*Annual Reporting
Chris Dreier/Gary Farrelly - The O.J.A.I. Annual Report
https://jointintelligence.org/
The report documents OJAI`s activities and achievements for the previous calendar year. The limited edition publication is co-authored by both directors and brings together images and writing from all current lines of enquiry such as paperwork, lists, maps, photo documentation and correspondence. Oversight and risographed production of the annual report is the competence of OJAI`s Berlin office (OJAI Nord). Physical copies of the annual report are circulated by mail to relevant collaborators, supporters and other stakeholders.
*Administration of aesthetics
Jelena Vesić - “Administration of aesthetics” or on underground currents of negotiating artistic jobs; between love and money, money and love
http://transformativeartproduction.net/administration-of-aesthetics/
The term administration of aesthetics has been forged for such needs as an allusion to or inversion of Buchloh’s term aesthetics of administration; the inversion in terms of difference between the exhibition mode or the moment when art is presented and the process that precedes it, i.e. agreements, negotiations, communication, all those things that have been categorized as too banal and therefore set behind “the stage” for exhibiting and presenting art. At the time, Buchloh’s aesthetics of administration emerged from subversive appropriations of bureaucratic and institutional forms in conceptual art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, better known as the art of institutional critique. In analogy with labour negotiations, which are the focus of this paper, the term was introduced to mark art which reveals the relations of production, pacts and deals that are usually covered up, eluded or decorated with the experience of “real art”.
How are modes of production established by the means of speech and communication? How do individual actors position themselves in their role of employers or employees? Unofficial, para-legal agreements on art production, often founded in peer-to-peer bases, figure as dominant forms of negotiation about “the delivery” of content or participation in various cultural events. We can even say that production forms find their sources precisely in this para-legality and one-on-one relationship, whereas institutional “officialdom”, mobilization of the representative apparatus, legal verification of the agreement – all this represents mere administrative confirmation of something that has already happened, which has been concluded and which served its function.
*Ambiguous oversight
Peter C. Earle. A Century of Anarchy: Neutral Moresnet through the Revisionist Lens,
https://mises.org/library/anarchy-aachen
The remarkable experiment that was Moresnet was an indirect consequence of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), which, like all wars, empowered the governments of participating states at the expense of their populations: nationalism grew more fervent; many nations suspended specie payments indefinitely; and a new crop of destitute amputees appeared in streets all across Europe.
In the Congress of Vienna, which concluded the war, borders were redrawn according to the "balance-of-power" theory: no state should be in a position to dominate others militarily. There were some disagreements, one in particular between Prussia and the Netherlands regarding the miniscule, mineral-rich map spot known as the "old mountain" — Altenberg in German, Vieille Montagne in French — which held a large zinc mine that profitably extricated tons of ore from the ground. With a major war recently concluded, and the next nearest zinc source of any significance in England, it behooved the two powers to jointly control the operation.
They settled on an accommodation; the mountain mine would be a region of shared sovereignty. So from its inception in 1816, the zone would fall under the aegis of several states: Prussia and the Netherlands initially, and Belgium taking the place of the Netherlands after gaining its independence in 1830. Designated "Neutral Moresnet," the small land occupied a triangular spot between these three states, its area largely covered by the quarry, some company buildings, a bank, schools, several stores, a hospital, and the roughly 50 cottages housing 256 miners and support personnel.1
The territory "originate[ed] in mistake … perpetuated by [the] jealousy [and] inability of … two governments to concur in partition," and initially, little changed within the district.2 But over the next few decades, Moresnet's small size and ambiguous oversight by several national powers came together to create an inadvertent experiment deep in the Aachen forests of northwestern Europe.
*Bureau
https://archive.org/details/JJVoskuil-20052006-hetBureau
The Bureau is a cycle of novels in seven volumes by the Dutch author J.J. Voskuil, and meticulously describes the daily affairs of an agency based at the Meertens Institute, where the author worked between 1957 and 1987. Maarten Koning is the protagonist of this five thousand page cycle. The reader follows him on his daily journey to his workplace: an office where research is carried out into Dialectology, Folklore and Onomastics. All of Maarten Koning's experiences and social contacts at his workplace are described in detail. It covers the period 1957-1987. The cycle is very strongly autobiographical, and all the characters in it are based on real people. And Het Bureau was not made up either, but is based on the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam.
