[...]metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]


[background:]

this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.

part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.

My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.

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

“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”

insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
    |       |       |        |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence

•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity


یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد


[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.

•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)

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

installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation

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

[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction


[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, mercenary, revolutionary edifice
amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinker/writers)
conceptual axes/archetypes of: power, hostility, banishment, solitude, desire, sacrifice


[*]mystic:
sunken tranquility, relaxed self-annihilation, ascetic renunciation of material (=/= postmodernism's obsession with speed, with narcissistic technologies, hyper-materialism)
neomystial trajectories of new-wave iranian cinema filmic style --> hypnotic effect =/= audition, dialogue, narrative
& exile space


[*]sectarian:
will to extremity
(apocalyptic writing)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)

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

[this project works with:]

[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
 }--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
  +}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood

~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving in the wound
(assumptions of) inevitability + anticipation + projection ==> mithridatic remedy (in ideological & literary apparatuses): “swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself” (Mohaghegh) [a form of training? for continuation?]--> the poet asking us to fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement (@Ali ) ==> (extremist:) thought and expression have taken the shape of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]

fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]



cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the minuscule and the colossal]
----[they are the initial inventors of the earth's wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects]
----[they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the older deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation]

isolationism + monumentality

(teratological formations in modernity)

inner contemplation / evacuation

attunement to the nothing
athleticism of stillness

[interiority (feels the need to?) stretch out into exteriority:] (to transfer) personal self-contained oblivion --onto--> universal plane

(Setareh's event:) one part shadow, one part mist, one part smoke and mirrors *.*.*.

...one part strategic essentialism, one part deconstructive smokescreen

part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer

part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug


a site for hermeticism (recession from humans) ==> elevation



[inoperative community =/=] *excessive community*, where players must remain mesmerized, enchanted, and vigilant

sectarian <--> full charismatic authority -->? morshed (=/= “pseudo-autonomous passivity”)
مرشد --> with its own matrix of study: hypnotic exchange [it requires ecstatic projection, not scholarly detachment]

ISIS --> scaffoldings of invisible subjugations, highly performative site

***how does one make the memory [--> Hoda], the shadow [--> Ehsan], the ancestor [--> Sina] speak across generations?***


the riotous, the militant, the deranged --> they have suspicions ~=> ?

(sectarian mode of) *reading: to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absurd temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text ==> apocalyptic significance (~ master-disciple relationship)--San'an--> an excursion into the otherworldly
-cryptic terminologies
-cosmic ideas
--> ‘knowing’ becomes a high-stake transaction, one's own identity, future, and self-consciousness hangs in the balance (--> i can recognize this extremism in myself)

(an issue with iranian artists:) the pursuit to become the echo of a profound legacy***(!!)

***echo becoming*** --> (Mohaghegh's tone:) in an epoch that runs entirely on hollow spectacles of meaning and simulations of depth <-- aesthetic

(since declared by Western theory itself, and i agree too?) it is obsolete to speak of “legitimate/authentic knowledges =/= mythic doctrines” }==> the question then becomes:
*which phantom-sphere is more arresting, more aesthetically philosophically attractive?* (--> phantomology, Avital) ~/?= *which archive remains on fire throughout?* (--> the concern of many of my peers in apass. why archive has become a predominant topic and practice: lack of master signifier ==> archiving as one remaining meaningful thing to do, that there is nothing meaningful to be done [<-- that is my source of disagreement with archive-discourse, because it matters that there is something to be done now])


(taking) high doses of impulse and reason

**adapting old tales to new territories of experience** (<-- we need to permanently work this, read it, and so on)


exceedingly well-versed fever-dreams of Rumi
his intellectual-bodily gesture
its innovative proportions
his typology of communication/education (in Majales-e Sab'e مجالس سبعه)
remote plane of calculation


•magnetic power of the sectarian voice (=/= “the weak cult of modern inevitability” ==> a formula of alienation, insularity انزوا, indifference)
•freedom to choose the all-engulfing one thing (--> ISIS) =/= countervailing definitions of freedom: the freedom of infinite mediocritized choices (--> consumerism)


