[...]t an appreciative audience
by ringing the changes on the resonant cultural themes of self-purification through self-abnegation, scientists persuaded themselves and others of their worthiness to assume priestly functions in an ever more secularized society.
humanity and self-restraint, the one imposed from without and the other from within, thus define the pride-breaking morality of the scientists.
objectivity is a morality of prohibitions rather than exhortations
subspecies of interpretation: projection, anthropomorphism, insertion of hope/fear into images/facts of nature,
varieties of objectivity:
A. mechanical objectivity
B. the metaphysical element that makes objectivity synonymous with truth
C. aperspectival element that identifies objectivity with the escape from and all perspectives
it is tempting to collapse all of objectivity into the view from nowhere. this temptation to simplify by conflation should be resisted, for the highest expressions of objectivity in one mode may seem worthless when judged by the standards of another mode.
(as humans we must deal with our personal, idiosyncratic, perspectival perception)
photo: accurate rendering of sensory appearances
objectivity is a multifarious, mutable thing, capable of new meanings and new symbols: in both a literal and figurative sense, scientists of the late-nineteenth-century created a new image of objectivity
...................................
we must consider the paths people and trees have taken
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
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(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)
government of nature
invasive animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly, do those plants travel? to treat the ‘remaking’ of surroundings as a neutral, benign category, served from the colonial history of globalization, is problematic at best.
treating plants metaphorically only as immigrants, but never as settlers, paradoxically divides human from nature. it elides the forms of displanting--of botanical colonization--that were part and parcel of the colonial encounter.
Myths of the ‘noble eco-savage’ and the ‘ecological Indian’ have been shown to be inaccurate (Krech, 1999; Whelan, 1999)
(the notion of the Anthropocene implies) an ecology in which humans are immanent to the natural world
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(eyes are) visual possibilities
“eyes” (are always) made available [...] with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds... [Haraway, SK]
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lecture khm Luis
trans or cross ecological movement, from amazon to shahname, because i like it and i care for thoses ecologies.
and because we can't keep clean. i love to talk about clean and dirt. maybe some other time. if we can say anything about the world is that it is dirty and excessive and lunetic. literally lunar. the moon. if you think your bio and biology is not scheduled by moon or lunar forces think again.
do i need a bit of ego to sustain this skin-encapsulated organism (pointing to myself. this is another pointi dance)
tech interface amaz div device literature
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[Avital]
in the conflict of rhetorics, the victory never goes to any but the third language. The task of this language is to release the prisoners: to scatter the signifieds, the catechisms
to enter areas of conflict [...] fragile zone where non-knowledge dominates knowledge
Self-dissolving and regathering, the subject became linked to the possibility of a new autonomy, and opium illuminated in this case (Baudelaire, though under De Quincey’s influence, was to use it differently) an individual who finally could not identify with his ownmost autonomy but found himself instead subjected to heroic humiliation in the regions of the sublime. Opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
mapping the body as an intensive conflictual site
scenography and rhetoric of armed conflict
(Avital on) the maternal trace in the technological revealing from Heidegger to the Bushies
the readers and nonreader
the scene of the proto-pedagogy (involves only two persons): The master and pupil together produce an allegory of being struck, enlightened
(for Levinas:) expérience =/= épreuve
•experience --> a knowing of which the self is master is always said
•épreuve (text, trial, proof) --> the idea of life and of a critical ‘verification’ which overflows the self of which it is only the ‘scene’ ~~> a test site in which the self is placed at absolute risk, life submitted to incessant probes, find themselves subjected to the rigors of the épreuve
conflict's another logic of rigor in certain types of non-Western practices (such as Zen and yogic teachings)
the pupil is led to an inner experience without interiority, to understanding without cognition, without a history ==> subjectivity
the Zen pupil, often a wanderer, listens differently, stilling herself to consider the sonic eventfulness of growing grass
...understanding no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing
going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle
...cannot be properly located or possessed
the inaction hero
(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage
The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan
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My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.
Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could raise all actual agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.