*Bureaucracksy
https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/What_is_Bureaucracksy
The term "bureaucracksy" combines the French word bureau – desk or office – and the Greek word κράτος (kratos) – rule or political power – with the Old English cracian – to make an explosive noise.
Bureaucracksy is a solution to a problem, the performance of a task, or a 'fix' for a group of interacting or interrelated entities (comprised of one or more people and having a particular purpose) that form a unified whole. Bureaucracksy includes the activities of setting the strategy and coordinating the efforts of its entities to accomplish its objectives through the application of available resources (such as financial, natural, technological, human and nonhuman), which is inelegant ("hacky"), or even incomprehensible, but which somehow works.
Surrounded and influenced by its environment, a bureaucracksy is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and expressed in its functioning. People may deliberately create individual or formal bureaucracksies, but the development and function of bureaucracksy in society in general may be regarded as an instance of emergence. That is, bureaucracksies arise, develop and function in a pattern of social self-organization beyond conscious intentions of the individuals involved.
Various commentators have noted the necessity of bureaucracksies in modern society. Bureaucracksy is often used to modify a working system, to ensure backwards compatibility, and as a quick solution to a frustrating problem. Bureaucracksy explores methods for breaching defenses and exploiting weaknesses in a system or network – similar to a workaround, but quick and sometimes ugly. Accordingly, the term bears strong connotations that are favorable or pejorative, depending on the context.
*Bureaucratic stacking
Term that emerged when thinking about the way public administrations in Belgium (probably not exclusively here) operate with people who are not Belgian nationals or considered as should not be Belgian nationals. Administrations develop a tendency to increase the volume of administrative procedures, it’s a stacking of administrative requirements which are not especially aligned with legal requirements. It is not clear whether this tendency is the result of explicit and strategic decisions within the administrations but what is clear are the consequences: disproportionate need of legal help and support for people in vulnerable position who typically lack resources (time and money), maintenance (at best) or intensification of precarity. The stacking talks about a tension between rigidity and suppleness (not finished)
*Coordination
Christopher M. Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Sofware, Durham-London, Duke University Press, 2008, CC-BY-NC-SA
http://reader.lgru.net/texts/coordinating-collaborations/
" Coordination is important because it collapses and resolves the distinction between technical and social forms into a meaningful whole for participants. On the one hand, there is the coordination and management of people; on the other, there is the coordination of source code, patches, fixes, bug reports, versions, and distributions—but together there is a meaningful technosocial practice of managing, decision-making, and accounting that leads to the collaborative production of complex software and networks. Such coordination would be unexceptional, essentially mimicking long-familiar corporate practices of engineering, except for one key fact: it has no goals. Coordination in Free Software privileges adaptability over planning. This involves more than simply allowing any kind of modification; the structure of Free Software coordination actually gives precedence to a generalized openness to change, rather than to the following of shared plans, goals, or ideals dictated or controlled by a hierarchy of individuals.
Adaptability does not mean randomness or anarchy, however; it is a very specific way of resolving the tension between the individual curiosity and virtuosity of hackers, and the collective coordination necessary to create and use complex software and networks. No man is an island, but no archipelago is a nation, so to speak. Adaptability preserves the "joy" and "fun" of programming without sacrificing the careful engineering of a stable product. Linux and Apache should be understood as the results of this kind of coordination: experiments with adaptability that have worked, to the surprise of many who have insisted that complexity requires planning and hierarchy. Goals and planning are the province of governance—the practice of goal-setting, orientation, and definition of control—but adaptability is the province of critique, and this is why Free Software is a recursive public: it stands outside power and offers powerful criticism in the form of working alternatives. It is not the domain of the new—after all Linux is just a rewrite of UNIX—but the domain of critical and responsive public direction of a collective undertaking.
