[...]derstanding, 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[...]