some titles from how we became posthuman

sherry turkle, Life on the Screen： identity in the Age of the Internet (1995)

David Porush The soft machine: Cybernetic Fiction

Authur Kroker Hacking the Future： Stories for the flesh-eating 90s 1996

my mother was a computer N Katherine Hayles

The Regime of computation
p17 "Computation" in the sense ... connotes far more than the digital computer, which is only one of many platforms on which computational operations can run....p18 The computational regime continues in the tradition of Turing's work by considering computation to be a process that starts with a parsimonious set of elements and a relatively small set of logical operations. Instantiated into some kind of platform, these components can be structured so as to build up increasing levels of complexity, eventually arriving at complexity so deep, multilayered, and extensive as to simulate the most complex phenomena on earth, from turbulent flow and multiagent social systerms to reasoning processes one might legitimately call thinking.


p25 "emergence".. refers to properties that do not inhere in the individual components of a system; rather, these properties come about from interactions between components. Emergent properties thus appear at the global level of the system itself rather than at the local level of a system's components.

p28 The central problem of achiving emergence through more than one level is bound up tightly with issues of representation. As Nicholas Gessler, among others, has pointed out, one way to think about this process is to imagine a mechanism whereby the patterns that emerged at the first level are represented by a different kind of mechanism, which then uses these representations as primitive to create new emergent patterns, which in turn would undergo further re-representation and be turned into primitives for the third level, and so on.

p31 An important aspect of intermediation is the recursivity implicit in the coproduction and coevolution of multiple causalities. Complex feedback loops connect humans and machines, old technologies and new, language and code, analog processes and digital fragmentations. Although these feedback loops evolve over time and thus have a historical trajectory that arcs from one point to another, it is important not to make the mistake of privileging any one point as the primary locus of attention, which could easily result in flattening complex interactions back to linear casual chains. The contemporary indoctrination into linear causality is so strong that it continues to exercise a fatal attraction for much of contemporary thought. It must be continually resisted if we are fully to realize the implications of multicausal and multilayered hierarchical systems, which entail distributed agency, emergent processes, unpredictable coevolutions, and seemingly paradoxical interactions between convergent and divergent processes.


Gessler, Nicholas, "Evolving Artificial Cultural things- that-think and work by dynamical Hierarchical synthesis"

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature 1997

McGann, Jerome J. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the world wide Web 2001

when our eyes no longer see (2)

Worster, Donald. Nature's economy: A history of Ecological ideas cambridge University press1994

Jameson, Frederic. "Cognitive Mapping" in Marxism and the interpretation culture edited by cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg university of Illinois Press 1988

Aesthetics and Politics edited by Ronald Taylor including Ernest Bloch and Georg Lukacs

when our eyes no longer see

When Our Eyes No Longer See: Realism, science, and Ecology in Japanese Literary Modernism Gregory Golley 2008 Harvard University Press


some books:
Peter Galison Einstein's clocks, Poincare's Maps: Empires of Time 2003 New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003
Image & Logic: A Material Culture of Microphsics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997

list of world literature

意）艾柯《玫瑰的名字》（《玫瑰之名》）
（法）波伏娃《女宾》（《女客》）
（法）杜拉斯《情人》
（法） 加谬《鼠疫》
（英）多丽丝·莱辛《金色笔记》（《女性的危机》）
（意）卡尔维诺《看不见的城市》（《隐形城市》）
（俄）艾赫马托娃《安魂曲》
（德）聚斯金德《香水》
（美）海明威《永别了，武器》
（新西兰）《曼斯菲尔德小说选》
（美）福克纳《喧哗与骚动》
（哥伦比亚）马尔克斯《百年孤独》
（奥地利）卡夫卡《审判》
（巴西）普依格《蜘蛛女之吻》
（英）奥维尔《1984》
（英）赫胥黎《美丽的新世界》
（日）村上春树《世界尽头与冷酷仙境》
（捷克）米兰·昆德拉《生命中不能承受之轻》（《沉重浮生》）
（英）福尔斯《法国中尉的女人》
（英）伍尔芙《奥兰多》（《美丽佳人奥兰多》）
（瑞士）杜仑马特《法官和他的刽子手》
（美）小库特·冯尼格《猫的摇篮》
（美）约瑟夫·海勒《第二十二条军规》
（英）大卫·洛奇《小世界》