*Council house
The Land That Never Has Been Yet : Scene on Radio
Our season-long series will touch on concerns like authoritarianism, voter suppression and gerrymandering, foreign intervention, and the role of money in politics, but we’ll go much deeper, effectively retelling the story of the United States from its beginnings up to the present.
http://www.sceneonradio.org/the-land-that-never-has-been-yet/
The clans would be sitting in here, and sometimes it was everybody in the village. Usually these houses were large enough that the entire population could get inside the town house, or the council house. This is where the important decisions got made in Cherokee communities. Davy tells me the people would seat themselves according to their clans. DavyArch: In each community, there would usually be a council of seven women, one from each of the seven clans. These were the elder women and they ruled the roost. I mean, their word was law.John Biewen:Sometimes the decisions were about war and peace. If the community decided to wage war, a male war chief would be appointed to take the lead. In peacetime, a different male chief would serve. The peace chief was not the decider; his job was to execute the community’s decisions –decisions reached through consensus, which might take days or weeks. Davy Arch: So this was how the government worked. And it drove the Europeans nuts when they came in and tried to do business with us. They might have to sit for a month and listen to all the councils, all 15the children, all the, everybody, you know, say whether or not they wanted to do business with this trader, or something, and then at the end of the month they’d decide they didn’t want to do business with them. [chuckles]John Biewen:Those who carried the most influence were the seven clan elders, who, Davy points out, were also mothers and grandmothers. They stood to lose husbands and sons in any fighting. Davy Arch: So when they were sitting in on council to decide whether or not to participate in battle or war, they took that into consideration, which created balance. That was our whole objective as human beings was to create balance, and *be* in balance with our surroundings and everything else, so, by these women taking part in the decision-making....
*Coronawoordenboek
https://www.taalbank.nl/2020/03/14/coronawoordenboek/
A dictionary of new words in Dutch that have appeared since Covid 19 has emerged.
*Craxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craxism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettino_Craxi
Today, the term Craxism is often used in derogatory form to define a corrupt politician, although some welcome him in a favourable manner: this is the case of those who, following the dissolution of the PSI, joined the newly formed Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi (centre-right), but also a part of those who formed the Italian Socialists, small party adhering to the Alliance of progressives of Achille Occhetto (centre-left).
In Italy, the main critics of the Craxism (as well as the figure of Craxi), are the former Communists (including most members of the Democratic Party) and some media left-wing press (Il Fatto Quotidiano, il manifesto, L'Espresso, La Repubblica, etc.), while the biggest supporters are the PSI of Riccardo Nencini and various politicians of The People of Freedom and the centre-right, as Silvio Berlusconi (also ex-Socialist), Renato Brunetta, Maurizio Sacconi, Stefano Caldoro and Stefania Craxi, Bettino's daughter.
Abroad, Bettino Craxi has received praise especially by Mário Soares, Ricardo Lagos, Felipe González, Lech Walesa, Ronald Reagan, Sergio Romano (Italian Ambassador in the USA), Renato Ruggiero (Socialist diplomat and former Director of the WTO) and Boris Biancheri (writer and diplomat).[1]
*Data Activism
Miren Gutiérrez - Data Activism and Social Change
http://93.174.95.29/main/72C34398A0EFEF2B1087D372BFC70744
This book efficiently contributes to our understanding of the interplay between data, technology and communicative practice on the one hand, and democratic participation on the other. It addresses the emergence of proactive data activism, a new sociotechnical phenomenon in the field of action that arises as a reaction to massive datafication, and makes affirmative use of data for advocacy and social change. By blending empirical observation and in-depth qualitative interviews, Gutiérrez brings to the fore a debate about the social uses of the data infrastructure and examines precisely how people employ it, in combination with other technologies, to collaborate and act for social change.
*Disruption
Sven Spieker, The Big Archive, art from Burea, p.85
chapter 5: The bureaucracy of the unconscious
As early as 1914 Duchamp had introduced as art a card index whose sole
purpose was the disruption of such well- ordered discursive correspondences.
He suggested the creation of a dictionary whose various entries would be stored
on discrete pieces of paper organized by visual tabs:
- Dictionary
- —of a language in which each word would be translated into French (or other)
- by several words, when necessary by a whole sentence.
- —of a language which one could translate in its elements into known lan-
- guages but which would not reciprocally express the translation of French
- words (or other), or of French or other sentences.
- —Make this dictionary by means of cards.
