1,167 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2023
  2. Jun 2021
    1. Thinking about what Escobar calls the “radical interdependence” of all things — human and non-human — is key: every design and designer constitutes part of a dynamic set of relations with innumerable others, making and unmaking the world, sustaining and unsustaining, or, as Fry would put it, futuring and defuturing.

      Thinking about this as a writing problem: how would we/one write this? Bears upon design journalism.

    2. One of the most vocal proponents of ontological design theory, much of his output has focused on the dialectical agency of design as both a “futuring” activity — that extends possibilities for the prospering of life on earth — and a “defuturing” one — that instead reduces those prospects by causing severe social and environmental harm, thus “taking the future away”.

      futuring v defuturing

    3. Just as we have no memory of how we acquired language and began to use and be shaped by it, we have no memory of how we began to use and be shaped by design

      Interesting move to memory here. Something there.

    4. The hyphenation is employed to emphasize how “being” is always situated “in the world”. A human being cannot exist independently of its surrounding environment — it is not possible to be without being-in-the-world.

      Sloterdijk as well.

  3. Jul 2019
    1. Th is common world is not so much a place where entit ies agree to show up, but rather is a milieu among a diversity of milieus that is actively made through shared inhab it a tions and exper i ences

      This is good shit here. This whole piece has me thinking Latour and von uexküll

  4. dfmi.dwrl.utexas.edu dfmi.dwrl.utexas.edu
    1. I found this approach unsatisfying; yet I could appreciate his agnostic stance

      I wonder, out loud, what happens if we replace agnostic with agonistic, which I see as “productive stride,” following Hawhee?

    1. At same time, I am drawn to the value of thinking of things as the gathering of something diffuse without anything becoming discrete

      This reminds me of the wonderful expression, “Don’t make this a thing.” What McCormack is suggesting is, in fact, making something a thing through fieldwork.

    2. is amplifying, attuning, defamiliarizing, drawing out, following, foregrounding, gathering, holding in place, providing some con-straint, tracing and tracking, scattering.

      Love this litany of terms here. Very generative.

    3. And this is because thinking—and non-representational thinking especially so—is already empirical.

      This is a wonderful moment that really helps me think through non-representational thinking.

    4. And it also has something to do with how the stricture of method is often rather too easily invoked, with a chiding tone, as a kind of reminder that theory is something existing above or outside the world,

      Same.

    5. about how attending to the properties and qualities of things

      At the risk of shameless self-promotion, this is akin to what Lars Soderlund and I attempted to articulate with our article “Speculative Usability.”

  5. Jun 2019
    1. Conclusion: Rhetoric’s Footprint

      If anyone is interested, I kept thinking through the footprint and it became this chapter: "Better Footprints".

      I want to think more intensely about footprints. I want to re-emphasize movement, embodiment, place, and inscription, which are all side lined or even implicitly disparaged in the prominent employment of footprint. What is it to place one's feet and to inscribe with one's own body? In making environmentalism a question of a footprint's size, do we lose the nuance of kind? Everything leaves its mark upon the world.

    1. Perhaps the Dithering is a more apt name than either the Anthropocene or Capitalocene!The Dithering will be written into earth’s rocky strata, indeed already is written into earth’s mineralized layers

      The reason I actually quite like Dithering, aside from being a huge KSR fan, is that it marks not what "we" have done in the past but what "we" are doing now (as speculatively witness from the future).

    1. This idea raises questions about how humans conceptualize the autonomy of nonhuman animals—a consideration central to compassionate conservation

      Amy raises a really compelling question here for me. I am interested in thinking through an ethics built upon autonomy and minimal intrusion in the context of Barad's investment in intraction.

    1. They take us higher, lower, deeper, involve us speaking to minerals, taking a breath of air with the wind, and seeing differently

      This connects with Braidotti's investment in "pragmatic experimentation."

      This is also a spot where I think we can think through the limits/trouble with representationalism as articulated by Barad.

    1. set of sensitivities in our encounter with empirical phenomena:

      I commented on the Bignall and Rigney piece that I liked the phrase "affective neighborhood (176). It strikes me here that this neighborhood can defined in terms of resonant "sets of sensitivities."

    1. affective neighbourhood

      I really dig this turn of phrase here: it productively suggests not that these carious approaches are doing the same thing, turning over the same ground, but that what is being done resonates affectively--shared commitments, shared interests, etc.

  6. May 2019
    1. According to design educator Anastasiia Raina, it’s not too early to begin considering what the roles of designers might be in a future where tasks like layout and production are completely automated.