The long Twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our time

Giovanni Arrighi London and New York: Verso 1994

P4 More specifically, the starting point of our investigation has been Fernard Braudel's contention that the essential feature of historical capitialism over its longue duree-- that is, over its entire lifetime- has been the "flexibility" and "eclecticism" of capital rather than the concrete forms assumed by the latter at different places and at different times....

p5 It seems to me that these passages can be read as a restatement of Karl Marx's general fomular of captial: MCM'. Money capital (M) means liquidity, flexibility, freedom of choice. Commodity capital (C)means capital invested in a particular input-output combination in view of a profit. Hence, it means concreteness, rigidity, and a narrowing down or closing of options. M' means expanded liquidity, flexibility, and freedom of choice.
...
P6. Marx's general formula of capital (MCM') can therefore be interpreted as depicting not just the logic of individual capitalist investments, but also a recurrent pattern of historical capitalism as world system.The central aspect of this pattern is the alternation of epochs of material expansion (MC phases of capital accumulation) with phases of financial rebirth and expansion (CM'phases).... Together, the two epochs of phases constitute a full systemic cycle of accumulation(MCM').
p6 Four systemic cycles of accumulation will be identified, each characterized by a fundamental unity of the primary agency and structure of world-scale processes of capital accumulation: a Genoese Style, from the fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries; a Dutch Cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and has continued into the current state of financial expansion.

P8 An agency is capitalist in virtue of the fact that its money is endowed with the "power of breading" (Marx's expression) systematically and persistently, regardless of the nature of the particular commodities and activities that are incidentally the medium at any given time. The notion of systemic cycles of accumulation which we have derived from Braudel's historical observation of recurrent financial expansions follows logically from this strictly instrumental relationship of capitalism to the world of trade and production, and emphasizes it. That is to say, financial expansions are taken to be symptomatic of a situation in which the investment of money in the expansion of trade and production no longer serves the purpose of increasing the cash flow to the capitalist stratum as effectively as pure financial deals can. In such a situation, capital invested in trade and production tends to revert to its money form and accumulate more directly, as in Marx's abridged formula MM'.

新中国出版五十年纪事

新华出版社1999

1953.5.13 出版总署发出《关于登记内部期刊的几个问题的解释》，就内部期刊的含义，哪些内部期刊需要在出版行政机关办理登记以及内部期刊的审批、出版发行等问题作了解释。


1956.4 《全国总书目（1949-1954）》出版
此后版本图书馆每年编印一册《全国总书目》

Borges

Signs of Borges (sylna Molloy?)

Borges: Writers on the Edge (Beatriz sarlo)



an writer influenced by Borges
Ricardo Piglia La Ciudad Ausente (the absent city?)

sound studies books

K.J.Donnelly, The Specter of sound
Music in film and Television
K.J. Donnelly, Film music: Critical approaches

Beyond the soundtrack: Representing music in cinema

John cage: Silence: lectures and writings


about music in 1970s documentary: new york is on fire(?)

facing reality: chinese documentary, chinese postsocialsim by chris berry

Berry, Chris. 2002. “Facing Reality: Chinese Documentary, Chinese Postsocialism.” In Wu Hung, Wang Huangsheng, Feng Boyi, eds, Reinterpretation: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art (1990-2000). Guangzhou: Guangdong Museum of Art, 121-131.


cinema verite of Fred Wiseman and Ogawa Shinsuke

p121 In the People's Republic of China,however,postsocialism has more parallels with Lyotard's postmodernism, where the forms and structures of the modern (in this case socialism) persist long after faith in grand narrative that authorizes it has been lost. Furthermore, this condition is even felt in the West, where the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 forced those on the left-- do such terms make sense anymore?-- to confront not only declining faith in liberal capitalist democracy but also the absence of any visible alternative. In other words, I write this essay not with a neo-Cold War hope that China may one day join the "free world," but out of a shared interest in the question of tactical response to having to work in the globalizing territory of what de Certeau calls "the space of the Other," at a time when the absence of visible and viable outside space threatens the meaningfulness of the very phrase.

post-Berlin Wall film Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Michel de Certeau The Practice of Everyday Life

Black sun : depression and melancholia / Julia Kristeva ; translated by Leon S. Roudiez.