Duchamp goes on to wonder how such a dictionary index ought to be classifi ed
(“fi nd out how to classify these cards”) and concludes that, rather than arrang-
ing the cards by the traditional alphabet, one should group them according to “a few
[chance-generated] elementary signs [signes élémentaires], like a dot, a line, a circle
etc. (to be seen) which will vary according to the position etc.” 9 By questioning the
translational economy that governs the dictionary, Duchamp also questions the
discursive foundations of card indexes such as Kuntze’s with its assumption that
the identifi cation of similar characteristics in a variety of objects (Merkmale, in Kant’s terminology) can be used to organize and unify knowledge. Traditional dictionaries assume that words in diVerent languages can be translated to the extent that they correspond to hidden universals of which they are but diVerent incarnations. In this understanding, the French word “table” corresponds to the same universal idea of a table as, say, its German or Spanish counterparts. By contrast,
in Duchamp’s dictionary- index, words cannot be directly translated into French; they can only be circumscribed by several other words, creating the need for new entries and classifi cations. Duchamp’s experiment represents an expansion of Mallarmé’s secret card index, which Walter Benjamin—himself an avid user of indexes for computing his texts—described as a “poetic working instrument.”
Under the veneer of the rationalizing card index based on the similarity of shared characteristics, Duchamp creates an everexpanding web of differences classified by arbitrary symbols (dots, circles, etc.) that disrupts mechanical models for the computation of written symbols such as Kuntze’s. It is not surprising that Duchamp admits that his language has no sound: “—Sound of this language, is it
speakable? No. Relation to shorthand.” Consisting of nothing but differential relationships between signs, the language proposed by Duchamp’s dictionary cannot be spoken because it cannot be systematically represented.
*Metaphors
Images of Organization - Gareth Morgan
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/images-of-organization/book229704
"[The book] is based on a very simple premise: that all theories of organization and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that lead us to see, understand, and manage organizations in distinct yet partial ways" ... "but at the risk of distortion."
Part I. Introduction
Part II. Some Images of Organization
2. Mechanization Takes Command: Organizations as Machines
3. Nature Intervenes: Organizations as Organisms
4. Learning and Self-Organization: Organizations as Brains
5. Creating Social Realty: Organizations as Cultures
- " But what is this phenomenon we call culture? The word as been derived metaphorically from the idea of cultivation: the process of tilling and developing land. When we are talking about culture we are usually referring to the pattern of development reflected in a society's system of knowledge, ideaology, values, laws, and day-to-day ritual. ... When talking about society of culture we are thus using an agricultural metaphor to guide our attention to very specific aspects of social development."
6. Interests, Conflict, and Power: Organizations as Political Systems
7. Exploring Plato's Cave: Organizations as Psychic Prisons
8. Unfolding Logics of Change: Organization as Flux and Transformation
9. The Ugly Face: Organizations as Instruments of Domination
Part III. Implications For Practice
*Neutral
Zinc - David van Ruysbroek
https://www.bol.com/nl/f/zink/9200000051792920/?country=NL&approved=true&language=nl-NL
‘There sits Emil, an old man at forty-two, under a blanket, coughing. He’s had five nationalities, without even moving house.’ For more than a century, the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany shared a neighbour, Neutral Moresnet, a completely forgotten mini-state that is now part of German-speaking Belgium but from 1816 to 1919 had its own flag, its own government, its own police force (one rural constable), its own postage stamp (valid for two weeks) and its own national anthem (in Esperanto, no less). It covered an area of 3.5 square kilometres, featuring zinc, distilleries, cabarets, brothels, smugglers, philanthropists and forests.
*Nor Submissive
Ni Juge, Ni Soumise
https://www.rtbf.be/tv/detail_ni-juge-ni-soumise-un-documentaire-comme-vous-n-en-avez-jamais-vu?id=10408314
Atypical and eccentric, Judge Anne Gruwez takes us through the criminal investigations, witness hearings and crime scene visits that make up her daily life. Anne Gruwez is not a judge like the others, she uses frankness even in court, she is a true humanist, slightly provocative. She believes that there is no work that doesn't leave room for everyone's personality.
In addition to a glimpse into Anne's daily professional life, the common thread of this documentary is around a particular case. The judge chose an unsolved case that was close to her heart: the murder of two prostitutes in the 90s in Brussels. At the time, the status of the two victims and the absence of their families meant that the case was closed without too much insistence. Today, progress in investigative methods and DNA analysis allow the investigation to be relaunched.
