[...]ts forms:) they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface:
•revolutionary
•criminal
•religious
•mystical
•magical
•military
•*avant-garde*
•
**(its conceptual coridors:) each fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality):
•delirium
•murdur
•hallucination
•whispering
•doom
•
}<=~ ***the self-chosen against the world***
(“we” is the electric compartment of the sect. the sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)
*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity
Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*
(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”
“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*
sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)
sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])
hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing
sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)
...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death
xxxxx 280
...................................
(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*
...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)
[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason become the main pillars of subjectivity
Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography
Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]
*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]
community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages of intersection and divergence =/=) *community*:
•tends to evoke an essentialist claim
•there is typically some centralized discourse of unity, some absolute principle that binds everyone
•functions as self-enclosed and exclusionary phenomenon
•breeds insularity and protectionism
=/= vulnerable, permeable, susceptible to transformation
=/= riot crowd (open fever and pulsation always searching out new formulations, *new exteriorities* to traverse ==> remains restless, agitated, insatiate)
•community eventually ofers abstract representation of their lived experience (**becoming symbolic**) =/= riot crowd remains material, visceral, a carnavalesque sensation, and therefore formless [--> Elen's response to apass offered “community"]
(with the intention of it lasting, *nothing deserves to stay “as is”* [?!])
*stale archetypes of the collective knowing subject (“they”)*
problem with ‘periphery’
***deadly and deathly delusion that there is a “within”***
-the periphery in its own removed site it circumscribes a sacred boundary
--> exilic consciousness
-interior sense of belonging: remaining an outsider event --> using treachery for the sake of vitality [~~>? Elen's *playful betrayal* (in apass environment) to emerge (and inflect) herself at will]
what makes the exile (=/= the knowing subject) more fascinating is that *it does not need to exist* (--> the ‘need to exist’ lies at the root of the knowing subject's violence)
the community is desperate to exist ==degenerates==> into totalitarian declaration of its rights; obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)
=/= the exile (the animal, the child, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion) carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. they come and go, as impersonal, nameless, metamorphosing creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some *new game* or *secret to pursue*
communities --> distinctly humanist : importing a kind of micro-universality --> ladem with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (originally from the enlightenment) ==became==> source of judgment ==> taxonomies of power ==> disenchantment, alienation, genocidal playback
Mohaghegh suggests the always social logic of community formation is toxic, “the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom” --> to avoid the “trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications of ethical responsibility, and seek more elusive pathways of dialogue and juncture” (--> i am not sure about it, this could be also problematic)
...................................
[title]
**chaotic topology of imagination**
Ali's constant antagonism (in his work and in his speech acts)
Mohaghegh's use of “third-world authors”
they write the unnamable --&--> execute a vast becoming (of devastating scale and proportion)
to place these authors in immediate exchange with “western” thought --> to allow for a toxic, فرسایشی abrasive confrontation that reveals the outstanding distance from such conventions of knowing [--> my work is about this, to visist (visit + resist) these sites of critical encounter and embed them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]
epistemic warfare (~/= my ajayeb)
masks of an impersonal nightwalker consciousness
madness
hallucination
amnesia
becoming a faceless engraver
their explicit conceptual elements:
•burial --> blindness
•annihilation --> contagion
•shadow --> inhuman
•desertion --> deception
}--> chaotic experience
(according to Mohaghegh) this chaotic middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities
(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory
(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)
***chaotic textuality <--> <==> conflict***
actualization of a *will to cruelty*
to performance a fatal experience of the text
(literature as question =/=) literature as moral transaction [<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)
literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*
experiential elsewhere
the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak
[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challenged and not left standing
no dynamics of meaning-formation solidified
no acculturation (~ integration) of the reader is embarked upon
no (de)codification successful
all techniques of truth-telling must fail
--> refusing the closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages
[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow
imperative to restlessness
writing-act as inherently antagonistic
borders of subjectivity:
•dominant ideologies of history
•conspiracies of identity
Foad's poem “farar”
textual experience as a prism of subversion, innovation, and becoming
•hardened instinct for ruin kharabat خرابات
•fusion of:
◦appearance & disappearance
◦tragedy & delirium
◦creation & destruction
•(unsteady condition of the writing-act [unpacks itself without origin] where) *nothingness & excess* tangle
bluring of possibility and impossibility
to compose an affective universe without recourse to the myth of origin (*?) ~= to express a singular voice without access to a name
his literary-poetic mosaics
tracking the chaotic imaginary
(subjectivity's) disassociation from the world --> Hedayat's The Blind Owl (<-- an overreactive consciousness?)
*one that owes nothing to what came before*
a consciousness once held hostage
*carving inward and then assuming a combatitive stance*
ever quickening its velocity, only then to exhaust its force and vanish as if exorcised into breathlessness (--> what is this body?) -->{ persistent injury --> chronic wearing-down ==> subjectivity is overcome : *acceptance of cruelty* (=/= death wish) : raising the stakes of existential experience by transmitting the authorial self beyond its own limits and toward its chaotic possibility (=/= death wish)
annihilation epitomized as instance of vicious travel*** --> ?!
thought-scarring affect
(radical modification of consciousness:)
•Kierkegaard: “I die death itself”
•Bataille: “he who does not ‘die’ from being merely a man will never be other than a man” ~~--> Rumi's bemirid بمیرید بمیرید
•Nietzschean call for an experience of the end: “from love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush”
•Cioran's futurity that would “let all form become formless, and chaos shwallow the structure of the world in a gigantic maelstrom, that would be tremendous commotion and noise, terror, and explosion, and then let be eternal silence and total forgetfulness”
•Deleuze and Guattari's meditation on life overrun by “desiring machines for whom the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever”
•Benjamin's “destructive character” clearing away
an annihilative technique
writing-act and the *conceptual terrain of fatality*
an ecstatic mode
bringing consciousness to sleep
***rage = excess + shadow (~ blackout) }--to--> formlessness [example: Hedayat: author's misshapen hallucination, beggin for an end to subjectivity and existence to “surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion"]
*individous potentials* of the rage (<-- lure of the rage)
-(Sana's) angered disposition
(as a) performativity of ignition and collapse
**rage/anger is always (sees itself as) innocent**
rage proceeds as a state of innocence, a forward moving clearance, to become an agent of sheer delivery, to commit at will
innocence tries to remember ~ that which “remembers” has become foremost innocent. wants its members/phallus back
[rage components: innocence, forgetting, coldness]
--> impact without imprint (--we must always have an imprint of our impacts)
the text becomes existence itself (--> the monsterous consciousness of Hedayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]
...fastened itself to...
(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~
*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world
the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]
deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]
lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion
San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)
(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary
(illusions go on unarrested)
Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)
Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”
(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)
(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intentionally sets out to become lost
vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected
self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself
arc of necessity
the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...
{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it
...................................
Glissant
constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)
grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)
world meant as raw material for a book
Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity
chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi
negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)
Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality
“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”
...in the unexpected expanse of global relating
“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)
modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories
[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of water
harsh bitter truth of the sea <--> inscrutable, ambiguous nature of the experience
preoccupation with the need to create a literary language --> specificity of lived experience
*narrateur enfant*
nar[...]