[...]f pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald, and its belly of red coral. Its eyes were like glittering stars, and its tail of pearl, and its reins of light
--> vehicle to traverse from geographical to cosmological space

journey-to-the-center or exile-to-the-edge

[title]
*the old-hag world*
being-in-the-world = old hag with an ugly face, practice of seduction, artifice, cosmetic embellishment, optical tricks, enhancements

the designer, the seamstress, the architect, the sculptor, the illusionist, the surgeon, the perfumer --> surat صورت =/=? facade

[infernal-geological finale]
I heard a voice, whose intensity caused me to tremble with fear…I said, “O Gabriel, what is this terrible sound?” He answered, “O Muhammad, know that on that day God created hell, a rock slipped from the edge of hell. Until tonight it's been falling down. It has reached the bottom of hell just now.
#darkness, zolmat, rock
•pit's conceptual trinity
•hearing/listening is closely linked to ominous experience (the bell's toll, the wolf's howl, the thunder's rumble)


some passive surrender to vague faith
any suggestion of intuitive-experiential awareness (gnosis)

subject caught-between

sitophobia --> the fear of eating anything
aquaphobia --> the fear of drowning everywhere

between lamenter and euphoriac

islamic insistence on the concealed (unseen face of God) ==> profuse dissension, variance, discord, agitation (infinite faces)

lohe mahfuz
the guarded tablet
quantification
institutionalized record
universal finitude

1. artifacts of hell
◦camphor --> link between the demonic and the aromachological (mastery of the psychological effects of fragrance)
◦chain --> experience of ligatures, cords, shackles
◦nail --> impalement potential
◦stones --> crushing effect
◦drink boiling water (hamim) and filth (ghislin)
◦devils force-feeding them Zaqqum
◦demons were placing fiery bits of corpses into their mouths
◦ichor was dripping from their tongues --Mohaghegh--> ichor interestingly refers both to the mythic substance that runs in the veins of pagan gods and the putrid discharge that oozes from fresh wounds
◦hell-dweller: scorpion, ideal killing-machine, back-biter, poisoned tips
--> ***nonstop leaking of the inward outward***
2. body parts of hell
3. topographies of hell

Mohammad's night-journey's hellscape, vivid orchestration of space
[...]in one direction, a “river of bile, blood, worms, and fire[...] boiling together, putrid and revolting” alongside another “black and rippled with fire[...] growling at itself with clamour and terror”

experimental cuisine (demand a certain oblique consciousness from the participant)

angel physiognomy (multi body, collective chant) ~= underworld scorpions
atonal angelic larynx ==> non-harmonic, anarchic, cacophonous image of the heavens (--Mohaghegh--> divinity as noise)
•prophetic listener (body became organs of hearing, schizophrenic audition of شش جهت six directions)

wind of barrenness
rih al ‘aqim (from the species of criminal wind bad-e dabur, God sends it to destroy things)
•blows throughout the placeless realm
•particular condition of absence (in taxonomies of ruin and chasm)
•their moon-like faces
•innumerable

[*]veil: transcendent invisibility, receptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)

galleries of self-covering demonic beings

Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features


astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings



(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)

(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself

in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)

signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest

•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey


Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal

somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)

(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space


in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]


Ishtar
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)


Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children

(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)


Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”


Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)


non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)

cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)


nocturnality and contagion

snakes and dragons of constellations

paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)


death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching



The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow

egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude woman
cow arching over the earth
--> night does rule from transcendent distances but rather envelops (or swallows) whole the existent into its gut (or uterus) [<-- digestion?]
[metaphysics:] (away from) patriarchal gaze --into--> maternal stomach

Khonsu
•bloodthirsty (eating the organs of royal opponents)
•merciful --> [its creative epithets:] traveler, embracer, pathfinder, defender, “He Who Lives on Hearts”
one who resembles his own waning moon

Nephthys
tied to the night of the soul's traversal
sepulchral
(endow pharaohs) with the vision for “that which is hidden by moonlight”

