[...]hat are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?

the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area


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

the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’

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

i am following the movement of certain words here

spam =/= internet

spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have

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

[title]
“it's your turn now to play”

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

(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence

material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad

(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images

what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)

[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible

sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,

“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}

movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)

(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being

...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined


--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I

how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-

(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associations between figures and signs) --> something as the cause of a feeling in someone --> “involving relationships of *difference and displacement*{as the form or language of the unconscious} without positive value” --> affective economies -->{social, material, psychic}

{ psychoanalysis = "absent presence” of historicity-->(sideways movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and destination

**the movement between signs converts into affect
feeling <--> fetish commodity

in Freudian model, the movement between objects is intrapsychic --> trace of how histories remain alive in the present*** [regarding ajayeb's histories, histories that “stick” and which does not need to be declared, #fohshe heyuan/heyvan فحش حیوان/حیوون sideways movements...]
-(ajayeb's) past histories of naming

objects, the author of emotions



(how) emotions align subjects

_“surfacing” of individual_

(Ahmed suggests that) emotions are not simply “within” nor “without” but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.

narrative = production of the ordinary


•(which crimes against persons become crimes against place? -‘us’-)
•“body of the nation”
•scene of “our injury” (--> also in Iran: “our” historical injury)
•(the fucking) right to defense --> ‘home’ itself becomes to be mobilized as a defense against terror, becomes transformed into the symbolic space of the nation #[example of when the approach (to/by objects) itself becomes a fetish object*] --> “staying at home”: a form of mobilization [---> go to three little pigs] ---- “the constitution of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)


origins of bad feeling
threat to violate the pure bodies [vulnerable and damaged bodies of the white woman and child]

*affect is economic* --> it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement --> they align subjects --> effect of collective --> (in Ahemd's economical model of emotions) they work to bind subjects together : the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding” --> her notion of economy =/= {inside/outside model --> positive residence of emotions: “I have an emotion” or “something makes me feel a certain way"}--> “fear does not come from within the subject, nor does it reside in its object”
-([@Hoda's take on witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds; affect generates the surfaces of collective bodies (<==allows== not to locate affect in a subject or object) ~~--> [to initiate with Hoda an examination of the) *mobility of bodies of subjects* (in the West or her regions =/= question of the mediatization of her emotional experiences}

*emotions ‘involve’ subjects and objects*

what constructs emotions as positive or negative residence?

[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i say that my work in ajayeb, which i named it as ‘organizing my memory, and also, that which comes to mind’ is all about this reconstruction of cognizeds and percepts? is that why i am having less and less unconsciousness in my daily life?!])
-cognizant agah آگاه
-in Freud's model of unconsciousness, the affect itself is not repressed, rather, what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached --> displacement

(Lacan's) subject: proper scene of absence and loss*
a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles --> constitution of the subject as “settlement”

([what is?] Eszter's right and will to keep looking for signs of difference. --when she was talking about idiosyncrasies of her countries)
*[with Eszter's “the nation has suffered enough!"] --Lezra--> politics in a sense is precisely concerned with what is or is not *enough*
“it's enough!” --> #demand something or before which I make a claim. it is practical (even technical) or is dealing with being practical
the haunting modifier of “enough”
the *amount* of something (-of suffering in this case) <-- “That's enough coffee”
-we are dealing with materiality and measure
{has that anything to do with the enough of Ekaterina's “good-enough mothers”?}--> true enough-ness for an effect to be achieved

model of emotion ==> materialization of bodies

(emotions construct) bodies as ‘enveloped’

in standard psychological model, fear ‘has’ an object
*(Ahmed's) fear: “passing by” (=/= arriving) of the object, impossibility of containment of object

anxiety is an approach to objects =/= fear is an object's approach

in Freud: self is made by the fear of father


Ahmed's model of ‘impact of fear’
fear does not leat to containment but an expansion --> his/her embrace of the world
•being sealed into a body that takes up less space!
**fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others** (interesting for Mona's work)
[structural possibility:] proximity of fear-object --is--> possibility of future injury

impressions of coherence, “sticking together”
(that is perhaps why dictionaries and bestiaries are interesting: because their elements do not “stick together” in the sense of an affective economy [of inquiry and narrative] #lists)


ontology of insecurity --> (naratives of) crisis ==> “return” (to values) --> fetish
-production of crisis is crucial for insecurity
-declaration/announcement of *crisis* reads the fact/figure/event and transforms is into a fetish object that then acquires a life of its own
-it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure (again)-->(the word “again” in the rhetoric of safty becomes itself the fetish object with its own life)
[security is bound up with “the not (me/us)"]

being invaded by inappropriate others [in histories of Iranian modes of intersubjectivity: ‘being invaded by the appropriate other’ ~=? being of Tasavof, #slave manifesto, let me know if you want me to kill your master.]

(in the 1999 film Matrix we see the image of the ‘strengthening the will’ of the human community in the face of the nunhuman machine others: Matrix ==> “us”)
(Matrix's) narative logic of an internal strength being posited as responsible for recovery, survival, and moving forward of the human race. (@Maarten, displacements of weakness and strength)

values that garantee survival
technologies that garantee survival
--> they become moral


those who____
speak (against) the “truth” of the world, cause the “ruin” of the world

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

say your name before talking
it's a Q and A, a lecture
--> it is a violent day
asking for your name is intrusive enough, even before asking where you come from [--> #estizah]


(learning from Heidegger:) abbreviation is already an effect of technology
case of Germany specially
and persian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage


[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> basirat بصیرت ==> ta'amol تأمل (modalities of meditation and speculation)
(in psychoanalysis) anxiety =/= fear
(in capitalism) anxiety --> boredom ==> capital
(in settler white colonialism) anxiety ==> safty
(in Ahmed) anxiety --> approach to objects
(in Ahmed) fear/anxiety ==> effect of “that which I am not”

(ghol قول, gharar قرار, gharardad قرارداد [~ that which is promised by the ghol], ghovate ghalb قوت قلب) contracts also come to reassure, otherwise we might be in the radically open space of psychosis.
***contracts, they disambiguate the space***
{+} (pointed out by Derrida:) “contract” is less terrorizing than assuming that there is something natural that binds us... (@Luisa) contract is a non-natural conventional object. (the textual nature of contracts allows it to be read, written, rewritten, reformatted and rearranged.)%-->{ontic & ontologic}
•what kinds of violations does the contract capaciously includes in itself?
•there is nothing natural about here and us being here. (spatiotemporally clock tells us not only what time it is, but also where and who we are: how “time-teller” is spatially architecturally phallically positioned: in the center, on the top, wrapped around the body, and so on.)


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

[apass opening week 08.05.2017, (my response to) what is “artistic research”?] artistic research is a fancy way of transforming your “weird feelings” about the world into an “inquiry,” so to say, and at the same time resist to be faithful to standard accounts of what counts as a “serious knowledge claim.” So it includes a lot of messy thinking-feeling, embodied practices, affects, poeticity, semi-scientific work, magic, data collection, mutative interpretative reading, forgetting things, detours, rituals, dead-ends, writing under the influence of scarce foreign obscure philosophies, literary drugs, and boldly using metaphors from different disciplines of “study” that one can find. So, on the one hand, it is a term, invented to indicate a “fluid modern personality” within a turn in humanity studies that opens up to ‘what an artist already knows’ or ‘what an artist is allowed not to know’ within their specific historically situated set of tools. And, on the other hand, it indicates an important shift in the education of art, in which the attitude of the artist changes: instead of making things into a “resource” for artistic creation, rather making things into a “topic.” That means a whole new set of relationalities and new forms of attention need to be learned and cultivated, which were historically often absent in the education of art.


-i want to bring a circus inside {--> within}
-my business still with aesthetics (my own image) (narcissistic stuff...)
-to show up as a guy, castrated and very advanced (--> you can only come up castrated unless you are extremely advanced, #harem stuff)
-i am trying to come forward with all the rigor and rhetorics available to me

the death score

Leo correcting his proper name in my mouth. (signature: master of your name --> master of your house)
Leo named his future projection: “Empathoscene”
[sometimes your name is the first doorkeeper (as in Kafka'a Turhüter)]

Eszter's ‘what is there as an obstacle to the freedom of man (?)’ (question marked by me)
--> the spatial gesture of the ‘stop’ (#Selma)

Maarten's version of confusion (stated by himself) is due to that: the messianic horizon is essentially confusing (?)
his autopoiesis and cognitions

Nicolas's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]

Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary

for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,

Vladimir's tether on disambiguity

Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)


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

[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]


“point of view” is an important metaphor


#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]


the name of the world is “detail”


***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language

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

don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am saying is that: it is not clear what the destiny of art (or of anything) is

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

perhaps what i am trying to learn--with apass, ajayeb, writing, harem, etc--is to ask what do i need--which skills, abilities, or literacies--to become equipped to share the experience of the habits of the world (of ajayeb) that i am discovering

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

Luisa: “the visual (side)effects of a ‘not being supported’”
effect --> object --> suport --> object2 --> suport3 --> suport4 --> ...
(at one point Marialena pulling away a support box ==> Luisa's cry sound side-effect of a ‘not being supported’)
•?how is it done for her: construction of indifferent objects
•which import function is materializing her ‘objects’? [public import]



I want my friends to become marvelous thinkers makers, I want them to ask interesting questions



Esta: “when we enter the presentation we are researchers, we are not friends” [--> “neutrality” of encounter]
(but i want to explore new places in my work with the people who care for you)
(is this at all possible? to enter with friends a non-friend zone?)