      I read this piece through Braidotti's emphasis on pragmatic experimentation. I have been re-reading her book The Posthuman for a directed reading course I am doing this summer on Posthuman Design and it keeps striking how many "design challenges" Braidotti's work spin off. Her work is a kind of posthuman progymnasmata, and Raina's work, described here, really brings that across for me.

    1. ‘more-than-human

      I'd be interested in exploring the phrase "more-than-human" in relation to other formulations such as post-human, extra-human, non-human and even inhuman. What does more-than bring/do that the others do not?

    1. posthuman predicament

      I am intrigued by Braidotti's use of predicament both in terms of what the word my denote/connote and in relation to her general dislike for framework of vulnerability that sometimes accompanies posthumanism.

  7. Feb 2019
  8. Jan 2019
    1. There is an enormous difference, for example, between the postmodernclaim that we have moved from the regime of the real into that of thesimulacrum and the posthuman claim that the real is structured bysimulacra.

      Read this alongside and through Siegert's articulation of the difference between American and German posthumanism. What Muckelbauer and Hawhee write here hues closer to the Teutonic.

    1. Strong Defense a

      Here’s a resonate articulation of what we might recognize as a strong defense: “As for the terms good and bad, they indicate no positive quality in things regarded in themselves, but are merely modes of thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things with one another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good nor bad to the deaf.” -BENEDICT DE SPINOZA, THE ETHICS

  9. Jul 2018
    1. For something to exist, for it to have been felt as such, there had to have been a cut, for it is the cut that brings the occasion to experience, making it known in itself

      Resonance with Barad’s ‘agential realism.”

    2. speculative pragmatism, speculative in the sense that a process remains open to its potential, and pragmatic in the sense that it is rooted in the in-act of its “something doing.”

      Digging this very much.

    3. This means that it is an occasion of experience that creates the conditions for subjectivity, a subjectivity than can never be disen-tangled from how the event came to fruition

      So a question for us is what kinds of subjectivity escape created by digital, sonic techniques and technologies.

  10. Apr 2018
  11. Mar 2018
  12. Feb 2018
    1. The libertarian Silicon Valley view is lame. They’re not geniuses. I would say that your average scientist is more politically savvy than your average computer geek making tons of money down in Silicon Valley.

      BOOM!

    2. HF As you mentioned actor networks, do you like the work of Bruno Latour? KSR I think Laboratory Life and Science in Action are crucial texts, and they taught me a lot.

      This is edifying.

  13. Jan 2018
    1. Even if we sometimes reach what resembles the rationalist ideal, we probably do so only sporadically, and the notion of controlled, effortful thinking is probably a very bad model of conscious thought in general. Our conscious mental activity is usually an unbidden, unintentional form of behaviour. Yet somehow the tourist on the prow begins to experience herself as an omnipotent magician, making dolphins come into existence out of the blue, and jump at her command.

      Perhaps this resonates with Easterling's "No You're Not"?

    2. Instead, our conscious inner life seems to be about the management of spontaneously emerging mental behaviour.

      I can dig this, but I'm not sure about the word "manage." Would use something like "tune" perhaps.

    3. One of the most exciting recent research fields in neuroscience and experimental psychology is mind-wandering – the study of spontaneous or task-unrelated thoughts. Its results have radical implications for politics, education and morality.

      Links with Citton on multitasking perhaps (138)

    1. What we are seeing now is that when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.

      Well put.

    2. But back then, every political actor could at least see more or less what everyone else was seeing.

      This goes all the way back to the rhetoric of the agora, which was designed for visibility.

  14. Dec 2017
  15. Oct 2017
  16. Sep 2017
  17. Jul 2017
    1. More than just promoting better urban design, Placemaking facilitates creative patterns of use, paying particular attention to the physical, cultural, and social identities that define a place and support its ongoing evolution.

      More than just object forms.

  18. Jun 2017
  19. May 2017
    1. Post-humanism in general (and Thomas Rickert, in particular) would read this scene as being about more than Florens, the human who is seemingly acting upon the plantation home in this scene.

      I am digging this connection here. That said, I am left wanting a little more here. This segment, relative to rest, feels less developed. That may not necessarily be a bad thing as this is perhaps the point to which the database project has brought you. I for one am interested in seeing you push this even further in the future.

    1. the speakers needed to forcefully assert themselves onto the scene, because anything else [would have been] too easy to write off (Byron).

      I am thinking back to the day in class when we discussed rhetoric as the open hand vs the fist (and the image of black power).

    2. This bizarre leap from public speaking to nudity was a means to attack and undermine the Grimke’s as women and as moral authorities.

