[...]ist may make an inventory of what makes the animal act and react --> collecting ‘meanings’ the scientist rebuilds the world as each animal perceives it + seeks for which meaning all these things take for it (=/= adopt the perspective of animal)

the scientist aims not just to understand what something merely ‘means’ for another being, but also how something ‘matters’ for it (~ the most meaningful)

language of perspective --Daston--> what does it mean to understand other minds
*sympathetic projection* [--> **perspective: apotheosis of subjectivity as the essence of mind] <-- a cultural shift:
•habit of interior observation cultivated by certain forms of piety
•increasingly refined language of individual subjectivity (developed in the 18th and 19th century novel)
•equation drawn between ‘sensory experience = self’ by sensationalist psychology
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy

perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective ==imperil==> necessary distance (or ‘sanitary cordon’ between the observer and the observed)
}==>
•anthropomorphism =/= science
•anecdote =/= legitimate date
•nonhuman =/= beliefs (--> you can't attribute belief to animals)


(old dualism of) “Science =/= non-science” ~= “imaginative (autobiographical, emotional) =/= factual (neutral)” ~= “body =/= mind”

(reconstruction of)
what is most meaningful for animal
what is the perspective of animal

*most meaningful: affected perspective* (Despret) =/= (Uexküll) semiological perspective (of the tick)

(looking for or) focus on affected perspective ==Despret==> (reveals) scientists’ bodies in their practice --> what having a body means (for scientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made” by scientific practices [<-- that is why the question of science is important for whoever dealing or working with the body]
+
(Annemarie ==>) bobies (that are made) are enacted multiples (in medical practice)
+
(Despret -->) how bodies are undoing and redoing themselves through different scientific practices with animals? = *how are bodies growing multiples in diverse practices?* + (its corollary) *how do each of these practices (+ animals they are addressing) enact each of these bodies?*



Mowat's *modest embodiment* ==Despret==> partial affinities [=/= seeing like a wolf or mouse] ==> feeling or being like a wolf or mouse = ****to be taken in a radically non-psychological sense**** (--> Cinderella's non-psychological relation to her birds and mice =/= contemporary western psychological subjects)
---> go to wildboyz, Cinderella under a mouse regimen
-using his body as an experimental tool --> eating a wolf's diet (=/= empathy, romantic dream of being a wolf)
submit his own body to mouse diet
one uses one's own body to meet the needs of another
Mowat used his own body as a means of generating scientific proof, and turned it into an apparatus for validity [--> how do we apply or misapply our body in artistic environment for generating truth and validity? to be careful with the context of generalization]
([artist's and] scientist's) body: a technical device, the witness
(companion story -->) ***to embody the way other beings solve their survival problems***

“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of the morning greeting ceremony

limits of endurance


i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation

Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)

***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)


wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries


what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?

(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*

****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)


companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}



[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodied practices of knowing [of (Sina's) Cinderella]

**bodies enact =/= perform**
@Chloe, Mette --> (ironic) performing a protocol =/= embodied choreography
(contemporary choreography =/= embodiment)

(scientists and animals are fleshy creatures which are) enacted and enacting through their *embodied choreography* (<-- epistemological, political, ontological)

scientist work [observing, collecting events, meeting them, writing about, inscribing them into theories --> explain why they do what they do] ==> *makes their animals more real*
--Despret--> a praxiographic account [~= feedback] (paying attention to the way scientists embody their work) ==> *make scientists more real*


(for apass) we need praxiography =/= philosophy or theory [of artistic research]
Sina's note taking in apass --> how *practices at some point become words*
#feedback in apass ==make==> artists and their work more real
feedback ==> interpretive version --> 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==> possibility of an embodied communication (=/= experiencing with one's body what the other experiences)
---> go to Cinderella's empathy: make one think with & with the body
--Despret--> *empathy becomes a scientific tool* that need to be shaped, forged, refined, embodied, a tool that attunes bodies

[*]care: it matters for them that it matters for their animals (***what matters for the other person becomes your matters***)

how to act in a polite manner in a baboon's world? (or in an artist's world, when we give feedbacks)
{seeing like a baboon =/= acting like a baboon = corresponding with a baboon}--> *they transform themselves in order to create partial connections* (James’ “acting as if”) =/= performative
•to act with the baboons (learn how a tree gives you dirty looks, how it resists the proposition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”

embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement

[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond

--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies

“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism

***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)

Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*

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

Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist

اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them

*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*

-why do we listen to prohpets?

quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being

(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance

(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*

what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language


*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in

very bottom of the ladder of choices...

for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی

ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)

ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne

*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study

(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens

the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution

the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning

---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity for all time for all cultures)


ravens are capable of being silent when they don't care to be noticed

(the raven inviting the others to share in the party, when food is difficult to find + they are experts in hiding food items) eyes of an ethologist --> why do ravens do that which the logic of evolution should prohibit them from doing? --Despret--> this motive will be not only a matter of discovering but also of inscribing in the regime of proof

hierarchical ladder =/= great economy of conflicts

one-upmanship

(raven's) acts that appear to be useless, pertain at once to both the game and to the affirmation of skill

**reciprocity of exchanges of good conduct**
•you are interested in the differences
•you are interested in unexpected strategies
•you take into account the fact that the animal does not cease to transgress the rules and models + that it is unpredictable in its choices (<-- ravens demand this) ==> you adopt other ***criteria of achievement*** [--> in giving #feedback to artists: understanding their ‘criteria of achievement’ (has nothing of an ambitious program about it, but) leaves their program totally open in regards to its realization]
◦for example (Heinrish explains) raven's criteria of achievement: the raven can ****procure resources from the environment and convert them to a little more of itself**** (<-- @apass this is also what artists do, *converting the environment into a little more of itself*)
=/= theory of sociobiology {raven = an umpteenth example of the “all purpose” model of the theory of the “selfish gene” --> altruistic behaviors ==> transmit the greatest possible number of its genes to the population --> ravens who are altruistic recruiters (sharing rare resources), costly from the individual point of view, can reap benefits in regard to evolution ~= *the animal simply obeys a relatively inflexible rule: help your relatives, ignore others, and you will multiply the copies of yourself* --> *your animal will be similar to others and all the variations be nothing but details of the same motive* [=/= Cinderella]}

how does the motive make the “crime” an achievement for the raven?
how (to accord) this achievement (with that which) translate to (the raven's everyday) survival?

(register of) negotiations of interest and stakes ~/= (politeness of) “getting to know” by posing the question, in terms of achievement, what it is that interests the raven
--> to elucidate (not just what and how, but) why the raven does what it does
•the ravens will not show you straightforwardly what counts for them --> you have to create situations that permit the ravens to help you decide (among all the contesting fictions) the right fiction [#artistic feedback as fictioning]

dance of hesitation


(a cadaver لاشه, once a preditor, waiting for an imprudent raven) to reverse the situation: to convert the bird into a little more of itself
==> salutary egoism: it would be better to be with many others in the case of this type of error

organization
cooperation
i find, you open

*work of the researcher = leading the ravens to take a position in relation to his fictions and hypothesis* (resisting those that don't explain, clarifying those that do) --Despret--> **the researcher must create a dispositive that confers on the ravens “the power not to submit to his interpretations”** <-- politeness of “getting to know” {"getting to know you” does not necessarily turn on an attentive benevolence but on the art of finding the forces, and exchanging them, in an exercise of [*]rivalry: (constituted by) a clever mixture of complicity & opposition}

test of the intelligence and cunning (of each other)

(in the case of ravens [and #feedback in art])
theoretically --> we understand nothing
practically --> we have to learn their tricks to be able to approach them

**a matter of finding the procedures that attest to the pertinence of explanations** (=/= a matter of explaining/understanding them)


enigma --{(like good detective stories) inscribes the protagonists in a relation of}--> rivalry هم اورى : if you want to understand them you must try to be as smart and cunning than they are (not letting oneself be duped by appearances)

politeness --> suspicion ~= respect (‘re-spectare’ to look twice)
•confidence without verification offers little guarantee as to its robustness

we want to witness in a reliable manner = we want that which we learn from the ravens is to be treated with confidence = we want to define ourselves as authorized by them to speak in their names = we want to (required to) offer them the opportunity to show what they can do (with the *great flexibility of our interpretation*)


[*]trap
(enigma of the apparently inexplicable behavior) --> *how to ask the ravens, with the same politeness, to take a position in relations to all the possible conjectures of the investigation?* how to ask them to teach us the good explanation, the right motive? ==> the researcher will have to learn the ***art of the trap and the net*** = the art of the lure and the trick = ***the art of learning from those whose enigma you are trying to solve*** (and have no intention of helping you) --> ‘how that which counts can count for them’
•*the art of metis / cunning intelligence* : the particular form of intelligence that the greeks (learning from hunters and fishermen) cultivated = intuition شهود + cunning مکر + perspicacity فراست + dissimulation فریب + improvisation بدیهه + vigilant attention هوشيار + sense of timeliness بجا (<-- this type of “getting to know” was constituted exaclty to be found in a domain where human intelligence is constantly at grips with the land or sea animals in an are where humans saw their intelligence and techniques transform in learning from animals**** [-how to prolong the possibility of this transformation?]) <-- *it is the only way of getting to know that can hope to address intelligent highly flexible* (Despret > Heinrish) = ravens who require of those who want to know them the same flexibility and the same intelligence
}-->[reading ajayeb bestiary as enigma; Bambi's mother studies; little mermaid; (using Despret's ethological research to think about) art of feedback ~= getting to know you =/= audience engagement]


strange politeness
art of cunning (lures + manipulation) --> enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]


to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]

to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)


the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones

-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?

