[...]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?” [...]