READING ROOM #42 - reading and repairing with Varia
https://page-not-found.nl/2021/11/24/reading-room-41-reading-and-repairing-with-varia/
11.12.2021 (14:30-16:30 & 17:00-19:00)

     v _____ v  _____    _   _  v _____ v   ____      ____       _      ____
     \| ___"|/ |_ " _|  |'| |'| \| ___"|/v |  _"\ v v|  _"\ vv  /"\  v |  _"\
      |  _|"  V  | |   /| |_| |\ |  _|" R \| |_) |/ \| |_) |/ \/ _ \/ /| | | |
      | |___    /| |\  v|  A  |v | |___    |  _ <  I |  __/   / ___ \ v| |_| |\
      |_____|  v |_|v   |_| |_|  |_____|   |_| \_\   |_|    A/_/   \_\ |____/ v
       <<   >>  _// \\_  //   \\  <<   >>   //   \\_  ||>>_    \\    >>  |||_
       (_V_) (_A_)(_R_) (_I_)(_A_) ("_)(__) (__) (__)  (_P_)(_A_)_D_)  (__)  (__)

  Welcome to the etherpad-lite instance hosted by Varia! 
  You are most welcome to use it but please take note of the following things: 
  j
  VISIBILITY:
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  If you wish to publish a pad to the Varia etherdump <https://etherdump.vvvvvvaria.org/> add the magic word __ PUBLISH __ (remove the spaces between the word and __) to your pad.

*･゜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:A

k
sLSdg
g
ks
kjh
x
x
asd

• • 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.

            interstice                                                                                                                            
                     ]                            [                           

Where                                 Did                                i                     leave               my             glasses
                   a friend once asked ...                                                                                                                         
                                                inter                                                                                             
                 w  here do            we      g                                  from here              here here here ?  
                 echo o    o     o     o    o    o                o             o             o                     o       
                     stay  in    the  margins                                                                                              

                              S   u   c   h    a    w   i   d   e   b   r   e   a   t   h   i   n   g    s   p   a   c   e   !                            
                                                                                                                                           avocado

• • 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.

pickles (she/her) many screens of different sizes and compatibilities. warm tea.
jojojojojojon (we/whem) coffee shop (pretty good internet, not so good background noise)
sam (she/they) my room, sitting in bed, it's foggy outside, i like the colors of this collective note taking
Sebastien (he/him): everything's quiet here, my daughter is asleep, in my window people pass by in front of me unknowingly
v (*) : i am sitting in a room haha that resonates ;)
joana (she/her) I hear the washing machine (for clother) and a few birds singing too
sissel (she/her)looking at a plant that comes from a cut that used to be my aunt's. It's not growing! Would like to be a better plant mom
annie  (she/her) likes reariting, is in the basement atelier, can see the stems of a few plants out(s)ide
shailoh (she or they, both are fine) just back in my studio, returned from the veggie market. I'm living in my studio at the moment in Amsterdam, with my library and plants. very decadent - safe place to recover after a few rough years. reading  is my primary relationship.
cristina (she/her), sitting in my bedroom, realising that i need to water my plants soon. quiet environment, only the cars outside passing through
haha a theme
hahahha we could exchange cuts! i also have a few :)
Sounds good! (although cutting this one might be the final blow... it seems to be hanging on for dear life...
hahhaahahah! let's spare it then, but i do have some cuts to give away *wink wink* no exchange needed
yay!

• • Stretching activity 4.1
  • → Change your pad colour using the colour wheel on the top right. (if you click on the little icon of three people in the top right corner and then on your colour in the square you can change it)
  • → 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 it's magic.
  • we are all not unlike flat stanley, a tomboy who was as flat as a piece of paper. t[sHe]y fell up and down in draindrops but could also not go on holiday in an envelope unless there was a big bubble package to float away in
  • a safe little irreality bubble where everything kind of makes nonsense

a bit lonely but also excited, like collective play. how relaxed this is compared to zoom(bies)
makes me feel con nected
different  flows of energy, sometimes enthusiastic other times fatigued
> in a time and space warp... and a little disappointed that i didn't get to see you all irl. it's been so long! ah yes, indeed.<3 same feeling, but I'm glad we found a creative way to be together :-) yesss <<< 3
at least this is alive movement and colorful
as unusual - and its sooooo nice to see colors dancing (who else is missing dancing together? me! desperately!)I danced for the first time in what feels like years last friday! meeeee

• • i'm in two places at once...(at least =8) and is that a nice feeling? superpower dis-placed, con fused  but also spread a little thin it is nicely disorienting

Below here we will move onto a new exercise about ...