*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*


biological detective stories

curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know

more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis

{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can understand, and I too am recruited” }--Despret--> ***if this recruitment by nonhumans was able to acquire such an efficacy, it is because the human was transformed by those whose enigma he was trying to understand*** [=/= animal rights activist ==> evidence arrive in the form of a weakened raven that has to be saved]

***letting himself be drawn into their enigma = converting the environment into a little more of himself ==> he learned to become sensitive to what makes the ravens sensitive*** (Cinderella's mice learned that about her)

Heinrish --> I, as a mammal for whom they are not intended, can feel [...] I also feel I can detect a raven's surprise, happiness, bravado, and self-aggrandizement


(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the ravens demand --Cinderella--> *progress often depends more on how well one follows the situation than on how well one controls* (especially when control is difficult)
•one must learn to ask them to give evidence differently and to try to understand *how a raven ponders a question*


and now, when everything is suddenly new, this bird acts as if nothing is out of the ordinary! [...] I can only guess that they see it not as an absolute but as departures from the accepted. when everything is different, then comparisons cease, and almost anything can be accepted -Heinrish
(--> integration)


tame
questions that the other ones do not allow to be asked
tamed and be tamed to better find out what matters from a raven's point of view
gain the trust to respond to the demands of the politeness of *getting to know*
•the dispositive of taming then proves to be a privileged access of “getting to know” : it actualizes competences that have less chance of occuring in usual conditions (those of the birds and those of the researcher) ==> transforms habits (those of the birds and those of the one who investigate them)

aviary مرغدانی

the most adventurous & the most curious ==> the most attached to the researcher (to Cinderella) ==> hierarchy takes shape as a function of bravery [=/= bravery of adventure in the shape of radical detachment and fluidity]

(when) *investigator becomes biographer* (==> the story changes)

(how when why) the fact of recruiting must be linked to demonstrations of bravery

position in the hierarchy
manner of recruiting


shyness: dancing a little dance of hesitation


(Despret's account of how Heinrish succeeded in) recruiting the ravens around his problem <~~~~> *he sufficiently recruited himself to invent pertinent ways of addressing them* ==> the models are now commensurate متناسب with their unpredictability
@apass

Heinrish becomes their expert and their reliable spokesperson ==> (like Pierre) he could now convince and interest his colleagues in terms that count for them (==> enroll other researchers to pose other questions) ==> he could bear witness for them
=/= Hitchcock's the birds --> nature turned to horror, based on in Germany in mid-1990s fifty ravens invaded the idyllie Swabian Alps region... ==> their killing would be necessary
(chain of recruitment:) the German ravens had in thier turn succeeded in recruiting the representative of the american ravens, and Heinrish was able to recruit ecologists, who in their turn mobilized experts and politicians, who themselves modified the habits of the owners of the cows and sheep... [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]

***amazing interspecific recruitment***


Sina --telegram--> visual animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)


wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)


the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥

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

[title]
the old taghalob (تقلب cheat)
history of enumeration in the Iran (measurement, weight, scale)
the history of our non-mathematical practices

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

time travel (in TV series or literature) --> (regardless if they are dystopian or not) essential for creating sensations of historical continuity

Marzolph on premodern middle eastern narrative culture
seafaring merchant...
sailor's yarns

tales documented in persian literature of the muslim period appear to be offshoots of earlier versions in either indian or arabic literature --> arabic as the lingua franca of the day

Kitab ajayeb al Hind, wonders of india, 10th century by iranian captain Bozorg ibn Sahriyar of Ramhormoz

(Marzolph holisitic assessment [=/= Beyzai's parochial claims of iranianness] of) middle-eastern narrative traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position

city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.

agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat

[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protagonists of merchants (often thrift sons of rich merchants, who embark on travel after they have wasted their fortune with false friends)
•save himself by his inventiveness, strong determination, physical strength
•there is no single predestined future but a variety of options whose eventual practical course depends on the protagonist's active intervention
•(Sinbad left behind on an island where) the Ruhh has laid its eggs (spirit's eggs تخم های روح 🥚🥚🥚)
•althought most of them kill other people in order to survive, their action is spontaneously motivated by the needs of the moment
•

با هزار زحمت with a thousand efforts


customary formal “hearing is obeying”


pitfalls
“[...]When I returned home, my wife had died. They lifted her up, took me along, and brought us to that cave. With a rope they let me down and blocked the entrance of the cave. After they had lowered the [body of my dead] wife and the [bundle of] clothes and I had regained my senses, I got up and saw a tremendously large cave. I installed the wick and lit the lamp, chose a place by the side, cleaned it and made a bedstead. And when every two days they threw somebody down there alive, I killed that person with my knife and took the supplies of three days bread and water, until one day they deposited in that cave my former wife’s sister alive, together with her dead husband. When she saw me, she recognized me and consented to marry me. I slept with her and had several children with her. Some time later I started to dig the ground in a corner of the cave with my knife until I had made a [large] hole to the side of the sea. Every day I would sit there, until I finally saw a ship. I attached a piece of cloth to a stick and waved it, until the ship came close and took me and my children aboard. They also asked me the same question [i. e. why my children had heads like horses], I told them my story, and they delivered me to my country. I had many more children with that woman. This is the story of my children and their ancestry.”


moral obligation of contemporary society
...the king would use the slave girl as muslim men would do = for entertainment of all kinds (including sexual intercourse, but not eating them)


relief after hardship فرج بعد از شدت

urdu romance bagh o bahar باغ و بهار

(the considerably older) misogynous motif of the unfaithful wife
husband and sife being buried together

--> part and parcel of the **narrative stock** talented storytellers would exploit to construct their tales

intertextual references
•cannibal black men
•the one-eyed person whose one eye had been picked out by a bird (a well-known narrative from premodern arabic and persian tradition, a one-eyed character is taken as an ill omen, whereas here he figures as a friendly advisor and helper)
•
--> ***stock characters*** of premodern middle eastern literature

Marzolph --> concider texts as artful creations composed by a talented narrator =/= taking texts as the products of an anonymous popular “fold” tradition that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual

*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*

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

*~._

all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's


عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)

[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)

[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire

}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?


the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo

sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness

(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects

•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation

(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere” =/=? ajayeb premodern


zoo
one of the most ancient institutions
transformed by the event horizon of modernity

(Fanon dramatizing) colonialization is animated by zoonomia as phantasy: “when the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary”

*we = sadism's children*

how imaginary beings and *fantastic zoology* always carry a colonial logic

biological essentialism : a dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic

...racial and colonial violence of slavery

prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)

[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incoherent genders to make gender matter at all****
--Hayward--> when trans becomes ‘this’ (an effect of gender) then it can only serve regimes of power


[Hayward's (expected and a bit cliche)] transfigurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating


native
a zoological term

Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast

(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)

soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)

carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]

genre of animal

Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)


maroon: escaped cattle


typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic

glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*

xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)

Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]

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

*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)

•to pose
•to transpose

in my work, i transpose: walk through readings (=/= transform: performative “true” embodiment)
•transposition: a mapping of senses, to change something into another form (+ its foreclosures, refusals, limits) = expressive excitation, provocation of difference that cannot be resolved by penetration or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration

border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood

sensation: a composite of affects and percepts

personal =/= individual

Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina

story: act of violence and deception

medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account

accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations

described: formalistically detailed transpositional

post-animal: the afterward of the animal is meat


bumptious coherence of bodies

(neighborhoods) designed to make some vulnerable while others safe
percussed by bullets or by traffic
*threat as invitation*

جراحی زیبایی who alter themselves through surgeries and hormonoes *to feel themselves differently*
(shia in iran is islam after a cosmetic surgery to feel their religion differently)

*changing sex is about changing senses and species* @Foad


depending on my needs, i pretend not to understand

instrumentalization of animal life
surgically changing body


technique of eschew اجتناب
eschewing a nature or culture distinction


sex in pieces
spheres of imagination


[my work:] transhistorical diagnosis: reading in pieces neighborhoods of imagination (opposed to what is available)
#sleep-walking


web-building beasts (spiders) [webbing =/=? weaving: a feminine trope?] }--> expression of the body
my fleshy referent 🕷
over-reaching subjects
*spider's web ==propose==> home and territory are of and with the body*
spiders are scenes of arachnophobia and revultion
extending bodily substance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes

[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*

[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat


•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects

(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**

(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts

irreverent intimacies


thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”

limits (of my body) = energized zones


sadomasochism stitches


*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)


pastpresent: an always present past in the present

*patterns longer than lived experience*

[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies


{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place


•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally


(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus


[*]texture: residue of unmetabolized and metabolized sensations of animate forces --> emergence of bodiliness (<-- Hayward's rhetoric)

transitional body = textural body

architecture: the most binding part of the communal rhythm

appearance ~= metonymic
appearance allows her to emerge situationally as a woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject


(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment


identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference

(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)

cross-species rejoiners
mended spiderwebs


error is (still a kind of) expression


human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials


(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”


(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*


...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals

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

what does the maze mean for the rat?
what a maze can mean?

experimental psychology --> subjects conform most often to the expectations of their experimenters [--Despret--> they are *artifactual*]
-*the scientists think that the subject respond to the question that is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)

organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner


what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view

a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do

{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}--> the animal **fills its environment with perceptual objects**, it constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•

for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***

[*]subject: that which accords meaning

the object is constituted in action (the animal never enters into a relation with an object as such) --> meaning does not emerge from the object = objects are not alone in having meaning accorded to them

Umwelt: an environment of relations

no animal can be neutral of another (in the environment) <--if-- it can be seen to be accorded a meaning

***strange lures ==make=possible==> types of research***

Cinderella to the mice : alluring producer of sociality (lure: enticement for meaning) <== *lures are frequently required in order to convey the meanings of an animal*

a human can take on the meaning of *socius* (comrade, friend, ally)
a human can learn what a socius means in the like of a jackdaw (to be taken for a material socius)
--> ‘associating with' = carry out various activities together

you want to be taken by somebody from another species for a material socius (that is also why people have pets) =/= pray


meanings are not fixed once and for all, flowing from elementary needs of the organism: meanings are flexible, can apply to other beings, extend to unforseen situations, change, and even invent and create new relational uses (<-- this is what i experience in translational working with meanings in farsi literate in my lectures)


(Cinderella asking) when observing rats, what can produce the activity of translating their behaviors in terms of meanings?


one confuses the term “examine” with that of “neutralize” --> (Watson, scientist) removed the rat's eyes, olfactory bulb, and whikers, which are essential to the sense of touch in rats, before throwing it into the exploration of the maze...
--Despret--> if the world had probably lost all meaning for this de-sensed rat, the rat itself had lost all meaning for its experimenter (if it ever had one for him)
-this is the goal of the procedure: search out the lowest common denominator, the left-over, the automation, the behavior that from one species to another will render all organisms commensurable تناسب پذير [<-- no!!!!]

the tacit assumption that an animal could ever enter into a relationship with an object is false <--Uexküll-- (to have in mind) to study the most different kinds of animals in their relations to a maze


her attic, Cinderella in the universe of meanings

an epistemological problem --> it is not straightforward to enter into the subjective universe of an animal in interrogating it through an experimental dispositive thought up by a human

[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]

maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of view of the rat (Uexküll calls “familiar path”)? how rats in pretending to respond to the questions of the behaviorists respond in fact to another question?
-behaviorist's question: what is the abstract relation of a being, whatever it may be (that which the behaviorists call an organism) to a natural object?

why do rats always touch the walls as they go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?

