Highlight: : On the other hand, modern art often worked by reduction and
simplification rather than excess. In that sense, digital hypermedia (and
MTV) are closer in spirit to the excessive rhetoric of early modernism than
to the visual practice of high modernism. The rhetoric of cyberspace is
reminiscent of the manifestos of Fil- ippo Tommaso Marinetti and the
futurists.
Highlight: : just as hypermedia strive for immediacy, transparent digital technologies
always end up being remediations, even as, indeed precisely because,
they appear to deny mediation.
Highlight: : Although transparent technologies try to improve on media by erasing

them, they are still compelled to define themselves by the standards of
the media they are trying to erase.
Highlight: : In general, digital photorealism defines reality as perfected photography,

and virtual reality defines it as first-person point-of-view cinema.
Highlight: : It would seem, then, that all mediation is remediation

Highlight: : at this extended historical moment, all current media function as

remediators and that remediation offen us a means of interpreting the
work of earlier media as wel
Highlight: : older media can also remediate newer ones.

Highlight: : The double logic of remediation can function explicitly or implicitly, and it
can be restated in different way
Highlight: : Remediation ar the mediation of mediation. Each act of mediation depends
on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, re-
producing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to me-
dia. Media need each other in order to function as media at all.
Highlight: : Remediation ar the inreparability of mediation and reality. Although Bau-

drillard's notion of simulation and simulacra might suggest otherwise, all
mediations are themselves real. They are real as artifacts (but not as
autonomous agents) in our mediated culture. Despite the fact that all
media depend on other media in cycles of remediation, our culture still
Highlight: : needs to acknowledge that all media remediate the real. Just as there is
no getting rid of mediation, there is no getting rid of the real. Remediation
as reform. The goal of remediation is to refashion or reha- bilitate other
media. Furthermore, because all mediations are both real and mediations
of the real, remediation can also be understood as a process of
reforming reality as well
Highlight: : MEDIATION AS THE MEDIATION OF MEDIATION

Highlight: : Derrida and other poststructuralists hape argued that all interpretation is
rein- terpretatio
Highlight: : Just as for them there is nothing prior to writing, so for our visual culture
there is nothing prior to mediation
Highlight: : In We Have Never Been Modern (1993), Bmno Latour takes us further in
understanding the role of postmodern theory in out media- saturated,
technological culture. For Latour, as for Jameson, Tntem- potaq- theory
gives a special status to language and interpretation: "Whether they are
called 'semiotics,' 'semiology' or 'linguistic turns,' the object of all these
philosophies is to make discourse not a ttanspar- ent intermediary that
would put the human subject in contact with the natural world, but a
mediator independent of nature and society alike"
Highlight: : language is regarded as an active and visible mediator thar fills up the
space between signifying subjects and nature.
Highlight: : Postmodern theory errs in trying to isolate language as a cultural force,

for it Fails to appreciate how language interacts with other media, other
technologies, and other cultural artifacts.
Highlight: : For Latour, the phenomena of contemporary technoscience consist of

intersections or "hybrids" of the human subject, language, and the
external world of things, and these hybrids ate as teal as their
constituents-in fact, in some sense they are mote real because no
constituent (subject, language, object) ever appears in its
Highlight: : In Telctbeory, published in 1989 2 and rherefore before the advent of

the World Wide Web, Gregory Ulmer made an influential attempt to
refashion academic discourse for whar he characterized as the 'age of
video:' In this new, highly mediated environment, he argued, academic
discourse must abandon its daim to critical distance and become more
like television (10-11). He has rub- sequently revised his argument to
take in new media as well.
Highlight: : In The Media Equairon (1996)

Highlight: : people relate to medis in the same way in which - they relate to other
people or places.
Highlight: : has five variables: manners, - personality, emotion, id roles, and form.
Each of rhese variables, they argue, affects the way in which people
reLare to media and should inform the design choicer made by media
technologirrs and developers
Highlight: : pure form, segregated from the other constituent^.

Highlight: : The events of our mediated culture are constituted by combinations of

subject, media, and objects, which do not exist in their segregated forms.
Thus, there is nothing prior to or outside the act of mediation.
Highlight: : Media function as objects within the world-within systems of linguistic,
cultural, social, and economic exchange.
Highlight: : Media are hybrids in Latour's sense and are therefore real for the cultures
that create and use them.
Highlight: : Modern an played a key role in convincing our culture of the reality of
mediation. In many cases, modern painting was no longer about the world
but about itself
Highlight: : Painters offered us their works as objects in the world, not as a

representation of an external world.
Highlight: : By diminishing or denying painting's representational function, they

sought to achieve an immediacy of presentation not available to tradi-
tional painting, where immediacy had been achieved by concealing signs
of mediation.
Highlight: : the need to distinguish mediation and remediation from representation.

Highlight: : Mod- ern painting achieves immediacy not by denying its mediation but by
acknowledging it.
Highlight: : Michael Fried,

Highlight: : defining characteristics of modernist painting is its insistence on

acknowledging the conditions of irs own mediati~
Highlight: : The reality of modernist painting extends beyond the work itself to the
physical space that surrounds it.
Highlight: : the space between viewer and canvas is controlled, institutionalized, and
policed as a special, real kind of space, which people walk around or wait
before entering.
Highlight: : Mediations are real not only because the objects produced (photos,
videos, films, paintings, CD-ROMS, etc.) circulate in the real world, but
also because the act of mediation itself functions as a hybrid and is
treated much like a physical object.
Highlight: : also a sense in which all mediation remediates the real. Media- tion is the
remediation of reality because media themselves are real and because
the experience of media is the subject of remediation.
Highlight: : The word derives ultimately from the Latin remedeui-"to heal, to restore
to health." We have adopted the word to express the way in which one
medium is seen by our culture as reforming or improving upon another.
Highlight: : In TheSofi Edge (1997), Paul Lev- inson uses the term mdiation to
describe how one medium reforms another (lOP114)
Highlight: : media develop "anrhroporropicaliyY'-chat is, to resemble the human

Highlight: : we invent media rhat improve on the limits ofpdor media
Highlight: : writing makes speech more permanent; the VCR makes TV more
permanent; hypertexr makes writing more inrer- arrive; and so on.
Highlight: : We are arguing rhat remediation can work in both directions: older
media can also refashion newer ones. Newer media do not
necessarily supenede older media because the process of reform and
refashioning is mutual.
Highlight: : It is possible to claim that a new medium makes a good thing even better,
but this seldom seems to suit the rhetoric of remediation and is certainly
not the case for digital media. Each new medium is justified because it
fills a lack or repairs a fault in its predecessor, because it fulfills the
unkept promise of an older medium. (Typically, of course, users did not
realize that the older medium had failed in its promise until the new one
appeared.)
Highlight: : The rhetoric of remediation favors immediacy and transparency, even
though as the medium matures it offers new opportunities for
hypermediacy
Highlight: : What remains strong in our culture today is the conviction that technology
itself progresses through reform: that technology reforms itself. In our
terms, new technologies of represeota- tion proceed by reforming or
remediating earlier ones, while earlier technologies are struggling to
maintain their legitimacy by remediating newer one
Highlight: : The cyberenthusiasts argue that in remediating older media rhe new
media are accomplishing social change. The gesture of reform is
ingrained in American culture, and this is perhaps why Amer- ican culture
takes so easily to strategies of remediation.
Highlight: : media reform reality itself. It is not that media merely reform the
appearanceof reality. Media hybrids (the affiliations of technical artifacts,
rhetorical justi- fications, and social relationships) are as real as the
objects of scienc
Highlight: : Media make reality over in the same way that all Western technologies
have sought to reform reality. Thus, virtual reality reforms reality by giving
us an alternative visual world and insisting on that world as the locus of
presence and meaning for u
Highlight: : Recent proposals for "ubiquitous" or "distributed computing would do just

the opposite, but in the service of the same desire for reform
Highlight: : the strategy of ubiquitous computing is to scatter computers and

computational devices throughout our world-to "augment reality" with
digital artifacts and so create a "distributed cybespace." Its advocates
see such a strategy "as a way to im- pmve on the 'flawed' design in
ordinary reality," in which "objects are largely 'dead' to distinctions we
care abou
Highlight: : Latour has argued, however, that for hundreds of years we have been
constructing our technologies precisely to take our cultural distinctions
seriously.
Highlight: : For Latour (1992) the idea of technologies that embody our cultural
values or distinctions has been a feature not only of modern but of
"amodem" or "premodern" societies as well.
Highlight: : For hundreds of years, the remediation of reality has been built into our
technologies of representation.
Highlight: : Nor will ubiquitous computing be the last expression of remediation as re-
form-as the burgeoning promises made on behalf of "push media" already
remind us.
Highlight: : a medium is that which remediates. It is that which appropriates the
techniques, forms, and social significance of other media and attempts to
rival or refashion them in the name of the real
Highlight: : A medium in our culture can never operate in isolation, because it must
enter into relationships of respect and rivalry with other media
Highlight: : inevitably claim that it was better in some way at achieving the real or the
authentic, and their claim would involve a redefinition of the real or
authentic that favors the new device. Until they had done this, it would not
be apparent that the device was a medium at all.
Highlight: : "mediatization."
Highlight: : device, together with its social and cultural functions, did constitute a new
medium.
Highlight: : The cultural work of defining a new medium may go on during and in a
sense even before the invention of the device itself.
Highlight: : All sorts of cultural relationships with existing media are possible. The
only thing that seems impossible is to have no relationship at all.
Highlight: : a medium is a hybrid in latourl mse

Highlight: : does not mean that the mode of financing cuuser American television to
be what it is
Highlight: : the character of a technology such as television is articulated through a

network of formal, material, and social practices.
Highlight: : Whenever we focus on one aspect of a medium (and its relationships of
remediation with other media), we must remember to include its other
aspects in our discourse. In the case of film, for example, when we look at
what happens on the screen (in a darkened theater), we can see how film
refashions the definitions of immediacy that were offered by srage drama,
photography, and painting. However, when the film ends, the lights come
on, and we stroll back into the lobby of, say, a suburban mall theater, we
recognize that the process of remediation is not over. We are confronted
with all sorts of images (posters, computer games, and videoscreens), as
well as social and economic arrifacts (the choice of films offered and the
pricing strategy for tickets and refresh- ments).
Highlight: : We must be able to recognize the hybrid character of film without claiming
that any one aspect is more important than the others.
Highlight: : embody or carry economic and cultural ideologies

Highlight: : (Kellner, 199

Highlight: : . Each new medium has to find its economic place by replacing or
supplementing what is already available, and popular acceptance, and
therefore economic success, can come only by convincing consumers
that the new medium improves on the experience of older ones. At the
same time, the economic success of workers depends on the new medid
acquired status.
Highlight: : the whole entertainment industry's understanding of remediation as

repurposing reveals the inseparability of the economic from the social and
materia
Highlight: : pouring a familiar content into another media form; a comic book series is
repurposed as a live-action movie, a televised cartoon, a video game, and
a set of action toy
Highlight: : not to replace the earlier forms, to which the company may own the rights,
but rather to spread the content over as many markets as possibl
Highlight: : Each of those forms takes part of its meaning from the other products
inapmcess ofhonorific remediation and at the same time makes a tacit
claim to offer an experience that the other forms cannot. Together these
products constitute a hypermediated environment in which the
repurposed content is available to all the senses at once, a kind of mock
Gesanitkumrwer
Highlight: : For the repurposing of blockbuster movies such as the Batman series,
the goal is to have the child watching a Batmanvideo while wearing a
Batman cape, eating a fast-food meal with a Batman promotional
wrapper, and playing with a Batman toy. The goal is literally to engage all
of the child's senses
Highlight: : refashioning of materials and practices. When artists or technicians create

the apparatus for a new medium, they do so with reference to previous
media, borrowing and adapting materials and techniques whenever
possible. Thus, Gutenberg and the first generation of printers borrowed
the letterforms and layout from the manuscrip
Highlight: : After winning their rather easy battle of remediation, printers in the late fif-
teenth and early sixteenth centuries moved away from the manuscript
model by simplifying letterforms and regularizing the layout
Highlight: : photography, Talbot, one of the pioneers, justified his invention because
of his dissatisfaction with a contemporary device for making accurate
perspective drawings by hand, and the name "camera" was his
remediation of the ramwa Iuridu (Trachtenberg 1980, 27; Kemp 1990,
200)
Highlight: : Film technicians and producers remediated both photography and the
practices of stage plays.
Highlight: : In computer graphics, paint programs borrowed techniques and names
from manual painting or graphic design practices: paintbrush, airbrush,
color pal- ette, filters, and so on
Highlight: : World Wide Web designers have remediated graphic design as it was
practiced for printed newspapers and magazines, which themselves in
some cases have reappropriated the graphic design of the World Wide
Web
Highlight: : The remediation of material practice is inseparable from the remediation
of social arrangements, in the first instance because practitioners in the
new medium may want to claim the status of those who worked in an
earlier medium.
Highlight: : We have so far used the term immediacy in two senses: one
epistemological, the other psychological. In the epistemological sense,
immediacy is transparency: the absence of mediation or representation. It
is the notion that a medium could erase itself and leave the viewer in the
presence of the objects represented, so that he could know the objects
directly. In its psychological sense, immediacy names the viewer's feeling
that the medium has disappeared and the objects are present to him, a
feeling that his experience is therefore authentic. Hypermediacy also
has two corresponding senses. In its epistemological sense,
hypermediacy is opacity-the fact that knowl-
Highlight: : edge of the world comes to us through media. The viewer acknowledges
that she is in the presence of a medium and learns through acts of medi-
ation or indeed learns about mediation itself. The psychological sense
hypermediacy is the experience that she has in and of the presence of
media; it is the insistence that the experience of the medium is itself an
experience of the real. The appeal to authenticity of experience is what
brings the logics of immediacy and hypermediacy together.
Highlight: : This appeal is socially constructed, for it is clear that not only individuals,
but also various social groups can vary in their definitions of the authentic.
What seems immediate to one group is highly mediated to anothe
Highlight: : All debates about UFO films and photographs turn on the question of
transparency
Highlight: : The experience of hypermediacy also depends on the social con-

struction of the media used. Staged rock productions are hypermediated
events, which no one interprets as transparent in the sense that the
media are to be forgotten or erased. But by entering into an immediate
relationship with the media themselves-the sound, the lights, the televised
images-rock fans achieve an experience they regard as authentic.
Others remain distanced from that experience, either repelled or simply
unmoved
Highlight: : Western societies accepted the idea that a photograph truly captures the
world. Digital photography is now challenging that claim to immediacy
Highlight: : so that a new kind of hybrid is emerging whose social and practical
meanings have to be re- worked
Highlight: : experiments suggest to us that neither the social nor the technical aspect
of mediation should be reduced to the other. Both Western and African
subjects clearly use their innate visual systems to process the information
in the image, but it is also clear that the images are socially constructed.
For the Westerners, photography and linear- perspective drawing are
media that are constructed as transparent.
Highlight: : What counts as transparent or as hypermediated depends on social

construction, but the social construction of immediacy is not arbitrary or
oblivious to technical details.
Highlight: : It is not helpful to seek to reduce any aspect of media to any other. This
applies equally to the economics of media, to which traditional Marxists
(and capitalists) seek to reduce all other aspects.
Highlight: : "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical eproduction" (1969).

Benjamin's argument is that mechanical repro- ction produces a
fundamental change in the nature of art, a change t destroys the artwork's
"aura" by removing it from the context ritual and tradition in which art had
been historically embedded.
Highlight: : Benjamin posits that technology creates a new kind of political or
revolutionary potential for mass art, a potential that can also be
dangerous
Highlight: : Benjamin's argument that technologies of mechanical reproduction are

politically enabling has its counterpart today in the claim by some
enthusiasts that new media, particularly the Internet, will bring about a
new kind of democracy
Highlight: : Howard Rheingold (1994), "The political significance of Icomputer-

mediated communication) lies in its capacity to challenge the existing
political hierarchy's monopoly on powerhl communications media, and
perhaps thus revitalize citizen-based democracy" (14). In the most
extreme version of this argument, we find John Perry Barlow prn-
clauning in his "Declaration of Independence" (http:i/www.eff.orgi
publPublicationsiJohn.Perry.Barlowlbarlow~O296.declaration April 17,
1998) that cyberspace is a new political territory in which the laws of
mdustrial capitalism no longer apply and that a new political order lies on
(or perhaps just beyond) our monitors
Highlight: : the medium of political representation disappears and citizens can

communicate their political will directly with each other or with their
government
Highlight: : Benjamin begins with the assertion that film technology, or mechanical
reproduction in general, breaks down the aura of the work of art by eliding
or erasing the distance between the work and its viewer
Highlight: : removing the aura makes the work of art formally less mediated and
psychologically more immediate.
Highlight: : On the other hand, Benjamin's mechanical reproduction also seems to

evoke a fascination with media
Highlight: : simultaneously entranced and aroused by the mediation of film

Highlight: : contrasts seeing a film with viewing a painting

Highlight: : Perhaps for Benjamin, the immediacy offeted by film is the immediacy
that we have identified as growing out of the fascination with media: the
acknowledged experience of mediation.
Highlight: : although filmmakers work hard to conceal the signs of material and
technological mediation, their final product calls attention (through the
rapid succession of images) to its aesthetic, temporal, and formal
mediation in a way that traditional painting does not.
Highlight: : Thepainter maintainr in hir work a natural dirtancefvom reality, the camera-
man penetrates deeply into itr web. There is a tremendous diference
between the picturer they obtain. That of the painter :J a total one, that of
the cameraman ronrirtr of multiple fragmentr which are arrembled under a
new law. Thur, fir ! contemporary man the representation of reality by
thefilm is incomparably more rignrficant than that of the painter, rince it
offerrrr, preri~ely became of the thor- oughgoingpermeation of reality with
mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality l l which ir j+ee of all
equipment. And that is what one IJ entitled to ark fvom a i
Highlight: : Benja- min still seems to believe both that it is possible to get past
mediation to "an aspect of reality which is free ofall equipment" and that
political revolution may come about through such an achievement.
Highlight: : The work of art today seems to offer "an aspect of reality which cannot be
freed from mediation or remediation," at the same time that new media
seek to present us precisely with "an aspect of reality which is free from
all mediation:' Thus remediation does not destroy the am of a work of art;
instead it always refashions that aura in another media form.
Comment remediation is necessary due to presence of gaze mediating self reference

:
Highlight: : Benjamin's essay has often been read as an expression of the techno-
logical determinism implicit in classical Marxist thought
Highlight: : British Marxist Raymond Williams (1975)

Highlight: : argument against the notion that new technologies "are discovered, by
an essentially internal process of research and development, which then
sets the conditions for social change and progress" (13).
Highlight: : Enthusiasts for cyherspace such as John Perry Barlow credit the Internet
with creating a new culture
Highlight: : technological determinism has been one feature of traditional Marxism

rejected by postmodern theory and cd2 tural studies
Highlight: : McLuhan's (1964) then in; Buential theory of media as "extensions of

man."
Highlight: : McLui han had isolated and abstracted media from their social contexts,
as i$ media could work directly on some abstract definition of human
nature: Williams (1975) objected that in McLuhan's work, "as in the whole
formalist tradition, the media were never really seen as practices. All
specific practice was subsumed by an arbitrarily assigned psychic func-
tion, and this had the effect of dissolving not only specific but general
intentions. . . . All media operations are in effect dissocialised; they are
simply physical events in an abstracted sensorium, and are distinguish-
able only by their variable sense-ratios" (127).
Highlight: : The idea that new electronic technologies of communication will
determine our social organization is cleady not threatening to corporations
that produce and market those technologies.
Highlight: : We need not be afraid of McLuhan's "formalism," as long as we

remember that technical forms are only one aspect of technologies that
are simultaneously social and economic.
Highlight: : McLuhan did bring to our attention the fact that media take their meaning
through interactions with the senses and the body, although feminist
writers since the 1970s have elaborated this idea in ways that McLuhan
did not envision. In short, we can reject McLuhan's determinism and still
appreciate his analysis of the remediating power of various media.
Highlight: : In an effort to avoid both technological determinism and determined

technology, we propose to treat social forces and technical forms as two
aspects of the same phenomenon: to explore digital technologies
themselves as hybrids of technical, material, social, and economic fac-
ets.
Highlight: : Because our digital technologies of representation are simultaneously

material artifacts and social constructions, there is no need to insist on
any aspect as cause or effect.
Highlight: : When we do write something like "digital media are challenging the status
of television and film," we are asking readers to treat this as shorthand. A
longer, and less felicitous, version would be that "the individuals, groups,
and institutions that create and use digital media treat these media as
improved forms of television and film." Media do have agency, but that
agency is constrained and hybrid. To say that digital media "challenge"
earlier media is the rhetoric of technological determinism only if
technology is considered in isolation. In all cases we mean to say that the
agency for cultural change is located in the interaction of formal, material,
and economic logics that slip into and out of the grasp of individuals and
social groups.
Highlight: : In all cases we mean to say that the agency for cultural change is located
in the interaction of formal, material, and economic logics that slip into
and out of the grasp of individuals and social groups.
Highlight: : the implications of gender for our understanding of remediation

Highlight: : technologies of transparent immediacy based on linear perspective, such
as perspective painting, photography, and film, or computer graphics and
virtual reality, may all be enacting the so-called male gaze, excluding
women from full participation as subjects and maintaining them as
objects.
Highlight: : transparent immediacy itself may be a gendered notion,

Highlight: : Martin Jay (1988) has suggested that Al- bertian technical perspective
joined with Descartes's philosophical dualism to constitute "Cartesian
perspectiva1ism"-a way of seeing that characterized Western culture at
least until the coming of modernism in the twentieth century
Highlight: : the logic of the visual is a male logic. According to one critic [Luce
Irigaray], what is absent from the logic . . . is women's desire" (187).
Highlight: : the desire for visual immediacy is a male desire that takes on an overt
sexual meaning when the object of representation, and therefore desire,
is a woman, as in the Diirer woodcut.
Highlight: : Laura Mulvey

Comment what does iPad do in/through this context?

:
Highlight: : The actual rmage of wonan as Cpassiue) raw material for the (active) gaze
of man takes the argument a step further into the mntent andstructure of
representation, adding a further layer of ideologicalsignlficance
demanded by rhepatriar- chal or& in its favorite cinematic fin-illusionistic
navatis,e film.
Highlight: : Theplate ofthe look definer cinema, thepossibility of varying it and

exposing it. This is what makes cinema guite diffent in its
uoyeuristicpotentia(from, say, striptease, theatrei showr, andso on.
Highlight: : cinema build1 the way she is to be lookedat into the spectacle itrelf. . . .
Cine- matic coder create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby
producing an illusion cut to the measure of &ire. (1989, 25)
Highlight: : the desire for immediacy, which then becomes a male desire to possess,
or perhaps to destroy, the female.
Highlight: : film is the definitive medium for representing this desire, because only film
can offer a mobile and shifting point of view.
Highlight: : film's claim to immediacy is that it defines and controls the structure of the
gaze with greatet precision.
Highlight: : film remediates striptease and the theater (we would add photography
and painting) through its ability to change point of view, and, because of
this remediatinn, it offers a new path to satisfying a familiar desire.
Highlight: : The immediacy of such new media as computer games and the World
Wide Web is supposed come through interactivity-the fact that these
media can change their point of view in response to the viewer or user
Highlight: : there is the immediacy that comes through hypennediacy-an immediacy
that grows out of the frank acknowledgment of the medium and is not
based on the perfect visual re-creation of the world. In such cases, we do
not look through the medium in linear perspective; rather, we look at the
medium or at a multiplicity of media that may appear in windows on a
computer screen or in the fragmented elements of a collage or a
photomontage.
Highlight: : Linda Williams (1995, 1-22) have criticized Mulvey's influential view for
not attending to the multiplicity of possible viewers and viewing positions
Highlight: : we need to understand the filmic gaze in the context of other media or
mediated experiences- for example, in the early days of film, the
pleasures of strolling along boulevards and through arcades, of looking
inta shops, and of visiting museums and other exhibits (Friedberg 1995,
59-83; Schwartz 1995, 87-1 13)
Highlight: : from its beginnings the cinema has entered into remediating relationships
with a variety of other forms, and these relatianships may encourage
ways of looking other than the appropriating male gaze.
Highlight: : in our media-saturated culture, we see film through other media and other
media through film in a play of mutual remediations. The experience of
transparent immediacy remains important in con-: temporary Hollywood
film, but it is not the sole experience that eve; ,aHollywood film offers. Even
for a male viewer, a recurring fascinatio~ '3with the medium distances and
frames the viewing experience; th& viewer oscillates between a desire for
immediacy and a fascination wi the medium.
Highlight: : now even old films are caught in the logic of hypermediacy,) In the mid-
1990s a remastered version of Vertigo was released for thei theater, and
part of the remastering process included digital enhancing. 1 The movie is
available on videocasette and on laser disk, and a search of of the Web
reveals well over two-thousand web documents that men-! tion Hitchcock's
Vertigo, some of which include film stills.
Highlight: : Although linear- perspective painting and film may keep the viewer distant
from what he views, in virtual reality the viewer steps through Alherti's
window and is placed among the objects of representation. Similarly, the
desire for sexual immediacy could aim for a voyeuristic examination of the
objects of representation or a union with them. If the aim is voyeuristic,
then the spectator is practicing the traditional male gaze. However, if the
aim is union, then the desire for immediacy could be interpreted in
Lacanian terms as the longing gaze of the mirror stage-a desire to return
to an original state of union (with the mother) prior to the split that defined
the subject and simultaneously privileged the male realm of the Symbolic
over the realm of the Imaginary. The desire for immediacy then
becomes the desirt to return to the realm of the Imaginary and could well
be shared by female spectators.
Highlight: : of the futility of believing that any technology of representation can fully
erase itsel
Highlight: : Transpar immediacy attempts to achieve through linear perspective a sing

"right" representation of things. Linear perspective becomes the norm and
normative way of looking at the world, while hypermediacy b comes the
sum of all the unconventional, unusual, and in some se deviant ways of
looking
Highlight: : Hypermediacy is multiple and deviant in suggestion of multiplicity-a

muliplicity of viewing positions an multiplicity of relationships to the object
in view, including sexual jects.
Highlight: : we might argue that linear perspective, which enact the heterosexual
male gaze, depends on hypermediacy, which is defined as an "unnatural"
way of looking at the world. As the sum of all unnatural modes of
representation, hypermediacy can then be used to justify the immediacy
of linear perspective. It would be for this reason that hypermediacy always
reemerges in every era, no matter how rigorously technologies of
transparency may try to exclude it. Transparency needs hypermediacy.
Highlight: : Virtual reality is also the medium that best expresses the contemporary
definition of the self as a roving point of vie
Highlight: : virtual reality has become a cultural metaphor for the ideal of perfect
mediation, and other media are now being held to the standard
supposedly set by virtual realit
Highlight: : . In the name of hypermediacy, virtual reality games are refashioning the
experience of the arcad
Highlight: : some computer researchers still remain committed to the paradigm, but
our culture at large has lost interes
Comment out of date

:
Highlight: : If artificial intelligence in the 1950s and 1960s refashioned computer from
a mere adding machine into a processor of symbols, tual reality is now
refashioning the computer into a process0 perceptions.
Highlight: : The supposedly immaterial world of cyberspace is itself both a reflection

and an extension of these public media space
Highlight: : the logic of hypermediacy predominates

