Thrift/Latour notes

ACTOR.  

What counts as 'me' and 'we' are being redefined by a range of transhuman approaches.

Spinoza's body:  'there is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force.  The plane is concerned only with movements and rests, with dynamic affective changes…

Shift focus away from human individual subject. 

Pre-individual:  modes of apprehension/existence that are not subject-based.  

Gap of subject/object replaced by a horizontal realm of dueling/cooperating entities.

Rendered mobile, stable, combinable

'we must live surrounded by an ocean of hybrids whose nature we do not know or at best imperfectly understand because we bleed into them in so many odd ways' … you can see it as a problem or as an opportunity.

Mediation -- to Negotiation -- we even negotiate time

For Latour, an actor is not a substance but a kind of explorer, testing what can and cannot be withstood.  (for Thrift, the metaphor is 'rehearsing')

There is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, and created by the entity that is the focus of attention.  It becomes more real by the more allies it has.

Spinoza: everything is a part of thinking and doing simultaneously - they are aspects of the same thing expressed in two registers. Knowing proceeds in parallel with the body's physical encounters.

PRECOGNITIVE/AFFECTIVE

The precognitive as more than an addendum to the cognitive.  Affect.  Just as important as signs and signification. Body expressive without being a signifier. (imitation, modulation)

New relational modes.

Distributed cognition and distributed pre-cognition.

PRACTICES

Again, there is no other way to define an actor but through its action, and there is no other way to define an action but by asking what other actors are modified, transformed, perturbed, and created by the entity that is the focus of attention.

The world is made up of all kinds of things brought in to relation with one another by many and various spaces through a continuous and largely involuntary process of encounter, and the training that such encounter enforces.

practices:  material bodies of work or styles that have gained enough stability over time -- through, for example, the establishment of corporeal routines and specialized devices -- to reproduce themselves.  

The stability is a result of schooling in these practices, of each actor holding the others to them, and of the brute 'natural' fact that the default is going to continue on in most circumstances. 

Practices are productive concatenations that have been constructed out of all manner of resources and which provide the basic intelligibility of the world.  Actions presuppose practices.

WHAT OF THE HUMAN BODY?

The human body is what it is because of its unparalleled ability to co-evolve with things, taking them in and adding them to different parts of the biological body to produce something which, if we could see it, would resemble a constantly evolving distribution of different hybrids with different reaches.  

WHAT OF THE SITE?  

An active an always incomplete incarnation of events, an actualization of times and spaces that uses the fluctuating conditions to assemble itself.  Not so much a result of punctual, external causes as it is an insertion into (and negotation of) multiple flows.

EVENT.  What constitutes an event?  What forces trigger it?

AN ETHIC OF EVENT-ING

A generalized ethic of out-of-jointness within which 'every familiar is ultimately strange and… indeed, I am even in a crucial sense a stranger to myself.'  It can be thought of as an opportunity to build new forms of life in which strangeness itself is the locus of new forms of relationship, neighborliness, community.  It suggests a particular form of boosting aliveness, one that opens us to our being in the midst of life through a thoroughly ontological involvement.  'Everyday life includes possibilities for withdrawing from, defending against, its own aliveness to the world, possibilities of, as it were, not really being there, of dying to the other's presence. The energies that constitute our aliveness to the world are subject to multiple modifications and transformations. CRAFTSMANSHIP, SKILL - working as part of a community of ability.  

A poetics of mundane space and time.  A politics of what happens.  A permanent supplement to the ordinary.

The assembling of more performative political ecologies. (after Butler)  Making more room in the world for new political forms, which at the same time, produces new excitations of power.  

SPACE

How do spaces resonate, obtain their particular 'atmosphere'?

Actors continually change size, scale up and down.  A multiplicity of scales is always present in interactions.  How do actors negotiate and assemble across scales?