inclusion =/= involvement
(inclusion usually mistaken as literally for physical inclusion)



How Kobe's work can move from a “case-finder agency” to a consequential work? [--> storytellings for making consequential meanings*] that means: what does it mean to live in the consequences of the relations one is enacting?
(when I look at my friends and peers in apass, I can see and feel the knowledges they inhabit in their bodies and the living effects of their languages. I re-figurally feel the figures they embody and their objects whether they assist or resist states of transformation.)


ephemeral things become food

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

Esta, risking one's life


@Hoda, Xiri,
the idea of “express its inner experience”
simulation of

Xiri's sense of entitlement to accusation


@Leo, fiction of sharing
‘something tangible, like a meal’
something phantasmatically hooked up to libidinal openness, like a drug


@Elen, DUI: driving under influence, what are we on when they were driving her cars
DUI has become the pharmecy take on drugs to take away and winning the drug war
movement under influence, MUI
legelized use of motor activity
driving while impaired/driving while intoxicated (DWI)
drink-driving (UK)
driving risky (DR)
drunk driver (DD)

the notion of game and rule for Elen and Luisa and Eszter: it is until ages of 3 and 6 that children must not play by rules, and only after that the concept of rule-based-games (such as sports) should be introduced to them. what does that say about our artistic environment when we talk rules or breaking rules?
i am becoming more interested in the ‘rules’ that the artist (or non-artist) is proposing, and not my own ‘freedom’ in their work. what does it mean or do to become interested in the *freedom of others* and not yourself? ==> paying attention to the most implicit rules of your game, that means i am paying attention to your freedom that has articulated itself in the creative gesture


instead of (the “how” of) “how do i show my interested texts?” (which was proposed in Maarten's exhibition of poems) i like to ask (the “what” of) “what requires reading?” (also @Sven) (my kill-joys in apass ... am i being too ontologic with everything? --> I am operating from the position that understanding materials, practices, and interpretation implies questioning ontological assumption ==> challenge concepts)


@Eszter: is there a notion of ‘natural’ embeded in her ‘compelled’? there is nothing natural about us being here, there is nothing natural about here
•cognitivism: (when talking of representation) a psychology of doing which emphasizes human cognition endowment enabling man to develop intellectually ==> classifications (are easy seen) as properties of mind =/= classifications as materials or materially textured --> “a common way to hear people's experience of this materiality is through metaphors. So the generation of metaphors is closely linked with the shift to texture.” (Bowker)
•behaviorism: a theory of doing that focuses on objectively observable behaviors and discounts independent activities of the minds involved in the doing

-->? behavioral intervention
(footnote on) behavior therapy --> breaking one's loops (of: reverie [mind fleeing across secluded planes], reaction to stimuli [overwhelmed by the speech of the others ~ neurosis], distorted thinking [overstressed emotional reasoning], , ,)
[*]behavior therapy: treatment of neurotic symptoms by training the patient's reactions to stimuli --> *cognitive restructuring* could help Eszter in her artwork? (to reestablish the relationships between stimuli and responses)
(techniques:)
•counterconditioning
•punishment (operant conditioning)
•habituation
•functional analysis
•*behaviour intervention plans*
•automatic thought record
•

i can only guess (with cognitive therapy) at the interior landscape of her reverie, her internal reality (~= psyche) [--> i am reminded by this again that knowing anyone's psyche is impossible, as in psychology is an impossible science]
[*]cognitive therapy: identifying and changing unhelpful or inaccurate thinking, problematic behavior, and *distressing emotional responses*
--> learning to monitor thoughts (in three layers:)
1. core belief [deepest level of our thinking, underlying self-values and perceptions of the world, have an absolute quality: “I am worthless.” “I am inadequate.” “if I fail, I am worthless.” “I am unsafe in the world.” etc.]
2. intermediate beliefs [expectations and assumptions, guidelines we follow, maintaining our anxiety and depression: “Always look for danger and expect it to be there.” “If I don't understand something perfectly, then I'm dumb.” etc.]
3. automatic thoughts [immediate thoughts that go through our mind in response to a situation, usually negative and unquestioned: “She thinks I'm weird.” “I won't pass that test.” “This is too hard. I'll never understand this.” etc.]

types of automatic thoughts:
•evaluation (evaluative thoughts)
•coping strategies
•avoidance
•

[cognitive distortions]
typical mistakes in thinking:
•*all or nothing* / all-or-none thinking (“If I'm not a total success, I'm a failure.”)
•*catastrophizing* [--> middle eastern fortune-telling, omen, foretell the future] ( “I'll be so upset, I won't be able to function at all.”)
•*disqualifying the positive* (positive experiences do not count: “I did that project well, but that doesn't mean I'm competent; I just got lucky.”)
•*emotional reasoning* (“I know I do a lot of things okay at work, but I still feel like I'm a failure.”)
•*labeling* (“I'm a loser.” “He's no good.”)
•*magnification/minimization* (“Getting a mediocre evaluation proves how inadequate I am. Getting high marks doesn't mean I'm smart.”)
•*mental filter* [selective abstraction] (“Because I got one low rating on my evaluation it means I'm doing a lousy job.”)
•*mind reading* [narcissism] (believe to know what others are thinking: “He's thinking that I don't know the first thing about this project.”)
•*overgeneralization* (“[Because I felt uncomfortable at the meeting] I don't have what it takes to make friends.”)
•*personalization* [narcissism] (believe others are behaving negatively because of you: “The repairman was curt to me because I did something wrong.”)
•*should/must* [imperatives] (having a fixed idea of how you or others should behave: “It's terrible that I made a mistake. I should always do my best.”)
•*tunnel vision* [cyclopean view] (“My son's teacher can't do anything right. He's critical and insensitive and lousy at teaching.”)


what is the most central belief about herself?
which experiences contributed to the development and maintenance of the her belief?
which positive assumption helped her cope with the core belief?
what is the negative counterpart to this assumption?
which behaviors help her cope with the belief?

*basically there is often no evidence that the automatic thought is true

http://static1.squarespace.com/static/521a7b2ee4b0ee587906d191/t/5774531e03596e22f1d2c844/1467241246388/CBT+Case+Conference+Handouts-1.pdf


(a deep problem with behavior analysis is that it comes from the study of animal learning in the 20th century... observing cats trying to escape from home-made puzzle boxes, and things like that)


(for Eszter:) complex ~= coherent (=/= *contradictory*)

Eszter could benefit from learning about collective behavior sociology
/individual behavior is completely unpredictable
/collective behavior is to a large extent predictable

contagion =/= convergence
(Kelile Demne: evil is convergent)

*contagion: crowds exert a hypnotic influence over their members
*convergent: people who want to act in a certain way come together --> crowd diffuse responsibility but the behavior itself is claimed to originate within the individuals
*emergent-norm: people find themselves in a vague, ambiguous, confusing situation ==> new norms “emerge” on the spot, which may be at odds with normal social behavior
*value-added: release valve سوپاپ for built-up tension within community
*complex adaptive systems: autopoiesis or self-creation of patterns and new entities

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

(footnote on) personality disorder
deviating from ‘orders’ accepted by the individual's culture
-your distinguished and enduring behavioral and mental traits that differ from social norms and expectations
it is in relation to others --> cognition, emotiveness, interpersonal functioning, impulse control ==> personal, social, occupational disruption

egosyntonic personality disorders are most difficult to treat (such as: narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, gambling problem)

*egosyntonic: in harmony with the needs and goals of the ego [--> defences ==> maladaptive coping skills ~=> anxiety, distress, depression]
*egodystonic: in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image

obsessive-compulsive disorder --> egodystonic
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder --> egosyntonic

Freud: psychic conflict arising when the original lagging instincts come into conflict with the ego (or egosyntonic instincts) [such as: erection problem ==> egodystonic]

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

[*]personality disorder: (a type of psychological disorder generally defined by) the lack of insight into the disorder

borderline personality disorder =/= shades of gray
(a view that sees) significances as unfair and uncaring (devaluation) or flawless (idealization)
(a standardized criteria of diagnosis since 1980) a certain class of neurotics who, when in crisis, appeared to straddle the borderline into psychosis
fluctuation in identity --> chaotic identity (=/= chaotic imagination)
*the most treatment-resistant personality type*
-75 percent in female patients
-related to neglect in childhood

borderline personality disorder often comes with very smart people
borderline personality + high intelligence ==>
•parakandegi-e zehn پراکندگی ذهن sporadic and dispersed mind --✕--> hadaf jahat kushesh fa'aliat هدف جهت کوشش فعالیت having a target, direction, effort, activity
•going from one thing to another without consistency in life باری به هر جهت

borderline personality disorder + narcissistic personality disorder [seeing people from top to down] ==> winning arguments by mixing imagination and reality, saying everything they like to others
--> (donya-e zehni) a mental world in which imagination and reality are not distinguish (~-> lying)

(a nontherapeutic approach) to turn the borderline into storyteller:
•dissociation --into--> impossible association
•disconnection as a state of consciousness --into--> impossible connection
•lying as a feature --into--> fabulation
•manipulative behavior --into--> articulative
•demand --into--> performance
•chaotic identity --into--> chaotic imagination
•ذهن پراکنده (sporadic mind) --into--> ذهن انحرافی (deviant mind)
•sensitivity (of thin or no psychological skin) --into--> sensibility
•

a therapeutic approach to borderline personality:
•dialectical behaviour therapy (<--?-- mindfulness)
•


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

%notes on #workshop of question (HWD)
-how come in my drawing class participancts couldn't even hold the pen
-participants lenzes couldn't focus, the words were in blur and in disarray
-i had to stop free associations and staggerings, and return to the task at hand
-it was like teaching a new language
-i was trying to share my methorodlogy, specificly. not a jam session
-is it neccesory or interesting to learn eachother methodlogies in order to get involved and engagned in eachother practices? maybe not --> go back to representational tools --are representational tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not there by free will that is usually mobilising them to look for and join a workshop that they are interested in.

