links: BBB/ Jitsi call link to tune in with each other---> https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/cri-hgz-jrl-aqp (if you encounter a difficulty, we are here to help :)) PAD for AUDIENCE: https://pad.vvvvvvaria.org/READINGROOM-42-VARIA-Reading-and-Repairing Texts in the running: - Nina Power: READING RIOTOUsly < — + - Eleanor Rees: MARk-MAkING IN THE VIRTUAl < — ** - Grace Harrison, UNARmED READING GROUPs - epiphany in the beans, Robin Wall Kimmerer < — ** - The Interdisciplines, Melissa Adler < — + - Eve Sedgewick, You're so paranoid To Do: > decide which texts? > ways of reading: > magic words > modes of annotation > cross anotating / parallel weaving of texts; in first exercise with excerpt from Eve? > anotate as alter ego / anotate as an object; > when to use scores? as a mode of reading or as an activity alongside reading? > tidy this pad > Cristina posts Dear Science > Amy makes score with paintings > Amy scans the book & uploads to nextcloud https://mailchi.mp/679dfa35312b/wrapping-the-end-of-the-year-in-a-warm-scarf > create a link nextcloud for sounds sharing; https://cloud.vvvvvvaria.org/s/PaFHqcN4YMqLcFa > Joana adds to Nina Power > check timings > add more of Eve > make the playlist for dear science COPY + PASTE: amy WRITE ON CHAT + TIME KEEPING: Joana and Cris line-up: 14:30-16:30 workshop 1 17:00-19:00 workshop 2 workshop 1 * 14:30 - 14:35: waiting for people to arrive * 14:35 - 14:50: intro to Page Not Found, Reading Room, intro to Varia, Joana says something about Varia + connection to Reading Room Varia (NL) is a Rotterdam based initiative focused on working with, on and through everyday technology. At its core the initiative aims to be a social infrastructure from which to collaboratively facilitate critical understandings on the technologies that surround us. The initiative is a membership-based organisation striving to become a space for questions, opinions, modifications, help and action. Joana Chicau is a graphic designer, coder, researcher — with a background in dance — currently based in London. In her practice she interweaves web programming languages and environments with choreography. She has been actively participating and organizing events with performances involving multi-location collaborative coding, algorithmic improvisation, open discussions on gender equality and activism. Amy talks about Read & Repair (using tools & reading methods developed in these moments) Cristina introduces BBB, (constant) and a bit on how to use it shares how to use the etherpad * 14h50 - 15h00: (dears who is introducing this? amy can present the texts and maybe Jo you can close with the content? -yes! I can close somehow) * present line-up reading + reasoning behind choosing texts / structure of the sessions; * titles of all texts (will also be announced in the pad?) * Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick * Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick * Nina Power: READING RIOTously, found in The Act of Reading, published by Torque 2 * Eleanor Rees: MARk-MAkING IN THE VIRTUAl also found in The Act of Reading, published by Torque 2 * reflecting on reading & writing from different positions and disciplines * annotation as a form of collective reading; we read each person thoughts as we read; it stretches the 'reading'; * annotating as a form of collective commentary * saying visual goodbye (we will still be around BBB if need be) and moving to the pad for warming-up exercises; *・゜゚・*:.。..。.:*・*:.。. ☀️ Warming-up ☀️ *・*:.。. .。.:*・゜゚・* Stretching activity 1.1 → Look at your fingers. Starting from the little finger on your left hand, massage each fingertip. You can move on to the right hand now and do the same. If you feel any tension on the way press for a few seconds and release. → When you are done shake your hands freely. → Press a random key below: Stretching activity 2.1 → What is your screen's width? Fill one entire line with your colour. You can press space or use any other key. → Write one or more words in the line without breaking it. You might need to delete some spaces. Stretching activity 3.1 → Fill in one line of the pad with your preferred (nick)name, your pronouns, something about the environment that you are in right now, and anything else you would like to share with the group about yourself. Stretching activity 4.1 → Change your pad colour using the colour wheel on the top right. → Open as many browsers as you can and access this pad url from different locations. You can also use Incognito Mode for this in the same browser. → Finish the following sentence: Being online makes me feel like ... Stretching activity 5.1 → Now we will experiment with "pad listening" and "pad speaking". → Form groups of two by writing your nick/names next to each other below. → Choose one of these two actions: - Start with the first few words of a sentence - "Listen" to what the other is writing and step in if you think you can continue their sentence. → Switch up these roles. * 15h00 - 15h10: intro and generation of magic words; * . * . . * .. * . * . .. * * * . * * . * Magic Words * . . . * . . . . * . * * * . Magic Words were brought into the software ecology of Etherpad by Michael Murtaugh, a member of the Brussels-based arts organisation Constant. Magic Words are used to enact certain commands; using __PUBLISH__ on this pad indexes it on this page: https://vvvvvvaria.org/etherpump/ (every hour, so at 13:00 it will be indexed) They are little spells that can be used anywhere on the pad to indicate how we want to interact with the text. We would like to think together with you what kind of social incantations magic words can evoke. What kind of relations between text & reader, reader & reader, place & text, place & text & reader could the magic words provoke? If we see magic words like small instructions that can be activated during a collective reading experience, how would that affect our being together? We will be adding, using and reusing new magic words during the reading time that will follow. .. - * Spellbook for Reading through Magic Words . - * .. Here are a few examples of what the magic words could look like. Think of them as launching a specific kind of interaction with the text fragment that it sits next to. This will be our collective spellbook that