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. meta-discipline

      or "meta-practice" (D. Gross)

    3. 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

    4. 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.

    5. surrounds

      understood as ambient

    6. 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.

    7. pluriverse

      Echoes of William James as well.

  3. Jul 2019
    1. extends

      I think it’s productive to swap this out for “transduces” here. Extensions runs the risk of limiting such a devices in-formal differences.

    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. participatory

      Again, thinking agonistically here.

    2. 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. bone conduction offers opportunities for novel and rich experiences with sound and bodies.

      This reminds me of Sara Hendren’s work on assistive technology: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/all-technology-is-assistive/

    2. Transducers vibrate the sound directly into the banister hiding it in the metal.

      Compelling resonance here: https://youtu.be/Dfj4afhh_uw

    3. engaging sonic interactionsexploring the life of trees

      Resonates with the “Cyborg Botany” project. https://youtu.be/3fsE_c__zV4

    1. dirigibility

      Latin dirigere, ‘to direct’

    2. the absence of a loved one

      Many years ago, after a beloved pet died, my dad had us all write messages on balloons that we then released at once.

    3. 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.

    4. object

      Thing is here preferable to object (Latour, “Making Things Public”).

    5. object

      Thing is here preferable to object (Latour, “Making Things Public”).

    6. thing

      Thing here resonates with Latour’s work on the term.

    7. , I want to show how the balloon is a device for making something happen.

      This is basically what I want to spend all we doing!

    8. 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.

    9. 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.

    10. weak theory in an unfi nished world”

      I am eager to explore how various practices of sensing resonate with weak theory.

    11. 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.

    12. 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. “stretch our sensory, perceptual, experimental, and conceptual powers so that our [methods] can be tested and extended” (2013, 169).

      "Sets of sensitivities" (Pickering).

    2. Ecological thinking is not limited to environmentalist projects, so any adaptive system (a city, a lab, a discipline) could serve

      As with Parikka, ecology is an operation.

    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. Ecology is more like an operation.

      This really struck me. We aren't observing or describing an ecology, but practicing something as an ecology.

    2. 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. Order is part of the account, but only insofar as it creates the conditions for the occasion to become stable enough to have an effect within the realm of the actual.

      taxis

    2. dodge to liv

      Resonance with Latour’s ‘demon of the double click.”

    3. 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.”

    4. therefore it does not exist

      Could we then speculate that sonic methods create new ways to exist? Modes of sonic existence.

    5. 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.

    6. knowledge does

      This is the rhetorical question for/of field methods.

    7. Subjectivity is how the occasion accounts for itself.

      This is pretty great.

    8. 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.

    9. is decipherable precisely because its operations are muted

      Muted? Make it supersonic!

    10. ocating art not at the level of the fi nished object but in its trajectory

      This moment strikes me as very important for DFMI.

  10. Apr 2018
  11. Mar 2018
    1. I contend with what’s there and what’s not there. In return, my body disappears and reappears.

      hiding and seeking

  12. Feb 2018
    1. My feeling is that surveillance is a false issue, that there’s no problem except for the credit rating.

      Wow.

    2. Corporations could squeal but they couldn’t make the army go onto the streets against the people

      Hum. Let's hope not.

    3. 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!

    4. 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.

    5. This is funny, because they’re acting politically without admitting it.

      Green Earth

  13. Jan 2018
    1. rational

      So, after all of this, we still know what rational argument is?

    2. For those of us willing to face up to facts

      Who is the "me," the "us," that faces up to facts? The word face here being interesting to me.

    3. sophisticated trick

      A "trick" compared to what?

    4. shape

      Better than "manage" I think.

    5. 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"?

    6. 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.

    7. 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. At this moment in the evolution of the auto industry, there were still no seat belts, airbags, emission controls, or mandatory crumple zones.

      Great point.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. How do you respond to what you cannot see?

      This is the question, perhaps.

  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. conflicting accounts

      Do "conflicitng accounts" always result in erasure?

    4. 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?

    5. 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. meaning

      I wonder if meaning gets at it here. Maybe consequentiality or effectivity. That is, meaning is but one effect of the body doing something.

    2. articulation

      Think about how Foucault could expand your use of articulation here.

    3. 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. utilizing

      A very "suspicious" word in this context. There is a potentially weak defense of embodiment lurking here.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    4. relatively equal access to knowledge

      And were in posession of more or less uniform bodies.

    5. 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. Or as when she reflects on the “present” moment of her writing

      One recalls Woolf here as well.

    2. inserts

      Very "interesting" verb choice here.

    3. The result is a layering of language, a tapestry, a work of art (Amanda).

      A composition.

    4. 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.

    5. discovered

      Is discovered the best word here? What does it presuppose?

    6. 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.

    7. 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?

    8. reinforces

      I am not sold on this here. Is playing with the binary in an explicitly deconstructive mode the same as "ultimately" reinforcing it? if so, how?

    9. as vehicles

      Hum. I am not sure about this word here, which makes the body into a means of conveyance. The body as merely a support system.

    10. 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. markers of her intersectional multiplicity

      The tongue becomes as a thing.

    2. we have to acknowledge that they move in another dimension as well

      What does this dimensionality achieve?

    3. pulling us back into the moment of the text’s production.

      Pulling us back into it's magma? Just riffing here.

    4. sit up straight, you’re slouching!

      don't yell at me!

    5. never truly allowing there to be a post-production stage wherein the text is completed and stands on its own

      I am recalling Muckelbauer on rhetoric here.

    6. we are returning the text to the production stage,

      re-production

    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. Here is the a mercy excerpt on which the image above is based.

      This is powerful stuff. I can see what you are working with it.

    2. 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. This piece refuses to be a mere residue

      Nice.

    4. 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.

    5. 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"?

    6. It seems to add to the “performance as a process” idea

      I think you are onto something here.

    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. foreclose the understanding of how “nature”and “culture” are formed

      Such binaries turn such concepts in black boxes.

    3. 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?

    4. Agency is theenactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dy-namics of intra-activity.

      How can we make this work as rhetoric?

    5. 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.

    6. That is, intra-activity is neither a matter of strict determinism norunconstrained freedom

      Avoiding this binary is important.

    7. 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.

    8. The inscription model of constructivism is of this kind: culture isfigured as an external force acting on passive nature.

      Nice nutshell definition of social constructionism.

    9. 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.

    10. The differential constitution of the “human” (“non-human”) is always accompanied by particular exclusions and alwaysopen to contestation.

      Rhetoric.

    11. 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.

    12. 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.

    13. 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.

    14. Discourse is not a synonym for language.24

      Important distinction here.

    15. the universe is agential intra-activity in its becoming
    16. Inessence, there are no noumena, only phenomena. Agential realist phenomena are neitherKant’s phenomena nor the phenomenologist’s phenomena

      Important distinction here.

    17. 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.

    18. Boundaries do not sit still.

      This a key posthuman insight.

    19. practices

      Strong connection to Boyle as well here.

    20. I argue thatphenomena are not the mere result of laboratory exercises engineered byhuman subjects

      Important caveat.

    21. 21

      This is a hugely important footnote.

    22. 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.

    23. 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.

    24. 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.

    25. for example, its anatomy and physiology

      From where do the guts come?

    26. 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.

    27. 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. repeatedly

      Links to Muckelbauer's "Returns of the Question."

    2. Engaging in a bit of etymology, I propose another version

      See why etymology is important?

    3. 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.

    4. Such ethics are not to be thought of as separate from practice but are practices in the strictest sense.

      Back to the strong defense, but with some differences.

    5. 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.

    6. 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.