%(am I?) ‘coming back with advices’ in my work [[#Esta]]

is it interesting for me or my research to think about how we moved that plant around in the 4th floor?
*moving plants* is risky
as backdrop for human activity
passively vegetating
making local and global connections: which local or global connections was made (by Sina, Xiri and Esta moving the plant)? (how the plant was repositioned in our) making of public common spaces
-practices of concern
(attentive to the plant that was a) shared “thing” between us
what was mediated, navigated and articulated with that plant in apass 4th floor?
(with this i am trying to ask about the) kinds of imaginative world-making at work
gathering forces
-

the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...
(which objects of our systems design supporting some and not others) leaving out what are locally perceived as “nonpeople” can mean nonworking system. (biologists not seeing their secretaries as doing real science, artists in apass not seeing the mice doing real work, etc.)
--> *(Leigh Star's) “ethnography of infrastructure”* -infrastructure is both relational and ecological, both transparent and opaque. it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment. [*]infrastructure: a dense interwoven fabric of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).

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

my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)

i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.

i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and ongoing? there is this standard general sense that becomes very upset when things are not immediately understood (#double-click democratization of communication,) my workings have been perhaps invested in keeping my own (not-fully-)understood alive for a while. if things were instantly understandable we wouldn't be here.

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

question at Hoda

how to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices

physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond

ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness

what (else) literature can be if not elegy?

sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act

soft-spoken adjectives

“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?

sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?

temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her

incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference

anger, pain, misery, ...

which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخم‌بندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?

my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry

what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?

somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation

Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?

sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج

شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’

historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings”  ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception

her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)

ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive

how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling

Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?

within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed

bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past


she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been rifting between the difficult space between “here the Farsi-one” and “here the English-one”

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

#semester, seminar study the “scene of writing”
keywords: deconstruction, fabrication, articulation, plasticity

[week 1,2,3] encounters between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, writing, concepts of language:
•Derrida --> Freud / “Freud & the Scene of Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)

[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)

[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)

[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”

[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)


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

#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•

the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing

(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible

(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]


after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?

another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’

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

because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

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

committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•

(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)

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

towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding living with contradiction” : making choices without necessarily turning the other choices into something an enemy does --> important for collective research life; “[we] need each other's extremes”; *our activisms are not the same*: to open up to our extremes, to open up to what you are not sure of --> to find ways to be in productive alliance (=/= the notion that everybody has to do everything [tell Xiri])
•(educating oneself) actually know how to explain what somebody else said and not just what you said*** --> figuring out how to disagree with each other as well as agree, that no statement is going to be taken as evidence of being the enemy (--> we face this in apass)
•learning how to recognize authority (as a mentor and participant) (the problem of the inability to deal with authority, common in early feminist movement, traces in Xiri) --> being alert to how hierarchy shut people up that one don't acknowledge the hierarchies that emerge out of that *{alarm ==> hierarchy}*
•in apass i am trying to remember what my peers are doing, and when i see things i think of them, and they are in my citation network (they are all over ajayeb.net) and i am aware of what they have told me. words they are inventing are in my vocabulary too (that is why i am so energetic calling in Xiri's category change --> for example “generous suspicion”)
•collective research environment works by networks* (--> a problem with apass)


[*]epistemology = stories knowledges tell


sometimes practices demand:
•exclusive expertise (~ focus)
•extensive scholarship ==> linking and speculating
•attaching unexpected agencies and territories to each other


(better) understanding the mechanisms and affects of inclusion and exclusion in communities of practice
for example in apass (we are dealing with):
•suffer <== mutual incomprehensions
•pain <== heterogeneous knowledge worlds
•anger <== unevenly distributed power
•fatigue <== exposure to intensity
•tension <== different styles of knowing

unacknowledged suffering --(in past and present)@Hoda--> as well as pleasures


(what do you make out of reading your gender material?)


Greek brainwomb


feminism  ~/= feminist theory-->{highly diverse, located in many domains of practices in and out of the university, and understood to be this highly diverse activity}


the talks i have been giving are done by someone with a kind of mind and soul that just makes connections fast. i work orally. the lectures are heavily prepared (and some important ways unprepared in the manner of its performance: all those connections happening during the talk not knowing them beforehand, they happen by the encounter*) and full of cue (سخن رهنما، ايماء، اشارت) and quirk (تزئينات، تناقض گويى، تغيير ناگهانى فکر). my notes and scripting are invisible to my audience, but they are there at work. and it gets people excited. and that's the point. i work with confusion and excitement. i have not been good at laying out groundwork of skills, going to next level and so on. i am working with that feeling of “i am not sure what i am getting, by i think i am getting it”. i also always come back, loop again through the same material, go back to the question we were raising before and ***“watch what is happening to the language”***(Haraway). these are the ways my connections work. artistic and scholarly work works by **modes of attention** [--remember--> your mode of attention (= your mode of abstraction) is doing the foregrounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you make ‘your mode of attention = world’ to inhabit something for a certain time only to do a certain kind of work)] --(because)--> you are always jumping into the middle of something that is ongoing before you, into the middle of many conversations. you are learning how to get it in several ways at once. the hypertext that i have been building also characterizes these kinds of layering upon layering of textual work. teaching myself how to write and how to play with ideas.
working with (Haraway's) kind of good-enough approach to a body of scholarship --> inhabiting many things that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)

(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?

after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?

can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?


hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed


(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*

we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books


(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity

*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


***almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)


(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)


“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten


[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)


metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh


to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated


*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*

(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•


*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges


*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)

*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other

(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are


(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)


to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*


*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]


**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)

the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other


prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything


*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers

-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]

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

(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***


you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*


(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.

there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)


up-to-the-minute technologies

complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles

histories of dispossession and genocide


“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?


[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here


Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*


my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random

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

MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]

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batlagh باتلاق



it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***

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•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”

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[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality

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Stewart

surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image

images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself


تأثر ta'asor, نتیجه‌ی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy

the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in

in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march


(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date

the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams


the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact


“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”

(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream


[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path

traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}

(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia

a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)

(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye

“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact

surged toward the scene of their confident excitement

impact ==> the social

#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses



a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass

(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?


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armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war

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“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force

hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”


high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time

[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism

[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing

[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile

imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine


which hyperobject you are caught in?

image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow


figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex

my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark

situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner


*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)


the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of the world’?

(Morton asking for) a geophilosophy that doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance

Morton: global warming =/= climate change
if one takes the ‘climate change’ as a substitute for ‘global warming’ is like “cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust


acronyms, abbreviations:
dialoc دیالوک --> decrease in appropriate levels of concern
tomas توماس --> terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm
cohhatg کوهاج --> coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology
hhatg حج --> human history and terrestrial geology
pb پی بی --> philosophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles (arayesh آرایش) }--> this thinking still continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)

visist = visit + resist


correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)

Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined

[*]epistemology:
•how can i know what there are (or are not) real things?
•what gives me (or denies me) access to the real?
•what defines the possibility of access?
•what defines the possibility of possibility?


•Einstein discovered a rippling, flowing spacetime
•Tarkovsky discovered the ‘sensuous material of film stock’ --> ssoci
•Husserl discovered something strange about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a cion, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible


Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects

flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature


(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data

scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are

*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*

causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming

causal factoid


humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism


...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes


[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears


(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل

everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates


speculative realism, a rogue machinery

saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•

obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)


*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things
-the concept of ‘nature’ is (such) an “object in mirror” (#amazon project)
بنداز دور mythical land away --> a dis-dimension called ‘away’ (door دور) in iran (door andakhtan دور انداختن)
(there is no away on this surface we are in) --> throw away: an optical effect : there is no loger distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)

a threatening proximity

“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”


one's normal sense of time as a container


Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity


ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’


the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing


weather as monster

baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self


(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy

back-to-nature festivals

nihilistic princes of darkness

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my work is *to mix stories*

everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding

cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)

‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*

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on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)


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basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers

my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading

each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading

literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]

i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art

all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)


catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)

readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation

a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•


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learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose

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(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the world of people and things?]
•beginning to grasp the concepts of space and time in more logical, practical ways
•causality
•reading (is an industrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about identity formation?) --> [according to Erikson] only when identity is established [~ experimentation stopped] the questions “What have I got?” and “What am I going to do with it?” can be asked
[*]identity: to identify the object of one's fidelity***
-identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently prolonged
-->? genital stage

-(20-39 years) Intimacy / Isolation --> Love
[Can I love?]
[*]distanciation: “the readiness to isolate and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to our own, and whose territory seems to encroach on the extent of one's intimate relations”

-(40-64 years) Generativity / Stagnation --> Care
[Can I make my life count?]
guiding the next generation

-(65-death) Ego Integrity / Despair --> Wisdom
[Is it okay to have been me?]
(only now is able to) develop integrity

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

you have a ‘bad day’
(in Socrates:) because you are ignorant of geometry
(in Feminism:) because you are a man
(in communicative capitalism:) because you are ‘boring’


how to plot to take over the world?


