Summer 2014 Reading/Writing

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).

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).

#dh2014 Keynote (Latour)

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.

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.

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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).

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.

"...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).

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).

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).

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).