Apep =/= Ra (the light-god)
giant sea-snake said to lurk again in the primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies


(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]

teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst

night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure

(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy


(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]


Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)

earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)

a sunless place

mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)


night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman


(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend

learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper

language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky


Bronze Age eschatologies

queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions



dark thoughts

evanescing moon

...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky

thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)

*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن

***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***

Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali

...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him


(tactics of the willed unknown)
inspiration <--> madness
horoscope <--> puppetry


sensitivity to lower-grade intimation ==> gaining of subtle lunatic powers (in the arts as well #feedback):
•slight paranoiac ability
•slight manic ability
•slight delusional ability
•slight schizophrenic ability
•slight obsessive ability
•slight melancholic ability


when dreams replace sleep
when the dead pass into the deep of the night
when night's deep appears in those who have disappeared
Blanchot

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

Mohaghegh on Blasim's The Madman of Freedom Square
the story of two foreigners known as ‘the blondes’, identical twins of fair hair and complexion who come each morning (their place of origin and purpose unknown) to roam down the main street of a neighborhood called the ‘Darkness District’. This quarter of the capital city is thus named for being the only sector still lacking electricity, and our nar- rator describes the residents there as physically gaunt and existentially worn down. This is an unwell place, and so the sudden arrival of the blondes represents a contrast, a radical anomaly and an enchantment-in-waiting for a zone that otherwise wants nothing more than to lay down and give up forever. We are told that the ambiguity of their circadian walk has an immediate transformative effect on the district; though these figures never speak, they cast gentle glances upon the inhabitants on either side of the street, and this courtesy soon bears miraculous fruit as the wishes of each person, young and old, man and woman, find themselves granted. By day and by night, the Dark- ness District escapes its former wretchedness to become an increasingly scenic area, with the government finally bringing electrical power and the locals planting flow- ers and showing acts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).

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

Morton on Weber --> sociology is itself (the logistics of) disenchanted in exploring disenchantment

charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society

charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)

bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion

agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming

neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism

Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost

(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality

force-like animal magnetism

magic = causality + illusion

appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip

(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)

incomprehensible charisma of kitsch

(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])

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

(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile


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

body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)

cultural phantasms of bodily mutation

the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]


in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche

illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)

(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”

your body fighting for you
healing without cure

illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alternative system of ecstasy and meaning
•*illness: an inescapable condition of being*
-

(Dostoevsky's Myshkin) suffers a sacred illness

[your?] heritage -->
backed up by literature
backed up by philosophy
claimed by mythology


*epilepsy* (has a place in the history of thought) --> the Idiot's illness
•between psyche & soma
•between the *theory of trauma* (which focuses the history of the subject) & the *theory of fantasy* (which refers to transference and countertransference)
•the only illness to have its own mythological figure -->
•madness
•visionary excess

herald of epilepsy: Hercules, Buddha, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoléon, Lord Byron, Pascal, Van Gogh, Dostoevsky, etc.


foolishness
drunkards
maniacs
the pathologically resentful
the envious
a rapist
a crowd of cheaters
classic neurotics
subjects of delusional rantings
subjects of criminal intent


conscious =/= unconscious =/= drive

contract to his illness
manipulations of care

the sick often find someone who is even sicker to take care of (<-- the case with the Prince)


(according to Nancy -->) literature has always tried to produce the body (which philosophy suppresses)

any discussion of the body risks engaging a double bind (a psychosis):
•failure to produce a discourse on the body
•failure not to produce discourse on the body
--Nancy--> *the sick body* (in a frenzied state of belated, compensatory awakening) --demands--> a reading (interpretive and diagnostic strategies) that often culminate in *an excess of discourse* ==> opens up the space of necessary obscurity by which our bodies come to us