(Rilke)
“I wish to help and expect to be helped. Everyone's eternal mistake is to take me for a healer when, in fact, I am only attracting others, for my own profit, in the trap of a simulated assistance.”


(your) interview and interruption


I would take a bullet for you
/////
you go for the knife and i prepar myself to die

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

duty ~= Dienst nach Vorschrift
(the problem is that it is not enough to have a duty, rather, you have to define what ‘duty’ is. that is the only duty)

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

MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy... Although, that kid, guy, he has a spark. He is a pure account man.
MADMAN#2: and what is that job all about?
MADMAN#1: i don't know. it's about listening to people and never saying what's really on your mind.
MADMAN#2: no. it's about letting things go so you can get what you want.


“I could tell the minute she saw who I realy was, she never wanted to look at me again, which is why I never told her.”
--> i am not telling you anything, because the minute you see who i realy am, you never want to look at me again.

“...but nobody knows what is wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away.”

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

is this an honour?


(a) better thug


so, one summer evening, I was wrong, ...

once when i was wrong...


thank you for that kind (of an) introduction



i like to make decorations for other people's work

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

Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”



daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته



i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز


phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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

locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant --> for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,


subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring


[title]

might suffer

Freud's penis


ignoria


aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)



tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشت‌های مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
•train ==> skill

taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])



Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker



regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain

i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)

شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cannot be based on or created by mogheyiat, that means situatedness cannot make us feel/care/hate/commit]
شخصیت موقع بین shakhsiat moghe’ bin: situated subjectivity [--Haraway--> situated objectivity --> commitment based on care]

موقعیت mogheyiat (situtation, circumstance, condition) =/= واقعیت vagheyiat (reality)
(?one should) to live by vagheyiat, not mogheyiat
[i am educated to base research and knowledge both on mogheyiat and on vagheyiat --> crisis of situated knowledge in interpersonal relations: to feel about others based on mogheyiat/situation is a bad idea(?)]
@Hoda: turning mogheyiat into vagheyiat


(verb <--> adjective)
do the right thing (or take the right side) جانب حق را گرفتن [a form of closing off distance =/= disembodied seeing] <--> righteous حق به جانب [a form of embodiment, zero distanciation]



“your joke is the right of the other person”


you are hurt ==> “the other was bad” (is not the conclusion that is helpfull or capable of giving an opening, and it ends badly)
=/= people make mistakes

roshd رشد =/= pishraft پیشرفت
roshd --> shodan, becoming
pishraft --> to gain, progress,


selfishness =?=> being nice
khod khahi خود خواهی ==> nagozashtan-e tasvir/tasavor bad dar digari ["this is me, not you!"]
selfish = good at communication (do taraf-e miz khub harf zadan), bad at relating (nazdik shodan)
shakhsiat farasu-negar (cannot see themselves; ~=? selfish personality) =/= narcissistic pesonality (they have better chances for healing --> small doses of narcissism is necessity for self-interogation and integrated ego formation[?])


*anger is cheating*
(behaviour hal, negah be mozu-ha --> bazi بازی, hoghe حقه [transvaluated into innocence])


farar az ta'rif-haye ejtemayi فرار از تعریفهای اجتمایی ~-> farar az ejtema فرار از اجتماع

paying attention to others doesn't mean that you are understanding them (in the case of lonliness)

[title]
thousend and one questions

dark answers

why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?



negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)

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

savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note

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

being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness

ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement

narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up

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

“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]


liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)



takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)


تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking


the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بی‌عسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge


rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)

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

•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength, leadership
◾کناره گیر aloofness --> wisdom, independence
•*psychotic: makes a house, take it seriously, invites everyone to come (--> loss of touch with reality)
}=/= richer, more complex, more satisfying personality --> person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings

•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)




my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself


IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long


vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)

death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بی‌وفا, liabl)


put into words: have I been destroyed?


#workshop on Iranian elementary and post-elementary school books with adult artists


parde پرده ~= tasvir تصویر

damagh-sh دماغش
dar akhar -sh

حکمت مبتنی بر امور بین‌الذهانی
(hekmat mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense


[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•

(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)

‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*

issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,


[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوع‌ها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجا‌های بی‌معنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]

}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need both, because sometimes internalizing an alien syllable (via linguistic intelligence) might nest and flower their own random meaning networks, in a way that is not possible in mental intelligence



according to behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired science about consciousness-related processes {constitutive reductionism: ‘brain activity ==> mental processes'} =? end of psychology (and therefore: end of art? -because both always create *speculative molds*) --> which discipline will install an *understanding the psyche*
economically--> neuroscience will grow while psychology shrinks
[everything will depend on which reductionism you ascribe to them]

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

ideology: wrong questions

[parable of two side of a coin] tolerance = other side of harassment
(--Zizek--> the pseudo concept of) tolerance actually means “don't harassment me”

when you lack concrete politics ==> moralizations


we are no longer interpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic

(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)

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

[*]death drive (inerested in fucking, cannot being-with): *to lead organic life back into the inanimate state*, to return to an inorganic state (-we are talking symbolically not biologically) [=/= eros (interested in love, life, sex, and being-with, the world is very vivid to eros)]
-->{image of the eskimo piercing through the ice and snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized

Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)

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

pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries


bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی



(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)



motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws

what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?

“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”



to think about X = to change X
we change the subject
we get some info: there are 5 people in the room. but when we bring that information into thought (because of how we feel and of our believes ==>) we start to bend the 5 to 6 or to 50 --> a try to change the reality =/= thinking in calm condition using science, information, conversation

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

bipolar --> mood disorder --> relationship of the self with emotions
borderline --> personality disorder --> relationship of the self with the world (of subjects)
narcissist --> personality disorder --> relationship of the ego with the world

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

people who grew up in iran and former soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder

(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما


(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح  بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation

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

note on the workshop of anarchive in Zsenne apass summer 2018
(my issues with Manning's presentation of) process philosophy --> a system-builder mode of thinking --> *saying something (right) about every single thing at once*
-process philosophy puts forward the will and desire for “change,” therefore it developes a resistant to change (?)
-it tend to be a metaphysics without physics [?!] (when a metaphysics provoke less interest for ‘-physics’ and more for the ‘meta-’ /and why is that a problem?) [==> Barad is much more useful for me now]
-the real question of the workshop remained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]

(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])

-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)

Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]

-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]

Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)

-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?


(?how do you tell the tale of) *your adventures سلوک and achievements کرامت* (karamat va soluk)
(why self-promoting is such a turn-off? it makes the listener into someone to convince or win over into the Förderung of the speaker. [with Campbell:] self-marketing creates a ‘perverse knowledge’ about the work of the speaker, that means you give information about ‘healthy’ parts of your practice, your achievements and moral/material awards, with the assumption that the listener is going to make a good decision about the ‘halo effects’ of the speaker, but in fact you are made ‘brand literate’)
or [it is seems elementary but neccesory to ask Manning:] what is the difference between advertisement and knowledge?


there are innumerable ways to adapt to the world without creating a philosophical understanding of the world

(Manning) “we feel the force of form. this kind of beauty has nothing to do with an external aesthetic judgment.” (--> how the personal judgment is not worthy of philo when a tsunami is coming or one is on the way of being gang raped?)


during the workshop Manning remains the center of command. she constantly “knows” (better). and she insists that through letting go of our critical thinking the participants can understand her notions ==>? how can she not build disciples?!

on production
replacing the name of ‘production’ with ‘but we must leave a trace’ (which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)

(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?

the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons

“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand out and say that?)

(Manning) creating a concept of care =/= care as actually practiced in different parts of the world by people
(what is the politics of not caring?)

Manning's rhetoric of reasoning: ‘virtuous’
telling soft wisdom tale with an emotional twist at the end and how she did the right thing and came out clean and cool --> rectitude

her text has become all about the achievements of senseLab with a cover of high philosophical abstract conceptualization (~= fortification)
=/= taking *risk* (=/= adventure) of talking about the real problems that you face in doing/thinking
=/= abstraction as the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction

“adventure” is not the name of the game for me, for two reasons:
1. Manning brought her concept of ‘adventure’ to Belgium: the land of Tintin, poster of the moderinst adventure agency sold by the image of the individual blond univerasal truth-seeker exporting company who always wins by definition, Tintin is the one who doesn't have a culture and always others have culture in his stories
2. i have been researching europeans who came for an “adventure” to iran in the last millennium (such as Olearius), and it doesn't look good. when europeans go out of their center to east it is adventure (or anthropology), that means othering and feeling the differences of the other in order to feel outside. but when, for example iranians go to Europe, they never feel they are there for “adventure,” they are there to learn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”

(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]


-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?

rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “emerged” in the participants? (apply emergence-thinking to the participants)
-how hierarchies “emerged” in the workshop? and what are they?

to be ungraspable for the market ==> ? (marketing the self)
to be unintelligible for the university ==> ? (devitalizing the university)


questions:
•decontextualization, as an artistic ready-at-hand tool of concept-making, does it do good or bad to knowledge and imagination (as it is practiced by the people who use it) and how?
•facing the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction to our objects of attention, how do we build nontranscendental abstractions?
•and, why self-promoting is such a turn-off? (projecting a self-image of being cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?



in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’

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

eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans


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#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)


“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime

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researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?

a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,

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

few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)


i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behaviour concealed


***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***

‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless

impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed

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

#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements (Puchberg Austrian meadows, with it cows and horses, place of beauty and leisure) ==entails==> forgetting many others --> ‘forgetting’ (~ privileging one assemblage over others) ==remakes==> landscapes
(yet) ghosts point to forgetting, show how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces
( specters in grasslands...)


in apass (i can't pose problems until) we must address these question:
•European heritage of creating conviviality شادمانی قابل آمیزش (and very good at it)
•the idea of democracy as a political project اکثريت نجيب (soft ways of being together)
◦secularism of artistic research دين ناوابستگى (registers of logos)

[most of the times our collaborative research artistic practices explicate ‘soft ways of being together’ ==> a condition in which no one knows better than the other]

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the accelerationist fable of “running before walking”
ask any scientist and it comes to this. any problem caused by progress is because it has been going too fast. but the direction of its movement remains intrinsic to the idea of human
...

