[...]

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

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

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)


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thinking with traps [working title]
Allow me to make you a trap. I think traps and lures are interesting to think with when one is oriented toward a nontransportive investigative work. What I mean by nontransportive investigative work is a mode of approach to “getting to know” something [*call it research] where your subject does not speak plain to you, and you, nor your work, do not intend to transform them. The question of “what is interesting for them?” raises up immediately. This question emerges in all sorts of domains of social life. As a bullshiter [*a technical term for performance-lecture: an art of interweaving logos] and program-coordinator and educator in the art sector (ZUYD Toneelacademie Maastricht), I am permanently positioned to ask this question. For this I have found the notion of trap particularly useful to think with, especially in environments where participants entice each other in their subjects of knowledge by means of an adaptable cunning intelligence.


Somewhere between fairytale findings, animal associations, and dictations from Benjamin Alberti, Eva Hayward, Marcel Detienne, and Vinciane Despret, I am thinking about traps as zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts, made-up things that entice meaning across species. Trap-making is the forms of knowledge of the back-tracking of a fox, of building a fishing net, skills of a weaver, a carpenter, polymorphism of an octopus, and the rhetorical tricks of a crafty charlatan. The trap-maker imagines what is the perspective of a radically different being. If you make a trap for other animals you are fully engaged in multi-species perspectival game. You think about their bodies engaged in a perspectival communication. I argue, lures are needed to convey meaning. In this sense, lures and traps are mimetic devices, they are enticements of meaning, and we have mimetic participation with them. Mimetic is the opposite of semiotic. In mimetic participation, one does not ponder about the symbolic relations hidden in the game, but rather one is caught in its form. But this form can still be meta and not literal. In my understanding and use of lure one is not necessarily fossilized by this seizure. It is a form of figuration by trying to enact. It demands enacting something outside of you. A mimetic preoccupation is something that you cannot stop following. [*The fashion industry, marketing, conspiracy theories, art, psychology, and hunting, are all about mimesis.]


One mimetic form that I have been caught in is an old figure of children's fairy tale, Cinderella--during her confinement with the evil step-mother and two step-sisters. Cinderella is my ancestor and heritage. I was exposed as a child to Disney’s version of Grimm’s recollection of the story, which was the very last Disney movie that was officially dubbed in Farsi before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voiceover in Farsi was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in the Tehrani cabaret voice-performances. Her voice has a radically different feeling than its English original. In contrast to how “childish” the mice sounds in the movie, Cinderella's articulations are perceived much more “adult,” sexually textured, of how a young female sounded like in the Iranian consumer culture of the 1950s. Recollecting that Cinderella now reveals something else that corresponds with my research, an attic bestiary, a mini universe of meanings and beings with whom she is in conversation with and in a permanent collaboration of worlding.


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


[....]


Sometimes there is no maker behind the trap. They are created by the world, by random, emergent, coalescence of elements in the environment. In a witness-fable by Kelileh o Demneh we have a moment of problematization of cunning intelligence. The story goes, once a fox was walking down his forest when he noticed animals were escaping from something. Upon further investigation he found out they were running from a special sound that scared them, a loud drum. At this stage, he is curious but vigilance and not afraid, because he knows the forest is all deceit and trickery. His inner thought is opportunistic or playful, he thinks there must be something juicy there that I can get m[...]