[...]adness)

(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers

(in sufism) tension between good and bad feelings (ugly, outlaw emotions...) ==> progress (spiritual advancement)
--> (sufi) scandalous behavior: performative form of cultivating negative emotions in oneself and others

emotional regime
ecological phenomenology
emotional habitus

habitus = [*]mood: collective feeling --Bourdieu--> *making and using moods have to be integral part of (the goal of) any sociopolitical process* (@Foad, @Sina)
(**collective action if impossible if people are not in the mood**)


*educational material (~= ideological material) : integrated attitude toward the world*

regulatory forces of society construct (=/= control) behavior
[two feelings: you are *constructed* but still might find yourself with agency =/= you are original (essential, special) and might find yourself *controlled* by forces of society <-- bad idea for political engagement]

**politics --> a sphere that is deeply imbricated in the visual regimes of societies** (--> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)


(Naveeda Khan)

Jinns and children

a place for a child to build conviviality / continuity with a creature made of smokeless fire

(the girl) she charts through a modality of “hearing”

..that which defines the normative, the duties, and responsibilities that accompany observance of a religious tradition.

different intensities by which the normative is reiterated

Jinns are also known to eavesdrop (esteragh-e sam’) on the angels in the lower reaches of heaven to acquire limited knowledge of the future

the little mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self



**wonders of children

children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray


8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food

her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity



“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)

“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)


...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)

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

ecstatic identifications with...


one could legitimately dream of the prophet, but one could never call him forth
both these paths escape jinn, having a dynamic if disruptive presence within human world, alongside the presence of angels and saints

there can be no other experience of the prophet other than through the record of his words and deeds??!!!



the daily struggle to presence the prophet


علما olama =/= بچه bache
face-to-face =/= via-jinn

face-to-face learning from the olama (the authoritative transmitters) versus a faceless and voiceless jinn with his child serving as its ventriloquist (arusak gardan)

activating competing bodies of knowledge and sets of relations
(in the hope that one of them will pay off)


insistence on a modicum [minimum amount] of consistency

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

...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character


(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers


‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(for Zezru) the children are pure, they represent non-evil. they belong to shades. their innocence does not imply a state of passivity.


what regions of experience and expression the child has access to?

innate resources of children
Reynolds
children’s own resources are bolstered by the protection afforded by living and dead kin
a parent (or guardian), cannot know in advance what regions of experience and expression the child has access to or what he or she is capable of

in Islam: children are considered to have a certain strength and prescience that makes them effective as conduits to the world of spirits =/= innocent creatures to be protected
•children are free of religious obligations up to the age when they are seen as maturing
•protected by countercharms and exorcism only to an extent


a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity
[*]malevolence: something that holds out the possibility of harm (=/= actively intending harm)
[*]generosity: the willingness to concede to others (=/= a nobility of character)
religious differences --materialized-->
•as a malevolent witch
•in a father’s potentially malevolent instrumentalization of his daughter (bringing the jinn home)


parsayi پارسایی
*pious self = composition of a series of *presubjective singularities* (standing alongside one another [within a milieu comprising other such series/seriousnesses])
=/= self-contradictory subject arching toward resolution
=/= norm-bearing subject that has achieved coherence


(*presubjective singularities*)
let's explore how a self moves alone this series of singularities, what brings about movement, and where may it be tending [wohin]

---Naveeda--> presubjective singularities: different versions of oneself that are not sharply distinguished from one another but are nonetheless distinct

[*]subjectivity: whatever you do set yourself apart from others

Maryam's father, has moved from a version of himself that he knew to other versions of himself of which he did not have prior knowledge

his movement was toward the jinn and then away from them. so not in the series that constituted ‘him’, but also moved toward the series constituting the jinn. a zone of jinn becoming.
(or human becoming for the jinn)

allowing himself to be a multiplicity


“Our faith had become weak and our obligatory worship was suffering.”


is Sulayman (the jinn) then the arc of a certain line of flight for Maryam?

