- Feb 2019
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this fundamental errour with regard to our general idea of language, in confin• ing it to such narrow bounds, has had a remarkable effect upon our practice; and that some of its noblest uses have been lost lo us, thro' the want of a just notion of its comprehension;
We can certainly get behind this, right? Language, viewed narrowly, leads to a limited use of language. Viewed broadly, language is opened to new possibilities.
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strume11ts
New apparatuses with which to see and understand the world differently than did the Ancients.
The connection to Barad becomes even more apparent below when Vico calls "critique" an instrument.
Another instrument that Vico uses/alludes to is the act of classification ("set up a distinction," "the orderly reduction of systematic rules").
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nothing tends further to encrease and improve this talent, than praclice in a particular art,
And just like that, Barad and Siegert come crashing in. Practices shape the agent, yeah yeah yeah, but as the agent continues to practice, the world is shaped as well.
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when we use them as signs of real beings, which yet never had any reality or existence.
Barad immediately comes to mind; I'm thinking of her charge to doubt the Cartesian scheme in order that it does not continue to exist.
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like the medium through which visible objects pass
like an apparatus...
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no one has authority to determine the signification of the word gold
I'm struck through here (and the liquor example) how prescient Locke's inquiries are for our own investigations into rhetoric and the question of "what is human?" It feels like he's anticipating Barad's argument that each definition of gold -- its color, its weight, its malleableness, etc. -- creates a cut, a boundary around what gold means for each person that cares to define it. Barad sees these "local determinations" not as final but as fluid, even while being exclusionary (821). Locke is keying in on these exclusionary definitions and the problems they might pose to an empirical approach.
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we can know what we ourselves have made
This brings to mind an issue from last week, where we place more trust in words because they are our own construct (see Barad 801: "How did language come to be more trustworthy than matter?").
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Locke argues that all ideas arc mental combinations of sense perceptions and 1hat words refer not directly to things but to menial phenomena, the ideas we retain and build from sense impressions.
Like Locke, Karen Barad is pushing against the idea of words as representational of things, with her performative model?
"A performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things" (Barad 802).
In what ways does performance differ from "mental phenomena"? Mental = internal only where performance = internal and external?
Side note: every time someone says phenomena, I hear this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ytei6bu7kQ
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- Jan 2019
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mediating thirdpreceding first and second
"preceding" is doing a lot of work there. That sounds an awful lot like Barad.
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A posthumanist account callsinto question the givenness of the differential categories of “human” and“nonhuman,” examining the practices through which these differentialboundaries are stabilized and destabilized.
I'm tagging this for my own benefit, really, because here Barad offers an excellent, succinct distillation of this posthumanist thing.
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Meaning isnot a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoingperformance of the world in its differential intelligibility.
Notice the lack of reference to some "scientific observer" outside of the system who could "measure" meaning. She only refers to what is going on in the actual world.
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summary,
super helpful summary. Commenting just to tag it.
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abstract independently existing “object”
Since forever, apparently, science has relied on Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," in a sense. Not a god exactly, but some real or imagined unaffected observer whose presence serves as a fixed point from which to accumulate data. Why are we tempted to think this way? Aren't we all moving? What fixed point is there? I'm tempted to go back to the analogy of floating baskets tied together. There is an illusion of being grounded, but we aren't really.
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If performativity is linked not only to the formation of the subject butalso to the production of the matter of bodies,
Dr. Rivers, please freaking help.
Am I reading Barad right? Is she saying here "If not only the internal workings of the mind of the subject and the subjects actions are shaped by performativity, but also the physical compilation of the universe, then it is all the more important that we understand performativity and how it causes this shaping of the physical world."
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here are representations on the one hand and ontologicallyseparate entities awaiting representation on the other
Ok, I think this is it. This is her whole thing; her thesis. And it is one hell of a thesis.
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healthy skepticismtoward Cartesian doubt
lol, but for real, what Barad is suggesting really is difficult to do, or at least I'm finding it difficult to do.
We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. We believe words are more understandable and apprehensible than the physical world. . .
It seems crazy because our society is so science and tech driven, but she's right. We believe words to be prior (ontologically) to the world around us because they are a part of "us," our own minds.
Distorting Descartes's famous thought experiment here seems to help me understand this. While I suspect the average person could be pushed into admitting the possibility of an evil demon spinning an elaborate hoax for you, deceiving your physical senses and tricking your brain, I can't imagine finding anyone who would admit the opposite. The opposite would be that the external world exists largely as you perceive it. The demon is not manipulating your experience of the natural world at all. Instead, he is tricking you into believing you exist.
We're so Cartesian we can't even conceive of it being otherwise. Perhaps Spinoza would help here, as well as other monist ontologies?
Someone please redeem this annotation I don't even know what is happening anymore.
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“appearance” makes its first appearanc
"What is" instead of "which one?"
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ubjectivity canthen be re-defined as an expanded self, whose relational capacity is notconfined within the human species, but includes non-anthropomorphicelements.
Like mholder pointed out, this also speaks to Foucault's "Self Writing." In this case, I think the connection to the notebook and/or letter (correspondence) is important, where the "expanded self" is due in large part thanks to the non-anthropomorphic materials the writer interacts with (a la Barad's intra-activity, if I'm making that connect aright).
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a set of technologically inter-linkedmaterial culture
This resonates with many of the other articles: Rickert's materialist rhetorics, Barad's materiality, ...
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humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the allegedly universal measureof all things,
Protagoras's human-measure doctrine strikes again. (Cf. end of Barad article)
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- Intra-activity
- Subjectivity
- Braided stream
- Human-measure doctrine
- Rickert
- Foucault
- Matter
- Barad
- Protagoras
- Material rhetorics
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A posthumanist account callsinto question the givenness of the differential categories of “human” and“nonhuman,” examining the practices through which these differentialboundaries are stabilized and destabilized.
I'm tagging this for my own benefit, really, because here Barad offers an excellent, succinct distillation of this posthumanist thing.
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- Apr 2017
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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"?
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