[...]: hollow man up to the erosion of irreversible time
-vector of the progressive civilization going up stream (in the tropic river)
in archive invariability is global =/= irreversibility & chance
([i am more interested in the] obstacles in front of the) well-founded “conjoined world”

system statue

that which can be touched and tested

constant general random invariabilities in primordial path of matter

(**Serres:) morality = physics
(--> the image of physical collision and causality simulation --> morality)
--> what is then the image of the CG artist in the world? The wise man in and of the world, friend of the world, extended to the global universe:
*this is an important moment in Greek Wisdom, man is not an stranger but at home in world, (a disturbance a vortex in turbulent nature,) in contract with Venus =/= (breaking the contract,) man is stranger, fallen from sky, he hates things and fight against them, environment is an enemy --> martial neurosis from Plato to Descartes to Bacon to us

***hatred of objects at the root of knowledge***


messages exchanged:
•I, you, he, we, they,
•this, here, ecce,
•here is the thing itself


man: the one who subordinates every object to relations among subjects.

(the origin of) theater is submerged in animality : “politics and theater are merely mammalian”
-in comedy and tragedy there is only a question of human relations and there is never an object as such

(Hobbes:) “man is wolf to other men" = man is a subject to objects

*the discovery of the object*
(that there is such a thing as) object is an old original political relation tale
-a scientific invention? -->{always ask, what are the objects and subjects of [(pre)historic] science?}

*** “Aphrodite-pleasure is born of the world and the waters. Mars is in the forum and in the armed crowd. Reduce your relations to a minimum and bring your objects to the fore. Reduce the intersubjective to a minimum and the objective to the maximum. With your back turned on politics, study physics.  [...]  Forget the sacred, that means: forget the violence that founds it and forget the religious which links men to each other. Consider the object, objects, nature.”
Serres*

...nevertheless the plague returns and there is violence

sacred --> division of space --> temple --> inside & outside --> a dichotomized space --> a boolean geometry, a two-valued ontology --> inside : religious , outside : profane --> inside : matter , outside : void -->? Atom

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

Origin of geometry, construction of geometric idealities, establishment of the first proofs, a Greek (or Egyptian priest) miracle
--Serres--> this is the same as asking: how one passed from one language to another, from one type of writing to another?

**we are always dealing with many languages**

one of my contracts: agreement on what is noise.
I never truly made an agreement with my audience on what we might collectively agree about noise and interference.
•mode of communication, meaning-making, language, transference, transformation,
•what is the intersection of our repertoire? (in apass, particularly; each of our mimetic preoccupations, dynamics of our violences, our mathematical sites, drawings on sand, modifiers, etc.)
==> dialogue

mathematics: (presents itself as) a communication maximally purged of noise

HRN: human relation-noise
=/= geometry


die agonal


to which degrees my work on ajayeb aligns or depends on the “new language” of the inexhaustible discourse of mathematics as inherented from the Greek geometry into the modern culture?

What are the inaugural relation of the geometric (metrological) ideogram to the CG? And to the Egyptian priest?
What is compared, modeled, simulated:
•flood
•fires
•celestial fire
•catastrophes
•violence of the elements
•


ajayeb: doxographies (, legends and allegories) composed in natural language (?)
=/= (the problem of) how to duplicate the cube ---,{thematized object of the complete intersubjective relation}
~=? alogon =/= logos: proportion, measured relation, discourse;
alogon prohibits speaking

crisis and recast, questions of archive


Luisa, Foad
(the space of the relation between) experience & abstract --> between sense & purity
(an inquiry line for Luisa: try to figure out the status of pure [which is impure? when history changes])

my allegorical covers

meaning of:
•non-disproportion
•nonviolence

Socrates: you are in crisis because you are ignorant of geometry

even: same
odd: other

برهان خلف borhane kholf, irrationality of the absurd

the irrational is mimetic


=======================


“before-after” temporality narrative

Serres's fabulous work on the effects of the style in science
--> styles profile from (a sort of) stability *** -they inspire disciplines and furtilize fields of research, they seizes what is at stake in sciences

who believes that the passage from local to global is always possible?!
Lucretius answer is immediately “no”

in apass each of us is somehow busy with the critique of unidimensional platitude characteristics of our milieus. / Is that the global notion in our researches?

I want to take it up, maybe fulfill, and modify the project sketched out in ajayeb al makhlughat 10 centuries ago.