everyone can add, edit or use at will, even while reading the text. We will take some time now to add our own magic words to the list below. __CANWEDISCUSS__ If a sentence or paragraph is raising questions or you would like to know what others think about it, we can use this incantation to take it with us into discussion. __ALOUD__ This magic word is used to encourage those encountering it to read aloud the text fragment that it sits next to. __REUSE__ This magic word invites the reuse of the text fragment that it sits next to in an unexpected context. __TWICE__ Read this sentence twice. Read this sentence twice. __MAGIC__invite others to turn something written into an incantation? * 15h10 - 15h30: experimentation with Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick text & magic words We're going to read excerpts from the book Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction is About You by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who worked in the fields of gender studies, queer theory, and critical theory. We will paste excerpts of this text intermittently on the pad, we will remove our colours so it's easier to read, and so we can see better our annotations. As we go through the text, we will use the magic words to annotate our thoughts, feelings, considerations and reactions to what we read. We will read in whatever pace feels good for us, and follow some kind of collective rhythm on our way. Unmistakably the essays pointed toward a book. But excited by the force, the originality, and in many cases the beauty of these pieces, I still found it difficult to articulate more than a negative sense of what kind of a moment they might collectively represent in queer theory or in literary criticism. Clearly and queerly enough, they share a relaxed, unseparatist hypothesis of the much to be gained by refraining from a priori oppositions between queer texts (or authors) and non-queer ones, or female ones and male. In fact, the list of damaging a priori oppositions to which these essays quietly, collectively find alternative approaches is very impressive: the authors transmit new ways of knowing that human beings are also machines, are also animals; that an ethic or aesthetic of truthtelling need not depend on any reified notion of truth; that the materiality of human bodies, of words, and of economic production may misrepresent but cannot simply eclipse one another; that pleasure, grief, excitement, boredom, satisfaction are the substance of politics rather than their antithesis; that affect and cognition are not very distant processes; that visual perception need not be conceptually isolated from the other four bodily senses; that gender differentiation is crucial to human experience but in no sense coextensive with it; that it's well to attend intimately to literary texts, not because their transformative energies either transcend or disguise the coarser stuff of ordinary being, but because those energies are the stuff of ordinary being. (...) Aside from the deroutinizing methodologies of these essays, what seems most hauntingly to characterize them is how distant many of them are from a certain stance of suspicion or paranoia that is common in the theoretical work whose disciplinary ambience surrounds them. (...) How did it spread so quickly from that status to being its uniquely sanctioned methodology? I have been looking back into my own writing of the 1980s as well as that of some other critics, trying to retrace that transition- one that seems worthy ofremark now but seemed at the time, I think, the most natural move in the world. Part of the explanation lies in a property of paranoia itself: simply put, paranoia tends to be contagious. More specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, and in particular symmetrical epistemologies. (...) Paranoia is an inescapable interpretive doubling of presence." 6 It sets a thief (and if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; "it takes one to know one." A paranoid friend, who believes I am reading her mind, knows this from reading mine; also a suspicious writer, she is always turning up at crime scenes of plagiarism, indifferently as perpetrator or as victim; a litigious colleague as well, she not only imagines me to be as familiar with the laws of libel as she is, but eventually makes me become so. (All these examples, by the way, are fictitious.) /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; (...) Some of the main reasons for practicing paranoid strategies may be other than the possibility that they offer unique access to true knowledge. They represent a way, among other ways, of seeking, finding, and organizing knowledge. Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly. I'd like to undertake now something like a composite sketch of what I mean by paranoia in this connection - not as a tool of differential diagnosis, but anyway as a tool for better seeing differentials of practice. My main headings will be: Paranoia is anticipatory. Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia is a strong theory. Paranoia is a theory of negative affects. Paranoia places its faith in exposure. (I) That paranoia is anticipatory is clear from every account and theory of the phenomenon. The first imperative of paranoia is "There must be no bad surprises," and indeed the aversion to surprise seems to be what cements the intimacy between paranoia and knowledge per se, including both epistemophilia and skepticism. D. A. Miller notes in The Novel and the Police that "Surprise ... is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, he survives by reading as a frightening incentive: he can never be paranoid enough."12 The unidirectionally future-oriented vigilance of paranoia generates, paradoxically, a complex relation to temporality that burrows both backward and forward: because there must be no bad surprises, and because to learn of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known. As Miller's analysis also suggests, the temporal progress and regress of paranoia are, in principle, infinite. (...) (2) In noting, as I have already, the contagious tropism of paranoia toward symmetrical epistemologies, I have relied on the double senses of paranoia as reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia seems