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

@Hoda: to be very careful with the fetish of “refugee's suffering” --> turning a serious political problem (geopolitics of western intervention, europe's economic neocolonialism) into a (sentimental liberal) humanitarian concern ==> avoiding critical political analysis

?a different program: not to be yourself
to bring our struggles together (not our so-called cultural differences)

refusal to integration is problematic as integration (into host's pleasure principle)

authentic imperialism has always been multicultural

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on affect
affective character practice of retrospection: a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn?

1970s and 1980s anthropology of emotion: how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse =/= anthropology of affect: how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture ==> *creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it*

**poetics may quite possibly be all that we have, it certainly isn't all that we are**

[*]politics: permutations of evolving power relations and our reflexive attempts to negotiate and manage them

*affect theory: an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it

industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)

spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large

affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices

methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap

The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum

...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore

countervailing forces of sense and story

to inspire a sense of critical urgency

affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes

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contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy

***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)

the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience reception

anarchic and eroticised happening-art

“participation = collectivism =/= capitalism”

@Eszter: (?the “ideological” in) participation in a welfare state social democracy

the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)

*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)

*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy

to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience

(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

hit-and-miss field trips

the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships

comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority

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

only working with (that seems to be) your idea

(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious

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

Hillman

like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.

what are art's investments in psychology today?

all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)

“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*

(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**

(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul

symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality

“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses

♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)

the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science

recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•

[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***

analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual

mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego

****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*

-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?

-please let's have a darker kind of light...



(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world

(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)

(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes

(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function


Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)

mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*

root metaphor of psychology (?)

(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us

[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity

tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***

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

(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?

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-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben

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act of cultural and economic exchange
act of reciprocal exchange, of creative mutuality (to benefit in a myriad of ways related to our professional status, our institutional ‘worth,’ the social and cultural capital perceived to be attached to the ‘networks’ in which we operate)
[to interrogate] concepts of artistic labor and value
time, labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems

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https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology

operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced

state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity

*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids

unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power

mutant forms of technological self-subjugation

(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics

[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture



[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology

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

[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect

[title]
Whatever Professor

[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}


things that do the reading, editing, assembling

*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps

[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*

#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units

theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)

aftershocks of a shock you can't point out

(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”

designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out

evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)

proliferation of little worlds...

story = relay, weiterleiten, رله

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

in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology



score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia



wry --> wryly کج معوج شده

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

paleonymy (use of a preexisting word in a new context) --> we are stuck with old skeletons neurotic words [that are not mutating] (for example man, woman, animal, black, etc.) [=/= hope for mutation, random emergence, sudden epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)

a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)

(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting

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practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings

teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted

festering + sheltering

“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart

rock-solid otherness

sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism

(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us

indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’

**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**


emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls

compositional writing: an associational register (of connections and differences) that worlds object-reals [real: a tangle of elements thrown together in a radical composition]

social-material world = composition = prismatic --> for people who are:
•attuned to them (or)
•identified with them (or)
•hostile to their existence (or)
•tired of them (or)
•excited to see their outline on the horizon (or)
•sharply excluded from them (or)
•

the way Attar (in the labor of a worlding) write in Tazkirat al-Awliya : describing a saint's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects

accrual and loss

...realm of killed off things

perception, context and cause
located nowhere in particular (or)
in some paranoid hyper-place

under what spell did things happen or half-happen or start to happen and fail?

Stewart: theory (drawn through writing) = compositional attunement

difference and repetition (+ potentiality and loss) ==> reals

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

knowledge: view from nowhere onto the world =/= knowing: participation in ongoing mutually constitutive processes in the world

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رواقى
stoicism: “detachment ==> clear thinking”
psychological independence <== *stoicism* (<~~)--> causality =/= anxiety

philosophy shows many ‘theories about causality = ways to reduce anxiety’ --Despret--> our experience sometimes require us *to go farther than the instrumental (causal)* and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction

*anecdotic causality*
([in apass we constantly do] the practice of using) [*]anecdote: expressive causalities*
anecdote: the intersection between the artist (patient) and feedback (therapist) --> circular causality --> (helps the feedbacker or therapist) *to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion*


stoic distinction: event which are dependent on one's *will* =/= events which are in the realm of one's *desires* (one which one has no control)
--> closely related to the (Seligman's) *causal attribution: a theory of contingent causality affecting the subject in her or his interpretation*

•نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)

stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****


Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)
•[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final

Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”

(anecdote ~=) myth: an illustrative and contradictory example --> the defense against anxiety (in reality's confusion) : the categorizing of opposites in order to establish orderliness in the world of a search for causes [<-- which is a fable]
==> *the event (at the absence of significance of the signs) would justify the present reality* (==>? integration)
==therapy==> arrange the reality categorically & chronologically + enlarge on the reality by adding information

myth brings into play a purely expressive modality (expressed in an interpretative manner) [=/= explaining] }--> (stoic) perverted causality


[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression

‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity


[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations


“anxiety as cause”

[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]


a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)

--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*


...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> the intervenor [looks for the ticket which would allow him to clim on and go around:]
•observe the causal chains
•giving the causal chains a different accent علامت، با تکیه بر صدا نه معنی
•create a global field of observation from which he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
•risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•

the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)

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

Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties

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

shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves

we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change

in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)

to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question

(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values


the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all

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

(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)

(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology



my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work



my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)



adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations are not free floating and not available for everyone. some are more attached or stucked to particular positions, some less, they are “marked” as Harraway put it.


anti-knowledge disposition of sex-education tv seriese
verybody is self-educating in the story
all positivity is created by ‘bravery,’ not their ‘knowledge’
nobody knows anything or can know anythingbravery has replaced faith ()
•Otis's knowledge: psychology is debunked
•Maeve's knowledge: existentialism is irrelevant


if in art we have affinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”



what is the state of art after Goya?



sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”


two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)


world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy

something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series


hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)

poor cognition <--> boring environment


another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)


romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]



برون افکن بنه زین‌دار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar

haft modaber هفت مدبر

jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal 

ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر

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

***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)

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

[title]
king real

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

my problem with
•conceptual art: jumping (transcending) from material to meaning
•viscerality: every expression matters as long as it affects the viewer in the stomach




(call of) phenomenology: to return to the appearing of that which appears



political philosophy
political science
political art

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

in Tehran (?how are made) the boundaries of jorm (جرم =/= law), gonah (گناه =/= god), and ? (=/= norm)
--> norm, law, sin, akhlagh اخلاق



•[thanks to Gesellschaft =/= Gemeinschaft ==>] jamee جامعه society =/= ejtema اجتماع community = norm + place (+ identity)
◦ ejtemayi اجتماعی social =/= ejamyi اجماعی collective
•tars ترس fear =/= ezterab اضطراب anxiety
•sharm شرم shame =/= khejalat خجالت shyness



آتش آب خشک را پر میکرد از آتش تر
ab-e khosht = piale
atash-e tar = sharab


tar تر = allude آلوده = sabok سبک


khosro shirin
tarof ghabl az bad o bira goftan

shenidan (niushidan) ~= fahmidan فهمیدن

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

*negative bias = the negative is more ture*
negative bias: negative stimuli elicit a larger brain response than positive ones
(can then negative bias explain racism? <-- we are shaped by negativity)
positive-negative asymmetry
(in trying to) make sense of the world --> focus more on the negative
bad ==> attention
negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive


(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together



to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)



•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood



(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing


three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map

*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world

science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)

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

[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’

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

...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)



two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]

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

government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)



morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages

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

#cat's cradle

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy


technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)

culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)

writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)

technology: a form of life
language: a form of life

create a critique
create a difference (however small, partial, modest, without narrative, without guarantee)

oneiros
oneiric


technical axis  |__
                        /   mythical axis
    textual axis


a cosmos furnished in _ian style
•Aristotelian style: actors are self-moving modular single-substance subjects with adhering accidents ==Haraway==> all else is ground, resource, matrix, screen, secret to be revealed, fair game to be hunted by the hero (<-- our video games are designed in this style)
•

others with reduced powers of self-direction: women, people of color, the sick, nonhuman nature --> need to be *patient*

(metaphysical fatigue)

***patience =/= passivity***

self-invisible transcendent subjects out on a noble journey to report on embodied nature

the problem of (pre-discursive:) believing that nature and society are really fundamentally there
--> conjuring tricks of establishing categorical purity (of nature, of culture, of nonhuman, of human)