#my reading act with ajayeb is like the practice of pencil monoprint on paper on a relief surface. The patterns of reading emerge as the pencil moves gently across the paper, pressing down or not. The paper, pencil, pressure, movement, the object behind, the touch of three elements, interactive interfacial patterns of readingwriting with ajayeb's textual corpus*


” [...] the industrialized world is frequently condemned to considering the concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine

(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision

which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?

How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)

Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set of bodies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the unfolding of the different movements.”


the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb

my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•


“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics

speaking the language of dynamics


what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes

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

Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass


Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.

Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.

E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.

What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?

Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.

Every reading is difficult, Shakespeare, maulwürfe, mathematics. The difficulty of reading is in transforming the ways we are obliged to think about those texts.

The transformation is crucially always already in the texts he reads. Describing what happens when reading a passage of anything. Everything is in Shakespeare, in Plato, in Kafka. The relation between description and transformation is uncanny.

To talk about the logics of supplement is another way of attending the deconstructive effects of the and. To put into effect new discourses, new acts. This description and transformation is deconstruction, is more than a language and no more than a language.

There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes in the text, between what a text says and what a text does.

Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading.

(Writing is) is winking at someone (you like)  while listening to my favorite music.

A writing that is not structurally readable -- iterable -- beyond the death of the addressee, would not be writing.

The supplementarity of digression, a fictional supplementarity. Freud is compelled to tell a story but in the act of doing so, he betrays the annulment or effective impossibility of this story. Sons murder of primordial father. Origin of morality: earliest moral restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a dead which gave those who performed it the concept of crime.

The feeling that a text is especially written ‘for’ derrida... As if waiting for him to come along and point it out.

Freud's story is less the narration of an imaginary event than the simulacrum of narration. Freud's quasi event, is at once of fictional narrative and as narrative as fictive. It is the origin of literature at the same time as the origin of law, derrida suggests.

Kant, Freud, Kafka, what makes important all these thinkers for Derrida has to do with how each in their different way brings out a ghostly or virtual ‘narrativity and fiction’ at the very core of legal thought.

Law is always an idiom. An idiom is an expression with a meaning that cannot be guessed from the meanings of the individual words: its door concerns only you. One's relation to the law is singular.

The drama of naming (@Sonja naming the dance, dancing the name, is she dancing the name of the dance)

john Keats, prospective; Williams Wordsworth, retrospective. Prospective work consists of hopeful preparation, anticipation of future power rather than meditative reflections on past moments of insight and harmony. Oriented towards the future.

All i am doing today, like derrida, can be seen as a grafting (ghalameh zadan) or extension, supplement or prosthesis, an outgrowth from somewhere else, earlier on.

I will attach to the story of maulwürfe like the shit on his head.

Recalling and reinventing Shakespeare, the idea is not to bring it from past to present, something that is already disjointed in time towards the future. I push the characters of King Lear to a future. The deconstructive reading of the play has to do with the opening of the future itself. It is utterly important that you do something unpredictable for yourself. If you are in the business of hate, love suddenly, changing tracks brings the unexplainable to the trajectory. Going in discipline is like riding a train on rails, i am not saying to go off the track and crash or stop, but to change track experimentally and to change gear. The tracks are built for us to move in the field of thought, they don't cover the whole surface, by moving along them we can witness the new to emerge from our interdisciplinary run.

Derrida shows, reminds, that we can never do anything systematically.

Monstrosity in the story Yal-o Ejdeha by Shamlu. Monsters of the deep..

my aim was to show the monstrosity of all the characters in King Lear not just Edmond. Edmond is the artist of the self. Shakespeare makes unacceptable characters. King Lear play is intolerable itself, an encounter with the opening of the future itself. Instead of giving in to the normalizing and legitimating representations which identity, recognize, and reduce everything too quickly, why not rather be interested in theoretical monsters, in monstrosities which announce themselves in theoretical reading.

The proper significance is simply and categorically deferred forever, insistent strangeness of the force of deferral, (effecting what derrida has called) the singularity of the here and now.

“explained” is “explained away.”

unreasonable is not concealed necessarily.

Duty to irresponsibility

any phantasmatic organization, whether collective or individual, is the invention of a drug, or of a rhetoric of drugs, be it aphrodisiac or not.
In talk, i respond to the how of a poem or text dictating a kind of addictive reading or desire in the reader.