Nancy --> The body does not know; but it is not ignorant either. Quite simply, it is elsewhere. It is from elsewhere, another place, another regime, another register [not an “obscure” knowledge, or a “pre-conceptual” knowledge, or a “global,” “immanent,” or “immediate” knowledge]
•philosophy calls “body” presupposes the determination of something like an
authority of “immediate knowledge,” a contradiction in terms, which inevitably becomes “mediated” (as “sensation,” “perception,” synaesthesia, and as immense reconstitutions of a presupposed “representation”)

the site of nonknowledge that the body traverses --Nancy--> *is related to thought* <-- the body thinks (in a sense) beyond giving or making sense
==> *thought is itself a body*

-Heidegger was the one who unhitched “thought” from philosophical operations and gave it weighs in as body ==> Nancy

in Dostoevsky --> the body commended by *illness* bears a memory trace of the *sacred* (+ finitude of all bodies)

“God is dead = God no longer has a body” ==Nancy==> bodies (bereft of trickle-down symbolicity) will have to be:
•pumped up
•prosthetically amplified
•steroid-enhanced
•“built”
•buffed
•bionically ensured
•drugged
•“medicated”
•cloned
•remade
==> the technobody or replicant will be made to substitute for the lost body of the divine trait

last night he dreamed of (apocalypse technological dominion:) spread of the railroad and the distribution of connectors installed by new technologies as instigators of the unsacrificeable...

(in literature) apocalypse = vehicle (a technological momentum)

the unnamed God has vanished together with this unnameable thing...

Myshkin’s illness still binds him to the sacred --> this body retains and persists in making sense, the illness continues to produce sense

...poverty, hunger, deportation, torture, deprivation, ugliness, horror --> bodies sacrificed to nothing


[*]sacrifice: a body's passage to a limit where it becomes the body of a community

(after Christ -->) body is nothing but a wound =/= illness

(when it persists) pain ==> I'm not well, I'm in trouble, therefore I am.

jouissance: a pain that succeeds <-- a place where being, utterly exposed, is external to itself


[*]body: surplus of objectivity

our body acts as a traumatic place (that causes a series of failures)

(idiot's seizure) epilepsy
Then suddenly something seemed torn asunder before him; his soul was flooded with intense inner light. The moment lasted perhaps half a second, yet he clearly and consciously remembered the beginning, the first sound of the fearful scream which broke of itself from his breast and which he could not have checked by any effort. Then his consciousness was instantly extinguished and complete darkness followed.

(going to fetal position)
seizure: an enactment of a wish to return to the womb
epilepsy --Sutterman--> sadomasochistic phantasms that feature the self as murdered child

breaking a prized vase
delivering rants in place of conversation

Dostoevsky's idiot:
•repugnant
•uncanny
•a kind of Bataillean reversal (at bottom is unmistakably Christian)
•provokes love

according to Dostoevsky: *idiot ==provoke==> love*

Faust had reported that two souls inhabit his body [==> switching body types] {--> two sick bodies} (hallucinated + internalized)
1. the ailing body --> you can get rid off with drugs (dealt with Mephistopheles)
2. the abandoned body --> inglorious corpse

body doubles reflecting one another (---> go to mirror)

Avital --✕--> movements [such] as Positive Action, Positive Choices, and the marks of similar tags of empowerment that issue from the hope that we know what we’re doing, that we can take charge and act up and affirm our bodies, our selves, that we can now stop being victims and relinquish passivity.

torturer <--> healer

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

شطح shath: literary technique (san'at adabi صنعت ادبی)
(jCzF0RD-a_M)
shath: contradictory speech (kofr + iman)

del-bari (dressing up and going out[?]) =/= gush be harf kasi dadan (listening)
گوش به حرف کسی دادن =/= دلبری

خجسته khojaste: thinking all the time that everyone is saying hello to you

Hafez = connected pockets of meaning =/= Ferdosi's organized pockets of meaning =/= bestiary's listed pockets of meaning

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

indian ocean diaspora
indian ocean slave trade ==> atlantic slave trade and the new-world diaspora

Lee --> influence of African and afro-iranian people on other iranians and on persian society and culture

