Modes of Non-linear Study
a contribution by Setareh Noorani
Setareh Noorani. Photo by Jarmal Martis.
“This riffing and writing is a kind of study - which is what you do with other people”
– Fred Moten, We Are The Voices Radio
When asked to contribute to this edition of hoekhuis themed ‘The Study’, I was compelled to give a glimpse into my recent modes of fragmented, non-linear study: a form of study where the words are encountered, not yet fully known. These words, quotes, images, and sounds encountered -- noted down in booklets, saved in online pads and lists, and digital documents -- affect each other: they are ‘riffing’ off each other. They find shared inhabitance in various archival instances for different purposes of study, while I immerse myself in an array of paralleling and cross-referencing fields (architecture, architecture theory, archival theory, feminist, queer, and decolonial studies). These are fields that all are in-formed by the continuous presence of violence, pain, joy and wilderness around us - by a wholeness of life.
This contribution is in a sense a wider and longer enduring experiment of the footnote constellation, a constellation of asterisks, carried on in projects like Collecting Otherwise (Het Nieuwe Instituut) and my latest contribution to Footprint Journal. This is also a project of being generous with one's references and quotations in an effort to break the (institutional) instinct of authorship and enclosure of the commons, as well as a consenting to not-being-complete / open-ended / unfinished.
Lately, I have been trying to immerse myself in the subjects of refusal, (Marxist) utopia, the no-place, and ‘endings’, opposed or entangled with the archives and registers of knowledge that we (the oppressed, the marginalised, the non-consenting) desperately need to survive the foreclosure of alternatives (and alternative futures) to extraction, death, and corruption.
When to put ‘stuff’ to rest? - stuff as an entire enmeshed epistemè, irreducible to singularity? How can we stick with the trouble and ‘imagine for the futureless future’?
How and on what levels can we think of appropriation, of ‘livelihood’ stolen or prematurely ended through appropriation, or survival through the remix - the fugitive rethinking happening on the ground in the everyday?
In what way are we, researchers, architects, artists, workers - homo faber - made complicit in the tracts of capital accumulation and labour exploitation; and how can we refuse?
OneTab screenshot 23/08/2022
The following (incomplete list of) notes, links, samples and snippets have been collected for a couple projects within the scope of 3 months of study (June 2022 - August 2022).
"[...] in that zone or bound spot where we might find, if we were prepared to or anticipating it, those "fugitive moments of comprehension" that could yield a genealogy of and paradigms for more adequate histories and theories of the many real and imaginary strivings for a livable and humane social existence" (Avery Gordon, Hawthorn Archives)
"[...] embodying, partially as best as they can, some of "the means by which society can be rendered adequate to the full breadth of human potentialities." Defined equally by what/who they refuse and what/who they embrace and side with, these individuals and projects are part of a set of parallel universes of living otherwise which have existed – some for a very long time – on differential but proximate planes." (Avery Gordon, Hawthorn Archives)
Solemnly swear to not be reduced to a singularity
Preparing events…. Janushoved – “I always wanted a feeling of anonymity” (interview)
“We position collecting otherwise as a situated and resituated action. A European archive cannot collect otherwise, at the moment, because it is unavoidably inhabited by histories and bodies that cannot collect in ways other than they have been conditioned to do. Collecting otherwise thus passes through habilitating (ex)colonial peripheries and bodies to collect for themselves, according to their own interests and needs. This needs to happen in a situated and re-situated way.” (To Be Determined - Trojan Horse Cell, 2021, Collecting Otherwise)
"becoming unavailable for servitude back stiff with conviction" (Toni Cade Bambara)
“Negritude is the re-appropriation of ourselves by ourselves. ... Our negritude is humanist, is situated in history. Our negritude is developing our roots.” (Aimé Césaire, Gaps)"meandering streams of unguided hopes, dreams, fantasies, fears, recollections" (Patricia Williams)
"Mostly older LPs, all played with at least 25% pitch down, recorded on a humid spring night in the Appalachian Mountains..."