***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***

the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*

(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer

...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar path” nor that of the meaning of the wall


artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her

hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation


(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control


sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it

each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects

(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*

*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of 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 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 --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)

•(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane

consumption of neighboring species


*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)

deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either

the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else

recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation

([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of thought)


(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo

condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death

Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata

*cruelty =/= violence*

•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode 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 characters)

the good soldier Svejk --> good-natured side of czech national identity

self-congratulatory narrative <-- (when you think you are always) morally on the right side
@apass

(tv series) forging resistance-based (national or individual) memory


the way in which a society understands its own past --> through culture (not a matter for politicians and legislative measures alone) that particular narratives about the past are kept alive and help to structure understandings of the present

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

strolling: walking in the city --> sense of belonging to the city
walking in 19th century (starting with England) --> something for the lower class
--later--> walking became a middle class pursuit (something you do in your garden ==> parks for walking)
city walking --> claiming step by step parts of the city --> practice of belonging [~ sense of place (in history = nationalism) of certainty + comfort] --> belonging is an individual imperative (something that is created by the individual on the ground) [~/=? a category of exclusion]

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

anger: an expression by which the observer perceives as if something *happened to the person who is angry* (a passive experience, not something that the person did)

intuition = recognition

•memory is really bad at remembering lists
•memory is really good at remembering routes through space
•(humans are good at remembering) agent-thinking =/= abstract notions


*anger ==reveals==> world*

anger ==> makes you ungly ==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]

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

postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network

Imre

western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history


two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)

literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past


-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*

***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once

television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]

historical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present


in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present

national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)

television as a massive archaeological site

polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing

(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media


(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past

{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]

(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory

post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)


nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**

nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy


there are more than one way of (content of) longing

television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media

(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms

...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation

(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*

nostalgia --foreground--> coexistence of different temporalities in the present

postsocialist nostalgia in Romania is similar in structure to late socialist nostalgia of the 1980s in Hungary

manage feelings of dislocation ==> longing for national homes
~~--> preference for literature and high art as expressions of what has been identified as cultural nationalism (“national tradition = tradition invested in high art”) + perceived illegitimacy of popular cultural production and consumption (concealed by the allegedly rebellious “dissident” status of intellectuals) ==organize==> the contents of collective memory


Imre --> racialized underpinnings of allegedly “pure” aesthetic judgments


inherently nostalgic and pre-modern postsocialist population <==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


television's capacity for personalization and narrativization

*demiworld of popular culture*
television’s dominant position within the domestic environment and its special appeal to an emotionally available female or feminine consumer --> television: the mass medium of the socialist period --pose--> the danger of a passive mindless consumption of formulaic narratives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch


Western European cultural nationalisms

the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity


West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters


(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years


aspirational narrative (of nation...)

postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)


(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**


national specificities of memory systems developed around television


nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors

FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry


(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending) *top-down history lessons* + the work of *popular memory* ==> punctuate contemporary continuities with the communist regime that are taboo in official narratives but prevalent in popular perceptions of history
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)

socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*


(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)


(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propaganda --> *a familiar ironic mode of experiencing history vicariously* (in a way that is experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person)


(looking at televisual nostalgia -->) late socialism ==> an affect & epistemology that can only access the “authentic” through contradiction ambivalence self-reflective irony
<--Holdsworth-- expression of present anxieties about history and memory in general

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___[notes Tehran 2023]___

semiotics: study of the differnce between “what you say ~/= what they understand”

(my fundamentals:)
*sharing =/= communicating*


آشپز دیو سپید
it is said that the White Div had a cook --> exploring the cosmology of Div (in Shahnameh) with food, hunting for eating, bestiary, cooking technology, taste
(inspired by anime JYfdfDU9JUY)
#short story: narrartor describes the story after the defeat of the White Div (Div-e Sefid) by Rostam. “rather than worring about the kingsmen X, he was more interested in what is for dinner...”. there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...”  “immediately asked for more”

dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by not having a map (or guide) --> are we in a dungeon?

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journalism: professional discursive pursuit (of truth, of propaganda, etc.)
=/= journalism: proximity to the event + the risks that that entails

(Ghazzi's notion of) *affective proximity* : (a mode of consideration, a way) to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country
--> a media practitioner =/= the event they are representing and participating in
affective proximity : what locals navigate to reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country =/= discursive

*emotional labour* of media practices of local reporters and witnesses

what the word “revolution” mediates (in Syria, Iran, etc.) [~/?= civil war]
1. an indication of commitment to a desired goal
2. an identity marker based on a past-oriented lament over what was sought but not achieved

study of affect and emotion in global news --(contextualized within)--> unequal power relations (==> journalistic roles & modes ofrepresentaiton)

user-generated-content
political economy of global war reporting
living with violence

journalism <--?---> affect

affective proximity
==shape==> the boundaries of journ0alism and activism
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure

(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts

(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]

...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others

(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor

[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)

journalism = represent + narrate

(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them

(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***

proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)

*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals


*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•

(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence

(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”

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

collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood

global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)

one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission  =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)

(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}

zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding & speaking of) “history = a series of junctures scattered across time”


(the problem is) ***historical consciousness*** --> orientational
“bestows upon actuality a temporal direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of historical memory” (Rüsen)
1. make specific references to historic events (compare them to the present [==guide==> political action])
2. *making references to “history” at large*

[*]zigzag memory structure: deploy mnemonic spins to reframe historic events
•establish equivalent between the present and the past [--!--> (fundamentally despotic?) technique that i also use in lecture performances]


authoritarian populism


(Hegelian) [*]action: pursue one aspect of history + breaking away from away from another
1. (modern) revolutionary: telling a new story, (--populist--> focus on) *exclusionary politics*, once the leader is in power the objective is to prolong the idea of historic juncture --justify--> continued exclusion

populist --Laclau--> (invocation of)
•people = empty signifier
•leader = embodiment of people's agency

***rhetoric of resentment*** --> victimhood
[*]resentment: an emotional-moral framework --aim--> continuously regenerate the felt intensities --underwrite--> demands for revenge + lamentations (of victimhood)


***nationalism ==> populism***

(many countries) national identity (& militancy) is intertwined with:
•narrative of self-victimization --
•invocation of trauma

victorious victimhood ==fuels==> aggressive militancy
for example --> Israel: nothing counts as evidence as one's own empowerment, one is always under threat, if Israel cannot maintain the omnipotent position that its victory offered (1967) it would be under existential threat

anticolonial nationalism (or postcolonial populism)
•past injury (“We have been oppressed” ==> “re-empower ourselves again”)
•decades after independence --still--> fixated on the anticolonial moment ==> perpetuate a sense of victimhood }--> to mask authoritarianism

victimhood
•Hindu nationalism --> reformulated history from a focus on colonialism and postcolonial nation-building into a narrative of victimhood that blames historic Muslim invasions for the decline of Hindu civilisation and nationhood
•China --> reformulated its school history textbooks to stress victimhood and humiliation through the idea of China's “100 years of humiliation” in reference to Western and Japanese invasions
•United States --> nationalism often takes the shape of antipathy to government that is enmeshed with an ideology of liberal individualism
•
}--> ***logic of empowerment*** (--permeate--> economies of visibility)


***memory narrative***


iran --> shohada شهدا martyrs of iran-iraq war --> after the war became the picture of collective victimhood (“heroes = us”)

Erdogan's speech
“we have been tested by fire” (--?--> Siavash's fire trial is populist?)
~= “we have been tested by enemy”
~= “evil forces”


(from) populism --to--> neofascism
(from) generic rhetoric of an unidentified enemy --to--> articulation of an identifiable foe (who is met with political violence)

authoritarian state apparatus [= political system + culture + institutions + ?] --allow--> smoother way of operationalisation of narratives (about the dangers of adversaries)
-exactly what kind of state apparatus we have in iran?


historical victimhood --> resurgent populist discourse
•people have been enduring victimhood for too long
•fateful junctures throughout history
•authentic great path
•urgency of message
•

animating rhetoric with self-victimhood ==produce==> divisions (men =/= women, us =/= enemy, etc.)



exclusionary politics <-- homogeneous community (=/= alien intrusion, outside forces, immigrants, minorities, etc.)

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Kundera
is humor modern?
*humor is not ancient* (?!)
“whatever humor touches it ambiguites”
humor = ambiguitor

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globalization =/= cold war
globalization =/= enlightenment (“universal humanism + rationalized tech ==> freedom for all”)

cold war = a meaningfull relation between ideology & power [==give==> orientation + identity --> normative approach to global phenomena]
geopolitc + ideologic borders
=/=
globalization --> completly different political behaivor (definitions of national goals, friend and enemy, etc.) --> pluralist democracy (differences + contrasts) =/= social democracy (erasing differences)

globalization = attitude حالت =/= meaning
[cold war: “world ~= (a sort of) problem” --> behaviors had] meaning ==> (base for) power

cold war: war ==> identities
globalization: conflits =/=> identities

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two points
•artistic research: a form of art that uses knowledge as its main medium
•artistic research has no relation to the unknown (=/= an idea of research im in which one faces something unknown or new therefore needs to research)
•my work (in general) has been about the critique of engineering (the talent of engineering)


the fossil of fire goes back before the wild-life

the history of fire related to the history of forest

In the 1950s, government officials in Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca--in southern Mexico--blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history of their forests. Clearly, the communities internalized parts of the state-sponsored degradation discourse. (However, discourse analysis is not enough; it is all too easy to treat discourse as a monolithic structure of ideas[...] ) [...] These discourses require a threat, a source of chaos and disorder to which the moral regeneration of the progressive discourse can provide a solution. In the case of the Sierra juarez, forest fires provide this opposition. [...] It is exactly this resistance of the natural world to discursive domination that is one of the themes of this article. [1]

[1]ANDREWSA LVADORMA THEWS - suppressing FIRE AND MEMORY: ENVIRONMENTALDE GRADATIONAN D POLITICALRE STORATION INT HES IERRAJ UAREZO F OAXACA, 1887-2001

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Jinn older and Man

ecology of the Jinn


(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire
striking sparks of fire
and roasting at hell-fire
the fire of Allah, kindled
...



bringing together of two homogeneous blocks of material in a given, already-inhabited space

as if we knew what space and time mean



“the desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice. [...] the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.” (Meloy)
(what the design of fire is as expression of? what shaped fire? ice?)
(we are shaped also by fire)

how you go from lizard to bird?
it must have been through the behavior of lizard that ‘birdness’ has come to be possible. a certain trait of behavior have allowed the lizard find itself in the air.


ice age
story of fire, story of grass, ...

after the establishment of a land-based flora (Middle Ordovician period, 470 million years ago) and permitting the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere it permitted the possibility of wildfire.

Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the dominant component of many ecosystems, around 6 to 7 million years ago;

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electrical fire



conflict between the “junk” and the “text” that seemed to fascinate

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

how to write cold with fire? the medium of fire is incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements energized by their contact fuels a sudden blow of increase in their excited entropy. flame. action is the breeze that death digs. foam knows no halt. the focus is noised and seeds location. place penetrates in shattery nozzles originating from thousands of nowheres. inferno's insurance is about aggression of hot.

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A) Accident, Action, Adrenaline, Aggressive, Aid, Aircraft, Alarm, Alert, Ambulance, Apprehension, Arson, Ash, Assess, Assist
B) Bad, Barricades, Battle, Blacken, Blame, Blanket, Blast, Blaze, Blister, Blow out, Breeze, Burning, Burns, Bystander
C) Car, Careless, Catastrophe, Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone



(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them with a substance as he infected the Indians with worshiping cow and Christians with worshiping the hoof of Christ's donkey and the pagans with worshiping idol and matter
and we shall mention the attributes of fire and its properties:
Know! That fire has taken the whole world of universe and no stone and no wood is not uncharged with fire. If a fool takes a piece of wood and asks “where is fire?” I say the way of everything is in manifestation as when two woods strike together made of Margh and Afar,[1] fire will appear or hit stone to metal

[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the origin of fire

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we are too abstract, we are thinking yes there are things out there wild or whatever. then we must be surprise to see that the abstract far thing is made of flesh, quartz, or fire.

unlike camels and rats and sheep, other four legged or mammals, fire is not designed for something, the way organisms evolved to have meanings and representations to each other. fire embodies a vast place in our material and industrial and semiotic world but itself is not a creature of evolution. it knows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.

every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work

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(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulation of synonyms (before language) --> metaphors given birth slowly --> from the Pleistocene to Ordovician --> the accumulation of oxygen --> fire was permitted to exist --> etc.
(keeping a fire burring for a long time is a very strange thing to do. it is utterly Paleolithic to do keep fire, making it stone. it was Muhammad who turned off the lights, literally. when he was born, one the oldest Zoroastrians fire temples suddenly extinguished for no apparent reason. the blessed dark. the box, fire, both are means to have access to the inaccessible. #Muhammad inception/birth had to be connected to a supernatural event.)

