[...] subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{question =/= demand}*--> Nancy
[the use of ‘transference’ is a way to account for the relationship between readers and texts. the emphasis in Lacan is on the ‘supposed’ and not on the ‘know’. reader assume that the text ‘knows’. --> What Lacan's understanding of the transference points to is the fact that we must see the meaning of any given text not within the text itself but as a reconstruction between reader and text.] [in other words, transference is ‘a representation of the past’ (childhood and etc.) to the present ]
a pedagogical problem: rapid transferencial turn-over: going from one subject-supposed-to-know to the other (=/= reading)
#the kind of ‘reading’ [encountering a text, artwork, speech, ourselves, etc.] that i am talking about is not about this transferencial energy directed towards the sujet supposé savoir. this practice of reading is about to read together and to read ourselves reading, to an atentiveness to the way we are reading or not-reading or aberating from something and be attentive to that disjunctive movement. what is noncomprehension? what is the experience of nonunderstanding? and so on.
*so, the sujet supposé savoir is the one who is structurally is in a place of knowledge which doesn't mean that subject is filled with or capable of offering power and knowledge but that is projected onto that functional space* --> sujet supposé savoir is merely a spatial determination? (is this related to my interventive lectures in outdoor spaces in order to sabotage ‘what is meant to signify’ of the spatial subject-supposed-to-know?)
*sss is one of the effects of subjectivity -- a scenography of transferential intensity : we credit that being with having knowledge to transmit, and then we might also resist it.
---let's get out of this space!!?
--%--in the context of pedagogy, students regards their teachers as sujet supposé savoir, that they should know something. “it is the students’ supposition of an art teacher who knows, who have something more than they have in themselves, that initiates the teaching and learning process rather than the art knowledge actually possessed by the teacher” (Hetrick). (is it the architectural gesture--the center--that produces the recognition of the teacher situated as “teacher”?) *“the spell of transference.” / at some point some gesture is taken by the student as a sign of hidden knowledge and intention ==> transference establishing itself; (how education [and love?] without transference looks like? --> Julia Scher, ‘post-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)

according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])

-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]

in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.

@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other metric systems? art not as an action, but a reaction? not a communication, but a reception? {---> go to my master studies Diploma on passivity in performance art}

registers of ‘complaining’ in Lili's discourse. she is a bit like Faust groaning, habe nun akhhhhh Philosophie and so on. [Ach of Sprache] (that they have done all the work, they know everything, yet know not enough of what really counts [that is the incalculable] and cannot be satisfied by mere knowledge available to them. nor can they keep themselves to the restricted zone of knowability.) so Lili saying “it's too much!” is a hysteric wish for ‘more’?
(Freudian joke, the hysteric says: “is that all there is!?” while the neurotic says: “this is too much!” to the same object)

*it was Goethe who invented the super-ego, Freud named it following him.

the all-or-nothing view: i know everything or i don't know anything, problem of scale, problem of ‘circumstance = reality’
kloAQsvRkFY

the figure of the ‘accuser’ and the ‘straight talk’ for Lili
...that people would speak literally
going from proof to proof, from necessity to necessity --> displacement (=/= detour)

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

@Ekaterina; some other characters:
the jealous, the impassioned, the persecutive, the erotomaniacal,
complainer,
noble trader,

Ekaterina, asking for a fabulation? her totem making
Deleuzian fabulation: a fiction made up by people in their process of becoming
making up stories
=/= fiction (on its own; it doesn't have that relation with becoming)

in which conditions the paranoid mother occupies the failiour of the good-enough mother?
what constitutes the ‘site’ for her mother?

(how her) characters keep running into eachother in a universe of recursive connection (?)



**stories that collect stories** [~= archive? my hypertext? a mouth full? --this specific type of stories are dangerously worlders, usually handed to the unquestioned mechanics of universalized taxonomy and 17th century rigs: encyclopedic homogeneous tables. they are the stuff of ajayeb]
(mispronounced by Ekaterina > captured by Hoda > found object by Sina)

stories that collect other stories:
1- archive ~--> sortability
2- translation ~-->  linearity
==> universality (that both these stories claim)
(my work on hypertext apass ajayeb graph rigs, is to deal within these conditions of storying. my shift of interest)

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

(“dealing” @Luiza:)
(or in Lili's term “..a way to tackle issues”)

[with Avital]
*modalities of dealing-with:
-parasitism
-(under the spell) drugs =/= struggle (according to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx --> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lunched by Heidegger, who was on a mission: we have a mission, we have a mission of transmission, we have a mission to inscribe things--not from God but from what has happened to us and been left to us after the death of God (as Nietzsche has announced.) {yes, without a proper address, a state of epistemic alert, and so on} and (3) *task* associated with Benjamin. the Aufgabe is that which inscribes in itself ‘giving up,’ the Aufgabe, it means it is impossible, we take it on as a kind of ethical, political obligation, but in the word Aufgabe is also ‘Gabe’ meaning ‘gift’ in German, it is gift and giving-up. [Derrida beautifully asks to negotiate endlessly with the ‘given,’ even if the Gift that is given is poisonous.] -->{ we can see how operate but also how they contaminate (and leak into each other.) we might have a sense of three of them}
-ontology of “struggling” a way out of Aporia [denotes, in philosophy, a philosophical puzzle or state of puzzlement] --> we can't! --> we must try to work to locate modalities of stagnancy (rokud) without necessarily seeing the Exit. how do we live with these catastrophic markers that mark us?
-Paleonymics: a certain operation according to which one continues to put old words to work. The use of a pre-existing word in a new context. -- we are stuck with old pomping meanings.
--(Stengers) connecting materialism with struggle --> (in apass) we are descendants of this trope

for Luiza, the meaning of ‘infold’? instead of ‘unravel’? --> interface*
(i want to point out the ‘synthesis’ in her work rather than the ‘analysis’ implied in the term ‘unravel’)



Lacoue-Labarthe made Heidegger possible to read for Avital
(and that is what Avital does, make a lot of things possible to read for me)

(to incorporate a) *rigorous hesitation* (=/= Leo's “slowness”)
going step by step in the confrontation (essential to the unfolding of thought)
**not turning ‘weakness’ (or metaphorical weariness) into a (compelling) paraconcept [<-- Levinas does it]
-taking on the the big topoi of the day like a warrior
courage --comes--> from the *abyss of needling fearfulness*
*German romantics invented the always-with-community, a living-with, a Mitsein practice of living life philosophically (full of moments of restricted solitude, pressure zones, etc.)
(office of friendship...) i am friend in a Freudian ambivalence, that means i undermine the friend, try to trap him and catch him off guard
-if you are so calm, then i will try to bring you over to my side of the barricade of obsessional neurotic (a condition in which the mind is intruded upon against her will by images, ideas, or words. consciousness remains lucid and power to reason remains intact ==> temporarily deprivation of individual of freedom of thought and action [<== intrapsychic conflict of sexual origin that mobilizes and blocks all flows of energy (in the case neurotic a source of pleasure to the child =/= hysteric)])
-when we write do we need to demonstrate a far-ranging grasp of the political consequences of every possible metaphysical move?
...prime mover or suspects such as Plato, Heidegger, Derrida
*acceleration: that we are result-oriented, business-oriented, under the gun of gains, and subject to the push towards scientific objectification =/= i try to work with different degrees of attention: slowing down for checkpoints, allusive clusters and dense indicators, that are also problematic and short-circuited (in my lectures) ==> to get to the *notational space* that we can calmly observe, examine and explore together.
-to be lucid about your own part taking in narcissistic economy
*mimesis*: those things we are still stuck in in very covert and unavowed ways ~-> ‘destiny’ (a term i use when i mean mimesis for us [-a disease that shows symptoms characteristic of another disease])
(i am not pessimistic at all) i have just a catastrophic intuition that informs my grammar =/= mimetic hell

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

*complaint (blocks ‘becoming’?)
-so if i am used to complaint in all sorts and forms and shapes, what do i do if not complaining? that means i need to start learning new techniques of being in the world.
-complain, forms of protest, grievance, <--(contamination)--> lament (sug سوگ, zaje ضجه)
-dispositions of Beschwerde
-which minorities are associated with bitching and moaning? (naleh va shekayat ناله و شکایت, ghor غرولند, غر) (a feminine accent?!)
 -it is often said that “children should stop complaining”
“stop complaining” ?!! [~~> pointed to or relevant for Lili also]
***complaint : the disenfranchised (az hagh mahrum shodeh از حق محروم شده) language of muted rage***
what is (let's) bitching together?
is religion one long complaint? (--'reformation’ as a cover-up)
the “i prefer,” non-need, non-preference
*forms of relatedness--in certain societies the opening self of sociality consists in complaining. (starter-utterances; social encounter involves nagging about your friends, parents, lovers, etc.) --making friends is via complaining. (this is about the conditions of Mitsein, being-with) {non-affirmation ~/=? complaint; we mistake so easily non-affirmation with complaining. (is this Lili's take? her complaints about the insufficiencies of being.)} --> is complaint parasitized by calls for retribution?
Klage (complaint) --to--> Anklage (accusation)
*complaint remains a repetitive fixation that feeds rather than exhausting its course (/Avital, aw9Cv_wQ4CQ) -- it does not finish itself off, or move up the ladder of transformation [important for Sana], actually increases pain --> so, (according to the analyst:) complain is jacking up one's suffering (the Analytiker can't take it anymore)
Avital > Kittler: the Ach of Sprache, (in our historical language usage:) literature or language as complaint. sigh in literature (also pointed out by Lili)
--the modern techo-monster Faust opens with the complain
**what is then a proper address?
...the wish for more

-do machines complaint or lament?