An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of the random traveler who casts a gaze in another world of virtual and visual agency, and emphasises the randomness and hideousness of looking. The transaction between the eyes in the evil eye goes both ways to posses both the beholders. The target of the evil eye is always missed[ar] due to the internal conflict of perception and will. The intersection of visions is feared and programmed in the modalities of material talisman and culturally protective performances for the subject from meeting the other’s gaze. But the evil eye is precisely so powerful and real because of its ability to name the uncanny event of encounter. “Nothing is wholly obvious without becoming enigmatic.”[12]
[Serres]
does experimentation, in art science, excludes subjectivity? More the importance of experiment on self. Returning the aim back to knowledge, instead of the division of knowledge. Our subjectivity is not an illusion to be overcomed, but that is another part of reality.
Displacement on the space of myth. Myth informs science.
To know is to navigate between local fragments of space , to reject techniques of classification and separation, to implement a philosophy of transport to counter the dogmatism of united and systematic knowledge.
...the itinerary traces the transmission, transformation, and multiplication of messages through diverse spaces of communication.
The spatial language of the writing of the world, geography, language of paths, movements, marks the moment of passage towards a new epistemology.
World is the space of your inscription, scientists. To read and to journey are the one and same act.
Fantastic flow of myth. The sacred and the religious words are spoken at the same time and in the same breath as those of science and of journeys.
Two speakers, united against the phenomenon of interference and confusion. Who's stake is in interrupting communication? The above interlocutors are on the same side, far from the dialogical game.
Demin includes himself in the circuit, blurs the message, renders it unintelligible, and exactly by that assures transmission. Parasite produces by the way of disorder a more complex order.
..penetrative grasp of a text, discovery and recreative apprehension of it life-forms, is impossible to paraphrase or systematize.
..temporal and local settings of one's text. (to master it?)
to read X, is literally, to ‘prepare’ to read X
in certain civilizations there comes epochs in which syntax stiffens...
Changing landscape of fact
unexamined smiles
worn tropes
words, the guardians of meanings, are not immortal.
Metaphysical scandal
note on history: past is a language construct, that the past tense of the verb is the sole guarantor of history.
Dialectics as a method of intellectual chase.
Who first told a joke?
Certain languages are inhospitable to new metaphors.
Language-act
to read: is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.
my original repetition
we re-enact in our educated consciousness
in what sense does unperformed music exist?
The same ground, when using the ‘speculative instruments’, the critic, editor, actor, and reader stand on.
When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.
Encode and decode “message”, misleading operative models of translation between different languages and even within a single language.
One treason in translation: words rarely show any outward mark of altered meaning, they body forth their history only in a fully established context.
What material reality has history out of language? --the tasavof verbal linguistic tradition
silence knows no history...?
...to remind you that everything is the condition of madness.
“Tense Past”
..the landscape composed by the past tense, the semantic organization of remembrance... is styled and coded differently by cultures. --miniature illustrating San'an?
The verbal icon made up of all successive translations of Greek literature and philosophy has oriented fundamental movements in Islamic feelings --Farabi, Mirdamad, etc.
My translation of classics is not out of a vital compulsion for immediacy or precise echo. I am not trying to build my own resonant past. Myth of the ‘true past’... different perspectives can co-exist and blur
the metaphysics of the insult, in San'an story
i am interested in the conventions in which texts can be read, in which a semantic statement can be carried over into someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)
...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)
(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)
fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note: surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence to destroy his imagined enemy. Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being.
The multitudinous existence of child has left comparatively few archives.
...the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
intercourse and discourse
feminine use of subjunctive, in European languages, give a characteristic vibrato to material facts and relations. ... They multiply the facets of reality, they strengthen the adjective to allow it an alternative nominal status.
...obtuse resistant fabric of the world
in every known culture, men have accused women of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality.
The chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech, is older than fairy-tales.
...men's delight in women's voice when their register is sweet and low.
the change in men's voice, the crowding of cadence, the heightened fluency triggered by sexual excitement. And how men's speech flattens, how it's intonations dull after orgasm.