*    .  *      .        .  *   
  ..    *    .      *  .  ..  *
 *    *            .      *   *
.     *  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 16:00 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. 
    • // I don't really understand this one - can someone clarify? copy paste it in another place in the pad? send a text message containing the phrase to a dear friend? :)
    • __TWICE__ Read this sentence twice. Read this sentence twice.
    • __MAGIC__ invite others to turn something written into an incantation?

• • • __SKIP__ this part is non-essential, boring, repetative or can be glossed over if we run out of time

• • • __TRANSLATE__ translate this sentence into another language.

• • • __HYPERLINK__ associative link to something exciting/relevant on the interwebz 
    • yeah was just thinking that..  

__IN:VISIBLE__ become a ghost(writer) =;) euhh what do you mean? well I was thinking of colour mimicry (works probably best with many windows on different devices connected via different IPs? (not so sure if this is really applicable for collaborative annotation but we might give it a try?

• • • __GETAGLASSOFWATER__ get up and get a glass of water
    • _RE-TURN to ...._ 
    • __LISTEN__ something to read more than once, or read together, in order to pay close attention to
    • __CONFUSION__ simply acknowledge your confusion, cartoony question marks bubble around your head
    • __EXAMPLE__ provide a concrete example of something described in the previous sentence
    •  __C/Q __ Comment/Question
    • __SO TRUE__ Just to nod and mumble: "oh yes, indeed" :))

!!!!!!!! __CHECKIN__ remember your body (stretch legs, breathe deeply)
___DEFINITION___

Question ; are we allowed to erase? i'm not in charge, but i'd say why not?
mm what about strikethrough, so you can still see? Usually we ask not to erase one anothers writing here. ok, so no battles :)

Can we combine them?
__ALOUD__ __THRICE__ Beetlejuice __MAGIC__
Noooooo! and whoops everyone became a... (not able to write anymore....)



Below here I will post another exercise, we can keep adding magic words whenever we feel like it above here.

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.

The full text is available here - https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1629909863-sedgwick-1997-paranoid-reading-and-reparative-reading.pdf