@Luiza; (one of sub-phenomenon of utterance) *blush* registers a complaint(?)
(--> to be noted that certain white skin-colors considered racistly “capable” of displaying moral anxiety.)
-a level of affect and meaning that remains at the loss of words, between shame and excitement, confession and disavow. blush speaks for her at moment when she cannot stand up for herself?
-or it betrays her with a sudden spread of skin-mapping releasing a secret or indexing a moral blemish (lakedar لکه دار), a pigmentation... (how to read it?)
-blush manages to register a complaint and it signs off [concludes] at an unspoken accusation...
-blossoming of senses, cultural significance, who is capable of blushing? --> (decency's) *outrage* (--> libidinally charged, prompting a political arousal --> still a vitality stirs in the complaint--*the complaint can bring movement*) [Luiza's climate of resistance and her integrated modality of ‘struggle'] --> **inner life of morality**
-flush?

[complaint,] is it issued from a place of impotence or does it have the potential to move mountains? (Avital--Sina's emergency supply of meaning)
can it arrive at any destination whatsoever?
‘complain’ and ‘explain’ relationships
(laughter as a form of complaining)
‘complain’ and ‘politeness’ relationships
what complaint has to do with our anger-management programs?

complaint ~/= lament (complaint won't shut up but lament desires its ending)
lament is fined to mourning and loss ~/= complaint (resisting a fixed relation to loss) seems unable to mourn
*complaint cannot mourn. [complaint as a form of mourning-disorder]
(is mourning busy with ‘continuity in life’? a world that is not made of connections: zendegi bi/ba tadavom زندگی‌ بی/با تداوم, jahani ke be ham mortabet nist جهانی‌ که به هم مرتبط نیست)

is any critique not a complaint? not throwing something in the field of complaint? (--> Luiza, Lili; certain forms of protest dominates their utterances)
--different morphs of civic grief--
(why am i concerned with complaint of my friends? this is about checking my own infrastructural concerns about zones of encounter and redirecting oversized libidinal aggressions, [and pain-relief? {is my work all about (philosophical/artistic) pain-relief?}])

complaint =/= staying within the boundaries of coded gracefulness
(...credit reserved for non-complainers) ,,, ((minor scales of)) protest and breaking rhymes (of master discourse?) (@Sana, perturbed by manners of injustice; her libido [zist-maye زیست مایه, shur-e hayat شور حیات] is at stake)
--when complaint takes over and you don't even know if there is an injury anymore at the root of it.
(we are traveling behind its possible meaning-fields)

de-shamanization and translation /(non-transparency should rule?!)


are we trapped in a grid of grievance?

different forms of ‘maybe’ (i am trying to install?)

how complaint is then situated in ‘becoming’?

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

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

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

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

what-should-have-been

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

metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)

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


R_dzvJYDZXM

CrGJIS3quYY


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




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

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

@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/readings/manovich_database.pdf]
what is for Anouk ‘information’? and what is for her the relationship between information, knowledge, interface, and perceptable?
for her what is the relationship between ‘information’ and ‘infinite’? (infinite as the universe of all possible images)

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

*Pierre's ‘rights of nerves’ --> “talking to everybody”
[rights of nerves: you are promted to do what you do out of disgust, outrage, fear, or driven by anxiety, you don't know why, you are compelled towards an object or project or thing or unthing]


*Seba: for him “narrative =/= complex” (the question of “complexity's situatedness”) for him: “multiple perspectives ==> coherency (=/= bi-rabt بی‌ ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)

(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)

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

my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,

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

the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)


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

sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)

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

*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter

*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two

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

[with Kenney]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)

speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres

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

the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)

what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?

[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror

(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)

“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”

a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century

the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)

‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> this is precisely the standard account of technology in high-techno-scientific capitalist sunny societies] --> the idea that magicians can “forget” (or “lose”) their magic suggests a guarantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)

(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)

(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental reason ~= reification (madiat, jesmiat) as reason
(Habermas:) systems rationality, economic and bureaucratic rationality (==> patterns of meaning rendered functional) =/= communicative processes that sustain the lifeworld

the same Platonic tradition produces: {theory =/= practice} ==> {mind =/= body} ==> {"conceptual” =/= “material"} (and privileging one over the other)
(for the Frankfurt School) truth = "a moment of correct praxis”

what is at stake is the way ‘The Magician’ heroes’ way of non-relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit “world” that they inhabit.
...that science is an ‘account’ of reality not a ‘tool’ for coping with it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake

then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?


the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.

(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)

[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]


Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art -->  objective science + universal morality + law  ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-fulfilling and self-justifying observing subject

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

(Freud's) ego: the record of abandoned object cathexes
(cathexes ~= electrical charge; the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object)

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

(15.02.2017) three objects from apass:
-complaint
-evidence
-monologue


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

on futurity; in SF capital (Mark Fisher) the information (somewhere between cybernetic futurism and “New Economy”) is a direct generator of economic value ==> ‘the information about the future’ circulates as as increasingly important commodity* (Eshun)

SF: engineering feedback between its preferred future and its becoming present --✕--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)

@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-in her criticism of “eurocentrism” how are afrofuturism and arabfuturism located? (curatorial) let's invite them as her allies in Hansaring Studio.

countermemorial mediated practices

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

خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)

(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)

Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]


sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?

in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.

auto-erotic solipsism

باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)

auto-erotic economy

the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation

“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)

{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)

[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)

*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)

diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)

*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?

(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)

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narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism

[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)

*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between different media
conceptual interplay between media
space of alchemical transformation
(at the level of) conflict of interpretations
radical understanding of interdisciplinarity

diaspora: no longer having a clear answer to “where are you from?”

what might we learn from narcissism (from mimesis)?
mediate and fracture the writing of the self

wound: disconnected event
not adding up to a comprehensive narrative of the ethnic self

*ego-under-construction*
Freud's primary narcissism, we love ourselves before loving others
(for the child) narcissism = intermediate
(secondary) narcissism: the processes by which the distinction between the ego and external object is lost
(Lacan) loss of distinction between the ego and its reflection in the mirror
--> narcissism helps the infant in trying to distinguish himself from the mother/other

narcissism beyond infantile sexuality -->
narcissism: structure (=/= state) <== when the burden of desire on the subject becomes intolerable

(?what are new structures of) artistic narcissism
*an occasion to erotisize your own body*
to erotically emphasize a particular memory
stitching together of the naked ethnic body

hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed

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%note on Alice's workshop:
how the idea of mimesis came when we were not sure what she meant by “make note.” the signifier of “note” defined itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)

Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the workshop was based on her (finished) ‘notions,’ with her ‘indisputables,’ her ‘literal’ objects; (dance, active, body, imagination, practice, generative, creative, etc.)
•production of the “I” in her work; (a nasty side-effect: collateral individuation) (when were the moments in the workshop that an interesting “we” was created and for whom?)
•the problematic difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ at the footing of her thinking (--> my whole apass research is about this)
•(artist's) imagination as a magic wand that can transform things

*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]

it felt like Alice believes that people, we, have control over our metaphors, but in the course of the workshop there were many occasions that was not the case:
Sina, landscape --> optics
Esta, building/house --> geometry --> security
Agnes, supermarket --> exchange
Juan, crime --> arrest
Zoumana, garden (~-> fecundity) --> immunity
Eszter, electronic device --> closed
Ekaterina, zoo --> objects of care (~-> animal ~= diseased .--> objectifying or babying them)


* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer


(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe



***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)

history of the idea of nature

‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?

(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)

technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?

the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed

whose dialects are mutually intelligible?

human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!

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(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process

asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage

war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war

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@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a garden full of indirections, snakes?

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#my trope-findings, (bilingual nonsystematic comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات‌ (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طی‌الارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care




on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behaviour’ becomes performance material


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agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)

agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic

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@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the probable.]
to do hope-work is about ‘not talking (too much) about the future’ =/= commitment in terms of probabilities, refusal to treat your subjects as if they were objects of management --> let's set aside our own hopes, and work to honour the **hopefulness of others** (Deborah Rose)

“And hope is here, all around us. Creatures want to live.” (not in the “future”)

the accelerationists putting things in their cascade of failures, (everything sinks effortlessly into it,) and creating a vanishing point in terms of a western saturated temporality. for them the present is the time of announcing the news of salvation or apocalypse, and has no thickness. (the desire) to step out of history, and is made void in the process of realization, the idea that “everything is possible.” they experience their freedom as universal freedom * (noted by Blanchot.) [--> the problem with all male action heroes...]

