[...]-> *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) and'>& 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 and'>& 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[...]