生产模式：透视中国当代艺术

In production mode: contemporary Art in China by Pauline Yao published by timezon8, 2008

大芬村经济生态 刘鼎--《产品》“将艺术品的流水线制作、生产、展示同时集中在美术馆内的一次艺术计划”

2007 艾未未将1001名木雕师输出到第十二届卡塞维尔文献展上
艺术家雇佣工人、助手和工匠辅助艺术制造

p19 enact factory-like modes of production that advocate a post-authorship position

“hidden masses”
P24 the economy of scale mass production of art

participation-- collaborative or collectively produced art


minimalism Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Dan Flavin

解冻文学和回归文学 谭得伶 吴泽霖 北京师范大学出版社2001 北京

其他书目 李明滨 《俄罗斯二十世纪非主潮文学》北岳文艺出版社 1998

解冻文学 1953斯大林去世到60年代中期 1956苏共二十大 赫鲁晓夫反斯大林个人崇拜
1954-1956 爱伦堡发表了中篇小说《解冻》
奥维奇金 《区里的日常生活》
列昂诺夫 《俄罗斯森林》
肖洛霍夫 《一个人的遭遇》和“战壕真实派” 卫国战争中冲奔前线的一代作家
帕斯捷尔纳克《日瓦戈医生》
劳改营题材小说 索尔仁尼琴《伊凡×杰尼索维奇的一天》

“第四代”小说家 1956《青春》杂志发表21岁作家《维克多×波德古尔斯基演义》
1960 《青春》阿克肖诺夫 《同窗》
这批“出生在30年代，道德的形成却是在斯大林死后和党的二十大以后” “有一种清算父辈的愿望” “不仅开始怀疑斯大林的价值，而且也怀疑全部过去的历史”
子辈/父辈 自白性的第一人称叙事 《带星星的火车票》

布尔加科夫1891-1940
皮里尼亚克1894-1938

A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre

Rick Altman


reference: Fredric Jameson: "magical narratives: Romance as Genre," New Literary History 7(1975)135-163

double and Xu Xi's "The stone window"

Xu Xi one of few Hong kong authors who write in English
Daughters of Hui

literature on double:
Fred Botting. 1996 The Gothic. Routledge

Otto Rank 1971 Beyond psychology(1941). New York: Dover.

Andrew Webber. 1996. The Doppelganger: Double visions in German Literature. Oxford University Press

change mummified II

wrong assumptions: analog= indexicality index vs digital
p302 "In that case, indexicality becomes just a subset of analog inscription, for it is minimally defined as including some element of physical contact between referent and sign." "(n)ot the analog in general but the indexical becomes the opposing term, against which the digital may be defined and which it surpasses."-- digital utopia

hybridity -- confuses the opposition between digital and indexical
digital indexicality
p307 The "pure" of "pure data" cannot mean the obliteration of referential origins, for without referential entities or events preexisting the data itself, that data would have no informational value as survaillence. (note: he is talking about digital surveillance of military spy satellites)
p308 It (note : a digital camera)gathers light like a traditional camera but does not record its presence by chemical reactions on photosensitive substances. Instead, it is a machine for encoding light intensities as numbers on a magnetized substrate, and the perceived image is actually composed of pixels with assigned color values arranged along Cartisian coordinates.

P309-310
Andy Darley has proposed dividing this history up to the present into two phases, which overlap but are defined by different dominant tendencies. The early phase peaked during the 1960s, when cutting-edge developments in computer imaging technologies and techniques often partook of the rhetoric and rationales of high modernist abstraction. ....
But following this early period, according to Darley, the dominant tendency in computer imaging turned depictive, emphasizing forms of pictorial versimilitude to achieve what has come to be called simulation.


some references:
Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1991)
Miriam Hansen, "Early Cinema,late Cinema: Transformation of the Public sphere," in Viewing positions: Ways of seeing film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994)

Andy Darley, "From Abstraction to Simulation: Notes on the history of computer imaging," in Culture, Technology, and creativity in the late Twentieth century, ed. Philip Hayward (London: John Libbey, 1990)

Gene Youngblood Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970)

change mummified

Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory Philip Rosen (Minneapolis·London: University of Minnesota Press 2001)

p6 But more indicative is his(my note: Bazin's) general conception of the history of filmic textuality as an ongoing, never-completed dialectical sequence of representation strategies attempting to move toward total flexibility and completeness in encountering the real.I would emphasize two related temporal assumptions of this mode of thinking first, the present is always already different in some respect from the past, and second, reality is definitionally temporalized, in the sense that it always involves change or at least the consistent potential for change. In chapter 3, we will see that these are fundamental assumptions of modern historicity.