(is this a kind of “game-over” discourse?)

*time (thinking with Haraway)
the sequential palindromic time (in Western-related cultures) [جناس قلب palindrome: from the Greek roots palin “again” and dromos “way, direction”; a word, phrase, number, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward; (un)parsable palindromic motifs;]
there are many sorts of temporalities in West, but the most naturalized and intuitive, ready-to-hand (and black-boxed) version of it is the “past, present, future.” the notion of ‘present’ becomes a (mathematical) vanishing point, a pivot or a point rather than itself a thickness, an inaccessible past being transmuted into a future that is always to come. [=/= the lived time of the flesh]

--> what counts as a responsible person in temporality? (@Seba, @Pierre's “future”)
in my work on ajayeb in apass, i choose to give account to responsibility in a way *to face those who come before rather than to face the future*, this is about a switch in the direction of attention.
•narratable memory with named people turned to ancestors and moved into dreaming time
•past: quiet country --> bear the mark of the care of generation, inhabits both living and dying --> recuperation (behbud بهبود, ramagh رمق)
•present: wilderness --> ongoingness (thickened with creatures)

[in (my reading?) ajayeb's temporality] things come from the past and the future simultaneously


what i respond to = what i inherit


science (in the way that is presented) is outside history, and becomes simply that which is “the case” of the world
**everything that one does is inside time, but that which is acquired (becomes a view onto a scene) and is outside of time**

***(dangerous) ways of being outside of the time of the thick present*** (Haraway)
‘-scene’: a thick presence of now, has many durations in it

(my work on ajayeb's past tense trans-species affair) is about those with whom one must get on together, in the enacting of responsibility for those who came before. how not to exit time? (= “staying with the trouble”)

trans-species affair then and now

(in our) multi-dimensional inhabiting of space with critters (you can't only talk about capital, land, labor without having a multispecies affair)


Badiou's points on accelerate:
•unifying us around negativity
•future of western world
•question of private property --> key of soical organization


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#work on video series (with? Christian, Esta,)
messy short videos (for youtube or other places)
1. critique of magic in cinema
2. representation of knowledge in cinema
3.
to perform past and present alarmingly simultaneously, to intermix the directions of causation and influence, they cannot be linear and progressive, against a production of present [presentism]



#create identity research center for/with my work
1. harem (حرم)
2. ajayeb (عجایب)
3. wortsalad
4. erklammern (with Foad)
5. san'at-e mojarad-sazi (صنعت مجردسازی with Foad)
6. garden (باغ)
7.


#what am i learning from Hiwa's Chicago Boys project?
history, recent region departures, study group, music, jam, more and more people together with their voices and stories, faces, sing, play, discomfort in instrument, tour, collectivity, sojourn in stage, conviviality, cover song,
-when i look at the videos of the project i feel like i want to do or be part of something like that, i want those qualities, i want the way people are looking and feeling like there.

#i am learning from Kohn that the survival is complicated, from Haraway that world works by excess and therefore filled with hope, with Sennett and Delanda a better account of socio-material history, from Ahmed a different understanding of psychoanalysis, from Barad poetry and argumentation, from Scher the effort needed to become interested, from Kenney that there is no need for a “standard language” to describe your interventions or to produce a body of knowledge about your matters of concern,

(this is one place that i am recognizing and foregrounding a binary structure:)
•women in my life: Avital, Haraway, Ahmed, Scher, Barad, Despret, teaching me science and art, attentive modes of differential reading and writing, practices of care and concern
•men in my life: Serres, Sennett, Delanda, Levinas, Anand, teaching me a non-guilt-driven knowledge of history and past, a different mode of remembrance which provokes a different mode of response and responsibility


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alive --[]--> dead --[]--> ancestor

what provokes storytelling?

(Harawayian) inhabiting ==> responsibility --> alignment

(a split-self at home with) contradictions ==> dealing with situated knowledge }--> this is about ‘ongoing’

note to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (for example ‘human intentionality,’ ‘human rights,’ etc) *but to hold on (while knowing how contaminated it is) to any concept (which are always unsettled) until it gets a particular (situated) job done
(which job i am try to get done with my good and bad concepts?)

where are we headed with our syntax?

“-scene” : the ‘now’ of the species [--> pleistocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]

Sa'di, thinking not with the capital T, rather with the flower, with the cut tail of the animaux

competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)

“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)

in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”

holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)

•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•

anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing

[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)

does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?

the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to

(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)

the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.

(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***

the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking

‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same

#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•

[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary

belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)

...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”

(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous


#[nodes and notes]

the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]

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the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative

(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**

when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the craft work) that when you learn how to do one thing you see other things that need to be explored [-> question for Eunkyung's drawing skills and practice]

*craft is more important than art(?) (Sennett)
...the notion that the work art breaks the conventions of practice, that it is something that makes an epistemic break. --> emphasis on innovation (something new)--that is a reflection of sort of 19th century bourgeois ideas of about making art.
•privileging the creative act over the craftsman act
•in innovation the “innovator” is separated from the “mass” =/= craftsmanship is collective and additive --> (in craftsmanship) the performance is myself
•creativity being a form of individuation or separation (@the exploratory shift in Eunkyung's work that Pierre highlighted)

*** craft-work is about additive skill; it is about building on what you know rather than throwing it out *** (=/= capitalist logic of progress, creativity in the sense that ‘something’ where before was ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)

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Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”

cooperation is about getting deeper into something

conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)

in modernity everything seams to need to be verbalized. what happens to the unverbalized, the unprogrammatic? --> can you have an implicit right which can't be verbalized? maybe no, maybe this is the limit of the social...

purposiveness: when you hear somebody go “i am going to put clearly what we all want...” you have submitted to that person (almost erotic) --> “they really know who they are” ==> you become a spectator to their definiteness

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who the fuck = theology
how the fuck = empiricism
what the fuck = ontology
how the what the fuck = epistemology
why what the fuck = metaphysics
why the fuck = ethics
why give a fuck = teleology
the fuck itself = phenomenology
fucked up = pathology
fuck all = nihilism

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Aela to Sven: “everytime you disappoint me you gain in depth” (5 April 2017)

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(06.04.2017) %notes after my apass endweek presentation:
•my implicit focus and energy on the body and its organs of gesture that animates us
•loving telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized

(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training

also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)

asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said

1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not placed somewhere in me, it is always an articulated matter of ‘with’ or in interaction with, it is a sym, changes before i can grasp, knowing is done always with a figure or a thing, it includes all sorts of optics and technologies, (affect theory, media theory, epistemology,)
2- the response to the second question is also not clear, i am not sure what i am told, i don't remember or hear, what i am told is infolded in what i know, (when i started with my islam lecture series i was testing the waters of these two questions and the possibility of staying with them without freaking out of ambiguity or ploting an answer)
3--> #cat's cradle


#on hypertext note:
i am becoming skilled at looking at my notes:
{(1) what are the *skills necessary* [=/= tabula rasa (of the reader, of the audience) of the communo-capitalism's standard of “user-interface"--the strange idea that the interaction and reading doesn't need or must not need learned-efforts or skills, that it should be “easy” and “effortless” --> fallacy of the unskilled listener.] to engage, interact, and get involved with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of (my) reservoir? }--> ** let's ask that question with every apparatus that engages us into desire, movement, articulation, ...
skills --> to become ‘literate’ in this particular way --> situated knowledge includes this situated literacy and skills of reading particular to the object of “text” (in that case how do i address my interest in the pervert reader? the skills of the unlearning*)
the skills necessary for my work to work comes with time, attention, and desire ~-=>? #harem (=/= ladies room)
--> (2) this skills of (my) reservoir, what set of questions or problems equip me to address?

varzidan, varz, varzide, ورزیده

Sennett's love for his subjects is extraordinary (=/= iconoclasm, futurism) and it influences me deeply, his voice and care when he opens his reflection, findings, etc.

ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area


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the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’

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i am following the movement of certain words here

spam =/= internet

spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have

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[title]
“it's your turn now to play”

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(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence

material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad

(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images

what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)

[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible

sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,

“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}

movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)

(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being

...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined


--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I

how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-

(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associations between figures and signs) --> something as the cause of a feeling in someone --> “involving relationships of *difference and displacement*{as the form or language of the unconscious} without positive value” --> affective economies -->{social, material, psychic}

{ psychoanalysis = "absent presence” of historicity-->(sideways movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and destination

**the movement between signs converts into affect
feeling <--> fetish commodity

in Freudian model, the movement between objects is intrapsychic --> trace of how histories remain alive in the present*** [regarding ajayeb's histories, histories that “stick” and which does not need to be declared, #fohshe heyuan/heyvan فحش حیوان/حیوون sideways movements...]
-(ajayeb's) past histories of naming

objects, the author of emotions



(how) emotions align subjects

_“surfacing” of individual_

(Ahmed suggests that) emotions are not simply “within” nor “without” but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.

narrative = production of the ordinary


•(which crimes against persons become crimes against place? -‘us’-)
•“body of the nation”
•scene of “our injury” (--> also in Iran: “our” historical injury)
•(the fucking) right to defense --> ‘home’ itself becomes to be mobilized as a defense against terror, becomes transformed into the symbolic space of the nation #[example of when the approach (to/by objects) itself becomes a fetish object*] --> “staying at home”: a form of mobilization [---> go to three little pigs] ---- “the constitution of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)


origins of bad feeling
threat to violate the pure bodies [vulnerable and damaged bodies of the white woman and child]

*affect is economic* --> it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement --> they align subjects --> effect of collective --> (in Ahemd's economical model of emotions) they work to bind subjects together : the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding” --> her notion of economy =/= {inside/outside model --> positive residence of emotions: “I have an emotion” or “something makes me feel a certain way"}--> “fear does not come from within the subject, nor does it reside in its object”
-([@Hoda's take on witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds; affect generates the surfaces of collective bodies (<==allows== not to locate affect in a subject or object) ~~--> [to initiate with Hoda an examination of the) *mobility of bodies of subjects* (in the West or her regions =/= question of the mediatization of her emotional experiences}

*emotions ‘involve’ subjects and objects*

what constructs emotions as positive or negative residence?

[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i say that my work in ajayeb, which i named it as ‘organizing my memory, and also, that which comes to mind’ is all about this reconstruction of cognizeds and percepts? is that why i am having less and less unconsciousness in my daily life?!])
-cognizant agah آگاه
-in Freud's model of unconsciousness, the affect itself is not repressed, rather, what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached --> displacement

(Lacan's) subject: proper scene of absence and loss*
a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles --> constitution of the subject as “settlement”

([what is?] Eszter's right and will to keep looking for signs of difference. --when she was talking about idiosyncrasies of her countries)
*[with Eszter's “the nation has suffered enough!"] --Lezra--> politics in a sense is precisely concerned with what is or is not *enough*
“it's enough!” --> #demand something or before which I make a claim. it is practical (even technical) or is dealing with being practical
the haunting modifier of “enough”
the *amount* of something (-of suffering in this case) <-- “That's enough coffee”
-we are dealing with materiality and measure
{has that anything to do with the enough of Ekaterina's “good-enough mothers”?}--> true enough-ness for an effect to be achieved

model of emotion ==> materialization of bodies

(emotions construct) bodies as ‘enveloped’

in standard psychological model, fear ‘has’ an object
*(Ahmed's) fear: “passing by” (=/= arriving) of the object, impossibility of containment of object

anxiety is an approach to objects =/= fear is an object's approach

in Freud: self is made by the fear of father


Ahmed's model of ‘impact of fear’
fear does not leat to containment but an expansion --> his/her embrace of the world
•being sealed into a body that takes up less space!
**fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others** (interesting for Mona's work)
[structural possibility:] proximity of fear-object --is--> possibility of future injury

impressions of coherence, “sticking together”
(that is perhaps why dictionaries and bestiaries are interesting: because their elements do not “stick together” in the sense of an affective economy [of inquiry and narrative] #lists)


ontology of insecurity --> (naratives of) crisis ==> “return” (to values) --> fetish
-production of crisis is crucial for insecurity
-declaration/announcement of *crisis* reads the fact/figure/event and transforms is into a fetish object that then acquires a life of its own
-it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure (again)-->(the word “again” in the rhetoric of safty becomes itself the fetish object with its own life)
[security is bound up with “the not (me/us)"]

being invaded by inappropriate others [in histories of Iranian modes of intersubjectivity: ‘being invaded by the appropriate other’ ~=? being of Tasavof, #slave manifesto, let me know if you want me to kill your master.]

(in the 1999 film Matrix we see the image of the ‘strengthening the will’ of the human community in the face of the nunhuman machine others: Matrix ==> “us”)
(Matrix's) narative logic of an internal strength being posited as responsible for recovery, survival, and moving forward of the human race. (@Maarten, displacements of weakness and strength)

values that garantee survival
technologies that garantee survival
--> they become moral


those who____
speak (against) the “truth” of the world, cause the “ruin” of the world

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

say your name before talking
it's a Q and A, a lecture
--> it is a violent day
asking for your name is intrusive enough, even before asking where you come from [--> #estizah]


(learning from Heidegger:) abbreviation is already an effect of technology
case of Germany specially
and persian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage


[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> basirat بصیرت ==> ta'amol تأمل (modalities of meditation and speculation)
(in psychoanalysis) anxiety =/= fear
(in capitalism) anxiety --> boredom ==> capital
(in settler white colonialism) anxiety ==> safty
(in Ahmed) anxiety --> approach to objects
(in Ahmed) fear/anxiety ==> effect of “that which I am not”

(ghol قول, gharar قرار, gharardad قرارداد [~ that which is promised by the ghol], ghovate ghalb قوت قلب) contracts also come to reassure, otherwise we might be in the radically open space of psychosis.
***contracts, they disambiguate the space***
{+} (pointed out by Derrida:) “contract” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallically positioned: in the center, on the top, wrapped around the body, and so on.)


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

[apass opening week 08.05.2017, (my response to) what is “artistic research”?] artistic research is a fancy way of transforming your “weird feelings” about the world into an “inquiry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which the attitude of the artist changes: instead of making things into a “resource” for artistic creation, rather making things into a “topic.” That means a whole new set of relationalities and new forms of attention need to be learned and cultivated, which were historically often absent in the education of art.


-i want to bring a circus inside {--> within}
-my business still with aesthetics (my own image) (narcissistic stuff...)
-to show up as a guy, castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me

the death score

Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]

Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)

Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon is essentially confusing (?)
his autopoiesis and cognitions

Nicolas's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]

Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary

for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,

Vladimir's tether on disambiguity

Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)


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

[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]


“point of view” is an important metaphor


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


the name of the world is “detail”


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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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



Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)

inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)



How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)


ephemeral things become food

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

Esta, risking one's life


@Hoda, Xiri,
the idea of “express its inner experience”
simulation of

Xiri's sense of entitlement to accusation


@Leo, fiction of sharing
‘something tangible, like a meal’
something phantasmatically hooked up to libidinal openness, like a drug


@Elen, DUI: driving under influence, what are we on when they were driving her cars
DUI has become the pharmecy take on drugs to take away and winning the drug war
movement under influence, MUI
legelized use of motor activity
driving while impaired/driving while intoxicated (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risky (DR)
drunk driver (DD)

the notion of game and rule for Elen and Luisa and Eszter: it is until ages of 3 and 6 that children must not play by rules, and only after that the concept of rule-based-games (such as sports) should be introduced to them. what does that say about our artistic environment when we talk rules or breaking rules?
i am becoming more interested in the ‘rules’ that the artist (or non-artist) is proposing, and not my own ‘freedom’ in their work. what does it mean or do to become interested in the *freedom of others* and not yourself? ==> paying attention to the most implicit rules of your game, that means i am paying attention to your freedom that has articulated itself in the creative gesture


instead of (the “how” of) “how do i show my interested texts?” (which was proposed in Maarten's exhibition of poems) i like to ask (the “what” of) “what requires reading?” (also @Sven) (my kill-joys in apass ... am i being too ontologic with everything? --> I am operating from the position that understanding materials, practices, and interpretation implies questioning ontological assumption ==> challenge concepts)


@Eszter: is there a notion of ‘natural’ embeded in her ‘compelled’? there is nothing natural about us being here, there is nothing natural about here
•cognitivism: (when talking of representation) a psychology of doing which emphasizes human cognition endowment enabling man to develop intellectually ==> classifications (are easy seen) as properties of mind =/= classifications as materials or materially textured --> “a common way to hear people's experience of this materiality is through metaphors. So the generation of metaphors is closely linked with the shift to texture.” (Bowker)
•behaviorism: a theory of doing that focuses on objectively observable behaviors and discounts independent activities of the minds involved in the doing