(Elen's struggle to gauge her place in the existential game)


my critical rant


*build the raft* <-- a poetic strategy (<-- i do this too, to go beyond the postcolonial aftermath)


tale of the “symptom of a plague” (--> tale of “where we stand”) ==> (a concealed need for) ***immunity*** (=/= toxication)
‘reality principle’ of Ali , apass

“the eastern postmodernism arrives at the doorstep of the western philosophical outlook as a foreigner” -Mohaghegh
==> a *privileged semantic heritage* --suggesting--> an occluded alternative --from--> a shrouded/shredded resource ریزریزشده [==?==> my reparative readings (of ajayeb). this is something i should be careful about: to give the iranian semantic heritage density and texture, and not privileging it, not to give it a “voice” or “awareness"]

(Mona's disposition:) the assassin = the spectator

(for Ali ) truth has a dead body, (deranged, tortured, raped)

(oriental)[*]exotic: commingling of ***excess & absence*** ~= the third world (middle eastern) becomes all that EU renounces: the indecent, unrefined savage whose raw delirium stood as an offense to your elegance but somehow still enchanting a disenchanted earth

[*]eurocentrism: *carving a mirror into your presumed beginnings* (so it is displaces in elsewheres, as the effect of the mirror ---> go to the discussion of mirror in my amazon project)
[an imaginary mechanism of cutting off what the superego perceives as bad or good aspects of oneself (weakness or power) and projecting them onto someone else “over there” where they can be condemned, punished, praised, or endorsed (--mirror--> relates to images? =/=? introjection: process of symbolic identification --> relates to signifiers)]

iran has become the global instantiation of madness

***dispossessed of sublimity and excised from the world-historical process ==> *ontological vacancy* ==> Taliban extremism, achieving the mutual exercise of the death drive and the pleasure principle***(?!) ~->{rage of the id + libidinal appetite}--> never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence

margin sedimented its own center


making my own white noise


masochistic + melancholic = ?


infantilizing and self-contained forms of play masquerading itself as autonomy
(fashion makes such monsters:) “self-hating winners of the game”


[civilizational taxonomies]
of globalist division of labor
of democracy (+ its negational counterpart [~ third world] <-- to be very careful about it, i like to develop a bit of paranoia for it)

(in the alterity of ‘the textual’ someone else might be living)

[(who/why does that? -->) translation of] a familiar topography --into--> an ontological modality

state of non-temporality (<--?-- majaz @Hoda) ==> no more locked in the imperishable antagonism of: interiority & exteriority, presence & absence }--(Hoda's)--> extravagant paradox of *proximity & distance*
==✕==> derivative subjectivity


architects of the law (that Elen is against)


(fable of the) “despotism of the oriental way-of-life”


existential homogenization

traumatic obligation

disjointed + cyclical (mind) ==> ? ...

the (faint) whisper of “no more.”


disarray


artificial becomes set in stone as the natural

bankrupt master-discourse

explode text & life into...


horizon of textual expression

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

the idea of chaos for the experience of writing and thought

[*the world as a whole*, inexhaustible + urgent + unmastered (abundance of self-creation/destruction) --> totalitarian stimulus ==>] chaos: [~=?! hegemonic will to mastery]
•poetic imagination (--> an art that ventures and wins chaos)
•insurgent mind-set (--> that every man is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos --> Heidegger wants to live =/= insurgent's reflex in middle eastern anticontext, *eastern revolutionary ethos*, “thinking of struggle = dialectical”, no revolutionary intersubjectivity [~= otherless subjectivity])

Apollonian hyper-rational retreat from the void
Ascetic immensified retreat from the world

self-willed experience of the edge allowed to guide forward

(Nietzsche's Zarathustra's chaotic temperament:) “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”

“chaos" = what (western) modernity has left (in east)
(that is why terminologies of “nomadism” can hardly be appropriated in middle east--they are chaotic, not nomadic)


[idioms of resistance] ~~--> intoxicating sense of power

(anti-,) “being-against”:
•in modernity: a direct/dialectical opposition of forces
•in postmodernity: an oblique/diagonal stance
•today: “alternatives within" = an imperial device that works well ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself’ --> trans-systemic reality