Highlight: : Walt Disney once gave Billy Graham a tour of his park. When Graham
observed that Disneyland was a mere fantasy, Disney is supposed to
have replied: "You know the fantasy isn't here. This is very real. . . . The
park is reality. The people are natural here; they're having a good time;
they're communicating. This is what people really are. The fantasy is-out
there, outside the gates of Disneyland, where people have hatreds and
people have prejudices. It's not really real" (cited by Bryman 1995, 169-
170). Even if the remark is apocryphal, the mediated spaces of Disney's
parks embody this combination of cynicism and naivetC
Highlight: : Snow White (1937) was the first full-length cartoon with a sustained
narrative and therefore constituted a significant remediation of the
Hollywood film
Highlight: : he conceived of a theme park that would simultaneously refashion and be

refashioned by television as well as film
Highlight: : Christopher Anderson (1994) p nut that the four areas of the park are
physical expressions of four m genres: "Fantasyland (animated cartoons),
Adventureland (exotic ac adventures), Frontierland (Westerns), and
Tomorrowland (science tion)" (74-75).
Highlight: : At the s time, television's function of monitoring the world could be direct
toward the Disney films and the park and therefore enhance the auth ticity
of the experiences of both
Highlight: : Animated films, such as Pinocchio (1940) and Bamb: (1942), as well as
the animal films, such as Old Yeller (1957), provide emotional catharses
for young viewers and constitute the real, as Disney suggested to
Graham, as authenticity of communication and shared emotions. The
television series depended for its claim to authenticity on its own
"heartwarming" stories and animation~, as well as its "behind-the-
scenes" look at the park and the hlms.
Highlight: : Real cities and towns are themselves media spaces, which theme parks
reproduce and refashion
Highlight: : Theme parks remind us that the city is a space that is both highly
mediated and itself a kind of grand narrative.
Highlight: : Baudrillard's (19 well-known claim that "Disneyland is presented as

imaginary in o to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of
Los An and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the o
of the hyperreal and simulation. It is no longer a question of a
representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact th real is no
longer real" (25)
Highlight: : Disneyland does not conceal; rat exposes, even celebrates, the fact that
contemporary American s are media spaces
Highlight: : in the United States shopping malls are taking over this cultural tion. I
Highlight: : cordingly, American theme parks have become not only small-sca
versions of the city but grand-scale imitations of the shopping ma
Highlight: : the mall celebrates the hypermediacy of our culture and calls forth a
postmodern version of the flgneur, whose gaze, as she walks amid all
these competing media, is a series of fragmented, sidelong, and
hypermediated glances.
Highlight: : The shopping mall as a mediated space is simultaneously particularized

and anonymous.
Highlight: : Sorkin (1992

Highlight: : consumer capitalism demands sameness behind the variety

Highlight: : Their replicability enables malls to detach themselves from their

surroundings and become free-floating, hypermediated experiences
Highlight: : Aug4 contends that in "supermodernity . . . [a] dense network of means of

transport which are also inhabited spaces is developing; where the
habitue of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates
wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce."
For Aug4, these nonplaces are oat metaphorical, but can be measured
and quantified "by totaling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile
cabins called 'means of transport' (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the
airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail
outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks that
mobilize extraterrestrial space" (77). Nonplaces, such as theme parks and
malls, function as public places only during designated hours of operation.
There is nothing as eerie as an airport at three o'clock in the morning, or a
theme park after closing hours, when the careful grids of railings and
ropes that during the day serve to shep- herd thousands of visitors to
ticket counters or roller coasters stand completely empty. Such spaces
then seem drained of meaning
Highlight: : designed to have the feel and function of a town square, but it is avail-
able only to ticketholders and open only on game day
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight: : the individual experiences in these mediated encounters is the hyper-

mediacy of these nonplaces, which are defined not by their associations
with local history or even with the ground on which they are built, but
primarily by the reality of the media they contain. AugP continues: "The
real non-places of supermodernity-the ones we inhabit when we are
driving down the motorway, wandering through the supermarket or sitting
in an airport lounge waiting for the next Bight to London or Marseilles-
have the peculiarity that they are defined partly by the words and texts
they offer us"
Highlight: : To AugC's list of nonplaces we would add cyberspace itselk the Internet
and other manifestations of networked digital media.
Highlight: : Cyber- space is not, as some assert, a parallel universe. It is not a place
of escape from contemporary society, or indeed from the physical world It
is rather a nonplace, with many of the same characteristics as other
highly mediated nonplaces. Cyberspace is a shopping mall in the ether; it
fits smoothly into our contemporary networks of transportation, communi-
cation, and economic exchange.
Highlight: : many enthusiasts insist on the separateness and uniqueness of

cyberspace. John Perry Barlow's "Declaration of Independence for
Cyberspace,"
Highlight: : 1998). If they have no sovereignty, it is bec ' cyberspace is a nonplace,

although Barlow would not accept this c terization, and in any case the
"giants of flesh and steel" already quite successfully any number of
nonplaces. Barlow's denial th Internet is part of traditional history and
society is echoed, wi bloated rhetoric, by many other writers, for whom
cyberspace come a theological concept.
Highlight: : Albertian window, and their audience viewed the landscapes th windows
or doars, so that for them nature was framed by contemp architecture.
Such paintings often set the scene in an interior, n cause the story
demanded it, but as a way of symbolizing an taining their theological
message
Highlight: : what we as the natural world was subordinated to the religious, and that
dination was expressed through the Italian '"windowed" styl
Highlight: : began to give way as early as the seven century, in later Italian painting
and especially in Dutch lands
Highlight: : On the computer screen, how the windows have returned: everything in
this world (and, as the Pathfinder mission demonstrated in 1997, beyond
this world as is made visible to us through windows, which we can click
on and in a more literal way than one could enter the windowed spaces of
ian paintings. Furthermore, for enthusiasts at least, cyberspace is ding to
replace nature as the largest interpretive context
Highlight: : "Cyberspace involves a reversal of the curt mode of interaction with

computerized information. At present s information is external to us. The
idea of cyberspace subverts that r tion; we are now within information. In
order to do so we oursel must be reduced to bits, represented in the
system, and in the proc
Highlight: : become information anew" (225). Just as, in early religious paintings,
nature was initially separate from us and then became the predominant
context for understanding our world and our actions, so "the idea of
cyberspace" transforms information from something separate and con-
tained within our computers to a space we can inhabit
Highlight: : We inhabit cyberspace just as previous generations inhabited nature, or

even earlier generations lived in a theocentric world. For Novak, Benedikt,
and others, the master narrative of our culture is no longer the story of
God's relation to us or of our relation to nature, but of our relation to
information technologies. It is a theol- ogy of cyberspace
Highlight: : William Gibson invented the term in his novel Neuro- mancer (1986), he
described cyberspace as "a consensual hallucination experienced daily
by billions of legitimate operators in every nation . . . a graphic
representation of data absrracted from the banks of every computer in the
human system. Unrhinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the
nonspace of rhe mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like ciry lights
receding" (52
Highlight: : For cyberspace enthusiasts, there are two worlds: "the sensorial world of
the organically human" and the digitized, pure, immaterial world of
cyberspace
Highlight: : Benedikt thinks of the relation between rhese two worlds as an evolving
process of dematerialization: "And cyberspace, we might now see, is
nothing more, or less, than the latest stage in the evolution of [Sir Karl
Popper's1 World3, with the ballast of materiality cast away-cast away
again, and perhaps finally.
Highlight: : conceives of these as two distinct, autonomous realms (4). Proponents
of cyberspace seem to be replaying th logic of transcendence at the heart
of Christianity
Highlight: : We do not believe that cyberspace is an i material world, but that it is very
much a part of our contempor
Highlight: : world and that it is constituted through a series of remediations. As a

digital network, cyberspace remediates the electric communications
networks of the past 150 years, the telegraph and the telephone; as vir-
tual reality, it remediates the visual spaces of painting, film, and televi-
sion; and as a social space, it remediates such historical places as cities
and parks and such nonplaces as theme parks and shopping malls. Like
other contemporary mediated spaces, cyberspace refashions and extends
earlier media, which are themselves embedded in material and social
environments.
Highlight: : Ubiquitous computing is virtual reality's opposite number.

Highlight: : Telepresence can thus define a relationship between the medium and
the physical world different from that of virtual reality. While virtual reality
would replace the physical world with a simu- lacrum, telepresence brings
the physical world into the viitual environment (and vice versa)
Highlight: : Augmented reality remediates not perspective pain rather the windowed
style of the desktop interface.
Highlight: : In layi texts, and images over visible objects in the world, augment
frankly admits that it is a digital medium interposing itsel the viewer and
an apparently simple and unitary physical wo mented reality is
hypennediated, for it makes the user aware puter graphics as medium,
even if the goal is to keep the g the external object in close registration. In
this sense, augmented r is the apposite of telepresence, although, like
telepresence, augme reality celebrates the reality of its own mediation,
the power of purer graphics to act as objects in and therefore to affect the
wor
Highlight: : If the vir space reflects our world, then it will also have computers, televisi
radios, books, newspapers, and so on. Yet there is an irony of s
reference. If virtual reality is about stepping through the medium in
unmediated reality, then why does the virtual world need computer
Moreover, once we let computers and other media into the space, wha is
to keep them from multiplying so that the user can consult them at any
time for any purpose? The question becomes: If we can have computers
everywhere, why do we need virtual reality?
Highlight: : virtual reality turned inside out

Highlight: : everything is a medium, because everything is or contains a computing

device.
Highlight: : Enthusiasts for ubiquitous computing envision environments in which our

data files, applications, and preferences follow us automatically from
computer to computer as we move around our workplace. Devices that
are now "dumb," such as windows, doors, and refrigera- tors, become
"smart," communicating with us and with one another and anticipating our
needs.
Highlight: : making technological objects conform to huma wishes

Highlight: : Ubiquitous computing is an form of hypermediacy

Highlight: : turn our physical world into a place where ever thing mediates something
else
Highlight: : In reforming reality, the ubiquitous enthusiasts seem to want to avoid the
shifts of perspective that characterize virtual reality. The question of the
subject does not need to arise, because with ubiquitous computing, we
do not have to occupy different points of view. Instead, we stay put
figuratively and even literally, while the computers bustle around-opening
files, opening windows, switching cameras and sound systems on and off-
to suit our needs
Highlight: : Apparently frivolous, web cameras are in fact de vealing of the nature of
the Web as a remediator.
Highlight: : Web cameras are now often in stop motion, but full-motion video
eventually will put the Web in direct competition with broadcast and cable
television (Reid 1997).
Highlight: : Once again, transparent immediacy passes into hypermediacy, for if

these web cameras make part of the physical world available, they also
mediate that corner of the physical world by bringing it into cyberspace.
They make Maui, Antarctica, and Mars nodes on the Internet. Many of
these sites explore the aesthetic of hypermediacy by multiplying the
camera images on one page. They may present several images by the
same camera taken wer time; they may build a panorama from the
images of several closely aligned cameras (fig. 12.10); or they may simply
present unrelated image
Highlight: : These techniques I ,,E us conscious of each web camera as a

mediating technologyl
Highlight: : a site from the Netherlat that purports to be a view of the red-light district
in Amsterdam (A 12.12). Here the prostitutes put the shade up when they
are availal and pull it down when they are with a customer. As the site
moni the shade, it enacts the two logics of remediatinn. When the shade.
"h up, the window becomes transparent, and the web image express$,
quite literally the viewer's desire for sexual as well as visual immedia4 C3
p. 78 When the shade is down, the viewer can examine only th window
itself and consider what may be going on inside. The imag becomes a
representation of the desire for immediacy, which the web: '4 site
produces, thwarts, and then reproduces.
Highlight: : the user may be left to wonder why she ever needs to return to the
original medium.
Highlight: : The powerful cultural forces that fear the i diacy of the image can only
become more alarmed. On the ot the Internet is not comfortable with the
logic of transparen pornography on the Internet will always oscillate
between vis diacy and the irony and self-referentiality of the Amsterdam
W camera.
Highlight: : The strategy that dominates on the Web is hypermediacy, attainin real by
filling each window with widgets and filling the s windows
Highlight: : while relevisio (barely) distinguish between the physical reality and its
mediated sentation, the Web is even more aggressive in breaking down
that tier and insisting on the reality of mediation itself. Everything, fr the
snow fields of Antarctica to the deserts of Mars, finds its way on the Web.
Comment now itself remediated by AI, and vice versa

:
Highlight: : f "push technology.

Highlight: : of the vocabulary that we have developed (traniparenry, immediacy,

hypmnediay, and remediation
Highlight: : the bu world wants to understand remediation only in one direction,

reforming of the Internet into television. The reason is that the busi world
understands television and its mechanisms for the economic trol of its
audience.
Highlight: : Convergence is the mutual remediation of at least three portant

technologies-telephone, television, and computer-eac which is a hybrid of
technical, social, and economic practice and ea of which offers its own
path to immediacy.
Highlight: : The telephone offers t immediacy of the voice or the interchange of voices
in teal time. Tele sion is a point-of-view technology that promises
immediacy throug its insistent real-time monitoring of the world. The
computer's promise of immediacy comes through the combination of
three-dimension graphics, automatic (programmed) action, and an
interactivity tha television cannot match. As they come together, each of
these techno logies is trying to absorb the others and promote its own
version immediacy.
Highlight: : the double logic of remediation suggests that in our heterogeneous
culture, no one technology is likely to eliminate the others. In addition to
enhanced televisions, we will (and already do) have multimedia
computers that can present and manipulate video images. We will have
inexpensive computers designed to get most of their information and
applications from a network
Highlight: : Convergence is often misunderstood to mean a single solution, but in

fact, as these technologies appear, they remediate each other in various
ways and in various ratios to produce different devices and practices.
Convergence means greater diversiry for digital technologies in our
culture. It may always be true that, by bringing two or more technologies
together, remediation multiplies the possibilities. For the remediation at
least spawns one new technique while leaving the two others available for
cultural use
Highlight:
Comment now AI
:
Highlight: : The promise ofpush-pull media is to many the programming exp of

relevirion with two key yearnings: navigating information and rience, and
connecting to other people.
Highlight: : the promise of "connecting to other people" suggests transp ency--

breaking through the medium to achieve human contact. In t double logic
of remediation, the desire for transparent immediacy seldom abandoned,
even by those most committed to and fascinat with hypermediacy
Highlight: : the user or the viewer enter into a twofold relationship with the medium.
On the one hand, she seeks immediacy of the real in the denial of
mediation. On the other, she seeks that immediacy through the
acknowledgment and multiplication of media
Highlight: : we see ourselves today in and through our available media.

Highlight: : When we look at a traditional photograph or a perspective painting, we

understand ourselves as the reconstituted station point of the artist or the
photographer. When we watch a film or a television broadcast, we
become the changing point of view of the camera. When we put on the
virtual reality helmet, we are the focus of an elaborate technology for real-
time, three-dimensional graphics and motion tracking
Highlight: : we employ media asvehicles for defining both personal and cultural
identity.
Highlight: : technical analogs and social expressions of our identity,

Highlight: : simultaneously both the subject and object of contemporary media
Highlight: : We are that which the film or television camera is trained on, and at the
same time we are the camera itself
Highlight: : New media offer new opportunities for self-definition

Highlight: : Whenever our identity is mediated in this way, it is also remediated,
because we always understand a particular medium in relation to other
past and present media.
Highlight: : When we run a multimedia program on our des computer, each windowed
space (containing prose, static grap audio, or video) offers a different
mediation of the subject, and our rience is the remediation of these
differences
Highlight: : Because we unders media through the ways in which they challenge and
reform othe dia, we understand our mediared selves as reformed versions
of mediated selves.
Highlight: : Accordingly, there are two versions of the contemporary ated self that
correspond to the two logics of remediation. When W faced with media
that operate primarily under the logic of tran immediacy (virtual reality and
three-dimensional computer g we see ourselves as a point of view
immersed in an apparently s visual environment. In a virtual environment,
we have the free alter our selves by altering our point of view and to
empathiz others by occupying their point of view-techniques pioneered
and now extended and intensified in digital media. At the sam the logic of
hypermediacy, expressed in digital multimedia a worked environments,
suggests a definition of self whose key q not so much "being immersed as
"being interrelated or conne The hypermediated self is a network of
affiliations, which are const shifting. It is the self of newsgroups and email,
which may some threaten to overwhelm the user by their sheer numbers
but do n actly immerse her.
Highlight: : these two definitions of the self are complementary rather than
contradictory.' Both 1. Sherry Turkle has explored how definitions assume
that the authentic self can be achieved through the cOrnPuters in
generaland theln- terner in parricular &&c con- appropriate digital media,
which are themselves both transparent and temporaT notions of idenrity in
The hypemediated. Just as hypermediacy encompasses and complicates
Scond~r~and, more recently, transparent immediacy, the hypermediated
or networked self encom- oniheSmn. passes and multiplies the self of
virtual reality. The networked self is made up both of that self that is doing
the networking and the various selves that are presented on the network.
Highlight: : This remediated self reminds us of the analysis of the "empirical self" by
the American pragmatist William James,
Highlight: : For James, this empirical self is "thesum total ofall that [a 2. This period of
"electric cornmuni- 5 man) CANcall his" (291),
Highlight: : The material self includes (from innermost to outer- most) the body,
clothes, family, and home (292-293). The social self is 9 L, described
as "the recognition which [a man] gets from his mates," so m - - that
"properly speaking, a man has as many socialseluer as thereare individ-
ua/s do recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind (293- 294).
The spiritual self is more elusive, but James variously identifies it as "the
most enduring and intimate part of the self, that which we most verily
seem to be" (296); as "a sort of innermost centre within the circle, of
sanctuary within the citadel, constituted by the subjective life as a whole"
(297); as "the active element in all consciousness" (297); and as the "part
of the Self [that] isfih," that "which is as fully present at any moment of
consciousness in which it is present, as in a whole lifetime of such
moments" (298-299).
Highlight: : has a curious resonance with the networked self of digital technology
Highlight: : This active self works through various media.

Highlight: : Stanley Cavell (1979) has noted how the desire fo expression came out of
the desire for the real: "What Itraditionall ing wanted, in wanting a
connection with reality, was a sense of nerr-not exactly a conviction of the
world's presence to us, but of presence to it. At some point the unhinging
of our consciousness f the world interposed our subjectivity between us
and our present to the world. Then our subjectivity became what is
present to us viduality became isolation. The route to conviction in reality
through the acknowledgement of the endless presense of self
Highlight: : the strategy for achieving this unmed~ relationship shifted with
romanticism from an emphasis on the WO as object (mimesis) to the
viewer as subject (expression): "To speak our subjectivity as the route
back to our conviction in reality is to sp of romanticirm" (22). If the
Enlightenment subject was content stand and gaze through the window
frame, the romantic subject want to get closer
Highlight: : modernism went further in espousing the "cuu- less presence of the seli"
to itself.
Highlight: : efforts to achieve self-presence

Highlight: : When a viewer examines a linear-perspective painting, there remains a

critical visual distance; the window frame separates the subject from the
objects of representation. There are two ways to reduce this distance and
so to heighten the sense of immediacy: either the viewer can pass
through the window into the represented world, or the objects of
representation can come up to or even through the window and surround
the viewer.
Highlight: : Digital media have experimented with both of these strategies.

Highlight: : Virtual reality adopts the romanticism of the first. It allows the viewer to
pass through Alberti's window in an active search for reality to examine
and in some cases even to manipulate the objects of representation.
Highlight: : The second, more modernist strategy has been adopted by ubiquitous
computing and by hypermedia in general: the subjecr stays where she is,
and instead the objects of representation come to her to be appreciated
individually.
Highlight: : The goal is still immediacy through contact, but now the immediacy is
achieved when the user recognizes the multiple and mediated character
of the objects before her.
Highlight: : In three- dimensional computer graphics, the subject is defined by the

perspectives that she occupies in the virtual space. In this respect, she
is like the Enlightenment subject who was also defined by the station
point that he took up in front of the canvas or more generally by the verbal
and visual points of view that he held in his relations with the world.
Highlight: : But in her quest for immediacy, the subject in virtual space is not satis-
fied with a single point of view; instead, she seeks out the positions of
other participants and objects in that space. She understands herself as a
potentially rapid succession of points of view, as a series of immediate
Highlight: : This psychological economy ofre- mediation, in which the desire for
immediacy cannot be fulfilled by transparent media and must there-
fore be supplemented by technologies of hypermediacy, is analogous
to the Lacanian critique of desire as summarized by Slavoj iiiek (1993):
'Desire is consrituced by 'symbolic castrarion,' rhe original lorr of the
thing; the void of this loss is filled out by objetper;t a, the fan- rasy
object; this loss occun on accounr of our being 'embedded' in the
symbolic universe which derails the 'natural circuit of our needs" (3).
The double logic of remediation recapitulates this Lacanian psychic
economy.
Highlight: : experiences derived from those points of view. In the same way in hy
permedia, she is defined as a succession of relationships with variou
applications or media. She oscillates between media-moves fr window to
window, from application to application-and her ident is constituted by
those oscillations. In the first case, the subject is sured of her existence
by the ability to occupy points of view, whi the second she is assured by
her multiplication and remediation i various media or media forms that
surround her.
Highlight: : The desire for immediacy would appear to be fulfilled by the parent
technologies of straight photography, live television, and t dimensional,
immersive computer graphics. Such transparent te logies, however,
cannot satisfy that desire because they do not suc in fully denying
mediation. Each of them ends up defining itself reference to other
technologies, so that the viewer never sustains elusive state in which the
objects of representation are felt to be present.
Highlight: : Our culture tries this frontal assault on the problem of r sentation with
almost every new technology and repeatedly with familiar technologies.
When that strategy fails, a contrary stra emerges, in which we become
fascinated with the act of mediat itself.?
Highlight: : When transparent media fail to satisfy us, opaque (hyper ated) media
become necessary to our experience of ourselves.
Highlight: : When we engage ourselves with visual or verbal media, we become awar
only of the objects of representation but also of the media themse
Highlight: : Instead of trying to be in the presence of the objects of representa we

then define immediacy as being in the presence of media. This fa nation
with media works as the sublimation of the initial desire immediacy that
Cave11 identified as central to the Western trad the desire to be
immediately present to oneself.
Highlight: : the denial of mediation in transparent technologies-the attempt to get

past the medium to the unmediated red- may also reflect the denial or
subordination of the body in Western definitions of the self
Highlight: : Donna Haraway's influential cyborg is the body as remediated by vari-

ous contemporary technologies of representation.
Highlight: : the body itself functions as a medium: through traditional means such as
choice of clothing and jewelry, as well as more radical ones such as
cosmetic surgery, bodybuilding, and body piercing
Highlight: : the body becomes the material ground that carries or bears expressive
decoration;
Highlight: : such decoration appears to respect the boundary between the body and
the world.
Highlight: : our contemporary culture delights in confusing or breaking down the

boundaries between the body and the world and the body and technology
Highlight: : The reconstructed body may then become the subject of presentations
in popular media, such as film, television, and print advertising.
Highlight: : Balsamo shows how surgeons visualize the female body as an object for
cosmetic reconstruction.
Highlight: : Bal- samo contends that "new visualization technologies transform the
Highlight: : material body into avisual medium. In the process the body is fractured
and fragmented so that isolated parts can be examined visually. . . . A the
same time, the material body comes to embody the characteristic of
technological images" (56).
Highlight: : In its character as a medium, the body both remediates and remediated.
Highlight: : remediates the ostensibly less mediated bodies of earlier peri Western
culrure
Highlight: : another. strategies of both transparent immediacy and hypennediacy are

work.
Highlight: : the cultural ideal of "natural beau (57ff.). Because prospective patients do
not measure up to this id the surgeon first uses graphics to remediate the
patient's body vis and then employs the scalpel to bring this body into
agreement the visual remediation
Highlight: : the surgeon therefore realizes the ultimate gaze, one that not only
appropriates but also reconstruct
Highlight: : pursuing the ideal of natural beauty, surgeons must fragment and isolate
parts of the patient's body (Balsamo 1996, 56)
Highlight: : The situation is rather different for female bodybuilders, who are in control
of their own remediations and from the outset adopt a strategy of
hypermediacy
Highlight: : In making their bodies hypermuscular, they transgress two traditional

boundaries: they defy the cultural ideal of female beauty that women's
bodies should be soft and feminine and defy the tacit cultural conviction
that women's bodies are weak and frail in comparison with men's bodies.
In challenging both conventions, they call attention to their bodies as
media, as carriers of special culmral messages. At the same time, the
popular magazines and films work their own remediation on these
bodybuilders, often tacitly or explicitly criticizing them for their double
"transgression.
Highlight: : Orlan, Stelarc, and the transsexual Kate Bornstein,

Highlight: : She is reported to have said that she will stop her work only "when it is as
close as possible to the computer composite" (Dery 1996, 240). In other
words she is measuring her refashioning not against some "natural" ideal
of beauty, but against a highly and overtly mediated representation.
Highlight: : Stelarc's challenge is similar, as he refashions himself into Hara- way's

cyborg. As Dery (1996) describes it, "His nearly naked body plas- tered
with electrodes and trailing wires, the artist in performance bears a
striking resemblance to a Borg, one of the implacable cyhorg villains in
Star Trek: TheNext Gmeration. With his Amplified Body, Laser Eyes,
Third Hand, Automatic Arm, and Video Shadow, he bodies forth the
human-machine hybrid all of us are metaphorically becoming" (154)
Highlight: : As Stelarc himself puts it, "It is no longer meaningful to see the body as a
site for th psyche or the social but rather as a structure to be monitored
and mo fied. The body not as a subject but as an object-NOT As AN
OBJE OF DESIRE BUT AS AN OBJECT FOR DESIGNING" (cited by
Dery 19 161).
Highlight: : Balsamn (1996) describes the "process by which new i technologies

[used by the surgeon] ate articulated with ttaditio ideological beliefs about
gender-an articulation that keeps the fe body positioned as a privileged
object of a normative gaze" (
Highlight: : through strategies of hypemediacy, new media re ion the normative gaze
and its implied views of male and female tity, which is exactly what Orlan
does by remediating her body as an media display
Highlight: : transparency always passes into hyperm

Highlight: : Cave11 (1979) has argued that for the last two hundred years, we have
been pursuing not only the presence of the world to the self, but also the
presence the self to itself (22). Taking up this tradition, virtual reality and
three-dimensional graphics in general are technologies for achieving self-
presence through a newly mobilized point of view. @ p. 21 This freedom
of movement becomes the defining quality of the virtual self.
Highlight: : because the freedom to move through embodied space or cyherspace

can he the freedom to lay claim to physical and intellectual territory,
postmodern and postcolonial writers often express justifiable suspicion
ahout it.
Highlight: : Nonetheless, this same freedom can serve a more radical cultural
purpose: to enable us to occupy the position, and' therefore the point of
view, of people or creatures different from ourselves
Highlight: : To occupy multiple points of view (serially if not simultaneously) becomes

a new positive good and perhaps the major freedom that our culture can
now offer
Highlight: : You can be the mad hatter w you can be the teapot; you can move bark
andforth to the rhythm of a rung. You can be a tiny droplet in the vain or in
the river; you can be what you thoqht you ought to be all along. You can
switch yourpoint of vim to an object or a procm or another person? point
of vim in the other person? world. Arsurning multipleperspectiver is
apowful capacity; only afler young children are dmelopmmta(ly ready to
un&stand that each pro* reei from a different pmpertive can t& learn to
relate to others in an empathetic way. (Benedikt 1991, 3 72)
Highlight: : Virtual empathy can also be as radical as Lanier's suggest that the user
should learn about dinosaurs or even molecules b cupyiog their
perspectives.
Highlight: : in vi environments that allow for multiple users, any other figure, anim
object, may also be the avatar of another user.
Highlight: : empathy is everything that traditional, Enligh ment reason was not:
immediate, embodied, emotional, and cultur determined.
Highlight: : in both the dangerous and the apparently benign versions of empathetic
learning, the integrity of the self is always compromised. The borders of
the self dissolve, as it occupies the position and experiences the
problems faced by other creature
Highlight: : the freedom to he oneself is the freedom to become someone (or

something) else. Because there is no single, privileged point of view, the
self becomes a series of "other" points of view- the intersection of all the
possible points of view that can be taken in a given space
Highlight: : the space of contemporary culture-redefines the ego in its traditional sens
Highlight: : no romantic and no Freudian necessity. (There is, instead, a self akin to
William James's "pure ego" that serves as the "brand or "medium" that
marks or holds together the various mediated empirical selves that make
up the virtual self
Highlight: : aj5lmicphenornenol where the camera simulater the mwmnt of a

prrspecrive that rarely includes se@-rej2erential wisual inrpeciion of the
body as the vehicle of that perrperti
Highlight: : Virtual reality offers a remediated definition of the self as a new kind of
camera,
Highlight: : Martin Jay (1988) has pointed out that many postmodern theorists have
come to regard the eye as the most abstract and abstracting of the
senses
Highlight: : In his Meditations Descartes considered the possibility that everything he

saw (as well as heard or felt) was the product of an evil deceiver. To
achieve real knowledge, he proposed to withdraw entirely from the realm
of perception and concluded that sense perception itself was derivative
from reason rather than the reverse
Highlight: : Marcos Nod (1991),

Highlight: : The trajectwy of Wertm thought has been one movingfrom the concrete to tb
abstracr, from the body to the mind; recent thought, howwer, has been
upon us thefrailty of that Carterian distinction. The mind is theprop body,
and liver anddier with it. Everywhere we turn we see signs of thir ra tion,
and cybwspoce, in its literalplacement of the body in qacer invented by
mind, is locateddirectly upon this bluwing boundary, thisfault (227)
Highlight: : what Bourdieu and many others advocate as "embo knowledge": To

look at thought in this way [as Bourdieu doer] is to turn Derrartus down.
The centralpremire is not rhat the cogitdting mind can be certain o its
ability to beperent to itsee but rather that rhe body exists in space an and
through it3 interaction with the environmdnt definer the parameters w
which the cogitating *ind can awive at itr "rertainties." . . . What count
knowledge is also rudically rrvired, fw conscious thought becomer as b were
epiphenomenon cowerponding to the phenomenal body the body (160-
161)
Highlight: : the importance of the body for self-knowledg

Highlight: : As a technology for turning Descartes upside down, virtual reality's

wandering filmic eye reduces all abstraction to a series of visual
perspectives. What it offers in place of causal thinking is precisely that
faculty of imagination (making images) that Descartes disparages.
Highlight: : the notion of self that virtual reality and cyberspace promote. The key is to
experience the world as others do, not to retire from the distrac- tions of
the world to discover oneself as a thinking agent.
Highlight: : Instead of asserting its identity over against the world, the virtual self
repeatedly denies its own identity, its separateness from others and from
the world.
Highlight: : It does not learn by scientific study in a subject-object relationship, but by

"immersion," which produces empathy and identification.
Highlight: : seems to support the contemporary rejection of the Cvtesian self. Yet
Hayles (1993, 1994, 1995), and other postmodern and feminist critics
remain suspicious. For them, the proper alternative to Descartes's
decontextualized reason is an embodied knowledge that virtual reality
cannot achieve. Virtual real~ty threatens ro detach the user from her
body-a
Highlight: : virtual community or nates in, and must return to, the physical. . . .
Forgetting about body is an old Cartesian trick (113).
Highlight: : Simon Penny (1994), " reinforces Cartesian duality by replacing the body
with a body ima a creation of mind (for all 'objects' in VR are a product of
mind). such it is a clear continuation of the rationalist dream of disem
mind
Highlight: : Bdsamo (1996)

Highlight: : the repression of the b is technologically naturalized (126).