-->? behavioral intervention
(footnote on) behavior therapy --> breaking one's loops (of: reverie [mind fleeing across secluded planes], reaction to stimuli [overwhelmed by the speech of the others ~ neurosis], distorted thinking [overstressed emotional reasoning], , ,)
[*]behavior therapy: treatment of neurotic symptoms by training the patient's reactions to stimuli --> *cognitive restructuring* could help Eszter in her artwork? (to reestablish the relationships between stimuli and responses)
(techniques:)
•counterconditioning
•punishment (operant conditioning)
•habituation
•functional analysis
•*behaviour intervention plans*
•automatic thought record
•

i can only guess (with cognitive therapy) at the interior landscape of her reverie, her internal reality (~= psyche) [--> i am reminded by this again that knowing anyone's psyche is impossible, as in psychology is an impossible science]
[*]cognitive therapy: identifying and changing unhelpful or inaccurate thinking, problematic behavior, and *distressing emotional responses*
--> learning to monitor thoughts (in three layers:)
1. core belief [deepest level of our thinking, underlying self-values and perceptions of the world, have an absolute quality: “I am worthless.” “I am inadequate.” “if I fail, I am worthless.” “I am unsafe in the world.” etc.]
2. intermediate beliefs [expectations and assumptions, guidelines we follow, maintaining our anxiety and depression: “Always look for danger and expect it to be there.” “If I don't understand something perfectly, then I'm dumb.” etc.]
3. automatic thoughts [immediate thoughts that go through our mind in response to a situation, usually negative and unquestioned: “She thinks I'm weird.” “I won't pass that test.” “This is too hard. I'll never understand this.” etc.]

types of automatic thoughts:
•evaluation (evaluative thoughts)
•coping strategies
•avoidance
•

[cognitive distortions]
typical mistakes in thinking:
•*all or nothing* / all-or-none thinking (“If I'm not a total success, I'm a failure.”)
•*catastrophizing* [--> middle eastern fortune-telling, omen, foretell the future] ( “I'll be so upset, I won't be able to function at all.”)
•*disqualifying the positive* (positive experiences do not count: “I did that project well, but that doesn't mean I'm competent; I just got lucky.”)
•*emotional reasoning* (“I know I do a lot of things okay at work, but I still feel like I'm a failure.”)
•*labeling* (“I'm a loser.” “He's no good.”)
•*magnification/minimization* (“Getting a mediocre evaluation proves how inadequate I am. Getting high marks doesn't mean I'm smart.”)
•*mental filter* [selective abstraction] (“Because I got one low rating on my evaluation it means I'm doing a lousy job.”)
•*mind reading* [narcissism] (believe to know what others are thinking: “He's thinking that I don't know the first thing about this project.”)
•*overgeneralization* (“[Because I felt uncomfortable at the meeting] I don't have what it takes to make friends.”)
•*personalization* [narcissism] (believe others are behaving negatively because of you: “The repairman was curt to me because I did something wrong.”)
•*should/must* [imperatives] (having a fixed idea of how you or others should behave: “It's terrible that I made a mistake. I should always do my best.”)
•*tunnel vision* [cyclopean view] (“My son's teacher can't do anything right. He's critical and insensitive and lousy at teaching.”)


what is the most central belief about herself?
which experiences contributed to the development and maintenance of the her belief?
which positive assumption helped her cope with the core belief?
what is the negative counterpart to this assumption?
which behaviors help her cope with the belief?

*basically there is often no evidence that the automatic thought is true

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/521a7b2ee4b0ee587906d191/t/5774531e03596e22f1d2c844/1467241246388/CBT+Case+Conference+Handouts-1.pdf


(a deep problem with behavior analysis is that it comes from the study of animal learning in the 20th century... observing cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes, and things like that)


(for Eszter:) complex ~= coherent (=/= *contradictory*)

Eszter could benefit from learning about collective behavior sociology
/individual behavior is completely unpredictable
/collective behavior is to a large extent predictable

contagion =/= convergence
(Kelile Demne: evil is convergent)

*contagion: crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members
*convergent: people who want to act in a certain way come together --> crowd diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals
*emergent-norm: people find themselves in a vague, ambiguous, confusing situation ==> new norms “emerge” on the spot, which may be at odds with normal social behavior
*value-added: release valve سوپاپ for built-up tension within community
*complex adaptive systems: autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities

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

(footnote on) personality disorder
deviating from ‘orders’ accepted by the individual's culture
-your distinguished and enduring behavioral and mental traits that differ from social norms and expectations
it is in relation to others --> cognition, emotiveness, interpersonal functioning, impulse control ==> personal, social, occupational disruption

egosyntonic personality disorders are most difficult to treat (such as: narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, gambling problem)

*egosyntonic: in harmony with the needs and goals of the ego [--> defences ==> maladaptive coping skills ~=> anxiety, distress, depression]
*egodystonic: in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image

obsessive-compulsive disorder --> egodystonic
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder --> egosyntonic

Freud: psychic conflict arising when the original lagging instincts come into conflict with the ego (or egosyntonic instincts) [such as: erection problem ==> egodystonic]

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

[*]personality disorder: (a type of psychological disorder generally defined by) the lack of insight into the disorder

borderline personality disorder =/= shades of gray
(a view that sees) significances as unfair and uncaring (devaluation) or flawless (idealization)
(a standardized criteria of diagnosis since 1980) a certain class of neurotics who, when in crisis, appeared to straddle the borderline into psychosis
fluctuation in identity --> chaotic identity (=/= chaotic imagination)
*the most treatment-resistant personality type*
-75 percent in female patients
-related to neglect in childhood

borderline personality disorder often comes with very smart people
borderline personality + high intelligence ==>
•parakandegi-e zehn پراکندگی ذهن sporadic and dispersed mind --✕--> hadaf jahat kushesh fa'aliat هدف جهت کوشش فعالیت having a target, direction, effort, activity
•going from one thing to another without consistency in life باری به هر جهت

borderline personality disorder + narcissistic personality disorder [seeing people from top to down] ==> winning arguments by mixing imagination and reality, saying everything they like to others
--> (donya-e zehni) a mental world in which imagination and reality are not distinguish (~-> lying)

(a nontherapeutic approach) to turn the borderline into storyteller:
•dissociation --into--> impossible association
•disconnection as a state of consciousness --into--> impossible connection
•lying as a feature --into--> fabulation
•manipulative behavior --into--> articulative
•demand --into--> performance
•chaotic identity --into--> chaotic imagination
•ذهن پراکنده (sporadic mind) --into--> ذهن انحرافی (deviant mind)
•sensitivity (of thin or no psychological skin) --into--> sensibility
•

a therapeutic approach to borderline personality:
•dialectical behaviour therapy (<--?-- mindfulness)
•


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

%notes on #workshop of question (HWD)
-how come in my drawing class participancts couldn't even hold the pen
-participants lenzes couldn't focus, the words were in blur and in disarray
-i had to stop free associations and staggerings, and return to the task at hand
-it was like teaching a new language
-i was trying to share my methorodlogy, specificly. not a jam session
-is it neccesory or interesting to learn eachother methodlogies in order to get involved and engagned in eachother practices? maybe not --> go back to representational tools --are representational tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not there by free will that is usually mobilising them to look for and join a workshop that they are interested in.

%(am I?) ‘coming back with advices’ in my work [[#Esta]]

is it interesting for me or my research to think about how we moved that plant around in the 4th floor?
*moving plants* is risky
as backdrop for human activity
passively vegetating
making local and global connections: which local or global connections was made (by Sina, Xiri and Esta moving the plant)? (how the plant was repositioned in our) making of public common spaces
-practices of concern
(attentive to the plant that was a) shared “thing” between us
what was mediated, navigated and articulated with that plant in apass 4th floor?
(with this i am trying to ask about the) kinds of imaginative world-making at work
gathering forces
-

the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...
(which objects of our systems design supporting some and not others) leaving out what are locally perceived as “nonpeople” can mean nonworking system. (biologists not seeing their secretaries as doing real science, artists in apass not seeing the mice doing real work, etc.)
--> *(Leigh Star's) “ethnography of infrastructure”* -infrastructure is both relational and ecological, both transparent and opaque. it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment. [*]infrastructure: a dense interwoven fabric of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).

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

my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)

i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.

i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and ongoing? there is this standard general sense that becomes very upset when things are not immediately understood (#double-click democratization of communication,) my workings have been perhaps invested in keeping my own (not-fully-)understood alive for a while. if things were instantly understandable we wouldn't be here.