...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination

(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare


communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant
(Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, D+G, etc.) continental thinkers architects of masks:
•the overhuman (--> Nietzsche)
•the supplicant
•the deviant (or barbarian --> Foucault)
•the body-without-organs (--> D+G)
•the criminal
•the schizoid
•the headless monstrosity (--> Bataille)
[(an exilic) postcolonial intelligentsia]


---{Nietzsche and Artaud's familiar persuasive authority, similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis --> ‘cruelty,’ Artaud wanted to “reject form and incite chaos.” antipsychological violent physical determination (a cruel yet necessary act upon the spectator) to shatter the false reality (theatre/art as a place where the spectator/actor is *exposed* [=/= “protected"]) =/= (aesthetic) distance (---> go to ‘distance matters’); this is the paradigm in iran's theatre and performance scene, where the audience are to be engulfed and physically affected by the show, ‘to be trapped and powerless’ as a theatrical value is an Artaudian tradition.
-delirium: he wanted to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible energy] in order to heal/strengthened
-ecstatic loss of the self, hermetic elements in his works, and the idea of the “complete actor,” whirlpool of feelings and lunatic expressions, counter-force from the act of gesture, (and from his teacher Dullin) emphasis on mime, gymnastics, improvisation, voice production, and various exercises intended to heighten sensory perception, all reminds me of my own theatre training with Reza in jome class.}


(demonizing) the vital concept of the outside(r)


untrustworthy epistemic climate --> patterns of smoothness/coarseness

militant negotiations of desire

(Dabashi's vertical-horizontal colonialism:)
the third world subject:
1- marginalized by enlightenment discourse
2- materialy exploited under global division of labor
}-->{
alienated by:
1- (horizontally) the epistemic violence of colonialism
2- (vertically) foreign colonial state + indigenous comprador elite (واسطه‌ها و دلالان سرمایه‌داران خارجی در کشورهای آسیا و آفریقا و آمریکای لاتین)
2- (vertically) subsequent oppression and exploitation of anti-colonial regime
3- (horizontally) global division of labor


navigation of identity



the reward of the victim جایزه قربانی (--> to be beaten)
the reward of the survivor (--> the self-conscious affirmation of having endured and gone beyond)

slave moralities

the *self-with-no-other* (too far gone)

Hegel's master-slave dialectic (an insight into the skeleton of domination): the basic way in which it is always the master (self) who requires recognition from an external entity (the othered slave) [--> Westworld TV series base: master remains in a state of complete dependency for his own self-definition on the slave, whereas the slave can gradually ascend toward an independent consciousness by virtue of his subjection --> “its own being-for-self” (=/= multispecies companionship)]
or
Spikvak's dissolution of the master-slave dialectic: proposition for individuals to imagine themselves as both “receivers and givers” (distinction between ‘agency'[as rationally legislated and institutionally validated] and ‘subjectivity'[as unrepresentability])
--> this intervention is successful in greeting modernity as a global responsibility


***decolonization as a populist mode of resistance

otherless individuation:
•the hermit
•the mercenary
•the maniac


the lowest common denominator turned into a metaphysics

authentic malevolence


*objective cruelty* (of the modern epoch and its dialectic strap) can only be undone by (a non-matching iteration of) *subjective cruelty*
*!!!


local: a forced site of radical alterity
(be careful with the notion of premodern local [~= anti-modern] --> retrieved moment of premodernity. --> rhetoric of retrieve and retrieving / remembering / )


(detachment is a genre)

justice: a sacrosanct universal
to protect one concept above all others, (justice)
undeconstructible call to planetary justive**

original philosopher being called:
-Heidegger support Nazism
-Adorno turned his back on postwar German student movement
-Foucault endorsed Islomic front in the Iranian revolution and Zionism at different times

Spikvak's project:
to articulate an escape from the border position of otherness
to make indivuality the culprit متهم beneath the heels of packed generalities
==> a negational subjectivity: preluding any form of existential action that is not politically oriented

(Mohaghegh:) otherness cannot be the best point of departure for resistance --> one walks over the abyss; one does not stay within it

belligerence --> resentment

“an Eastern postmodernity cannot therefore come about through the constitution of aplanetary subjectivity, which fearfully resembles the liberalist rhetoric of universalism and in the wrong hands could even potentially serve as an underhanded discursive alibi for globalization, but must arise from the emergence of a supra-planetary subject within the third world that refuses to recognize the very existence of that which calls itself modernity”
--> insurgent: is an elitist --> he pushes difference to its extremity (<-- i do that!)