(talking) fire --> speech
(telling) stone --> written

in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.

(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)

the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)

we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)

“After you die, others live.” (Sina)

old world's arboreal simians, monkeys

Anthropos

cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.

Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality

ontogenesis---extended in human (the specialized and scheduled development of physical and psychological traits that appear, disappear, or stagnate during the life cycle of the individual.) --> Neoteny (a “state of newness"--a retardation of certain parts of the maturing process.) preprograms life stages, so that our becoming is a lifelong process.
-developement of the self in terms of harmonious relations to other species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -- i myself have turned to old folk to do storytelling, as necessity(!?)

one emerging in Pleistocene, is about perceiving one's place in the scheme of things (and not sending people down the pit into darknesses)

WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)

attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)

inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.

human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic

(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes

Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

trees structure space

**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)

“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]

mammalian ecology

[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]

a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)

a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness, errors of judgment, and the decrepitude of age and disease.)
-Those who fled had to understand [the limits of distance, the intentions of the others, and] (the ability to control) the abyssal terror that itself would engulf them if they submitted to panic. ==> mind
-“self” emerged as the consequence of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and telling is about the told, the ear.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous touch is the matter of stone, intimacy*, sensuous intimacy with the stone, sensuous proximity)
---(rock in water : reef)
-transcontextual; transcontextuality = tanglement {figures running in opposit directions but held together}


nature is a context
*past is a context

*the landscape is full of ghosts (whether we want it or not)
mediated forms

Some examples of exothermic processes:
-spontaneous combustion (~= fire)
-Nuclear fusion (~= sun)
-(in this writing, i am going to take a defenition of fire recovering it from bible, that of the spectacle flame that of the material of specter in the Qur'anic Jinn, and not other forms of exothermic processes)

the issue is reversibility
(“evolution” inevitable? Irreversible?)


[title]
•A Materialist Inquiry into the Beyond
•A Mineral Inquiry into the Beyond
•Genealogy of a Worship: Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone
•Talking-Fire and Telling-Stone - Genealogy of a Worship
•Ajayeb-e Atash
•Fire and the Transcendental Subject
•Zolmat and the Appropriation of the Elsewhere
•Fire and Different Internals of Being
•Black-Box and other Human Extensions



genealogy of a worship (fire)
how can one pray ‘to’ animals? (~ prey upon them)
how can one pray ‘to’ elements?

amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?


Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)


Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies

“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative

(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)



fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order

*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity. -- it is about making permeable bodies (+and landscapes through their interactions.) --- climb: embodied practices of resilience and interrelation ==> a different ecological model: working with the limits and obstacles that illness brings =/= repudiating illness in favor of ***survivorship narratives***} --> there is a moment in Shahnameh highlighting this narative---can we look at the story of Siyavash, his fire-trial, against Sudabeh? Siyavash raised by masculine figure Rostam cannot love the feminine processes of Sudabeh, (she wants him, in an experimental [sex] erotic participation, her attempt at melting his moral ice, which we later find out fire cannot melt***) to break the fabric of obligation (his intense commitment to the father-king combination) =/= tribalism, betraying the patriarchal arrest (the myth of a single god/father and patriarchal faithfulness - *the myth of the strong personality*) ==> Siyavash--patriarcal type of guy who doesn't know how to greet her snaky figure politly--excuses himself of a vital encounter and sustains an ascetic subtraction, and lets Ferdosi--alwayes on God-Fire's side--execute Sudabeh through the bad boy Rostam hyper-masculinity itself. Siyavash/Rostam is utterly non-queer, Siyavash: Rostam's pet project, domesticated, passes the exam. Sudabeh is shocked and screwed-over by the narrative and spectacularisation of the fire's truth-event in an “enactment” plotted by Ferdosi--she is done, she doens't have a deal with fire. She is accused of being Eros, of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality, the chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech.
smell of Sudabeh: moshk, golab, sharab, infinite odors--she is ‘full of it.’ drugs, toxins, rumorous texts, etc. smell of Siyavosh: nothing. neutral. sober. his silence-treatment appeals to the big father. (king's nose. smelling as justuce method? objective observation, provisional logic of nose, smell of smoke, and fire)
Rostam takes no delight in Sudabeh's voice since its register is nothing sweet nor low.
Siyavash corresponds to a set of idioms and is enraptured in the movement of certain silences in which he can grasp only certain falsehoods or menaces.
so Siyavash is ready to go to-the-fire but not to-the-woman.
(never hesitant, even kills his own son by ignoring his signals) Rostam never daird to look the devil in the eyes (---Sudabeh had?)

the Sudabeh's case is a non-agonistic agon, not to be fooled by its decieving differences from Rostam's combats--both are competition as a form of exclusion. in her case we see forms of social conflict in gender, class, race, and even material relations, (she is not relating to fire) leading to her losing the boy's game.

under the barbarous mathematics of Rostam, her figure fades into aspects and grammar of men,

fire signaling essence, essencing being (of her, his, it)
[things are still essencing at the distance---what Rostam radically is unable to understand]

(a network of relations and nonrelations depends on the way we address how Ferdosi greets Sudabeh, failed in the exam and examination ==> fire creating a network of relations [Rostam, Siyavosh,] and nonrelations [Sudabeh, King,])
-what are the conditions enabling the delivery of the Sudabeh [to the beyond (of Shahname)]? (of greeting her?) which poetic sites [we don't want to enroll]? (we don't want to enroll in Rostam's department. the tragic hero, he ‘hits’, always after to save his sovereign, good at haft-khan, ending beasts [we are interested in the beasts, and not in his “seven” trails], so hurried in killing that he finshes his own son, not invincible to treachery and that is his end. but what was treachery again? (in Shahnameh) anything other than athletism and boys sord play: female “mouth”)
-Ferdosi resisting any project of fusional gathering
[unlike Sudabeh, Tahmineh--Rostam's wife--was after having a child with him. she gets a pass, passing Ferdosi's test of maternity. is Sudabeh's fault that she doesn't want to mother? And Rudabeh wants Zal az far as he plays the classic male role model in stealing her?]

[there is a moment in Shahname when it conjoins women and [disgust?], enmeshing them] [and why am i taking upon myself to defend woman? interrupting the abyssal enjoyment of the poem in punishing Sudabeh?]----of Ferdosi not allowing a feminine drift and deviation, from the Law. ***it's Father Time.
--> am i reclaiming otherness by enforcement? (recover her? =/=? understand her) why zoom in her? why teaching myself how to trust and desire her? (allowing myself being lured by her. why it is imperative to let ourselvse to be lured by the “her-idea”?) (is Ferdosi mobilizing forces in iranian hearts? militarize them? “jang-avari”) (the point is not to take critical power in disclaming the fire that valorized Siyavash and then take Sudabeh's side. rather the point is to energize the experiences of metamorphic transformation that animated fire of the fire-temple in the mind of Ferdosi. by participating in Sudabeh's case, her assemblage, i am also recovering my own capacity to care for Ferdosi's fire too and accept being mystified by its telling flames. [end of Sudabeh part])

in a world where humans were increasingly rendered particularly lively (than the creatures without nervous systems ~= objects) with intense awarenesses, fire seemed to be even more lively, with an access to a/its/the beyond
(from stone as a fellow being to the fire the authority figure---by the end of Pleistocene)

(Jesus) will baptize you with fire. (the Old Believers)


moses in fire: stop the representation! stop the constant demonstration! show me body! show me a flesh i can feel! put your hand in the fire moses! i am that which is not burning your hand. i am what that lies beyond. you are my creation, you are of mediation. if your body was my creation, your hand would burn.
it is told that Zaratustra had a fire that was everlasting and would not burn.

باور ‘bavar’ ba+var (var = tested ~= just or fairly judged)
Ibrahim's case is a *warm var

water trial, drowning women to examine if they are witches
water+fire trial -- azmun-e ab-o-atash آزمون آب و آتش



The Paleozoic was a time of dramatic geological, climatic, and evolutionary change. The Cambrian Period witnessed the most rapid and widespread diversification of life in Earth's history, known as the Cambrian explosion, in which most modern phyla first appeared. Fish, arthropods, amphibians, anapsida, synapsida, euryapsida and diapsida all evolved during the Paleozoic. Life began in the ocean but eventually transitioned onto land, and by the late Paleozoic, it was dominated by various forms of organisms. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, many of which formed the coal beds of Europe and eastern North America. Towards the end of the era, large, sophisticated diapsida and synapsida were dominant and the first modern plants (conifers) appeared.

The Paleozoic Era ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth's history, the Permian-Triassic extinction event. The effects of this catastrophe were so devastating that it took life on land 30 million years into the Mesozoic to recover.[4] Recovery of life in the sea may have been much faster.[5]

[4] Sahney, S. & Benton, M.J. (2008). “Recovery from the most profound mass extinction of all time” (PDF). Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological. 275 (1636): 759-65. doi:10.1098/rspb.2007.1370. PMC 2596898free to read. PMID 18198148.
[5] http://www.economist.com/node/16524904 The Economist



not a naturalistic schema of the geometry of hot point, nor a geometric schema of naturalistic fire.



i am loosening the tight axiom of relation of A<-->B, something other than the predecessor-successor or cause-effect pair (--> this order of structure is coming from greek geometric,) i am trying an unordered order-of-reason that is more reflexive, symmetric, and intransitive. (in the San'an text, the construction of the text represents each chain incomplete and displaced.)



greet and grid you

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

a word on anxiety*

For Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety deals with “nothingness.” It is a breakdown of both world and self. For Goldstein, the drive to overcome anxiety by the conquest of a piece of the world is expressed in the tendency towards order, norms, continuity, and homogeneity. Deleuze and Guattari echo this diagnosis when they claim that striation is negatively motivated by anxiety in the face of all that passes, flows, or varies and erects the constancy and eternity of an in-itelf.

[can we say that the whole enterprise of the beyond is a striation of the unkowable, motivated by anxeity?]