to require to be imitated in order to be understood; and it, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation. Paranoia proposes both UAnything you can do [to me] I can do worse," and UAnything you can do [to me] I can do first" -to myself. (...) The contingent possibilities of thinking otherwise than through "sexual difference" are subordinated to the paranoid imperative that, if the violence of such gender reification cannot be definitively halted in advance, it must at least never arrive on any conceptual scene as a surprise. In a paranoid view, it is more dangerous for such reification ever to be unanticipated than often to be unchallenged. (3) It is for reasons like these that, in the systems-theory-influenced work of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins, paranoia is offered as the example par excellence of what Tomkins refers to as "strong affect theory" - in this case, a strong humiliation or humiliation-fear theory /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; (...) An affect theory is, among other things, a mode of selective scanning and amplification; for this reason, any affect theory risks being somewhat tautological, but because of its wide reach and rigorous exclusiveness, a strong theory risks being strongly tautological. (...) This is how it happens that an explanatory structure that a reader may see as tautological, in that it can't help or can't stop or can't do anything other than proving the very same assumptions with which it began, may be experienced by the practitioner as a triumphant advance toward truth and vindication. (...) Subversive and demystifying parody, SUSPICIOUS archaeologies of the present, the detection of hidden patterns of violence and their exposure: as I have been arguing, these infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling have become the common currency of cultural and historicist studies. If there is an obvious danger in the triumphalism of a paranoid hermeneutic, it is that the broad consensual sweep of such methodological assumptions, the current near-profession-wide agreement about what constitutes narrative or explanation or adequate historicization, may, if it persists unquestioned, unintentionally impoverish the gene pool of literary-critical perspectives and skills. The trouble with a narrow gene pool, of course, is its diminished ability to respond to environmental (for instance, political) change. ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; (...) Another, perhaps more nearly accurate way of describing the present paranoid consensus, however, is that rather than entirely displacing, it may simply have required a certain disarticulation, disavowal, and misrecognition of other ways of knowing-ways less oriented around suspicion-that are actually being practiced, often by the same theorists and as part ofthe same projects. The monopolistic program of paranoid knowing systematically disallows any explicit recourse to reparative motives, no sooner to be articulated than subject to methodical uprooting. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissable within paranoid theory both because they are about pleasure ("merely aesthetic") and because they are frankly ameliorative ("merely reformist"). (...) To recognize in paranoia a distinctively rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse above all to surprise, is also to glimpse the lineaments of other possibilities. Here, perhaps, Klein is of more help than Tomkins: to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new: to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.23 Because she has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently from the way it actually did.2 ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; A more recent and terrible contingency, in the brutal foreshortening of so many queer lifespans, has deroutinized the temporality of many of us in ways that only intensify this effect. I'm thinking, as I say this, of three very queer friendships I have. One of my friends is sixty; the other two are both thirty, and I, at forty-five, am exactly in the middle. All four of us are academics, and we have in common a lot of interests, energies, and ambitions; we have each had, as well, variously intense activist investments. In a "normal" generational narrative, our identifications with each other would be aligned with an expectation that in another fifteen years, I'd be situated comparably to where my sixty-year-old friend is, while my thirty-year-old friends would be situated comparably to where I am. But we are all aware that the grounds of such friendships today are likely to differ from that model. They do so in inner cities, and for people subject to racist violence, and for people deprived of health care, and for people in dangerous industries, and for many others; they do for my friends and me. Specifically, living with advanced breast cancer, I have little chance ofever being the age my older friend is now. My friends who are thirty years old are similarly unlikely ever to experience my present, middle age: one is living with an advanced cancer caused by a massive environmental trauma (basically, he grew up on top of a toxic waste site); the other is living with HIV. The friend who is a very healthy sixty is the likeliest of us to be living fifteen years from now. It's hard to say, hard even to know, how these relationships are different from those shared by people of different ages on a landscape whose perspectival lines converge on a common disappearing-point. I'm sure ours are more intensely motivated: whatever else we know, we know there isn't time to bullshit. But what it means to identify with each other must also be very different. On this scene, an older person doesn't love a younger as someone who will someday be where she now is, or vice versa. No one is, so to speak, carrying forward the family name; there's a sense in which our life narratives will barely overlap. There's another sense in which they slide up more intimately alongside one another than can any lives that are moving forward according to the regular schedule ofthe generations. It is one another immediately, one another as the present fullness of a becoming whose arc may extend no further, whom we each must learn best to