The project of a text, the project of a theory

according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourning.

After him, it is all war and crumbling.

We know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever.


The meaning of meaning [...]

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

[*]deconstruction: a sort of strategic device + opening onto its own abyss (one of the most influential approaches to texts) =/= method

Campbell --> Derridean deconstruction is visual
Derrida's thinking helps us take images seriously (as philosophical artefacts)
•organizational image: the aesthetic ambassador for the organization (it visualizes + gives aesthetic value to it)
•advertisement: preeminent image of production and consumption of the global economy

image = logocentric vision --need--> problematizing =/= solutionizing


-is there a spirit of critique that is not liberatory in purpose?

Derridean deconstruction: a critical approach --draw--> attention to the operations of method itself (=/= method):
[~? feedback types:]
1. interventionist --advocate--> different/contradictory readings (of images)
2. radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> what is overlooked
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)


intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning


Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parergon
subjectile
}--> levers applying torque گشتاور and displacement in the textual machinery


deconstruction
==> counter-intuitive analyses
--> presupposes a detailed knowledge of construction (one must become intimate with the ways something is assembled) [=/= cart blanche for meaning]
--> (Jassem's style of) reading otherwise: passing the classical discipline (=/= abandon, jettison it) to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalizes, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, not serious enough

•anthropcentric truth: a truth that appears to human beings
•instrumental truth: a truth aimed at getting things done (making things work)
•teleological truth: a truth which closes debate and fastens meaning


[*]visual = a form of control (<--Campbell-- this aspect makes it central to organizational analyses) <==
1. *visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation* (vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually)
2. *conflation of the ‘seen = known’* : “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world” (<-- imagined inseparable) ==> the idea that depiction/picturing/seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them
3. *visual organizes the worldview of the seer* --> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisble (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)

***instances of visual control:
•uniforms
•packaging
•computer software packages
•brand logos
•buildings
•websites @apass
•management reports
•staff
•servicescapes [an environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•


harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl

logocentrism: letting the logic lead the letter --Campbell--> images are logocentric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [--> for example forensic architecture images =/= Derrida's *there is nothing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning


[title]
ruined coherent heritage


there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within

bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing

death of man
•Barthes --> death of author
•Strauss --> structuralist approach to human nature
•Foucault --> history of the historical arbitrariness (of the human sciences)
•
}--> antihumanism (of Barthes and Foucault) suggests it might be possible to stand outside the humanist legacy (and analyse from a position outside) ==Derrida==> (escaping from human constitutes) a very human tendency that has been at work in the cultural and social imaginary since antiquity --> for example Foucault's archaeology: (to understand) *how reason determined madness in different eras by looking at how reason evolved historically* ==> puts the analyst outside the humanist legacy of reason ==restore==> the metaphysical illusion of mastery and control
=/= Derrida

(my problem with making alternative *archives, gardens, and maps* in art:)
•metaphysical complicity (with archive and garden) + critique we direct against complicity (with archive and garden) --> we cannot give up the “+" = slip into the form, logic, implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest


logocentrism operates in images by appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image --> for example
[*]map: visual organization of the world --> quickly erase or black box the circumstances and history of their own construction ==> marshal vision into logocentric coherence --> act as reflection (=/= representation) of the world

radical cartography is now an established sub-discipline of geography (*maps are deconstructed to identify their logos*) @Sina's mimesis of Olearius's cartography

deconstruction is most needed at precisely those images where our immediate reaction is to say “there's nothing to be deconstructed here” (“that's just the way it is”)

software design (website interfaces) --> images of technology


critical practice: producing a new knowledge of the text (==> explain the ideological necessity of its silence) =/= make a whisper audible, complete what the text leaves unsaid

other: other meanings of a text, other ways of seeing things

self/other --Derrida--> it only has meaning insofar as it differs from something else
•every concept has its opposite or its other (somehow marked within it)
•the good one can be designated only through the metaphor of the bad one #fable


deconstructing an image:
•looking at what the image includes and excludes
•detecting the social roles it creates
•examining the hierarchies that appear natural in the image
}<== **visual representation works as much through what is not shown as what is shown** (Hall), through feints and deceptions (Mitchel), through gaps and silences (Joy + Venkatesh), through stated and unstated (Stern), through the not seen or said (Rose)