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

question at Hoda

how to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices

physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond

ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness

what (else) literature can be if not elegy?

sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act

soft-spoken adjectives

“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?

sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?

temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her

incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference

anger, pain, misery, ...

which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخم‌بندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?

my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry

what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?

somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation

Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?

sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج

شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’

historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings”  ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception

her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)

ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive

how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling

Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?

within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed

bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past


she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been rifting between the difficult space between “here the Farsi-one” and “here the English-one”

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

#semester, seminar study the “scene of writing”
keywords: deconstruction, fabrication, articulation, plasticity

[week 1,2,3] encounters between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, writing, concepts of language:
•Derrida --> Freud / “Freud & the Scene of Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)

[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)

[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)

[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing

(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible

(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]


after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?

another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’

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

because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

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

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

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

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

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

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

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding living with contradiction” : making choices without necessarily turning the other choices into something an enemy does --> important for collective research life; “[we] need each other's extremes”; *our activisms are not the same*: to open up to our extremes, to open up to what you are not sure of --> to find ways to be in productive alliance (=/= the notion that everybody has to do everything [tell Xiri])
•(educating oneself) actually know how to explain what somebody else said and not just what you said*** --> figuring out how to disagree with each other as well as agree, that no statement is going to be taken as evidence of being the enemy (--> we face this in apass)
•learning how to recognize authority (as a mentor and participant) (the problem of the inability to deal with authority, common in early feminist movement, traces in Xiri) --> being alert to how hierarchy shut people up that one don't acknowledge the hierarchies that emerge out of that *{alarm ==> hierarchy}*
•in apass i am trying to remember what my peers are doing, and when i see things i think of them, and they are in my citation network (they are all over ajayeb.net) and i am aware of what they have told me. words they are inventing are in my vocabulary too (that is why i am so energetic calling in Xiri's category change --> for example “generous suspicion”)
•collective research environment works by networks* (--> a problem with apass)


[*]epistemology = stories knowledges tell


sometimes practices demand:
•exclusive expertise (~ focus)
•extensive scholarship ==> linking and speculating
•attaching unexpected agencies and territories to each other


(better) understanding the mechanisms and affects of inclusion and exclusion in communities of practice
for example in apass (we are dealing with):
•suffer <== mutual incomprehensions
•pain <== heterogeneous knowledge worlds
•anger <== unevenly distributed power
•fatigue <== exposure to intensity
•tension <== different styles of knowing

unacknowledged suffering --(in past and present)@Hoda--> as well as pleasures


(what do you make out of reading your gender material?)


Greek brainwomb


feminism  ~/= feminist theory-->{highly diverse, located in many domains of practices in and out of the university, and understood to be this highly diverse activity}


the talks i have been giving are done by someone with a kind of mind and soul that just makes connections fast. i work orally. the lectures are heavily prepared (and some important ways unprepared in the manner of its performance: all those connections happening during the talk not knowing them beforehand, they happen by the encounter*) and full of cue (سخن رهنما، ايماء، اشارت) and quirk (تزئينات، تناقض گويى، تغيير ناگهانى فکر). my notes and scripting are invisible to my audience, but they are there at work. and it gets people excited. and that's the point. i work with confusion and excitement. i have not been good at laying out groundwork of skills, going to next level and so on. i am working with that feeling of “i am not sure what i am getting, by i think i am getting it”. i also always come back, loop again through the same material, go back to the question we were raising before and ***“watch what is happening to the language”***(Haraway). these are the ways my connections work. artistic and scholarly work works by **modes of attention** [--remember--> your mode of attention (= your mode of abstraction) is doing the foregrounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you make ‘your mode of attention = world’ to inhabit something for a certain time only to do a certain kind of work)] --(because)--> you are always jumping into the middle of something that is ongoing before you, into the middle of many conversations. you are learning how to get it in several ways at once. the hypertext that i have been building also characterizes these kinds of layering upon layering of textual work. teaching myself how to write and how to play with ideas.
working with (Haraway's) kind of good-enough approach to a body of scholarship --> inhabiting many things that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)

(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?

after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?

can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?


hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed


(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*

we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books


(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity

*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


***almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)


(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)


“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten


[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)


metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh


to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated


*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*

(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•


*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges


*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)

*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other

(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are


(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)


to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*


*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]


**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)

the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other


prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything


*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers

-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]

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

(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***


you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*


(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.

there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)


up-to-the-minute technologies

complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles

histories of dispossession and genocide


“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?


[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here


Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*


my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random

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

MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]

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

batlagh باتلاق



it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***

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

•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”

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

[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality

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

Stewart

surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image

images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself


تأثر ta'asor, نتیجه‌ی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy

the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in

in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march


(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date

the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams


the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact


“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”

(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream


[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path

traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}

(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia

a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)

(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye

“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact

surged toward the scene of their confident excitement

impact ==> the social

#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses



a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass

(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?


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

armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war

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“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force

hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”


high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time

[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism

[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing

[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile

imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine


which hyperobject you are caught in?

image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow


figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex

my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark

situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner


*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)


the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of the world’?

(Morton asking for) a geophilosophy that doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance

Morton: global warming =/= climate change
if one takes the ‘climate change’ as a substitute for ‘global warming’ is like “cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust


acronyms, abbreviations:
dialoc دیالوک --> decrease in appropriate levels of concern
tomas توماس --> terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm
cohhatg کوهاج --> coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology
hhatg حج --> human history and terrestrial geology
pb پی بی --> philosophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles (arayesh آرایش) }--> this thinking still continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)

visist = visit + resist


correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)

Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined

[*]epistemology:
•how can i know what there are (or are not) real things?
•what gives me (or denies me) access to the real?
•what defines the possibility of access?
•what defines the possibility of possibility?


•Einstein discovered a rippling, flowing spacetime
•Tarkovsky discovered the ‘sensuous material of film stock’ --> ssoci
•Husserl discovered something strange about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a cion, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible


Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects

flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature


(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data

scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are

*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*

causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming

causal factoid


humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism


...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes


[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears


(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل

everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates


speculative realism, a rogue machinery

saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•

obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)


*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things
-the concept of ‘nature’ is (such) an “object in mirror” (#amazon project)
بنداز دور mythical land away --> a dis-dimension called ‘away’ (door دور) in iran (door andakhtan دور انداختن)
(there is no away on this surface we are in) --> throw away: an optical effect : there is no loger distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)

a threatening proximity

“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”


one's normal sense of time as a container


Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity


ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’


the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing


weather as monster

baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self


(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy

back-to-nature festivals

nihilistic princes of darkness

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

my work is *to mix stories*

everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding

cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)

‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*

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

on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)


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

basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers

my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading

each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading

literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]

i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art

all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)


catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)

readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation

a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•


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

learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose

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

(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the world of people and things?]
•beginning to grasp the concepts of space and time in more logical, practical ways
•causality
•reading (is an industrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about identity formation?) --> [according to Erikson] only when identity is established [~ experimentation stopped] the questions “What have I got?” and “What am I going to do with it?” can be asked
[*]identity: to identify the object of one's fidelity***
-identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently prolonged
-->? genital stage

-(20-39 years) Intimacy / Isolation --> Love
[Can I love?]
[*]distanciation: “the readiness to isolate and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to our own, and whose territory seems to encroach on the extent of one's intimate relations”

-(40-64 years) Generativity / Stagnation --> Care
[Can I make my life count?]
guiding the next generation

-(65-death) Ego Integrity / Despair --> Wisdom
[Is it okay to have been me?]
(only now is able to) develop integrity

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

you have a ‘bad day’
(in Socrates:) because you are ignorant of geometry
(in Feminism:) because you are a man
(in communicative capitalism:) because you are ‘boring’


how to plot to take over the world?


(Rilke)
“I wish to help and expect to be helped. Everyone's eternal mistake is to take me for a healer when, in fact, I am only attracting others, for my own profit, in the trap of a simulated assistance.”


(your) interview and interruption


I would take a bullet for you
/////
you go for the knife and i prepar myself to die

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

duty ~= Dienst nach Vorschrift
(the problem is that it is not enough to have a duty, rather, you have to define what ‘duty’ is. that is the only duty)

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

MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy... Although, that kid, guy, he has a spark. He is a pure account man.
MADMAN#2: and what is that job all about?
MADMAN#1: i don't know. it's about listening to people and never saying what's really on your mind.
MADMAN#2: no. it's about letting things go so you can get what you want.


“I could tell the minute she saw who I realy was, she never wanted to look at me again, which is why I never told her.”
--> i am not telling you anything, because the minute you see who i realy am, you never want to look at me again.

“...but nobody knows what is wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away.”

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

is this an honour?


(a) better thug


so, one summer evening, I was wrong, ...

once when i was wrong...


thank you for that kind (of an) introduction



i like to make decorations for other people's work

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Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”



daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته



i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز


phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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

locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant --> for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,


subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring


[title]

might suffer

Freud's penis


ignoria


aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)



tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشت‌های مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
•train ==> skill

taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])



Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker



regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain

i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)

شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cannot be based on or created by mogheyiat, that means situatedness cannot make us feel/care/hate/commit]
شخصیت موقع بین shakhsiat moghe’ bin: situated subjectivity [--Haraway--> situated objectivity --> commitment based on care]

موقعیت mogheyiat (situtation, circumstance, condition) =/= واقعیت vagheyiat (reality)
(?one should) to live by vagheyiat, not mogheyiat
[i am educated to base research and knowledge both on mogheyiat and on vagheyiat --> crisis of situated knowledge in interpersonal relations: to feel about others based on mogheyiat/situation is a bad idea(?)]
@Hoda: turning mogheyiat into vagheyiat


(verb <--> adjective)
do the right thing (or take the right side) جانب حق را گرفتن [a form of closing off distance =/= disembodied seeing] <--> righteous حق به جانب [a form of embodiment, zero distanciation]



“your joke is the right of the other person”


you are hurt ==> “the other was bad” (is not the conclusion that is helpfull or capable of giving an opening, and it ends badly)
=/= people make mistakes

roshd رشد =/= pishraft پیشرفت
roshd --> shodan, becoming
pishraft --> to gain, progress,


selfishness =?=> being nice
khod khahi خود خواهی ==> nagozashtan-e tasvir/tasavor bad dar digari ["this is me, not you!"]
selfish = good at communication (do taraf-e miz khub harf zadan), bad at relating (nazdik shodan)
shakhsiat farasu-negar (cannot see themselves; ~=? selfish personality) =/= narcissistic pesonality (they have better chances for healing --> small doses of narcissism is necessity for self-interogation and integrated ego formation[?])