• • • • • 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 __MAGIC__ human beings are also __MAGIC__machines, are also __MAGIC__animals; that an ethic or aesthetic of truthtelling need not depend on any reified notion__SKIP__ of truth___endofSKIP___; 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 __SKIP__four__ENDSKIP__ bodily senses;__LISTEN__ __CHECKIN__ 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.__LISTEN__
        • (...)
        • __LISTEN__ 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 __ALOUD__suspicion or paranoia__/ALOUD__ that is common in the theoretical work whose disciplinary ambience surrounds them. __CANWEDISCUSS__
        • (...)
        • __GETAGLASSOFWATER__
        • 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 of remark 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. __CANWEDISCUSS__ More specifically, paranoia is drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, and in particular symmetrical epistemologies.
        • (...)
        • __TRANSLATE__ Paranoia is an inescapable interpretive doubling of presence." 6 "Paranoia is een onvermijdeiljke interpretatie van de verdubbeling van aanwezigheid"  Paranoia is restrictive, paralyzing and feeds back on itself. La paranoïa est la présence dédoublée, à la quelle on ne peut échapper durant l'interprétation. It sets a thief (and if necessary, becomes one) to catch a thief; it mobilizes guile against suspicion, suspicion against guile; __ALOUD__"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. __ALOUD__(All these examples, by the way, are fictitious.) __ALOUD__
        • /
        • /////////////////////// 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:
        • __ALOUD__
        • Paranoia is anticipatory. __CHECKIN__
        • Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. __CANWEDISCUSS__ Mimetic of what? __ALOUD__ Paranoia is a strong theory. __CANWEDISCUSS__ What do people interpret this to be? A strong theory? Who decides? In that it defends itself? ah, interesting.. there is no doubts, perhaps... And any criticism of a paranoid theory is interpreted within that theory A strong argument: one where the argument provides probable premise for its conclusion(s) to be true (compare to weak argument: which fails to provide provable support for its conclusions).
        • do you decide when you use it? decide in it's strength ...
        • Paranoia is a theory of __ALOUD__ negative affects __C/Q __(necessarily negative? I doubt that) negative can also be seen as the opposite. Paranoia places its faith in exposure. __CONFUSION__ huh? did anyone follow this?
        • (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,"_CHECKIN__ I feel this on a personal level :P but maybe I'm so paranoid I think this introduction is about *me* 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 __TWICE__ "Surprise ... is precisely what the paranoid seeks to eliminate, but it is also what, in the event, s*he (= we?) survive(s) by reading as a frightening incentive: s*he (= we?) can never be paranoid enough."12
        • __TRANSLATE__ 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. Paradoxaal genoeg geneereert paranoia met het eenrichtingsverkeer van toekomstgerichte waakzaamheid een complexe realtie tot de tijd, de zich zowel vooruit als achteruit graaft: immers mogen er geen slechte verrassingen zijn, want paranoia eist dat slecht nieuws al bekend is. 
        • __SO TRUE__ As Miller's analysis also suggests, the temporal progress and regress of paranoia are, in principle, infinite. __CANWEDISCUSS__
        •  /

• • • • • /////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;
        • //////

__CHECKIN__ and __GET(ING)A GLASS OF WATER__ / (or a cup of tea/coffee to sit with me at my computer - ah, companionship)