The affect can be inhibited; it can remain in consciousness but attached to another idea, or it can undergo transformation, notably into anxiety.

automatic anxieties

poetry of the others

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

my text, like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra) will wait for me at the end, greet me at the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat وعده‌گاه قیامت (The Resurrection, The Last judgment)

like Mohsen Feyz (one of the most brilliant students of Mullah Sadra,) I hope to meet again this text as it is waiting for me at a “beyond” that Mullah Sadra beautifully and rigorously theorized. At the meeting-place of the Vadegah-e Ghiamat, at The Resurrection, The Last judgment, this text will greet me, as all writing is resurrected and approaching their authors, while we tremble together to the other-side.
#For those who love stones.



better that your tomb be the hearts of men


a symbolic geography of the land of fireplaces, poses a landscape which creats its own generation of eyes.

their minds each a fireplace

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

Sohrevardi, in one of his stories, proposes a creature in darkness with no senses, blind and deaf. still he recieves a mail, an incoming call, in the dark.

elsewhere, the agency of fire (khasiate fa'ale atash) <-- bizari az khala (abhorrence of vacuum/void?)

the extraordinary honor of fire is because of its ability to move more sublime than any other. fire is related to movement. stillness is darkness and lack of ‘cause’ --> if you move, you create the ‘cause’ of movement in the world, in the beings that sense that movement, interpret it, and absorb your movement: the movement is semiotic, because it generates/proposes/sustains/initiates causality--not in the sense that your movement has consequence, but it that it risks semiotically in the eyes of the beholder a causation ‘of’ movement prior to the mover.

tabiate atash shabihe jan ast (nature of fire is like essence of life)

(for ancient iranians) fire became thus Qibla

fire: atashe mahsus (sensable fire,) khalife anvare maghul (deputy of intellectual illuminations)
(not stewardship?)

(Empedocles) “only with fire fire can be seen.”

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

(what complicates?) the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions

the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil


our contract with Allah

with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance

...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification

contaminative and communicative

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

in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,

[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?

how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


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

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)


transsubstantiation

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

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

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

against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone triggering often ideas of rigidity ~= stupidity:
aghlesh par-sang barmidare عقلش پاره سنگ برمیداره (crazy, imagination, thinking, excess,)
divane sangi be chah miandazad... دیوانه سنگی به چاه می اندازد... (stupidity, tool, irreversibility, questions of agency and responsibility,)
naravad mikhe ahanin dar sang نرود میخ آهنین در سنگ (stupidity, penetration,)
shamshir bar sang azmudan شمشیر بر سنگ آزمودن (uselessness, stupidty, destruction, test, inattention,) [~= shekar zire ab penhan sakhtan (شکار زیر آب پنهان ساختن --> story of the apes, Buzinegano Kerme Shabtab بوزینگان و کرم شبتاب) ~= mosht dar tariki zadan مشت در تاریکی زدن]
sang az pase divar andakhtan سنگ از پس دیوار انداختن (uselessness, wrongness, chance,)
pay dar sang amadan پای در سنگ آمدن (random trouble, naturaly unforseen hardship, cripeled,)
sang dar kise kardan سنگ در کیسه کردن
del dar sang shekastan دل در سنگ شکستن (to keep quite, benefit of silence, resist speaking the rumorical utterence,)
dele sang دل سنگ (cold-hearted,)
آتش از دل سنگ بیرون آوردن atash az (ضمیر چوب zamire chub va) dele [darune] sang birun avardan (possiblity through work, interrogatory turture,)
sang سنگ =/= la'l لعل --how?--> sang (in Pahlavi) ~= value
sang سنگ =/= abgine آبگینه (glass, mirror, sky, diamond,) (سنگ آبگینه sange abgine: a rock to create mirrors with, abgine ze sang mizayad--khaghani آبگینه ز سنگ می زاید)
sange emtehan سنگ امتحان, az sang birun amadan از سنگ بیرون آمدن, bar sang zadan بر سنگ زدن (trial, test, valuate, messure, quality check,) --?--> related to mine and mineral that gave metal and gold (in many parts of iran sang is the unit of messurment for water ---> go to Dehkhoda) (sang is just a mean to put other things in weight, due to its abundance and nonshiny surface in front of reflective materials: diamond, water, etc.)
sang dar darya andakhtan سنگ در دریا انداختن (positive chance, relying on destiny, butterfly effect, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang andakhtan سنگ انداختن (causality, scale, benefiting from the nature, lever, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang bendaz baghalet baz she سنگ بنداز بغلت باز شه (stupidity, uselessness, unrewarded hardship, questions of agency and responsibility,)
sang az mum sakhtan سنگ از موم ساختن (impossibility, stupidity, wrongness,)
sang bar shishe zadan سنگ بر شیشه زدن = not drinking wine anymore (breaking the wine glass) (sometimes stone has come to mean the wine glass itself: sang ~= bade باده)

sange ghali سنگ قالی (to put a rock on an iranian carpet so the wind doesn't take it away. the stone is invited into the culture. doesn't matter why. it is there sitting with us.)

as a unit of measurement, it apears that in farsi stone associates with quantitative nature, and in Ajayeb (therefore) fire with qualitative production of nature(?)
atash is pure quality
sang has no quality, it has only quantity
---this is undermind:
a trip to the archive of stones, muze jawaherat tehran (Treasury of National Jewels موزه جواهرات ملی ایران)
ahjare nafise احجار نفیسه (diamond, gold, etc.)
ahjare karime احجار کریمه (zomorod زمرد, yaghut یاقوت, la'l لعل, etc.)


exposure to its antibodies
risks contamination

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

(to address) unmarked territory and unmarked destiny

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

stones tell destinies, they are old old old, they are carriers of memory, witnesses of the past, no to wipe out its rough-edged remainders

another take on rock: Stromatolite (are the real telling stone, once bacteria) --> fossilization (~= stone) {structure, morphology,
(gaining sale [Stromatolite is bacteria preying] --> predation --> Multicellularity)
-distinguish between biologically formed and abiotic stromatolites is (hopefuly) still open
•a stromatolite from 2000 million years ago made by a comunity of bacteria, the same bacterial who produced oxigen (that we have in the atmosphere today) (Lynn - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlxqeSXyPd8)
•landscape made by bacteria: cyanobacteria became the first microbes to produce oxygen by photosynthesis. (although the excess of free oxygen was toxic to anaerobic inhabitants, therefore responsible for one of the most significant extinction events in Earth's history.)

Stromatolites (/stroʊˈmætəlaɪts, strə-/[1][2]) or stromatoliths (from Greek strōma, str?ma, mattress, bed, stratum, and ?????, lithos, rock) are layered bio-chemical accretionary structures formed in shallow water by the trapping, binding and cementation of sedimentary grains by biofilms (microbial mats) of microorganisms, especially cyanobacteria.[3] Fossilized stromatolites provide ancient records of life on Earth by these remains, some of which may date from 3.7 billion years ago.[4][5] Lichen stromatolites are a proposed mechanism of formation of some kinds of layered rock structure that are formed above water, where rock meets air, by repeated colonization of the rock by endolithic lichens.[6][7] (Wikipedia)


*oxygen

[img https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oxygenation-atm-2.svg]

O2 build-up in the Earth's atmosphere. Red and green lines represent the range of the estimates while time is measured in billions of years ago (Ga).
Stage 1 (3.85-2.45 Ga): Practically no O2 in the atmosphere. The oceans were also largely anoxic with the possible exception of O2 gases in the shallow oceans.
Stage 2 (2.45-1.85 Ga): O2 produced, and rose to values of 0.02 and 0.04 atm, but absorbed in oceans and seabed rock.
Stage 3 (1.85-0.85 Ga): O2 starts to gas out of the oceans, but is absorbed by land surfaces. There was no significant change in terms of oxygen level.
Stages 4 and 5 (0.85-present): O2 sinks filled and the gas accumulates.[1]

[1] Holland, Heinrich D. “The oxygenation of the atmosphere and oceans”. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences. Vol. 361. 2006. pp. 903-915.


metazoan phyla : animal

history of life is tight to hisory of oxygen --> fire
Aerobic metabolism is more efficient than anaerobic pathways

Abiogenesis: the natural process of life arising from non-living matter, how pre-life chemical reactions gave rise to life on Earth
•self-replicating molecules
•RNA world --> catalyze peptide ligation or amino acid polymerization --> protains, specialized biocatalysis --> RNA + iron ==> DNA : data storage
•synthesized from inorganic compounds
•catalysis in chemical systems =?=> molecules necessary for self-replication
•this is a protain writing


*water
Study of zircons has found that liquid water must have existed as long ago as 4.4 Ga, very soon after the formation of Earth [...] water with similar deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio was already available at the time of Earth's formation, as evidenced in ancient “eucrites” meteorites originating from the asteroid Vesta. (wikipedia)


(four elements temporal hierarchy)
earth > water > oxygen(air) > fire

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

[with Guy Debord]

fire media theoretic

‘image’ detached into a stream, percieved as generality --> an inversion of life (“visible” negation of life - that has invented a visual form for itself)

(its social practices)

fire, not subordinate, as spectacle comes as means of unification, locus of illusion, generalized apparition --> seperation
(its general truth) fire untouched by evolution and form binding constrains, is a universal mater, the spectacle of burning flame manifests itself as a positivity out of reach and beyond. the case of fire is different than Deobord spectalcle who speaks: “Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.”

therefore fire specatle is not image, rather social relationship between subjects that are mediated by it

thus the function and phenomenon of separation mediated by fire becomes part and parcel of the unity of the world, from now on
-a new form of the sacred emerged with the discovery of fire's image
-produced new worshipful subjection

the language of the fire as spectacle is composed of signs that talk to Moses, Zaratostra, and others
-in this writing i like to rewind theology and pause at the moment Moses meets Fire in mount sinai, go after some media theoretic specualtions, asking what are the conditions of this (inter)mediated encounter? and what are the consequences of talking to fire? (technicity and affectibilty)
(mount sinai : cradle of stone, rendered dead matter when ‘he’ comes out of stone-age)
•the Israelite's God, who appeared “by day as a cloud and by night as a fire” (Exodus 13:21)

[fire and brimstone, an idiomatic expression of signs of God's wrath in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the New Testament.] --> the fate of the unfaithful
(--> perceptible to the naked of the prohpet)

fire's mechanisms of contemplation

(in my preaching here i won't do what christians used to encourage repentence)

it is important not to put fire in abstract opposition to concret stone activity

mystic order ~?-> spectacular order

the spectalce of fire reciprocal alienation was part and parcel of human social life and its essence underpinning its relations to the real

diversities and contrasts in looking into the image of flame

what is already in society that fire (spectacle) gives expression? the beyond

(fire, we are) governed by its agenda

***monopolization of the realm of appearances*** (excluding other illusions, apparition, tellings, etc.)

-with fire a new brand of storytelling
***fire's spectacular aspect (accumulated to the point that) produces an image-object that is a seperate entity [accumulation --> generality/category --> new object], that of the mediated, from the fire itself, a second objecthood detached from its materiality, introduing transcendent immateriality --?--> metaphysics
-taking over life and existence


from vision to wisdom
categories of visulaity took human cognition hostage, gave rise to a metaphysical tradition/abundance imposing itself upon existence, regulating the perception of material life, philosophizing ‘reality’ to ‘beyond nature’ : *alienated thought* (due to the alienated power of fire) --- immaterial specatle of the afterlife, the world-beyond rendering life dead

abounding in metaphysical subtleties
-metaphysical abundance

...allegiance to the frozen

(Rumi's calling) “You must burn!” - this is very selfish
[to Siyavash?]

still today in sci-fi we are talking to a technoilogized light (as the messenger of beyond)

fire, transforms the world, not in terms of changing manifest matriality, rather the mind and thinking

fire in its temporal animation renders space fixated, giving the illusion that (visual) animation = life {~= spectacle}


the fire spectacle colonizing our participation with the beyond, colonizing the way our flux of senses make tentative contact with the other sides,
(what a stone suggests? the senses that never stop participating, never stop throwing themselves beyond the immediatly visible)

every phase of existence

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” Rumi wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mullusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality [~-> mutation is not random])

(Waddington then launched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.