The motif of the woman or maiden who says very little, in whom silence is a counterpart to chasteness and sacrificial grace, lends a unique pathos to Antigone or Oerepidus..
fabric of obligation, different for men and women within the same community
linguistically programmed conceptualizations vs. biologically determined apprehensions of sense data
...lady Macbeth negates the fierce reality of Macbeth vision
...communication like breathing is subject to obstruction and homicidal breakdowns, under stress of hatred, of boredom, or of sudden panic, great gaps open ...that their previous understanding had been based on a trivial pidgin which had left the heart of meaning untouched.
What is the female speech in San'an?
By far the greater proportion of art and historical record has been left by men. The process of ‘sexual translation’ or of the breakdown of linguistic exchange (is seen, almost invariably, from a male focus.)
-the breakdowns and translations in San'an story.
-The sexual translation and breakdown of linguistic exchange in San'an story.
How, when, and who can see or render the genius of women's speech and see the crisis of imperfect or abandoned translations (from both sides)?
...having an ‘ear’ for contrasting pressures of sexual discourse or identity
in San'an, man and woman, each respective experience of eros and language had set them desperately apart.
In whose idiom, male or female, one can grasp (only) falsehood or menace?
...as declaimer of my own stifled, tongue
any model if communication is a model of translation, of transfer of significance. No two localities use words and syntax to signify exactly the same things, to send identical signals (of valuation and inference).
[the matrix space tries to create that assurance of identical signals, the electronic, digital space, grid, systematic, node based-- but linguistic storytelling is not]
In performance, corresponding to my level of literacy, and a private thesaurus, part of my subconscious and personal memories, and using the singular and irreducibly specific ensemble of somatic and psychological identity.
Getting out of one's own dictionary of private remembrance, in old age.
A study of translation is a study of language
the ideal of a totally personal voice, of a unique ‘fit’ between an individual's expressive means and his world-image, perused by the poets.
Only when we reflect on it, when we lift the facts from the misleading context of the obvious, that the possible strangeness, the possible ‘unnaturalness’ of the human linguistic order strikes us.
I am interested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation
(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of translation
translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.
My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.
Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house
in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture)
it is exceedingly difficult for an outsider to, operating inevitably within the world-frame of his own tongue, to penetrate to the active symbolic depths of a foreign tongue.
---we reach for the bottom and stir up further darkness.
..a careful philosophically and poetically disciplined observation
beautifully logical (discrimination) about: causation, action, result
dynamic or energetic quality, directness of experience.
(these words for Shabnam?)
...all matters of the function of thinking
(why do i want to bring to her, to Shabnam, the quintessence of the rational?)
‘the inner music of meaning’
the german tenderness
german tender---zart
(in Shabnam's poetry : the clash between ‘mental’ and ‘psychic’ codes of recognition)
the villain is outside the law (of exchange)
...the court of words---in ikhvano safa animals demonstration
...when the market of life has closed down
faith and substitution of meaning
how can i tear you from your vows, and not myself use vows?
The faiths that are sworn (before every exchange or change)
a word for a woman bound by another sacred word --> breaking your oaths---in the age of ... (message to the tribalist, the son)
Don Juan: yesterday you gave me your word to come to dine with me.
A beautiful woman: yes where must i go?
Don Juan: give me your hand.
a madman /
outside the law of reason, a dog /
outside the law of man, a devil /
outside the law of god, a...
The hypocrite pays in appearance
devil dubing/subtitling the society of reasonable men
..mad dogs
law directs the circulation of goods. What does it mean for an object oriented thought?
Law directs the circulation of goods, women, promise; of representations, insults, jests
i, as the text of sina, will show you that...
An ordering relation is irreflexive, antisymmetric, and transitive
sequential to consequential
(the concern of narrative)
order of reason (one order among many other sequences)
reason has immense consequences, so does aesthetics
betterable better : finding a stronger one---Kelileh Demneh
the case is of a maximum
the tree of the “better”
a whole forest hidden by a single tree
‘possibility’ is always the higher point on the tree
if you kill me now, my time freezes and its order disappears.