• • • • • [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]
        • [coming back slowly again, the glass of water took me to the kitchen, which took me to the broth and dinner simmering]ooh yummy
        • (...)
        • 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, __C/Q __ as Butler and others view it (does Butler do so? and others?), through paranoid lenses. As we've seen, camp is currently understood as uniquely appropriate to the projects of parody, denaturalization, demystification, and mocking exposure of the elements and assumptions of a dominant culture; and the degree to which camping is motivated by love__LISTEN__ seems often to be understood mainly as the degree of its self-hating complicity with an oppressive status quo. repair, for me, would be also to use paranoia as a positive tool by turning it inside out, by appropriating it etc - like in networking, hypertexting, anonymous multiple authorship etc
        • i guess the suggestion is that there can be something incredibly liberating in appropriating the oppressive tools of the status quo. the examples can be found in kink, in camp, in meme culture, drag expressions where the taboo appearances and behavior become desirable and somehow it takes out the sting to want the thing instead of having it forced on you
        • aka - repair requires consent
        • Oh nice to come back to a convo happening higher up in the document:) This helps a lot to make sense of the text :)
        • i am just catching up now, took a little break ;/
        • __CONFUSION__ __CONFUSION__ I find it difficult to grasp the main concepts after this jump to reparative I guess... Can it be that by appropriating/claiming what hurts you, its effect is lessened, or that by renewing its meaning you own it? yes, that's what I was musing about as well
        • I guess I don't really know what camp means (well I know what it means but I think maybe it means something else here? And yeah I guess how it all relates to what we just read..) for me it's about how we consider one anothers intentions for doing something, and how we can read the action in different ways depending on the lived experience we perceive it from. camp is a really complex idea (and has been treated extensively outside as well as inside queer discourses).. I think with different interpretations.. so it's hard to nail down for me as well what the writer means, but it seems to be pretty strongly linked to a certain understanding of camp developed by Judith Butler? Usually I think of camp as something that's socially "normal" or predominant being pushed to an extreme of absurdity, or something being so absurd it becomes tragic
        • Probably outdated (not outdated, one of the seminal texts! - but also not nearly the entire story)  __HYPERLINK__ https://monoskop.org/images/5/59/Sontag_Susan_1964_Notes_on_Camp.pdf
        • Here's a reader (including Sontag) with multiple perspectives - https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrp56 thanks!
        • here are some visual examples from an exhibition on Camp at the MET in NYC (I was there!) 
        • https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/camp-notes-on-fashionhttps://assets.vogue.com/photos/5cd0d8413a6b712f00bf0284/master/w_2560%2Cc_limit/00-story-violet-chachki.jpg
        • ah, this is helpful. I felt a bit hurdled into a lot of terminology I didn't know about :) 
        • (...)
        • _RE-Turn_194
        • __REUSE__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__DEFINITION__ (*just begun and so not fully formed or developed; rudimentary.)(nice magic word, thank you) 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 of present with past, and popular with high culture.__CANWEDISCUSS__
        • Is 'the reparative' in opposition to 'paranoia'??
        • I feel like sometimes Eve puts them in opposition and in other moments does not. To me Eve also writes that we should read in both ways, they are needed in combination.
        • No, not in full opposition, methinks - the gesture of repair is not to discard something broken (like paranoia), rather to mend it, pimp it, fix it, tweak it, bend it, patch it, decorate it, salvage it - a trash pickers mentality. Who knows repair? Those who live in the gutters, in the margins, wading through debris and scraps and making fabulous outfits. Glitter in our wounds.  Ah, ok that makes a lot of sense :-) ...so in a way it's a way of treating broken coping mechanisms without trying to start over or disregard where they come from.
        • Yes! Also not trying to pretend that we can ever 'undo' or heal the damage - we live with it. 
        • This makes a lot of sense:) And what she said, the paranoid is the ones who need reparative strategies (practices?) the most
        • (...)
        • I would want to add, practices __TWICE__-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___ (aha, now I get it). And if the paranoid __C/Q: what, now: _or the depressive__ positions operate on a smaller scale than the level of individual typology C/Q: what's individual topology? I think an overly complex way of saying "subjective experience", they operate also on a larger, that of shared histories, emergent communities, and the weaving of intertextual discourse.
        • C/Q:
        • (...)
        • __TWICE__ 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 __ (oh, gotcha! I feel now like a mouse trapped in her own nest) __EXAMPLE__ could anyone give an example of such a motive? it would be hard to find an example of anti-intellectual writing in academia I suppose eh, perhaps citation indices and other algorithms used nowadays within academic evaluation systems? these can be quite anti-intellectual (quants, quants)I was thinking about accessibility of writing styles, or who can be an academic yes, ideed, definitely another good example!This annotation technique ^_^  I can see that, truly it would be difficult to place this technique within some circles of "reputable scholarship" try anyway :)  art can be the secret back door :-) . The prohibitive problem, however, has been in the limitations of present theoretical vocabularies rather than in the reparative motive itself. __LISTEN __ 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.__SO TRUE__ (well yes the last sentence suggests that paranoia and/or reparation understood as cultural practices can work well as survival strategies within cultures that tend to muzzle whatever is beyond/off their norm-?) yeah, I wonder if paranoia is so much a survival strategy as also a reaction that reifies and reinforces the muzzling? how is reparation different from paranoia?  ah,

 and those practices are reparative...

• • • • • __CANWEDISCUSS__
        • I still would like to think together about this balance between reparative practices and paranoia.. perhaps I still don't quite understand them.. me neither or me what "green" wrote above gave some clarity :)
        • there's also more on this above, line 236!<3 takk
        • ///////////////////////// Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;
        • //////

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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzfq7MlN5i8 I got a M&M commercial first :-P cool visuals @_@ 
Elza Soares - album: A Mulher do Fim do Mundo; first song: Coração do Mar   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXyXbyEW2YA

• • • • • 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 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 areas of 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.
        • (...)
        • 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 interruptions. 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. 
        • (...)
        • 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;
        • [we don't need to finish reading to return to BBB, and we can share another excerpt during the break if you are curious to read more]
        • lets meet again on ---> https://bbb.constantvzw.org/b/cri-hgz-jrl-aqp

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * 16h30 - 17h: [we are now having a break between our 2 sessions]* * * * * * * * * * * *

• • 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.