Highlight: : Randal Walser

Highlight: : More than any ~nechaniim yet inventd> (yberipace) willchange what humam
perceive themrelz'er to be, at a vwy funrlammtal andpevional level. In
cybirspace, there is no needto moveabout in a body like the one
youposiess inphysical reali You mayfeel more comfwtable, at$rit, with a
body like your "own" but UJ y conduct more ofyour lifi and affairs in
cyberspace your conditioned notion of a unique and irnmurable body wiM
give way to a far mm liberated notion of "body" ai something quite
dirposable an4 generally, limited. You wiN$nd that rome bodies work best
in some iituatiom while otheri work best in others. The
Highlight: : ability to radically and compellingly change onet body-image is bound to

have a deep psychological efft, calling into quertlon just what you
consider yowselfto be. (cited by Rheingold 1991, 191 )
Highlight: : For him, the importance of the body in defining the self is precisely the
reason that virtual reality will have its great impact.
Highlight: : Virtual reality will change our notion of self because we will now be
dynamic or unstable bodies.
Highlight: : Although the current technology is therefore open to the anti-ocularist

critique of the phallic gaze, that critique does nor show it to be Cartesian
Highlight: : It seems that any plausible definition of self must now deny Cartesian
detachment and rely exclusively on knowledge obtained in context and
through the senses
Highlight: : perhaps media theorist Florian Rotzer (1993) is right in arguing that
precisely because a sense of touch is hard to integrate into new digital
media, it will be regarded as the privileged sensation: "With the
audiovisual media, the sense of touch is becoming privileged, although
there have been efforts to incorporate it into VR technology. It is not the
eyes and the ean, not the forms, sounds and words, but the collision of
bodies . . . that will become the primary indication of reality experience in
the age of simulation" (124).
Highlight: : it remediates both herseY and other media as it seeks to represent the
world
Highlight: : Virtual reality functions for its contemporary user as the so-called
cinema of attractions did for filmgoers at the turn of the century.
Highlight: : Virtual reality defines the self through visible bodies, no through minds,
which do not appear in virtual worlds.
Highlight: : T interaction of technology and the body today comes not exclusively
even principally through prostheses or breast implants but rath through
the ways in which visual and verbal media present the b and participate in
the definition of the self.
Highlight: : Those W insist that the body plays an undeniable part in the definition oft
contemporary self should be prepared to recognize the mediations the
body that must also be part of that definition.
Highlight: : Transparent te nologies such as virtual reality do not simply repeat but in
fact reme ate the Cartesian self. They cannot succeed in denying the
body; inste they can only remediate it.
Highlight: : In other cases, the hypermediacy of the digital self is overt and
acknowledged-for example, in multimedia applications in which the user is
never allowed to forget the artifice that she is experiencing. In such cases,
the self is expressed in the very multiplicity and fragmentation of the
windowed style.
Highlight: : In place of the unity and consistency that we used tovalue, the "Electronic
Behavior Control Sys- tem" offers the momentarily unifying experience of
watching the piece unfold. The self of windowed multimedia is the
necessary inverse of the self of virrual reality. If applications like virtual
reality offer the user one point of view after another, hypermediated
applications like the "Electronic Behavior Control System" offer the viewer
multiple, simultaneous points of view that cannot be reconciled. The
hypermediated self is expressed in the tension of these competing
viewpoints.'
Highlight: : A sense of presence of oneself to others and of the self to itsel comes not
through immediate visual perception, as it does in virt reality, but through
the feeling of being connected to others thr the Internet.
Highlight: : immediacy can be pursued through the acknowledgment of the medium

and the genre.2
Highlight: : people engaged in this ceremony function only through their textual
mediations.
Highlight: : The text-and all each participant ever experiences is a text on his or her
screen-is saturated with an awareness of contemporary fantasy-romance.
T
Highlight: : trouble explicitly admitting that they are communicating through a

computer network and implicitly acknowledging that they are inhabiting a
fantasy.
Highlight: : In MUDs the participants are quite clear about their own mediated status:
by inserting themselves into a narrative, they are mediating themselve
Highlight: : Identity in the Age of the Internet, Turkle (1995) offers numerous
examples of the textual construction of identity in networked environments
Highlight: : Many regard their experiences in MUDs as more emotionally satisfying
than their lives in the physical world.
Highlight: : textually mediated encounters offer adventure within safe limits. But it is
also worth noting that such sex is an extreme form of remediation.
Highlight: : LamdaMOO, one character forced others to perform sexual acts: that is,
he programmed the MUD so that the prose descriptions of these
characters' actions were no longer under their control, and they were
described as having sex.
Highlight: : rape in a MUD can mean only that the participants became unwilling
rather than willing remediators of the pornographic
Highlight: : The victims, however, experienced the rape as a serious and real
violation of self precisely because their selves were constructed and
maintained through the text that now betrayed them.
Highlight: : The desire is instead for the self: for oneself to be present to others or
indeed to itself. This desire for the immediate self can be sublimated and
can reemerge as a fascination with the intricacies of programming and
inhabiting the MUD.
Highlight: : Barthes's analysis of the immediacy of photography?

Highlight: : the insistence that everything that technology can present must be
presented at one time-this is the logic of hypermediacy.
Highlight: : hypermediacy's claim to authenticity of experience.

Highlight: : not surprising thar enthusiasts should continue make the claim of novelty,
for they have inherited from modernism assumption thar a medium must
be new in order to be significant.
Highlight: : Cave11 (1979) has remarked, the task of the modern artist was alw "one
of creating not a new instance of his art, but a new medium in
Highlight: : the medium must pretend to be utterly new in order to p mote its claim of
immediacy
Highlight: : It must constitute itself as a medium t (finally) provides the unmediated

experience that all previous me sought, but failed to achieve
Highlight: : As we have shown, what is in fact new is the particular way which each
innovation rearranges and reconstitutes the meaning of e lier elements.
What is new about new media is therefore also old a familiar: that they
promise the new by remediating what has g before.
Highlight: : The true novelty would be a new medium that did not refer for its meaning
to other mediaat all. For our culture, such mediation without remediation
seems to be impossible.
Notes in Document
'Apple A10X - Wikipedia':
Highlight: : 2. "iPad Pro 10.5" Teardown" . iFixit. June 13, 2017. Retrieved June 14,
2017.
(Apple A10X - Wikipedia, p.3)
Highlight: : Cunningham, Andrew (June 12, 2017). "Review: The 10.5-inch iPad Pro is
much more "pro" than what it replaces" . Ars Technica. Condé Nast.
Retrieved June 12, 2017.
Highlight: : "iPad Pro Tech Specs" . Apple. June 5, 2017. Archived from the original on
June 5, 2017. Retrieved June 5, 2017.
Highlight: : "10.5-inch and 12.9-inch 2017 iPad Pro FAQ: Everything you need to know!"
. iMore. Retrieved 2017-06-15.
Notes in Document
'WHAT OBJECTS MEAN Second Edition ':
Highlight: : Nietzsche and Perspectivi
(WHAT OBJECTS MEAN Second Edition , p.7)
Highlight: : Peirce on Signs

Highlight: : Roland Barthes on the Semiotics of Objects

Highlight: : Conclusions
Highlight: : Functionalism
Highlight: : Uses and Gratifications Provided by Artifacts

Highlight: : Jean Baudrillard on The System of Objects

Highlight: : Needs Versus Desires: Traveling Light and Arriving Heavy

Highlight: : Marxist Theory and Alienation

Highlight: : The Role of Advertising

Highlight: : Walter Benjamin and the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction
Highlight: : Authenticity and Postmodern Thought

Highlight: : John Berger on Objects and Advertising

Highlight: : Myth and Material Culture

Highlight: : The Myth Model and Material Culture

Highlight: : Smartphones
Highlight: : Books
Highlight: : The Analyzing Artifact Advertisements Game

Highlight: : The Functions of Objects Game

Highlight: : The Myth Model Game

Highlight: : Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst, has a theory about human development that
can be used to help us understand the role that smartphones play in our
lives. In his book, Childhood and Society (1963), he offers a theory about
the eight crises we all face, at different stages in our lives, as we grow
older. I have not dealt with the two crises we face in infancy, since at those
stages we don’t use smartphones. I list Erikson’s crises, which all take the
form of polar oppositions, and then suggest the functions that smartphones
play relative to these crises. The material on the eight crises is found in his
chapter, “The Eight Ages of Man.
Highlight: : Adult Generativity/Stagnation Career, Community

Highlight: : David Brooks deals with changes that have taken place in what might be
called “intellectual affectation” (August 8, 2008:A19). There have been, he
suggests, three epochs of importance. The first, from 1400 to 1965, was
one of snobbery, in which there was a hierarchy of cultural artifacts with
works from the fine arts and opera at the highest level and the strip tease
at the lowest level. In the 1960s, he writes, high modernism was in vogue.
In the late 1960s this epoch was replaced by what he calls the “Higher
Eclectica.” This epoch was characterized by dumping the arts valued in the
epoch of snobbery in favor of a mixture of arts created by members of
“colonially oppressed out-groups.” What he is describing, though he doesn’t
mention it, is the impact of postmodernism upon culture, with its emphasis
on eclecticism and the pastiche. It was “cool” to have a record collection
with all kinds of “world” music and to decorate your house with religious
icons or totems from Africa or Thailand. “But on or about June 29, 2007,
human character changed,” Brooks writes. “That, of course, was the
release date of the first iPhone. On that date, media displaced culture.”
What that means is that the way we transmit things, media, replaced the
content of what we create, culture. Really hip and cool people can be
recognized as such because they are both early adopters and early
discarders of the newest gizmos.
Highlight: : blurred the distinction between work and play since, thanks to these
phones, it is possible to do both.
Highlight: : Marshall McLuhan (

Highlight: : Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1965:172–173)

Highlight: : Perhaps the most significant of the gifs of typography to man is that of
detachment and noninvolvement…The fragmenting and analytic power of
the printed word in our psychic lives gave us that “dissociation of
sensibility” which in the arts and literature since Cezanne and since
Baudelaire has been a top priority for elimination in every program of
reform in taste and knowledge…It was precisely the power to separate
thought and feeling, to be able to act without reacting, that split literate man
out of the tribal world of close family bonds in private and social life.
Highlight: : Donald Teall

Highlight: : (The Virtual Marshall McLuhan

Highlight: : The Mechanical Bride, which some consider to be one of the founding
documents of early cultural studies. While the Bride was not initially a
success, it introduced one aspect of McLuhan’s basic method—using
poetic methods of analysis in a quasi-poetic style to analyze popular
cultural phenomena—in short, assuming such cultural productions to be
another type of poem.
Highlight: : McLuhan distinguishes between hot media and cool media

Highlight: : There is a basic principle that distinguishes a hot medium like radio from a
cool one like the telephone, or a hot medium like the movie from a cool one
like TV. A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in “high
definition.” High definition is the state of being filled with data. A
photograph is, visually, “high definition.” A cartoon is low definition because
very little visual information is provided….Hot media are, therefore, low in
participation, and cool media are high in participation or completion by the
audience.
Highlight: : consider the differences between electronic media and print media
Highlight: : based on material found in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

Highlight: : Electronic Media Print Media the ear the eye all-at-once linearity
simultaneity interconnectedness emotion logic radio books community
individuality involvement detachment pattern recognition data
classification
Highlight: : McLuhan is famous for popularizing the notion of the global village and for
arguing that “the medium is the message,” which suggests that the impact
of the media itself is more important than the content they carry
Highlight: : Narratives play an important role in our lives. As I define them, narratives are
stories, generally with a linear or sequential structure, which pervade our
media, our popular culture, our conversations, and our dreams
Highlight: : Laurel Richardson, who has written extensively on narratives, explains their
significance to us (1990:118): “Narrative is the primary way through which
humans organize their experiences into temporally meaningful
episodes….Narrative is both a mode of reasoning and a mode of
representation. People can ‘apprehend’ the world narratively and people
can ‘tell’ about the world narratively.” She adds, “According to Jerome
Bruner (1986) narrative reasoning is one of the two basic and universal
human cognition modes.
Highlight: : As Ito explains, “as the Japanese read manga and experience various
events, social situations, and emotions vicariously, they not only entertain
themselves, but also learn social skills and gain pragmatic information and
knowledge that are necessary for everyday life” (392–393)
Highlight: : manga characterized by “intense, often sordid realism frequently focusing

upon lust and violence.” They explain the significance of manga in the
following manner: The fundamental sociopsychological motive that can
be attributed to the comic medium’s success is its instant provision of
escape from frustration and monotony into a sensorily exciting, self-
affirming dream world. The charm is achieved by turning the reader into a
voyeur of almost film-like action and forcing his immersion into the
experiences of the characters through emotionalized and highly dynamic
situations of tension. (1986:168)
Highlight: : There is a tradition of pornographic art work in Japanese culture, so seeing

sexually explicit representations of sexual relationships is not new. One
fascinating erotic Japanese image shows an octopus having sex with a
woman, with its various tentacles caressing her breasts and one
penetrating her vagina.
Highlight: : there are intertextual relationships between ancient Japanese

pornographic illustrations and what one finds in manga.
Highlight: : Let me suggest some of the more important uses and gratifications that
manga supply. To be amused. Manga entertain their readers with
narratives that interest them. To experience extreme emotions in a guilt-
free setting. Many manga are full of violence and sexuality, but readers
don’t feel any guilt in reading these texts. To find distraction and
diversion. The stories in manga draw people into their own world and let
readers escape, if only for a short while, from the burdens and worries of
their everyday life. To obtain outlets for sexual drives in a risk-free manner.
The sexuality that plays a major role in many manga speak to and help
assuage the sexual drives and desires of the readers. To share
experiences with others. People who read the same manga can talk about
them, the same way that people who watch the same television programs
often talk about the shows they’ve seen. From a Freudian psychoanalytic
perspective, manga are “id” texts which escape the strictures of the
superego because they are works of fiction, which enables the egos of
manga readers to ward off strictures from their superegos by suggesting
that manga are works of art that function as a kind of catharsis and enable
readers to deal with their sexual drives in a culturally acceptable manner.
One might even suggest that manga are similar to dreams and, as such,
provide scholars with valuable insights into the Japanese psyche.
Notes in Document
'the medium is the massage':
Highlight: : The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping
and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of
our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and re- evaluate practically
every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted
(the medium is the massage, p.9)
Highlight: : Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by
which men communicate than by the content of the communication
Highlight: : The alphabet and print technology fostered and encouraged a fragmenting
process, a process of specialism and of detachment. Electric technology
fosters and encourages unification and involvement.
Highlight: : The older training of observation has become quite irrelevant in this new
time, because it is based on psychological responses and concepts
conditioned by the former technology—mechanization.
Highlight: : Anxiety" is, in great part, the result of trying to do today's job with
yesterday's tools-with yesterday's concepts
Highlight: : " In the study of ideas, it is necessary to remember that insistence on hard-
headed clarity issues from sentimental feeling, as it were a mist, cloaking
the perplexities of fact. Insistence on clarity at all costs is based on sheer
superstition as to the mode in which human intelligence functions. Our
reason- ings grasp at straws for premises and float on gossamers for
deductions." —A. N. Whitehead, "Adventures in Ideas."
Highlight: : When two seemingly disparate elements are imaginatively poised, put in
apposition in new and unique ways, startling discoveries often result
Highlight: : Survival is not possible if one approaches his environment, the social
drama, with a fixed, un- changeable point of view—the witless repetitive
response to the unperceived.
Highlight: : remedial control, born out of knowledge of media and their total effects
on all of us, must be exerted.
Highlight: : Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts. Now
all the world's a sage
Highlight: : Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of "time" and "space" and
pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men
Highlight: : The old civic, state, and national groupings have become un- workable.
Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than "a place
for everything and everything in its place." You can't go home agai
Highlight: : the educational estab- lishment where information is scarce but ordered
and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and
schedules. It is naturally an environment much like any factory set-up
with its inventories and assembly lines
Highlight: : Under conditions of electric circuitry, all the fragmented job patterns tend to
blend once more into involving and demanding roles or forms of work that
more and more resemble teaching, learning, and "human" service, in the
older sense of dedicated loyalty
Highlight: : Politics offers yesterday's answers to today's questions

Highlight: : All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal,
political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social
consequences that they leave no part of us un- touched, unaffected,
unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and
cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work
as environments
Highlight: : Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense

perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and
act— the way we perceive the world. When these ratios change,
men change.
Highlight: : The fragmenting of activities, our habit of thinking in bits and parts—
"specialism"—reflected the step- by-step linear departmentalizing process
inherent in the technology of the alphabet.
Highlight: : Until writing was invented, man lived in acoustic space: boundless,
directionless, horizonless, in the dark of the mind, in the world of emotion,
by primordial intuition, by terror. Speech is a social chart of this bog.
The goose quill put an end to talk. It abolished mystery; it gave architecture
and towns; it brought roads and armies, bureaucracy. It was the basic
metaphor with which the cycle of civilization began, the step from the dark
into the light of the mind. The hand that filled the parchment page built a
city
Highlight: : Printing, a ditto device confirmed and extended the new visual stress. It
provided the first uniformly repeatable "commodity," the first assembly
line—mass production
Highlight: : It created the portable book, which men could read in privacy and in
isolation from others. Man could now inspire—and conspire
Highlight: : Like easel painting, the printed book added much to the new cult of
individualism. The private, fixed point of view became possible and literacy
con- ferred the power of detachment, non-involvement
Highlight: : Ours is a brand-new world of allatonceness. "Time" has ceased, "space"

has vanished. We now live in a global village...a simultaneous happening.
Highlight: : Our electrically-configured world has forced us to move from the habit of
data classification to the mode of pattern recognition. We can no longer
build serially, block-by-block, step-by-step, because instant communication
insures that all factors of the environment and of experience coexist in a
state of active interplay
Highlight: : We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire
human environment as a work of art, as a teaching machine designed to
maximize perception and to make everyday learning a process of
discovery.
Highlight: : Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes
which are invisible. The groundrules, pervasive structure, and over-all pat-
terns of environments elude easy perception. Anti- environments, or
countersituations made by artists, provide means of direct attention and
enable us to see and understand more clearly. The interplay
Highlight: : The main obstacle to a clear understanding of the effects of the new
media is our deeply embedded habit of regarding all phenomena from a
fixed point of view. We speak, for instance, of "gaining perspective."
This psychological process derives unconsciously from print technology
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight: : We impose the form of the old on the content of the new
Highlight: : We simply are not equipped with earlids. Where a visual space is an
organized continuum of a uniformed connected kind, the ear world is a
world of simultaneous relationships.
Highlight: : We employ visual and spatial metaphors for a great many everyday
expressions. We insist on employ- ing visual metaphors even when we
refer to purely psychological states, such as tendency and dura- tion. For
instance, we say thereafter when we really mean thenafter, always when
we mean at all times. We are so visually biased that we call our wisest
men visionaries, or seers!
Highlight: : the environment that man creates becomes his medium for defining his
role in it. The invention of type created linear, or sequential, thought,
separating thought from action. Now, with TV and folk singing, thought
and action are closer and social involvement is greater. We again live in a
village.
Notes in Document
'The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations':
Highlight: : the theoretical disappearance of the object-based digital interface, its re-
emergence as human body and the issues related to power, control, and
ownership that follow it in these environments.
(The Digital Interface and New Media Art Installations, p.11)
Highlight: : what artistic experimentation with digital interfaces might reveal about the
changing relationship between humans and technology
Highlight: : the digital interface, as it is currently defi ned, as an instrument that acts
and reacts to human input is inad- equate.
Highlight: : a necessary and important condition of everyday life, in that it forms,

informs and structures our relationship with technology.
Highlight: : a critical investigation into the aesthetic aspects of the device in digital
artworks can help us understand and possibly reconfi gure our rela-
tionship with technology.
Highlight: : surface-level aesthetics (representation, expression, form).

Highlight: : The “disappearance” of the object- based digital interface and its
emergence as human body in interactive new media installations points to
what I will argue to be the particular potential of creative uses of the
interface in interactive new media installations to intervene in and possibly
destabilize conventional structures and narratives around digital media
technology.
Highlight: : when interfaces are positioned, in academic and popular rhetoric, as

invisible, shape-shifting things – when they “vanish into the background”
and then suddenly re-emerge as human bodies – they become a matter
of control and regulation. More precisely, they become a matter of power
and control over bodies as well as a matter of regulation of
communication, interaction, knowledge, and movement in time and space
in both interactive new media installations and in everyday life.
Highlight: : By investigating how interfaces exert control over bodies, as well as

regulate communication, interaction, knowledge, and movement, I also
examine what artistic experimentation with interfaces might reveal about
the changing relationship between humans and technology
Highlight: : what artistic experimentation with interfaces might reveal about the
changing relationship between humans and technology
Highlight: : what bodies, both human and non-human, are, who regulates the shape
or form they assume and who controls the narratives around them.
Highlight: : to introduce a different approach to the study of the interface by examining
its use in aesthetic contexts
Highlight: : to interrogate why the aesthetic processes that bring it into being actually
matter in interactive new media installations.
Highlight: : The word “interface,” Seung-hoon Jeong (2013) writes, became popular in
the fi eld of computer science in the 1960s, referring to the “interface
between machine components (hardware or software) and/or the point
between these technical machines and human users.
Highlight: : Interfaces can be anything from tangible objects to human body parts, and
to graphic designs. The word “interface” can also denote methods of
technological exchange and modes of communication.
Highlight: : Florian Cramer and Matthew Fuller (2008)

Highlight: : fi ve different types of interfaces: (1) hardware that connects users to

hardware; (2) hardware that connects hardware to hardware; (3) software or
hardware-embedded logic that connects hardware to software; (4) software
that connects software to software (APIs); and (5) symbolic and linguistic
handles, which make software accessible to users via text, sounds, visual
representations or the re-appropriation of familiar physical objects –
otherwise known as “the user interface” (UI). 10
Highlight: : (5) symbolic and linguistic handles, which make software accessible to
users via text, sounds, visual representations or the re-appropriation of
familiar physical objects – otherwise known as “the user interface” (UI). 10
Highlight: : in the humanities (Ishii and Ullmer, 1997; Blackwell, 2006; Cramer and
Fuller, 2008; Dourish and Bell, 2011).
Highlight: : What exactly is a digital interface? And what does it actually do in

interactive new media installations?
Highlight: : earlier writings on this subject exist (Dinkla, 1994; Penny et al., 2001), and
although new texts appear in this area annually (Mondloch, 2010; Andersen
and Pold, 2011; Galloway, 2012; Jeong, 2013; Farman, 2013; Emerson,
2014; Hookway, 2014; Andersen and Pold, 2018)
Highlight: : I use the following defi nition of interactive new media installations:
interactive new media installations are technologically based artworks that
require subjects to make a physical contribution to the completion of the
artwork via interaction with a digital interface.
Highlight: : digital interfaces are also symbolic in that they deploy visual and linguistic
metaphors (fi le-folders as icons, the word “desktop” to describe the objects
Highlight: : located on computer screens) that, as Cramer and Fuller argue, are used to
“hide, and condition the asymmetry between the elements conjoined” as
well as describe the “condensations of computational power that
computers embody.” 17 Thus, they posit “the term interface emphasizes
the representation or the re-articulation of a process occurring at another
scalar layer.” 18 Interfaces, for Cramer and Fuller, are not just tools for
facilitating connections; they are also processes that “articulate, fi lter, and
organize the activities modelled and modulated by the interface.”
Highlight: : main objective of this book is to develop an understanding of how the

interface can be seen as an important actor in positioning and (re)shaping
specifi c ways of relat- ing to the subject, to technology, to artistic practice
and to others. In simpler terms, I am not so much concerned with
providing a technical description of what the digital interface does or can
do (although this issue is important and will be discussed); I am primarily
interested in examining what a digital interface may be, and in exploring
potential ways of thinking and doing that it could possibly bring about when
theorized in non-instrumental ways, from within aesthetic contexts.
Highlight: : a dynamic, hybrid, aesthetic and cultural process. The interface then is a
threshold, a mediator, and a boundary, but in a more complex sense than
something that allows a viewer/participant access to a distinct space, a
technological instrument that controls an entity’s behavior, or a device
that shows us glimpses of something (an image, a snippet of code, an
artistic practice)
Highlight: : Lori Emerson’s (2014) defi nition of the interface as a technology that
mediates relationships between entities and the aesthetic objects they
produce, as well as the technical machine-based processes that take place
below the surface.
Highlight: : 20 I take Emerson’s defi nition further, suggesting that the interface
mediates, and therefore creates relationships, between
viewer/participants, artists and artworks as well as infl uencing the
movements and perceptions of those interacting with it. In this way, I am
not simply proposing a more expansive defi nition of the digital interface in
interactive new media installations; I also critically question the relation-
ship between art, technology and viewer/participants. Specifi cally, I look at
how this relationship establishes systems of interaction, forms of
spectatorship, and modes of thinking, and how the rising popularity of the
interface, and the disappearance of it, informs the conditions of
contemporary new media artistic practice
Highlight: : New media art is a subcategory of digital media art; it refers to artworks
that exploit particular properties of digital media technologies and use
them as a medium, rather than as a tool to automate previous artistic
processes and practices (i.e. software like Photoshop, Maya, and After
Effects).
Highlight: : Another path, I would argue, connects notions of performativity, audience

participation and embodied interaction found in early feminist,
performance, and body art that rely on what Amelia Jones (1998) terms
“interpretation-as-exchange” to early cyberart works that require the
audience to make a contribution of some sort to the completion of the art
work. 26 However, unlike in some body art performances, audience
participation and embodied interaction in new media art is not meant to
decenter Cartesian subjectivity or challenge notions of exclusionism and
Kantian disinterestedness found in conventional art history and criticism
(although some new media artists do deploy interactivity in their
installations for exactly these reasons). 27 Instead, interactivity is used,
by some new media artists, in order to comment on the use of computer-
based technology in contemporary society. In this way interactive new
media installations can be seen as self-referential, in that they comment
on or critique themselves.
Highlight: : the history of digital media art should be seen, as Paul suggests, as a set of
interconnected narratives and processes that feed back on each other and
intersect at certain points.
Highlight: : experimental,
Highlight: : non-linear
Highlight: : open-ended narratives
Highlight: : forms, modes of interaction, interfaces, and sometimes creators

Highlight: : works in which these elements are put into different and critical
relationships.
Highlight: : by creatively pushing forward both the technical and formal aspects of the
medium through a juxtaposition of aesthetics, computation and bodies
(both human and technological), and creatively exploring the relationship
between the three.
Highlight: : linear accounts suggest fi nality, thus inscribing, to an extent,

technologically based mediums into linear developmental narratives of
media and technology.
Highlight: : Questioning these perceptions challenges traditional Western notions of

art history and criticisms which claim that technologically based art is
simply a visual process, production or sensation, allowing different, more
performative and body-based lineages of the movement to come to the
fore.
Highlight: : Many different scholars, from N. Katherine Hayles (1999a, 2017) and
Amelia Jones (2006, 2012) to Nathanial Stern (2013) and Kate Mondloch
(2018), have stressed the importance that the body and embodiment play
in new media art.
Highlight: : new media art goes beyond the visual register that contemporary art
history, criticism, and society tends to operate on.
Highlight: : interactive new media installations are not exclusively visual. New media art
creates embodied and performative modes of existence and identifi cation.
Therefore, new media art as a movement is heavily infl uenced by
embodied and performative art practices.
Highlight: : six dis- tinguishable yet interrelated theoretical iterations of digital

interfaces commonly deployed in interactive new media installations: the
aesthetic interface, the agential interface, the embodied interface, the
cybernetic interface, the ubiquitous interface and the implanted interface.
These interfaces, briefl y discussed below, directly relate to the six key
concepts (aesthetics, agency, embodiment, cybernetics, ubiquity, and
interiority
Highlight: : The Aesthetic Interface

Highlight: : broadly defi ned as a philosophical mode of engagement with, and
experience of, art.
Highlight: : Sean Cubitt’s (1998, 2005, 2016)

Highlight: : understandings of digital aesthetics as the mediated experience of time to

theorize this concept.
Highlight: : aesthetics does not just shape our experience of digital artworks; it also
shapes our interactions with, and our experience of, the interface.
Highlight: : we might begin to make sense of the interface in interactive new media
installations as a fi eld of critical inquiry, as a cultural problem to be
examined, rather than a technology to be studied.
Highlight: : not about the object itself; rather, it is about the systems – technological,
philosophical, embodied, and socio-political – that permit, shape, and
produce the interface and the wider issues such as interaction and agency
that surround it. In short, aesthetics is about the mediated experience of time
that the relationship between the artist, the artwork, the interface and the
audience creates.
Highlight: : critical exploration of the processes built into them

Highlight: : The Embodied Interface

Highlight: : Current interface aesthetics, as Jeong (2013) writes, “emphasizes that the
material interface with digital code often remains meaningless until we
access it through our physiological sensory organs.”
Highlight: : the viewer/participant is not only accessing information, through

participation, but contributing aspects of her own evolving material ontology
to her experience through her engagement with and embodiment of
technology
Highlight: : Amelia Jones (2012) and Jean-Luc Nancy (2000)

Highlight: : the use of the embodied interface in aesthetic settings can illuminate the
role technology plays in the co-constitution of the human.
Highlight: : how the use of the interface in interactive new media installations positions
the relationship between the body and technology as a co-constitutive
and collaboratively produced experience.
Highlight: : unstable, uncertain and to a certain extent open to reconfi guration by the
viewer/participant.
Highlight: : interactions that emerge out of the relationship between the

viewer/participant and the digital interface are dynamic, open-ended and
performed.
Highlight: : in-process happenings that emerge out of, and with, the
viewer/participants’ interactions with the interface
Highlight: : it is the specifi c events and effects that the relationship between the body
and technology helps create that bring the digital interface into being, thus
allowing it to actually “matter”
Highlight: : The Agential Interface

Highlight: : the multiple types of agency, as well as bodies, at play in the articulation
of the interface
Highlight: : an expansion of the notions of agency beyond their traditional humanist

conceptualizations.
Highlight: : new media installations become a testing ground for this conceptual
expansion.
Highlight: : Bernard Stiegler (1998) states that Western philosophy “at its very origin
and up until now . . . has repressed technics as an object of thought.
Technics is the unthought.
Highlight: : ideas about technology in Western philosophy are constituted on the

basis of a false separation between the philosophical concepts of
episteme (human knowledge) and techne (art or craft).
Highlight: : “technical beings” lack an ontological status.