tracklist:
Annea Lockwood - Immersion + Tiger Balm (Glyn Maier edit)
Patti Tassini - Hula Om
Thomas P Heckmann - 08-36-29
Midori Hirano - Patterns
Terry Fox - Ether
Audubon Survey 1968, Hawaii
Dan Gibson - Solitudes Vol. 4
Morton Feldman - String Quartet II
Phill Niblock - A Third Trombone
Iannis Xenakis - Polytope De Cluny
Jon Gibson - Melody IV
Joyul - Backstroke
Annette Brisette - Feeling Dub
Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia
"In part out of enraged necessity, given the futility of rational or moral appeals to responsible political, economic, and military authorities, and in part out of a capacious and willful desire to begin again, the resistance deepened, moving beyond opposition per se to articulating other ways of living." [Avery Gordon, Hawthorn Archives, 15]
Instead, theories of existential debt always end up becoming ways of justifying-or laying claim to-structures of authority [David Graeber, Debt, 69]
utopian surplus, a “real and objective possibility” that “surrounds all given existence” [Avery Gordon, Hawthorn Archives, 4]
“The point here is not to make an analogy between the deconstruction of the center and the organization of the jazz ensemble]: it’s to say that that organization is of totality, of ensemble in general. Among other things, this music allows us to think of tonality and the structure of harmony as it moves in the oscillation between voice and voicing, not in the interest of any numerical determination (the valorization of the multiple or its shadow), not in the interest of any ethico-temporal determination (the valorization of the durative or of process), but for a kind of decentralization of the organization of the music; a restructuring or, if you will, a reconstruction.” [Fred Moten, In the Break, 68)
Gaps and breaks ________________
Institutions shall not foreclose the future, we - the marginalised folk - will always find the gaps in the institution - we will find ways to inhabit the gap.
“we refuse to ask for recognition and instead we want to take apart, dismantle, tear down the structure that, right now, limits our ability to find each other, to see beyond it and to access the places that we know lie outside its walls.” [Jack Halberstam, THE WILD BEYOND: WITH AND FOR THE UNDERCOMMONS]
“The work of inhabitance involves orientation devices; ways of extending bodies into spaces that create new folds, or new contours of what we could call livable or inhabitable space.” [Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, II]
“In particular, it questions the potential of orthographic conventions of architectural drawing and mapping to talk about these spatially. The paper asks whether orthographic drawings can tell a different story, and looks to the potential of mimicry to “tell” the narratives of populations and their spaces otherwise rendered invisible within academic research.” [Huda Tayob, Subaltern Architectures]
“We need to complicate the relation between the lines that divide space, such as the equator and the prime meridian, and the ‘‘line’’ of the body. After all, direction only makes sense as a relationship between body and space. For instance, one definition of the left direction is: ‘‘on or towards the side of the human body which corresponds to the position of west if one regards oneself as facing north.’’. The body orientates itself by lining itself up with the direc . tion of the space it inhabits (for instance, by turning left to exit through the door ‘‘on the left side of the room.’’) The left is both a way we can turn and one side of our body. When we turn left, we turn in the direction that ‘‘follows’’ one side of the body.” [SA, QP, 13]
E9: The Industrial Workers of the World in the US, 1918-1950s
https://workingclasshistory.com/tag/iww/
Nomad, being nomad - but not like Constant’s New Babylon, roaming, being fugitive, however not escaping community/the communal……………
https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/7604/#!
Hoekstra, R., 2020. Second-Wave Feminism in Dutch Universities: Revisiting the Work of Feminist Scholars and Its Consequences for Dutch Architectural History. Architectural Histories, 8(1), p.13. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.374
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Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher, zinester and is part of various experimental collectives. She uses various media in her projects and artistic contributions to explore ways of publicizing and embodying, questioning processes of trauma and time; always moving in the grey space between academic research and art.