*anger is cheating*
(behaviour hal, negah be mozu-ha --> bazi بازی, hoghe حقه [transvaluated into innocence])


farar az ta'rif-haye ejtemayi فرار از تعریفهای اجتمایی ~-> farar az ejtema فرار از اجتماع

paying attention to others doesn't mean that you are understanding them (in the case of lonliness)

[title]
thousend and one questions

dark answers

why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?



negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)

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

savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note

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

being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness

ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement

narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up

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

“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]


liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)



takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)


تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking


the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بی‌عسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge


rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)

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

•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength, leadership
◾کناره گیر aloofness --> wisdom, independence
•*psychotic: makes a house, take it seriously, invites everyone to come (--> loss of touch with reality)
}=/= richer, more complex, more satisfying personality --> person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings

•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)




my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself


IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long


vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)

death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بی‌وفا, liabl)


put into words: have I been destroyed?


#workshop on Iranian elementary and post-elementary school books with adult artists


parde پرده ~= tasvir تصویر

damagh-sh دماغش
dar akhar -sh

حکمت مبتنی بر امور بین‌الذهانی
(hekmat mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense


[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•

(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)

‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*

issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,


[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوع‌ها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجا‌های بی‌معنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]

}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need both, because sometimes internalizing an alien syllable (via linguistic intelligence) might nest and flower their own random meaning networks, in a way that is not possible in mental intelligence



according to behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired science about consciousness-related processes {constitutive reductionism: ‘brain activity ==> mental processes'} =? end of psychology (and therefore: end of art? -because both always create *speculative molds*) --> which discipline will install an *understanding the psyche*
economically--> neuroscience will grow while psychology shrinks
[everything will depend on which reductionism you ascribe to them]

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

ideology: wrong questions

[parable of two side of a coin] tolerance = other side of harassment
(--Zizek--> the pseudo concept of) tolerance actually means “don't harassment me”

when you lack concrete politics ==> moralizations


we are no longer interpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic

(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)

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[*]death drive (inerested in fucking, cannot being-with): *to lead organic life back into the inanimate state*, to return to an inorganic state (-we are talking symbolically not biologically) [=/= eros (interested in love, life, sex, and being-with, the world is very vivid to eros)]
-->{image of the eskimo piercing through the ice and snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized

Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)

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

pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries


bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی



(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)



motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws

what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?

“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”



to think about X = to change X
we change the subject
we get some info: there are 5 people in the room. but when we bring that information into thought (because of how we feel and of our believes ==>) we start to bend the 5 to 6 or to 50 --> a try to change the reality =/= thinking in calm condition using science, information, conversation

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

bipolar --> mood disorder --> relationship of the self with emotions
borderline --> personality disorder --> relationship of the self with the world (of subjects)
narcissist --> personality disorder --> relationship of the ego with the world

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

people who grew up in iran and former soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder

(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما


(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح  بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation

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

note on the workshop of anarchive in Zsenne apass summer 2018
(my issues with Manning's presentation of) process philosophy --> a system-builder mode of thinking --> *saying something (right) about every single thing at once*
-process philosophy puts forward the will and desire for “change,” therefore it developes a resistant to change (?)
-it tend to be a metaphysics without physics [?!] (when a metaphysics provoke less interest for ‘-physics’ and more for the ‘meta-’ /and why is that a problem?) [==> Barad is much more useful for me now]
-the real question of the workshop remained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]

(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])

-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)

Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]

-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]

Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)

-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?


(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?


there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world

(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)


during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!

on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)

(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?

the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons

“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand out and say that?)

(Manning) creating a concept of care =/= care as actually practiced in different parts of the world by people
(what is the politics of not caring?)

Manning's rhetoric of reasoning: ‘virtuous’
telling soft wisdom tale with an emotional twist at the end and how she did the right thing and came out clean and cool --> rectitude

her text has become all about the achievements of senseLab with a cover of high philosophical abstract conceptualization (~= fortification)
=/= taking *risk* (=/= adventure) of talking about the real problems that you face in doing/thinking
=/= abstraction as the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction

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

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


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

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

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


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



in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’

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

eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans


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

#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)


“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime

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researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?

a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,

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

few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)


i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behaviour concealed


***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***

‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless

impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed

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

#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements (Puchberg Austrian meadows, with it cows and horses, place of beauty and leisure) ==entails==> forgetting many others --> ‘forgetting’ (~ privileging one assemblage over others) ==remakes==> landscapes
(yet) ghosts point to forgetting, show how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces
( specters in grasslands...)


in apass (i can't pose problems until) we must address these question:
•European heritage of creating conviviality شادمانی قابل آمیزش (and very good at it)
•the idea of democracy as a political project اکثريت نجيب (soft ways of being together)
◦secularism of artistic research دين ناوابستگى (registers of logos)

[most of the times our collaborative research artistic practices explicate ‘soft ways of being together’ ==> a condition in which no one knows better than the other]

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

the accelerationist fable of “running before walking”
ask any scientist and it comes to this. any problem caused by progress is because it has been going too fast. but the direction of its movement remains intrinsic to the idea of human
...

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

@Hoda: to be very careful with the fetish of “refugee's suffering” --> turning a serious political problem (geopolitics of western intervention, europe's economic neocolonialism) into a (sentimental liberal) humanitarian concern ==> avoiding critical political analysis

?a different program: not to be yourself
to bring our struggles together (not our so-called cultural differences)

refusal to integration is problematic as integration (into host's pleasure principle)

authentic imperialism has always been multicultural

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

on affect
affective character practice of retrospection: a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn?

1970s and 1980s anthropology of emotion: how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse =/= anthropology of affect: how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture ==> *creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it*

**poetics may quite possibly be all that we have, it certainly isn't all that we are**

[*]politics: permutations of evolving power relations and our reflexive attempts to negotiate and manage them

*affect theory: an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it

industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)

spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large

affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices

methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap

The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum

...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore

countervailing forces of sense and story

to inspire a sense of critical urgency

affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes

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contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy

***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)

the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience reception

anarchic and eroticised happening-art

“participation = collectivism =/= capitalism”

@Eszter: (?the “ideological” in) participation in a welfare state social democracy

the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)

*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)

*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy

to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience

(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

hit-and-miss field trips

the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships

comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority

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

only working with (that seems to be) your idea

(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious

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

Hillman

like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.

what are art's investments in psychology today?

all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)

“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*

(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**

(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul

symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality

“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses

♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)

the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science

recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•

[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***

analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual

mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego

****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*

-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?

-please let's have a darker kind of light...



(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world

(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)

(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes

(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function


Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)

mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*

root metaphor of psychology (?)

(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us

[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity

tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***

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

(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?

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

-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben

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act of cultural and economic exchange
act of reciprocal exchange, of creative mutuality (to benefit in a myriad of ways related to our professional status, our institutional ‘worth,’ the social and cultural capital perceived to be attached to the ‘networks’ in which we operate)
[to interrogate] concepts of artistic labor and value
time, labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems

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

https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology

operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced

state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity

*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids

unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power

mutant forms of technological self-subjugation

(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics

[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture



[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology

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

[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect

[title]
Whatever Professor

[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}


things that do the reading, editing, assembling

*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps

[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*

#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units

theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)

aftershocks of a shock you can't point out

(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”

designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out

evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)

proliferation of little worlds...

story = relay, weiterleiten, رله

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

in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology



score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia



wry --> wryly کج معوج شده

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

paleonymy (use of a preexisting word in a new context) --> we are stuck with old skeletons neurotic words [that are not mutating] (for example man, woman, animal, black, etc.) [=/= hope for mutation, random emergence, sudden epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)

a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)

(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting

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

practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings

teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted

festering + sheltering

“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart

rock-solid otherness

sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism

(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us

indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’

**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**


emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls

compositional writing: an associational register (of connections and differences) that worlds object-reals [real: a tangle of elements thrown together in a radical composition]

social-material world = composition = prismatic --> for people who are:
•attuned to them (or)
•identified with them (or)
•hostile to their existence (or)
•tired of them (or)
•excited to see their outline on the horizon (or)
•sharply excluded from them (or)
•

the way Attar (in the labor of a worlding) write in Tazkirat al-Awliya : describing a saint's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects

accrual and loss

...realm of killed off things

perception, context and cause
located nowhere in particular (or)
in some paranoid hyper-place

under what spell did things happen or half-happen or start to happen and fail?