reading: detailed and specific examination (of a piece of text) = لاروب dredging machine --> disturb the text (dissecting patiently and minutely the narrative, structure, syntax, figuration, images, metaphors, metonyms استعمال لفظ در معنای غیرحقیقی majaz) ==(draw out)==> complexities, ambiguities, aporias, ironies, taken-for-grantedness, just-is-ness
--imply--> a critique of objectivity
{revelation = disturbance}-->{alternative meaning = site of simultaneous deconstruction}

dynamics of reading (close reading)
1. working of a text hides itselg (images of soap powder, children's science homework, computer chips, etc.)
2. rigorous inspection of the text
3. text is not immune to interpretation (~ text reconfigures itself according to the touch of history, personality, method, intention, politics, culture of any given interpretation =/= closed space)

*reading = producing meaning* =/= reflecting


•Toyota's advertisement --> an image of gay family life --> the image converges on a notion of multicultural pansexual divergence --> market conditions under which homosexuality is accepted
•Joe Camel campaign --> Joe (from Joseph Old Testament) shortened in colloquial american usages to “Joe”, which by the 1930s began to designate anyone whose real name is unknown or connoted the “most typical” of any category of person [=/= dinosaurs] + camel: beast of burden and of humility (Aesop's fables) and as creatures of uncontrollable lust (from depiction by monks in medieval times to teach moral fables to the public)

performance of a textual sex change operation

(monotonality) monovisuality of the dominant visual message

logocentric: a transcendental signified to which the text refers


Plato's powerful attack on writing as “dead speech”: Socrates and Phaedrus walk in the countryside. Socrates recounts to him a myth about the origin of writing: the king Thamus is presented with a present from his son Theus; the gift of writing. Theus tells his father that the gift will make his people wise as it will improve their memory --✕--> Derrida shows that in the same argument Socrates goes on to describe speech as another sort of writing; he actually uses a writing metaphor to describe the “true nature” of speech “not merely as a knowing, living, animate discourse, but as an inscription of truth in the soul”


deconstruction =/= re-interpretation
     |                    |
impossible +          providing a
plausible story       different story


deconstructive reading (idiosyncratic to the text) ==offer==> multiple & contradictory potential meanings to the text


Derridean approach to meaning making:
•cricular
•paradoxical
~= it requires us to *deconstruct the deconstruction* --> *work against meaning and interpretation*


name of man: (the name of that being who throughout the entire history has dreamed of full presence = the reassuring foundation, the origin =/= play)

[my fable workshop was about this -->] Derridean deconstruction of images -->
•drawing attention to the way image constructs itself in order to implicitly represent a single history (=/= seeking to tell the truth about what X means)
•keeping alive the contradictions within it (=/= solutionizing)


(?how to deconstruct [iamges of]) nanotechnology: practice of manipulating all types of living and non-living matter at its atomic level
•corporations portraying nanotechnology as a positive and legitimate force (+ visually close down the possible meanings of its products) = Iron Man
•nanospace: planetary bodies afloat in the darkenss of intergalactic space
•fantastical unserious endeavour


([what is?] my problem with) message شعاری


**advertisement ==> confuse agency & ownership**

the fantastic is rescued by the human (face)

(in advertisement -->) **the ways in which knowledge & reality are marshalled into collective visual consensus**


visual deconstruction --> rigor towards the idiosyncrasy and singularity of any text


restricted economy of the text ==> particular meaning =/= Derrida: moveing from a restricted --to--> general economy of the text

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

metaphysics: enterprise of returning (strategically, ideally) to an origin (a priority) thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical [=/= to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident]
<--Derrida-- (the most constant profound potent metaphysical gesture in Western philosophy:) conceiving simple before the complex, essential before the accidental
}--> logocentric thought: thought which does not adequately attend to the contradictions inherent in its own medium ==> [logocentrism:] (fable) faith in the status of language as a lucid carrier of meaning (=/= attentiveness to the materiality of communication and the implications of such a project)

pecific languages make communication material, and exploring the interplay of terms within a linguistic system (-->? baroque) =/= Enlightenment = Age of Reason (logos)




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

Beauty and the Beast
or, blast of the clean slate



(goddamn it)

The picture of a relatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit, is a powerful metaphor for the cosmic genesis of spatial structure. (Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy)

baroque Trauerspiel, classical synthesis, ...
synthesis: synthetic thinking (the combination of ideas into a complex whole)
this is not a reasoning exercise (deducing particularity, etc.)