Highlight: : Stiegler posits that humans have access to “originary knowledge.” 36 For
this reason, he states that humans can only experience themselves
through technology.
Highlight: : technology destabilizes notions of the “originary human,” instrumentality,

and interiority.
Highlight: : humans have never been, and can never be, separate from technology
because they are fundamentally constituted by technology.
Highlight: : “technical beings” lacking an ontological status raise important questions

about the agency of the non-human to the fore.
Highlight: : agency is not merely confi ned to humans in the clas- sic Aristotelian
sense, but encompasses the non-human as well.
Highlight: : there are multiple agents and agencies (both non-human and human) at play
in the construction and deployment of interfaces
Highlight: : These agents and agencies are not neutral

Highlight: : they aid in the articulation and construction of the way in which subjects
conceptualize and classify entities, as well as the way in which they
experience and interact with interfaces
Highlight: : Instruction and the Interface
Highlight: : instruction is executed and inscribed, as a method of power and control

Highlight: : through the cybernetic interface

Highlight: : a mode of transmitting instruction

Highlight: : The interface may be regarded as a cybernetic tool that simply controls
interaction, limits access and regulates viewing habits.
Highlight: : in interactive new media installations, as viewer/participants have the ability

Highlight: : to resist or intervene in the instruction given and generate moments of

rupture in the spaces they are located in.
Highlight: : shifts from the cybernetic transfer- ence of immaterial data to the embodied
actions of the viewer/participant.
Highlight: : the viewer/participant, rather than the interface, becomes the locus of
interaction
Highlight: : the cybernetic interface can provide options for viewer/participant

intervention via resistance and/or subversion of instruction.
Highlight: : can alter the dominant metaphors and models

Highlight: : viewer/participant resistance has the ability to allow for certain destabilizing
effects, such as the creation of a different dialogue between the
viewer/participant and the digital interface through the modifi cation of the
underlying frameworks that com- pose the relationship between the human
and the machine.
Highlight: : Jones’s (2001) theorization of new technologies

Highlight: : because the conceptual frameworks for understanding the relationship

between the body and technology have changed.
Highlight: : The Ubiquitous Interface

Highlight: : Mark Weiser (1991)

Highlight: : the seamless integration of technology into every place, object, building,
and body
Highlight: : focusing the subject’s attention away from the “single box” allows technology
to “fade into the background,” thus rendering it invisible.
Highlight: : focus on smaller details instead of foregrounding the “attractiveness” of

the technology being used.
Highlight: : makes itself the center of attention

Highlight: : Theories of technology that promote invisibility, as N. Katherine Hayles

(1999a) posits, are worrisome because they render the human body as
excess “meat” and treat human consciousness as something separate
from the human form.
Highlight: : highly problematic, not only because of the disembodiment that comes
with them, but also because they erase the aesthetic processes and
relationships (i.e. the attractiveness) that bring them into being.
Highlight: : widens the separation between the art work and the subject, the artist and
technology.
Highlight: : the interface has productive capacities, and these capacities appear not
merely through mediating “the world,” or disappearing from it, but through
the subject’s ability to interact in conjunction with and embody it.
Highlight: : The Implanted Interface

Highlight: : linking the outside of the body to the inside in an attempt to render it
transparent and, in some cases, to erase bodies that do not conform to
normalized standards.
Highlight: : allow the viewer/participant to begin to (re)confi gure the key concepts of
agency, identity, embodiment, and the self
Highlight: : humanist myths of wholeness (of the body, of the human) and innocence
(of technology)
Highlight: : agency, autonomy, and embodiment are not universal concepts.

Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight:
Highlight: : the digital interface in this work emerges out of, and in conjunction with,
the viewer/participant’s interactions with it, and in doing this it generates
contradictions and undecidability, thus providing us with alternative
possibilities and strategies for conceptualizing and interacting with the digital
interface.
Highlight: : the term “digital interface” is the name given to the active form by those who
create, analyze, and use it, and that draws upon, produces, and
constantly reproduces the complex and dynamic processes that constitute
it.
Highlight: : The digital interface, then, as exemplifi ed above, becomes both an active
and integral part of the relationships that it contains and remediates, as
well as a deeply entangled part of the system that constitutes the
interactive new media installation. This system includes the artists, the
viewer/participant, the interface, and the interactive new media instal-
lation itself.
Highlight: : a much more networked model of the digital interface

Highlight: : one that (re)positions the relationship between the digital interface and
the viewer/participant as co-constituted and relational.
Highlight: : A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (London: John Wiley &
Sons, 2016)
Notes in Document
'POST-DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE NEW
AESTHETIC':
Highlight: : Medial Orientations: A Cautionary Tale
(POST-DIGITAL RHETORIC AND THE NEW AESTHETIC, p.7)
Highlight: : The New Aesthetic and (Post-)Digital Rhetoric

Highlight: : Rhetorical Ecologies and New Aestheticism

Highlight: : Barbara Maria Stafford

Highlight: : the dominant literate and linguistic perspectives in culture had led to a
bias in which printed words were intrinsically (though by no means
naturally) coupled with reason and “introspective depth,” while visual
aesthetics and image-based representations (i.e., the practice of imaging)
were viewed as a kind of “dumbing down” (4).
Highlight: : “verbalizing binaries,” like signifier/signified, “turned noumenal and

phenomenal experience into the product of language” (5), which not only
reinscribed a Carte- sian separation of the mind and body but also
routinely “collaps[ed] diverse phenomenological performances . . . into
interpretable texts without sensory diversity” (6)
Highlight: : What gets elided in these orientations, according to Stafford, is “the

developmental link between perception and thought” (6), which is pre-
cisely what good imaging work attempts to foreground.
Highlight: : not attempting to delegitimize writing (or the study of linguistics); rather,
she was trying to grasp the “genuine nature” of a different set of
representational and communicational values
Highlight: : cre-
Highlight: : ating a space for reimagining the power of imaging and, in so doing, free-
ing “graphicacy” and the realm of the visual aesthetic from its “subordinate
[position] to literacy” (5).
Highlight: : validity) to imaging itself—a rich and “fascinating modality for configuring
and conveying ideas”
Highlight: : If the age of computerism, as Stafford referred to the turn of the

millennium, was to be dominated by image-based mediascapes, then a new
order was required.
Highlight: : arguing for the epistemic value of imaging—embracing the aesthetic

dimension as a way of knowing and accounting for the various impacts of
critical and creative media on human consciousness
Highlight: : a literacy for everything!) But for all their administrative appeal and cache,
what resides at the core of these varied “literacies,” as rhetoric and
composition scholar Kathleen Blake Yancey intimated in “Made Not Only
in Words: Composition in a New Key,”1 is the attempt (among
scholars) to bring “inside” the academy what is otherwise a series of
techniques and techné developing and circulating among a digital public
“outside” academic walls (see also Benkler2 ).
Highlight: : to adopt a literacy-orientation as the primary (and sometimes only)

response to new mediating technologies and the human–technology
relationships they introduce is, at best, short-sighted, and, at worst,
egregious in how it limits thinking and practice
Highlight: : Anne Wysocki has argued, always emerge “out of existing technologies
and out of existing material economies, patterns, and habits” (8).
Therefore, in its initial moment, the cavemen had little recourse but to
think of the wheel in terms of a previous technology with which they were
familiar: the platform.
Highlight: : is being a platform part of its affordances? Yes. Can it work as a
platform? Technically. Does it make sense that the cavemen made sense
of the wheel as a platform? Absolutely. But does this make it any less
absurd? No.
Highlight: : the current “caveman’s wheel” is the advent of new mediating

technologies. And much like the cavemen, when rhetoricians approach
new mediating technologies from the perspective of literacy, they too end
up trying to carry the wheel
Highlight: : Jenny Bay and Thomas Rickert argued in “Dwelling with New Media,” is
an engagement that affords new mediating technologies their own
ontological weight and/or rhetorical agency3 —approaches that allow
one to attune to technologies on their own terms.
Highlight: : new mediating technologies as partners in a symbiotic engagement, not

as neutral servants to a human will.
Highlight: : attuning to the intuitions, implications, and insinuations of the techno-

phenomenon known as the New Aesthetic as a way to expose new
practices and proclivities for twenty-first-century rhetoricians.
Highlight: : takes stock of contemporary mediascapes by immersing the inquiry in

what media studies scholar and critical theorist David M. Berry refers to
as the “inconspicuous surface-level expressions” and media artifacts of
the everyday—which, he argues in “The Postdigital Constellation,” allows
one to better grasp the ontological, ideological, and epistemological dimen-
sions of a given epoch (50).
Highlight: : a different kind of aesthetic sensibility and creative practice manifesting in
art, culture, commerce, media, and the like
Highlight: : James Bridle began capturing examples of what he saw as a “new

aesthetic”—moments and manifestations that situated com- putationality
and related elements of the network apparatus as increasingly
aestheticized values.
Highlight: : Curt Cloninger argued in “A Manifesto for a Theory of the New Aesthetic
Highlight: : the residue of the digital in people’s

Highlight: : everyday lives

Highlight: : rich complexities in contemporary human–technology assemblages—

adding depth to how one might understand the techno-human capacities
that individuals possess for experiencing and making sense of the
(mediated) world.
Highlight: : explore, explicate, and expand the critical and creative impulses of the
New Aesthetic (as archive and rhetorical ecology), doing so not simply as
an extended examination of the New Aesthetic but rather to delineate and
leverage its operative contours and position them as loose guides for the
doing of rhetoric in a post-digital age.
Highlight: : the pseudo-continuum that exists from new media studies to post-digital
aesthetics to the New Aesthetic.
Highlight: : parallel with Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 considerations. The web (or Web 1.0)
was fairly static (primarily a client-based internet), while Web 2.0 moved the
world toward a dynamic social web. Web 3.0 is yet something else,
involving, as media arts scholar Virginia Kuhn has argued in “Web Three
Point Oh: The Virtual Is the Real,” at least three common approaches: a
shift from indexical to semantic web, an attunement to an increasingly
visually saturated culture (i.e., “imageworlds”; see also Stafford), and an
orientation toward ubiquitous computing and the ways in which it breaks
down any digital/real distinction (1).
Highlight: : Lukasz Mirocha contends, in “Communica- tion Models, Aesthetics, and

Ontology of the Computational Age,” that the New Aesthetic is “a
movement rooted in Web 2.0 culture,” owing to how it operationalizes the
“logic[s] of the hyperlinked interface and freely shareable information”
(63).
Highlight: : (more about where it is than about rhetorical considerations of how it is or

ontological considerations of what it is)
Highlight: : Kuhn explicitly looks at how Web 3.0 technologies call into question the very
distinctions between the virtual and the real. While she does not address
the New Aesthetic in any capacity, many of the core gestures she makes
of Web 3.0 have touchstones with the New Aes- theticism
Highlight: : new media (and new media principles) took shape on the front edge of
Web 1.0 technologies and solidi- fied, more or less, in the Web 2.0 era;
post-digital (and post-digital aesthetics) took shape somewhere between
the coming of Web 2.0 technologies and the Web 3.0 turn; and the New
Aesthetic was of a different moment yet, taking shape in a culture
operating in (if not beyond) the Web 3.0 mobile, techno- cultural scene
Highlight: : the result of multigenerational patchwork, which is methodologically

similar to much in the scholarly world (e.g., digital literacy), is that more
than occasion- ally one is dealing with a major corporate computational
structure operating on a piece of programming code written twenty to
thirty years ago.
Highlight: : like hitching a Boeing 747 to a team of horses in order to get it up in the
air—and what the New Aesthetic seems to be doing is highlighting the
horseshit on the runway.
Highlight: : the rhetorical limits of any patchwork concepts and structures that other
medial orientations might provide. These other frameworks may help
contextualize and even operationalize the rhetorical dimensions of the
New Aesthetic, but the goal will be to explore the New Aesthetic as a rhetori-
cal ecology and to articulate its circulating intensities as operative guides for
post-digital rhetoric.
Highlight: : a level of screen essentialism

Highlight: : considerations of remediation to bear on (a) the very experience of the

pixel, and (b) how something like the New Aesthetic helps situate the
rhetorical value (and significance) of the pixel itself.
Highlight: : attempts to demonstrate a more collaborative relationship between

humans and technologies, and it reconfigures the rhetorical practices of
post- digital making in terms of a willingness to play rather than the long-
standing orientation toward a will to mastery.
Highlight: : hyperawareness of mediation
Highlight: : the rhetorical value of hypermediation (in the artifacts themselves and in
audience expectations), to call attention to the potential of crafting
hyperrhetorical mediations, and to introduce the very necessity of moving
away from practices rooted in ekphra- sis toward those more firmly
grounded in experience design.
Highlight: : introduces the New Aes- thetic, locates its value for rhetoric, situates it as
its own rhetorical ecology, and uses its rhetorical dimensions to help call
to attention its operative contours. Then, working with each contour one
by one, it introduces their complexities, unpacks their value for
understanding the rhetorical capacities of human–technology
assemblages, and positions them as a guide for the practices of post-
digital rhetoric.
Highlight: : The first contour deals with the blurring of the digital/real divide and the
very need for an ecological orientation. The second shows how
technological values become human sensibilities and, in so doing,
reshape rhetorical practices. The third highlights an altogether different ori-
entation to making—pointing to the collaborative (rather than controlling)
partnerships among human–technology productions as well as to the
generative value of the novice and the need to focus on human–
technology relations. The fourth foregrounds the mediation itself and how
contemporary media
Highlight: : tions play within the hypermediacy of their own medial practices, fostering
awareness, working rhetorically, and inviting specific kinds of relationships
and expectations from specific kinds of audiences. Together, the contours
offer something akin to “a rhetoric” for post-digital knowing, doing, and
making,
Highlight: : seeks not to raise further alarm about the mechanization of human
bodies, nor to reinscribe any particular tool/user paradigm, but rather to
sincerely inquire after the human–technology relationships at the center of
so many cultural and com- mercial activities today.
Highlight: : first, to understand the impact of emergent ordering principles,

representational practices, privileged perspectives, and technological
values (aesthetic or algorith- mic, material or mathematical) on human
ways of being in (and representing) the world; and second, to capture
something of an “enhanced” posthumanism taking shape in today’s
digitally saturated moment.
Highlight: : while the focus of this work is on the intersections and interpenetrations of
humans and technologies and the object is the New Aesthetic, the output
(the contributions and scholarly interests) leans necessarily toward
rhetoric, particularly the inventive practices central to rhetoric in a post-
digital age.
Highlight: : James Bridle

Highlight: : a new aesthetic sensibility and creative practice manifesting in art,
culture, commerce, media, and the like. The main thrust of this aesthetic
involved everyday working creatives leveraging—as model, metaphor,
and meme—the forms, functions, and infrastructures of computers and
network culture.
Highlight: : Tumblr account2 (the New Aesthetic archive),

Highlight: : Bridle’s artifacts varied so extensively in style, purpose, and delivery that
there was little consistency among their critical features and aesthetic
dimensions, making it difficult, if not impossible, to define.
Highlight: : Bruce Sterling argued in “An Essay on the New Aesthetic,”

Highlight: : a new kind of art practice and cultural critique—if not a twenty-first-
century rhetorical orientation—calling attention to human relationships
with technologies, human acts of mediation, the systems and protocols
that produce particular computational representations, and the human
viewpoints that frame those considerations.
Notes in Document
'strange tools':
Highlight: : the opposition between two different ways of thinking about visual
experience.
(strange tools, p.7)
Highlight: : the scientist’s way, seeing happens in the brain, thanks to the way the
brain manages to make sense of information available on the retina.
Highlight: : the artist’s way, seeing isn’t something that happens automatically, or for
free; we are too liable not to see even what is there. Seeing is an
achievement, our achievement, the achievement of making contact with
what there is. We can fail to see
Highlight: : I have sought to develop a new way of understanding perception.

Highlight: : Seeing, according to the enactive or actionist position that I have been
working out, is not something that happens in our brains, or anywhere else,
for that matter; it is something we do, or make, or achieve. And like
everything else we achieve, we do so only against the background of our
skills, knowledge, situation, and environment, including our social
environment.
Highlight: : Seeing, I have come to realize, and so I’ve been urging in my writing, is
more like climbing a tree, or reading a book, than it is like digesting what
you’ve eaten
Highlight: : Science and philosophy, to the extent that they concern themselves with
art, tend to do so from on high. They seek to explain art, to treat art as a
phenomenon to be analyzed. Maybe we’ve been overlooking the possibility
that art can be our teacher, or at least our collaborator. Not because art is
cryptoscience, but because it is its own manner of investigation and its own
legitimate source of knowledge
Highlight: : What might the character of the knowledge at which art aims be?
Highlight: : art provides us an opportunity to catch ourselves in the act of achieving our
conscious lives, of bringing the world into focus for perceptual (and other
forms of) consciousness.
Highlight: : gives us an opportunity to move from not seeing to seeing, or from seeing
to seeing more or seeing differently.
Highlight: : animated by three ideas.

Highlight: : art is not a technological practice; however, it presupposes such practices.
Works of art are strange tools. Technology is not just something we use or
apply to achieve a goal, although this is right as a first approximation.
Technologies organize our lives in ways that make it impossible to conceive
of our lives in their absence; they make us what we are. Art, really, is an
engagement with the ways our practices, techniques, and technologies
organize us, and it is, finally, a way to understand our organization and,
inevitably, to reorganize ourselves.
Highlight: : The job of art, its true work, is philosophical. This is the second animating
idea. Art is a philosophical practice. And philosophy—artists will like this, I’m
not so sure about philosophers—is an artistic practice. This is because both
art and philosophy—superficially so different—are really species of a
common genus whose preoccupation is with the ways we are organized
and with the possibility of reorganizing ourselves.
Highlight: : this is what philosophy does.

Highlight: : The third and final animating idea is one that will itself acquire meaning only
after we have advanced considerably: art and philosophy are practices, as I
put it, bent on the invention of writing.
Highlight: : breast- feeding is also a key to understanding the very nature of art; the
fact that pictures of nursing mothers are so common may point to one of
art’s abiding features: art is always concerned with itself
Highlight: : activity of breast-feeding

Highlight: : exhibits six distinct features.

Highlight: : First, it is primitive. It is basic. It is biological

Highlight: : Second, despite being basic, and primitive, it is also obviously an activity
that requires the exercise of delicate and evolving cognitive skills on the part
of both mother and infant.
Highlight: : Third—and this is obvious—the whole activity has a structure; it is organized

in time. Indeed, it has something like the structure of turn taking
Highlight: : Fourth, neither mother nor infant orchestrates or directs breast-feeding.
Highlight: : the demands of the activity as a whole control, that is, they downward
entrain, the behavior of the individuals caught up in it
Highlight: : Fifth, the whole activity has a function. Exactly what the function is, as we
have seen, remains somewhat ambiguous.
Highlight: : Finally, although breast-feeding, as we have noticed, is an almost worklike

source of conflict, a negotiation, it is also, at least potentially, a source of
pleasure for both mother and child
Highlight: : breast-feeding organizes us

Highlight: : we find ourselves put together and made up in the setting of the activity
Highlight: : “organized activity

Highlight: : any activity, such as breast-feeding, that is marked by the six features I
have enumerated.
Highlight: : Organization, importantly, is a biological concept

Highlight: : how mere matter, and the order characteristic of physics, gets taken up,
integrated, and organ-ized in the self-making, world
Highlight: : creating manner of life

Highlight: : organization, fundamentally, is our biological condition, our existential

condition. To be alive is to be organized
Highlight: : art and its problems have their origin in this vicinity
Highlight: : From the standpoint of the theory of organized activities, driving, walking,
talking are expressions of the same basic human nature that unfolds in
suckling.
Highlight: : they are habitual.

Highlight: : to participate in these activities, and to do so well, that is to say, with skill
or expertise, we need to relax into habits
Highlight: : the level at which activities are organized is not the level of the nervous
system, any more than it is the level of the atom.
Highlight: : neither is it the level of conscious, deliberate action

Highlight: : We are organized at an intermediate level, at what the roboticist Dana

Ballard has called the “embodiment level.”
Highlight: : not subpersonal—it is not the level of things happening inside us, however
we model these.
Highlight: : not the personal level itself either, the level at which the person knowingly
and authoritatively decides.
Highlight: : It is not a requirement that organized activities be social. Sometimes the

environment itself organizes us individually.
Highlight: : Perceiving is typically caught up with acting.

Highlight: : Every time you move your eyes or your hands, you produce sensory
changes. And as you move around in relation to the environment, how
things look changes steadily
Highlight: : perceptual constancy.

Highlight: : Seeing, if this approach is right, is a temporally extended, dynamic exchange

with the world around us, one that is guided by principles of timing,
thoughtfulness, movement, spontaneity, function, and pleasure, like those
we see in operation when we drive or walk or breast-feed, but that are also
governed by all manner of learned understandings and expectations and
engagements with this or that task (watch repair, typing, driving home, etc.)
Highlight: : seeing (and all kinds of perception) is the organized activity of achieving
access to the world around us
Highlight: : Our lives are one big complex nesting of organized activities at different
levels and scales.
Highlight: : We are always captured by structures of organization. This is our natural,

indeed our biological, condition
Highlight: : these structures of organization are not of our own making.

Highlight: : we are, or are at least liable to get, lost in the complex patterns of
organization that make up our lives.
Highlight: : we make art out of organized activities.

Highlight: : Wittgenstein wrote that a philosophical problem has the form I don’t know
my way around. Roughly, I’m lost. His method in philosophy was, in effect, to
create usable maps (“perspicuous representations”) to enable one to find
one’s way around. If I am right, this is exactly the project of
choreography—to fashion for us a representation of ourselves as dancers;
to make clear what is otherwise concealed and only poorly understood.
The work of choreography—the work of art—is philosophical. Or better,
both philosophy and choreography aim at the same thing—a kind of
understanding that, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, consists in having a
perspicuous representation—but they do it, so to speak, in different
neighborhoods of our existence. Philosophy is the choreography of ideas
and concepts and beliefs
Highlight: : Choreography, in turn, is the philosophy of dancing (or of movement).