Sissel (She/Her) It is now dark outside, being in Scheveningen the silent muttering is sometimes ruptured by (illegal) fireworks
Joana (she/her) drinking tea
pickles (she/her) feeling very full from eating a snack too fast
annie (she/her) it's getting dark outside - will be returning to the Netherlands next year- yeahhh also has a new linux uubuntu andneeds to get used to that - will be slow
Sebastien (he/him) now at Page Not Found, surrounded by books! My back hurts, I might not be able to stay the whole session unfortunately
cristina (she/her) admiring the books behind Sebastien! ahaha THANK YOU! will try to visit very soon :) Yes! Do come :)



our first exercise for this evening is here:
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 year of publishing please?2015 2015 https://torquetorque.net/publications/the-act-of-reading/ :)
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 did we before?  collectively[but we do][if a newspaper is very big, others can read across your shoulder. involuntary collective reading maybe probably] Oh, sharing a physical newspaper :) seems like an activity that's rarely present anymore...if you all read the same newspaper, is there something in collective readership?, you can read individually, and in a compact manner. 
      • And I think this goes along with a kind of shrinkage of mobile reading technologies.[!] This reminds me of David Lynch complaining about people watching movies on their smartphones (he didn't like it) 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. I wonder what the critique is, I guess we'll find out o-o hm yes also not clear to me!maybe if we imagine the image we can feel the critique?
      • 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'm curious about this.. hard to pick up on what this is? Oh, there are immediately images on my mind, 17th to 19th ct paintings i.e. 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. I'm not? (this text/ lecture was presented in a UK context so it has a more colloquial tone/ speech-like format and yes there was a particular audience to it) 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!oy..
      • 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; :) what about hearing conditions? Good point, who knows whether its read right if there's a big riot going on... but pretty harsh piece of legislation in either case!
      • 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. :) :) :) 
      • Oh wow, interesting.. is this true? supposedly yes; the Riot Act deffinitely existed!
      • //////////////////////////////// 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. [that worked as a pencil?] 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. Isn't this also more a general idea behind education? that you are equipped to participate in society... do these campaigns go further than formal/ institutionalised education? lots of people attend some kind of education but do not receive enough attention to learn to read, maybe? 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. thinking; reading as a part of becoming - reading as a passive act versus writing as an active geste
      • ///////////////////////////////// — 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. >rubbing<
      • 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’ ("I do" describes consent, no?) (yes and in some cases it is legally bounding so it does more in the eyes of the law, like signing a contract) 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. I think this is true for all utterings, also the ones that are not related to concete materiaal acts, décissions etc.  
      • it is not only the utterance but also the witnessing that are part of its performativity.agreedCan you be your own witness to your utterance? not in a court I don't think!Ah I guess I was mostly thinking about utterances in general. I guess that brings it to the last paragraph!Derrida...hah! We are the only witness to all of our utterances
      • It makes me think about affirmations, and wondering if they are materially changing something in the brain.. like chemically
      • (...) maybe but every utterig has a material influence , may be small, but ... so every uttering asks for a responsability
      • 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. Material force of words.. hmm interesting. 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. What do you all think of this?

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 by Nina Power, 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. the way I look at a thing depends on my orientation. My position from where I'm watching, sensing, touching, smelling.
      • 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. Back to dreaming about dancing together. 
      • morphic paranoia I am other. Other is ‘I’.
      • 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. a as a mark of water, stain, ephemeral, evaporates
      • >rubbing<
      • The material also speaks to me. From our conversation we co-create, by looping and unfolding another capacity of matter. Co-creating new texts by weaving together associations and traces from a collective experience.
      • Together we make a boundary space where I am extended outside my brain, negotiating obstacles different surfaces and opposite temperatures and tricky terrain by reading the world around my sentience in all its languages, human and not.
      • 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. *I cheated, this is from the first text* cheating is allowed :)
      • 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.
      • The system connects, energy is transformed and I am away again into the river, streaming and looping, reading and writing, reading and writing.
      • .writing and reading, writing and reading, looping and streaming, river the into again away am I and transformed is energy, connects system The
      • //////////////////////////////// — Please press the space bar or type '/' at the end of the text once you have finished reading;
      • / (and i regret, but i won't be able to weave/repair other threads into this text)/
      • (ah beautiful way you are doing it below!)