imagine you find a head. how do you search for the body? (research project)

graduating from ... and approaching ...
(from fairy tale ---> approach myth)


--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html
becoming Amazon as the fear of the male.
(Amazon as male hunter symbol)

(symbol for) masculine gender principle
(to disavow sexual difference)

I am not bringing the text to you, or you to the text.
as you have already guessed we have to destroy both the notion of text and you, to some extent, in order to permit a reading to constitutes itself.

is San'an a prince charming?
(let's examine)

the spiritually established death-birth (death of birth and birth of death) at the end of story

Miyazaki's faceless monster (in Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し), with his flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance. he goes from loneliness, to love, to greed, and finally becomes a student body. he has great agency in the beginning and docile in the end, [اسیر صورت --?--> اسیر معنی]


San'an is determined to see it through, the whole process

the German super-ego
the German ego
to carefully inject some of German super-ego to the Iranian ego

(for Anastasia) what is the next war?
ترسا

(to the audience:) you should feel free to make notes, because I am making notes while you are talking, and these kind of lectures I am doing are the process of those note-makings.
I like to interrupt you. the performance is itself an interruption of you, like when we say in a conversation “may I interrupt you” your pace, your velocity, your speech-acts, etc.


what is being ‘interested’ in the history of illusion?


in your process in becoming woman, you might end up becoming a female robot.
(Tarsaa's part)
whose testicles are smashed here?
to the less molested .... (body of the pupil)
psycho-history


human preparedness for inter-relations with technology and technologization



***test some failures


a different brand of anxiety (?)


walking on groundlessness, literature, house of literature?

protest against “was”

give literature in its totality

initiate a program

we don't love our selves nor our neighbors

San'an, when he thinks he is getting close, he has abysses he has to clear

which language the house speaks? or which language German speaks?

house of literature, house is the site of kinship too.
if literature is like a house at all



unreadable algorithm of encounter

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

I hope we can get along famously



my work has been really about old forms in the city, how should we build,
tyranny,
packaging (packaging existing knowledge, the way for example the IT industry does it.)
am I against packaging?


rationalizing and separating functions in the city



place, space, face,



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

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

the structure of space in San'an poetry

distinction between subject and object, between signifier and signified, encompassing the whole of dualistic logic through its branching patterns, through its definitions of set pathways between root and branch.

the Arborescent model of relationships in San'an story?

The rhizome likewise resists structures of domination, such as the notion of “the mother tongue” in linguistics, though it does admit to ongoing cycles of what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments.

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

about my performances:

“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
(Deleuze - Rhizome)

...consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.

“...a mapping rather than a tracing”

“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”

“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)


my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.

not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.

(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.



(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred by the licensed masters acting as a corporation, with the consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a personal matter between the master and the student. The master conferred it on an individual for a particular work, or works.” [...]

feeling cool and correct
(in) a parasitical golden age

what is “education” in a mystical world (or actually a mystical world-view)
how can be undermined or rewired, (“teaching” without education)


magical idealism

from Delphi-magiscism to the San'an

(does San'an actually wants to go to Greece?! but went to Italy?)
اقصای روم


the space we are founding ourselves in is not neutral, not innocent, not un-signed
it is paid for, has a certain architecture, (phallic work)

the intellectual mask...



semiotic of learning and thinking


(Maulwurf,) shit on your head, shit is the origin of all gifts, when a child offers his first donation, “look what I have produced!” I honor you with this Kacke.
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/VomkleinenMaulwurf.html
how can we bring the variety of animals into the singular butterfly metaphor? (Attar's bird's butterfly effect)

Schmetterling! (parvaneh - پروانه)
(‘schmettern’ in German: v. smash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.

Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه

Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)



(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)


time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,

•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor

resistance-fight / ideological dictator
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire

ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)



what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion

to endure the direct
epistemic fear

I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past century


(mystic war:)
the decadent view of the obliterated


(swallowing partial glances of the)
“extinction of society”
drinking it
these signals of vanishing are forms of training?
a formula of continuation?

ancient models of defense****

مکانیزم دفاعی
other mature forms of defenses:
•sublimation
•projection: a characteristic that one perceives in oneself but seems unacceptable is instead attributed to another person, denial in attribution [still popular Feuerbach's idea of “religion = projection”, “God = outward projection of a human's inward nature” informing secular anthropological explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a seemingly rational or logical manner and are made consciously tolerable, ad hoc hypothesis: to save it from being falsified [<== introspection illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)
•

•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect

*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety


ego: part of our psyche that is reality based



[title]
methinks

...the absence of mercy

complain =~ elegy =~ prayer (---> desire to future)
(elegy assumes that there is something in the information that makes a difference and not in the receiver of info.)

