[...]t the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed

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

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

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

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

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


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


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



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

history of the idea of nature

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

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

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

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

whose dialects are mutually intelligible?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


what i respond to = what i inherit


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

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

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

trans-species affair then and now

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


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


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

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



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


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

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

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


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

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

what provokes storytelling?

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

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

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

where are we headed with our syntax?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary

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

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

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


#[nodes and notes]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

cooperation is about getting deeper into something

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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