Summer 2014 Reading/Writing

@rhetbit / rhetbit.tumblr.com

A commonplace site for keeping track of the work I'm doing over the summer.

Human puppets could not conceive of themselves as being puppets at all, not when they are fixed with a consciousness that excites in them the unshakable sense of being singled out from all other objects in creation. Once you begin to feel you are making a go of it on your own--that you are making moves and thinking thoughts which seem to have originated within you--it is not possible for you to believe you are anything but your own master (18).

Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy against the Human Race. New York: Hippocampus Press, 2010.

#posthuman #human #puppets #agency #objects

A diagram is an image that works. It spatializes semantic value, using the graphic features of spatial organization to express the semantic value of relations. Diagrammatic reasoning argues for graphic organization as a meaning producing system, one in which the organization of elements must be read in relation to each other. The complexities that can multiply inside the system are infinite, and the ways these structure values can either be articulated ad infinitum as well, or reduced to a few key principles: a set of moves that are primary, and the notion of inflections and attributes. Each configuration is specific. That degree of particularity will always escape the reach of a fixed nomenclature. Classification is always partial, incomplete, an open set, expanding by example (23).

Drucker, Johanna. Diagrammatic Writing. 2013.

#diagram #graphic rhetoric

#dh2014 Keynote (Latour)

Since I'm reading AIME at the moment, I thought I'd drop a link here to the page for the DH 2014 Keynotes (http://dh2014.org/program/keynotes/). Latour delivered the conference opener earlier today, and presented a 2-part talk. First part was about how our emphasis on the digital functions to highlight the material (as opposed to offering an escape from it), and the second was a careful description of what he was trying to do with the website for AIME (moving the experience of reading/writing from our scriptoria to screentoria).

I'll have to take a closer look/listen once the vid is archived on the DH site, but I thought that his take on DH (where the D functions to remind us (and our audiences) of the materiality of the humanities) was an interesting one. At one point, he noted that the digital "was a fiction," but he meant that specifically in terms of the [FIC] mode, which I think confused those who hadn't read the book.

#Latour #AIME #materiality #digital humanities

Neither straight lines nor crooked ones, networks of reference move along in their own way, and if they have to be compared to something, it should be to the everyday work of a Department of Roads and Bridges, with its corps of structural engineers and the back-and-forth movements of bulldozers on the construction site of a public works project. Wanting to use straight talk thus does not mean, despite the claim often put forward, that one is going to speak "as the sciences do" or "the way a scientist talks," but that one wants to imitate the results without having to encumber oneself with imitating the burdensome process as well.

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

#networks #reference #straight talk #double click #Moderns

If you make the absence of any mediation, leap, or hiatus pass the one and only test of truth, then everyone, scientists, engineers, priests, sages, artists, businessmen, cooks, not to mention politicians, judges, or moralists, you all become manipulators and cheaters, because your hands are dirtied by the operations you have carried out to maintain in working order the networks that give direction to your practices.

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

#networks #relationism #truthnlies #rhetoric of no rhetoric #immediatism

It is necessary then to distinguish two grand domains which are, like fighting siblings, so much more different from one another strictly by virtue of being so intimately conjoined. Media and mediation, one might speak casually about one or the other without realizing the fundamental difference dividing them. It would not be necessary to accentuate the difference if others had not already mixed them up so awkwardly, or as is often the case failed to understand the subtlety in the first place. In reality these two systems are violently unconnected (13).

Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012.

#media #mediation #tropology

The network form has eclipsed all others as the new master signifier. Today it explains all manner of things, from social networks, to neural nets, to network-centric warfare. Indeed it is no coincidence that Deleuze's growing popularity at the end of the twentieth century paralleled the ascension of the new postfordist and networked epistemes such as game theory, cybernetics, ecology, graph theory, etc. These are some of the many fields that have contributed to the dominance of furious media (62).

Galloway, Alexander R. "Love of the Middle.” Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

#networks #mediation #episteme #furious media

The notion of network can now be made a little more specific: it designates a series of associations revealed thanks to a trial—consisting in the surprises of the ethnographic investigation—that makes it possible to understand through what series of small discontinuities it is appropriate to pass in order to obtain a certain continuity of action (33).

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

#networks #associations #ANT

http://sextile.com/2014/06/13/mercury-retrograde-body-mitten/

In this way, media force us to think less about things like senders and receivers, and more about questions of channels and protocols. Less about encoding and decoding, and more about context and environment. Less about writing and reading, and more about structures of interaction. These other issues do not disappear, of course, but must now be tackled within a slightly different set of considerations (2).

Galloway, Alexander R., Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. "Introduction: Execrable Media." Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

#media #media theory #mediation

Nonhuman beings are responsible for the next moment of human history and thinking. It is not simply that humans became aware of nonhumans, or that they decided to ennoble some of them by granting them a higher status--or cut themselves down by taking away the status of the human. These so-called posthuman games are nowhere near posthuman enough to cope with the time of hyperobjects (201).

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

#nonhuman #posthuman #hyperobjects

We need to get out of the persuasion business and start getting into the magic business, or the catalysis business, or the magnetizing business, or whatever you want to call it (181).

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

#persuasion #reason #magic #nonhuman

Objects comprise an untotalizable nonwhole set that defies holism and reductionism. There is thus no top object that give all objects value and meaning, and no bottom object to which they can all be reduced. If there is no top object and no bottom object, it means that we have a very strange situation in which there are more parts than wholes. This makes holism of any kind totally impossible.

Morton, Timothy. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

#objects #holism #tropology

"...the adventure of these last three centuries can be summed up by the story--yes, I admit it, the Master Narrative--of a double displacement: from economy to ecology" (23).

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

#economy #ecology #AIME #Moderns #habitation

Conditions of felicity or infelicity do not refer simply to manners of speaking, as in speech act theory, but also to modes of being that involve decisively, but differently in each case, one of the identifiable differences between what is true and what is false. What we say commits us much more extensively than we would like to think--enough to make slow down and ponder before we speak (21).

Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

#felicity #modes #AIME

So while digital technology is introducing new critical methods and procedures, it does not fundamentally alter the sociologics of scholarship and education nor their institutional mechanisms (144).

McGann, Jerome. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

#DH #sociology of knowledge #scholarship

Mapping digital scholarship to the ontologies, but not the sociologies, of the internet not only constricts its institutional presence, it obscures the sociohistorical character of traditional philology itself (139).

McGann, Jerome. A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

#digital scholarship #philology #DH #sociology of knowledge

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