friendship between a human (little sunni girl) and a nonhuman (jinn) [<-- enabled & nurtured by the possibilities of malevolence + generosity] ==> movement within a field of negativity ==Naveeda==> a means of gaining voice



artificiality of need in the everyday --> this view eclipses what is at stake in the everyday life, what jeopardized it internally and externally

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

*the formation of selves within contemporary Muslim societies:
(A) existence of multiple selves within an individual, which is context-dependent and intersubjective. the individual may espouse different self-representations at different moments, these are not viewed as inconsistent to the illusion of wholeness (Ewing 1997)
(B) the subject acts on herself in such a way as to make the norm constitute her as pious self. this is a self that is generated through its particular emergence from and interpenetration with, the norm. (Mahmood 2001)
(C) the self as the realm of presubjective possibilities. in Deleuze words “impersonal and pre-individual singularities” exists within a plane of immanence. “far from being individual or personal, singularities preside (take over and govern) over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a ‘potential’ which admits neither Self not I, but which produces them by actualizing or realizing itself, although the figures of this actualization do not at all resemble the realized potential.” the actualizations are in link with his plane of immanence. (Deleuze 1990)

a given individual moves between these qualities without necessarily morphing into entirely different selves --> ***difference internal to being***
(that ‘difference’ is internal to being)



to betray the immediate norm (of this society) (to ensure a continued relationship with them)

but i am already moving to my next self



*ethics of listening
(1) gestures as cultural text (Clifford Geertz)
(2) codes to crack the regulative mechanisms of a society (Pierre Bourdieu)
(3) how thinking proceeds apace with gestures, how gestures gather thought, sounded and unsounded, and how voice is incorporative [tending to incorporate or include things] of these gestures

(Heidegger shows)
metaphysical relation: think ==> speech
(only when one speaks, does he think--not the other way around)



temporality of memory
(...it took them two years to remember to tell me this)



possession: is to be struck by any number of somatic illnesses or psychic effects of mysterious origins (Bown 1993)



mythopoetic (registers of Qur'an)
mythopoetic registers of everyday life



Jinn can trick the humans into looking at a copy of them (and then change form or into formlessness)


the copies of time-honored practice of embodying and transmitting the islamic tradition is now haunted by *modern anxieties*


Asb-e Imam-Hossein



it is in islamic tradition that being a muslim entails keeping up the illusory nature of everyday life while also participating in it. (not excessive withdrawal nor excessive attachment)
[why isis breaks this?]

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

[✕] technologies of the “here and now”
[✕] semiotic-tech of “elsewheres”
}-->
(separated in the past, *ontological difference*, a fiction) in West: (--> that is why Latour anthropologizes modernism)
*[philosophy]--signals--> here (in Europe and West), selves
*[anthropology]--signals--> elsewhere, others }--> a wannabe discourse on Others
}--> (ontological difference between anthropology & philosophy [in their mode of immersion in the metaphysical] is part of) colonial community, a form of ‘negation’ =/= my recent antagonism [the way i am studying is for *extension*{= extending but also standing in tension with, a lineage(=/= rupture)} rather than *negation*]: since i got into Olearius, 2017, I am developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say life (also power and ethics) comes to attention simultaneously anthropologically and philosophically from elsewhere and here [--> to reed something from the outside ~= reterritorialization (of concepts, interests, affects, percepts,)]--> when concepts are reterritorialized they illuminate the world differently


*we need better construction of past for building truly decolonial community* <-- is my antagonism needed for this?


anthropology: a mode of heightened attentiveness to life
(Singh)

Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze --> a loss of anthropologically generated theory

(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves

(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)

philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into thoughts’ --> no! no!

how philosophy relates to and draws on nonphilosophy (is usually geographical*)

more differences:
•geographical: western/non-western
•naional: indian/french
•subdisciplinary: analytic/continental