(Haraway's three webs of discourse:)
1. cultural studies: a set of discourses about the (irreducible specificity of) apparatus of bodily/cultural production (=/= comparative culture studies)
2. feminist theory/project: view from the marked bodies (in stories, discourses, practices), where *the description of the situation is never self-evident* + need for an elsewhere
3. science studies: technologies for establishing matters of facts, ‘technoscience =/= science and technology’, artifacts with politics, science as practice + culture


can't cradle
one person can build up a large repertoire of string figures on a single pair of hands --> the figures can be passed back and forth on the hands of several players
--> *embodied analytical skils* [<-- my goal im apass]
--> making + passing on cultural interesting patterns
=/= making a tangled mess
=/= theory of everything (--> for example string theory, stc.)
=/= war game ==>{models of knowledge building, tropes for one's own practice}
=/= trials of strength passing as critical theory (~ heroic, agonistic encounters)

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

Delamont & Williams --> (Haraway's) thread metaphor ~= *metamethod*

(from) [analytical] tangled yarn ball --to--> [activist] can't cradle

Galison's intercalation [molecular interweaving] --> exposing an overt technology (the radar wants to be seen as both winner of war + advancing pure physics)
~/=
Haraway's weaving [textile dissection] --> exposing a covert technology (patriarchy, eugenics, colonialism, racism embedded behind the public face of conservation, education, biopolitical establishment)

biology = politics (by other means)

cyborg
•has no original eden it was banished from
•has no dust it can return to
==Haraway==> situated partial knowledges


gendering the laboratory ==>
•modest witness
•new forms of gender (male virility,)


touching the elephant and knowing
touching different part of the world
touching a human body and guessing at the riddle

by touching the different parts => some are running, rotting, flickering, etc.

for doing anatomy you need a corpse (that means you already rule out things such as eating)

archeological anthropology
human-animal stories
hunting each other / together
domestication

Tsing

the greedy beast within us

collaborative garden (feed together)

descriptive practices of poetics and natural history


mission of all atlases to characterize (not simply inventory) phenomena
(to characterize, not invent; mixed in ajayebnameh عجایب‌المخلوقات / عجایب نامه?!)

atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(what ajayebnameh habituates? not the eye?)

to explicate rival cosmologies

one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice


atlases of characteristic images presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and casual processes (but not ajayebnameh عجایب نامه, aj bring precise individual instances in its unique stories)


atlas(es) of(/for) the eye

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

[the identity of objects:]

Manuel Delanda: Any materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds. But then it confronts the problem of the origin of the enduring identity of the inhabitants of that world: if the mind is not what gives identity to mountains and rivers, plants and animals, then what does? An old answer is “essences,” the answer given by Aristotle. But if one rejects essentialism then there is no choice but to answer the question like this: all objective entities are products of a historical process, that is, their identity is synthesized or produced as part of cosmological, geological, biological, or social history. This need for a concept of “synthesis” or of “production” is what attracted Marx to Hegelian dialectics since it provided him with a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب‌, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?



...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Marxism notion of ‘ideology’) =/= {relational character of any (social) identity + infinite play of differences}= discourse --> ‘the social’ always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute ‘society’;
& (in advanced capitalist societies:) identity = the unstable articulation of constantly changing positionalities, ‘social agent = decentered subject’ --> how can we, then, say the subjects misrecognize themselves in this kaleidoscopic movement of differences? =/= (Marxism's notion of) ‘false consciousness’; can we do without (the concept of) ‘misrecognition’?
--> (Laclau suggests) the ideological* (~=? will to totality):
•misrecognition of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]

what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]


what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration

ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?


rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)

... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”



Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”

--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.

one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge



Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).

reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.

The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.

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

[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real



... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه

... treating entities trafficking in the futures

active capacities of description

this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings

the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)

this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale

(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self

the beings in ajayeb (عجایب‌) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me

recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting


what is the sociocultural world we construct?


dream images, vivid mythical scenes,


form travels/passes through us

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

[Latour modes of existence]

(to distinguish types of)
incompatible truths

“truth"--is the expression of an encounter with forms of existence

to understand the others in the absence of a description of ourselves
(what is realistic?)

to direct attention towards the beings about which humans are interrogating themselves



عجایب‌ ajayeb is a ‘network’ more than anything else, in it “God” has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

we are seeking to redefine the paths of beings that are unique to ajayeb without giving them substance and without jumping immediately into transcendence. (using Latour words) [transcendence is never gradual, in the places i come from, it is always a shock, happening, a truth-event]
-each word (God, Angle, Jinn جن, fog, etc.) brought into its own network,
-what are contrasts and of category mistakes particular to each
-and their crossings----and what is the vocabulary specific to each crossing

the network of associations necessary for the exercise of religion without bracketing off its ontological requirements.

explanatory rage (tavahoshe roshangari توحش روشنگری) --✕--> networks necessary for religious meaning

(the aim is) deploying the network (of ajayeb)
it is about grasping ajayeb's beings not as substances but as *trajectories*--and give them a more precise *direction.*

what is important in working these modes what kinds of possibilities are “afforded” to the investigator, myself. what kind of actor am i?

(specifications of the type of beings that the mode leaves in its wake)

**other beings necessary for its existence**
(my personal/public question, what other beings are necessary for my existence? and therefore for your existence as well.) ----> the heterogeneity of the actors needed for the pursuit of any course of action


*metamorphosis (a mode of existence first detected in psychogenesis?) what we encounter whenever we address the manner in which existents are transformed or transform in order to subsist (zist زیست)
-defined by a certain kind of continuity and obtained by a certain type of discontinuity
-metamorphosis is about crisis, possession, alienation,
-metamorphosis sharply contrasts *cure* (~= ritual)
-allowing for installing unconscious (states,) crush, posses, bewitch, kill,
-beings with specific properties that are invisible, changeable, powerful, favorable, unfavorable
-exploration of transformations
-cosmological specialties
-seniority and extension of metamorphosical beings (of elaborations carried out by all groups in met)

{that which addresses the “me,” the “ego” =/=? that which allows one to resist the forces of metamorphosis}

the iconoclastic episode we are in now, which we must work to make it as short as possible

(to specify) dualisms that make it extraordinarily difficult to maintain ontological pluralism

it is the moderns quasi-subjects (‘person’) who feel themselves to be **directly addressed,** (redressed and saved) --> to exist
(what art suffers now, that i should directly address the modern subject, and other mode of subjectivity or other kinds of addressee and addressing is brutally criticized and irrelativized)
-(love's type of address:) addressed to us ==> make us exist --> a person
(existing as person is the only way? no no no!) -- the emergence of persons is a local and historical phenomenon that we simply cannot extend to all collectives

(how to extricate ourselves properly from the) notions of Nature, Matter, Object, and Subject

to get around two major *obstacles: (the prevailing notions of) Society and (especially of) Economy (=/=? modes of existence's system of coordinates)

the same beings that made the author of ajayeb speak, got my/our ancestors excited,


*technology: that which we emphasize whenever we pay attention to the unexpected detours {the hiatus of the detour, the zigzag of invention, ruse, trajectory obtained by a certain type of discontinuity} by which existents have to pass in order to subsist. (=/= technological domain technical objects, material world, socio-technical networks,) (~ technically)
-fictional beings adds additional variety to technical beings --> aestheticization of techniques: obsolescence, ruin, adjustment, efficiency
-we must extend ‘fictional beings’ far beyond the narrow domain of art and culture, is to give a whole new meaning to the expression “material culture.”
-1- Technique's zigzagging motion assumes a know-how, a judgment, a constantly reprised evaluation of formidably demanding specifications;
-2- Technical beings leave behind them complex frameworks and combinations of associations which appear difficult to understand once left to themselves, without the folding motion and the detours which enabled them;
-3- relative fragility of technical beings: it establishes combinations and bridges between completely heterogeneous types of beings

*fiction: ...beings be grasped according to a particular relationship between materials and figures which cannot be detached without those two layers losing their specific form of objectivity. {fictionally : materials <--> figures}
fiction objects: everything that folds technical beings --> to derive from them a new type of *alteration* --(generates)--> another world (a world which has the particularity of not being able to be detached in any way from the materials [from which it appears to detach itself.])
*fictional beings:
 -they extract materials from forms, figures or small worlds that can neither be detached from these materials nor reduced to them.
 -khosh-yomn خوش یمن and shoom شوم (felicity and infelicity) --> pretense (vanemud وانمود); they depend on the always fragile maintenance of the relation between material and form
 -*specifications* of “fictional beings” (that leaves in its wake) ==> worlds (unlike fic all other modes fold for their own use by managing to extract from materials)

All continuations of a “course of action” suppose a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory. ==> gap, break

the mini-transcendence required for any definition of the being-as-other

(haven't we managed?) to allow several modes of existence to run, flow, pass, each one appearing indeed to possess its own conditions of truth and falsity and its own mode of subsistence

‘libido sciendi’: to recognize the branching that allows us to stop confusing the chains of reference it has to establish in order to ensure knowledge with the leaps that things have to make to maintain themselves in existence

*“beings of law,” : those beings that wake a judge up at night and force him to ask himself “Did I make the right decision?”


