[...]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,

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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)


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

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*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

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[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

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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*** (=/=? si[...]