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

...a perceptual game of risking linearity, collapsing discovery and jurisdiction (a judiciary not a branch of any map of governance)

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

(Haraway on Burning Man:) Fire in the North American West has a complicated multispecies history; fire is an essential element for ongoing, as well as an agent of double death, te killing of ongoingness. The material semiotics of fire is our times are at stake.
[]three icons (suggestions by Haraway, three “-cene” tuned tor the touch of its critters):
1- ‘missing ice’ of the Capitalocene
2- ‘flame’ of the Anthropocene
3- ‘red clay pottery’ of the Cthulucene




(Conley >) Rosolato treats perspective in terms of the origins of sensuous affect:
infant's projective activity + infant closes its eyes to fend off menace, hence negotiating with the real in a space and time prior to the mirror stage

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

The artful sandwich of Rostam-rock-div provides a thinking mode of who-caries-who: whose being is dependent on whose existence. The earth that the Rostam is laying on, is sacred, on the hands of an ancient creature, who has a very delicate way of “wounding” very much different than Rostam’s quick hit-man style.[23] The div does not “end” Rostam as efficiently as the protagonist might have done it, but introduces the intermediate being of the lithic and the riddle. The div engages in a game. Rostam wants to kill. Finish a job.

The techno-sci-story of the bacteria producing the air, earth and mitochondria,[24] is the one I like to delink-with the Rostam of Shahnameh from its chain of meanings and relations to the div that he must kill. The Rostam-stone-div compilation is about the abyssal div’s death-forming and life-forming powers. Rostam, himself coming from certain transvaluative body-buildings, is taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

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

“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts of Baja California “destitute” without asking the natices if they were misreable
*for many natives in the Jesuit era, christianity was not a means by to give order to mystery (or give order to misery)* it was food. [...] another kind of appetite could lead people there...
*the christian hell looked a lot like the life they had left [...] many Indians so hated the cold that on a chilly day at the mission, a sermon about the fires of christian hell delighted them ♥

Meloy > Steinbeck: “food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time”

better roads and bigger tourism = predatory brand of industrial leisure examplified by Cabo San Lucas (and Dubai in the middle east)

(Meloy herself part of a group) a goofy one with animal notes, plant books, and ‘je suit’ literature


(clinging to) the delusion of *feral self-reliance* --> [*]fishing: citizenry in the public of resourcefulness

“do not go to the hunt carrying meat from home.”


in my work the technique of storytelling: to create a stage for a wider out-of-control explosion of gesticulating arms

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

    “wherever you are, wherever you go, there are untamed creatures nearby that need you attention. unplug your modem. slam shut your self-help books. quit standing around like a wall trout. get to work.
    invite warblers to your neighborhood with shaggy plots of greenery. learn everything you can about the bandit-eyed racoon that stares at you through your sliding glass door, demanding enchiladas.
    mark the direction of jet black darkling beetles marching up a red dune like a troop of miniature helmets. east? south?
    let black widows live in your soffits.
    lie on your back on a breezy sweep of beach and stare at the undersides of magnificent frigate birds. master a hyena's laugh and use it when in the presence of politicians.
    admire the make midwife toad, who carries fertilized eggs on his back for a month. understand that certain species of mollusk can change their gender, know that from a ball afloat on tiny filaments inside its fanned shell, a sea scallop can tell which way is up.
    crane your neck. worm your way. wolf it down. monkey with things. outfox your foe. quit badgering your tax attorney.
    take notes on the deagness of coral, the pea-size heart of a bat. be meticulous. we will need these things so that we may speak.
    the human mind is the child of primate evolution and our complex fluid interactions with environment and one another. animals have enrished this social intelligence. they give concrete expression to thoughts and images. they carry the outside world to our inner one and back again. they helped language flower into metaphor, symbol, and ritual. we once sang and danced them, made music from their skin, sinew, and bone. their stories came off our tongues. we ate them. they ate us.
    close attention to mollusks and frigate birds and wolves makes us aware ont only of our own human identity but also of how much more there is, an assertion of our imperfect hunger for mystery. ‘without mystery life shrinks,’ wrote biologist Edward O. Wilson. ‘the completely known is a numbing void to all active minds.’”
(Meloy, Eating Stone p142-143)

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

Jacobsen on ancient mesopotamian

*religion = response*

[*]numinous: a unique experience of *confrontation with power* not of this world, confrontation with a ‘wholly other’
--> terrifying, demonic dread, awe, sublime majesty, fascinating, demanding unconditional allegiance, etc.
*positive human response [in thought (myth, theology) + in action (culd, worship)] ==> religion*

metaphor: human psychological reaction to the experience [of numinous] by means of analogy
-in metaphors all that is shared by the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world

in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood

human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)


*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence

mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn there موقتا but he is altogether transcendent, and there is nothing but a purely situational ephemeral relation with the bush}
--✕--> a mesopotamian would have experienced the burning bush differently: numinous power of the bush's being (not just “in” it) --> numinous = immanent =/= transcendent

power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush and identifies itself as the god of Moses's father --> needs introduction =/= numinous power speaking to the mesopotamian Enkidu in Gilgamesh Epis does not choose to disassociate itself from it locus and so needs no introduction. --{"the sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling to him.” <-- the power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, is what animates it and motivates it, *is the god who informs it*}

in Akkadian (the language in which epic of Gilgamesh is written): ‘the word for X = the numinous power in X’
•(word for) visible sun = sun god
•the sumerian word for sky, the visible blue dome overhead, which turns black and full of stars that make their wat across it at night = the name of the numinous power in the sky, its power and its will to be, the sky god

the form given to numinous encounter may adjust to the content revealed in it

*sometimes the form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is given in simple observation* --> the numinous power in thunderstorm developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle, but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head

**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying numinous content in different ways
-series of suggestive variant images all expressive of its power to wax, to produce and yield


lord: a charismatic leader magically responsible for producing fertility and plenty for his subjects
...situationally determined nonhuman forms --✕--> victory of human form over nonhuman forms slowly and with difficulty (with the begining of third millennium from early Dynastic onward)


intransitive: fulfilled in the specific situation or phenomenon and did not reach out beyond it (~ characteristic boundness to some phenomena)
(ancient mesopotamian saw) numinous as immanent ==> name that power and attribut form to it in terms of the phenomena


[Jacobsen's well articulation to pose a question -->] *the characteristic of mesopotamian boundness to the externals of situation in which the numinous was encountered...* ==>
•intransitiveness
•differentiation ==> pluralistic aspect (--> polytheism) --> divine aspects that it recognized

plurality ==> ability to:
•distinguish
•evaluate
•choose

“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed

they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.

(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination

the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all

we are not determined, we are engendered


numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within

efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples

*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence

poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*


(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to embodiment =/= habituation
--> house = temple = representation of the power that is meant to fill it

(similar to human dwelling) ***house = temple = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available

the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it

authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”

house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...


ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them

there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia

immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)

false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further

older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings

religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents


[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity

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

(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties

(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)

***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***

}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)

to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•social
--> describing relations (human and nonhuman) established through water
*what water can do: flow*

agentive or affective capacities of materials --> (bad philosophy of flux) flow as a overgeneralized model for materiality =/= expanding relations water engenders through its properties in particular locations or rivers

*humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity*

(Alberti asking within archaeology:) how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?

now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of meaning remains --Alberti--> how are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? how different meanings can adhere to the same substances?

materials (water, parasite, etc.) lend themselves to conceptual innovation

often things are willed away (not by a more agentive segment of the population [<-- paranoiac understanding], but) due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere

(how not to) think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate (~ scheme transfer) --✕--> properties are imminent in embodied human engagement with that world [~ Baradian: there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object]
•body may be the first tool
•properties (or potentials [ajayeb style?]) cannot be listed

X as agent presents us, as shadow shows...

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

winds
روح ruh, spirit =/= wind: thermal expansion of air ~ air’s tendency to rarefy and expand under the influence of heat
(recognition of) thermal expansion of air ==> motor of global atmospheric circulation

explaining winds --Borrelli-->
•how rational thought could grasp
•how divine power descended to earth

pneumatic machines
gears, weights, levers, pulleys

****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things

varieties =/= causes


cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
  |           |  
[-O-] ==> {t|/?#$^%V!~)&^} <-- premodern science and art today stays here (---> go to Stewart’s attunement to phenomena)


[*]navigation: negotiation between the direction one ‘witches’ to travel & the direction that is ‘possible’ to travel --> wind sense:
temperature
humidity
intensity
regularity
smell
knowledge of astronomy + geography


wind rose --> (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)

estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time

Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis

Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth

Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally

hot and dry exhalations

aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it

air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken

16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena

#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,

feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air

...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between

spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)

*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures

effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization

pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)

(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours


ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise

air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument

Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena

wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated

منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings

*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*

innate heat of living bodies

wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours


16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب


orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system

Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons


sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)


...our sublunar world

gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”


visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)

(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force

on the transmutations of air

(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]

(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures

(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force


(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life

weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)

(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind

Galileo --> earth's rotation ==> (<--evidence--) wind
Bacon --> exhalations together with air [rarefaction and expansion of air / exhalation drawn up by sun] ==> wind
Fludd (meteorological cosmica) --> wind: principal meteorological phenomenon (princeps meteororum) and closest to God
“wind is an aerial spirit, of middle consistence, inspired or animated by the breath of Iehova, which he extracts from his treasure-case according to his will, to effect either a punishment or a benediction”
•angels: efficient cause of winds (in borg macro- and microcosmos)
•(changes in the air --corresponded-->) temperament of living creatures ==> wind
•pulse of the heart caused by the spirit of life
•thermal expansion
•vaporization (+ contraction) of air
•pneumatics


“wind = thermal expansion & contraction of air” --> a vitalistic-alchemical Rosicrucian conception of meteorology and cosmology =/= Descartes’ mechanical-corpuscular view of nature -->{wind <== vapours drawn up from earth and water by solar heat (vapours expanded when heated and when they encountered the opposition of other vapours clouds or mountains they ended up escaping in the one free direction)
•vapour: (made out of) small corpuscles together with even smaller particles filling the gaps between the corpuscles

Froidmont --> wind: (made of) dry and hot exhalations =/= animated (as the stoics dream)
{winds flow towards Earth because of their gravity, like streams and rivers in their beds} gravity ==> wind =/= (direct expression of) celestial power and caused by God’s angels


scorched by rays and reflexes of the sun
denser


Torricelli conceptualized the motion of the hot and cold air masses by thinking them as separated by the walls of a building and in this way he ignored the air’s life-like tendency to expand when heated. instead he reasoned in terms of change of weight applying Archimedes principle