apprehend, fulfill, and bear company. [jumping to the reparative part of the text now, so this is a very fragmented reading of the full text. We will share a link to it later if we want to fill in some parts] (...) At a textual level, it seems to me that related practices of reparative knowing may lie, barely recognized and little explored, at the heart of many histories of gay, lesbian, and queer intertextuality. The queer identified practice of camp, for example, may be seriously misrecognized when it is viewed, as Butler and others view it, through paranoid lenses. As we've seen, camp is currently understood as uniquely appropriate to the projects of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure ofthe elements and assumptions of a dominant culture; and the degree to which camping is motivated by love seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo. (...) The desire of a reparative impulse, on the other hand, is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self. To view camp as, among other things, the communal, historically dense exploration of a variety of reparative practices is to be able to do better justice to many of the defining elements of classic camp performance: the startling, juicy displays of excess erudition, for example; the passionate, often hilarious antiquarianism, the prodigal production of alternate historiographies; the "over"-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products; the rich, highly interruptive affective variety; the irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation; the disorienting juxtapositions ofpresent with past, and popular with high culture. (...) I would want to add, practices -that can be divided between the paranoid and the reparative; it is sometimes the most paranoid-tending people who are able to, and need to, develop and disseminate the richest reparative practices. And ifthe paranoid or the depressive positions operate on a smaller scale than the level ofindividual typology, they operate also on a larger, that ofshared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse. (...) The vocabulary for articulating any reader's reparative motive toward a text or a culture has long been so sappy, aestheticizing, defensive, anti-intellectual, or reactionary that it's no wonder few critics are willing to describe their acquaintance with such motives. The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; Score for annotation: Now we will repeat this annotation exercise, but this time we will think about alternative magic words. What could be our 'reparative' and 'paranoid' magic words? Add them to our spellbook and read the text again. * 15h50 - 16h10: Moving away from the magic words, we're going to continue thinking about different modes of reading, of paranoia and repair with excerpts from the book Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick, who is a professor in Gender studies and whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies. Score for annotation: sonic annotations Experimenting with another mode of note taking or commentary making: We can record your own sounds and share existing sounds that we feel connect with what we are reading. To share them you can upload them here - https://cloud.vvvvvvaria.org/s/PaFHqcN4YMqLcFa or share music links below here as we read; Sound links Dear Science The ideas and curiosities gathered in Dear Science are bundled and presented as stories. Telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are relational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people, places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots. The process is sustained by invention and wonder. The story has no answers. The stories offer an aesthetic relationality that relies on the dynamics of creating-narrating- listening- hearing- reading- and-sometimes-unhearing. (...) This story is about methods and methodologies.1 It thinks about methodology as an act of disobedience and rebellion and focuses on how black studies scholars have used and can use method to engender radical scholarly praxis. The story understands, in advance, that the commitment to disciplinary thought is thick and wide-ranging. Discipline is the act of relentless categorization.2 In many academic worlds categories are organizational tools; categories are often conceptualized as discrete from each other. Categories are things, places, people, species, genres, themes, and more, that are grouped together because they are ostensibly similar. Categories are classified and ranked and sometimes divided into subcategories (genus). Academic disciplines make knowledge into categories and subcategories; methodology and method make discipline and knowledge about categories. Canons and canonization are very clear and obvious examples of this.3 The weight of discipline is evidenced 36 by the density of disciplinarity and the method of making disciplined categorization happen: around every corner, at every turn, disciplinary practitioners provide disciplined narratives that confirm the solidity of disciplinary knowledge and its categorical difference from other ways of knowing.4 The canon, the lists, the dictionaries, the key thinkers, the key-words, the core courses, the required courses, the anthologies, the qualifying exams, the comprehensive exams, the core textbooks, the tests, the grading schemes and rubrics, the institutes, the journals, the readers. Core.5 Learning outcomes.6 The demonstrated knowledge of Jürgen Habermas texts requires the refusal of W. E. B. Du Bois and can in no way imagine—even in refusal—Ida B. Wells. (The breadth and depth of the answer demonstrates the scholars’ substantive and comprehensive knowledge of...) Disciplines are coded and presented as disconnected from experiential knowledge; experiential knowledge is an expression of data (The objective census numbers factually show that the poor living here experience...). Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly disconnected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split, and create fictive distances between us. Footnotes: 1. For an extended, overlapping, and different story, see Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 2. In this story I discuss discipline, disciplinarity, disciplined thought, as academic areasof study. Thus, I am not referring to the practice and work of study. In much of black studies this work is very disciplined. It is a practice of rigor, care, monumental effort. This work takes time, and has psychic and economic costs. It is enveloped in long lists of books, extensive notes and songs, and layers of intellectual histories and theories by black and nonblack thinkers (the work, the practice, is disobedient not undisciplined). 3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Har-court Brace, 1994). 4. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 67–79. 5. Core: the central or most important part of something. 6. “Learning outcomes are statements of what a learner is expected to understand, value, or demonstrate after completion of a process of learning. The Learning Outcomes are mea-surable, and communicate expectations to learners about the skills, attitudes and behaviors they are expected to achieve after successful completion of a course, program or degree. Accurate assessment of learning outcomes is an essential component of competency-based education. This project aligns well with the academic plan . . . which emphasizes the devel-opment of fundamental academic skills, transferable skills that span a range of disciplines and are essential for professional practice. . . . The aims of the project are: to quantif y student achievement of transferable learning outcomes; to develop reliable and sustainable means of assessing student learning; to encourage faculty to develop and assess transferable skills in their courses and programs; and to build a foundation for a wider rollout of this type of assessment across faculties and programs over the next few years.” See Queen’s University, “Queen’s Learning Outcomes Assessment,” accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.queensu.ca/qloa/home. ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; (...) Wynter is offering a way to read radically. A small slice of her project, then, is not to provide us with a problem (Man1-Man2) followed by a solution (replace Man1-Man2), but to, first, encourage us to read differently (from a third perspective, from the perspective of struggle, from demonic ground) and observe how our present system of knowledge, a biocentric system of knowledge upheld by capitalist financing, is a self-referential system that profits from recursive normalization; and, second, to read and notice the conditions through which self-replicating knowledge systems are breached and liberation is made possible. Black intellectuals engender a perspective of struggle, the demonic ground, and other heretical inter-ruptions. Across her writings, Wynter illuminates the ways in which the history of blackness provides the conditions to learn and live and love our world differently. Reading anticolonially is deciphering practice.21 As a methodology (rather than simply a time past that is over and done with) the 1960s questioning of the global world system that Wynter highlights is productively unfinished. Positioned as an open questioning, method and methodology are unhinged from the stasis of noun, and thrown into the less predictable work of verb. Method-making. I theorize Wynter’s insights on the rebellious potential of 1960s—what she describes as the groundwork for the realization of a new order of being human—as long-standing and unfinished method-making.22 This kind of analytical maneuvering marks black rebellion as method-making; this is one way to signal and think about the praxis of black life and livingness. The maneuvering, ideally, dwells on and thinks about the questioning and overturning of normative systems of knowledge, and thus what it means to be human, by situating the process of inquiry as the analytical framework through which to study. Method-making compulsively moves with curiosity (even in frustration) rather than applying a set of techniques to an object of study and generating unsurprising findings and outcomes. Methodology is disobedient (rogue, rebellious, black).23 Footnotes: 21. Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,” in Ex­iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: A frica World Press, 1992), 237–279. 22. Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” 163. 23. Thank you, Lisa Lowe. ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; (...) Connections. Reading across a range of texts and ideas and narratives—academic and nonacademic—encourages multifarious ways of think-ing through the possibilities of liberation and provides clues about living through the unmet promises of modernity; method-making undercuts the profitable standardization of racial authenticities and disciplining practices.31 These processes, in turn, hopefully challenge two bothersome analytical habits. The first, which has been continually inserting itself into this story, is the tendency to seek out and find marginalized subjects, who then serve as academic data and provide authentic knowledge about oppression.32 The second is the tendency to privilege some theoretical or academic work as the methodological and intellectual frame through which to analyze the data (so we apply Karl Marx or a Marxist frame, say, to sites or communities of oppression). Both of these approaches objec-tify the data (insert the figure of the black), by assuming black objecthood is only and primarily an analytical site. Studies that focus on resistance may counter objecthood while still assuming objecthood as cosmogony of black existence. This is not just an occurrence in the social sciences; it also occurs in the humanities, when the data is creatively based (apply-ing Judith Butler to, say, Toni Morrison, as though Morrison’s creative text is not an intellectual narrative but, rather, data that, for example, il-luminates performativity. W hat has Morrison taught Butler?! Something, I hope!).33 So the conundrum is soldered to our analytical sites, specifi-cally when blackness is conceptualized, a priori, as a site that signifies dis-possession or emerges out of dispossession. The data-of-dispossession, like the enfleshed identity-discipline, is mobilized to advance feminist or related antioppression projects, only to dispossess the marginalized by presupposing that their political vision is teleological, moving, say, from