*the postcolonial arguments continue ti operate within a domain of critical theory that is always articulated from the space of dorment self* ==>
1- absolute annihilation of the other (<=~ my kind of paranoia?)
2- acceptance/internalization of the other --> being for-itself to behold the existence of the other but “not to make use of it”


“a freedom fighter traces his name in fire, and in the frozen throats
He dies”
(-Adonis)


Mohaghegh's methodological suggestion for how masks are forged:
a man or woman sits kneeling in a bare nondescript room, at which point various concepts are then intermittently released through the ventilation shafts and into the room's atmosphere, one after another, in slow vaporous bombardments that compel their own transfigurations for whoever breathes them. The question of what happens for the immediate circulation/navigation of the self at the center of that room, the imprint or reverberation that a lone concept holds on this hanging form, the way it inscribes and inflects an inescapable existential spasm (like a serum), is of the highest order for our project.


*on Levinas
Levinas's concept of otherness --> its theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity (part of the Western philosophical tradition) [...] entrenched within an enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated other =/= *otherless subjectivity*
-Levinas's principle goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the other --proving--> ***something that might fix the master***
==> self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness ==Mohaghegh==> the other is never entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion
the other possesses (the talent of) infinity ==> ther other's responsibility is to dispense that infinity ==> ethics (not permitting the other leaving the situation)
***why is the other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy?***


it has become frustrating for me to chase these sublime phantoms (of the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable) drifting into incessant negative theologies... --?--> self always sees itself as that which it is not =/= (ontological differential of) the earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, the one with a staunch existential verifiability, the one whose trachea or fingertips might be severed by five bullets around the corner, the one who plays with mortal stakes and states of emergency on daily basis, the one of famine, war, or occupation


rapid evacuation
agility
velocity
dexterity
third world subjectivity must transmit itself through the affective matrix of radical coldness

Nietzsche and Sartre locating their own becoming-frigid within the realm of otherless individuation, neither hesitate to look at Eastern corridors


insurgent becomes the writer of (Manning's) impersonal event


touchstone of a rare immunity and a weapon

to evoke the anxiety of the audience (-Hoda?)


“kill him” --> shortening of language to mirror the contradiction of being : most horrifying manifestation of formalized coldness. not just the license to kill, but the mechanistic invocation of the license


the ‘what has always been’
eternal war
همیشه اینجوری بوده --> proposition of the insurgent stoicism یاغی رواقى [~ a self-without-other: has experienced firsthand the detriment of othering, @Foad]

(the rant, the taunt متلک, the insult فحش, the battle cry)

axis of eternity, middle eastern recourse to an original circularity of things
a concept of time as pure circle (from medieval mysticism)
=/=
deconstruction's uncanny
psychoanalysis's trauma

[a technique i use in my lecture-performances, i work reverentially = reverie + reference] --> could be helpful for Eszter

*(colorfulness ==> entanglement)*


the ligature (خط پيوند)
the outliner
unimagined destiny


(little freedom called) curiosity =/= alertness (<-- freedom of nerves)


(my problem with the) discourse of the trace (=/= heritage, tradition studies)
“let's leave a trace” --> you create your own kind of starting from yourself. you have no ancestors and your roots are in your footsteps
(it is never my concern how to leave a trace. rather, reading the fubar that is left by others for me to read)


(contemporary colonialism is tentacular)

contemporary colonialism with its *clash of civilizations rhetoric* [~=>? multiculturalism] =/= ancient warlords and dynasties (--Foucault showing the difference between a medieval monarch’s beheading of a subject and the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state) }<-- they don't get it: Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others. that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity

the problem is those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical”

(eastern insurgent has been:)
•technically innovative
•epistemologically and ideologically distinctive
•existentially grounded in the waters of ‘what has always been’