Highlight: : Both philosophy and choreography take their start from the fact that we are
organized but we are not the authors of our organization. Instead of
thinking of choreography as a philosophical practice, or philosophy as a
choreographic one, we would do better to appreciate that both
choreography and philosophy are species of a single genus that, for want
of a better name, I will refer to as the study of our organization; philosophy
and choreography are organizational and reorganizational practices. They
are practices (not activities)—methods of research—aiming at illuminating
the ways we find ourselves organized and so, also, the ways we might
reorganize ourselves
Highlight: : expose the concealed ways we are organized by the things we do.
Highlight: : How can you think about Julius Caesar, or what you will have for breakfast
in seventeen days, or the center of gravity of the solar system, or the big
bang, or the lives of your unborn descendants? We need ways to reach
these things in thought. We use language, and writing, to do this
Highlight: : Thinking is more like bridge building or dancing than it is like digestion. We
ourselves are creatures of technology through to our most intimate cores.
And this is so because thinking, no less than dancing, traveling, and
talking, is an organized activity. And technologies are evolving patterns of
organization
Highlight: : art, I am proposing, takes its impetus from the fact that we are organized
but are lost in the nesting, massively complicated patterns of our
organization. Art—and philosophy, too—are practices for investigating the
modes of our organization, or rather, the manner of our embedding in
different modes of organization. Art is not just more organization
Highlight: : Socrates’ philosophic work is anything but conversational, whether he was

a writer or not. A Socratic dialogue begins not with conversation but with
the interruption of conversation, with the disruption of the engaged, ordinary
thought and talk practices of his friends and colleagues. This is why he
made them so angry, and it may be why he was perceived by his
contemporaries to be such a threat. Socrates was telling them that their
talk was not good enough
Highlight: : lack the means, the tools, to make explicit that which governs their
thoughts and actions. They don’t have a clear view, an Überblick, of their
conceptual activities
Highlight: : A Socratic dialogue is staged. It is a model of a conversation. It is not a

conversation. It is philosophy. Or, we could say, it is art
Highlight: : Choreography knows itself to be, at least in part, a quest for a not yet
discovered method of notation. This self-conception is in the very word
“choreography” (literally dance + write) itself. It is the hallmark of
choreography that it strives for and always fails at making adequate
scores. If I am right, this feature is the hallmark of all the arts, and
philosophy, too.
Highlight: : We do not write to record language. Like language itself, writing is to think
with. The use of writing to score music, or baseball games, or engage in
mathematical proof are not merely specialized applications, they are a
glimpse into the fact that writing is precisely not ancillary to speech, a
subsequent development for the purposes of recording speech. It is rather
an autonomous linguistic technology for engaging with the world around
us. It is a framework, or a manner, or a style of engagement
Highlight: : First, writing is not ancillary to speech. Writing, in the case of baseball, is a
tool for thinking about baseball, just like speech is itself. And as such,
devising ways of writing baseball reorganizes baseball itself and
transforms it. It is also the case that we can apply this sort of graphical
technology to language itself. And as in the case of baseball, so writing
language organizes and transforms language. And moreover, we have
seen, it is not just that we can apply this sort of graphical technology to
writing, as we do to baseball, but that we must.
Highlight: : practices of self-organization. As with baseball. There is no baseball without

thinking about baseball. The second order penetrates the first order through
and through
Highlight: : the arts, and philosophy, are bent on the invention of

Highlight: : writing, that they aim at or tend to its invention, what I mean, in effect, is that
they arise precisely at the juncture where our genuine, full-blooded, first-
order engagements become problematic for themselves. Which is to say
when they fully become what they are, that is to say, organized activities
that are governed by a self-conception of those activities themselves (i.e.,
by an ideology).
Highlight: : institutions of language governance are associated with the nation-state

Highlight: : writing is already extant and there is no sense in which art aims at inventing
writing or in contributing to its authoritarian rule. Neither art nor philosophy
aims at serving reigning ideologies in that way.
Highlight: : writing, which was once applied to speech as a way of modeling it, has
looped down to such a degree that we can now think of writing itself as an
instrument of our linguistic organization. It’s not that art, and philosophy,
need now to resist writing, or turn away from it. It’s rather that the need to
write ourselves starts all over again. We need to write the way scriptoral-
language organizes us.
Highlight: : And this is the work of the literary arts. Literary artists take all the ways we
find we must express ourselves, or write down our stories, or articulate our
lives, and they make that their problem. They try to invent new ways of
writing.
Highlight: : it is an illusion that a score determines the way the music is played. Scores
are instruments for playing and they capture the work, they capture the
music itself, only in the setting of a practice of making, teaching, training,
using, and criticizing the use of scores in performance.
Highlight: : there are ways of using texts to govern, guide, or inform performance. And
the same surely goes for musical scores. But not because the score
captures and determines the music, as it were, all on its own. One might
just as well have said: the music captures the score.
Highlight: : at a certain point in history, musicians devised a way to model their

musical activity in writing—their melodies and scales and instruments—
and this in turn looped back down into the practice of allowing musicians to
rethink their activity in new ways. Scoring reorganized.
Highlight: : If the musical work is tied to the score, then the musical work is concerned
with a problem: how to write itself
Highlight: : Art, and philosophy, aim at the invention of writing. Sometimes this takes
the form of resisting conventionalized ways of drawing, writing, notating,
scoring. And other times it takes the form of weaving methods of
representing ourselves to ourselves from scratch.
Highlight: : This is because we think of ourselves, and of others—of how we look—on

the model of how we show up, or might show up, in a picture.
Highlight: : Anne Hollander, “is the standard by which the direct view is assessed—
including the direct view of the self in the mirror.”
Highlight: : Hollander’s words, “Far from seeing objectively, the mirror gazer is
engaged in creating a posed studio portrait of himself, not even a candid
shot.” Mirror images, we might say, are transient or throwaway selfies.
Highlight: : In one sense, then, pictures hold us captive, they reign over us. We are
captured by them. But they also supply the resources we need to free
ourselves of their control. We don’t step outside of pictoriality. That’s not
possible. But we can dress differently, that is, we can make different
pictures. In this way, art emancipates us from the organization and
regulation imposed by technologies.
Highlight: : Pictures afford the model of what it would be to step back and take a look, to
detach and disengage, to contemplate rather than carry on. Pictures gives
us what we might call the aesthetic sense. Pictures are not so much the
result of an applied aesthetic sense as they are its very precondition. In the
beginning was the picture. We can contrast aesthetic, contemplative
seeing with what we might call seeing in the wild. Wild seeing is active,
embedded, subordinate to task, an openness to our world rather than, if
you like, a state of reflection on or contemplation of the world. Most seeing,
most of the time, is precisely not contemplative; not, in any sense,
aesthetic. It does not rest on deliberate acts of looking and inspection.
Highlight: : Wild seeing is spontaneous and engaged; it is direct and involved. Wild
seeing is acting in concert with the stuff around us. Aesthetic seeing, in
contrast, is something more like the entertainment of thoughts about what
one is looking at
Highlight: : just as writing shapes our conception of language, as I argued in the last
chapter, so pictures shape our conception of seeing. And just as writing
loops down and alters our live action in and with language, so pictures loop
down and alter the ways we exercise our visual powers. Pictures become
an instrument for seeing. Pictures become the standard by which at least a
certain variety of direct awareness is assessed.
Highlight: : We don’t make pictures to lay down memories; we make pictures, in this
epoch of pictorial consciousness, so that we can even have experiences. It
is as if, were we to fail to make an image, or, indeed, to concern ourselves
with images, nothing would ever really happen. And so lovers hold each
other tight on the bench by the sea, but she holds her camera phone out and
takes the selfie that authenticates the event as significant
Highlight: : not merely a passing fad or impulse, but a kind of culmination of the way
pictures have made us, as it were, in their own image
Highlight: : Pictures belong to our prehistoric technology and so they have truly
shaped how we human beings experience vision
Highlight: : Aesthetic seeing,

Highlight: : What makes it aesthetic is that it stems precisely from a curiosity and
disinterestedness about one’s very own inclinations to respond. The
aesthetic attitude is thoughtful and inquiring, which doesn’t mean that it is
not also strongly felt and passionate.
Highlight: : I have been arguing that the aesthetic sense depends on the prior
existence of picture-making technologies. But it is precisely art’s work (and
philosophy’s), as I argued in the last chapter, to invent these technologies,
these means of writing ourselves down.
Highlight: : Newman, in admonishing us to resist our natural tendency spontaneously

to respond to what there is around us by, in this case, moving back so as
to get a better overview of the scene, is inviting us to violate our habits as
lookers and thinkers, to confound our unconsidered motivations. Now, it
isn’t possible to alter our basic perceptual motivations and ways of
thinking. But it is possible to alert us to their existence. Perhaps Newman
believed, as I do, that one of art’s tasks is to afford us just this sort of
opportunity to catch ourselves in the act of encountering the world, and so
to let us encounter ourselves in a way that we otherwise never can
Highlight: : more than instructive; it constitutes a research practice.

Highlight: : art objects in general—as philosophical objects

Highlight: : A work of art is a strange tool; it is an implement or instrument that has been
denuded of its function. Art is the enemy of function, it is the perversion of
technology. This is why architecture has a problematic standing among the
arts; it is not an accident that great architects make houses with leaky
roofs. And this is why, although much art concerns itself with love and
erotic feeling, there is no pornographic art. Pornography has a function; it
aims at something. Art, in contrast, is always the subversion of function
Highlight: : art is bad design on purpose. It calls attention to itself. It begins precisely
with this ungroundedness or absence of utility, this free fall. When you stand
before a work of art, you are bound to ask, What is this? And crucially, when
we are dealing with art, although there are many answers we can give to
this question, there is no one answer that we can take for granted at the
outset.
Highlight: : When we ask of a work of art What is this? What is this for? we need to
come up with our own answer. And so we need to take a stand, a stand,
critically, on our relation to the background, on our relation to that which we
normally take for granted. Artists make strange tools because tools, in the
broad sense I have been urging, are critical for human beings. They
organize our lives and, in part, make us what we are. Works of art put our
making practices and our tendency to rely on what we make, and so also
our practices of thinking and talking and making pictures, on display. Art
puts us on display. Art unveils us to ourselves
Highlight: : The general form of the work of art is: See me if you can! The work of art
dares you to try, to look hard enough so that you can. Let me explain.
Every work of art (whether dance, song, poetry, film, whatever) challenges
you to see it, or to get it. The work of art (not the artist, not the performer)
says, Bring me into focus, if you can! Crucially, you usually can’t, at least
not right away
Highlight: : Choreography, in a sense, is the interruption (or subversion) of dancing.

Just as, we shall see, painting is the interruption of picture making.
Highlight: : art presupposes technology without being itself a technological practice.

Art presupposes practices of doing and making without being manufacture,
business as usual.
Highlight: : deep affinities between art and philosophy, as practices and as fields.
Highlight: : It is a striking feature of philosophy, then, and of art, that these practices
have no subject matter that limits them
Highlight: : If art and philosophy are unified, it is precisely as practices.
Highlight: : Philosophy is continuously renewing, revising, revolutionizing, and

rethinking itself. Philosophy is a problem for itself
Highlight: : Exactly the same is true of art.

Highlight: : The art is in the act of installing the urinal. Really, the work is a kind of
performance. Duchamp’s work poses these very questions. His work asks:
What is art anyway and why does it matter?
Highlight: : as with philosophy, art renews and revises and returns and remakes itself
over historical time.
Highlight: : we can speak of change and history and even evolution in philosophy and
in art, but we cannot speak of progress.
Highlight: : there aren’t breakthroughs or discoveries or results or findings in these

fields, certainly not ones that invalidate or cancel out earlier ones or
preclude future ones.
Highlight: : A philosophy text is more like a score than it is like a record of fact or
finding.
Highlight: : a philosophical abstract is always dubious. A philosophical piece of writing

is the philosophy, not a report of it. Like a score, a philosophy text is an
instrument for undertaking philosophy in the style or in the locale of the text’s
author. To read a philosophy text is to participate in the performance of the
ideas and feelings and puzzlements it traces out
Highlight: : To read a philosophy text is to participate in the performance of the ideas

and feelings and puzzlements it traces out.
Highlight: : Philosophical writings are of no use to someone who is untroubled by

philosophical anxieties.
Highlight: : occasions for active engagement on the part of people who are disposed
to do something with them.
Highlight: : power in the way that jokes have power, as moves in a game of
communication and reflection. Maker and public jointly undertake the work
that makes art possible.
Highlight: : method and result are one.

Highlight: : Dewey
Highlight: : the museum is antithetical to art

Highlight: : Works of art don’t just sit there in the museums, shining for all the world to
see. Audiences and makers engage with each other through the
opportunities that artists manufacture. We enact art as much as we
perceive it
Highlight: : art and philosophy problems for culture.

Highlight: : Artworks and artists are objects of suspicion. And so too philosophers.
Highlight: : Plato’s
Highlight: : that it isn’t the conclusion to the argument that is the source of philosophy’s
value. Its value is the change in the way we understand
Highlight: : how the different concepts and commitments and values that we hold at
once all hang together.
Highlight: : You start out thinking you know what justice is, or personal identity, and at
the end, having faced up to the manifest and evident shortcomings of any
view that you or your interlocutors can come up with, realize that you don’t
know. Yet your not knowing is infused with understanding.
Highlight: : Philosophy aims not at discovery but at understanding

Highlight: : art, has exactly the structure of a philosophical dialogue in Socrates’ or
Plato’s sense
Highlight: : The work of art, like that of philosophy, is the reorganization of ourselves.
And this reorganization, this work, aims also at understanding.
Highlight: : it is a striking and abiding feature of art that it makes us argue. It is a

domain of dispute.
Highlight: : aesthetic disagreement is a kind of philosophical disagreement (or that

philosophy is, in effect, a domain of aesthetic dispute).
Highlight: : Philosophical puzzlements concern getting clear about where we find

ourselves and what we think given what we already know. Philosophical
arguments are persuasive but also educational, and they are practical.
They pertain to the question of how we should carry on (in this intellectual
or practical domain or that)
Highlight: : Art and philosophy share a common aim: self-transformation and the
achievement of understanding
Highlight: : Artists who make pictures are, in my view—and I’ll have a lot more to say
about this as we go on—using picture-making technologies to put pictures
and the role that pictures play in our lives on display in order to call them
into question.
Highlight: : Artworks are philosophical objects, and if it is worthwhile doing philosophy

with pictures, this is because, well, pictures are important to us.
Highlight: : they do organize our lives; indeed, they do so in ways we have no real
comprehension of or control over.
Highlight: : Barnett Newman, Ad Reinhardt, Al Held

Highlight: : do philosophy where the relevant forms of puzzlement and need arise: in
the act of depicting.
Highlight: : If works of art are strange tools, if art happens with the disruption of
business as usual, always demanding that we look differently and try to
see what we don’t quite know how to see, then it isn’t surprising that we
run the risk of failing to see anything at all and just finding ourselves
trapped and disengaged with the works around us and with our lives.
Highlight: : Pictures are tools for showing things, for putting things on display. This
generalization captures the basic function of picture making without
flattening out or ignoring the great diversity of background contexts that
motivate and condition the practice of picture making.
Highlight: : pictures are a special kind of model. And that a model is something we use
to stand in for something else. A model is a proxy.
Highlight: : things we put to work in order to think about or investigate something else
Highlight: : their effectiveness, their power to show us something, has to do with the
way we make them and, critically, with the way we use them. We look at
them, study them, think about them. And because of the way we look at
them and make use of them, they can inform us about something else, the
thing that actually interests us: How does this work?
Highlight: : a model is a substitute for what we are modeling. Models are tokens we
think with. We can use a good model as a substitute and therefore as
something we can regard as the thing that interests us.
Highlight: : True artists don’t only make experiences. They make objects (paintings,
performances, whatever) that afford precisely the opportunity for integral
experiences whose integration is, as it were, made manifest.
Highlight: : you encounter something that was made for you to encounter; you
encounter it precisely as an opportunity to encounter what it is for an
experience to be made.
Highlight: : you yourself must now make your own experience of the artwork.
Highlight: : activate it by activating yourself.

Highlight: : Artworks give you an opportunity to enact the ways in which our lives
unfold. In which experience happens. In which we achieve our active lives.
The art stands forth for you—as Heidegger might say, it shines—as
exemplary. It is an experience. It affords you an experience.
Highlight: : puts our fundamental nature as makers, that is to say, as experiencers, on

display
Highlight: : exhibits our manner of organization to ourselves and it does so in a

comprehensible and recognizable way
Highlight: : art is experience. It isn’t the things that matter. It is the experience of those
things. But those experiences don’t come for free. We need to make them.
Art is an opportunity to make experience, to make ourselves, and so to
live.
Highlight: : Art is philosophy, after all. It is putting all that about our condition and
nature on display
Highlight: : Preface
Highlight: : PART I 1. Getting Organized 2. Reorganizing Ourselves 3. Designers

by Nature 4. Art Loops and the Garden of Eden 5. Art, Evolution, and the
Puzzle of Puzzles 6. A Short Note on Ecstasy, Sports, and Humor 7.
Philosophical Objects
Highlight: : 11. Art Is a Philosophical Practice and Philosophy an Aesthetic One

Notes in Document
'Understanding-Media-The-Extensions-of-Man':
Highlight: : Media Cold and Hot
(Understanding-Media-The-Extensions-of-Man, p.30)
Highlight: : A hot medium is one that extends one single sense in "high definition."
High definition is the state of being well filled with data.
Highlight: : Telephone is a cool medium. or one of low definition, because the ear is
given a meager amount of information.
Highlight: : Hot media are, therefore, low in participation, and cool media are high in
participation or completion by the audience.
Highlight: : any intense experience must be "forgotten," "censored," and reduced to a

very cool state before it can be "learned" or assimilated.
Highlight: : The medium of money or wheel or writing, or any other form of specialist
speed-up of exchange and information, will serve to fragment a tribal
structure.
Highlight: : Similarly, a very much greater speedup, such as occurs with electricity,
may serve to restore a tribal pattern of intense involvement
Highlight: : Specialist technologies detribalize. The nonspecia ist electric technology

retribalizes.
Highlight: : The waltz was a hot, fast mechanical dance suited to the industrial time in
its moods of pomp and circumstance. In contrast, the Twist is a cool,
involved and chatty form of improvised gesture.
Highlight: : it makes all the difference whether a hot medium is used in a hot or a cool
culture. The hot radio medium used in cool or nonliterate cultures has a
violent effect,
Highlight: : A cool or low literacy culture cannot accept hot media like movies or radio
as entertainment. They are, at least, as radically upsetting for them as
the cool TV medium has proved to be for our high literacy world.
Highlight: : One way to spot the basic difference between hot and cold media uses is
to compare and contrast a broadcast of a symphony performance with a
broadcast of a symphony rehearsal.
Highlight: : The principle that distinguishes hot and cold media is perfectly embodied
in the folk wisdom: "Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses."
Glasses intensify the outward-going vision, and fill in the feminine image
exceedingly, Marion the Librarian notwithstanding. Dark glasses, on the
other hand, ere- ; ate the inscrutable and inaccessible image that invites a
great deal of participation and completion.
Highlight: : That technologies are ways of translating one kind of knowledge into
another mode has been expressed by Lyman Bryson in the phrase
"technology is explicitness." Translation is thus a 'spelling-out" of forms of
knowing.
Highlight: : All media are active metaphors in their power to translate experience into
new forms.
Highlight: : By means of translation of immediate sense experience into vocal

symbols the entire world can be evoked and retrieved at any instant. In
this electric age we see ourselves being translated more and more into
the form of information, moving toward the technological extension of
consciousness.
Highlight: : we can translate more and more of ourselves into other forms of
expression that exceed ourselves.
Highlight: : By putting our physical bodies inside our extended nervous systems, by
means of electric media, we set up a dynamic by which all previous
technologies that are mere extensions of hands and feet and teeth and
bodily heat-controls--all such extensions of our bodies, including cities--
will be translated into information systems.
Highlight: : Man must serve his electric technology with the same servo-mechanistic
fidelity with which he served his coracle, his canoe, his typography, and
all other extensions of his physical organs.
Highlight: : An external consensus or conscience is now as necessary as private

consciousness. With the new media, however, it is also possible to store
and to translate everything; and, as for speed, that is no problem. No
further acceleration is possible this side of the light barrier.
Highlight: : Under electric technology the entire business of man becomes learning
and knowing. In terms of what we still consider an "economy" (the Greek
word for a household), this means that all forms of employment become
"paid learning," and all forms of wealth result from the movement of
information. The problem of discovering occupations or employment may
prove as difficult as wealth is easy.
Notes in Document
'Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience The Role of
(Liberated) Embodied Simulation Vittorio Gallese ':
Highlight: : The neuroscientifi c subpersonal level of description is necessary but not
suffi cient, unless it is coupled with a full appreciation of the tight
relationship that the brain entertains with the body and the world
(Naturalizing Aesthetic Experience The Role of (Liberated) Embodied Simulation Vittorio Gallese
, p.1)
Highlight: : Film, Art, and the Third Culture (2017), Murray Smith
, p.1)
Highlight: : “an exploration of philosophical naturalism, as candidate methodology for

the theorization of fi lm in particular and art, more generally” (2017: 21)
, p.1)
Highlight: : philosophical naturalism as “a commitment to the pursuit of philosophical

questions in the light of the knowledge and methods of the . . . natural
sciences” (2017: 22)
, p.1)
Highlight: : four possible ways in which the relationship between the natural sciences
and the arts and the humanities might be conceived: (1) eliminativism; (2)
cooperative naturalism; (3) autonom- ism; and (4) cherry-picking.
, p.1)
Highlight: : Smith endorses cooperative naturalism, according to which the

knowledge and methodology of the natural sciences comple- ment—rather
than replace or eliminate—those of the humanities.
, p.1)
Highlight: : a naturalized aesthetics of fi lm and art

, p.1)
Highlight: : contributions of evolutionary theory and cognitive neuroscience.

, p.1)
Highlight: : envisioning the cultural as an extension or outgrowth of the natural—that
is, as an evolved capacity of humans to develop and use instrumental
intelligence (Wojciehowski and Gallese 2018).
, p.2)
Highlight: : could bring to scientists’ attention an enormous corpus of knowledge tes-

tifying to the world’s great cultural diversity and to some universal principles
presiding over the way human beings relate to reality through the lens of art
and fi ction (Wojciehowski and Gallese 2018)
, p.2)
Highlight: : “triangu- lating aesthetic experience”

, p.2)
Highlight: : empirical approaches can help us to address fi lm and art experience.

, p.2)
Highlight: : necessary to distinguish among three levels of description when

investigating aesthetic experience: the phenomenological, the
psychological (or functional), and the neurophysiological.
, p.2)
Highlight: : “Neuroscience may play a vital role here, in pushing us towards one of
the . . . many psychological explanations on offer for any given mental
phenomenon” (2017: 63).
, p.2)
Highlight: : The subpersonal level of description provided by neuroscience is necessary

but not suffi cient to understand human cognition and aesthetic experience.
To make sense of cognition and aesthetic experience, we need to study the
brain, the body, and their relationship with the world and with the brain-body
of others (Gallese 2014, 2016; Gallese and Cuccio 2015).
, p.3)
Highlight: : cognitive neuroscience can empirically investigate art and aesthetics
using different approaches to address a number of different issues and
questions: (1) it can use artistic expressions to understand how the brain
works; (2) it can localize in the brain—and/or reduce to its functioning—aes-
thetic concepts (beauty, the sublime, etc.); (3) it can study the brain to
explain art; and (4) it can study the brain-body in relation to artistic
expressions in order to understand the constitutive elements of aesthetic
experience and the genesis of aesthetic concepts. Elsewhere, I have
proposed that neuroscience can be highly relevant to addressing the
experience of fi lm and art, particularly if spelled out as in (4) (Gallese
2017a).
, p.3)
Highlight: : (Gallese and Guerra 2012, 2014, 2015), neuroscience can contribute to
theoretical debates on mediated experience, bodily engagement in
aesthetic experience, new theories of enactment, and simulation.
, p.3)
Highlight: : Style is basically what strengthens our relationship with a work of art,
what allows us to orient (or lose) ourselves within the imaginary worlds of
fi ction. Style is a way to manipulate the mediation, to establish a peculiar
intersubjective relationship between us and the work of art (Gallese and
Guerra 2012, 2014, 2015).
, p.4)
Highlight: : to profi tably conjugate the experiential dimension through a study of the un-
derlying subpersonal processes and mechanisms expressed by the brain-
body, and promote investigations that can lead to progress in both the
theoretical and philosophical stylistic fi elds (see, e.g., Heimann et al.
2014, 2017).
, p.4)
Highlight: : mirror neurons and embodied simulation.

, p.4)
Highlight: : a new model of perception—embodied simulation

, p.4)
Highlight: : a new understanding of the brain-body contribution to the unique human

capacity to constantly inhabit the real world and the parallel worlds of fi
ction.
, p.4)
Highlight: : Our visual experience of the world is the outcome of multimodal inte-
gration processes, in which the motor system is one of the key players. The
multimodal integration of what we perceive is triggered by the potentiality
for action we express corporeally. We build nonverbal representations of our
surrounding space, and we have similar nonverbal relationships with objects,
things, and other human beings by using the functional base mechanism of
, p.4)
Highlight: : embodied simulation.

, p.5)
Highlight: : The pivotal motor aspects of our bodily selves integrate and anchor to a
bodily fi rst-person perspective the multimodal sensory information about
the body and about the world with which it interacts (Gallese 2014, 2016).
, p.5)
Highlight: : We are open to the world because of the motor potentialities that our
bodily nature entails. The way in which the visual world is mapped by the
motor system incorporates agents’ idiosyncratic ways of interacting with it.
To put it simply, the producer and repository of content is not the brain per
se, but the brain-body by means of its interactions with the world of which
it is part.
, p.5)
Highlight: : The activation of embodied simulation is the recall of the background

bodily knowledge that we recruit when witnessing others’ actions, emo-
tions, and sensory experiences; when remembering past experiences; when
planning future actions; when engaging in fi ctional experiences; and when
comprehending linguistic descriptions of facts, actions, and events (see Gal-
lese 2011a, 2011b, 2014, 2016; Gallese and Cuccio 2015).
, p.5)
Highlight: : Neuroscience allows us to understand how the line between what we call
reality and the imaginary worlds of fi ction is much less sharp and clear
than we might think.
, p.5)
Highlight: : Similarly, to see something and to imagine it, to act and to imagine one is
acting, share the activation of partly common brain circuits (see Gallese
2014, 2016; Gallese and Cuccio 2015).
, p.5)
Highlight: : embodied simulation and neural “reuse” (Gallese 2011a, 2014, 2016).
Embodied simulation theory posits that the mirror mechanisms underpin
mental simulation processes primarily because brain and cognitive
resources typically used for one purpose are reused for another purpose.
The direct matching between simulator and target, however, is primarily
intrapersonal, since it pertains to the mental states or processes that an
individual undergoes both when planning an action or experiencing
emotions and sensations and when observing someone else’s actions,
emotions, and sensations.
, p.5)
Highlight: : The parallel imaginary fi ctional worlds we create and inhabit are possibly
the outcome of embodied simulation combined
, p.5)
Highlight: : with the ability for cognitive abstraction. Furthermore, the bodily memories
and imaginative associations that fi ctional content can awake in our minds
provide the idiosyncratic character of its appreciation.
, p.6)
Highlight: : Our relationship with the world of fi ction is double-edged: on the one
hand, we pretend it to be true, and on the other hand, we are fully aware it
is not.
, p.6)
Highlight: : Smith proposes that empathy in narrative arts might widen “in scope and
intensity” (2017: 191) because “the crafted environment of narrative
artefacts enables the authors of such objects to shape, and thus to distil
and concentrate, our responses to a high degree” (192) by means of a
specifi c engineering of “an object precisely designed to elicit empathy”
(193)
, p.6)
Highlight: : embodied simulation can be relevant to our experience of fi ctional worlds
because of the “feeling of body” that they evoke by means of the
potentiation of the mirroring mechanisms that they activate (Gallese
2011b, 2012; Wojciehowski and Gallese 2011, 2018).
, p.6)
Highlight: : In this way, embodied simulation generates the specifi c attitude informing
our aesthetic experience. Such potentiation supposedly boosts the bodily
memories and imaginative associations that fi ctional content awakes in
our minds, and thus provides the specifi c character of its reception.
, p.6)
Highlight: : distancing from the unrelated external world, which remains at the
periphery of our attentional focus.
, p.6)
Highlight: : such distancing, this temporary suspension of the active grip on our daily
occupations, liberates new simulative energies.
, p.6)
Highlight: : we distance ourselves from the “everyday” context. By adopting such an atti-
tude, our embodied simulation becomes “liberated”—that is, it is freed from
the burden of modeling our actual psychophysical presence in daily life;
hence, new simulative energies are liberated.
, p.6)
Highlight: : sense of safe intimacy with a world we not only imagine, but also literally
embody with augmented intensity.
, p.6)
Highlight: : when engaged with fi ctional narratives, the contextual bodily framing—
our being still—additionally boosts our embodied simulation. Our being
still enables us to fully deploy our simulative resources at the service of
the immersive relationship with fi ction, thus generating greater “feeling of
body.”
, p.7)
Highlight: : Being forced to inaction, we are more open to feelings and emotions
, p.7)
Highlight: : a sort of “neotenic look” (Gallese 2017b). This is similar to the way we
look at the world during the early period of our development, in which,
because of our poor motor autonomy, our interactions with the world are
mainly mediated by the embodied simulation of events, actions, and
emotions animating our social landscape.
, p.7)
Highlight: : a greater degree of motor inhibition, likely allows us to allocate more

neural resources to the task at hand, intensifying the activation of em-
bodied simulation and, in so doing, making us adhere more intensely to what
we are simulating
, p.7)
Highlight: : some of the most vivid fi ctional experiences we entertain, as those

occurring during dreams, are paralleled by the massive inhibition of the
muscle tone in our body.
, p.7)
Highlight: : The technological evolution of digital image reproduction enabled the
miniaturization of screens. In this way, a substantial part of the human
scopic universe has been literally sucked under the surface of multiple
portable screens. Images are literally always at our fi ngertips. The still or
moving images, though from remote locations, have entered forcefully
into our peri-personal space, remain-
, p.7)
Highlight: : ing there for many hours every day. The screen is no longer just a
transparent medium: it has become a techno-body prosthesis, since it is
the body that constitutes—performatively and in an analogical way—the
triggering and stopping engine of the digital reproduction of images,
thanks to the contact with the fi ngers of our hand.
, p.8)
Highlight: : new “prêt-à-porter” action of looking

, p.8)
Highlight: : a frequent “textual” intermittence, such as when we interrupt the vision of a

fi lm to actively seek Google information about the content we are enjoying.
, p.8)
Highlight: : Through contact with the screen, the body of the spectator becomes the di-
rect controller of the images and of their fl ow. Now the spectator owns the
image, even to the extent that she “holds it in her hand.” The screen
assumes the appearance of a wrapping, a transparent skin constantly
touched lightly by the fi ngers of the spectator: the screen becomes a
“skin-screen” (Gallese and Guerra 2018).
, p.8)
Highlight: : The haptic dimension of vision and the metaphorically prehensile charac-
teristics of the eye (Merleau-Ponty 1964) double and become literal. Contact
is no longer just simulated; it is current. The “skin-screen” doubles the
tactility of vision by virtue of its being the potential object of manual
contacts.
, p.8)
Highlight: : in those moments the screen ceases to be transparent; it becomes

opaque; it becomes a quasi-skin upon which our fi ngertips dance.
, p.8)
Highlight: : “performative relocation”

, p.8)
Highlight: : How much do these bodily contacts with the screen affect our vision of
the images? How does this intermittent opacifi cation of the screen that
makes it “present” as such modulate our responses as spectators? How
much does it affect our empathic connection to the relocated fi ctional
narratives we interact with? I think these questions are fully compatible
with the perspective put forward by Smith in his book: they can be
fruitfully addressed by neuroscience, and will be the target of our
empirical investigation in the near future.
, p.8)
Highlight: : Gallese, Vittorio. 2011b. “Embodied Simulation Theory: Imagination and

Narrative.” Neuropsy- choanalysis 13 (2): 196–200.
, p.9)
Highlight: : Bodily Selves in Relation: Embodied Simulation as Second-Person Per-

spective on Intersubjectivity.
, p.9)
Highlight: : Gallese, Vittorio. 2016. “Finding the Body in the Brain: From Simulation
Theory to Embod- ied Simulation.” In Goldman and his Critics, ed. Brian
McLaughlin and Hilary Kornblith, 297–317. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
, p.9)
Highlight: : Gallese, Vittorio. 2017a. “Visions of the Body: Embodied Simulation and
Aesthetic Experience. Aisthesis 1 (1): 41–50.
, p.9)
Highlight: : Neoteny and Social Cognition: A Neuroscientifi c Perspective on