oppressed to free. All too often this process describes black objecthood. Description does not question the generic class. It is not curious or un-comfortably and persistently open. If the rebellions and resistances that question our present system of knowledge are authenticated and read as only oppositional to objecthood, rebelliousness fades. As method of lib-eration and life, rebellion sustains. Footnotes: 31. A note on interdisciplinarity: normally, interdisciplinary method asks the scholar to bring together two or more academic disciplines, in order to hopefully broaden and refine our approach to any given subject; interdisciplinary work seeks to breach the barriers be-tween prescribed and sanctioned knowledge bases as a way to challenge how we understand the production of knowledge. As I see it, though, this is more than bringing together texts; interdisciplinary methods must always insist that nonwhite academic and nonacademic voices be understood in relation to, rather than outside of, dominant disciplinary academic debates and theories in order to continually unsettle what we think we know. I say this, too, because the production and protection of disciplinary knowledge—including “interdisci-plines” like gender studies or other identity studies—is a racialized and protectionist knowl-edge project. 32. Keguro Macharia, “On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 183–189. ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; Score for annotation: sonic annotations We will record your own sounds and share existing sounds that we feel connect with these texts the texts we have been reading and the ways we have been reading and annotating. To share them you can upload them here - https://cloud.vvvvvvaria.org/s/PaFHqcN4YMqLcFa or share music links below; * 16h10 - 16h20: Recording moment and return to BBB * 16h20 - 16h30: Listening moment and return to BBB This is the end of our first part of the session, you are very welcome to stay for the second part which will start in 30 minutes. You are very welcome to take a break too! We will now jump to BBB to say bye in case you need to go : ) * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 16h30 - 17h: [we are now having a break between our 2 sessions]* * * * * * * * * * * * workshop 2 * 17h - 17h15: waiting for people to arrive * brief introduction again to Reading_Room / Varia / Constant * 17h15 - 17h20:warming up again Re-Stretching activity 1.2 → Fill in one line of the pad with your preferred (nick)name, your pronouns, something about the environment that you are in right now, and anything else you would like to share with the group about yourself. If you've participated in the early afternoon session, please share something new about yourself. * 17h20 - 17h35: Score01: Close Reading of Nina Power: READING RIOTously We will intermittently post parts of Nina Power: READING RIOTously, found in The Act of Reading, published by Torque 2 As we read, we may wish to annotate or contextualise the writing in your own experience. We would like to add our comments around or inside of the text as a way to bring it closer to us. We will remove the colour of the paragraphs, so we can see our personal colours, and recognise that other voices are on the pad. We welcome discussion. Nina Power: READING RIOTously I’ve only got one image and it’s this one — a very blurry bad photograph taken on my mobile phone in berlin Airport recently. And I wanted to put it up just because although it’s an advert for the smaller version of Die Welt, Die Welt kompact. The point is, you don’t have to share this big newspaper anymore, you don’t have to read collectively, you can read individually, and in a compact manner. And I think this goes along with a kind of shrinkage of mobile reading technologies. but what I like about this image is that you can also read it differently which is as a kind of critique of the idea of collective reading, or a shared image of reading. So I want to have that in the background and maybe come back to it at the end, I think in many ways my talk here is going to be quite old school, compared to some of the more interesting technological papers or the papers that are looking at the neuroscience of reading, because I want to focus on I suppose two main themes, one of which is the relationship of the law to reading and the way in which we are bound by certain ways in which the law uses reading to construct power and to present an image of force which seems to be inescapable. And I think that hasn’t gone away, I think we are still bound by a very old fashioned notion in which the law uses reading on a range of populations. Then in a more dense last ten minutes, I want to think about what it means to read beyond disciplines. Sam mentioned interdisciplinarity, and I want to think about transdisciplinary reading as a way of reading, which isn’t bound by the strictures of disciplines and some of the supposed expertise, which come from being a specialist in something. If we think about the politics of reading, as a kind of ideological question, it presupposes that there are different ways of reading in different societies under different modes of production. So we can talk perhaps about capitalist modes of reading and about communist modes of reading. I’ll talk in a bit later about bourgeois image of the individual reader. I think we can ask who gets to read and how they read, whose acts of reading bind us with their work and who gets to back up their reading with force or the threat of force and then we can ask what would it mean to read against this threat of force the legal mode of reading in a post-disciplinary or transdisciplinary way. I want to focus particularly on the legal mode of reading, which is the reading of the Riot Act, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. It was brought in by the Riot Act of 1714 and it was last used in the Uk in 1919 during a police strike. It wasn’t repealed until 1973. It’s a proclamation ordering the dispersal of a group of any more than 12 who were “unlawfully, riotously tumultuously assembled together” basically it could be read out by a mayor, a bailiff or a JP (justice of the peace), and then everyone had an hour to disperse. If you didn’t you would be charged with a felony, which was punishable