Mohaghegh making a link between Hassan Sabbah and Ahmad Shamlu:
•Sabbah: leader of the Ismaili assassins and keeper of their Nizari fortress at Alamut: that he was said to have never left his inner quarters [the library, courtyard, or bedchamber] for thirty-five years except twice to stand on the rooftop and look out beyond the mountain --> this is the worldview of the eternalist at work. He participated in ‘change,’ manipulated them toward fatally constructive ends even, but did not honor these developments as a journey of any substantial kind.
[flash forward a thousand years...]
•Shamlu: same attitude: when he was asked to comment on his country's most recent uprisings offered the following metaphor: he said to think of the event as when a man who is sleeping on one side of his body for most of the night begins to ache and so rolls over to his other side and continues sleeping --> the movement is not sufficient as to prove impressive


(Mohaghegh stresses in postmodern Middle Eastern thought:) the prominence, variability, and magnification of the willing subject


-Foucault's early outright support for the Iranian Revolution of 1979
-Baudrillard's theoretical flirtation with Islamic terrorism
-Badiou and Zizek's dazzled looks toward the Arab Spring
}--> they mistake fireworks for explosions, and ill-equipped for such far-off archaeological digs


internal saboteur

heritage of deconstruction:
•parody
•parasitism
•mimicry

Rumi points to those madmen who would wash their wounds in blood
... we are no longer interested in the face of the other but only the other's defacement

the destruction that cleanses
the rabidness that is a precipice

(what i am learning from Shahrzad, i wish and my work has been always about the ways of learning: ****to buy my people time to think and breathe in other directions****)


an eastern step: to make language peripatetic (salek سالک wandering from place to place on foot [why not make it to the Wonderland's Alice?]) ==> (a non-regimented) textuality within a body that charges --> *uncivil incarnation*


*killer's freedom*

freedom
-Heidegger: (massive difference between) a self-automating freedom that one attains via a borrowed sacred (handed-over, Frankenstein) and a hard-won-freedom attained through the rending-apart of a closed world (through the intractable سرپيچی)
-Sartre: a self-conscious authorship of the world, condemned to a certain responsibility before the event of one's own existence [--> the problem occurs when someone made it their task, duty, or entertainment to compel the other to experience such freedom]
-Nietzsche: ‘freedom = exclusive gift of the enemy’ ~ ‘respect-for-life = euphemism for death’ [life (if it has worth) is meant to be disrespected, contested, and hounded] --> ‘insurgent = warrior’(<-- the substance remains the same)


Adonis: “don't come closer, the wound is nearer than you / don't come closer, the wound is more beautiful than you” (@Hoda, Ali )

ancillary فرعى کمکى, تابع, مستخدم بومى --> کلفت
avarice حرص


affective overreaction <~=-> radical coldness


**literal**
western inability to understand the turbulant reaction abroad --> loss of the power of the literal (--> *democracy depends and works with the literal*:)
literal has given way in the west to the transference of image, language, and thought to a purely representational or metaphoric domain (to talk about things, but not speak the event itself)
“one cannot grow angered over a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing (or a dance), then one also cannot experience captivation with a film, sculpture, treatise, or drawing” (Mohaghegh)
[yet the literal is sneaky in that is always decontextualizes, it vibrates and swings so conspicuously from its point of origin]

(old Marxist, anarchist, and postmodern critique: ‘hyper-mediation + technological diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)

code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”

a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself --this-is-why--> most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can not longer shock [--> bankruptcy of the contemporary artists in europe]) =/= in the East: 1400 year mythologies can still provoke hysteria and radical fever }<-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)


Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]

a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)


dysmorphic labor

emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور


[*]insurgent = revolutionary of the unreal (=/= [Nasser's kind of] the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask--that there is nothing there to see


*practice of irregular warfare ==> irregular subject of war*

(weeds of) modernity:
•as ideology --> power
•as institutional mechanism --> society
•as phenomenology --> perception
•as ontology --> being/death
•as cultural emergence --> spectacle
•as temporal orchestration --> time
•as configuration --> body/space
•as political economy --> capital
•as epistemological framework --> knowledge
•as discursive apparatus --> language/meaning
•as epoch --> history

immediacy =/=? alienation
brutal =/=? idealistic
retrograde =/=? futuristic
esoteric =/=? banal
technological =/=? carnal
genesis =/=? apocalypse
system =/=? chaos