(feeling smashed by) ‘the task of mimicking the world’


*articulation* is an ontological property of the universe; a being is articulated (rather than being a silent presence, made immediate, persistent, given duration without existence).
-It is the articulation of beings that enables us to talk about them and to judge, that is to say, to monitor the risks they take in being “permitted by” and “promised to”. (modes of existence)
translation, discrepancy, displacement, interpolation,
(problem with “statement” [=/=? articulation] is that it must correspond to a ‘state of affairs’ [~=? politics])
==> to free science from: completeness, comprehensiveness, formality, expressibility, inscriptibility. (Vollständigkeit, Verständlichkeit, Formalität, Ausdrücklichkeit, Unbeschreiblichkeit.) [what is a science that is not describable? ~-> Sohrevardi {forms of enunciation}--> how to specify the Sohrevardi's felicity (sa'adat سعادت) conditions (of enunciation)? ---- (his) “equipped knowledge” (=/=? situated knowledge), awkward distributions, etc.] #(this is all about me trying to learn how to make room...)
knowledge moves around everywhere without our knowing how
“waiting to be known”


*translation =/= {transportation without deformation ~= description}
every transfer is translation
(political:) transfers of necessity
following the thread of modes
translation =/= displacement: merely a change of place
translation refuses the choice between being and non-being and rejects the principle of non-contradiction by which a thing cannot be, in the same respect, both itself and another.
translation: to be at the same time and in the same respect one thing and another --> this is the condition of being --> give place to mediators / “excluded middle”
(translation enjoys that) a being can be itself through the intervention of a being other than itself
(monitoring translations in ajayeb) --> and my treason/translation which brings about completely different trajectories, which allows itself to be grasped by surprise or action etc. / to trace a/its network
translation ~=? occasion ~~--> the essence of situation
-no one can simply (ever) “remain the same,” “without doing anything” --> one needs to pass ~= translation


*interest: a mediator that arises between two entities that do not know, before it arises, that they could be attached to each other. -->{
-‘object’: set of quasi subjects that are attached to it
-‘subject’: set of quasi objects that are attached to it}--> what new translation interest makes the (quasi) subject of a (quasi) object grow. --and vice versa--


radical position of *semiotics* on the issues of context, referent, and enunciation (that anthropology is able to escape)
(i am talking about a semiotics that is not obsessed with the search for “structure”)
{ (fictional beings ~=>) semiotic ~=? ontology }--> science of “sense” (=/= science of “signs”)
-the world itself is articulated
{ the study of sense =?=> extrication from language }--> this bifurcation (enshe'ab), as old as philosophy itself, used the discovery of “reference” as an opportunity to expel the referent to a position outside language.


(Aristotle's narrative : “the imitation of an action” -->) Ricoeur's three types of *mimesis:
1. prefiguration ()
2. configuration (kingdom of the “as if”)
3. refiguration (integration of the imaginative or “fictive” or “as if” into actual) of the field of action;

‘reading’ is configuration (Ricoeurian)

•use of symbols : being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else;
•narrative: competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of “followability”


...empirical means to locate the boundaries of capitalism

(to enclose something -->) ontology of the Accounts Book --> Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya's story of the boy, bird, butcher, accounts book, and the theme of repayment, quittance.
to place everything it does not take into account outside the enclosure and everything it does take into account and that properly belongs to him inside
--> origins of property

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

growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)

(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]


(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people

renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’

*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)

geopolitics of difference

“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)


“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”

to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]

(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) he have discovered
...painful history of the anthropologist's gaze


[*]value: what one is ready to die for / what makes life not worth living if one is deprived of it

european history tied to the elaboration of:
•science as value (--✕--> apodictic truth, social construction, etc.)
•law as value (--✕--> power, rhetoric, etc.)
•politics as value (--✕--> [*]social: the name of what is assembled--associated)
•
•

scientific ties
legal ties
political ties
=/= social associates

so difficult to enunciate something religiously because of *the ease with which it is accounted for by other types of explanation* (especially social explanation)


in apass we need to practice saying: “I don't want to take that or this contrast into account any more” (because you want to do something else for a moment)
--> you return to a project --and--> i have been fighting so that (myself and) you **don't become modernist again** (~ that means you engage in the conflict of values that has characterized modernist history)
(with work on ajayeb) i am engaged in the project of ***disentangling the entire set of values that constitutes my rightful inheritance***

(the question of) “what treasure have we inherited? how can we claim it?” --> it is so dangerous to answer those questions alone, without each other ==> selfish identities and origins
(eurocentrism, or the former ‘others’ answering it for everyone, without you)


ecologizing

ecological consciousness =? your entire way of life must be modified or else you will disappear as a civilization


(not being the heir of) emancipatory tradition

(if) modernism is Promethean, then green bio economy and clean technology is Promethean even more

(the bad idea of and hype of) technological solution to ecological crises


*renewing everything here and now* is first of all a religious passion
?@Leo


-what modernism did to science is worse than what it did to religion
it deprived it of its energy, restricting it, to *mere furniture of the soul* [--> Iron Man's idea of technology-human relation]

modernism's politicization of science


speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*


Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)

science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)


what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project


the transcendence and transubstantiation of science

when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]

‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative

(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established


contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*

(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence

immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities

geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles

(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])

[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)

(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)


([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known

the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects


metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory


***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference


*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounded in the *ideology of making and mechanism* ==>
•organisms are erased as individual actors
•organisms are transformed into the carriers if indisputable necessities
--> both tried to save individual organims from their apparent meaninglessness by adding to them an overarching narrative recited by an otherworldly divinity

(‘necessities’ are often imported)


(Assmans's) *mosaic division*
(=/= a sort of relaxed attitude towards truth)
divisions ahad never beed asked before whether or not they were the “true” ones. they could be added to one another, translated into one another, piled on top of one another for additional safety --✕--> *contesting the claims to existence of all divinities but one*
==> a connection between the question (irrelevant until then) of worship and a question of an absolute (=/= relative) difference between true and false

[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”

monotheism ==allowed==> humans to escape from a too close adhesion چسبنده to the natural world
Moses's project ==> we have exctracted ourselves from the world

(Assmans:) without the transcendence of monotheism we would be left with the mere immanence of the natural world *** [--> the problem of transcendence/immanence as only options of relatedness]
(a bad story:) secular narratives that: the stark immanence of the natural world will save us from an escapist adherence to the transcendent world of beyond [--✕--> my Zolmat text is was about the problematization of that view (transcendent world of beyond) in Islamicated ecological consciousness in ajayeb]


****to move from ideology to recognition**** (of the many different contrasts we have lived by without granting them enough room)


the drab and entirly mythical drama of light overcoming darkness


religious traditio operates by its abilities of two transformation:
1. a radical transformation of the far away into the close and the proximate [#Zolmat] (dead is alive)
2. a positive view of all artificial transformations (=/= tendencyo conserve what it is)

**what happens if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific form of transcendence (salvation?) into the fabric of the other two modes of existence: reproduction and reference?

Leo's dream (and also deep sin): the urge radically to transform *that which is given* into *that which has to be fully renewed* --> alternative, dream of a different world
[=/= to grasp this world (and only this world) otherwise]

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

look at spec over the spectacular
(in ajayeb)

i can't give you a dialectical conclusion

maybe a mouth-full

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

[Paul Shepard]

our perception of animals as the language of nature in Thinking Animals and The Others; the “natural” way of childrearing in Nature and Madness; and the bear as a dominant sacred animal connecting people ceremonially to the earth in The Sacred Paw.

Octavio Paz reminds us: “The past reappears because it is a hidden present. I am speaking of the real past, which is not the same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”

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

[Corbin]

it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.

things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of ajayebnameh, Shahname شاهنامه, Qur'an قرآن, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی‌) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)

[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]

platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history

ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.

(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انسان‌نما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)

Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحاله‌ها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیز‌ها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*


there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ----> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man--that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)

Alchemist's chemistry
Nicolas Oresme's geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinuous

(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralised, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)


the dichotomies or dissociation of thought/being, being/action



حیدر آملی Haydar Amuli's delinkings (destroying precisely certain dialectics or dichotomies:)

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

Holul حلول, Sodur صدور, Tajasod تجسد
(immanence, transcendence, incarnation)
(the eidos reflected in the mirror--divine in the prophet--remains untouched by the mirror, because the real is not ‘incarnated’ in the eidos, the reflected image)

-alame khiali عالم خیالی: imaginaire/Hollywood
-khiale khallagh خیال خلاق (--> alame mesal عالم مثال =/= alame ajsad عالم اجساد) :
1-khiale mottasel خیال متصل: imagining inherent in human
2-khiale monfasel خیال منفصل: imaginal apart from human
-alame hess عالم حسس: molk ملک --> universe of forgetfulness


Tonekaboni, is against: “mojudate moghayade vahmi faghede tagharor mibashand.” (موجودات مقید وهمی فاقد تقرر میباشند)
--> vahdate vojud وحدت وجود =/= vahdate mojud وحدت موجود
*danger: tarde amre mesali طرد امر مثالی ==> ma'ad dar amre khiali معاد در امر خیالی


death, life, past, and future are not properties of objects, rather of subjects (anha sefate nafs hastand آنها صفات نفس هستند) [Corbin]
and you bestow them to objects that you think they are “dead,” “alive,” “from past,” or “of future”


“khorre” or “khorne” according to zaratustra: a light originated from the essence of the divine being and because of that some apparitions have gained hierarchy, and each human capable of a certain techne.


the idea of a divine presence in *heikal* هیکل

according to Socrates: bodies are frames and tools of the selves (nofus نفوس)
according to Plato, what the self (nafs نفس) does not had essentially that it had to descend into the material world? what the senses told the self that itself could not say?