by death. so it’s not a casual just: ‘go home’, it’s ‘go home or we will kill you’. I’m going to read the riot act, it says: Our sovereign lord the king chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of king George I, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the king! So that would have to be read out by that person in a position of power, the interesting thing is that it had to be read out completely correctly, or the conviction would be overturned. So in a sense there is a restriction on the law itself. The reading had to be perfect; otherwise you can’t put people to death. So in 1830 there is a very famous case where 250 people had assembled with the purpose of breaking threshing machines, and the magistrate read out the Riot Act but he forgot to read out the ‘God save the king’ bit at the end, so all of the convictions were overturned. //////////////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; I think thinking about the way in which the law uses reading also troubles any wholly positive collective image of reading as well and I was thinking about the mass literacy projects, for example, in Cuba in 1961, Chile under Allende, Sandinista Nicaragua, Columbia, El Salvador and now in East Timor as well. so in 1961, Cuba reduced illiteracy from 42%, to about 4% in about a year — an incredibly impressive mass mobilization of literacy campaign. The campaign included the offer of free glasses for those who had poor eyesight and found reading difficult. Ten of thousands of volunteer teachers were mobilized to travel around and teach people particularly in rural areas, how to read. In December 1961, hundreds of thousands of the newly literate marched on the Plaza de la Revolución carrying giant pencils. A fact I thought was interestingly resonant given the mobilization of the giant pencil in recent days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. The Cuba mass literacy campaign, and these other mass literacy campaigns, often under socialist governments, were mobilized by the idea that reading could enable you to engage politically and socially, it wasn’t simply reading as a kind of technocratic idea or reading for its own sake. It was the idea that reading was the beginning of a whole process of becoming a political and social subject, so you could participate actively in the construction of a socialist project and lots of people have argued that this partly explains why it was so successful because it had another dimension and it wasn’t simply reading for its own sake. //////////////////////////////// — Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading; Just to come back to the law for a second. And my argument that the law kind of creates a problem, for both of these, both the capitalist individualist bourgeois conception and the collectivist concept of reading. And I want to turn to JL Austin’s, How To Do Things With Words in the 1950s, where the questions the idea that the business of the statement can only be used to describe somestate of affairs or to state some fact — either truly or falsely. And very famously he comes up with the idea of the ‘performative utterance’, which is then taken up by people like Judith Butler, later on and theories of performativity. so what is a performative? They do not describe or report anything, and are not true or false. The uttering of a sentence in a performative utterance, is or part of the doing of an action. so the famous examples that JL Austin uses is the ‘I do’ in the wedding ceremony where the speaking of that or the reading of that phrase is at the same time the kind of incorporeal but real transformation of someone from a non-married to a married state, i.e. the uttering of the sentence is part of the doing of an action. (...) To link back to the reading of the Riot Act issue, those performatives that comes from the side of the law i.e. the triggering of the sentences following the jury’s verdict of guilty forexample, have this clearly binding effect, a material force. If you are found guilty in court, you cannot question the fact that this also has a practical component. you can’t say, ‘I refuse to acknowledge this’. you can say it, but it won’t make any difference, you will still be dragged off forcibly. I wanted to quote a sentence from Derrida’s 1989 Force of law: The mystical Foundation of Authority where he says, “there are laws that are not enforced, but there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force”. I think behind all of these statement is the way in which the law continues to read out versions of the Riot Act, whether it actually has to read them out or not doesn’t really matter. It troubles any easy conception of reading and the politics of reading that we might want to have. * 17h30 - 17h45: Another Score for annotation: parallel weaving of texts: Close reading of Eleanor Rees: MARk-MAkING IN THE VIRTUAl (from the same publication by Torque) As we read, we can return to the first text, copy and paste snippets or reflections and interweave with the text we will post below. We are learning from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Loom Book - https://evekosofskysedgwick.net/art/loom-book.html Eleanor Rees: MARk-MAkING IN THE VIRTUAl Matter is, fluid, morphic. Being is, liquid, is a realist statement which informs how I understand writing and reading. We read and write from within being alive. The two acts are then interwoven — stitches in one cloth. Reading is writing as both are acts of interpretation. And what is interpretation? It is a shifting and rearrangement of space, a mark-making in the virtual. When we read ideas appear through association, are seen in space, are evoked and invoked, called up to the fluid realm of the virtual, vision, imagination. If this inner world is carved into as we might a cave wall, onto it we press our pigments or scratch out an image from a rock. If the virtual is a material we skim stones over surfaces and ripples form. From these associations breed associations, looping back to produce further connections. The touch of the keyboard, how I sit, my breath, my nervous system settled at home or destabilized by changes in air pressure, the hail on the window pane, who I am missing and who I have seen, all feed into loops of ideation — emerging