Ziba Khanum (d. 1932 Yazd)
the life of one enslaved African woman who lived in iran
(recovering what can be recovered of their industrial lives)

iranian history --> issues of:
•race
•gender
•religion
•elite social and economic networks
•nature of slavery
•value of subaltern history


the idea of (academioc study of) history: study of structures, institutions, abstractions ==> generalizing categories (such as slavery, freedom, modernization, etc.) =/= (biographical turn) towards biography of one woman

****(biography ~~>) *personal experience* =/= (category of) slavery: an abstraction that bunches together and confuses historical instances of displacement, isolation, dependence, unfree labor****
(--Cinderella-->)
personal experience =/= displacement
personal experience =/= isolation
personal experience =/= dependence
personal experience =/= unfree labor


19th century iran (--> estimations:)
•one/two million slaves exported into persian gulf (to Bandar Abbas in iran) from east-african/indian-ocean trade
•two-thirds of the slaves were african woman and girls, almost always destined for residence in wealthy households (as domestic servants and concubines)

1868 census conducted in Tehran: 2.6% of the civilian population of the city was designates as african slaves and/or “household servants”

categories of slave/servant in shii iran:
•nokar نوکر male servantkh
•khedmatkar خدمتکار female servant
•kaniz siah کنیز سیاه female black slave/servant
•khajeh خواجه male black slave/servant
•gholam siah غلام سیاه male black slave/servant

issues of:
•race
•religion
•assimilation --> *enslaved africans were not given (arabic) muslim names, but were assigned persian names as part of the process of assimilation into persian households* [Dade: persian for nanny, nursemaid]


Ziba Khanum
she is remembered by her great-grandchildren as their earliest ancestor
her descendants relate different stories of her origin as part of family lore
she was purchased in Zanzibar, others suggest Mombasa (--> as commodities slaves were classified by country of origin: habashis were regarded as the most beautiful, intelligent, expensive slaves, followed by bambasis, then nubis and zanjis [these term refere to the ports])

modern rationalization for Ziba's sexual relationshipto Haji Muhammad Ali:
•Haji took her a concubine wuth the permission of his wife
•because his wife was sick and could no longer serve him
•master married Ziba after his wife's death

there were no barriers (either legal, religious, moral) to a master taking a slave as his concubine
both *slavery* and *concubinage* were recognize and regulated by islamic law (shari'a)

umm-walad ام ولد mother of the son --> slave woman کنیز impregnated by her owner, thereby bearing a child
--Lee-> slave woman might, under these circmustances, have a strong incentive to bear a child by her master, in order to move toward the center of her master's household, to protect herself from sale, to free her child and herself, and to inherit part of the master's wealth (through her offspring) <-- the sexual aspects of the relationship were considered incidental ضمنی and carried no moral stigma or social shame [=/= children born to slave fathers were slaves]


gathering of men (were held regularly) as social occasions for business, entertainment, smoke opium, etc.

clandestine conversations were not unusual

shari'a was interpreted and administrated by shii clerics in Yazd, and there was always room for manipulation of the law


Ziba Khanum's situation illustrates the problem of applying western legal categories of “slave” and “free” to the lived experience of enslaved women in iran
(her legal status as a free woman had little consequence <-- she remained dependent of the family and lived in their household)

***limited value of “slave =/= free” --Lee--> when applied to the study of muslim world***
modern state ==> “slave =/= free” (presupposing a secular state that is able to guarantee the lives and properties of individuals who can claim its protection) }<-- societies that are constructed around the ideas of:
rights, citizenship, secular state =/=
   |            |           |
kinship, belonging, religious authority, hierarchies of dependence (<-- middle east)

19th century iran --> there was no ideal within the society of freedom from relationships (of kinship, household, belonging, community solidarity, wealthy patron)--with--> implications of dependence, obedience, obligation
•any such freedom would have left an individual *isolated* and *vulnerable*