Embodiment
, p.9)
Notes in Document
'Neoteny and social cognition: A Neuroscientific
Perspective on Embodiment ':
Highlight: : the crucial role played by bodily relations and sociality on the evolution
and development of distinctive features of human cognition
(Neoteny and social cognition: A Neuroscientific Perspective on Embodiment , p.2)
Highlight: : neurophysiological level of description is here accounted for in terms of

bodily-formatted representations
Highlight: : Neoteny refers to the slowed or delayed physiological and/or somatic

development of an individual. Such development is largely dependent on
the quantity and quality of interpersonal relationships the individual is able
to establish with her/his adult peers
Highlight: : embodied simulation, in allowing humans to engage in social relations,

and make sense of others’ behaviors.
Highlight: : This approach can fruitfully be used to shed new light onto non
propositional forms of communication and social understanding and onto
distinctive human forms of meaning making, like the experience of man-
made fictional worlds.
Highlight: : the crucial role played by bodily relations and sociality for the evolution
and development of distinctive features of human cognition.
Highlight: : non-propositional forms of communication and social understanding and

onto distinctive human forms of meaning making.
Highlight: : A common misconception of cognitive neuroscience consists in

perceiving its reductionism not as a necessary methodological strategy,
but as an ontological statement, according to which a necessary and
totalitarian identity theory between brain and behavior, brain and
psychology, or brain and cognition should be established.
Highlight: : Cognitive neuroscience should investigate human nature first and

foremost by clarifying what human experience is made of.
Highlight: : I proposed to empirically study social cognition and intersubjectivity by

carefully distinguishing three levels of description: the phenomenological,
the functional and the sub-personal ones (Gallese 2001).
Highlight: : The experience we make of the world, as humans, is indeed always
exceeding the words and concepts we normally employ to describe it.
Highlight: : intersubjectivity speaks of the quintessential nature of human beings as

situated, feeling and interacting bodies.
Highlight: : Being, feeling, acting, and knowing describe different modalities of our
bodily relations to the world. These modalities all share a constitutive
underpinning bodily root, mapping into distinct and specific ways of
functioning of brain circuits and neural mechanisms.
Highlight: : comparative approach, the only approach capable to connect distinctive

traits of human nature to their likely phylogenetic precursors.
Highlight: : The human brain-body system developed throughout millions of years in

order to interact with a physical world inhabited by inanimate three-
dimensional objects and other bodies
Highlight: : The human hand—which is oddly represented next to the mouth in the
sensory-motor cortex, despite the fact that hand and mouth are not
anatomically contiguous, as if almost betraying their common social and
communicative vocation
Highlight: : The human hand became a builder of symbols: at first, probably, body
ornamentations of which no traces have been left, then jewels and finally
world representations on rock walls and caves.
Highlight: : Symbolic expression, which since modernity we also learned to recognize

as artistic production, is the ability to transform material objects by giving
them a meaning which they would not have in nature by themselves,
through the action of the hand.
Highlight: : The hand creating symbols turns pragmatics into po(i)etics, thus enabling
to give presence to meaning, to produce truth starting from a knowledge
that up to that moment had been exclusively put to the service of
utilitarian goals.
Highlight: : the process of symbol making, in spite of its articulation as progressive

abstraction and externalization from the body, seems to keep its bodily
ties intact, not only because the body is the instrument of symbol
production, but also because, as it will be proposed later on, it is the main
instrument of their reception.
Notes in Document
'Finding the Body in the Brain. From Simulation
Theory to Embodied Simulation. ':
Highlight: : MNs are motor neurons we discovered in macaques’ motor cortex that
discharge both when the action is executed and when it is observed being
performed by someone else (di Pellegrino et al. 1992; Gallese et al. 1996;
Rizzolatti et al. 1996)
(Finding the Body in the Brain. From Simulation Theory to Embodied Simulation. , p.2)
Highlight: : “a ‘cognitive continuity’ exists within the domain of intentional state

attribution from non‐human primates to humans, and that MNs represent
its neural correlate.
Highlight: : grounded in the ability of both human and non‐human primates to detect
goals in the observed behavior of conspecifics.
Highlight: : relies on a process that matches the observed behavior to the action
plans of the observer. […]. Action‐goal understanding […] constitutes a
necessary phylogenetic stage within the evolutionary path leading to the
fully developed mind‐reading abilities of human beings” (Gallese and
Goldman 1998: 500).
Highlight: : in both macaques and humans MNs indeed do not map just movements,
but also goal‐related motor acts.
Highlight: : a simulation type account of mirroring that would not depend on

introspection.
Highlight: : the cortical motor system maps space around the body, the activation of
hand grasping‐related neurons during the observation of manipulable
objects (canonical neurons) (see Murata et al. 1997; Raos et al. 2006),
and the relationship between the activation of the cortical motor system
and the understanding of action‐related language. Thus, I introduced the
notion of embodied simulation (ES) (Gallese 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b).
Highlight: : the notion of embodied simulation
Highlight: : (ES) (Gallese 2003a, 2003b, 2005a, 2005b).

Highlight: : the notion of simulation as reuse.

Highlight: : the cortical motor system plays an important role in cognition

Highlight: : the ventral premotor cortex and the posterior parietal cortex of macaque
monkeys demonstrated that the cortical motor system is functionally
organized in terms of motor goals.
Highlight: : motor acts – movements executed to accomplish a specific motor

outcome – such as grasping, tearing, holding or manipulating objects.
These motor neurons map the relationship, in motor terms, between the
agent and the object of the motor act.
Highlight: : effector‐object relation (for example, hand‐object)

Highlight: : the formulation of the “Motor Cognition” hypothesis as a leading element

for the emergence of social cognition (see Gallese et al. 2009).
Highlight: : cognitive abilities like the mapping of space and its perception, the
perception of objects occupying our visual landscape, the hierarchical
representation of action with respect to a distal goal, the detection of motor
goals and action anticipation are possible because of the peculiar
functional architecture of the motor system, organized in terms of
goal‐directed motor acts. The proper development of such functional
architecture likely scaffolds more cognitively sophisticated social cognitive
abilities.
Highlight: : these perceptual qualities are not the outcome of the impression exerted
by the external world on our perceptual and cognitive systems.
Highlight: : These perceptual qualities are the intentional correlates of the motor
potentialities expressed by our situated body.
Highlight: : perceiving a visual object or hearing a sound within peripersonal space
evokes the motor simulation of the most appropriate actions towards that
very same spatial location (Rizzolatti et al. 1997; Gallese 2005b).
Highlight: : multisensory integration of self bodily‐related stimuli affecting the body

and its surrounding space.
Highlight: : the very same neuron controlling a hand prehension suitable to grasp
small objects will also fire equally well to the mere visual presentation of
small objects like a small sphere, a small cone or a small cube. The
objects shapes are different but they all specify a similar type of grasping.
Highlight: : 3D objects, are identified, differentiated, and represented not in relation to

their mere visual appearance, but in relation to the effect of the potential
interaction with a situated potentially acting agent.
Highlight: : canonical neurons contribute to a multimodal representation of individual‐

object‐relations. The visual world is always also the horizon of our potential
pragmatic relation to it (Gallese and Sinigaglia 2010).
Highlight: : the functionality of the motor system literally carves out a pragmatic
Umwelt, dynamically surrounding our body. The profile of peripersonal
space is not arbitrary: it maps and delimits a perceptual space expressing –
and being constituted by – the motor potentialities of the body parts it
surrounds.
Highlight: : an important component of my perceptual experience of the coffee mug is

determined, constrained, and ultimately constituted by the limits imposed
by what my body can potentially do with it.
Highlight: : The intentional character, the “aboutness” of the representational format

of our mind could be deeply rooted in the intrinsic relational character of
the bodily format of bodily action representation.
Highlight: : shows how intrinsically intertwined action, perception, and cognition are
(Hurley 1998; see also Gallese 2000).
Highlight: : Content is not exhausted by the propositional format of representation.

Representational content cannot be fully explained without considering the
ongoing modeling process of organisms as currently integrated with the
object to be represented, by intending it.
Highlight: : The same motor circuits that control the ongoing behavior of individuals
within their environment also map distances, locations and objects in that
very same environment,
Highlight: : thus defining and shaping in motor terms their representational content. The
way the visual world is represented by the motor system incorporates
agents’ idiosyncratic way to interact with it. To put it simply, the producer
and repository of representational content is not the brain per se, but the
brain‐body system, by means of its interactions with the world of which it
is part.
Highlight: : Unfortunately, most of these studies do not go beyond a mere

correlational enterprise. The truth is that we do not know why these corti-
cal areas are relevant to mindreading; unless we content ourselves with the
tautological statement that mindreading is implemented in those brain
areas.
Highlight: : a direct modality of access to the meaning of others’ behavior is available,

a modality that is different from the explicit attribution of propositional
attitudes.
Highlight: : MNs are motor neurons that not only respond to the execution of
movements and actions, but also during their perception when executed
by others. The relational character of behavior as mapped by the cortical
motor system enables the appreciation of purpose without relying on explicit
propositional inference.
Highlight: : beliefs, desires, and intentions are neither primitive, nor the only bearers
of intentionality in action. We do not necessarily need to meta‐represent
in propositional format the motor intentions of others to understand them.
Highlight: : In several situations we do not explicitly ascribe intentions to others; we

simply detect them.
Highlight: : The discovery of MNs gives us a new empirically founded notion of

intersubjectivity connoted first and foremost as intercorporeality – the
mutual resonance of intentionally meaningful sensorimotor behaviors.
Highlight: : The ability to understand others as intentional agents does not exclusively
depend on propositional competence, but it is in the first place dependent
on the relational nature of action.
Highlight: : A multiplicity of “mirroring” mechanisms are present in our brain.

Highlight: : thanks to the “intentional attunement” they generate (Gallese 2006), allow
us to recognize others as our fellows, likely making intersubjective
communication and mutual implicit understanding possible.
Highlight: : Embodied simulation (ES) aimed to account for basic social interactions
by means of a neurobiologically plausible and theoretically unitary
framework.
Highlight: : ST claims that understanding others’ behavior usually involves pretense.

People first create in themselves pretend desires, preferences and beliefs
of the sort they take others to have. These are then fed into their own
decision‐making mechanism, which outputs pretend decisions used to
predict
Highlight: : others’ decisions (see Goldman 2006).

Highlight: : Simulation can also be used to retrodict mental states, that is, to identify
which mental states led another individual to perform a given action.
Highlight: : Two different views on the core meaning of “mental simulation” are currently
being proposed: simulation as resemblance and simulation as reuse.
Highlight: : The notion of simulation as resemblance seems to fit the standard story of
simulation type mindreading. The simulator supposedly forms pretend
mental states matching, as closely as possible, initial mental states of the
target, and uses her own decision‐making system to generate pretend
mental states which match the target’s states as closely as possible
(Goldman 2006, 2009).
Highlight: : The main argument of the reuse view is that, on almost any story, all
simulation type mindreading requires any resemblance of the mental
states or processes between the simulator and the target to arise from the
reuse of the simulator’s own mental states or processes. At bottom it is
mental reuse, not resemblance, that drives mindreading (Hurley 2008).
Highlight: : Exaptation refers to the shift in the course of evolution of a given trait or
mechanism, which is later on reused to serve new purposes and
functions.
Highlight: : intentionality, the aboutness of our representations is – in the first

place – an exapted property of the action models instantiated by the cortical
motor system (see Gallese 2000: 34).
Highlight: : a given brain area’s neural specialization for processing a certain type of
sensory stimuli can also instantiate a novel use‐dependent functional
specialization for different stimuli of the same sensory modality.
Highlight: : Novel cultural habits, like writing and reading, have the potentiality to
remodel in a use‐dependent way a given regional brain function in the
course of one individual’s life by amplifying the set of stimuli belonging to
the same sensory domain it can process.
Highlight: : a given cognitive function can be supported by a variety of brain circuits;

the newer in evolutionary terms a cognitive function is, the wider is the brain
circuit underpinning it.
Highlight: : The same holds for emotions and sensations. Within the anterior insula
the same voxels typically underpinning the subjective experience of
disgust also activate when attributing disgust to others.
Highlight: : The simulational reuse of mental states and processes instantiated by ES is

constitutively embodied.
Highlight: : Goldman and de Vignemont (2009) provided a very useful taxonomy of the
different notions of embodiment.
Highlight: : mental representations might differ in virtue not only of their content but also
of their format.
Highlight: : mental representations might have partly overlapping contents (for
example, an action outcome) while differing from one another in their format
(for example, bodily instead of propositional).
Highlight: : A core claim of ES theory is that similar constraints apply both to the repre-
sentations of one’s own actions, emotions or sensations involved in actually
acting and experiencing and also to the corresponding representations
involved in observing someone else performing a given action or
experiencing a given emotion or sensation.
Highlight: : Hence, ES is the reuse of mental states and processes involving

representations that have a bodily format.
Highlight: : consider mindreading, as conceived of in a broad sense, as a non

meta‐representational way of understanding others, basically sharing a
common crucial feature: the mapping of the other onto the self,
reciprocated by the mapping of the self on the other. This approach to
intersubjectivity qualifies as second‐person perspective (see Gallese
2014).
Highlight: : Mindreading as conceived of in a narrow sense, should instead qualify the

type of explicit third‐person form of understanding we refer to when
others’ behaviors or mental states are opaque and ambiguous, thus
requiring explanations.
Highlight: : ES and the underpinning MMs by means of neural reuse can constitu-
tively account for the representation of the motor goals of others’ actions by
reusing one’s own bodily formatted motor representations, as well as of
others’ emotions and sensations by reusing one’s own visceromotor and
sensorimotor representations.
Highlight: : there are two ways in which a given mental content can be attributed to
others: the first one is explicit and representational, while the second one
is implicit and functional.
Highlight: : Understanding others is a complex enterprise. It requires the representation

of others’ proximal and distal goals, others’ emotional state, the
identification of the beliefs, desires, and intentions specifying the reasons
promoting behavior, and the understanding of how those reasons are
linked to agents and to their behavior.
Highlight: : There is indeed a way to connect the common pre‐linguistic sphere to the
linguistic one (Gallese 2003b, 2007, 2008; Gallese and Lakoff 2005;
Glenberg and Gallese 2011). It consists in showing that language, when it
refers to the body in action, brings into play the neural resources normally
used to move that very same body
Highlight: : However, it seems that the relationship between language and body does
not move along a single direction. The fact is that language is
unequivocally constitutive of human nature and, as such, seems to offer us
wholly human modalities of experiencing our corporeity.
Highlight: : if one reversibly interferes with this process, for instance by means of
transcranial‐TMS stimulation, understanding of language is jeopardized.
Highlight: : language allows us, and this is unique among all living species, to fix and
relive specific aspects of our bodily experience.
Highlight: : become a paradigm, a model, for understanding others and us.

Highlight: : Chomsky’s major influence. In 1966 Chomsky published a book

significantly entitled Cartesian Linguistics.
Highlight: : It is from Descartes that the idea comes that language has little to do with
the body
Highlight: : the body is not a substratum and material of language

Highlight: : language is exclusively the tool to express a

Highlight: : thought that is formed independently of language itself

Highlight: : language is the tool through which we manifest an autonomous thought

preceding language – a thought structured by logic
Highlight: : The theses informing the Cartesian idea of language can today be
challenged
Highlight: : concepts like subject, object, time, space, universal, etc. Such concepts
correspond to precise grammatical structures that, most likely, contributed
by co‐evolutionary dynamics to the structuring of rational thought (Hinzen
and Sheehan 2013).
Highlight: : ES makes available to us an exemplary case, a model, in relation to

which understanding of language is also enacted.
Highlight: : If therefore it is true that the symbolic dimension opens up some

possibilities for us and creates worlds for us which only linguistic
creatures can enter, on the other hand it is also true that language strongly
exploits mechanisms rooted in our corporeality. Enactment of the simulation
process in understanding language seems to suggest that the symbolic
dimension and the bodily one cohabit in linguistic praxis.
Highlight: : today many wonder about the possibility of identifying mechanisms that can
anchor such structures to our bodily experience. This is the real challenge
for the embodied cognition approach to the role played by language in
human social cognition.
Highlight: : Embodied simulation is always aimed at “navigating” in the world and,

therefore, eventually at acting.
Highlight: : a direct, experiential form of understanding of other people’s actions and

experiences and, on the basis of this understanding, it allows us to
regulate our actions and our experiences.
Highlight: : ES makes implicit knowledge about others immediately available, with the
aim of regulating our interactions with them.
Highlight: : our understanding of literary characters is almost always second‐person,

based on the possibility of perceiving analogies between our own
experiences and others’ and made possible by the hypostatization of our
experiences that is achieved through the simulation mechanism
(Wojciehowski and Gallese, 2011).
Comment Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a
:
fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it
were a concrete real event or physical entity.
Highlight: : suspension of the “concrete” application of a process

Notes in Document
'(Blackwell Companions to Art History) Christiane
Paul - A Companion to Digital Art-Wiley-Blackwell
(2016).pdf':
Highlight: : Generative Art Theory
((Blackwell Companions to Art History) Christiane Paul - A Companion to Digital Art-Wiley-
Blackwell (2016).pdf, p.7)
Highlight: : Digital Art at the Interface of Technology and Feminism

Highlight: : Computational Aesthetics

Highlight: : Critical Intelligence in Art and Digital Media

Highlight: : Critical Play: The Productive Paradox

Notes in Document
'The Digital Plenitude The Decline of Elite Culture and
the Rise of Digital Media Jay David Bolter ':
Highlight: : Catharsis
(The Digital Plenitude The Decline of Elite Culture and the Rise of Digital Media Jay David Bolter ,
p.6)
Highlight: : Flow
p.6)
Highlight: : Procedurality, History, and Simulation

p.6)
Highlight: : Social Media and the Politics of Flow

p.6)
Highlight: : Conclusion
p.6)
Highlight: : Under the lead designer, Jony Ives, the Apple team applied a modernist
look first to the iMac and then to a series of portable devices (the iPod,
iPhone, and iPad). The principle of totalizing design becomes apparent
when we listen to the promotional videos released for these products, in
which Ives and the Apple team describe with fetishistic love the angle of
the iPhone’s beveled case or the crispness of the text on the retina
display of the iPad. In all this, Apple is continuing a tradition that proceeds
from the workshops of the Bauhaus and Swiss graphic design, through
Scandinavian product design, to the devices of Braun and Sony. The
rhetoric is also in the spirit of McLuhan. As Jobs said in the Macworld
speech with which we began this chapter, and as his team reiterates with
each new device, Apple’s products are designed to change the way we
read, listen to music, or make phone calls. They incarnate the idea of
progress through technological innovation. As a popular modernist, Jobs
was always confident that good design could bring order to the chaos of
our media plenitude. In the end, of course, he could only do so for Apple
products and their communities of users.
p.86)
Notes in Document
'Minds in the New Media Ecology ':
Highlight: : narrative’s capabilities in terms of the evocation and simulation of mind
(Minds in the New Media Ecology , p.1)
Highlight: : digital media definitely “push the project of cognitive literary and narrative
theory into new (kinetic, cybernetic, ludic) territory”
(Minds in the New Media Ecology , p.2)
Notes in Document
'HANDBOOK of MATERIAL CULTURE ':
Highlight: : Structuralism and Semiotics
(HANDBOOK of MATERIAL CULTURE , p.6)
Highlight: : Phenomenology and Material Culture
Highlight: : Objectification
Highlight: : Agency, Biography and Objects

Highlight: : Scenes from a Troubled Engagement: Post-structuralism and Material

Culture Studies
Highlight: : Technology as Material Culture

Notes in Document
'Journal of Material Culture Volume 17 issue 1 2012
[doi 10.1177%2F1359183511433259] Meyer, M. --
Placing and tracing absence- A material culture of the
immaterial.pdf':
Highlight: : an almost counterintuitive aspect of absence: its material culture.
(Journal of Material Culture Volume 17 issue 1 2012 [doi 10.1177%2F1359183511433259] Meyer,
M. -- Placing and tracing absence- A material culture of the immaterial.pdf, p.1)
Highlight: : the relational ontology of absence, conceiving absence not as a thing in itself
but as something that exists through relations that give absence matter.
Highlight: : Absence, in this view, is something performed, textured and materialized

through relations and processes, and via objects. We therefore need to
trace absence.
Highlight: : This entails following and describing the processes through which absence
becomes matter and absence comes to matter. It means to map out, locate
and follow the traces of absence and understand absences as traces, that
is, as residual, incomplete, elusive, ambiguous, yet material entities.
Highlight: : how and where does absence come to matter?

Highlight: : how is absence performed, materialized and objectified?

Highlight: : In and through which kinds of tools, objects, representations and spaces
is absence made present?
Highlight: : the materiality and agency of absence;

Highlight: : related argument that absence is something that is ‘placed’ and that needs
to be ‘traced’ and leaves ‘traces’.
Highlight: : An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss

(Bille et al., 2010,
Highlight: : ‘absence … may have just as much effect as material presence … We

thus take absence to be as much of an occurrence in real life as
presence’ (p. 10).
Highlight: : the absent is made present through talk and texts, through thoughts and
things.
Highlight: : it is via various kinds of places, objects and practices that the absent can
have an important effect on the social world – in other words, that
absence has agency.
Highlight: : Kevin Hetherington (2004: 159),

Highlight: : Social relations are performed not only around what is there but sometimes
also around the presence of what is not … Indeed, the category of
absence can have a significant presence in social relations and in
material culture.
Highlight: : absence does things, it is performative.

Highlight: : Fowles (2010: 28, in AA)

Highlight: : ‘Absences push back and resist. They prompt us into action. And like
present things, absences also have their distinctive affordances and
material consequences.’
Highlight: : Absence is also something we engage with, something we do something

to
Highlight: : Woodthorpe (2008)

Highlight: : In a museum and a cemetery we can ‘feel’, ‘see’, and ‘hear’ absence. In
cemeteries, we are confronted with absence in the loss of people … In
museums, we are confronted with the absence of the ‘world out there’
and/or the ‘world that once was’. Both sites, hence, do something to and
something with the absent – transforming, freezing, materialising, evoking,
delineating, enacting, performing, and remembering the absent.
Highlight: : ‘presencing absence’.

Highlight: : The Matter of Death: Space, Place and Materiality (Hockey et al., 2010;
referenced as MD hereafter),
Highlight: : the material culture of death, that is: ‘the stuff, the spaces, the practices
which surround the ending of embodied life, the disposal of the body, the
mourning and memorialisation which then ensue
Highlight: : ‘spirits would not be the spirits they are without the places devised for
their “presence”’ (Davies, 2010: 212, in MD
Highlight: : these spaces have economic and political dimensions.

Highlight: : immateriality of the deceased may be ‘re-formulated and achieve serious

immediacy and presence’ by being subjectified and materialized through
such objects (Sørensen, 2010: 118, 128, in AA; see also Hetherington,
2004: 171 on the notion of care for the absent).
Highlight: : absences are ‘part of the material world’, but also ‘foreign to that world’
(Fowles, 2010: 39, in AA).
Highlight: : Absence turned into matter is necessarily uncertain, unstable matter. It is

difficult, perhaps impossible, to stabilize, formalize, or define absence.
For absence is, by its nature, unattainable, unstable, not present – hence
the paradoxical nature of any discussion about the materiality of absence
Highlight: : Perhaps one way to overcome this paradox and the ‘ambiguous materiality’
of absence is to think of absence as an ‘immaterial thing’ or ‘more than
immaterial and less than material’ (Bille, 2010: 179, in AA).
Highlight: : the often unmarked and unbounded grave threatens the boundaries
between the living and the dead, between death space and domestic
space.
Highlight: : the relational ontology of absence.

Highlight: : ‘personhood and identity emerge as relational, negotiated concepts that

refer to spatially located practices’ (Hockey et al., 2010: 227)
Highlight: : we should think about materiality and immateriality as ‘a spectrum of
engagements and entrapments’ (Meskell, 2010: 212, in AA).
Highlight: : in one way or another, absence goes with presence and that both stand
in a mutual relationship. We might, therefore, talk about the relational
ontology of absence.
Highlight: : All material entities are produced in relations; what defines and makes
them is their relational materiality.
Highlight: : absence not as an existing ‘thing’ in itself but as something that is made
to exist through relations that give absence matter. It means seeing
absence as something performed, textured and materialized through
relations and processes.
Highlight: : absence as a trace and as something that needs to be traced.

Highlight: : Hetherington (2004: 162)

Highlight: : ‘the absent is only ever moved along and is never fully gotten rid of’
Highlight: : Tracing absence is thus at once a spatial and performative act; a movement
that is always following and ‘behind’ its object and therefore unable to
capture it fully; and, finally, a trace is something that points to, something
that is incomplete, something that once was.
Highlight: : Hetherington (2004: 159) used the term ‘placing’

Highlight: : disposal is about placing absences and this has consequences for how
we think about “social relations’”
Highlight: : material culture and the productivity and consequences of ‘placing
absence’.
Highlight: : we should not consider absence and presence as a dualism and that we
should not strictly oppose the two. Both have agency; both are
performative and have effects. But perhaps the time has come to move
beyond such arguments. Rather than talking about presence and absent
presence, we might for instance use terms such as ‘propinquity’ in order
to talk about ‘degrees of nearness in different registers, rather than
presence … Propinquity rather facilitates presence in terms of relation,
analogy, nearness in time, or nearness of place’ (Buchli, 2010: 186, in
AA). In other words, we need to theorize about death, absence, presence,
etc. through concepts and approaches that relate, that hold together the
absent and the present. Such relational approaches invite us to embrace
absence and presence, materiality and immateriality, and to be
symmetric: the effects and presences of both present and absent things
can be similar.
Highlight: : when presence is turned into absence (a building destroyed, a person

dying), we are faced with cuts, ruptures and irreversibilities. Even though
the dead might have effects on and leave traces in people’s social worlds,
they cannot be brought back to life. A dead person, after all, ‘does not talk
back’ (Hockey et al., 2010: 11). There are some things that dead bodies
cannot perform.
Highlight: : absence is far more than a discursive ‘thing’ in that it is performed through
a material, technical and discursive assemblage. Thus, rather than
seeking to reveal a dialogue ‘with’ or ‘between’ entities, the way forward, as
both books demonstrate, is to map out all the places, metaphors and
objects that do the ‘talking’.
Highlight: : Recasting Mary Douglas’s (1984: 35) famous definition of dirt as ‘matter out
of place’, we might argue that, while absence is matter out of place, it is
still placed through matter. Although, strictly speaking, absence is a thing
without matter, absence is ordered, remembered, evoked and made
discussable and sufferable through materialities. And even though
absence escapes – and can only ever be partially and temporarily contained
in – certain places, it is within these places and through leaving various
kinds of traces that absence comes to matter.
Notes in Document
'Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media':
Highlight: : Digital Fiction and Your Divided Attention
(Refiguring Minds in Narrative Media, p.7)
Highlight: : Digital Fiction and Memory’s Playground

Highlight: : Coda: Pattern and Coherence

Highlight: : In the popular understanding, one of the most prevailing beliefs about the
use of digital media, in general, concerns the potentially deleterious effects
it has on attention.
Highlight: : digital media is also charged with compromising healthy social and
emotional development, especially of children, in the long term.
Highlight: : Ironically, amid the alarm of attentional breakdowns, contemporary cognitive

science has been busy dividing attention, so to speak, in an attempt to
better articulate its forms and functions.
Highlight: : cognitive scientists tend to reject a unified notion of attention and instead
describe it as a collection of different though often overlapping skills
mobilized for different tasks
Highlight: : These diverse forms of attention are partitioned into modes or subsystems,
and some of the most easily recognized (and those easiest to test
experimentally) include: sustain, which involves attention to a single task
over an extended period of time (such as checking widgets on an
assembly line); encode, which involves entering new data into working
memory (such as learning a street address); focus-execute, which involves
the execution of predetermined scripts or daily routines (such as feeding
the dog); and what is known as supervisory attention, which is effectively
the executive branch of attention that actively inhibits and overrides all
other competing signals in favor of a prioritized one.2 In this understanding,
attention is always divided, and this is a biologically necessary state of
affairs
Highlight: : “Deep attention . . . is characterized by concentrating on a single object for
long periods (say, a novel by Dickens), ignoring outside stimuli while so
engaged, preferring a
Highlight: : single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times.
Hyper attention, by contrast, is characterized by switching focus rapidly
between different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a
high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom” (187)
Highlight: : Hayles makes a convincing case for a generational shift in our consumption
of cultural artifacts that is literally, which is to say neuroanatomically,
changing the way we think and learn. Exposure to and desire for dynamic
participatory media—that which sustains our hyperattentive appetite—is
playing an ever more prominent role in the process of synaptic pruning
(called synaptogenesis) that bolsters the neuronal connections important for
cognitive development in relation to a particular individual’s (media)
environment. As Hayles observes, the privileging of neuronal patterns that
can cope with and, in turn, demand high levels of stimulation from multiple
channels of sensory input comes at the expense of our wiring for deep
attention, which of course has profound implications for literary studies and
the future of curricular design in the humanities
Highlight: : Scott Rettberg (2009), for one, argues that digital fiction marks a potential
convergence of the “configurative desires and cognitive behaviors of
Generation M,” on the one hand, and the “contemplative and interpretive
demands” of literary reading practices, on the other: “I can think of no literary
medium more suited to straddling the divide between hyper attention and
deep attention than electronic literature” (16)
Highlight: : The way in which minds and media reciprocally shape one another— what
anthropology describes as “technogenesis”—
Highlight: : Given its place in the current media ecology, digital fiction is uniquely
positioned in its ability to represent consciousness. Furthermore, digital
narratives can challenge commonplace ideas about the degradation of
attention in light of digital textuality and its supporting screen media by
innovating and disrupting traditional reading practices.
Highlight: : Hae Chang Heavy Industries (YHCHI) and, in particular, “The Last Day of
Betty Nkomo” (2005)
Highlight: : the speed and animation in their digital narratives combine programmatic
and discursive design in guiding our understandings of character interiority
through its own mode of cybernetic narration. The radical model of reading
and viewing prompted by YHCHI’s texts makes us acutely aware of the
function and limitation of our own perceptual apparatus and, in turn,
unsettles what we regard to be literary and imaginative experience
Notes in Document
'Exploring digital remediation in support of personal
reflection':
Highlight: : Increasingly our digital traces are providing new opportunities for self-
reflection.
(Exploring digital remediation in support of personal reflection, p.1)
Highlight: : editorial decisions that take place as part of the remediation process and
show how the transformations allow users to reflect on their digital identity
in new ways
Highlight: : a fluid rather than bounded interpretation of our social media spaces may be
appropriate. We argue that remediation can contribute to the understanding
of digital self and consider the design implications for new SM systems
designed to support self-reflection.
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Intimate Distance The
Technosexual Architecture of Camming
Architecture e flux’
Notes in Document
'Intimate Distance The Technosexual Architecture of
Camming Architecture e flux':
Highlight: : Designed for the webcam eye, domesticity in these rooms is reduced to a
bare set of signifiers without excessive concern for realism.
(Intimate Distance The Technosexual Architecture of Camming Architecture e flux, p.2)
Highlight: : The requisite appearance of the personal is rendered generic enough to be

universally inhabitable.
Highlight: : the decor of these spaces gives the work on display visual legitimacy, an
aura of authenticity, while also contributing to the sexual capital of the
worker within a field in which the domestic and the personal are associated
with the erotic.
Highlight: : both facilitating and defining the work on display.