(said sheep to the wolf)
relative relations and absolute limit; he is the master of future
where do you come from? : this is of your clan : irreversible genealogical tree : complete model of kinship (for the ordered structure)
the idea of non-destruction is strange in nature, as if there is a notion of construction in nature, establishes a responsibility.
Care, claims to have suffer
at the end; you are the cause, i am the effect.
Perfect, is free of the psychologism of hypocrisy
•hypocrisy comes from the word to judge
stable structures and dialectical processes are inseparable
(each choice associated with a location on the tree)
(best) reason always permits a winning game (?)
might into right and obedience into duty, that is transforming force into factual necessity, by the stronger. Obedience into law. This is Rousseau
means to have access to the inaccessible
the exact sciences the optimal relationship from subject to object, conceived since the classical ages
A slave who, while sleeping, dreams that he is free
(put to the order of slave, a slave presenting a project to his master)
leipniz and Descartes, posit a maximum and minimum strategy in an ordered space.
The universal quantifactor : constant repetition of all, always, never, absolutely, etc. --> “i shall always follow this path.”
“perfect” signifies “optimal”
quantification of a relationship followed to its limits.
The process quantified, the tactics maximised
(“result:” instead of “-->” (“arrows”) in my writing? )
‘to know nature is a game’
experiment is also a game?
With win or lose possibilities, in which there exists a guaranteed winning strategy.
Game is the model of all exact knowledges.
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The Ur-Supe, the original state of life, the marine mixture, the primal liquid state, prebiotic soup, the physiochemical condition for the origin of living beings
a mother emerges from a mother
the earth is in labor, a labor of metamorphosis, transformation, production, generation
beneath the anecdotes and pathos, the text mobilizes with great precision certain findings of rational mechanics
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
vocabulary =? Model of precision
centers are breasts
periodic breasts
last science transcends the first
reservoir exists for the circulation
two notions structurally stable in encyclopedia: circulation & reservoir
elements + operation =/= structure
analysing a text in terms of encyclopedia, i need to answer two questions: what is reservoir? What is circulation?
question regarding iranian literature reservoir: what is the reservoir? Where is the reservoir? What are its configurations?
(the last question syntactically proposes also the possibility of reconfiguration)
Is it metaphorical? Is it closed?
What is its plan? How it transports according to this plan? What are the circulating elements? What is stable there? What are the transformations when it transports?
Reservoir is libidinal*
capital, quantity of energy, constancy of force,
what can be applied to the pattern of circulations?
(of vocabulary, value, money, desire, etc.)
what blocks circulation? Who or what governs it?
In answering, you reconstruct (the entire set of what you consider interpretive)
application: strategy of conformity
explication: archaic and vague approximation
it is not necessary to introduce methods to read a text: the method is in the text. The text is its own criticism, its own explication, its own application.
Texts that operate = texts that are operated on ==> there are just texts
(there is no dichotomy in the operation)
technologies concerning heat, thermodynamics, shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are now working in.
...theories concerning processes of transformation.
...stages of alchemical initiations, archaic figure of fire,
How to make the history of science as effective as science itself?
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suddenly science falls silent and mythology speaks
transsubstantiation
the astronomer falls in ==> the truth comes out
(ask maryam's astronomer: what disconnects the connected?)
throw the key to the text
for classification, connection is at stake, space is at stake
the formal invariant is something like a transport
what is worse for classification?
non-connections that are at stake
we shall never be free of space
fire, and transcendental subject
accidents of space (at work upon the multiplicity of spatial varieties
what is the program of topology?
My body lives in as many spaces as the group (the society) has formed.
The euclidian house, the street and its networks, open/closed garden, closed space of the sacred, school and its fix points and social varieties, complex ensemble of flow charts, those of language, of factory of family, of political party, and so forth.
..my body is plunged in the intersection of this multiplicity
culture : constructing precise and particular connections between such spatial varieties --> “original intersection”
topology; culture connects and joints, art delinks and disconnects
(the law of incest prohibition c[...]