(question to an Iranian friend:) “why must we fasten our gaze to the objects of damage and derangement?” “why light lanterns to behold the corpse?” “or extend our focus on them?” (I am using Mohaghegh's words,) the extremist (or other aesthetic-philosophical strands of extremisms) would tell us not to look away, for the thought and expression have taken the shape of a ‘meteorological device,’ forecasting seasons (of storm)...

(you take the mithridatic venom to) cross into the next level of temporal experience

he makes “engravings of the atrocity”
(حکاکی از) سبعیت

a fanatical response to the storm


a charismatic authority undertakes a poetic articulation
or a poetic articulation becomes committed to an ideological program
[Iran Iraq war]


mysticism, a protocol of extremity, geared towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.

sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...

with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?

the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment


(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination



where is absolutism in San'an?

own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia

when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]

...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas

to become an echo of a profound legacy


we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?

which archive remains in fire throughout?

-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience


an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)


(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.



THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy

the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?

modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..

counter-veiling definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices versus the freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing.

these preferences: on some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?


(this talk might be) a critical rant

(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity

sacred crimes

one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body


never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity


(an existential evacuation)
committing oneself to erratic wanderings in the desert => translation of a familiar topology into an ontological modality?

the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance
(interiority and exteriority, presence and absence)

civilizational taxonomies (--> versus animist taxonomies, in Attar's animal-birds)



the (sacred boundaries of mysticism) and mystic boundaries of the civilized city
the peripheries of the city became mystic/sacred


mystical channels*


they present worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori

two irrational analytical strands:
(1) to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically imagined space (San'an's biography missing in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya--Attar's obsession with biographies, he is drugged by bios, totally high---he can't let go of them, he cannot detach from the absents, the paternals? his master-complex? has he forgotten to mention his teacher, San'an, in Tazkirat al-Awliya? --Attar is himself San'an? drugged and doped by tastes and spices of his shop, his establishment. OR San'an is Ibn-Sagha (ابن ساقا)? (Ibn-Sagha was a Islamist jurist who lived in Baghdad 11th century, lived Muslim and died christian.) Attar's engagement with remembrance and bios --> is the San'an's narrative also about forgetting? Tazkirat (تذکره) --> Tazakor (تذکر) --> remember! --we are now on how Attar's San'an influences Hafez--(حافظ) The Memorizer. Hafez loves the story of San'an the non-memorizer, San'an loses his ‘hafeze’ (حافظه). (according to Hafez and San'an, the best student is the one who doesn't remember. precisely because they are trying so hard to remind San'an of what they thing ‘he’ is) --> [Indian MATSYENDRANATH amnesia tale, tells the story of a yogi who falls in love with the woman kind--one of his students puts makeup and dances his memory back to him. he must become the woman. there is a queer moment in the origin story of the San'an, which Attar censures(?). he erased his name from the black-list of death-‘the forgottens’, then danced for him as a woman-story-teller. (muse is the mother of memory.) the class struggle has obviously a Bollywood touch to it]-->Attar's source and storage?)
regarding Hafez and San'an, the poet must leave the home, the poet must travel foreign zones, and stay in the foreign. (this is, by the way, Heidegger's reading of the poet.) and that is also one Heideggerian poetic demand that Hafez is failing to reconcile with, when he is turned back, not having the balls to cross the Indian ocean.
(2) importance of an elite rhetorical plane

initiatives towards the horizons of a mystical inquest


(cinematic) mystical landscapes
(what kind of mystical landscapes I am exploring in San'an's story?)


the dominion of the partially unseen


guarding its inner workings and trajectories
(the cinematic openness also is) guarantor of its constant mutability(?)



the exoteric logic of interiority (reigning since centuries in Iran)


for only the buried dimension is sovereign

secrecy =/= lie
(I am a fan of lie and against secrecy)
talk about a theory of lie
(a talk about a theory of violence)



[the issue of: opposite, omen, and alarm (in art)]
omen =/=? artwork
(omen is a phenomenon that is buried to foretell the future, isn't that an attractive trap for artist's self grandiosity?!)
omen has a binary answer
omen =~ ‘audire’ (Latin root, to listen)
omens come in the artistic and poetic production--in the poiesis--when the artist is young: the fabulous age of self-assertion, and he or she starts way to big and later is abandoned or abused by it.