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

iran: transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space --> anticolonial islamic front

the self-other construct

***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of its own historical realities/myths (=/= “ill-trafficked remedies of an outsider ideology”, a *second-hand personality* [<-- this is OK!])

cartographies of entrapment

Al Ahmad binary reasoning in his Westoxification
-the “eternal” struggle of east and west --> a rhetoric of transcendental struggle
-to perceive the “west” as merely an *epistemic fabrication* and not a civilizational reality <-- the enemy is authenticated
(-he makes a very bad move: relocate the structural site of resistance to somewhere outside the walls of the university)
*Al Ahmad's orchestration of degrees of cultural estrangement --into--> a tone of nationalist triumphalism ==> ***vanished premodern subjectivity to be restored*** (<-- i have to be careful with this)
-[that] the colonized intellectuals and political officials participate together in the eradication of third world heritage
-agents of foreign ministries: orientalists, ambassadors, advisors, who write hideous scrolls when they have finished their assignments that say “yes, you have the head of a lion and the tail of an elephant” (--> is this also close to my account of Olearius?!) ==> *devitalization* ==> *damaged subjectivity* + an *alternative historic consciousness* }==> hostile tenant of the before-this [=/= i work on an alternative queer]
(cyclopean view) Al Ahmad's dismissal of media: he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification --> media =/= local
(a civilizational dichotomy ==>) portray media as abusive of islamic tradition
**rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity**
disappearance or extinction of one's own rightful place within the world (<--~~ will to hegemonic mastery)
*(Al Ahmad deduces Chomsky on a global-imperial scale -->) the operation of the media can not be divorced from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation

Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}

*cultural extinction*

urgency is (always?) neurotic

(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation


(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace

عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion


•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality

centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods

Marxist tradition:
the underground aesthetic is quickly transfigured into a mainstream aesthetic --always--> in the hands of an authoritarian elite (<-- in apass with Leo we were talking about this)

جنبش mass aesthetic fears becoming official سازمانی

...based on exposing the damage of the global-becoming-local

Al Ahmad traces this “transnational hypnosis” to economic origin (<-- Ali )

(Mohaghegh's judgment on iranian anticolonial ideology:) its ineptitude Ungeeignetheit in realizing the myriad variances that render any medium riddled with paradoxes--derives itself from its concurrent inability to observe the possibility for different subject-positions within the third world

omnipresent deception of modernity

(aesthetic radicalism [ X ) political resistance]
“X” --> limited anticolonialism


(Mohaghegh on)
-Mehrjui's The Cow, offers a moving allegorical journey into the psychic turbulence of a peasant confronted with the obliteration of his premodern world (and thus becomes his lost animal)
-Naderi's Man with a Gun, depicts the material avarice that has overtaken local configurations in the wake of nascent capitalist formations to such a drastic extent that it gives rise to a well-digger's being cheated of his life savings
-Kimiai's The Deers, ...
}--> strong consonance with the anticolonial ideologues (examined thus far)


...caught up in your prose


on Sa'edi’ short story “Dandil” [--> grotesque cultural disaffection of the masses within Sa'edi's Dandil]
-depicting the horrors of daily life within a semicolonized atmosphere of a red-light district of a northern Iranian city
-there is an imagery of closure and suffocation
(Sa'edi revealing:) the material despair of a colonial condition leading (in high speed) to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics
under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery
--cognize--> the immediate material urgency of the third world subject
(Dandilian gathering around to watch the taking of the picture -->) the third world subject has assumed the schizophrenic role of a voyeur himself, spectating his own literal-symbolic rape but not fully understanding it as such, while the real agent of power remains camouflaged in semi-invisibility
(Mohaghegh:) the ideological content of Dandil stands the notion that the technological advancement of the western world has turned the peripheral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image

(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]

(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule



on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda

**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]

(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination
•precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity
--> “there can be only one diagnosis ==> only one elixir” ==> produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution

}==> ***the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation***

}--> (Sa'edi + Akhavan + ...) ~=> *messianic defender* of the national history : the sole harbinger جلودار of a *return to the real* ☠ [=/= cheerleader]