علم کلام
*reflections grounded on literary descriptions of ancient artefacts*
+ based on actual devices
--> wind = source of a potentially infinite quantity of motive force, the multiform expression of a single cosmic principle animating air

inverted glass experiment : a ***demonstration ~= simulacrum*** (of celestial motive forces) [~=? a fable]
#a demon working on demonstrations

mechanistic explanations ==> mechanical conceptualization:
•astronomical clocks
•clockwork automata
•computing machines
•optical tricks

--Borrelli--> weatherglass only became interesting when considered as a means of quantifying phenomena

*artefacts and artificial processes that lent themselves to conceptualization in vitalistic terms:
•alchemical experiments
•magnetic compass
•pneumatic engines
•speculate on wind
•falling bodies
•pendulum


(Halley’s) wind: successions of strokes indicating the direction in which a ship would travel under the influence of the wind blowing (at the specific point of the sea...) -~-~-> direction of a virtual invisible motive force

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

(?) people rely on singular ontology and multiple epistemologies

interpretation =? appropriation of other's existential labor (~/= culture)

Alberti's pot: instantiations of a concept of a world that is chronically unstable
(cranial modification, tattooing, treatment of the dead --manage-->) the inherent instability of bodies
•one's perspective is intimately connected to the body one is
}<-- did Alberti say all these things from the pots? no.


in Ingold: the indigenous people are presented as having some kind of privileged access to the workings of the world due to their close relationship to the land


ethics of theory
accounts of non-western
in our reconstruction of the past
usage glossed as a heuristic: an interpretive tool


Alberti --> claims to universality in our theories of matter rely on falsification through assimilation other people's theories of matter
==renforce==> (archeology) academy as an alibi for neocolonialism

(we should stop) searching for the answer to our relationship with the physical world [ontology of everything <-- this is my problem with philosophy] =/= ***accept a role as the point of articulation among sources of theories of matter, tangible evidence of alternative ontologies, communities past and present***

problems:
•*the elision of ontological claims by epistemological claims* : necessity of a singular ontology (as a guarantor in theories) even while a diversity of epistemologies are recognized and accepted (and when we pluralize “ontologies”)
•to use ethnographic accounts at the level of analogy (<-- i do this all the time)
•privileging of others (of their accounts of the world) --> for example in Ingold =/= attempting to *gain purchase on other people's world* --> for example Viveiros de Castro's concern is ontological (dialogical) =/= epistemological (monological)

*epistemologies masquerading as ontologies*(?)
•pluralizing the terms [ontologies, knowledges, epistemologies, etc.] --> (sending out the message that) we are good relativists --✕-->? actually allowing alternative theories of reality

([i have talked about this problem elsewhere -->] ontologies are relegated into) hierarchical epistemologies:
•anthropology --> they look at cultures --access--> ontology (nature of things) [==> “culture = ontology"]
•native ontology --> they look at matter: indifferent unchanging universal substance --produce--> epistemology [disguised as ontology] (worldview, perspectives)
}==> **our incommensurability is understood only at the level of epistemological difference**

-when i was iran, we were interested in the western ontologies, their universal theories of matter. people didn't recognize western philosophy as a cultural perspective or different epistemology, but as ontology. this is relation unfortunately is not reciprocal ---> go to Star Trek
-when you read other people's theories of matter, you don't do epistemological inquiry (~= anthropology)


***foreclosed =/= privileged***

tendencies in archeological theorizing:
1. *foreclosure: other peoples’ worlds are avoided, delegated to non-theory, to exotic finger-painting on the surface of matter (=/= what general theories are made of) --> appropriated through absent presence
2. *privileging: other people's worlds are privileged, given serious consideration (alterity is initially embraced) --> appropriated through assimilation
◦in a grand synthesizing theory of matter (~ an enframing mechanism that holds the other enframings within a space of intelligibility) the ethnographic material serves a buttressing tole: indigenous theories resurface as heuristics of analogies for specific cases

ethnographic information is crucial to recognizing the alterity of the past

(Alberti concerned with) how the indigene occupies textual space in Ingold: indigenous words appear in key moments in Ingold's text to seal an argument, or provoke an idea (at the level of analogy)
--Bakhtin--> monologism disguised as dialogism : a single voice playing many parts


analogical thinking:
--Thomas--> (interpretive) open ourselves to the difference of the past
--Alberti--> (appropriative) relies on representationalist logic; using analogies interpretively to the types of past we construct

(Viveires's) *controlled equivocation*
we compare mistaken assumptions on both sides

***interpretation =/= multivocality (polyphony)***
@apass: what other textual strategies can we develop other than polyphonic (multiculturalism at the level of text)?


[!we should say no to] general thing theory : tendency to produce overviews, universal accounts of the material world
•phenomenological world of essences that are revealed
•ecological world of affordances that are at hand
•some social world of false transcendence
-


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

mirror
ayene
pieces of metal that soldiers put on the back and legs
چارآینه

جفای فلک آینه گون ==> self (of the poet)
فلک falak --> ayene-gun --> jafa
دل del --> sang --> transforms stone to blood

آینه اسکندری ayene eskandari (was it a telescope? to inform/spy)
ارسطو به فسون و اعداد آن را از قعر دریا برآورد
•math اعداد, tricks فسون


mirror trap دام آینه

at any moment هرآینه

قبله مساز زآینه
mirror =/= qibla


آینه گردان
mirror-stepper = sun
•seven mirrors هفت آینه = planets


a short essay on matter mythology

[...]

Hayula---literally meaning ‘unformed monster’ tells the histories of nonhuman material and mythologies of matter-energy flow in the eye of different cultural convertors

[...]

Hayula (Persian: هیولا) (in classical islamic philosophy) mythologically refers to a pre-cosmological ‘form’ of energy---literally meaning ‘unformed monster'---from which eventually the ‘universe’ and ‘persons’ where created, and systematically provokes a meshwork of meanings that interrelate notions of energy, form, and selfhood in a premodern intercultural cosmology

[...]


parasitically seeking a host for Hayula nun-human histories

[...]


Memory is not the only and privileged way of connecting the past to the present. One of many crucial and important ways that past comes to effect the present is made over form. Form, with its strange logic and efficiency, has the capacity to freeze time. Life as we know it lies in the results of the processes that future forms come to effect the present. Any being's very survival depends on its ability to access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?

4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.

Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.

The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.

The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which might permit or prohibit seeing beyond its conditions.

In another level of description we will look at the concept of Hayula as a device in cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.



[...]

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

(Wietske Maas)

materiality that is specific to the eye

similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.

unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.

the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.

in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.

if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.

material commonality (worth exploring)

incarnate an external organ of vision

our tie with the general metabolism of light

correlations between human vision and the organic world

using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter

in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns

different regime of visibility
light is not just a stream of waves to be passively refracted and recorded but an active and autonomous medium of image-making

mineral kingdom -- forces that drive the becoming of both organic and inorganic matter

drive to formation (Bildungstrieb)

“Runge's willingness to attribute a life force to chemicals is a continuation of Romantic natural philosophy but meshed with Geothean morphology and experiment.” (Leslie)

chromatogram is an image, which discloses it's own bodily formation

here our focus should shift from the eye as a globular organ in the head of a vertebrate animal to the eye as an epidermic lens, a light-mitigating organ that attenuates the visceral contamination of radiation.

our inseparable alliance with plants

our eyes are immersed within a vegetative metabolism of a kind. we look at plants, but plants have already cannibalized our gaze as they become part of us looking back at them.


complex architecture of light:
plant photosynthesis is probably the most abused metaphor and analogy of life, widely quoted across a diverse spectrum of schools of thought to justify naturalist ideologies. it is believed that photosynthesis is behind a process of energy accumulation central to natural equilibrium and the food chain. however, there are various ways the process of light metabolism could be understood. it could also be understood as a process towards cosmic corruption and fermentation, or as a process towards more “complex architecture of light”.

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

[...]



(Ilana Halperin)

corporeal mineralogy

we are autobiographical trace fossils

what constitutes life in the world of geology?

microbes feasting on the mineral bodies of stones

more animal than mineral

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

big bang, first second of existence, second second, what is going on with the materiality

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

the dark matter, in Caecilian Kircher, we don't know what it is

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

[...]


[Gholam Hossein Rahimi + Abd Al-Rasul Emadi, 79113902605.pdf]

it is “proven” that location is not hayula (nor apparition)
hayula is anything that can have many faces [this is greek]

according to Aristotle: matter cannot separate itself from hayula (bzw. its apparition) but it can from its location.

in another sense, location is sometimes close to the notion of ‘face’ (surat صورت) of the matter, because it constitutes where the matter ends and where does it begins.

Avicenna: location is separate from located
‘location is the limitation of matter’
location and causality? ‘there’ (hamanja همانجا) is not ‘the reason’ (elat علت)
for him: ‘makan chizi joz nahayat-e jesm-e havi nist’ (مکان چیزی جز نهایت جسم حاوی نیست)
(location/place is nothing but the limits/ends/finalities of the holder or the comprising thing)

two locations meeting each other

Avicenna disagrees that hayula could be location, because he argues that hayula only accepts the significant apparition and not any.
some has believed that the location is the face of matter, because the matter is at its face/apparition the same way it is at its place/location.
the matter/jesm/ جسم doesn't move out of its face rather it moves within its face.
water -to-> air [this is apparition]
location -to-> located [this cannot be!]

هیولای ثانی hayulaye sani (secondary hayula) : it has act/ also is able to its “next level”

[they haven't thought about the notion of gravity.]

جسم jesm: body, object, substance, matter, corpus, flesh

when the matter/jesm/جسم leaves the space it takes orientations/coordinations/ab'ad/ ابعاد with itself away from that locality/place/makan/مکان

location/makan/ مکان : when matter is in location, the location is.
void/khala’/ خلاء: when location is emptied of matter, it is void.

for Avicenna, matter/jesm/جسم (can) have mental (zehni ذهنی) and hallucinative (vahmi وهمی) derivatives that are accessible in all its axis/directions (ab'ad ابعاد).
[we have to consider that here hallucination/vahm/وهم is a strong category of thought, it opposes reason/aghl/عقل, it is a device that Avicenna regularly uses in his research.]

for Pythagoras, void/khala’/خلاء is hole through which the universe breathes.
for them void was that which is between the natural numbers; 1, 2, 3, etc.
(they didn't distinguish between numbers and matters)

گسست/Gosast/rupture can only happen in corporal matter

[porosity, has social and material meanings: a measure of the void, the “accessible void”. and a sorting algorithm, ability to absorb fluids, and volume of bodies] [relates to Aristotle's notion of matter that which resists---the resistance of matters]
for Avicenna, the extension of admixtures is as follows:
•two matter from two different corporalities mix
•two dimensions mix
•one dimension and one matter mix

ذات zat: being, essence, substance, nature, the very core self of, same, identity of, spontaneousness, material object,
-the Zat/essence...

what is when apparition enters void?\

زمان سمتی zaman-e samti : directional time (?) [#archive]

for Avicenna location and located are inseparable, location is holder or an exterior or outer surface of the located.
for him, void has two problems: (1) the void's dimensions will mix with the matter's dimension. (2) void is infinite, therefore movement is impossible, since there is part of the universe that is not void therefore there can't be void in the universe since it has to be infinite.