(enforcement of an elusive stance from within) the self-enveloped site of the event----the artworks become closer to omens


at once episodic and veiled, protecting their right to invisibility above all else


(perceive themselves as) the merchants of the unreasoned experience.
(as opposed to the mechanisms of instrumental reason) ---- omens


Literatur(ware)haus
warehouse vs. Haus
(at the house of being)

warehouse of the irrational, a cellar-arena of provocation and unrest

I don't have an eloquent language--I am not in the house of language, but Attar is

transmutative
depthforming


sudden exposure to exile space

a postcultural interaction (?) --with no proximity to the past or known present
(am I trying to create proximity to history in my lectures versus my non-proximity in earlier visual works such as “vagabond” 2011 Tehran)
is that to adopt an ******existence without context******?
(in lectures, am I un-separating myself from my own history?)


*reverie (=the mind flees across secluded planes)

exile space =~ refuge, solitude, immobility =? nondialectics


[on Vagabond] --> http://www.sinaseifee.com/Vagabond.html
-domination of the partially unseen in my own film, ‘vagabond’
-did I believe that only the buried dimension is sovereign?
-continuously interlacing experiences of solitude and immobility
-minimalist side of mysticism --> stillness is a catalyst for acceleration?
-nomadic dispositions
-suspended (=the chasm of self-consciousness)
-


aesthetic tactility over aesthetic fantasy
where is the cinematic-mystical ritual happening?

profound separation from the networks of social reality
the subjects betrays its own history

interrupting the transmission of the episteme


the result of mystic disjointment => a renovated perception of all activity as self-forsaking (Tark-e Nafs? ترک نفس), (such that all locations appear scorched in turn)

stab-through and un-brace one once was

San'an's mechanistic commitments, he need to first book out of a place in order to write text, or to book himself in again
the San'an's poem's ‘Will' = instinct for abandonment and anonymity
is this instinct predicting what Attar will write? or explains *why he writes?
[writing as an act of memory and perform?]

the mystic event is predicted by an instinct for abandonment and anonymity,
at the same time it mutates the urban environment in which it stage its runaways line.
the cityscape is cast into the frenetic rush of this disavowal, to the extent that it becomes the equivalent of the desert

what are the indentitarian qualifiers that San'an wants or needs to chain-break?

to be honest, Attar's San'an's poetry, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions. [he wrote his poem in a time when the highly religious Sheikhs would go to monasteries and get drunk with the non-Muslims, getting high with the nonhuman. it is Seljuq (سلجوق) time, medieval Turko-Persian. The Seljuqs were educated in the service of Muslim courts as slaves or mercenaries. The dynasty brought with itself a sense of revival. Under the Seljuqs, New-Persian became the language for historical recording. Attar (عطار) means herbalist, druggist, perfumist or alchemist, and during his lifetime in Persia, much of medicine and drugs were based on herbs. Therefore, by profession he was similar to a modern-day town doctor and pharmacist. Rose oil means ‘attar’. Attar died a violent death in the massacre which the Mongols inflicted on Nishapur in April 1221.]
-in his Birds epic, he is bringing an instinct coalition that translates all movement into a devouring collectivity --> the logic of their fading (--of the birds) is the same explosively that that fuels their inception, (why the birds must gather in the first place?!)

once-mystical and now-postmodern tribalism (?)

(“I” threatens the nomadic workings of the pack event)
[there is a pack-event in the San'an's students]
self = migratory sensibility of a subjectivity adrift

the exile does not need to exist / the community is desperate to exist (which is why it degenerates into totalitarian declarations--do the San'an's students have that?)
is Attar, in his poetry, obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)? (when he repeatedly tries to synthesize an “authentic” discipleship, ﻣﺮﯾﺪى, Anhängerschaft?, for the San'an's “teachings”) --whereas the exile, the animal, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion --> carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity



رسوایی - using treachery for the sake of vitality
(‘Verrat'--betraying the student, in order to produce truth-event)

going into vicious levels of self-consciousness

between all the lines of statement that Attar constructs, what is being suggested in his music or words?