(trajectories of Derrica, a tradition of) negative transcendence: différance, an absence that transcends “a” and “not a” [=/= (trajectories of Deleuze, a tradition of) affirmative immanence, the self-differentiating intensities of “a”, compresence of “a"]

some Deleuzian terms:
•assemblages
•deterritorization
•becoming
•multiplicities
•excess
•schizophrenia (~ nondialectical thought, a nondialectical expression of different polarities held together. use ‘split’ to create a philosophy, [the ‘split’ metaphore is] an argument for the dynamism and temporality of the structure =/= dialectical historism and the Freudian unconscious) -- schizophrenia marks an unresolved, nondialectical tension
}--> giving me a range of concepts with which to inhabit a plenitude of life --> we need to create/borrow/steal/appropriate a range of concepts with which to inhabit the plenitude of life (in Tehran) that exceeds all the time. (that which the political consciousness of contemporary Tehran fails to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***

Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed”
[*]dialectics:
1- the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction
2- the valorization of the “sad passions” as a practical principle --> “the unhappy consciousness is the subject of the whole dialectic” (Nietzsche)
3- the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself
•Hegelian: a determinate negation, followed by a “higher” synthesis
•Badiou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory

postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics

to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and nonnegotiable indebtedness
•expressed relations of power
•other modes of spiritual and material relatedness (that would be lost if i were to tell a story that was only a variant of a master-slave dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*

how do we piece together a world?

ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)

encroachment tajavoz تجاوز


super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
•are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•

(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy


khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must explore theoretical alternatives to the concept of force: consent, contract, Singh's bipolar theory of force and contract, varying ideas of the “magic” of the state, Foucault's governmentality --> contemporary anthropology of the state, we examine varying pictures of state incapacity
•requirements: willingness to engage challenging concepts and texts, weekly online comment, class presentations and participation
•aims: a final essay: to make a coherent argument drawing on anthropological and theoretical literatures on state power
•axis: i work with Singh: that “there is no one correct answer we hope that students will come away with a better sense of the paradoxical coordinates of power such as violence and welfare, central to the making and unmaking of global modernity”
•reading: we will gradually build up towards the more difficult texts and ideas.
•note: You will not necessarily receive a better grade for any external research or new information you bring in but on how well you relate to the texts and ideas we have discussed in class. two student presentations. often a quieter, more considered response will be more highly valued.


[Singh seeks to signal] a wider range of forces (of which “repression” sarkub سرکوب would be one) and forms of contract (modes of give and take that are not exactly captured by the idea of “compassion” rahm رحم) [=/= VOA or BBC's dangerous notion of “informing” iranians’ political awareness]
-these two forms exist as potential tendencies of power, two forms among others that **power over life may take**
*tendencies* are not static or ahistorical [- Foad's “tendencies” (to destiny)] --> tendencies may morph and take new shapes --> they can also turn toxic when they are disappointed --> we oscillate from redemption to catastrophe =/= [this is the kind of political act/project we need:] “with Mitra and Varuna (~ region of structural-potential tendencies) we are not giving up hope, but the project becomes more specific: to track the particular degrees of force (many of which may be morally objectionable) and the modes of contract that are available in a polity” -Singh
...gestured to tendencies of thought

@iranian friends
to inhabit Mitra and Varuna is to not give up all political hopes and criticism (=/= dialectical political logic ==> a final purifying battle [~ Mehdi's totall earthquake offering a “higher” synthesis to his Tehran in a destructive scenario])

*** the locus of disappointment (& hope) [for iranian] ***

a concept can:
•shift or reverse the locus of our hopes and disappointments
•gives us coordinates along which to pay closer attention


nondialectical thought =/= law of noncontradiction : you are either for or against (Islam, state, ...)


a kind of life-force that an older generation of social science would have called “agency”:
“she is fearless and has an amazing ability to bring people together”, i was drawn to the vitality that she embody --> Singh understands her life not simply as a unidirectional story of “empowerment” or “agency” [a story many iranians are caught in] but as a *fluctuation between forms of strength and vulnerability*
(condition of life itself:) our particular strengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution


how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)


[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***

agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?