an islamic-iranian cosmology:
 -jabarut جبروت (alame oghule karubi عالم اقول کروبی) (Nous)
 -malakut ملکوت (alame nofus عالم نفوس) (Psyche) --organ--> khiale fa'al خیال فعال (= jesme latife nafs جسم لطیف نفس. niruye khial نیروی خیال is trainded still in middle east. this inter-monde is where mater --> immaterial & immater --> material; jesm ruhani جسم روحانی‌ & ruh jesmani روح جسمانی ==> constant happenings of historic nature ==> Ma'ad معاد) --> amre mesali امر مثالی
 -molk ملک (omure mshhud امور مشهود) (Sarx)


[Ashtiani, 2nd vol, p44, footnote]
ensane okhravie daraye badan (انسان اخروی دارای بدن) --> nash'eye jesmanie alame akherat (نشئه جسمانی عالم آخرت)
(baghaye) badane okhravie alame made (بقای بدن اخروی عالم ماده) --> hades zamanie (حادث زمانی)


لطیف latif ~= immaterial

actual/real ~= a dream between earth and sky


asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi داده‌های وحی (data of revelation)


Avicenna (selselemaratebe ebn-sinaie oghul سلسله‌ مراتب ابن سینایی عقول):
[each aghl عقل or angle with its own sky and nafs نفس ==> a whole universe for itself]
sending from one aghl to the other, till the 10th aghl = unlimited human nafs
10th aghl ~= philosopher's active aghl ~= ruh al ghodos روح القدس

(سهروردی) in Sohrevardi: angle and nafs are in the same trip

aghle hayulayi عقل هیولایی


[Averroesian/ابن رشدی =/= Avicennian/ishraghi/اشراقی] ==> destruction of the intermediate world of angles ==> secularization :
sociology <-- theology <-- angelology
(divine materiliazation --> social materialization)
totalitarianism <== ideology <-- spirituality (~=? intellectual immaterialism)

(?signing in iran:)
ghodsi shodane nahadha = orfi shodane maba'adotabi
قدسی‌ شدن نهادها = عرفی شدن مابعدالطبیعه
sacredization of institutions = secularization of metaphysics


the tragedy is not the affirmation of individualism, it is rather the forgetting of the infinite entity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism


تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies

contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]

(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجرد‌سازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)



*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth) --> the metaphorical entity
face/surate/صورت/apparition/majaz/مجاز/trope --> truth/reality



(سهروردی Sohrevardi's accord:) up in the highest point in the hierarchy of existence there is nur-al-anvar نور‌الانوار (light of lights) which its material-removing (dematerialising?) abstraction (tajarode made-zoda تجرد ماده‌زدا) constantly transcends, beyond any other abstraction. ==> first light is originated from it: anvare ghahere انوار قاهره (~= anvare fereshtegani انوار فرشتگانی) ~= first maleke mogharab ملک مقرب (or Bahman بهمن, Vahumane وهومنه, first of Zoroastrian Amshaspandan امشاسپندان) ==> (due to their interactions:) second light, second maleke mogharab is created ==> eshragh اشراق ==> eshragh ==> eshragh ==> ...

جسمیت‌شناسی‌ jesmiat-shenasi?

رب النوع rab-ol-no ~=? God of type, of abstract examples, (Plato's universals? type, general concept --> is always beyond the horizon, the reality of the type lies beyond a related one that it sustains (‘token’) ["Beyond the horizon there lies a Lion, a Lion more Lion than any more lion. And beyond saying ‘lion,’ which calls forth that Lion, lies yet another, who might just look back. And beyond this eyeing one, lies an undying one, one we call ‘Lion’ because she is a kind.” (Kohn, 2009)] --> apply this idea to the fire)
ارباب الانواع arbab-ol-anva ~=? angelology (iranians loved angels and were good at angelologic thinking, it was a technical term in knowledge production regarding *categories and types*) --> Platonic + Zoroastrian + (shiite) Islamicate [via Sohrevardi] cosmologies
-the angel/type that both emerges from and sustains the many lives of its many tokens (~= tashasho تشعشع).
according to ancient iranians, rab-ol-no or the type-God decided its own destination (calculation of its own destiny), but there was no correlation between the ‘type’ and its ‘token,’ there is no whole being created, there is no individuality being created. this general type has its own intellect/sense/reason (sho'ur شعور.) their relationship is of rage and love (ghahr قهر and mohebat محبت,) according to Sohrevardi.
-what question is posed from somewhere (slightly) beyond? a question includes the likeness of its answer (Kohn, 2009)
-the angel of type is all about ‘being in futuro,’ which captures the logic of life's continuity --> “over the horizon” houses this “living future”
-What is the relationship between this angelic world beyond us and the sociocultural worlds we construct?
-“mosol” مثل : the realm of objective “stuff” that exists out there beyond us, on the other.


*Barzakh برزخ =/= anvare pak انوار پاک (pure lights)
Barzakh = seperation, obstacle, pardeh پرده, veil, (shadow? mediation?)
-everything material that can be addressed sensually, an evil negation.
-Barzakh is dark (that is a different kind of Barzakh than what i talked about with Mi? not really, there it is theorized as *shadow* and inter-mediation)
-projections happen in Barzakh




[from MOP with Mi]
We both take interests in morphology of historical forces and intensive thinking under the influence of materiality. To traffic in the tropics of an isthmus between the sensible world and the divine that was brought into our discussion, was proposed in my last letter those marvelous creatures living in the logic of precariousness, those who live in another temporality that is eyewitnessed in distanced pasts.
...
We are here on this site in a landscape of memory, in a progressive user-friendliness and a technology that signals our arrival in an Alam-e Barzakh (عالم برزخ), an ontological intermediate realm of images and forms, the creatures that populate this world have the incorporeality of “images,” much like the cyberspace we are born into and populate.
...
Not to remediate Barzakh (برزخ) but to propose a media theory, sketch it, and archive it for later. And there will be things that have to remain impossible to verify by us and in those records, the general-purpose language of the technologies that we choose to archive ourselves with, on the side of forgetting, the site of externalized memories, will not verify histories of presence tattooed under the ear of the elephant of our story, as you whispered somewhere in the dark.
[...]
Yes, vocal works that informed and influenced Qahveh-Khanehe (قهوه خانه) still can be found in some places of tea or cafe houses in Iran. They are called pardeh-Khani (پرده خوانی), here someone who is a pardeh-Dar پرده‌در (“-Dar” meaning that who tears apart the pardeh پرده, and pardeh meaning screen or veil--the concept of pardeh always contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?

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a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود

atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
queer is about ‘marahele johare atefi’ (مراحل جوهر عاطفی), mohabat محبت (kindness or love,) without leading to ‘faghre erfani’ (فقر عرفانی)

[i have problem with] (escaping) the ‘pit of nature’ (chahe tabiat چاه طبیعت) in Sohrevardi's thought
-(he inverses the earth from positive to negative geology, sphere becomes pit)
-the project of post-Babylonian autopoietic-self, a self that is defined by the ‘meta-fall’ into the “pit of nature.”

‘andam-shenasi peikare latif’ (اندام‌شناسی‌ پیکر لطیف)

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[Avital]

what are the ways in which ajayebnameh relates to itself as its own future, its own labor and announced commitments?
(our reading of ajayeb is not a time quiz involving applicability and whether or not one “buys it.”)


i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory (in the philosophical work of ajayebnameh,) drifting involves randomization, fuzziness, and interference. there is no coherent programming nor concerted demand for rigor
(Avital: The origin of the demand for rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)

Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?

how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.

What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?

what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee

Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.

the metaphysical fantasy of completion.

colonization of discourse with rigor

The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind

{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”

trials and tryouts

[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)

...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.

what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?

[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****

[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]

what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)

...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**

knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.

(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself

The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”

...generous failure, productive of disclosure

...treaties suspend violence only momentarily, artificially

----only with the help of a discussion of rhetorical codes strong enough to scan the paradoxical logic of testing can we begin to analyze the problem of its unstoppability

...Platonic shredders, what allows us to know whether something is “good” if it has not been put to the test.
Can there be a human being without a test?

If Mary Shelley had seen the discovery of America as an event that occurred too suddenly, without the stops and protections of gradual inquiry--in sum, as a world-historical shock of intrusive violence that disrupted all sorts of ecologies, material and immaterial, conscious and unconscious--Nietzsche studies the profound disruption to thought that the experimental theater of America directed. (Ronell)

uninterrogated durability (as a first-rate value on earth)

(American) athleticism of identity switching----it means that anyone can in principle try anything out

Dr. Frankenstein's new *experimental jouissance*

experimenting inhabiting acts of promising (calculating or anticipation----acts by which the future can be nailed down)


It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going

...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone

register(s) of understanding


A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.

A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات


ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی‌ ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine

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Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.


Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)


...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,

...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...

ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty

There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.


The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*

the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)

(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective

your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability

{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}


destructive (and artistic) modes of production.

test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?



Avital's “speculative telephonics”

Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit

the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]

emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier


in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?

how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.

Wortsalad ---- Opheilia's kind of mouth that shoots poesy, one has the feeling that no one is there.
/ precisely when ophelia is about to become the poet Shakespeare strangles her in water to make place for hamlet's tragic autopoiesis /

it is (generally) very difficult to know “who” is talking --> “whom” is being addressed

endure the agony of the being called (a being-on-call, an answering device)

modeling different styles of irony

(what are we) telehearing (?)


language is the history of index finger (“...even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking. The teacher points, the God and the schizophrenic speak through or to the spiritual forefinger [sababe سبابه, angoshte shahadat انگشت شهادت].”)
-Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency).
-making the marionette come alive
-history of index finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading [...]