San'an, taken by otherworldly crafts that signal him to become (gracefully) transfixed

‘naaareh’ - نعره
far cry from the mystic's encounter with divinity

disavowal of (an explicit) narrative (trajectory)


[sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material] *mystic* =/= or? =~ *postmodern* [obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialistic]
is there in postmodernism then an alternative version of mystical experience?
...


feeling like a foreign body, until you find a job?! (Attari as a job)


let's jam on this


this story is prior to psychoanalysis (?)
positionality, placements, displacements

a system that doesn't have access to its own knowledge



historical struggle for the definition of the real


I can't keep clean boundaries


rituals (of promise and contract), (things that) must address anxiety --?--> a religious stamp


what is the San'an text promising the Other? (like every text does, every utterance)
what it cannot *not do?


my childish playful inventiveness and its relationship to weakness.
so I come up week, saying ‘let us do this or that,’ but that is a will to power (?)


we are here to understand the appropriation of meaning.
what does or does not belong to the protocols of reading, etc.

(think in terms of de-appropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when assuming responsibility for the work or thought of another) is that what I am practicing encountering the work of Attar? as an ally or ancestor or an unknown sidetrack of writing


different modalities of love and loving

I guess what I wanted to ask you is your love

I have been teaching Islam to you?! in a shattered and transgressive way
of course this not teach-according-to-definition

of course every demand is the demand for love


the SM-inserts in San'an story
he is asked to perform some serious Sado-Masochist interactions with nonhuman animals, his favorite book, and Tarsaa as stage-manager
we are left with the task of reading the enigma of something that no longer is. if things ‘were’ we wouldn't need to be thinking, reading, running after them.
(I am reading the enigma of something that no longer is)
precisely Bayazid defines Tasawwuf/Tasavof as something that ‘was’ and had no name and today ‘is not’ and has name.


I am taking in terms of constructions and phantasms

everything that comes at you, which is persecutory, is absorbed. that being able to crucified by the other.
doesn't have an experience to fire aggression

is it possible to be kind in a non-manipulative non-cognitive or non-calculative way?

San'an was booked “elsewhere,” he had a transcendental hearing, he had to take a call
[we should here study a ‘hauntology'---the science of morning-disorder. all prophets have it also]. haunt---the figure is neither present nor absent --> (and “real” presence has always been the religion's obsession)


از شبح به شیخ

از صنع به صنعان


صنع = fake, صانع fabricated, made-up, technological, dead, etc.
صنم = idol
صنع = eidolon
-(eídōlon, “figure, representation”), from εἶδος? (eîdos, “sight”), from εἴδω? (eídō, “I see”)
-a phantom, a ghost or elusive entity (=/=? haecceity)
-‘you still see them'---is this an origin of metaphysic?
-eidolon is the image in water, apparition, ‘surat,’ a double / technical. idea comes from the word “to see” in Greek verbs, linked to the notion of ‘eidolon’ is the ‘visible image’ (in ancient optics and theories of perception) [the visible image is what appears to operate San'an's dream]
-why eidolon has the tendency to become an idol that talks back? (San'an practically encounters an eidolon and converts it to an idol. what Tarsaa asks San'an to worship is the confirmation of what sheikh has already done.)
-what is the secret of the vitality of the image that bewitches San'an? why dream/images, works of metaphors have lives of their own and cannot be explained as epistemological windows onto reality?
-San'an is first captive of apparition (صورت), then captive of meaning (معنی‌)
-originality of the site is abolished by technological register of the ‘sent,’ (the telephonic cyber-space) of the eidolon =?=> displacement (-how San'an loses a sense of place first in order to move)

[in the beginning of Miyazaki's 2013 The Wind Rises 風立ちぬ, a boy, vivid dreaming, meets an Italian aerospace engineer, who is shocked when he hears that the boy thinks he is dreaming. then he deceivingly says to the boy: “yesssss yes you are in a dream, boy” and saying to himself “how naive the boy is."]
-how is it naive to think that you are dreaming? that what you are seeing and hearing is not ‘real’? ----San'an is not naive in that sense. he knows that the dream is not just a projection of his subjectivity. he is not Freudian, or he knows his own subconscious too well.
San'an going to Italy (Vatican?)

a mapping is going on

his cognitive defend system is d[...]