Highlight: : plug the body of a worker into a global economy composed of flows of data,
capital, and cum.
Highlight: : architecture not only houses bodies but also choreographs them, connects
them, and conditions them.
Highlight: : the body does not just inhabit architecture, but architecture inhabits the
body.
Highlight: : a near- instantaneous feed, which creates a temporal relationship between

the model and the viewers that distinguishes camming from other forms of
pornography and helps to produce the sense of authenticity that is
commonly cited as its primary draw.
Highlight: : you never really know what will happen next. There is no script, no editor, no
filters—it feels real. And, while you don’t inhabit the same space as the
cammer, you at least cohabit time
Highlight: : By reducing wasted time and increasing caffeine intake, the webcam
restructured the temporality of work and the biochemical composition of the
worker.
Highlight: : vulnerable to hacking, they have perforated the sense of privacy offered by
traditional architectonic elements like walls
Highlight: : A webcam does not just extend the visual acuity of the eye, but also
redesigns the human itself and its relationships to other bodies, spaces,
and objects.
Highlight: : With the assistance of a picture-in-picture of their own feed, the performer
discovers new ways to see themselves being seen
Highlight: : a somatic hermeneutics of “playing to your angles” and “knowing your best
light.
Highlight: : Proliferating through digital networks, the pixelbody of the cammer and the
pixelroom it inhabits meet the fleshy body of a consumer and are
incorporated into it: a barrage of photons penetrate the consumer’s eye
and are translated into neuronal signals that activate the paraventricular
nucleus in the hypothalamus, releasing oxytocin into the bloodstream and
producing a reaction in the spinal cord centers that, in turn, integrates the
sensory pelvic neural inputs and drives a genital response.
Highlight: : pre-established relationships with financial institutions that facilitate

payments
Highlight: : At any moment, thousands of homes are coupled together into a larger
machinic assemblage, a vast domestic urbanism—and that coupling is itself
part of the eroticism.
Highlight: : personal items like used clothing. These other modes of payment bridge
the virtual divide and involve senses beyond the visual, with a dildo or pair
of dirty underwear serving as a sort of haptic prosthesis, rendering both the
home and the body porous but still intact.
Highlight: : helps magnify the effect of intimacy for the consumer,

Highlight: : increasingly, cammers use teledildonics, or sex toys such as dildos,

vibrators, and fuck machines that can be controlled remotely through data
links, haptically compressing geographic distance
Highlight: : cam sex is not so much a pornographic media as a unique form of sex in its
own right
Highlight: : your touch extends not only through the vibrating machine lodged in the
anus of the cammer, but also through the webcam broadcasting the scene to
an
Highlight: : assembly of other unknown bodies whose pupils dilate, heartbeats quicken,
and dopamine levels rise as they watch the body onscreen react.
Camming is a technosocial orgy
Highlight: : at least some of the unique erotic appeal of cam sex comes from an
awareness of your own participation in this complex architectonic
assemblage.
Highlight: : The turn-on of cam sex is not just the bodies of the cammers and the acts
in which they engage, but also the relay of mics and speakers that let you
speak with them, the economy that says you tip and they act, the spectral
crowd of other masturbating bodies, and the way that the cammer’s room
reflects their personality, just like yours.
Highlight: : intensity can be attributed to the affective and emotional labor implicit in
camming, as well as the apparent intimacy produced by visual access to the
cammer’s own bedroom, among other things.
Highlight: : guides instruct cammers to both “personalize” by choosing decor that

matches their brand and “depersonalize” by removing things like
photographs.
Highlight: : Decorating for camming is not very different than decorating in general. It is
referential, it involves a careful balance between the generic and the
personal, and it is unpaid and under recognized while still producing value.
That is, decorating is labor that enables a space to serve a particular
function, be it camming or something else
Highlight: : works alongside a wide-range of institutions and apparatuses to help

manufacture the subject it claims to represent. In other words, decorating
is less a reflection of one’s personality than a means to produce it; a
collection of citations, an assemblage of associations.
Highlight: : the rising trend of people working from home suggests that the separation
between workplace and living space that marked the last century was just a
blip in an otherwise long history of their entanglement
Highlight: : Rather than a fixed or universal descriptor, the domestic constitutes a

historically contingent cluster of references informed by mediatic
representations, social norms, and individual experiences. As a descriptor,
it is at once fundamentally deictic and simultaneously embedded within an
economy of shared associations and affects.
Highlight: : sexuality and eroticism often belong to this economy, but often in the form
of opposition, refusal, or violence
Highlight: : closets—reveals the sexual saturation of domesticity rather than negates it,
while also introducing the possibility of transgression by establishing the
rule.
Highlight: : Sex, after all, tends to take place in homes. When it doesn’t, such as with
public sex, it can extract eroticism specifically from its displacement.
Highlight: : decorating fosters the sense that camming is a labor of love rather than
wage labor, which would suggest that the relationships forged between
consumer and producer are somehow more than just transactional.
Highlight: : The sets of Studio20 are no less domestic than a home. They are not copies
but the real thing—or as real as it gets. The domestic is a signifier without
a referent that emerges out of an economy of circulating images, affects,
language, capital, and bodies that includes camming as much as houses,
books, movies, and memories.
Highlight: : To represent the domestic is to produce it, to give it new meanings and
new associations. There is no original home to resemble, eschew, parody,
or appropriate, only a shifting constellation of resemblances and citations.
Highlight: : Bodies become entangled with one another and their environments to the
point where they all begin to blur into a massive technosocial whole.
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Lovecraftian Ontography’
Notes in Document
'Weird Realism:
Lovecraft and Philosophy
Graham Harman
.pdf':
Highlight:
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Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science
Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective ’
Notes in Document
'Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in
Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective ':
Highlight: : what we might mean by the curious and inescapable term "objectivit
(Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective ,
p.2)
Highlight: : The imagined "we" are the embodied others, who are not allowed not to
have a body, a finite point of view, and so an inevitably disqualifying and
polluting bias in any discussion of consequence outside our own little
circles
p.2)
Highlight: : traditionally what can count as knowledge is policed by philosophers

codifying cognitive canon law
p.2)
Highlight: : feminists have both selectively and flexibly used and been trapped by two
poles of a tempting dichotomy on the question of objectivity
p.3)
Highlight: : a very strong social constructionist argument for all forms of knowledge
claims
p.3)
Highlight: : all drawings of inside-outside boundaries in knowledge are theorized as

power moves, not moves toward truth
p.3)
Highlight: : Social constructionists make clear that official ideologies about ob-
jectivity and scientific method are particularly bad guides to how scientific
knowledge is actually made
p.3)
Highlight: : the law of the father and its resolution of the problem of objectivity, a
problem solved by always already absent referents, deferred signifieds,
split subjects, and the endless play of signifiers
p.3)
Highlight: : social constructionists might maintain that the ideological doctrine of

scientific method and all the philosophical verbiage about epistemology
were cooked up to distract our attention from getting to know the world
effectively by practicing the sciences
p.4)
Highlight: : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric. Practice is
persuasion
p.4)
Highlight: : All knowledge is a condensed node in an agonistic power field

p.4)
Highlight: : the rhetorical nature of truth, including scientific truth. History is a story
Western culture buffs tell each other; science is a contestable text and a
power field; the content is the form.
p.4)
Highlight: : the rich and always historically specific mediations through which we
and everybody else must know the world
p.4)
Highlight: : Nancy Hartsock

p.5)
Highlight: : abstract masculinity

p.5)
Highlight: : showing the radical historical specificity, and so contestabilit

p.5)
Highlight: : wanted a way to go beyond showing bias in science

p.5)
Highlight: : Humanistic Marxism was polluted at the source by its structuring theory
about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man and by its
closely related impotence in relation to historicizing anything women did
that didn't qualify for a wage
p.5)
Highlight: : still a promising resource as a kind of epistemological feminist mental

hygiene that sought our own doctrines of objective vision
p.5)
Highlight: : how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency

for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for
recognizing our own "semiotic technologies" for making meanings, and a
no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a "real" world, one that
can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite
freedom, adequate material abun- dance, modest meaning in suffering,
and limited happiness
p.6)
Highlight: : a successor science projec

p.6)
Highlight: : insistence on irreducible difference and radical multiplicity of local

knowledges
p.6)
Highlight: : Feminists don't need a doctrine of objectivity that promises

transcendence, a story that loses track of its mediations just where
someone might be held responsible for something, and unlimited
instrumental power.
p.6)
Highlight: : we do need an earthwide network of connections, including the ability

partially to translate knowledges among very different-and power-
differentiated - communities
p.7)
Highlight: : modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in
order to deny meanings and bodies, but in order to build meanings and
bodies that have a chance for life.
p.7)
Highlight: : Science has been about a search for translation, convertibility, mobility of
meanings, and universality- which I call reductionism only when one
language (guess whose?) must be enforced as the standard for all the
translations and con- versions
p.7)
Highlight: : enforceable, reliable accounts of things not reduci- ble to power moves
and agonistic, high-status games of rhetoric or to scientistic, positivist
arrogance
p.7)
Highlight: : Vi- sion can be good for avoiding binary opposition

p.8)
Highlight: : I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim
the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the
marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere
p.8)
Highlight: : to represent while escaping representation

p.8)
Highlight: : I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity

p.8)
Highlight: : situated knowledge

p.8)
Highlight: : distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything in the
interests of unfettered power.
p.8)
Highlight: : this eye fucks the world to make techno-monster

p.8)
Highlight: : insisting metaphorically on the particularity and embodiment of all vision

(although not necessarily organic embodiment and including
technological mediation), and not giving in to the tempting myths of
vision as a route to disembodiment and second-birthing allows us to
construct a usable, but not an innocent, doctrine of objectivit
p.9)
Highlight: : We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and
stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and
political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in
dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.
p.9)
Highlight: : only partial perspective promises objective vision.

p.10)
Highlight: : Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not
about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to
become answerable for what we learn how to see.
p.10)
Highlight: : The "eyes" made available in modern technological sciences shatter any
idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes,
including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building
on translations and specific ways of seeing
p.10)
Highlight: : All these pictures of the world should not be allegories of infinite
mobility and interchangeability but of elaborate specificity and difference
and the loving care people might take to learn how to see faithfully from
another's point of view, even when the other is our own machine
p.10)
Highlight: : a possible allegory for feminist versions of objectivit

p.10)
Highlight: : Understanding how these visual systems work, technically, socially, and
psychically, ought to be a way of embodying feminist objectivity.
p.10)
Highlight: : an argument for situated and embodied knowledges and an argument

against various forms of unlocatable, and so irrespon- sible, knowledge
claims.
p.10)
Highlight: : The alternative to relativism is partial, locatable, critical knowledges
sustaining the possibility of webs of connections called solidarity in politics
and shared conversations in epistemology. Relativism is a way of being
nowhere while claiming to be everywhere equally. The "equality" of
positioning is a denial of responsibility and critical inquiry. Relativism is
the perfect mirror twin of totalization in the ideologies of objectivity; both
deny the stakes in location, embodiment, and partial perspective; both
make it impossible to see well. Relativism and totalization are both "god
tricks" promising vision from everywhere and nowhere equally and fully
p.11)
Highlight: : But it is precisely in the politics and epistemology of partial perspectives

that the possibility of sustained, rational, objective inquiry rests.
p.11)
Highlight: : practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction,

passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for trans-
formation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing.
p.12)
Highlight: : "Passionate detachment"12 requires more than acknowledged and self-

critical partiality
p.12)
Highlight: : Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link

meanings and bodies
p.12)
Highlight: : the opening of noniso- morphic subjects, agents, and territories of stories
unimaginable from the vantage point of the cyclopean, self-satiated eye of
the master subjec
p.13)
Highlight: : The split and contradictory self is the one who can interrogate
positionings and be accountabl
p.13)
Highlight: : The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply
there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together
imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together
without claiming to be another
p.13)
Highlight: : There is no way to "be" simultaneously in all, or wholly in any, of the privi-
leged (i.e., subjugated) positions structured by gender, race, nation, and
class. And that is a short list of critical positions. The search for such a
"full" and total position is the search for the fetishized perfect subject of
oppositional history
p.13)
Highlight: : Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning.

Instruments of vision mediate standpoints; there is no immediate vision
from the standpoints of the subjugated
p.13)
Highlight: : Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical

positioning does, that is, objectivity
p.13)
Highlight: : Only those occupying the positions of the dominators are self-identical,
unmarked, disembodied, unmediated, transcendent, born again
p.13)
Highlight: : The only position from which objectivity could not possibly be practiced
and honored is the standpoint of the master, the Man, the One God,
whose Eye produces, appropriates, and orders all difference
p.14)
Highlight: : Positioning is, therefore, the key practice in grounding knowledge
organized around the imagery of vision, and much Western scientific and
philosophic discourse is organized in this way.
p.14)
Highlight: : Histories of science may be powerfully told as histories of the

technologies. These technologies are ways of life, social orders, practices
of visualization. Technologies are skilled practices
p.14)
Highlight: : The issue in politically engaged attacks on various empiricisms,

reductionisms, or other versions of scientific authority should not be
relativism-but location. A dichotomous chart expressing this point might
look like this: universal rationality common language new organon
unified field theory world system master theory ethnophilosophies
heteroglossia deconstruction oppositional positioning local
knowledges webbed accounts
p.15)
Highlight: : The primary distortion is the illusion of symmetry in the chart's di-
chotomy, making any position appear, first, simply alternative and,
second, mutually exclusive. A map of tensions and reason- ances
between the fixed ends of a charged dichotomy better represents the
potent politics and epistemologies of embodied, therefore accountable,
objectivity
p.15)
Highlight: : For example, local knowledges have also to be in tension with the
productive structurings that force unequal translations and exchanges -
material and semiotic - within the webs of knowledge and power.
p.15)
Highlight: : Webs can have the property of being systematic, even of being centrally
structured global systems with deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into
time, space, and consciousness, which are the dimensions of world
history.
p.15)
Highlight: : Gender is a field of structured and structuring difference, in which the

tones of extreme localization, of the intimately personal and individualized
body, vibrate in the same field with global high-tension emissions
p.15)
Highlight: : nodes in fields, inflections in orientations, and responsibility for difference

in material-semiotic fields of meaning
p.15)
Highlight: : Here, primate vision is not immediately a very powerful metaphor or

technology
p.15)
Highlight: : it seems to present to consciousness already processed and objectified

fields; things seem already fixed and distanced
p.16)
Highlight: : The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual
production, including the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our
biological eyes and brains
p.16)
Highlight: : here we find highly particular machineries for processing regions of the
electromagnetic spectrum into our pictures of the world. It is in the
intricacies of these visualization technologies in which we are embedded
that we will find metaphors and means for understanding and
intervening in the patterns of objectification in the world-that is, the
patterns of reality for which we must be accountable. In these metaphors,
we find means for appreciating simultaneously both the concrete, "real"
aspect and the aspect of semiosis and production in what we call
scientific knowledge
p.16)
Highlight: : I am arguing for politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and
situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being
heard to make rational knowledge claims.
p.16)
Highlight: : for the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring,
and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from
simpli- city.
p.16)
Highlight: : terpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood. Feminism is

about the sciences of the multiple subject with (at least) double vision
p.16)
Highlight: : So location is about vulnerability; location resists the politics of closure,
finality, or to borrow from Althusser, feminist objectivity resists
"simplification in the last instance." That is because feminist embodiment
resists fix- ation and is insatiably curious about the webs of differential
positioning. There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps
require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions.
But the feminist standpoint theorists' goal of an epistemology and politics
of engaged, accountable positioning remains eminently potent.
p.17)
Highlight: : Rational knowledge is a process of ongoing critical interpretation among

"fields" of interpreters and decoders. Ra- tional knowledge is power-
sensitive conversation.7 Decoding and transcoding plus translation and
criticism; all are necessary
p.17)
Highlight: : science becomes the paradigmatic model, not of closure, but of that
which is contestable and contested. Science becomes the myth, not of
what escapes human agency and responsibility in a realm above the fray,
but, rather, of accountability and responsibility for translations and
solidarities linking the cacophonous visions and visionary voices that
characterize the knowledges of the subjugate
p.17)
Highlight: : We seek not the knowledges ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the
presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision. We seek those
ruled by partial sight and limited voice-not partiality for its own sake but,
rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated
knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about
communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger
vision is to be somewhere in particula
p.17)
Highlight: : Throughout the field of meanings constituting science, one of the

commonalities concerns the status of any object of knowledge and of
related claims about the faithfulness of our accounts to a "real world," no
matter how mediated for us and no matter how complex and contradictory
these worlds may be.
p.18)
Highlight: : It seems clear that feminist accounts of objectivity and embodiment-that
is, of a world-of the kind sketched in this essay require a deceptively
simple maneuver within inherited Western analytical traditions, a
maneuver begun in dialectics but stopping short of the needed revisions.
Situated knowledges require that the object of knowledge be pictured as
an actor and agent, not as a screen or a ground or a resource, never
finally as slave to the master that closes off the dialectic in his unique
agency and his authorship of "objective" knowledge
p.19)
Highlight: : A corollary of the insistence that ethics and politics covertly or overtly
provide the bases for objectivity in the sciences as a heterogeneous
whole, and not just in the social sciences, is granting the status of
agent/actor to the "objects" of the world
p.20)
Highlight: : Accounts of a "real" world do not, then, depend on a logic of "discovery"

but on a power-charged social relation of "conversatio
p.20)
Highlight: : Acknowledging the agency of the world in knowledge makes room for
some unsettling possibilities, including a sense of the world's
independent sense of humor
p.20)
Highlight: : feminist visualizations of the world as witty agent

p.20)
Highlight: : try to strike up noninnocent conversations by means of our prosthetic

devices, including our visualization technologies
p.21)
Highlight: : the "activation" of the previously passive categories of objects of

knowledge. This activation permanently problematizes binary distinctions
like sex and gender, without eliminating their strategic utility
p.21)
Highlight: : She is structuring and active in every respect; the "body" is an agent, not
a resource. Difference is theorized biologically as situational, not intrinsic,
at every level from gene to foraging pattern, thereby fundamentally
changing the biological politics of the body.
p.21)
Highlight: : a final category useful to a feminist theory of situated knowledges: the

apparatus of bodily production
p.22)
Highlight: : the generation-the actual production and reproduction-of bodies and other
objects of value in scientific knowledge project
p.22)
Highlight: : wish to translate the ideological dimensions of "facticity" and "the
organic" into a cumbersome entity called a "material-semiotic actor.
p.22)
Highlight: : boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boun- daries are drawn by
mapping practices; "objects" do not preexist as such. Objects are
boundary projects
p.22)
Highlight: : Objectivity is not about disengagement but about mutual and usually
unequal structuring,
p.22)
Highlight: : We have, finally, no clear and distinct ideas. The various contending
biological bodies emerge at the intersection of biological research and
writing, medical and other business practices, and technology, such as
the visualization technologie
p.23)
Highlight: : Perhaps our hopes for accountability, for politics, for ecofemi- nism, turn
on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to
converse.
p.23)
Notes in Workspace:
Notes in ‘Skeptical Realism’
Notes in Document
'Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of
Fact to Matters of Concern ':
Highlight: : I did not exactly aim atfooling the public by obscuring the certainty of a
closed argument—or did I? After all, I have been accused of just that sin.
Still, I’d like to believe that, on the contrary, I intended to emancipatethe
public from prematurely naturalized objectified facts.
(Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern , p.3)
Highlight: : While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the
appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real
objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of
prejudices?
Highlight: : should we rather bring the sword of criticism to criticism itself and do a bit
of soul-searching
Highlight: : Their serious as well as their popularized versions have the defect of using
society as an already existing cause instead of as a possible consequence
Highlight: : Maybe I am taking conspiracy theories too seriously, but it worries me to

detect, in those mad mixtures of knee-jerk disbelief, punctilious demands
for proofs, and free use of powerful explanation from the social neverland
many of the weapons of social critique. Of course conspiracy theories are
an absurd deformation of our own arguments, but, like weapons smuggled
through a fuzzy border to the wrong party, these are our weapons
nonetheless. In spite of all the defor- mations, it is easy to recognize, still
burnt in the steel, our trademark:Made in Criticalland.
Highlight: : We have been com- plaining so much about the gullible masses,
swallowing naturalized facts, it would be really unfair to now discredit the
same masses for their, what should I call it, gullible criticism?
Highlight: : let the virus of critique out of the confines of their laboratories and cannot
do anything now to limit its deleterious effects; it mutates now, gnawing
everything up, even the vessels in which it is contained?
Highlight: : the famed power of capitalism for recycling everything aimed at its
destruction?
Highlight: : If the dense and moralist cigar- smoking reactionary bourgeois can
transform him- or herself into a free- floating agnostic bohemian, moving
opinions, capital, and networks from one end of the planet to the other
without attachment, why would he or she not be able to absorb the most
sophisticated tools of deconstruction, social construction, discourse
analysis, postmodernism, postology
Highlight: : My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the
wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to
be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little
mistake in the definition of its main target. The question was never to get
away from facts butcloser to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the con-
trary, renewing empiricism.
Highlight: : the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found
in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William
James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not
matters of fact.
Highlight: : The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was
no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from
them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them
possible. But this meant ac- cepting much too uncritically what matters of
fact were.
Highlight: : Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is
given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would
argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and
only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second
empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next
task for the critically minded.
Highlight: : while the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very
powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for
debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally
disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same
debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly
turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses.
My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that
deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no
longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would
put it? Is it really possible to transform the critical urge in the ethos of
someone who adds reality to matters of fact and not subtract reality? To
put it another way, what’s the difference between deconstruction and
constructivism?
Highlight: : to write not matter-of-factually but, how should I say it, in a matter-of-
concern way?
Highlight: : A thing is, in one sense, an object out there and, in another sense, an
issue very much in there, at any rate, a gathering
Highlight: : To use the term I introduced earlier now more precisely, the same word
thing designates matters of fact and matters of concern.
Highlight: : As Ian Hacking has recently shown, the engagement of a rock in
philosophical talk is utterly different if you take a banal rock to make your
point (usually to lapidate a passing relativist!) or if you take, for instance,
dolomite, as he has done so beautifully.
Highlight: : suddenly, in a stroke, an object had become a thing, a matter of fact was
considered as a matter of great concern
Highlight: : while in the case ofColumbiawe had a perfectly mastered object that
suddenly was transformed into a shower of burning debris that was used
as so much evidence in an investigation, there, at the United Nations, we
had an investigation that tried to coalesce, in one unifying, unanimous,
solid, mastered object, masses of people, opinions, and might. In one case
the object was metamorphosed into a thing; in the second, the thing was
attempting to turn into an object. We could witness, in one case, the head,
in another, the tail of the trajectory through which matters of fact emerge
out of matters of concern. In both cases we were offered a unique window
into the number of things that have to participate in the gathering of an
object.
Highlight: : Serres proposed the word quasi-object to cover this intermediary phase
between things and objects—a philosophical question much more
interesting than the tired old one of the relation between words and worlds.
Highlight: : My point is thus very simple: things have become Things again, objects
have reentered the arena, the Thing, in which they have to be gathered first
in order to exist later as what stands apart.
Highlight: : Every day historians of science help us realize to what extent we have
never been modern because they keep revising every single element of
past matters of fact from Mario Biagioli’s Galileo, Steven Shapin’s Boyle,
and Simon Schaffer’s Newton, to the in- credibly intricate linkages between
Einstein and Poincare´ that Peter Galison has narrated in his latest
masterpiece.2
Highlight: : the difference between modern and premodern, namely, the sudden and
somewhat miraculous appearance of matters of fact, is now thrown into
doubt with the merging of matters of fact into highly complex, historically
situated, richly diverse matters of concern. You can do one sort of thing
with mugs, jugs, rocks, swans, cats, mats but not with Einstein’s Patent
Bureau electric coordination of clocks in Bern. Things that gather cannot
be thrown at you like objects.
Highlight: : no matter what we do, when we try to reconnect scientific objects with their
aura, their crown, their web of associations, when we accompany them
back to their gathering, we always appear to weaken them, not to
strengthen their claim to reality.
Highlight: : 90 percent of the contemporary critical scene

Highlight: : fixate the object at only two positions, what I have called the fact position
and the fairy position
Highlight: : The fairy position is very well known and is used over and over again by
many social scientists who associate criticism with antifetishism. The role
of the critic is then to show that what the naı¨ve believers are doing with
objects is simply a projection of their wishes onto a material entity that
does nothing at all by itself.
Highlight: : the courageous critic, who alone remains aware and attentive, who never
sleeps, turns those false objectsinto fetishes that are supposed to be
nothing but mere empty white screens on which is projected the power of
society, domination, whatever.
Highlight: : behavior is now “explained” by the powerful effects of indisputable

matters of fact: “You, ordinary fetishists, believe you are free but, in reality,
you are acted on by forces you are not conscious of. Look at them, look,
you blind idiot” (and here you insert whichever pet facts the social
scientists fancy to work with, taking them from economic infrastructure,
fields of discourse, social domination, race, class, and gender, maybe
throwing in some neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, whatever,
provided they act as indisputable facts whose origin, fabrication, mode of
development are left unexamined) (fig. 3).
Highlight: : When naı¨ve believers are clinging forcefully to their objects, claiming that
they are made to do things because of their gods, their poetry, their
cherished objects, you can turn all of those attachments into so many
fetishes and humiliate all the believers by showing that it is nothing but
their own projection, that you, yes you alone, can see. But as soon as
naı¨ve believers are thus inflated by some belief in their own importance, in
their own projective capacity, you strike them by a second uppercut and
humiliate them again, this time by showing that, whatever they think, their
behavior is entirely determined by the action of powerful causalities coming
from objective reality they don’t see, but that you, yes you, the never
sleeping critic, alone can see.
Highlight: : The whole rather poor trick that allows critique to go on, although we would
never confine our own valuables to their sordid pawnshop, is that there is
never any crossover between the two lists of objects in the fact position
and the fairy position. This is why you can be at once and without even
sensing any contradiction (1) an antifetishist for everything you don’t
believe in—for the most part religion, popular culture, art, politics, and so
on; (2) an unrepentant positivist for all the sciences you believe in—
sociology, economics, conspiracy theory, genetics, evolutionary
psychology, semiotics, just pick your preferred field of study; and (3) a
perfectly healthy sturdy realist for what you really cherish—and of course it
might be criticism itself, but also painting, bird-watching, Shakespeare,
baboons, proteins, and so on.
Highlight: : we have had in effect almost no occasion so far to detect the total
mismatch of the three contradictory repertoires— antifetishism, positivism,
realism—because we carefully manage to apply them on different topics.
We explain the objects we don’t approve of by treating them as fetishes;
we account for behaviors we don’t like by discipline whose makeup we
don’t examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those
things that are for us worthwhile matters of concern.
Highlight: : critique was useless against objects of some solidity