****
all enslaved persons (and akk other persons) in 19th century iran necessarily were *embedded in muslim households* and moved along a continuum of whatever situation of power, respect, wealth, independence they might be able to *negotiate*
#Cinderella
****

women --> at the margins of wealth and power --> slave women most especailly (they moved toward the center by:)
1. performed valuable domestic duties
2. became the master's regular sexual partner
3. bore the master child

the goal of most women (slave or not) om 19th century iran --> to negotiate the most respected position (within the family that they found themselves attached to) <-- **the defining factor was gender, rather than slavery**
--> for example Ziba Khanum's free life after the death of her master was determined by *gender* more than her previous *slave status* or by *perceptions of race*


babi movement in 1844 iran
baha'i teachings of detachment and resignation in the face of adversity
Ghulam Ali by the end of hi life was the largest landowner in the vity and extremely influential in politics and business affairs [he had three kaniz: Fezzeh (silver), Zaffaron (saffron), Shireen (sweet)]


...complete disappearance of the african diaspora in iran (!!??)


Lee: how Ziba Khanum's life be represented and understood?
Spivak forcefully and poignantly demonstrates the appropriation of subaltern voice of the british imperialist “civilizing mission” by indian nationalists and marxist theorists in support of revolutionary ideologies --> the absent and silent subaltern can be represented in support of any position at all
Spivak suggests that a history of subaltern people (individual or conceived as a class) cannot be written at all + should not be attempted
~/=
Eve Troutt Powell --> *the danger of applying american abolitionist narratives and assumptions of atlantic slavery to very different situations in islamic realms*

(Lee making Spikvak's question specific -->) can Ziba Khanum ever speak? Lee's answer is no
we have no access to her thoughts or her inner life --but--> that does not mean her life is without meaning or value to history
*we must listen for the african voice in iran even when it cannot be heard*

siah siyah سیاه: afro-iranian children (descendants of african woman slaves served as domestic servants and concubines) who remained in iran, married local people, and could live normal lives as iranians (although they might be identified as black)
==> *some percentage of the iranian population is of african descent (especially among the wealthy clases who could afford slaves) <-- this heritage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*

we must regard them as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*

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

childhood Elias chap1

[*]childhood: idealized romantic construct, with denied legal rights, reflection of adults about themselves:
•nostalgia for an individual and collective past
•
=/= children vacillate between innocence & awareness, morality & immorality, cruelty & kindness, foolishness & wisdom, , , **children act as sophisticated consumers**
--Elias--> ***children make emotional, political, consumerist choices***

how adults construct childhood --> ***aesthetic social imagination***

how adults imagine children (in idealized forms ==> evocation of emotions) ==> give meaning to (individual and) collective realities

childhood --> worry + obligation =/= adulthood --> ease + freedom

(my childhood is sometimes remembered by me so different than of my friends --> makes the universal media objects specifically precious: cartoons that were watched by us across border and time ---> go to Sina's Children's Media Watch List childrensmedia.net)

imagine children -->
•nature of emotions
•relationship to religion
•relationship to society
◦articulation of attitude towards society
•constructing concept of:
◦individual
◦community
◦nation
◦gender
◦age

Elias's notion of emotion --> a broad category to index concepts of morally, ethics, politics, aspirational acts,

(everything depends on the ways we remember our [emotional experience of] childhood)

(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood


common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising

*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)

*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions

*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)

*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)


create and identify emotions in visual images

fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking

(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]


Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society

turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت

Iran special relation to *religious visual art*


(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive


Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response

modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal


(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations


*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)

Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)


(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)

unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images

evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)

(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***


[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination

(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love

physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual

(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”

(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm


strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children

didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•

age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images


questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena


•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art

visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•

seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional


•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]

(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}

(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]

}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime


Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)


objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration


index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies


(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible


(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people

[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation

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

childhood Elias chap2

philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings

Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind

favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]

it was only one and half a century ago that William James argued that human mental states were incapable inseparable from our bodily forms (=/= “mind =/= body”)


modern theories of emotion:
•universalism <-- sentimental desire to believe in the essential community of all human beings + appeal of neuroscientific inquiries into the biological bases of emotions + certain linguistics theories [--> for example (the fable of un[...]