            _,-+-._
         .-’       ‘’-._
        /               \
       ‘        ~.       \
      /    ~`’    ) .=” , )
     |           I (   ~ (
     \        ‘"”   `='  +
      `.,_   `”;:L0Ve’   *’
          `~'~.’  )_Y_0_U!\


*disease becomes temporary cure* (--> practiced by Al Ahmad, Shariati, artists [as irony and with the always problematic conception of the “masses” توده مردم mardom]:)
“[let's] re-employ the same reactionary elements in order to stir the masses, to restore awareness, and to fight superstition”
[still very common within critically-minded humanist social science schollar artists is the tendency to use critical theory (as diverse as it is) *to interrogate reality*
for us ([left inheritance] as postcolonialist, feminist, or biopolitician) the modus operandi of critical theory is to derealize, is to say: “this is an expression of paar.” “this is discursive formation.” “this is material assembly of objects.” ~= (an attempt to say) “this isn't real.” <-- this has been essentially a really powerful force and set of political strategies of the left @apass; this modus operandi is a killer blow for climate change from a leftist perspective (because the climate change is very real) (=/= speculative realism)]

Khomeini's cassette-tape revolution (radio medium infused with anticolonial propaganda) demonstrates the insufficiency of Benjamin's stance that “mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art...”
the symbolic fury of Khomeini's voice is only magnified in its cult-value through its transmission over the air waves, testifying more to MacLuhan's interpretation of the persuasive impact of radio
--> technological media in iranian anticolonialism does not elicit the democratizing effect anticipated by Benjamin


from--> metaphysical awe --to--> banalized horror

each year the islamic republic itself reenacts the arrival of the Khomeini in tehran airport through a procession of myriad cardboard interact and converse with these mock-images of the imam in a kind of makeshift, state-run passion play



post 1979 iranian cinematic renaissance
•medium of film achieved in the decolonized space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real

Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )

the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)

exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise

(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture


Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*


literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough

Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”

middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp

[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn

(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”

--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله

(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered

==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)

-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?

amorphous, obscure, versatile (thinkers and writers launching an intellectual-existential offensive against the disenchantment of the modern age)
along archetypes:
•power
•hostility
•banishment
•solitude
•desire
•sacrifice


contradictory experiences of the modern cityscape of the middle east --> at once a site of:
•autocracy and insurgency
•concealment and detection
•connectivity and alienation
•integration and crumbling
•gesticulation and idleness


Setareh's topics:
experiences of upheaval, hysteria, sabotage, collective suffering
--> Sana's topics:
existential-spatial understanding of questions of cruelty, betrayal, torment, annihilation


(poets finding themselves consumed with) the distinctive emergence of “the martyr”:

[-]Akhavan writing/witnessing at the time of reterritorialization of urban space during Mossadegh era: the subdivision of streets, districts, and neighborhoods into dueling sectors of power and resistance.
Akhavan's lament in “Winter”
disenchantment, bitterness, semiotic disorientation
touch = final sensory prism
Akhavan's task: to protect the domain of radical individuality (==> Ali's subjectivity)
(Mohaghegh asking:) *is the artist charge a mere diguise of influence and supermacy?* or **is the firmness of its articulation sanctioned by some dominant elsewhere or otherworldliness?**
*does the poetic consciousness believe itself of an elite unknown rank (against the monolith)?
sociopolitical discourses either bore or aggravate Akhavan --only--> (transient historical specificity of) *turmoil demands poet's greater urgency*
(the poet has earned the station to say) “no more of this” (“it's enough”) ~ an *order*  [=/= wisdom, sage, diplomatic response of an interlocutor, truth-telling, equal dialogue, negotiation]
poet's expertise and sensitivity: the storyteller's intimate relation to impermanence and destruction (--> Ali, Sana, Hoda, Setareh)

[-]Baraheni's depiction of the spatial domination of the city by Pahlavi regime from 1952 to 1979 --> SAVAK responded to and fueled a striking development in the political consciousness of the urban centers ==> labyrinthine evolution of the rebel form
hie poem “An Epic in Reverse” (Akhavanian reversal) neighborhoods of stigma, filth, and backwardness --> hybrid of animality and criminality
(Mohaghegh asking:) what is the author's recourse once stranded behind those iron bars, and now acquainted with the gleaming tools and instruments of the guards and royal executioners? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the ars[...]