p12 Bazin is quite consistent in his phenomenological solution to the subject-object split. For his phenomenology, the subject's projections toward exteriority are definitive, and Bazin can almost be read as analyzing the status of the objective for the subject. That is, "objective" here can be put in quotes with greater clarity, for the "objective" is always inflected by the "subjective," never available except through the processes of the later. Bazin often expresses this with the terminology of abstract and concrete,which should again remind us of his continental philosophical heritage: the world can never present itself or write itself apart from the abstracting drive of the subject to find meaning; the pure, brute concrete real in his totality and apart from the intentionality of a subject is simply unavailalbe as such to humans.

p15 It is not surprising that those who objected to 1970s film theory made perspective a major are of engagement.... Another recent alternative is Jonathan Crary's more or less Foucauldian position. While agreeing with 1970s film theorists such as Comolli that perspective constructs an ideal subjectivity, or position of "the observer," he argues that by the time of cinema appeared in the nineteenth century, the Renaissance spectatorial ideals emphasized in 1970s film theory had already eroded. The notion that it was possible to objectively or reliably map space according to the procedures of scientific optics (philosophically associated with the camera ob-scura and its successor mechanisms) had been replaced by another, more relativistic model. This model was associated with research on perceptual illusions , the bodily temporality of perception and so forth. It was part of a discursive field stated on the thesis that there is always on a subjective shaping of objectivity in visual and other perception, as opposed to a single ideal position of knowledge. (my note: discursive field for Bazin's theory, especially his phenomenological take)

p 16 In fact, the function of perspective in Bazin's theory invites us to displace consideration of the special appeal of cinematic "realism" from spatial similarity or dissimilarity between image and world to issues of temporality.
p17 This historical function can be described by saying that perspective provides a sort of credible code -- to put it in necessary oxymoronic terms, a reliable illusion--whose credibility can then be lent to automatically produced images. But then, by a peculiar inversion, it ultimately becomes the mechanical process that was previously a supplement to the spatial illusion of likeness, which, once established, lends its credibility, to the spatial configuration of the image. Thus, there is a distinction between perspective and the special credibility of the automatically produced image.

P17 It is precisly the activity and desire of the subject-- "our obession with realism"-- that makes indexicality the crucial aspect of the cinematic image for Bazin.
p23 So what is usually regarded as Bazin's ontology describes a subjective intentionality for automatically produced images based on a preservative obsession.
p27 Since the ground for Bazin's position is an account of a generalized subjective obsession, he must finally make imagination, fantasy, the illogical a root of any true realism.
(note: Bazin sees in film, and perhaps art in general, an generalized subjective obsession with preserving the past)

p31-32 In Bazin's work generally, the explicit concern with the flow of time and the various ways a subject obsessively apprehends the past is pertinent not only the filmic subject, but for the theoretical/critical subject-- sucha as Bazin himself. In Bazin's critical writings, filmic procedures are consistently conceived within the history of cinema, film style, and, to some extent, their wilder contexts.
P32 (w)e may also ask whether his work does not include a subtext on the compulsion and fascinations of history, the sublimations and attractions of the past, even outside cinema.

p32 It is possible to section Bazin's interest in historicity, considered as manifestations of the human concern with "pastness" in cinema carried to the prestigious knowledge claims of historiography. The most obvious and influential sector of this interest is surely his dialectical-evolutionary history of filmic styles.
(myth-- total film, American Western, soviet film)

p36 For even if there are individual and cultural variations in the ways that this projective desire of subjectivity is met, the desire is itself posited outside of change and history.
p37-38 The universality of the ambition for perfect reproduction of the world is the universality of the preservative obsession, the characterization of the subject that is Bazin's founding theoretical axiom. The axiom here finds reconfirmation in history. But the consequence is a waffling on any historical explanation of transformations among media and styles.
(note: To Bazin, the preservative obsession becomes a historical explanation for film history)

modern time awareness time-oriented labor cinema as kind of junction of indexicality and rationalization

"indexing history" p109 An emphasis on critically examined primary source materials in the training and work of historian has been extraordinarily functional in justifying the establishment of and claims to professional disciplinarity.
(note: the primary sources can be understood a species of indexical signs)

internaltionalism and cultural experience: soviet films and popular chinese understanding of the future in the 1950s

by Tina Mai Chen cultural critique No.58 (autumn, 2004), pp82-114

internationalism, film consumption

"Nor do analysts generally consider forms of consumption located in noncapitalist contexts that promote alternative globally situated subjects."
"soviet union's Today is our tomorrow."
"how consistency, in the domain of the popular, of slogans that associated the (good) Soviet Union with China's future enabled a malleable internationalism to remain 'popular' even across the divide of the Sino-Soviet split at the end of the 1950s. " "internaltionalism referred not only to Sino-Soviet relations; it invoked a utopian vision of an alternatively ordered world order premised on international proletarian revolution as well as the pragmatic politics of a Cold War world in which the strength of nation-states figured prominently."
Korean War-- soviet films "gongke bolin" elements of a larger ongoing common struggle
model women


reference: Tina, Tina Mai. "Female Icon, Feminist Iconography? Socalist Rhetoric and Women's Agency in 1950s China." Gender & History 15, no.2 (August 2003):268-95

