Protocol Institute Symposium · Memory research group
Continuity infrastructure
The phenomenon of continuity and the social infrastructure that makes it possible.
Ruthvik · Pond · pond.li
I · Continuity
The lukasa
A latent form, read and interpreted in the present.
What is instituted in the reading is continuity: between those who made the board and those who use it to orient themselves.
Continuity infrastructure
Continuity infrastructure
Past is made consequential, or significant, to the present.
Of some object, entity, process...
No requirement of unchanged identity or uninterrupted transmission.
Surviving
A text that lasts. A record that outlives its use.
Participating
A text taken up in a life: a national mythology, a language revived across a break.
Continuity infrastructure
Fidelity, wholeness and genealogy are not required.
Past
Present
what came before is active in what follows
what continues transforms the significance of what it inherits
Turn · to II
What makes this possible?
II · Continuity infrastructure
Fragmentation is the default. Continuity needs to be renewed.
External forms
The canonising text. Monuments, records, artefacts of collective memory.
without them: no content, no robustness
×
Protocols
Retellings, teaching, commentary, interpretation: the practices that occasion and organise return.
without them: fragmentation takes hold
Not a claim that collective continuity is good or bad, nor about which continuities are true.
Continuity infrastructure
Turn · to III
Personal scale continuities
Continuity infrastructure
The questions or features of the world that we find ourselves recurrently drawn to understand
Q
Q′
Q″
Q‴
The question changes; the stance changes; still a sense that the encounters belong together.
Two routes in: one question leads to the next; or unrelated reading suddenly bears on an old concern. Felt recognition, then take-up.
Our intellectual projects.
Why care: sustained inquiries partly form an orientation
Salience
what becomes noticeable
Affordances
what becomes possible
Legibility
what becomes puzzling, meaningful
A particular path makes some part of the world intelligible; others may never have had occasion to notice what you can see.
Receptivity: the inquiry can change, and continuing may mean discovering you were wrong.
Continuity infrastructure
Turn · to IV
Where do we already support this development?
IV · Infrastructure and its uneven support
Where it already works
Reading
Seminar
Reading
Seminar
Essay
Supervision
Writing
Conferences
Colleagues
Shared arrangements sustain a discipline and an individual's thought at once. Outside them, the person supplies more of the practice themselves.
Continuity infrastructure
The hupomnemata, the commonplace book
A record
things read, heard, thought
+
A practice of returning to it
rereading, meditation, discussion, application
In both cases the record belonged to a practice. Abundance is an old problem.
A notebook can survive after the practice has disappeared. The material remains; the occasions no longer reliably arise.
Foucault, Self Writing · Blair, Too Much to Know
Continuity infrastructure
Turn · to V
The contemporary landscape
V · The contemporary gap
Preservation
Take-up
Artefact / protocol asymmetries
Plenty of capture, organisation, linking, search.
The gap: protocols for personally directed inquiries to take up their own record.
Continuity infrastructure
The burden on the person
remember
find
recover significance
relate
carry forward
Every step is the person's, every time.
New material arrives already furnished with occasions to reach us. Ambient currents.
Continuity infrastructure
Turn · to VI
Building personal scale continuity infrastructure
VI · Pond
Record
the personal collection
Working surface
material in relation around a present inquiry
Take-up
recognise, judge, disagree, develop
Return
The product supports a protocol: software plus the participant's practice.
AI can surface material and propose relations. A synthesis is not yet continuity; it can simply become another document.
Continuity infrastructure
This talk, as an example
An earlier essay on archives
"continuity with the past, receptivity to the present"
A more general account of continuity
Returned to the notes
Past thought became consequential. The present inquiry changed its significance.
The tool and the conversation occasioned it. The person participated in instituting it.
Continuity infrastructure
To give the things we are recurrently drawn to understand occasions to continue, while leaving them open to being changed by what we encounter.
Ruthvik · pond.li