fluid to continue the movement, the tag-game, the dance writing and reading
morphic paranoia I am other. Other is ‘I’.
liquid material into the water 

• • • • • • • • • • • • • the river, streaming and looping, reading and writing, reading and writing, how I understand writing and reading

nervous system system system system  maintaining the systems 
the idea that reading could enable you to engage politically and socially

• • •  The system connects, energy is transformed and I am away again

:letting go of systems "no less acute than a paranoid position"
    a conduit do not describe or report anything, and are not true or false as long as you stay around around
    a conductor immediately to disperse 

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • themselves
          •  law   channels into sand
          • immersed within re pair 
          • "i make marks ... which in turn mark me" (punctum)
          • "i am other"

‘I refuse to acknowledge this’
away again into the river
streaming and looping
and then fading away
like tears in the rain, have this clearly binding effect, a material force: real transformation

• • • • • • RepairRiotRepair
          • RiotRepair
          • Repairanoia re pair
          • Riot (you will still be dragged off forcibly.)

Act riot
sharing the physical CAMP "I do" describes consent, no?One should hope so:)
so every uttering asks for a responsability (and repairanoia >> our tool for breaking up the solid aka normativity)!!!:) :) :)
__CANWEDISCUSS: i just asked myself about the entangements of norms, ethics, normativity, responsibility and the painful demand for solidifying all these in laws and ordners >> can we think of responsibility as fluid, as something other than ... so sometimes poetry can create problems as well?

• • • • • • • • • • From these associations breed breath associations

+I am extended outside my brain,+ "It makes me think about affirmations, and wondering if they are materially changing something in the brain.. like chemically" + And so I am immersed within this liquid being, in an ethics of relation +
The material also speaks to me

ineed to get aglass ofwater
This is almost like a

Thank you all for assembling this river

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. (this, the together, confused me)I interpreted it as together, you and object? yes, the only interpretation that leads somewhere probably, but still 
• >

This was really fun

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 two texts we have read above and add an annotation;