Stewart: theory (drawn through writing) = compositional attunement

difference and repetition (+ potentiality and loss) ==> reals

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

knowledge: view from nowhere onto the world =/= knowing: participation in ongoing mutually constitutive processes in the world

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رواقى
stoicism: “detachment ==> clear thinking”
psychological independence <== *stoicism* (<~~)--> causality =/= anxiety

philosophy shows many ‘theories about causality = ways to reduce anxiety’ --Despret--> our experience sometimes require us *to go farther than the instrumental (causal)* and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction

*anecdotic causality*
([in apass we constantly do] the practice of using) [*]anecdote: expressive causalities*
anecdote: the intersection between the artist (patient) and feedback (therapist) --> circular causality --> (helps the feedbacker or therapist) *to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion*


stoic distinction: event which are dependent on one's *will* =/= events which are in the realm of one's *desires* (one which one has no control)
--> closely related to the (Seligman's) *causal attribution: a theory of contingent causality affecting the subject in her or his interpretation*

•نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)

stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****


Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)
•[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final

Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”

(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information

myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality


[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression

‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity


[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations


“anxiety as cause”

[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]


a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)

--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*


...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> the intervenor [looks for the ticket which would allow him to clim on and go around:]
•observe the causal chains
•giving the causal chains a different accent علامت، با تکیه بر صدا نه معنی
•create a global field of observation from which he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
•risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•

the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)

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

Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties

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

shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves

we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change

in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)

to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question

(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values


the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all

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

(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)

(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology



my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work



my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)



adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations are not free floating and not available for everyone. some are more attached or stucked to particular positions, some less, they are “marked” as Harraway put it.


anti-knowledge disposition of sex-education tv seriese
verybody is self-educating in the story
all positivity is created by ‘bravery,’ not their ‘knowledge’
nobody knows anything or can know anythingbravery has replaced faith ()
•Otis's knowledge: psychology is debunked
•Maeve's knowledge: existentialism is irrelevant


if in art we have affinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”



what is the state of art after Goya?



sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”


two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)


world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy

something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series


hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)

poor cognition <--> boring environment


another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)


romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]



برون افکن بنه زین‌دار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar

haft modaber هفت مدبر

jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal 

ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر

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

***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)

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

[title]
king real

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

my problem with
•conceptual art: jumping (transcending) from material to meaning
•viscerality: every expression matters as long as it affects the viewer in the stomach




(call of) phenomenology: to return to the appearing of that which appears



political philosophy
political science
political art

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

in Tehran (?how are made) the boundaries of jorm (جرم =/= law), gonah (گناه =/= god), and ? (=/= norm)
--> norm, law, sin, akhlagh اخلاق



•[thanks to Gesellschaft =/= Gemeinschaft ==>] jamee جامعه society =/= ejtema اجتماع community = norm + place (+ identity)
◦ ejtemayi اجتماعی social =/= ejamyi اجماعی collective
•tars ترس fear =/= ezterab اضطراب anxiety
•sharm شرم shame =/= khejalat خجالت shyness



آتش آب خشک را پر میکرد از آتش تر
ab-e khosht = piale
atash-e tar = sharab


tar تر = allude آلوده = sabok سبک


khosro shirin
tarof ghabl az bad o bira goftan

shenidan (niushidan) ~= fahmidan فهمیدن

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

*negative bias = the negative is more ture*
negative bias: negative stimuli elicit a larger brain response than positive ones
(can then negative bias explain racism? <-- we are shaped by negativity)
positive-negative asymmetry
(in trying to) make sense of the world --> focus more on the negative
bad ==> attention
negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive


(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together



to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)



•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood



(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing


three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map

*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world

science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)

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

[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’

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

...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)



two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]

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

government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)



morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages

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

#cat's cradle

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy


technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)

culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)

writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)

technology: a form of life
language: a form of life

create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•

others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature

the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture


can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> making + passing on cultural interesting patterns
=/= making a tangled mess
=/= theory of everything (--> for example string theory, stc.)
=/= war game ==>{models of knowledge building, tropes for one's own practice}
=/= trials of strength passing as critical theory (~ heroic, agonistic encounters)

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

Delamont & Williams --> (Haraway's) thread metaphor ~= *metamethod*

(from) [analytical] tangled yarn ball --to--> [activist] can't cradle

Galison's intercalation [molecular interweaving] --> exposing an overt technology (the radar wants to be seen as both winner of war + advancing pure physics)
~/=
Haraway's weaving [textile dissection] --> exposing a covert technology (patriarchy, eugenics, colonialism, racism embedded behind the public face of conservation, education, biopolitical establishment)

biology = politics (by other means)

cyborg
•has no original eden it was banished from
•has no dust it can return to
==Haraway==> situated partial knowledges


gendering the laboratory ==>
•modest witness
•new forms of gender (male virility,)


touching the elephant and knowing
touching different part of the world
touching a human body and guessing at the riddle

by touching the different parts => some are running, rotting, flickering, etc.

for doing anatomy you need a corpse (that means you already rule out things such as eating)

archeological anthropology
human-animal stories
hunting each other / together
domestication

Tsing

the greedy beast within us

collaborative garden (feed together)

descriptive practices of poetics and natural history


mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایب‌المخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)

atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)

to explicate rival cosmologies

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice


atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)


atlas(es) of(/for) the eye

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

[the identity of objects:]

Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب‌, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?



...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Marxism notion of ‘ideology’) =/= {relational character of any (social) identity + infinite play of differences}= discourse --> ‘the social’ always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute ‘society’;
& (in advanced capitalist societies:) identity = the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities, ‘social agent = decentered subject’ --> how can we, then, say the subjects misrecognize themselves in this kaleidoscopic movement of differences? =/= (Marxism's notion of) ‘false consciousness’; can we do without (the concept of) ‘misrecognition’?
--> (Laclau suggests) the ideological* (~=? will to totality):
•misrecognition of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]

what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]


what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration

ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?


rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)

... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”



Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”

--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.

one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge



Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).

reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.

The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.

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

[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real



... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه

... treating entities trafficking in the futures

active capacities of description

this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings

the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)

this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale

(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self

the beings in ajayeb (عجایب‌) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me

recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting


what is the sociocultural world we construct?


dream images, vivid mythical scenes,


form travels/passes through us

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

[Latour modes of existence]

(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths

“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence

to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)

to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves



عجایب‌ ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence is never gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing

the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.

explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) --✕--> networks necessary for religious meaning

(the aim is) deploying the network (of ajayeb)
it is about grasping ajayeb's beings not as substances but as *trajectories*--and give them a more precise *direction.*

what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?

(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)

**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action


*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-beings with specific properties that are invisible, changeable, powerful, favorable, unfavorable
-exploration of transformations
-cosmological specialties
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in met)

{that which addresses the “me,” the “ego” =/=? that which allows one to resist the forces of metamorphosis}

the iconoclastic episode we are in now, which we must work to make it as short as possible

(to specify) dualisms that make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain ontological pluralism

it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) --> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love's type of address:) addressed to us ==> make us exist --> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) -- the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives

(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject

to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence's system of coordinates)

the same beings that made the author of ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,


*technology: that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours {the hiatus of the detour, the zigzag of invention, ruse, trajectory obtained by a certain type of discontinuity} by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (=/= technological domain technical objects, material world, socio-technical networks,) (~ technically)
-fictional beings adds additional variety to technical beings --> aestheticization of techniques: obsolescence, ruin, adjustment, efficiency
-we must extend ‘fictional beings’ far beyond the narrow domain of art and culture, is to give a whole new meaning to the expression “material culture.”
-1- Technique's zigzagging motion assumes a know-how, a judgment, a constantly reprised evaluation of formidably demanding specifications;
-2- Technical beings leave behind them complex frameworks and combinations of associations which appear difficult to understand once left to themselves, without the folding motion and the detours which enabled them;
-3- relative fragility of technical beings: it establishes combinations and bridges between completely heterogeneous types of beings

*fiction: ...beings be grasped according to a particular relationship between materials and figures which cannot be detached without those two layers losing their specific form of objectivity. {fictionally : materials <--> figures}
fiction objects: everything that folds technical beings --> to derive from them a new type of *alteration* --(generates)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach itself.])
*fictional beings:
 -they extract materials from forms, figures or small worlds that can neither be detached from these materials nor reduced to them.
 -khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
 -*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves in its wake) ==> worlds (unlike fic all other modes fold for their own use by managing to extract from materials)

All continuations of a “course of action” suppose a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory. ==> gap, break

the mini-transcendence required for any definition of the being-as-other

(haven't we managed?) to allow several modes of existence [...]