      It is bizarre, but, of course, not without historical precedence in terms of how both women and rhetoric are mutual constituted.

    3. Since part of the lesson from this historical moment is that the relationship between the rhetor and the audience does matter, it therefore undermines her very ideas to overlook or simply gloss the potential violence she faced by getting up on stage.

      Great point here. How did the speaker and her audience mutual constitute one another?

    4. The fact that we do not have information about the hostility she faced demonstrates that whatever violence was threatened against Stewart was not considered important or significant enough to be recorded and remembered.

      This is a compelling gap.

    1. Scars are not superficially upon the body, but woven into that body (Nathaniel).

      This annotation of mine is part of what's informing my response to other segment on rhetoric and embodiment.

  20. embodimentdatabse.wordpress.com embodimentdatabse.wordpress.com
    1. present themselves and their arguments in a way that would account for the biases and oppression to which they were subject

      Okay. So, in one sense yes, this is an apt description of what happened. In other sense, in a sense in line what you are cobbling together in/through this datacase, no. We have moved to a consideration of rhetoric well beyond the mere presentation of self. That is, your language here, your argument here, black boxes embodiment. In other words, you seem to be suggesting that women and people of color have bodies and that those bodies are then presented in certain ways. As you read your database as whole though, you are suggesting that stakes are actually much higher. Not just the bodies are presented certain ways, but that bodies become or take on form because they are performed in particular ways. That is, actual bodies are stake here.

    2. A generation of subjugated rhetors recognized that their embodiment impacted their ability to use rhetoric, and that their physicality shaped their relationship with the audience and the audience’s reception of their ideas.

      Nicely put.

    3. it was assumed that rhetors’ bodies were not relevant to their ability to make arguments or persuade

      Yes and no. In the context of this class, this statement works, but probably not as totalizing as it's expressed here.

    1. That is, like Corder, Anzaldua finds her sense of self in her difference from other people, but significantly she places emphasis on her physical differences as well as differences of ideas.

      Great connection to Corder here.

    2. This performance is not to merely demonstrate the fluidity of boundaries we take for granted and treat as immovable.

      The dimensions are themselves the result of boundary work/boundaries.

    3. expands it

      I like this move here, which likewise casts some doubt on your above assesment of Cixous. If Anzuldua is expanding Cixous, is she too risking reinscription? Or, given what else you have said about produtice, is reinscription always a risk?

    4. crucial

      Crucial along what dimensions? I read the Anzuldua section prior to this and so I have dimensionality on the brain. But there is also a larger queston here in how bodies come to matter. How is a body made crucial?

    1. Classmates’ micro-responses and annotations in bold and with (names) as best as possible after the inevitable meshing/melding of annotations/microresponses.

      You said it. Several other students have noted to difficulty in ultimately tracing who is saying what, which I am very much enjoying.

  21. embodimentdatabse.wordpress.com embodimentdatabse.wordpress.com
    1. This scene, in which Florens cries out to her mother through the literal writing on the wall, is incredibly resonant for literary and rhetorical reasons.

      I think you have chosen a great way into this database. And I like the idea of a "touchpoint."

  22. Apr 2017
    1. agential participation

      I am glad to see you pick up on the word participation here as it is quite crucial here. As I mentioned in class, a less sophisticated reading of posthumanism (in particular the Bay and Rickert piece) reads it as "giving" agency to non-humans, but it is much more complicated that than. Agency is not being reassigned here but differently distributed.

    2. Standing on an x made of painter’s tape and moving on an ordained cue create strict boundaries, but those boundaries reveal opportunities to perform, transform, and deform in, as Barad terms, a discourse with those boundary-formers.

      Smart stuff, Byron. Latour likes the word actor for exactly that reasons you articulate here.

    3. is always trying to not finally discipline itself.

      Yes. I like your dual use of "discipline" here as it suggests that the disciplining of rhetoric (historically) is what renders a posthuman rhetoric perhaps difficult to imagine.

    4. find strategies in transient, emergent coalitions and in diagramming networks of power.

      I like the word strategy appears here. It suggests a kind of responsiveness that is neither "passive" as Bitzer might have nor "active" as Vatz would have. Perhaps, following Barad, it is "intra-active"?

    1. There is an important sense in which practices of knowing cannot befully claimed as human practices, not simply because we use nonhumanelements in our practices but because knowing is a matter of part of theworld making itself intelligible to another part. Practices of knowingand being are not isolatable, but rather they are mutually implicated.

      Strong connection back to the Boyle article on practice.

    2. Agency is about the possibilities and account-ability entailed in reconfiguring material-discursive apparatuses of bodilyproduction, including the boundary articulations and exclusions that aremarked by those practices in the enactment of a causal structure

      This raises for me the questions of where and when of rhetoric?

    3. On an agential realist account, agency is cut loose from its traditionalhumanist orbit. Agency is not aligned with human intentionality or sub-jectivity

      This is a major conceptual hurdle: imagining agency without recourse to some version of humanistic subjectivity.

    4. In this case, therhetoric should be softened to more accurately reflect the fact that theforce of culture “shapes” or “inscribes” nature but does not materiallyproduceit

      The verbs become very important here.

    5. What is the nature of causality on this account? What possibilities existfor agency, for intervening in the world’s becoming?

      These are important questions for rhetoric. That is, the concern the possibility of rhetoric, for intervention, for invention, etc.

    6. matter is substance in its intra-active becoming—not a thing,but a doing, a congealing of agency. Matter is a stabilizing and destabilizingprocess of iterative intra-activity.

      Recall Burke's paradox of substance.

    7. Bohr offersa new epistemological framework that calls into question the dualisms ofobject/subject, knower/known, nature/culture, and word/world.

      This is nice articulation of posthumanism in general seeks to offer.

    8. Foucault’s account of discursive practices has some provocative reso-nances (and some fruitful dissonances) with Bohr’s account of apparatusesand the role they play in the material production of bodies and meanings

      This is pretty cool.

    9. Indeed, it is through such practices that the differential bound-aries between “humans” and “nonhumans,” “culture” and “nature,” the“social” and the “scientific” are constituted. Phenomena are constitutiveof reality.

      The difference cannot be known ahead of how it's practiced.

    10. On an agential realist account, it is onceagain possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in thefullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparencyor opacity, the geometries of absolute exteriority or interiority, and thetheoretization of the human as either pure cause or pure effect while atthe same time remaining resolutely accountable for the role “we” play inthe intertwined practices of knowing and becoming.

      here is what she is trying to do here.

    11. This entails a reworking of the familiar notions of dis-cursive practices, materialization, agency, and causality, among others

      this is what makes her piece particularly useful for us.

    12. For all Foucault’s emphasis on the politicalanatomy of disciplinary power, he too fails to offer an account of thebody’s historicity in which its very materiality plays anactiverole in theworkings of power.

      This a compelling reading of Foucault, that defracts Foucault.

    13. Atomism poses the question of which representation is real. Theproblem of realism in philosophy is a product of the atomistic worldview.

      Recall the presence of atomism in early articulations of the rhetorical situation, which Edbauer, for instance, takes issues with. And so note that Bitzer and Vatz can function as stand ins for scientific realists and social constructionists, respectively.

    14. The idea that beings exist as individuals with inherent attributes,anterior to their representation, is a metaphysical presupposition that un-derlies the belief in political, linguistic, and epistemological forms of rep-resentationalism

      Here is the humanism that Barad is engaging. She also clearly marks the stakes of this engagement.

    1. Persuasion occurs, then, not as much through rational appeals to claims but through an exercise of material and discursive forms. Practice makes persuasion

      Resonates with Muckelbauer's take of persuasion.

    2. As we are embodied and embedded as an ecological body, a practice absent moral imperatives is itself necessary since we cannot avail ourselves of critical distance to impose such ideal

      We are in strong defense territory here.

    3. alker’s conflation of agency with capacity works against reconsidering practice away from its current humanist confines.

      I am still chewing on the agency/capacity distinction, which I think is very important here.

    4. Practice, then, needs new terms for encountering its ways of becoming that are not reducible to a humanist orientation’s dependence on reflection

      Ever on the hunt for new terms.

    5. ut differently, just as critical consciousness seeks to practice one’s subject position, so does critical reflection hone a knower-known relationship to a variety of objects

      How does this critical consciousness reflect the mastery of technology that Bay and Rickert critique?

    1. New media cannot be under-stood in terms of subjective approaches to technologically-derived ob-jects, objects that stand against us in a kind offor/against relation: those that empower and enable us, and those that restrict or oppress us.

      Recall the FoucaultChomsky exchanged we watched in class.

    2. Dwelling in the world would indicate a mindfulness of these fourfold elements, which is to say, constructive activity driven by care for how the fourfold manifests itself, not as four different elements, but as a oneness with four expressions

      Something important to and for rhetoric happens. Note that mindfulness here is "constructive activity." Mindfulness, in other words, is not a kind of passive reflection but an active practice. This reaffirms something about rhetoric but also argues something provocative about what thinking is. There are strong links to Boyle here as well.