Notes
Introduction
See also Masschelein, Simons, Bröckling, and Pongratz (2007) for a discussion of the rise of the “learning society.”
For an overview of Agamben’s critique of the screen and a possible educational response, see Vlieghe 2017 and Lewis and Alirezabeigi 2018.
As we explore in chapter 2, this separation happens in two ways: summitting or browsing.
For more on pataphysics, see Hugill 2015 and Lewis 2020.
1. The Studio: A Queer History
See also the essays collected in Selmi 2008.
While it is important to point out that the collections that filled studio spaces were, at least in part, the result of colonialism (and an attending desire to order and classify the world), it is also important to note how the marvelous assortment of natural objects, human artifacts, magical implements, and scientific instruments found in studios present fluid and ambiguous meanings that undermine any attempt to characterize them neatly in terms of “meta-realities” such as colonialism, oppression, or possession (Kemp 1995). These collections refused to submit to precise categorization (as status symbol, for instance), and thus embody a distinctly pataphysical potential for igniting curiosities that betray colonialist agendas.
2. Studying Online: Virtual Studio Spaces
The ease of browsing we are discussing is not open and available to all. Indeed, search engines reproduce White privilege and discriminate against women of color through “algorithms of oppression” (Noble, 2018). In this sense, the ideal conditions for browsing are implicitly White, heteronormative, and male.
For a more detailed overview of the relation between Flusser’s theory of gestures and study, see Lewis 2019.
3. Protocols as Experimental Writing for the Studio
It is important to note that Masschelein and Simons (2011) describe the university in terms of various “experimental movements” of profanation rather than institutional crystallizations. It is not the lecture that is essential to the university but rather the movement that it embodies, a movement that we describe as drift (as a profanation of the sacred in order to produce knots and loops between people, things, and ideas).
For an example of a contemporary, postdigital book of secrets, see Rasmi and Schildermans 2021.