abstractions I draw out; energy encoded into language forms in my mind’s ear and eye. I read my own thoughts as I write, making judgements and following patterns I see forming through the process of writing. I read as a write. I shape and guide these ideas using the structure of syntax, which is a kind of governance, a legislator, and that which was in the world has become other, encoded in time awaiting another living body to read and interpret my reshaping of matter to continue the movement, the tag-game, the dance. And so I become a conduit, a conductor. Non-linear dynamics spill energy back out into the world which firstly filled me with its presence. I read the material: the context into which the writing will be published, the grain of the rock into which I shape the ink, the flow of the water I try to channel into sand to shape the word and leave a mark. The material also speaks to me. From our conversation we co-create, by looping and unfolding another capacity of matter. Together we make a boundary space where I am extended outside my brain, negotiating obstacles and tricky terrain by reading the world around my sentience in all its languages, human and not. And so I am immersed within this liquid being, in an ethics of relation, maintaining the systems through call and response, extension and return; dynamics over which I have little or no control. yet I guide the transformation as best I can. And reading is part of these exchanges of energy, part of the continuous activity of being alive. I make marks within the virtual which in turn mark me, or I am the marks for a moment as I lean into the water face first. I am other. Other is ‘I’. The system connects, energy is transformed and I am away again into the river, streaming and looping, reading and writing, reading and writing. * 17h45 - 18h10: Now we will return to ---> https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/cri-hgz-jrl-aqp --- and listen to a score: 'Codified Mandarins under Clock', a score based performance by Julia Barrios de la Mora. In the end we return to this pad and we will continue with another anotation experiment. < Identify an object in the space you are now in. What is the meaning implied in its name? What are the essential characteristics of that object that make it correspond to its name? If you can, take that object in your hand and relate with it as would so normally. (...) Now, try to look at it from another perspective: Look beyond the functionality that its name implies. Observe it closely as if no one has explained to you what that object was created for. Compare its properties with the ones of your own body. Focus on the basic levels: feel its different temperatures in relation with your temperature, its textures in relation with your skin texture, its rigidity in relation with yours, its dimensions in relation with your dimension and in your common relation to gravity. Focus for some moments only on one of your senses to acknowledge what you are experiencing: close your eyes, and smell it, taste it, create sound by touching it. See how this actions inform you differently. (...) Create a movement that you do together. > Describe below that same movement or gesture, in a few words or give it a name 'if it feels natural'. Take this movement, gesture, or the perspective from the object your observed, return to the text and add an annotation; * 18h10 - 18h15: Score for Cooling down our annotations with the artist Thao Nguyen Phan In the folder where we have collected our sounds, [ https://cloud.vvvvvvaria.org/s/PaFHqcN4YMqLcFa ] we are sharing a pdf of watercolour paintings by the artist Thao Nguyen Phan They are scanned pages from the book Monsoon Melody, that contains again, scanned pages of another book. ~ reading about reading and pages within pages ~ we will scroll through the water marks, zoom in and out, reconsider our focus and attention. We read the images together from our different positions and perspectives. What do we see? "Phan paints a series of watercolours on pages taken from an edition of de Rhodes' Voyages et missions du pere A. de Rhodes. This book was published in French in 1884. In the 19th century, Vietnam, prompted by the colonial power, takes up the Roman alphabet. Chinese writing is forgotten gradually, but not the tradition of painting. Phan refers to this here. The watercolours lead a life of their own, almost like dreams. The watercolours encounter the texts, inscribe themselves, superimpose themselves, immerse themselves, allow us to see through, engage in obstinacy and intentional alienation. On some of the pages extracted from the book, motifs from the films surface, like the school room. Other sheets show children carrying drums and flags. They sing, they dance, turning round. Their synchronized step is socialist. (...) In de Rhodes, there is a map of the Gulf of Tonkin. He marks the rivers as ilnes and the coast as its framing. Quite in the sense of European cartography." Score for annotation: Phan's paints are absorbed into the papers that told us a particular perspective of "journeys and missions of father A. de Rhodes" (who was a priest/missionary) For this score, spend some time with the hand drawn imagery and the moments it connects with, distorts, covers or accompanies the typed, printed, bound latin alphabet. Thinking about annotations as a commentary, what text/image/sign/symbol/object would you encounter, inscribe yourself into, superimpose yourself on, immerse yourself in to engage in alienation? What would you annotate in order to bring a different story to a dominant narrative? How would you annotate in order to challenge a dominant mode of notemaking? * 18h30 - 18h40: Observing annotating: take this time to scroll up the pad and skim through the first part of our session. We will play our sounds submitted earlier through BBB, so you can listen through that window on your laptop while your gaze and curiosity guides you through our earlier notes and traces. After this oblique reading, return to this section and think through any thoughts and reflection you would like to bring to the final discussion that will follow on a video and call in BBB. We'll return to BBB at 18:40 CET, where we will wrap up with a conversation together. * 18h30 - 19h: all texts & collective discussion on BBB