Plastic (1957 Roland Barthes)

Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyetheylene), plastic, the products of which have just been gathered in an exhibition, is in essence the stuff of alchemy. At the entrance of the stand, the public waits in a long queue in order to witness the accomplishment of the magical operation par excellence: the transformation of matter. An ideally-shaped machine, tubulated and oblong (a shape well suited to suggest the secret of an itinerary) effortlessly draws, out of a heap of greenish crystals, shiny and fluted dressing-room tidies. At one end, raw, telluric matter, at the other, the finished, human object; and between these two extremes, nothing; nothing but a transit, hardly watched over by an attendant in a cloth cap, half-god, half-robot.

Doing Cooking (Luce Giard)

One day finally, when I was twenty, I got my own small apartment, apart from school barracks, that included a rudimentary but sufficient facility in which to prepare my meals. I discovered myself invested with care of preparing my own food,delighted with being able to to escape from the noise and crowds of college cafeterias and from the shuttling back and forth to face preordained menus. But how was I to proceed? I did not know how to do anything. It was not a question of waiting for or asking advice from the women in the family because that would have implied returning to the maternal hearth and agreeing to slip back into that discarded feminine model. The solution seemed obvious: just like everything else, these sorts of things could be learned in books. All I had to do was find in a bookstore a source of information that was 'simple','quick','modern' and 'inexperience', according to my then naive vocabulary. And in order to secure the means to do so (at least, so I thought), I undertook the close study of a paperback cookbook devoid of both illustrations and 'feminine' flourishes. To my mind, this absence endowed the book with eminent practical value and sure efficiency.
From the groping experience of my initial gestures, my trials and errors, there remains this one surprise: I thought I had never learned or observed anything, having obstinately wanted to escape from the contagion of a young girl's education and because I had always preferred my room, my books, and my silent games to the kitchen where my mother busied herself. Yet, my childhood gaze had seen and memorized certain gestures, and my sense memory had kept track of certain tastes, smells and colors. I already knew all the sounds: the gentle hiss of simmering water, the sputtering of melting meet drippings, and the dull thud of the kneading hand. A recipe or an inductive word sufficed to arouse a strange anamnesis whereby ancient knowledge and primitive experiences were reactivated in fragments of which I was the heiress and guardian without wanting to be. I had to admit that I too had been provided with a woman's knowledge and that it had crept into me, slipping past my mind's surveillance. It was something that came to me from my body and that integrated me into the great crops of women of my lineage, incorporating me into their anonymous ranks.
I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw materials, of organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws: with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, freed from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.

comments on the society of the spectacle

Guy Debord translated by Malcolm Imrie (London, NewYork :Verso 1990)

P8-9
In 1967 I distinguished two rival and successive forms of spectacular power, the concentrated and the diffuse.... Since then a third form has been established, through a rational combination of these two, and on the basis of a general victory of the form which had showed itself stronger: the diffuse. This is the integrated spectacle, which has since tended to impose itself globally.
....
The intergrated spectacle shows itself to be simultaneously concentrated and diffuse, and ever since the fruitful union of the two has learnt to employ both these qualities on a grander scale. Their former mode of application has changed considerably. As regards concentration, the controlling center has now become occult: never to be occupied by a know leader, or clear ideology. And on the diffuse side, the spectacle has never before put its mark to such a degree on almost the full range of socially produced behaviour and objects. For the final sense of the integrated spectacle is this-- that it has integrated itself into reality to the same extent as it was describing it. As a result, this reality no longer confronts the integrated spectacle as something alien. When the spectacle was concentrated, the greater part of surrounding society escaped it; when diffuse, a small part; today,no part. The spectacle has spread itself to the point where it now permeates all reality....
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety; all the more welcome because it coincides with the generalised disapperance of all real ability. A financier can be a singer. a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join in the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different acticity from whatever specialism first made their name....