• • • • I had chosen (regrettably, later) a very plastic-y backpack... It turned out it was very conductive to sounding. i.e. making lots of silly sounds with all its plastic-y parts. 
      • A container, porcelain, cold, felt like containing but also being contained
      • A round scented candle that's on my desk, which is meant to smell like sweet wood. The gesture was one of rotation.
      • I'm thin, flat from a distance but if one can look closely I am always moving very slowly. I am cool. Slowly sinking I watch another form growing bigger, it connects to me. Impresses itself deeply into me, rubs across me, changing my direction.
      • >rubbing<
      • a glass frame with no border, connected with my face and tongue
      • a bunch of downfeathers from a goose. very soft. but they felt distracted, teared off from their origins - without any chance to return home. also in danger to be isolated from each other. so whereas i felt comfort they did not, not even when sitting together in my warm palm. i tried to talk to them. but obviuosly they were not able to hear me, or to understand me at all. i literally felt them crying, and then dying. just for me to keep me warm. the goose did not care (actually she gave them away while having sex with her partner).
      • the taste wasn't what I thought it was, teeth liberated surprise - right now i am going to eat my mandarin - oranje 
      • • 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 and method, the way McKittrick mentions, what text/image/sign/symbol/object would you encounter, inscribe yourself into, superimpose yourself on, immerse yourself in to engage in alienation?
turn it upside down
What would you annotate [something] in order to bring a different story to a dominant narrative? depends on who I think migh be reading, listening, watching, but in an academic context I would try to infiltrate it with art.
Use another language than English inside the English text try to have the reader deplaced elsewhere I feel like this annotation practice we've been doing here brings all the themes together in a very meta-way :) collective reading and  writing reariting :)in order to collectively understand (somethign that might be challenging or inaccessible on your own) yess
How would you annotate [something] in order to challenge a dominant mode of notemaking? using this methodology of reariting, but make it even more chaotic, to make it impossible to linearise anything and then go back to it a week after and try to finda knot, noeud, knoop in it that can be made into a tweet.
The term 'note making' makes me think of field notes, which makes me think of anthropology, and the business of doing science 'objectively', but as Michael Taussig shows in this beautiful book "I swear I saw This", there is always the subjective onlooker (often from a dominant narrative). The book is all about this drawing he made of something he wasn't sure he even saw.. 
We can contemplate these questions here on the pad together. We won't be adding to the book :)
I really appreciate this visual way to annotate, a beautiful and at the same time precise, rigid intervention. Almost a correction.
But I don't think it would be appropriate to add further annotations directly in the book (this is different from a talmudic text in so many ways). What I could imagine is to pick up visual and semantic threads, i.e. sugar/canes or stones or falling bodies and to continue elsewhere (i.e. here). And indeed one method could be weaving (thank you so much for hinting here to Kosovsky Sedgewick) - this also proved to be helpful earlier in order to avoid falling into nostalgic or other induced feeling and to move further. I really liked our 407ff session part. It sometimes really needs a tool, a strategy for the leap...To do this in a collective is very helpful as well =8)
for a long time now I have tried to imagine what I would put on the currency of my nation as alternative imagery. (as a passage towards no money) I would like different stories to be passed on in currency.
When I see the painted text "the impossibility of agriculture" I think about how to subvert all the signs on fruit and vegetables in the supermarket.
omg - i had one happy fortunate misreading here - i read "all the signs of fruit and vegetable". the stickers on fruit and vegetables are a nuisance indeed. but i was thinking of the false 'healthy' fruit and veggies, either raised in industrial agriculture and/or in post-post-still-colonial-structures. the images of fresh, oh-so-natural these toxic structures are hinding behind. in a way this would be one of the images i could imagine to work with (similar to the sugar cane watercolours) yes! and something to express how far the fuirt or vegetable has travelled

• • • • I also find it hard to add anything. The images stand so strong in themselves, but I appreciate them being brought in as an exmple of annotation as "reparation" - if I can make that connection? 
      • Ah ok :) I didn't understand that. Thanks for clarifying! :)

(Perhaps it helps to say that the invitation is not to add annotations to the pdf we looked at, but instead imagine what we would want to write/draw on following the method of Thao Nguyen Phan)

• • • • It makes me think of the way people annotate/correct biased news headings. Ie. writing 'people' instead of 'migrants', thus pointing out the way media is dehumanizing by categorizing this way. Again about dominant narratives and the pressure one can put against it.. 

The first thought coming to mind, perhaps contaminated by Nina Power's text, are legal documents. The Riot Act, for one. *only read God save the king in your head*

• • • • Yeah I was thinking about passports also. I remember as a kid I really wanted to draw on all the pages ha! I had a passport later in life, the first ID document I had was plastified so it was hard to write on it...Jon's American passport in particular, lots of images and bald eagles and such... very inviting to some serious annotation... hahha! would it still be valid I wonder?Oh I bet not, US customs ? nightmare... that would be an expensive drawing then

Annotation in the interstices, the gaps, spaces in between, annotation as juxtapotion, imposition, 
oh yes - there is always space for something to grow =;)

• • • • Such a beautiful text y'all! 

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.
 Thanks, such an impressively structured session! Very wonderful 

• • • • Yes, great many thanks for this wonderful afternoon - I have to leave now. Hope to see/meet/write/annotate with you again!
      • Thank you for joining! Hope the same :)
      • Thank you for joining us this afternoon and evening
      • Thank you, also hope so soon again!
      • wow good thanks
      • Mosterd na de maaltijd / an afterthought from shailoh: