[...]d --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.

-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)

the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)

-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)


***nothing is never merely a metaphor***

[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in sc[...]

[...][...] complaint haunts our era of desperate justice (Xiri, Sana, Varinia)
. a calling-system? a GPS that has lost its signal?

maternal super-ego
political passion emerging as a defensive strategy
(@Xiri, is she trying to add-on the super-ego for her concern of social justice?)

so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?

“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed worldliness

what-should-have-been

On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?

metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)

(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines


R_dzvJYDZXM

CrGJIS3quYY


(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to be raised
-what is the state of unknown in one's practice? rather than being a news agency




[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[...]

[...]nd classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]


“point of view” is an important metaphor


#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]


the name of the world is “detail”


***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language

...................................

don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is

...................................

perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering

...................................

Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]



I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions



Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people w[...]

[...]heory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

...................................

committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•

(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)

...................................

towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning ab[...]

[...]problems that you face in doing/thinking
=/= abstraction as the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction

“adventure” is not the name of the game for me, for two reasons:
1. Manning brought her concept of ‘adventure’ to Belgium: the land of Tintin, poster of the moderinst adventure agency sold by the image of the individual blond univerasal truth-seeker exporting company who always wins by definition, Tintin is the one who doesn't have a culture and always others have culture in his stories
2. i have been researching europeans who came for an “adventure” to iran in the last millennium (such as Olearius), and it doesn't look good. when europeans go out of their center to east it is adventure (or anthropology), that means othering and feeling the differences of the other in order to feel outside. but when, for example iranians go to Europe, they never feel they are there for “adventure,” they are there to learn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”

(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]


-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?

rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “emerged” in the participants? (apply emergence-thinking to the participants)
-how hierarchies “emerged” in the workshop? and what are they?

to be ungraspable for the market ==> ? (marketing the self)
to be unintelligible for the university ==> ? (devitalizing the university)


questions:
•decontextualization, as an artistic ready-at-hand tool of concept-making, does it do good or bad to knowledge and imagination (as it is practiced by the people who use it) and how?
•facing the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction to our objects of attention, how do we build nontranscendental abstractions?
•and, why self-promoting is such a turn-off? (projecting a self-image of being cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?



in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’:[...]

[...]y literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style


preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars


How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658


realized eschatology

انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}

pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign

(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*


(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)

gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)


leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper


•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social p[...]

[...]he ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities
-Sven's ordinary affects and DJings --> his noncoherent singularity ==> a nonrepresentational theory is needed to address them
asking Sven:
•what needs attending to (for you)?
•what/who are you in conversation with?



[scenes and selves]***
•layered textures of a scene



(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into little mythic kernal
•morphed into a cold dark edge
•hopeful
•
•
--> things take place as [*]precisions: the pressure points that open onto potentialities are taken up as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms


my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer

#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact

?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•

watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us

______________


“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)

poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)

[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work


my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account [...]

[...]a dynamic, forward-moving thing, one that includes evidence of struggle -->[*connection lies behind the “catalog of inadequate terms”*]
(one effect of my quirky talks is as if we have) climbed a ladder of phrases
...struggle to reconcile the delights of earth with the demands of heaven* [_i am keeping in touch with a way of talking (doubling phrases,,,) in performances which intensifies the audience's sense of the speaker's character, his enthusiasm, his giddy متزلزل pleasure in being overcome by what is (for him) the *sensory evidence* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension


“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...


(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)


(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world

@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی



saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’

the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)


X in Y's translation


“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*

(a [...]

[...]
(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead

the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]

...................................

Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***

immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)

interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency


*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*

...................................

Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation

*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species

envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences;[...]

[...]> coexistence of the various versions of a multiple object (<-- this is localized or *situated* : it happens “there” and nowhere else)
work of observation in apass:
•conceptualizations of short-term social exchanges
•conceptualizations of agency-structure dynamics
•getting closer to the everyday activities of those speaking
•(context driven?) forms of analysis
•methodological repertoire
•note: composites of linguistic repertoires that are embedded in meanings (is part of what happens in apass, not after what happens.) --> a form of digestion***
*praxiography: forms of analysis produced by practice researchers, a type of ethnographic method that converses with multiplicity (--> following a trail, walking a path =/= map out a field ~= philosophy of artistic research), doctors [analyst] and patients [analysand, artist] ascribe meaning in different ways --Annemarie--> yet they perform or enact reality together --> they *do the reality of a disease [problem, artwork]*
++{Annemarie uses the term “enact” to show that objects (such as body and disease) exist as articulations of the practices that produce them (~= Butler's performance), enacting (not explained by what went before, present remains unstable, patterns and routines and surprises) =/= making (‘causes’ lie when ‘making’ happened)}
[*]theory: conversations about the realities our words help to explore (=/= seeking to fix concepts)
in knowledge practice realities are various brought into being (+ limits of that adaptability) --> *ontology:
--anthropology--> people order “reality” seriously differently
--biomedical--> why, when, where is this truth realized? what does it depend on? what are its alternatives? --> *ontology does not precede knowledge practices* (various practices are closely linked ==> ontologies are linked [for example a patient who talks to a doctor in a consulting room may receive a clinical diagnosis, while laboratory measurements ‘do’ her disease in a different way. or in artistic research environments such as apass.])

(Annemarie's) praxiography --> asking what are the techniques that make things (their empirical, epistemological found objects) visible, audible, tangible, knowable (for this artist in front of me #feedback @apass)**


‘empathy’ is a word that is often recruited when bodies are involved --> resonances with troublesome romantic meanings (magic, fold knowledge)
embodied empathy shifts its meaning from one situation to another --> different meanings ==> different outcomes
[*]empathy: the process by which one delegates to one's body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies --> bodies are articulating and become articulated in the asking and in its responses
= making the body available for the response of another being (=/= feeling what the other feels)
==create==> possibil[...]

[...] the food eaten before
#Cinderella

it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved


animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥

(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique


animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them

(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)

why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”

...................................

Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)

normative moral claims

(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, even of they are not prescribed or proscribed in state or in customary law


*to write nonmorally about [*]ethics: a mode of relatedness, even if the relation is as ephemeral as a mood that may escape measure or description, lying somewhere between mourning and indifference
[=/= to have an a priori moral code based on which we might justify (or predict ahead) our emotional responses to particular killing ~= what constitutes a good life or death]

(mourning =/= indifference)

concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India

everyday affects (while witnessing or executing the death of animals)
doubts and pleasures
cruelties and indifferences
chicken shops
decimated forests of central India


moods:
•ambivalence
•cruelty and pleasure
•senses of devastation

modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)

--> ***how does (and doe[...]

[...]ons (if any) there of, even of they are not prescribed or proscribed in state or in customary law


*to write nonmorally about [*]ethics: a mode of relatedness, even if the relation is as ephemeral as a mood that may escape measure or description, lying somewhere between mourning and indifference
[=/= to have an a priori moral code based on which we might justify (or predict ahead) our emotional responses to particular killing ~= what constitutes a good life or death]

(mourning =/= indifference)

concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India

everyday affects (while witnessing or executing the death of animals)
doubts and pleasures
cruelties and indifferences
chicken shops
decimated forests of central India


moods:
•ambivalence
•cruelty and pleasure
•senses of devastation

modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)

--> ***how does (and does not) killability shade into vitality?***

what does it mean for animals to be alive in a severely depleted habitat?

(what it means to be alive in contemporary Tehran?)

profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value

-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)

animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)

آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism

#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.

religiously infused conscience
banality of secular cruelty
long-standing intimacy between violence and the sacred

#story
Nitin is jinn and no jinn wants to marry their daughter to someone who sells chicken for a living. Nitin has debilitating nightmares about dying chickens.
•poultry industry
•cage-free farming


(there is no “irreducible” ontological gap, disjuncture of temporality, ontological untranslatability, between:)
time of history/capital ~= time of the gods/ritual

both ritual and capital -[...]

[...]e of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*


a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی می‌کن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later

informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms


which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)


devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)


Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence


“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter

animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed

anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?

can we speak of a quality of death?

(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations


culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice

life =/= zoo =/= bios

...................................

retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present

retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment

ironic consumption...


... =/= how adults might perceive the political context

dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages

*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])

past: retro comedy

comedy: retrospective representation

(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its colorful c[...]

[...]

Cinderella lives with the precarity of a family who torment and insult her on a daily basis. I kept asking myself, why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she is capable of knowing new things about the animals she lives. She incorporates a form of transhumanity that lies in (1) the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she is not a master of nor can she escape from, and (2) in the way animals give her power and meaning. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? A skilled practitioner of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. A Cinderella who does her job is bizarre. It engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of evil circumstances. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present, inviting more interesting questions about her labor of knowledge production. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of imagining what animals are capable of, with and because of her labor. This is her mice-trap. Steeped in routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals, her technique of trap-making is not a category of human behavior, but a model for a form of intelligence. I argue that as a lover and interlocutor of mice, her traps are in the form of a net in which her subject becomes entangled. Lures are frequently needed to prompt meaning to an animal. Cinderella to the mice, is an alluring producer of sociality. Her mice-trap produces the meaning of the social. The mouse is captured not as prey but as material comrade and ally.


[....]


Sometimes there is no maker behind the trap. They are created by the world, by random, emergent, coalescence of elements in the environment. In a witness-fable by Kelileh o Demneh we have a moment of problematization of cunning intelligence. The story goes, once a fox was walking down his forest when he noticed animals were escaping from something. Upon further investigation he found out they were running from a special sound that scared them, a loud drum. At this stage, he is curious but vigilance and not afraid, because he knows the forest is all deceit and trickery. His inner thought is opportunistic or playful, he thinks there must be something juicy there that I can get my hands on. Lured in the other direction than other animals, he goes to the source of the sound, and puts his paws in it. He realizes that the sound was created by the force of wind moving a tree branch to hit the remains of an animal fat and skin caught in the branches. Disappointed and victorious, he calls the illusion and moves on. Here we have the fox revealing the techne of the lie: an assemblage of skin, fat, tree, and win[...]

[...]st and turn in every direction


forms of knowledge of Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Zeus, Prometheus --?-->
•a hunting trap
•a fishing net
•skills of a basket-maker
•skills of a weaver
•skills of a carpenter
•the mastery of a navigator
•the flair of a politician
•the experienced eye of a doctor
•the tricks of a crafty character such as Odysseus
•back-tracking of a fox
•polymorphism of an octopus
•solving of enigmas and riddles
•beguiling rhetorical illusionism of the sophists


(Greek's) ancient technical traditions --> particular type of intelligence: *objects which must be dominated by cunning*
(Detienne's research) to define one major category of the mind


practical intelligence manifested in the skills of the artisan (---> go to 3D hacker)


metis: coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behavior which combine flair, wisdom, forethought, subtlety of mind, deception, resourcefulness, vigilance, opportunism, various skills, and experience acquired over the years --> applied to situations which are transient, shifting, disconcerting, ambiguous


routine
chancey inspiration
changeable opinion
charlatanerie


dexterity
sureness of eye
sharpwittedness
}--Plato--> belong to a type of cognition which is alien to truth and quite separate from episteme, knowledge =/= Aristotle's “practical intelligence”


Plato
skill: *starting from the Forms, produces in the world of Becoming* creations that are as real, stable and organized as is possible


greek deity ~= ***Powers (power of binding) in a situation of confrontation*** --> find themselves in either position as victors =/= as vanquished (=/= Cinderella’s position neither victorious nor vanquished)


reality whose limitless polymorphic powers render it almost impossible to seize ==> cunning intelligence ([*]askew: adopt an oblique course, to bend intelligence, ready to go in any direction)
*intelligence attempts to make contact with an object by confronting it in the guise of a rival(= connivance + opposition)*
cunning intelligence (metis) ~/=? trickster, deceiver


[*]dominate: to enclose it/them within the limits of a single, unchangeable form within (his control) + he proves himself to be even more multiple, more mobile, more polyvalent than his adversary

...................................

Zeus’ metis
nothing can surprise him
nothing can cheat his vigilance
nothing can frustrate his designs


Iliad's man of metis: vigilant premeditation (=/= impulsiveness)
•displays a greater grip of the present (where nothing escapes him)
•more awareness of the[...]

[...]ich exacts high transaction costs. only where patents are perfectly enforceable will information be allowed to flow through markets, else antimarkets will prefer to internalize it into their hierarchies. one way a corporate hierarchy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.


at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.


automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge


(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)


the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions


the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures


are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?


future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.



[...]

...................................

the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms

(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality

living creatures and their inorganic counterparts


(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”


biomass = circulation of flesh

plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars

in a sense “higher” animals are just fancy decorations in an ecosystem
(decorative large predators)

ecosystem = succession of plant assemblages ==> stable states ==> climax

ecosystem = a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.


continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and intern[...]

[...]e.


eliminating judgment
the device would remove the process of abstraction from the artist's pen

what characterized the creation of late 19th century pictorial objectivity was self-surveillance

(note of Geppetto, Younus, Pinocchio)

personal equation: a systematic error correction


to produce reliable images


While in the early nineteenth century, the burden of representation was supposed to lie in the picture itself, now it fell to the audience. The psychology of pattern recognition in the audience had replaced the metaphysical claims of the author. Mistrusting themselves, they assuaged their fear of subjectivity by transferring the necessity of judgment to the audience.


(Grashey's) police metaphor was entirely appropriate. Not only was the history of late-nineteenth-century photography thoroughly bound up with the history of crime control, the x-ray photography itself was increasingly finding its way into court.

scientific evidence

legal evidence

at issue was, once again, the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology.

medico-legal concept of evidence

the image of the x-ray appeared (in court at least) to preempt and displace all other forms of knowledge.

(Allan Poe:) “if we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear--but the closest scrutiny of the photographic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.”

trompe l'oeil (new note)

in X-ray, the encryption of information takes place in the technology itself

photographs did not carry a transparent meaning


once so policed, and presumably only then, could the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own

in contrast to drawings, photograms were tarnished by the crudeness imposed by the limited palette of the color raster. Given the choice, the author clearly favored the crude but mechanical photographic process. Accuracy had to be sacrificed on the altar of objectivity. (is Kinect pure mechanical? why i have been insisting to remove my hands?! why i was craving for objectivity?)

=> to leave imperfections in the photograph as a literal mark of objectivity

testimony to objectivity

rejection of subjective temptation

sophistication could corrupt an individual? (you can be accurate but not sophisticated) (not cleaning up the image of plates)


The moral narrative surrounding this mechanical construction of[...]

[...]ranian artists often try to make their audience crazy* [-and myself included, check Sina lecture's chaotic verbalizations of delusional materials --> jouissance of disorganization]
-(in my lectures) am i externalizing my psychosis? [~ romantic]

(mother repeatedly commanding the child ‘Now, think!’ [~ to perceive the secret] ==>) threatened, mistrustful, isolated self ==> finding hidden meanings + sarcastic response [~=> unnerving the other]

small children exposed to unfamiliar and complex situations ==> often experience of ‘you are crazy!’


modern culture of obsessive-compulsive character traits as orderliness, competitiveness, intellectualization ==> obsessive-compulsive type of basic personality structure (is made very common among artists, people who are busy one way or another with analysis and psyche of the other) ==> **reaction formation** (which is one of the major defense mechanisms of the obsessive-compulsive) ~= long-repressed desires **to dismember the personality-structure of other persons**
[obsessive-compulsive personality type is very common in expertise societies: tavahosh-e takhasos, clean (+ “contaminated” things), one is deeply immersed in research, mental control, not wasting time, adherence to routines/rituals, washers, checkers, impairment in formulating an organizational strategy, etc. ==> cognitive inhibition, or violent disinhibition]

wishes to foster personality-disintegration in other persons + genuine and powerful interests in helping them <-- how is this possible?!
-Searles suggests that the desires to drive the other person crazy are a part of (the limitlessly varied personality-constellation of) emotionally healthy human beings


feelings of infantile satisfaction & omnipotent-mother fantasies

recrudescence of symbiotic techniques

the [same] sensation of being driven utterly mad by the impossible object [[...]

[...]l, having an edge, beating the system, being ourselves, checking out” -Stewart

(socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states, public feelings are not simply “good” pr “bad” but always) both powerful and mixed

the talk, once set in motion, expands into a بیشه thicket of stories and social maneuverings
(a scene in a restaurant becomes) maze of inspirations and experiments ♥
-“her brother's stories are shell-shocked and they have no endings. they leave you hanging”

singularity of the event ==> a “we” of all sorts opens in the room

chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things


...tuned in to some little something somewhere


“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart

force of things --> what counts as an event

a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)


childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty

graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers


[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...

(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road

...................................

Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory

...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?

spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity

sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, [...]

[...]dispositif: a network within which the body acquires its specific ontology

(Latour < Bowker:) the record ‘mediates’ the relations that it organizes, the bodies that are configured through it

regarding record, we can be concerned with:
•practices of reading and writing which bring the record to life
•mapping the configurations the record helps bring into being

how the structuring of the record speaks to the structuring of the bodies (of the artists?) we investigate? (@Sofia, Olga)

record -->{
production of human bodies
organizational hierarchies
selective memories

_________


Ribes Bowker - Between Meaning and Machine.pdf

...in the wake of ontologies
in participating in knowledge projects, first we learn about ontologies and then learned how to create them
(we rarely “produce” knowledge, we always participate)

ontology: an information technology for representing specialized knowledge in order to:
•facilitate communication across disciplines
•share data
•enable collaboration

(am i) representing the knowledge of my communities (?) -- what does that mean?

*routinization* (is that which is at stake in ontologies) --?--> *apprehension*: orientation to the informational organization of ones field
(to attend the routinizations and apprehensions in one's own practice --> ontology building)
•my routines of reading, highlighting, writing, idiosyncratic talks, feedbacks, questions, silences,
--> (attend to the) transformative consequences of learning and traversing routines --[+]--> the practice and material tools that accompany the reworking of them {knowledge in informational terms, fables, etc.}--> problematic of inter-operability
--> (and asking) how a (broader) community's interests are at stake with this? {to engage and enrol that community through what activities?} #microworld

(my routines:) with confidence deliberately working with:
•interrupting stories with stories
•partial connection (and its performance)
•moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
•mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
•mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al makhlughat
•mobilizing anachronic apparatus --> mobilizing different timescales ==> mixing up what counts as “us” (=/= chronology [?==> belonging])
•remembering what one knows (and organizing, performing, reworking it)
•having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•

wild facts[...]

[...] accompany the reworking of them {knowledge in informational terms, fables, etc.}--> problematic of inter-operability
--> (and asking) how a (broader) community's interests are at stake with this? {to engage and enrol that community through what activities?} #microworld

(my routines:) with confidence deliberately working with:
•interrupting stories with stories
•partial connection (and its performance)
•moving arguments through by infecting them with other arguments (=/= dialectical)
•mobilizing (multidisciplinary) fields (=/= the imperative of knowing A, B, and C first before you do D)
•mobilizing citation apparatus --> that which gives sense to what enables this work --> deliberately having a conversation with ajayeb al makhlughat
•mobilizing anachronic apparatus --> mobilizing different timescales ==> mixing up what counts as “us” (=/= chronology [?==> belonging])
•remembering what one knows (and organizing, performing, reworking it)
•having stakes in rationality (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•

wild facts amenable (تابع) to formal representation (formal modeling)

routine: practically enacted, having no existence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work

[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different languages

uncertain activities of knowledge

(what i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community
[asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling? (the question i asked Sven, telling others ‘this or that is the language i am using.’) (i am using a language that is Harawayian, Ronellian, Sadrian)

______________


http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html

...it is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's cool memories of simulacra (1990)

at stake: day to day work of building classification system

things to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”

fact is a consequence
(Dewey)

(in a way, my work [...]

[...]rough images

...................................

the horror of no longer remembering the reason for forgetting, or, “when the times comes for our battle, the memories'll be the armour”
Thyrza Goodeve

...................................

knowledge infrastructure
how do changes in knowledge infrastructures reinforce or redistributes authority, influence, and power? --> new ways of thinking and acting

create + share + dispute knowledge

(Facebook, Google, etc.:) vast stores of anonymized data to analysis and exploitation, engaging users and publics in new ways

axes of change: [fundamental transformations challenging our understanding of the ways knowledge is processed:]
1- technical systems and standards
2- new modes of analyzing social (re)organization that exploit the extensive traces left behind by users of information

including:
•education
•libraries: changing structures, services, and physical spaces
•publishing industry
•intellectual property
•global flow
•knowledge politics: filter bubble, counter-expertise,
•

unpaind individuals
“sticky” processes and routines --> *most knowledge workers’ salaries are still paid by bricks-and-mortar organizations with hierarchical structures, established insitutional cultures, systems of credit and compensation/

eventual rise of a scientific culture of “extreme openness”

(forms that are) human-readable & machine-readable <-- the move i made from my notebook to ajayeb.net



infrastructure =/= system

infrastructure perspective:
•modular
•multi-layered, multi-scaled (layered nature of infrastructure, navigating among different scales)
•rough-cut character
•ecologies/complex adaptive systems
-->** infrastructures consist of numerous systems, each with unique *origins and *goals, which are made to interoperate by means of *standards, socket layers [: a bony hollow into which a structure fits], social norms, and individual behaviors that smooth out connections among them
=/=
system perspective:
•fully coherent
•deliberately engineered
•end-to-end process


(Weinberger's notion of) *stoping point*
“knowledge as a series of stopping points”
•printed journal articles
•books
•textbooks
•(other fixed products)
--[changing to]--> a world where knowledge is perceptually in motion }--> in a way ajayeb.net is part of this transition
we face a world of abundant information, hyperlinked ideas, permission-free resources, highly public interaction, and massive, unresolved disagreement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy an[...]

[...]consort well) ==sometimes==> violation of standardization (that some believe is more equal)
(companions need to) [*]learn: emergently sensitize and attune among new cognitive and political circumstances (in and as their very moments of unknowing, when ethical and moral sortings are properly in flux)
(with) Bateson's negative sensitivities to systems, and with Katies King, I keep discovering just how literal is our many being-ness in multiply embedded sorts of biomic sympoiesis

{[*]lecture: feeling-in-the-mouth system, (the word-as-world inhabited by) alternate and overlapping peoples, memories, attunements, citation pools, histories, communities of practice, knowledges, ocean and freshwater “edges"}
{?can i propose (Katie King and Sandoval's) “oppositional consciousness” instead of (Mouffe's) “agonistic pluralism"}

responses, abilities, infrastructures, distributed embodiments,

[*]traumas: intensities crowded with affiliations, loyalties, essential truths

(Bateson > Leigh Star > Katie King) *transcontextual* (transcontextual circumstances: moving from one context to another, one world to another, one set of knowledges to another) ==> [*]boundary objects: workaround things, concepts, processes, even routines that permit coordination, sometimes collaboration, without consensus (non-conscious and conscious)--local, supralocaling, and global in material topologies in which spacetimenatureculture may be mixed, developmental yet transtemporal, (they don't create boundaries) *they work to keep boundaries from getting in the way of collaboration* [~=? sleep-walking: ignore or even miss that there are boundaries about, or honor boundaries = differences that should be honored without being stuck there]
---[can i suggest ‘enfolding’ instead of ‘sympoiesis’ for artists?]

****ajayeb: my transcontextual habitat**** [--(Katie King)--> sites where people, objects, animals, ecological processes, academic restructurings, and scales of injustice unfold, enfold]

‘to feel family and parent memories as our own’ --> a skill that intertwines historical and personal biography (sometimes trauma) as a feature of *memory encoding*

[*]autopoiesis: a notion, a theory of cellular organization, that makes a fold in history --> reformulating an orientation into an ‘experimental epistemology’

*memoir animated word-worlds worm-holed* (~= my lecture-performances, Katie King's talksites --> speculations gathering with stigmergy, recursive paradox, and a sympoiesis of boundary objects)

#my project: redesigning ajayeb's “writings” among dispersed, diffracted, and emergent methods of attention
-to redesign “aboutness” (as nonrepresentational : recursive relational agency of/about reciprocities in worldly processes)
-to redesign fiction of writing (khipu)
-to redesign @apass archive --> records of how things ha[...]

[...]accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attributed to somebody”


attention (in time) -->
•narrow the range of possibility of -ism(s)
•alter the grain of detail ==> *differential focus*


ajayeb.net: an intellectual infrastructure assemblaged and stacked (extensively scaled, intensely scoped) =/= disciplinized archives of references (a knowing that linkages exist and can be assumed and must be consciously made explicit as “new”)
•my “=/=” set the focus of lens unsed in examining --> alter the grain of detail (deliberately and dismissingly) --> a “we” is needed --to--> pull back --to--> include alternate knowledge worlds
ajayeb.net/bibli: bird's-eye view of the bibliographic growth

mobility and detachability of “nots” provoking frission

@ERG's new website: what if the worlding here needs to scope and scale along ranges of detail, indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?

routinized rhetoric about feminism

apparatus: open-ended practices

****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****

neutrality (<-- moral commitment) =/= relativism: forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority

(learning from Katie) my technique in ajayeb study --> i brazenly detach words from their original context and mobilize then all together for my own irritating purposes [...] i both reduce and add to the complexity (of globals and locals)
**(my play:) double or multiple consciousness ==> [*]ajayeb: growing boundary objects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the hu[...]

[...]ernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganization
==> a “decay” in the capacity for perception [<-- to be careful in working for ajayeb not to romanticize (elitist and regressive fantasy of communal relations in) premodern modalities of looking/listening as richer, deeper, or more valuable :
modern urban life as “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli” =/= premodern's “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase"]

(sensory mental schema)


understanding of distraction within a larger deterioration of experience

-distraction (not as a product of decay or anthropy, rather) as a mean to overcome bankruptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival of the lost ideal of artistic absorption in work now exiled to the margins of mechanized and routinized world
•Rodin: gazing of the handworker
-
}--> “reception in a state of distraction”, (<== absorption is psychologically grounded perception) =/= Crary arguing that attention and distraction ceaselessly flowing into one another on the same continuum (of social field)



[tales of understanding]-*
•what are the cognites of ‘contemplation’ (in german or farsi)?
the theological resonances of this latinate word --> contemplation: viewing/considering with continued attention; going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground


(to oppose) contemporary modes of distraction
modern forms of interiority, absorption, psychic isolation

Riegl's dream of a world in which art would be inseparable from an imaginary democratic harmony of individual and community (=/= harem)

collective attention (central attentive mass audience, 1900) : cinema

rational attention: attention linked to thought, one's telescope on object

(for Nietzsche:) attention: possibility of an absorption ==> forgetting --> life-affirmative }--> “focusing on the present moment”

final virtue of modern man: *presence of mind* --Nietzsche--> necessary part of the (cosmopolitan) individual's functioning within a modern world of economic facts and qualities --> ready at response to the machine, affinity with the technical, athletic political (#integration tale)
--> the (serious) modern soul is directed towards the news, focusing on the present, to employ the moment (#presentism #pa[...]

[...]
zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•

my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)


a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,

suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)

opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination

Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extinction of his society) [==implying==> an unstable domination] =/= administrated and rationalized order of a money economy

priestly status of Elen in her performances implying an pathos and metaphysics of distance (and dismantling it?)

be careful with this liminal positions:
•activation of a broken collective memory
•imposition of modern oblivion on the other


presenting music:
socialized activity, indicating the *superficial appearance of a collective reception*
immediacy of an audience
“physicality of music making itself” --Leppert--> the sight of the body's labor to produce sound
19th century ideal of a musical performer as a quasi-sexual virtuoso

performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department

...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)


*score* (coming from the boredom of a third-rate military music band after 1850 in Europe) aligned with the rationalizing imperatives of industrial production: hierarchically ranked states *executing an external algorithm* ~= partition: allocating its parts
[*]score: the image of programmed labor in our society (@Lilia) --> logic of combination


-in ap[...]

[...]nation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control

(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions

(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception might also have the capacity for *revivifying or expanding the limits of thought or cognitive awareness* [<-- and today 2020 many don't consider our contemporary media culture has this capacity]
--> what if our fragmented nature is one of the forms the discontinuous nature of reality can be apprehended?

celestial camera obscura

Dewey was deeply interested in practical ways of mind-body unity
rhythm, eurhythmy
alexander technique


unwavering model of pure contemplation
“pure knowing subject = forget your own personality, lose oneself in perception" = clear eye of the world (Schopenhauerian model of knowing in Doctor Strange movie, seeing the world directly and leave entirely one's own interests, the premodern idea of *perception = presence*)



Bergson (+ Cezanne) --> deepest forms of perception are mixed and composite

(in Matter and Memory) Bergson: establish a model of perception =/= routinized and reified forms of perceptual experience within western urban and scientific culture of the late 19th century

[*]externality = dream of inhuman immediacy: a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous
---> go to Lucy movie primordial and fundamental act of perception

Bergson (+ Dewey's ideal of coordination)
(the role of the) *body: reproduce in action the life of the mind*
(the role of the) *mind: hindering the thought from being lost in dream, an organ of ‘attention to life’
--> how memory and perception interpret each other
*memory coincides (diverge, intersect) with the “present” perception*
{ [*]determine: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination

--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)

*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*

(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in o[...]

[...]ken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)

Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*

literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation

to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending

...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference


business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism

how each of us work to fix identities

to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us

relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity

(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)

conspicuous ornaments of legend

masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings


(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip


towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations

which relics in contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?

...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repairing

*we need to imagine how to restyle the relation between wounding and care so we can start to transform the fabric of our society*
(Archer)

@Sina: deconstructing the work of mending ajayeb


[stitches] pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality
(Mark Newport)

linger in the cut produced by the suture (=/= patch over the proper wound)

(what kind of mending dares us?) to consider different, less clear-cut paths of relation and being (--✕--> masculinity's wounded duty)

Freud's fold of castration anxiety, fetishism, and Oedipus complex unfold in feminized form of labor to stitch and sew, to mark the wounds that “men must suffer” --> fashion material ritual, transforming and ideologically reinforcing femininity


[...]

[...]/> electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force

1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines

piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military

means of consistent calibration

🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)

electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements

}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)

distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism

#title
international bureau of measurement

Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories

kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force

metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity

*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire

turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper

Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality

post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling [...]

[...]lice determinations:) [examples of semi-events (half-witnessed):]
•a dangerous-looking animal moving about on a man's property turned out to be a black plastic trash bag blowing in the wind
•threatening graffiti on a lawn were markings made by phone company employees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)

[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)

(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)


A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?

([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground

(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered

harshly half-formed world

germinal aesthetics

channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*

the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses

(to sharpen) realist attention to things


[*]life: ontological entertainment

unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere

gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)


“expressivity sliced through[...]