Highlight: : Objects are much too strong to be treated as fetishes and much too weak
to be treated as indisputable causal explanations of some unconscious
action. A
Highlight: : scientific objects cannot be socially explained

Highlight: : The exhibition in Karlsruhe, Germany, Iconoclash,was a sort of belated ritual

in order to atone for so much wanton destruction.
Highlight: : too act, they too do things, they too make you do things. It is not only the
objects of science that resist, but all the others as well
Highlight: : To the fact position, to thefairy position, why not add a third position, a fair
position?
Highlight: : If we had to dismantle social theory only, it would be a rather simple affair;
like the Soviet empire, those big totalities have feet of clay. But the
difficulty lies in the fact that they are built on top of a much older
philosophy, so that whenever we try to replace matters of fact by matters of
concern, we seem to lose something along the way
Highlight: : As long as we have not sealed the leaks, the realist attitude will always be
split; matters of fact take the best part, and matters of concern are limited
to a rich but essentially void or irrelevant history.
Highlight: : Of all themodern philosophers who tried to overcome matters of fact,
Whitehead is the only one who, instead of taking the path of critique and
directing his attention away from facts to what makes them possible as
Kant did; or adding something to their bare bones as Husserl did; or
avoiding the fate of their domination, their Gestell, as much as possible as
Heidegger did; tried to getcloserto them or, more exactly, to see through
them the reality that requested a new re- spectful realist attitude.
Highlight: : What set Whitehead completely apart and straight on our path is that he
considered matters of fact to be a very poor rendering of what is given in
experience and something that muddles entirely the question, What is
there? with the question, How do we know it?
Highlight: : “For natural philosophy everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick
up and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of
nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science
would explain the phenomenon” (CN, pp. 28–29).
Highlight: : The solution or, rather, the adventure, according to Whitehead, is to dig
much further into the realist attitude and to realize that matters of fact are
totally implausible, unrealistic, unjustified definitions of what it is to deal
with things:
Highlight: : matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal
characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual entity. It is
this refusal which has caused the muddle of importing the mere pro-
cedure of thought into the fact of nature. The entity, bared of all charac-
teristics except those of space and time, has acquired a physical status as
the ultimate texture of nature; so that the course of nature is conceived as
being merely the fortunes of matter in its adventure through space. [CN, p.
20]
Highlight: : matters of fact are a poor proxy of experience and of experimentation
and, I would add, a confusing bundle of polemics, of epistemology, of
modernist politics that can in no way claim to represent what is requested
by a realist attitude.
Highlight: : the direction of the new critical attitude with which I wish to replace the
tired routines of most social theories.
Highlight: : this promising word gathering that Heidegger had introduced to account for
the “thingness of the thing.”
Highlight: : a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of anthropology, philosophy,

metaphysics, history, sociology to detect how many participants are
gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain its existence.
Highlight: : Objects are simply a gathering that has failed—a fact that has not been
assembled according to due process.3
Highlight: : It is entirely wrong to divide the collective, as I call it, into the sturdy
matters of fact, on the one hand, and the dispensable crowds, on the other
Highlight: : Archimedes spoke for a whole tradition when he exclaimed: “Give me one
fixed point and I will move the Earth,” but am I not speaking for another,
much less prestigious but maybe as re- spectable tradition, if I exclaim in
turn “Give me one matter of concern and I will show you the whole earth
and heavens that have to be gathered to hold it firmly in place”?
Highlight: : The critic is not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles.
Highlight: : The critic is not the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naı¨ve
believers, but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather.
Highlight: : The critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly between
antifetishism and positivism like the drunk iconoclast drawn by Goya, but
the one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile
and thus in great need of care and caution.
Highlight: : The computer is in for many surprises; you get out of it much more than
you put into it. In the most dramatic way, Turing’s paper demonstrates,
once again, that all objects are born things, all matters of fact require, in
order to exist, a bewildering variety of matters of concern.
Highlight: : What would critique do if it could be associated with more, not with less,
with multiplication, not subtraction.
Notes in Document
'Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a
Thing':
Highlight: : metaphorism
(Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing, p.70)
Notes in Document
'Strange Tools: What can art tell us about who we are?
| New Scientist':
Highlight: : ordinary tools are technological things: we make them to organise our
lives. But “strange” tools are those that help us make sense of how we
organise our lives.
(Strange Tools: What can art tell us about who we are? | New Scientist, p.2)
Highlight: : our lives are governed by organised activities, from walking to dancing,
talking to breastfeeding. Such activities, he says, have distinct features:
they are primitive, basic and natural, yet demand complex cognitive and
attentional skills; they unfold over time; they serve a purpose, and can be
pleasurable. “Our lives are one big complex nesting of organised activities
at different levels and scales,
Highlight: : Art, says Noë, is a way of “illuminating the ways we find ourselves
organised”.
Highlight: : Choreography, says Noë, lays bare the impulses that make us dance – it
shows how dancing affects our lives. In that sense, choreography is art.
Noë likens it to philosophy, which he calls the “choreography of ideas and
concepts and beliefs”. Both “expose the concealed ways we are organised
by the things we do”.
Highlight: : compares art to map-making: “The task of generating a representation of

the lay of the land has its source in a real need, or a felt anxiety.”
Highlight: : art as an activity that seeks to expose the patterns that govern us
Highlight: : art “affords revelation, transformation, reorganisation”;

Highlight: : art as an activity that must make us ask: “What is this? What is this for?”,
thus revealing something about ourselves.
Notes in Document
'Diffractive Art Practices: Computation and the
Messy Entanglements between Mainstream
Contemporary Art, and New Media Art ':
Highlight: : Karen Barad’s notion of diffraction (2007)
(Diffractive Art Practices: Computation and the Messy Entanglements between Mainstream
Contemporary Art, and New Media Art , p.1)
Highlight: : there are generative ‘entanglements’, as well as productive differences

Highlight: : differences emerge through material-discursive intra-actions

Highlight: : there are productive and generative differences between practices of art.
Highlight: : the fields of mainstream contemporary art (MCA) and new media art
(NMA)
Highlight: : revises the position taken in Prophet’s paper The Artist in the Laboratory:
Co-operating (T)reasonably (Prophet, 2011).
Highlight: : the ways waves (water, light, sound) combine when they overlap
Highlight: : “the [visible] diffraction or interference pattern that water waves make
when they rush through an opening in a breakwater or when stones are
dropped in a pond and the ripples overlap” (Barad, 2007).
Highlight: : diffractions can be used as a us

Highlight: : a useful counterpoint to the metaphor of reflection in technoscience

practice (Barad, 2007) because they do not “place the same elsewhere”
(Gibbs, 1998).
Highlight: : dynamic and overlapping ripples change one another’s form

Highlight: : diffractive patterns are always in movement, a movement we are also

situated within
Highlight: : We only see the differences of the water and the stones when they are in
relation to one another, when the stone is thrown into the water and the
ripple appears
Highlight: : Diffraction reveals the ways materialities emerge as differentiated events,

as they come together, in relation to one another, and this includes the
materiality of stone, water and the thrower
Highlight: : reflection (discussed later) might be to ‘look back onto’ arts practice,
diffractive patterns manifest through reading practices through each other
Highlight: : diffractive patterns manifest through reading practices through each other.
Highlight: : diffractive patterns describe intra-actions and interferences

Highlight: : includes practices) from which different entities (which in this case might
refer to art works, art theories, art practices) emerge.
Highlight: : small details in the experimental setup that are both material and
discursive (material-discursive) cause different entities to emerge
Highlight: : focus on what the differences are, how they matter, and for what and for
whom, attending to the “relational nature of difference” (Barad, 2007).
Highlight: : Diffraction does not fix the object of study and the perceiving subject (the
observer and observed) and they are no longer in opposition.
Highlight: : not use difference to create clear boundaries between practices, but
rather to map the material-arrangements that emerge from these
differences,
Highlight: : illuminates differences as they emerge, amplifying how such differences

get made, revealing what gets included or excluded through practice, and
prompting us to question how those exclusions matter
Highlight: : Whereas reflection suggests a mirror image, or copy, diffraction invokes

“patterns of difference rather than reflecting images” (Haraway, 1997).
Highlight: : widespread belief amongst cultural theorists and producers in the positive
results of blurring (another optical metaphor) the boundaries between
disciplines (Geertz, 2000).
Highlight: : diffractive methodologies build on situated perspectives instead of

proposing a separation of subject and object.
Highlight: : Diffractive practices recognize the entanglements of subject and object,

which Barad describes as “phenomena”
Highlight: : The diffraction method allows us to interrupt the tendency to see MCA as
a fixed and/or dominant frame of reference against which to read NMA
Highlight: : the patterns of interference at the boundaries or overlaps of these

practices.
Highlight: : ongoing temporal and spatial entanglements (Barad, 2007).

Highlight: : different entities (material- configurations) interweave and entangle in an

on-going process of intra-action, resulting in the production of new
entities, comprising entangled groupings that, in turn, entangle with others
(Barad, 2007).
Highlight: : different entangled strands cannot be adequately dealt with in isolation,

as if they were unrelated to the others”
Highlight: : Through diffractive reading we pay attention to some of these sorts of

entanglements, this attention recognises “we too are part of the world’s
differential becoming” (Barad, 2007) this is not a case of a “knowing from
a distance” (Barad, 2007).
Highlight: : instead they emphasise that instead of there being a separation of subject
and object, they are entangled in “phenomena”. Objectivity, instead of
being about offering an undistorted mirror image of the world, is about
accountability and responsibility to the entanglements of which we are a
part (Barad, 2007).
Highlight: : to “map the effects” (Gibbs, 1998) of these entanglements as part of

accounting for art practices that arise in the productive spaces of overlap
between these recognized fields.
Highlight: : not wish to reinstate an oppositional view of the two fields, but instead aim
to examine the complex space of differentiated, but not polarised,
practices
Highlight: : Reading the same debate diffractively reveals, to an extent, what the
discursive differences of MCA are and how they matter.
Highlight: : digital artworks’ lack of “the comfort of materiality” (Stallabrass, 2003)

whereby many immaterial new media artefacts are copyable where “no
one copy is better than any other, which may appear in many places at
once, which may run out of the control of artists and curators and which
are given as a gift. To the extent that online art is associated with the
culture of Web 2.0 and the ‘wealth of networks’, it appears not merely
dissociated from the mainstream market for contemporary art but
dangerous to it” (Stallabrass, 2003).
Highlight: : Due to the histories and funding of NMA and its venues and festivals,
works disseminated via NMA have tended to foreground computation and
new technological arrangements, leaving artists open to the accusation
that their works are technologically determined and not engaged enough
with material-discourses of technology that include the political,
aesthetical and ethical.
Highlight: : interference suggests connection, exchange, collision and a degree of

identification between forces whereas between fields implies a gap, a lost
space, a lack of communication. Artists working through diffraction often
deliberately make works that do not conform to the characteristics of NMA
or MCA. As Prophet observed (2011), “The productive differences of
positioning oneself outside of mainstream contemporary art has its
‘upsides’.
Highlight: : Claire Bishop’s rhetorical question, “how many [artists] really confront the
question of what it means to think, see and filter affect through the
digital?” (Bishop, 2012)
Highlight: : artists’ engagement with computation in NMA and MCA (and

beyond) has significantly changed both fields, in both their exclusions and
inclusions
Highlight: : the role, impact and function of computation.

Highlight: : computational processes continuously differentiate over space and time.

Highlight: : instead of making the thing, the way a potter makes a pot by direct
interaction with the material, there is a degree of indirection. Instead of
making the thing you set the motion into process and the process makes
the thing” (Jennings, 2000).
Highlight: : in her theorising for diffraction she provides a way to account for practices
and processes that materialise objects.
Highlight: : In the material-discursive context of NMA, code (and computation) are

inherent to the art that emerges with them, they are “constitutive elements
of material processes” (Gabrys, 2011).
Highlight: : matter’s dynamism (Barad, 2007),

Highlight: : entangled relations, entanglements that create temporal, spatial relations

with each other and with processes and practices from other disciplines.
Highlight: : after Barad (2007), we suggest the term diffractive art practices to
understand the “always-already” entangled practices of art, namely the
entanglement of material practices and the entanglements of the ways we
articulate the practices of art and the practices themselves. These
entanglements can be understood as emerging from the patterns of
interference that are sometimes revealed through artworks.
Notes in Document
'Alva Noë - Varieties of Presence (2012, Harvard
University Press).pdf':
Highlight: : presence is achieved
(Alva Noë - Varieties of Presence (2012, Harvard University Press).pdf, p.9)
Highlight: : its varieties correspond to the variety of ways we skillfully achieve access
to the world.
Highlight: : the central role understanding, knowledge and skill play in opening up the
world for experience.
Highlight: : The world shows up for us in experience only insofar as we know how to
make contact with it, or, to use a different metaphor, only insofar as we
are able to bring it into focus.
Highlight: : We achieve access to the world around us through skillful engagement;
we acquire and deploy the skills needed to bring the world into focus.
Highlight: : Presence is manifestly fragile.

Highlight: : it is a discovery.
Highlight: : The world does not show up as presented on a viewing screen; it shows
up as the situation in which we find ourselves.
Highlight: : criticism, reflection and refinement belong to the unproblematic language-
internal ways we use words. We don’t settle questions of meaning (or
grammar) at the limits of language, as it were drawing the limits by ty- ing
language to the world. We don’t ever get to the limits of language.
Highlight: : when it comes to language and meaning, we can’t make a clean

distinction between the first-order linguistic practice and the second-order
practice of thinking about our linguistic behavior. The first-order practice
contains within it the second- order practice. For thinking about language
and language-use is one of the basic and unavoidable things we use
language to do. There is no such thing as the naïve, unreflective,
theoretically unbiased user of language. For to understand a word is to
know how to use it, and that means, among other things, knowing how to
explain its use to another, how to answer the question what does this
mean? And also how to criticize or correct the usage of others as well as
to defend or justify one’s own usage.
Highlight: : there are distinctive ways we achieve access to the world around us, and
to these different styles or manners of carrying on there correspond
different ways in which worlds (words, meanings, pictures, people, places,
problems, everything) can show up for us.
Highlight: : Perception is a transaction; it is the sharing of a situation with what you

perceive.
Highlight: : To think of something is to be in a causal-conceptual space that contains

both you and that of which you think.
Highlight: : We look at the world, yes, but the world looks back! We are always in the
midst of making adjustments to the world around us. And we are always
liable to be caught in the act!
Highlight: : What the traditional view gets right is that perception is a direct encounter;
nothing could count as an episode of perceptual consciousness if it could
happen in isolation from its apparent objects. It gets wrong the idea that
only sense data and other “private” contents of consciousness can satisfy
this stringent condition of being objects of awareness.
Highlight: : our encounters with situations and things are, in a certain sense, always
only partial and incomplete.
Highlight: : we only ever encounter situations and things in a limited way— from this
distance, with all that noise, despite those obstacles, and so on. Every
perceptual experience is always, at best, a work in progress.
Highlight: : Instead of thinking of perception as a passage from inside to outside,

from in here to out there, I urge, in this book, that we think of perception
as a movement from here to there, from this place to that. We ourselves
(whole persons) undertake our perceptual consciousness of the world in,
with, and in relation to the places where we find ourselves. We are at
home in the world.
Highlight: : To resist traditional approaches to presence—this should be clear—is to

resist different ways of denying presence.
Highlight: : two different ways of thinking about theater.

Highlight: : audience and performers are together; they share a space and they are
both present to each other. This is the sort of shared, real presence we
enjoy today at sporting events.
Highlight: : actors no longer share a space with an audience; they reside in a sym-
bolic space.3 They might as well be projections on a movie screen.
Highlight: : modern science treats all presence as merely, in this new way, theatrical.
Highlight: : we never bear witness in the modern theater. We are like readers or
researchers, not like bystanders. There is, however, one striking
exception to this rule. When something goes wrong and the stagecraft
comes undone.
Highlight: : We experience it rather when a line is forgotten, or, perhaps, when a

scene stretches out to the point of boredom. Embarrassment is a
giveaway not of our sympathy but of our complicity; the embarrassment
tells that the theatrical denial of real presence was always really just a
pretense.
Highlight: : a symptom of our modernity

Highlight: : Are you believers? Or are you actors? There is always leakage between
these different stances.
Highlight: : The world does not really show up for us at all; for Heidegger, rather, it
“withdraws,” at least when we are engaged and at home in it. The world is
unobtrusive and unthought.
Highlight: : “Unthought” means that it [roughly, the scene around us] is not the-
matically apprehended for deliberate thinking about things; instead, in
circumspection, we find our bearings in regard to them
Highlight: : we live for the most part not in a world of objects and properties. What is
“given” to us is the “for writing,” the “for going in and out,” . . . “for sitting.”
That is, writing, going-in-and-out, sitting, and the like are that wherein we
a priori move. What we know when we “know our way around.”
Highlight: : For Heidegger, this sort of unthought, unmediated, unthematized

readiness-to-hand stands in sharp contrast to presence. Presence, for
Heidegger, is always the representation of a feature or object in thought
or experience, and so it is always correlated with observation
Highlight: : or
Highlight: : contemplation.
Highlight: : Talk of presence, for Heidegger, is always talk of a kind of thought-

mediated intellectual detachment from the world around us. And so the
contrast with readiness-to-hand could not be plainer.
Highlight: : the distinct place of equipment in our lives

Highlight: : he makes two critical errors, I believe, and these blind him to the fact that
his real discovery is not that absence, as opposed to presence, is what is
basic in our lives. He identifies and understands a variety of presence
that, for many reasons, modern philosophy has failed to understand.
Highlight: : Heidegger, and Dreyfus, repudiate presence in favor of absence,

because they insist that there can be no “unthought” presence, and they
insist on this because they take for granted an over-intellectualized
conception of the intellect, just that conception that modern philosophy
has taken for granted.
Highlight: : In fact, the whole field of the intellect—thought, concept-use, language—

is itself a sphere of absorbed coping (to use Dreyfus’s phrase).
Highlight: : The baseball player’s glove, or the carpenter’s hammer, although

withdrawn, and in that sense absent, are not absent tout court. Theirs is a
lively absence, not a dead one.
Highlight: : even if they are withdrawn into the background. They are there, after all,
for the agent; they are within reach; they are taken for granted, relied on.
Highlight: : In granting this, we do not run the risk of over-intellectualizing our lives
and activity, our engaged living, for we, unlike the existential
phenomenologists, hold back from over-intellectualizing the intellect.
Highlight: : readiness-to-hand is a form of presence, a way things show up

Highlight: : When we read, we don’t pay attention to letters and words. We don’t
need to. And moreover, to do so would disrupt the reading. Words, as
researchers in this area have learned, are like faces.7 We no more read
by seeing letters, than we experience faces by looking at noses, chins
and cheeks.
Highlight: : it is not the text itself—at least usually— that you pay attention to or think
about when you read.
Highlight: : what makes reading possible is our possession of a very complicated,

hard-won set of skills. It is only thanks to the solid embedding of these
skills in our lives that textual meanings can be, as they are, immediately
present to us
Highlight: : reading always takes place against the background of our more thorough
embedding in cultural, conventional, communicational contexts. We have
expectations at so many different levels
Highlight: : reading does not require that we stand back and contemplate the text—at
least it does not typically require this of us—and yet the ability to read
rests on the above-mentioned complicated and diverse skills.
Highlight: : As with reading, so with seats, and hammers, and baseball gloves.
Highlight: : It is only against the background of what we know how to do—a

background that we, with the help of others, make—that there is anything
there for us at all.
Highlight: : they don’t appreciate that presence is always fragile. They have a fantasy
of flow and merging with the world that is, in fact, phenomenologically far-
fetched.
Highlight: : breakdown, as the shat- tering of the spell, as ejection from the zone. But
breakdown of this sort is not breakdown at all; it is one of the shapes that
our skillful engagement with what we are doing can take.
Highlight: : the fragility of presence

Highlight: : the close interweaving of the practical and the intellectual in our lives.
Highlight: : that organic, somatic field of sensations that forms the ever-present
background to our lived achievement of the environment’s presence.
Highlight: : Perhaps the defining feature of the body’s sensual presence is the way it
resides (usually) in the background. If we are to hope to bring this
pervasive feature of our lives, of ourselves, into focus, then we need
actively to withdraw from our habitual engagement with the world around
us. We need somehow to let the body itself crowd into the space of our
attention and let itself be felt.
Highlight: : We try to let go of the world to make room for the body.
Highlight: : to this fact—that the world shows up—there corresponds the fact that we
ourselves show up.
Highlight: : achieve the world by enacting ourselves. Insofar as we achieve access to

the world, we also achieve ourselves.
Highlight: : we are cultivated ourselves—learning to talk and read and dance and
dress and play guitar and do mathematics and physics and philosophy—
and in this cultivation worlds open up that would otherwise be closed off.
In this way we achieve for ourselves new ways of being present.
Highlight: : the possibility that this duality of the person and the animal itself belongs
to our nature and so to our biology. The world shows up for us. We
cultivate in ourselves the power to bring the world forth. It is our nature to
do this. And in so doing we show up not merely as the animals we of
course are, but as persons capable of enacting the world through our own
skillful exploration and self-cultivation.
Highlight: : To see an object, it must be there for us, and to be there for us, we must,
in some sense, know it.
Highlight: : Vision is not confined to the visible. We visually experience what is out of
view, what is hidden or occluded
Highlight: : We do not see the world insofar as it projects to a point.

Highlight: : You don’t merely think that the tomato has a back, or judge or infer that it is
there. You have a sense, a visual sense, of its presence.
Highlight: : the problem of presence in absence. The object shows up for visual
consciousness precisely as unseen.
Highlight: : It is bedrock, phenomenologically speaking, that the tomato looks

voluminous, that it looks to have a back.
Highlight: : we take ourselves to have a sense of the presence in perception of

something that is manifestly out of view.
Highlight: : We see what the relevant neurophysiology represents. We visually

experience the presence of a voluminous furrowed ovoid if that is what
the nervous system represents.
Highlight: : The trouble is this: neurons speak only one language, that of the
receptive field. And there is no way to say “presence in absence” in the
receptive-field idiom.
Highlight: : away from neurophysiology and argue that the visual system plays the
odds. We see whatever is judged most likely to have produced the image
we receive. If you are presented with a cube in such a way that you can
only see one of its faces head-on, you won’t have a visual experience of a
cube.
Highlight: : the deep amodality of perceptual consciousness.

Highlight: : present as absent; they are amodally present

Highlight: : no perceptual quality is so simple that it can be consumed by

consciousness. (The idea of simple qualia is a myth.) Experience, in the
large, and in the small, is complex and manifold; it is always an encounter
with hidden complexity. Experience is fractal in this sense. Perceptual
experience extends to the hidden. In a way, for perception, everything is
hidden. Nothing is given.
Highlight: : The fact that we visually experience what is occluded shows that what is
visible is not what projects to a point. I propose, instead, that we think of
what is visible as what is available from a place. Perceptual presence is
availability.
Highlight: : It seems as if the detail is present in the world, out there, before me and
around me. The detail shows up not as “represented in my mind,” but as
available to me. It shows up as present—and this is crucial—in that I
understand, implicitly, practically, that by the merest movement of my eyes
and head I can secure access to an element that now is obscured on the
periphery of the visual field.
Highlight: : The proposal, then, is this: perceptual consciousness is a special style of

access to the world. But access is not something bare, brute or found.
The ground of access is our possession of knowledge, understanding,
and skills.
Highlight: : a special kind of understanding that distinctively underwrites our

perceptual access to objects and properties, namely, sensorimotor
understanding
Highlight: : we comprehend its sensorimotor significance. Sensorimotor un-

derstanding brings the world into focus for perceptual consciousness.
Highlight: : it is impossible to perceive real novelty.

Highlight: : To perceive something, you must understand it, and to understand it you
must, in a way, already know it, you must have already made its
acquaintance.
Highlight: : There are no novel experiences. The conditions of novelty are, in effect,
the conditions of invisibility.
Highlight: : You must master it. Domesticate it. Know it.

Highlight: : To perceive something is not to consume it, just as it isn’t a matter of

constructing, within our brains or minds, a model or picture or
representation of the world without. There is no need. The world is right
there and it suffices. At most we can meet the world. Stand with it, up
against it. The tomato is right there, front and back, for us to explore.
Notes in Document
'The Thought of Bernard Stiegler_ Capitalism,
Technology and the Politics of Spirit':
Highlight:
(The Thought of Bernard Stiegler_ Capitalism, Technology and the Politics of Spirit, p.6)
Highlight:
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Notes in Workspace:

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Notes in ‘Accelerationism’

Highlight: : 5 Queering Monsters

Highlight: : A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses

Highlight: : power of theoretical frameworks that help us understand how stories

Highlight: : followed the “crisis of representation” in anthropology and other disciplines

Highlight: : placing equal importance on knowledge building and aesthetics;attending to

Highlight: : Investigating how experiences are enlarged and/or constrained by relations

Highlight: : to address processes of unfairness or injustice within a particular lived

Highlight: : intersectionality, a term coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) to call

Highlight: : Sarah Ahmed’s notion of queering and queering practices as a method of

Highlight: : Queering practices include “counter-normative” relational and political

Highlight: : heterosexuality,as a “compulsory orientation,” reproduces more than

Highlight: : because of this intersectionality, the disruption and “disorientation” of queer

Highlight: : queering practices “disturb the order of things” by creating dissonance

Highlight: : autoethnography as a method poised to move beyond that narcissistic and

Highlight: : Queering autoethnography might enable us to consider these and other

Highlight: : questioning the normative in autoethnography

Highlight: : the antiteleological ethos of an autoethnogra- phy t

Highlight: : questioning how the idealizations of objective knowing are communicated

Highlight: : .Writing out of and through the dislocation and “becoming-time” of

Highlight: : draw on post-structuralist frameworks,as well as postcolonial and new

Highlight: : the glib dismissal of our work as me-search

Highlight: : exploding preconceptions about what it means to write-the-self-in-culture,

Highlight: : autoeth- nography is a thoroughly relational practice, one concerned with

Highlight: : y is invested, instead, in ‘we-search.’ In other words, the work of

Highlight: : By queering autoethnography, we are queering ourselves and others and

Highlight: : 57–58).What does it mean to be unintelligible? It means that we are not

Highlight: : and sexualities intelligible

Highlight: : Susan Stryker’s words that “Monsters, like angels, functioned as

Highlight: : Telling a story that narrates a monstrous, unintelligible, non-binarized or oth-

Highlight: : The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity

Highlight: : The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour

Highlight: : Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among

Highlight: : a mere moment of the realization process of capita

Highlight: : The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the

Highlight: : the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with

Highlight: : The accumulation of knowledge and skills, of the general productive

Highlight: : capital here-quite unintention ally-reduces human labour, expenditure of

Highlight: : Forces of production and social relations-two different sides of the

Highlight: : Jean-Joseph Goux

Highlight: : this movement of displacement belongs essentially to the

Highlight: : the center itself has its organized enclaves of underdevelopment

Highlight: : an increasing exploitation of the peripheral proletariat in relation to that of

Highlight: : Each passage of a flux is a deterritorialization, and each displaced limit, a

Highlight: : the relative diminution of surplus value in relation to total capital-a

(The Accelerationist Reader, p.159)

common stock, preferred stock, and minority interest.

Highlight: : there is a machinic surplus value produced by constant capital, which

Highlight: : On the one hand, codes continue to exist-even as an archaism-but they

the rules of a board game (e.g. the military signifiers in chess).

the sets of conventions or codes currently in use to communicate meaning.

framework within which signs make sense (see Semiosis).

(The Accelerationist Reader, p.160)

(Fanged Noumena_ Collected Writings 1987-2007, p.457)

Highlight: : An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips

Highlight: : Capital is machinic (non-instrumental)

Highlight: : Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy.

Highlight: : Machine-code-capital recycles itselfthrough its axiomatic of consumer

Highlight: : Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling

Highlight: : anthropological characteristics as a symptom of under development;

Highlight: : Commoditization conditions define technics as a sub stitute for human

Highlight: : sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and 5df-