*Powerline
- Outside In Radio- Powerline
http://outsideinradio.org/powerline/
Hydro-Québec, the world’s fourth largest hydropower producer, pumps out low carbon electricity at the cheapest rates in North America. For some, it is the key to a greener, more prosperous, future, but that “clean energy” comes freighted with a complicated history and an uncertain future.
This is the story of how a massive, state-owned utility company came to be a symbol of the French-Canadian people. It’s also the story of how a company, with all of the force of a colonial culture behind it, used its power to try to push Quebec’s original occupants—its indigenous people—to one side. It’s the story of how that effort led to something that has become its own kind of revolution in Canada: native people pushing to regain power over their own lives and culture.
*Ra-ta-ta Birocratie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI80WWZ1JWw
1974 Romanian satire on Bureaucracy by Vasilica Tastaman, Stefan Tapalaga, Dumitru Rucareanu
*Faith based development
Reply all - negative Mount Pleasant
Foxconn versus USA versus Mount Pleasant
https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/wbhjwd/132-negative-mount-pleasant
In Racine County, the Mount Pleasant Village Hall meetings are famous, very well attended. They actually tape the meetings and upload them to the website. And if you’re like me and have watched every single one, you will look forward to the moment when Kelly steps up to the mic. Kelly is basically the local civics watchdog. Almost every week she uses her allotted her three minutes to make it very clear to the people in power that she has her eye on them. And then something much bigger arrived in the summer of 2017. This decision the village had to make where the only thing anybody could agree on was that whatever they chose, it would completely transform their village. Everybody is assuming that it has to be some kind of development that needs a lot of land. You know, and they’re theorizing about what it could be, and of course they’re waiting in anticipation for the next village meeting. And then, one day, they get the news not from town hall, but from the President of the United States. Trump at the White House announces that a major company is coming to Wisconsin. And that company is Foxconn.
The Guardian article follow-up:
'They demolished my house for this?' Residents outraged by the Foxconn factory that fizzled
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/08/wisconsin-foxconn-factory-residents-displaced
*Rule by nobody
Adam Clair
https://reallifemag.com/rule-by-nobody/
"The logic of how these algorithms have been applied follows from the longstanding ideals of bureaucracies generally: that is, they are presumed to concentrate power in well-ordered and consistent structures. In theory, anyway. In practice, bureaucracies tend toward inscrutable unaccountability, much as algorithms do. By framing algorithms as an extension of familiar bureaucratic principles, we can draw from the history of the critique of bureaucracy to help further unpack algorithms’ dangers. Like formalized bureaucracy, algorithms may make overtures toward transparency, but tend toward an opacity that reinforces extant social injustices."
*Radmin
Radical administration reader
https://feraltrade.org/radmin/RADMIN_READER_FINAL.pdf
Assembled for RADMIN - A festival of AdministrationPresented by Feral Business Network & Cube Microplex, BristolFebruary 14 - 16, 2019.
*Reluctant bureaucrats
David Graeber, Utopia of rules p.54
https://library.memoryoftheworld.org/#/book/919e8eee-f98e-49bc-9db6-cb210e7752af
Great writers, then, know how to deal with a vacuum. They embrace it. They stare into the abyss until the abyss stares back into them. Social theory, in contrast, abhors a vacuum—or, this is certainly true if its approach to bureaucracy is anything to go on. Stupidity and violence are precisely the elements it is least inclined to talk about.
The lack of critical work is especially odd because on the surface, you would think academics are personally positioned to speak of the absurdities of bureaucratic life. Of course, this is in part because they are bureaucrats—increasingly so. “Administrative responsibilities,” going to committee meetings, filling out forms, reading and writing letters of support, placating the whims of minor deans—all this takes up an ever-expanding portion of the average academic’s time. But academics are also reluctant bureaucrats, in the sense that even when “admin,” as it’s called, ends up becoming most of what a professor actually does, it is always treated as something tacked on—not what they are really qualified for, certainly, and not the work that defines who they really are. They are scholars—people who research, analyze, and interpret things—even if increasingly, they’re really scholarly souls trapped in a bureaucrat’s body. You might think that an academic’s reaction would be to research, analyze, and interpret this very phenomenon: how does it happen that we all end up spending more and more of our time on paperwork? What is the meaning of paperwork anyway? What are the social dynamics behind it? Yet for some reason, this never happens.
*Science of the particular
Sören Rosenbak - The science of imagining solutions
https://umu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1272782/FULLTEXT02.pdf
Ex-ploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician: A Neo-Scientific Novel, which offered this following passage of extralucidity:An epiphenomenon is that which is superimposed upon a phenomenon.
Pataphysics, whose etymological spelling should be έπι (μετà τà φυσικά) and actual orthography ’pataphysics, preceded by an apostrophe so as to avoid a simple pun, is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter’s limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. Ex: an epiphenomenon being often accidental, Pataphysics will be, above all, the science of the particular, despite the common opinion that the only science is that of the general. Pataphysics will examine the laws governing exceptions, and will explain the universe supplementary to this one; or, less ambitiously, will describe a universe which can be – and perhaps should be – envisaged in the place of the traditional one, since the laws that are supposed to have been discovered in the traditional universe are also correlations of exceptions, albeit more frequent ones, but in any case accidental data which, reduced to the status of unexceptional exceptions, possess no longer even the virtue of originality.
Indeed, for the pata-physician, seen through the science of the particular, the world is wholly comprised of exceptions. Any exercise in deducing or inducing conventional logic or rules in a positivist manner is at best the amusing fruit of scientific imagination, at worst lazy circumventions made in the name of progress, utility, truth claims etc. And yet, how do these exceptions constitute a science? Bök points out that “[w]hile a metaphysical science must rule out exceptions, such exception are the rule (in which case they are no longer exceptions); instead, the rule is itself the exception in a ‘pataphysical science that rules out the rule” (Bök, 2002, p. 39). With this acute awareness that “nothing is any other thing” (Brotchie, 2014, p. 24) the pataphysician thus treats all these exceptions as equivalent.
*Serial bureaucratic grammar (+ quiet frequencies)
Tina Campt - Listening to Images, p.90
...The albums serialize and aggregate the criminal body through photographs that standardize individuals and assign them a number. Organized externally and internally by the date of the photo session, each page of the album assigns a criminal identity and visual uniformity indexed through the following information:
name
serial number
clothing
pose
sequential date of photo
A fifth haptic temporality is the temporality of my own archival contact with the images and the albums. The albums have a sensuousness that, to me, felt almost illicit. It felt wrong to have access to intimate details of bodily markings, illnesses, whippings, closest relatives, attempted and successful escapes. It was overwhelming to track these men from one ledger to the next and resist the seductions of the data and descriptions the albums contained. In fact, it was frustratingly easy to succumb to the original intent of the archive: to reduce the individuals to statistics. And it was literally dizzying to shift back and forth between the four tables Ericka had assigned me, on which I had placed the three ledgers corresponding to the photos of inmates in each album. As I wheeled myself on a rolling chair from one table to the next to connect each black or brown face with the compromised details of an identity assigned to him through the categories of the ledgers, this haptic encounter forced me to encounter them through a different sensory modality in an attempt to resist the silencing effects of the serial bureaucratic grammar of the archive. It forced me to attend to the quiet frequencies of austere images that reverberate between images, statistical data, and state practices of social regulation.
* The Sound of Bureaucracy
Work by: Delia-Cristina Gheorghiu, Programmer: Eugen Minciu
https://vimeo.com/27665343
If bureaucracy had a voice how would it sound? What does an invoice sound like? What about a fragment from an emergency ordinance? The starting point of the work is the difficulty encountered by Romanians who wanted to implement various projects in various areas using money from Norway Grants. The difficulties they encountered were mainly due to the heavily bureaucratic system in Romania. The work reflects something deeper, continuous, seemingly impossible to change – heavy bureaucracy.
Using the Ruby programming language an application was created. Through this application each word in the selected texts is randomly associated two sounds (one for vocals and one for consonants in each word). Once attached to a word the sound is repeated throughout a document every time that particular word appears. The texts are fragments from the codes used to identify a public purchase, a fragment from an emergency ordinance on public purchase, two forms, an invoice and a receipt. The words in these documents are attached only low-frequency sounds of 80 instruments which were selected from a media library. Played in loop these sounds are meant to render the quantity of ”bureaucratic noise” that each of us in Romania and possibly anywhere in the world are supposed to put up with every day.
*State worker
Stefano Harney - State work (Public Administration and Mass Intellectuality)
https://hortense.memoryoftheworld.org/Stefano%20Harney/State%20Work_%20Public%20Administration%20and%20Mass%20Intellectuality%20(8522)/State%20Work_%20Public%20Administration%20and%20Mass%20-%20Stefano%20Harney.pdf
Attention to the state worker in this way may be an atypical gaze forthe Left in the United States. But it is common enough outside theseknowledge-production circles. Beyond public administration, much ofcontemporary popular political discourse revolves around the stateworker and what she or he should or should not be doing, and whethershe or he is capable of doing anything at all. This discourse is joined by anattack on the lack of work in specific publics that the state worker isthought to have created: welfare recipients and unionized workers. Insome sites of labor, though, the state worker rivals even the welfarerecipient as the demon of nonproductivity. The health care debate wasperhaps the broadest discussion of the role of the state in the UnitedStates in recent years with the exception of the more covert ones on thewar on drugs, crime, and immigration. The latter has led to the Immigra-tion and Naturalization Service (ins) becoming the largest agency in thefederal government.
There is no question here of state worker compe-tence that would impede growth. But the former was destabilized andeventually recapitalized by the argument that state workers could notpossibly administer health care. In the case of the ins, state workerswere judged capable of the work; the opposite conclusion was reached in94 State Workrelation to health care. Yet these debates rarely disaggregate the stateworker enough for one to see the labor itself. The state workers countingballots by hand in the recent U.S. presidential election, though mostlyvolunteers, represent a target of attack on both competence and trust-worthiness. Strangely, the visibility of their labor on the television newseach night made them more di≈cult, not easier to attack.On the other hand, in the images of popular culture based on statework one almost always sees nothing but labor. Marx warned againstseeing human beings only as workers, yet it is remarkable how muchwork subsumes the state worker in popular culture. In fact, one can seein these images the way direct labor in the state disappears and laborbecomes a social act, part of a circuitry of social production as Deleuzecalled it. One may also sense the order this circuitry represents and thepolitics to which it remains susceptible.
Because it is not that work is consuming people in these imaginations of popular culture but thathuman beings and popular culture seem to have consumed work, pro-ducing wealth directly from the labor of representing themselves andbeing represented. Rather than looking at these dramas as metaphor,then, I would like to scrutinize them for the way they portray work. Andrather than asking these dramas to explain this portrait, I will turn topublic administration to do so.What Toby Miller terms ‘‘population imageries’’ of the state worker areavailable across the spectral dial.∞Ω The imageries of the state worker, per-haps the most dominant imageries of labor on television, are those of lawand order. In fa
ct, understanding these imageries as labor highlights howmuch representation of people working actually exists in the popularmedia today.≤≠ Popular police detective series like NYPD Blue and Homi-cide, docudramas like COPS and America’s Most Wanted, and the courtand law dramas such as Law and Order and The Practice play beside thestate security force of the future, Star Trek. For now, the X-Files is perhaps the most cultish and symptomatic of all the population imageries
*Stories
Katherine McKittrick - Dear Science and other stories
https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1104-0_601.pdf
The ideas and curiosities gathered in Dear Science are bundled and pre-sented as stories. Telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are re-lational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people, places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots. The process is sus-tained 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. The stories do not offer lucid tales or answers; rather, they signal ways of living in a world that denies black humanity (or, more aptly, the stories signal ways of black livingness).16 The story-text itself, read aloud or quietly, is an imprint of black life and livingness that tells of the wreckage and the lists and the dance floors and the loss and the love and the rumors and the lessons and the heartbreak. It prompts. The story does not simply de-scribe, it demands representation outside itself. Indeed, the story cannot tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell. The story asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained cues and diasporic literacies, rather than reams of positivist evidence. The story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we tell the world differently, with a creative precision. The story asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially. (And some things we can keep to ourselves. They cannot have everything. Stop her autopsy.) They cannot have everything. I present Dear Science as a series of stories as a way to hold on to the re-bellious methodological work of sharing ideas in an unkind world. Sharing can be uneasy and terrifying, but our stories of black worlds and black ways of being can, in part, breach the heav y weight of dispossession and loss. Our shared stories of black worlds and black ways of being breach the he
avy weight of dispossession and loss because these narratives (songs, poems, conversations, theories, debates, memories, arts, prompts, curi-osities) are embedded with all sorts of liberatory clues and resistances (PFUn k/f.u.n.k.).17
Sharing, therefore, is not understood as an act of disclosure but instead signals collaboration and collaborative ways to en-act and engender struggle. As a collection of stories, too, Dear Science un-derstands theory as a form of storytelling. Stories and storytelling signal the fictive work of theory. I hope this move, at least momentarily, exposes intricacies of academic work where fact-finding, experimentation, analysis, study, are recognized as narrative, plot, tale, and incomplete in-ventions, rather than impartial treatises. As story, theory is cast as fictive knowledge and insists that the black imagination is necessary to analyti-cal curiosity and study. Story is theoretical, dance, poem, sound, song, geography, affect, photograph, painting, sculpture, and more. Maybe the story is one way to express and fall in love with black life. Maybe the story disguises our fall.
- 13. VèVè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: A llusion in Maryse Condé’s Hérémakhonon,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: A frica World Press, 1990), 308–309.
- 14. Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy,” 308–309.
- 15. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1990); Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Au-dre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Cross-ing Press, 1984), 53–59; M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks(Charlottetown, Canada: Rag weed Press, 1989), 51–53.
- 16. Barbara Christian writes: “I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intention-ally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?” Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 68. See also Saidiya Hart-man on “critical fabulation,” in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 ( June 2008): 1–14. Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (London: Verson, 2019) is, for me, a beautiful and creative work that offers a mode of storytelling that captures and bends disciplined-interdisciplined genres.
- 17. Listen to Prince, “F.U.N.K.,” NPG Digital, 2007.
*Waiting
Shahram Khosravi, "Waiting", From Migration: A COMPAS Anthology
http://compasanthology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Khosravi_COMPASMigrationAnthology.pdf
--also, a video of Khosravi on waiting: https://parsejournal.com/article/waiting/
Waiting is a particular experience of time. Waiting is inescapable. It is a feature of human relationships. In our daily lives, we wait at airports, offices, and shops. Waiting is a common feature of bureaucracy; when in contact with organizations, individuals wait their turn and officials’ decisions. Waiting is expecting something coming from others. Keeping others waiting is also a technique for the regulation of social interactions. It is a manipulation of other’s time. Waiting, as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, is a way of experiencing the effect of power. ‘Making people wait... delaying without destroying hope is part of the domination’ (Bourdieu, 2000). To keep people waiting, without ruining their hope, is an exercise of power over other people’s time. Waiting is a common experience for the less powerful groups in society, producing ‘subjective effects of dependency and subordination’ (Auyero, 2012). The ‘punitive’ aspect of waiting is when a person is ‘kept ignorant as to how long he must wait’ (Schwartz, 1975). Waiting generates feelings of ‘powerlessness and vulnerability’. Marginalized and unprivileged groups, to use Crapanzano’s words, ‘wait for something, anything, to happen. They are caught in the peculiar, the paralytic, time of waiting’ (1985). Another consequence of waiting is the feeling that one is not fully in command of one’s life. To be kept waiting for a long time ‘is to be the subject of an assertion that one’s own time (and therefore, one’s social worth) is less valuable than the time and worth of the one who imposes the wait’ (Schwartz, 1975).
* Delicious User Guide (from 2009)
[Indieterminacy]
Can be found at https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/iB47HnRSm7HdXby
Based upon monitoring work for a music association, Delicious feeds were analysed extensively at the tags level to identify and classify work. The RSS feeds were aggregated using Yahoo Pipes, using a recursive loop, whereby tags with 'RollingNews' were parsed iteratively.
Since this version draft character annotations were created using the non alphanumeric keyboard pieces. I will try and find any reference to these.
Around that time period Yahoo sold off Delicious and the new owners infrastructure wiped the non alphanumeric tag names, obliterating the order that was created. Yahoo Pipes was also put to sleep by Yahoo. A pity, as the ability to harvest disparate users with a level of precision and aggregate it using free tools was effective (at least once the effort of identifying users who used social bookmarks relevant to the project).
The document permits a team to contribute towards the monitoring with information, guidelines and expectations. It could allow policmakers or researchers within a project to drill into niche areas conveniently on a needs basis.