(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)

(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*


“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”


Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)

yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)--> to be able to sense **varying intensities of conflict and cohabitation**
(play and war may both be latent in the give and take of everyday life, and the difference may not always be clear-cut)

نیرومندی و کثرت اهالی و تعارضات کشمکش و جماع
(how?) (to be able to) sense varying intensities [کیفیتی با شدت و سختی و حجم ~= انقباض ,در هم کشیدگی + شتافتن ,گرفته شدن + فراهم آمدن ,گرفتگی ,ترنجیدگی] of conflict and cohabitation[: my sister thinks of this term as family in small scale]
--> differential [داراى ضريب متغير، افتراقی، تشخیص دهنده the result of differentiation =/= different تمایز] intensities


bawdy مستهجن

intimate insults ==> accumulate deadly force

shifting intensities between a festival and a riot (are not necessarily a “modern” degeneration of traditional festivity) --> the case of new year's eve in Köln 2016
(bad or good) heightened intensities ==(may animate)==> new political and social movements or sustain the vitality of collective life --> intensities may also wane and become deadended

concept of vitality:
•Deleuze: intensity
•Nietzsche: will to power
•Bergson: elan vital
•Spinoza: conatus


as an ___ I respond to this challange with an ___ic persona

officiator

***(my methodology:) let's include in our dedication to X also a butt of jokes and mimicry


i see you, among other things, as ethical actors

(recent work in anthropology ==>) ethic =/= simply instantiating “categorical imperatives” and obligations, a journy from war (or politics, as the “continuation of war by other means”) to a nonagonistic equilibrium of “perpetual peace” (تعادل ناهنجارانه صلح دائمی)
*life often produces intensities and conflicts that cannot be accounted for by a priori rules and obligations


nobility = refusal of revenge

(Nietzsche:) to sanctify revenge with the term justuce <-- characteristic debasement of agonistic ethics (رستم)
as though justice were simply a further development of the feeling of having been wronged ***
*agon* can morph into a nobler, more animated form. it (can) come closer to life than to death


**(singular) energetic expression of vital life is not always “individual” **

noble and base --> they name a coordinate within (in excess) of which life forces flow and way and wane

Deleuze + Guattari + Nietzsche --> an ethical imperative to examine the kinds of life forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined

to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper


my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)


thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***


“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)


?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it


*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*


Derridean moment of negative transcendence

waxing and waning plenitude of that flux

Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•

*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)

دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت

Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --> this is a dialectical habit of thought: the idea that the signature moment of thinking is a determinate negation (of State, Islam, Europe, etc.) Singh asks: how did this particular mode of reflexivity come to stand in for “true” anthropological thought?



would it have been better to leave things more “fluid” and “complex and contradictory”? @Eszter


ethnographic labor:
1- a form of hunting and gathering impressions
2- sifting الک کردن and cultivating expressions

(my work in apass:) our relation to concepts becomes more explicit, as we turn impressions into considered thoughts

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

thinking postcolonial urbanism with Anand Taneja

(this is the question of the limitations of imagination:)
how (for a generation of scholars [or artists]) rural (india) [or syria, Iran, or South Korea] has become simply a space of disasters, statistics, and deaths --✕--> Anand's work is a counter-example [i am learning from him to be attentive to my own imagination's stopping-points. to resist stories that render life in those milieus unthinkable] --> that those spaces are not only of abjection but also of imagination and curiosity --> to think about alternative (conceptual) vocabularies to think about those abjected places, religion, and ajayeb [that does not only negate those milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is

how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms

(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu


anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level


*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule

[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)

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

(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition

jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition

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

vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)

Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita

*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)

singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes

anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined

can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture

recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)

(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness

-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence

(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations

pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death

heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]

heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order

(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability

...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality

(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic --> death: disarticulation --> must be undone by inhabiting the liminality : ritually rejoining the flow of life

similarities of ritual mourner and ascetic: transcending the categories of the social and the cosmic

incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]

(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life

emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)

***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)

critical event
critical structure

[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)

foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan

not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)

there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)

event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)

event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place

in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims

in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure

(**modernity is an event**)

pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order

Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering

the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)

Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***

toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)

poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture

...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity

(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,

*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*

Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)

Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to material objects and the external world
...existence of the finite neighbour (seemingly known other) --> may become unknowable

--> *Veena discovers the concept of skepticism for anthropology (as a discipline centrally concerned with the varying conditions of human relatedness and otherness)*

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminal[...]