Hayula has no resistance to different apparitions/surat/صورت

surathaye jesmani صورتهای جسمانی

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

[...]



pandora’s complexity

purely (?) material objective agent (evolving?)

Hayula--the first principle of everything material

bi-surat بی صورت

اشکال تن ashkal-e tan***
virtual proto-humanity (to different corporalities) --> pre-organic / anthropo*morphic* --> inter-corporal predation --> (sets post-mythic relations between species) --> trans-ontological intentionalities

hayula is a state of latency or potentiality --> possibility of metamorphosis in interpersonal relations...

every apparition demands a recipient

(مولوی‌) Rumi wants to be able to read the return-state to the hayula:
تبدیل شدن به tabdil shodan:
...be arkan (ارکان instrument)
...be heyvan (حیوان animal)
...be jan (جان aliveness? liveliness of artifacts? --?--> agency)
...be hilat (حيله, tech---means & ways) [tech? #ruse]

(in Rumi:) ruse ==> قید صید gheid-e seyd
Hafez is all about farib (فریب ruse)

material agents: {//complex forms of movement //affiliation into space}

stones, a substance indigenous to every place. (those who give up or try to stop or turn back become stones.)



the meta-fall of the material (in hayula هیولا)


apparition/surat/صورت (essence/mahiyat/ماهیت)?
matter/madeh/ماده (hast/هست/being/is-there)?

 --(surat)-->--(surat)-->
animal---flora---inanimate---hayula
 <--(madeh)--<--(madeh)--

in Sohrevardi, he removes the light as projection and ray-tracing, and proposes a theory of light (of theory of being) as “Filter” (veril?, hejab حجاب). (there is no filter between the sphere of the eye and the sphere of the planet Mars.)

apparition is essential or part of the essence or itself the essence

Hayula: mojude mobham o bi-ta'ayon, joz ghove-e mahz va este'dad-e serf nist. (jesme basit)
هیولا: موجود مبهم و بی تعین, جز قوه محض و استعداد صرف نیست
(جسم بسط)



[...]

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

(Delanda)

we are taking “real history” as starting-point

-to capture the dynamics of human historical processes, we must allow the nonhuman physics to infiltrate the human society---complex materials that form human culture. --> (for example) water in its several distinct states (solid, liquid, gas) in phase transition (intensity of temperature)---that which human society “see” as material-change

example of spontaneous structural generations are coherent waves:
*solitons* - forming in many different types of materials, from tsunamis (ocean waves) to lasers. --> *attractors* {stable states, which can sustain coherent cycles activity {periodic / chaotic}}
*monsoon* - a wind circuit that has powered all sail ships in Asian waters for centuries---in those urban centers in contact with monsoon, knowledge of its dynamical behavior and skills in tapping its energy accumulated.


“materials” are {-energetic -genetic -linguistic} --> the flow of human and the animal gene we have domesticated

the specific dynamic pattern of turbulent urban evolution in (European) towns should not be view as the result of “progress” but as the result of certain dynamics that intensify the accumulation of knowledge and technologies, and of certain institutional norms and organization. for instance, the 11th century industrial revolution can be viewed in terms of reciprocal stimulation between technologies and institutions, fueled by: -solar energy (agricultural) -gravitational energy (water) --> to power grain wills --> intensified by the flow of money.

*story of the bone*
(organism never forgot its mineral origins)
in organic world, soft tissue (gels and aerosols, muscle and nerve) reigned supreme until 500 million years ago. at that point, some of the conglomerations of fleshy matter-energy that made up life underwent a sudden mineralization, a new material for constructing living creatures emerged: bone. it is almost as if the mineral world that had served as a substratum for the emergence of biological creatures was reasserting itself...



genes as sorting algorithms, are themselves sorted out by selection pressures such as: -climates -predators -parasites


structure-generating processes sort things (1) take heterogeneity [collection of materials---pebbles, genes, roles, etc.] (2) homogenize them [through sorting operations] (2) consolidate them (into more permanent state)

catalyst: a chemical substance capable of “recognizing” specific material and altering that material's molecular state --> now it reacts with certain substances with which it would not normally react.

catalyst provokes a meeting of two substances

autocatalytic loops

superposition (interconnection of diverse overlapping elements),
catalysts,
stable patterns,
spatial intervals,
sedimentation,
cooling magma,
threshold of crystallization,
vicious fluid,
molten materials,
bifurcation,
densification,
intensification,
reinforcements,
injection,
nucleation events,
dislocations,
endogenous,
endogenous stable states,
chemical clocks,
aggregate,
consistency,
elementary atoms,
stratified structures,
interlocking (matching temporally),


species --> (gene pool of a ...) = an organic stratified structure

stratifies structures involve simple form of causal relations---one arrow from cause to effect [we can see this modality in the creation of institutions]


coal is the product of one of several types of mineralization that organic matter can undergo, and submitted by “civilizations” to deposit intensive exploitation --> flow of nonhuman energy ==> fuel its industrial revolution

industrial age = the crossing of a bifurcation where previous autocatalytic dynamics come to form a self-sustaining autocatalytic loop.

(both) industrial revolution and biological evolution, they lack [rpgressive direction nor consistent drive toward complexification---some species complexity while others simplify


cities as real transformers of matter and energy
cities are open or dissipative (esraf اسراف) systems, with matter-energy flowing in and out continuously



(in autocatalytic loops) the trigger-flow interactions: interlocks a series of separately reproductive systems into a single interactive reproductive system

antimarket ---money--> mining regions ==> intensified coa extraction ==> iron production ---> [steam] mechanical energy ---> cotton textiles ---> flow of profits ===money==> experimentation with coal, iron, steam

skill / know-how = catalytic info
(info capable of bringing together and amplifying flow of energy and materials)

economies of agglomeration (anbashtegi انباشتگی)

the law of diminishing returns (bazdeh nozuli بازده نزولی)
a point at which the level of profits or benefits gained is less than the amount of money or energy invested. (image)


illumination --> coal gas
motorization --> steam


knowledge is an input of production which 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 internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}


cities interaction with microorganisms

medieval cities ---islands--> {-concentration of energies -low degree of species heterogeneity (mainly humans)}

medieval European towns ----> isolated islands {/heat /food-web /cultural}

cattle as storage devices
process of shortening and redirecting food chains


biomass ["natural” state] ---> cooked biomass ---> processed through the “civilizing” power of fire*
{raw =/= cooked} ==> legend/myth
--> the cultural materials that accumulated unconsciously, sorted out by the pressure of the parasites themselves---germs and humans formed a meshwork

food ~ flow of flesh

culture is not a completely separate sphere of reality, but instead mixes and blends with flows of organic (and even mineral) materials.

flow of genetic materials

gene / ecosystem
|              \
homogeneous =/= heterogeneous

*genes tease out a form out of an active flesh

(genes ~) replicators began not only merely to exist, but to construct for themselves containers, vehicles for their continues existence.
-how these “replicators” created constructs out of flesh and bone ---> then how did ‘self’ emerged in this?


                (layers)
genotype  .../.../.../.../...  phenotype
   |             |                 |
info coded | self organizing   |  adaptive traits
into genes | processes (stable) |  of a plant / animal


human gene is variable du to: {1-ecosystem 2-taboos}


(ancient) migrations : vehicle for the mechanism of evolution that today is producing the greatest evolutionary effect, allowing the incorporation of new genes into established gene pools, enhancing intrapopulation and reducing interpopulation variability.



[leas normative and binding] to other cultures <-- culture --> to the same culture [central to society]


strata = reproductive niche
(niche : adjusted timing and quality)

hierarchy building = {-homogenization (by a sorting process) -consolidation (through coding into legal, religious, and other formal regulations)}


limits of bounded rationality (عقل معاش aghle ma'ash?)
(Bounded rationality is the idea that in decision-making, rationality of individuals is limited by the information they have, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the finite amount of time they have to make a decision.)
--> for example soil loss, due to careless exploitation of the forests’ resources has been a constant threat to urban centers throughout history. most urban civilization were able to pass their genes for only seventy generations before they ran out of soil ---> although some material and energy flows can be “socialized” (submitted to cultural control), in practice many are not.



(my interest and work on hayula is about:) the creative morphologies that have always resided outside the (west versus east) homoestatic text of the self and other

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

contemporary US film bestiary <==
•EC comics --> popular weird fantasy, horror science fiction
•creepy magazine
•the twilight zone --> horror, science fiction, suspense, comedy
•film noir --> flawed character hero <== german expressinonist cinematography
•cryptozoology (adventure)


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

division's of life

-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology

biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)

gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiological process)
bacterial omnisexuality --> fluid genetic transfers = sexual
=/= unitary self assumed in the zoocentric model

medieval microcosmic
correspondences among prokaryotic, eukaryotic, zoological and geophysiological (gaian) levels
--> holonomic continuum --> *a type of individuality that is spatially and temporally more inclusive* [-my research on ajayeb has been more tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct

•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants

bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell

(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)

the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan

*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*

(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria

metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...

fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite

army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings

chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical drive, (tubercle patients were orators or grandios liars)

[*]human body: an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells

eukaryotic cells leveling cytoplasmic calcium concentrations ==> [our] calcium phosphate of bone (mineral infrastructure of our bodies):
because seawater concentrations of calcium are often four orders of magnitude higher than [one in ten million], ocean-dwelling cells must exude calcium to avoid poisoning. in the full-fathomed sea did the bones of our ancestors and the shells of their eukaryote relatives evolve. skeletons dramatize an ancient waste, whispering a ghostly testimony to the useful internalization of hazardous waste sites. this givesa good indication of how life within the general economy evolves to deactivate, sacrifice and eventually incorporate the dangerous excesses that accrue from its solar growth. -Sagan
--> the body is multiple (even if orchestrated by vicissitudes and the need for harmony over evolutionary time
--> *nature is chimerical through and through*

intraorganismic genetic transfers

*health = matter of maintaining an ecology =/= matter of defending a unity*

[*]body: ornately elaborated mosaic of microbes in various states of symbiosis

the fiction of the self
**self is not only corporal but corporate**
-Sagan


telescopic technologies ==> Earth as a living entity ~= gaia: (a species of noble lie) biosphere behaives as a body
-temperature, pH and the distribution of reactive gases have remained extraordinarily stable for hundreds of millions of years

animal body --> exposed to natural selection =/= living Earth

•gaian worldview
•animism
•native Americanism
•deep ecologism
--> inhabits the responsive tissues of a planet-sized complex organism
--threatening--> into the muck of planetary personification New Age joy [---> go to the latest godzilla film industrial apologetics and ecological satanism --> tales of human accountability]
--> *biocentrism* [of our time 2019] ~=> noble fictions

cross-disciplinary science
mythopoetic
atmospheric chemistry

earth: organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun
-Lovelock
--depending--> on the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization

gaia <== narrative integration of cosmology and morality (<-- can we do without it?)

eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bod-ies made from reproducing eukaryotes


(three billion years ago, the oldest type of sex on the planet:)
bacterial omnisexuality --> promiscuous: not delimiting sexual exchanges with species barriers (+ it needs intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so)
--> lateral transfer

omnisexuality: a means of genetically “locking” together once-diverse groups (of prokar[...]