[...] model
(Veena)

...distance that arises out of forms of proximity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[i have been trying dicover skepticism unsystematically in artistic practices those that have strong concerns of social justice and suffering, but i never named it as such. @Hoda, Xiri's emphasis on the threatening nature of liminality (demand for equality or freedom) =/= **to take the possibility of unsettlement or chaos as founding concern**]
--> skepticism (may) suggests a differnt route of inquiry

(Veena -2007:) “the intimacy between skepticism and the ordinary is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]

skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life

speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***

[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)

there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)

more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument


two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract

[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?

the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state

having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->

(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***

exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions

-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands

(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]

(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*

question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]

sometimes recovery from violence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-to be able to affirm certain kinds of silence (is key to a political anthropology)

different rhythms of conflict and cohabitation

questions
-life-giving and life-denying rhythms of ordinary life
-how (a revolutionary) event is grown from the everyday, and must return to it

Singh: progress of ethnographic knowledge --> a sort of movement that include the ***emergence of new answers to earlier questions*** ~= new routes of inquiry
[=/= progress in the sense of a telos of increasing self-awareness]

intellectual vita (can't be all heroic and saintly, tales of adventures and achievements, as in the way Manning presented herself,) rather it can gather up it share of victories and wounds

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

everyday life: a life lived on the level of:
•surging affects
•impacts suffered or barely avoided
spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things
(Stewart:) “ideologies happen. power snaps into place. structures grow entrenched. identities take place. ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. but it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate”


*ordinary registers intensity* (regularly, intermittently, urgently, as a slight shudder)

(one can be) ***confused but attuned***

“we dream of getting by, getting on track, getting away from it all, getting real, having an edge, beating the system, being ourselves, checking out” -Stewart

(socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states, public feelings are not simply “good” pr “bad” but always) both powerful and mixed

the talk, once set in motion, expands into a بیشه thicket of stories and social maneuverings
(a scene in a restaurant becomes) maze of inspirations and experiments ♥
-“her brother's stories are shell-shocked and they have no endings. they leave you hanging”

singularity of the event ==> a “we” of all sorts opens in the room

chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things


...tuned in to some little something somewhere


“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart

force of things --> what counts as an event

a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)


childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty

graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers


[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...

(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road

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

Yazid: the archetypal tyrant of islamic memory

...a shift from thinking of Urdu as exclusively Muslim to thinking of Muslims as the custodians of a shared heritage that Hindus have forgotten, but have the potential to reclaim
-Anand --> how do we understand the islamicness of urdu poetry?

spread of [...] poetry far beyond the bounds of exclusively muslim identity

sufism as an everyday mode of speaking of and speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]

earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic


Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality

many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)

(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction

importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order

(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows

shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself



perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)

Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)

Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*

...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”

*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry

question of coherence = question of finding a grammar

difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence

(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)

[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us



Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?

*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*

-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge

گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof

economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life

•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}

many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer

Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions

intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)

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

(Mufti > Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination

***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism

intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism

[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment

[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence

my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis

subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)

(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***

islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west

jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms

emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}

(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies

[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)

*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*


precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)

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

systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning

moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next

moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*


moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by demon]

reddish
orange
gold
yellow
white


the moon changes its course frequently because it is not able to master the cold

when moon light...
upon moon lands...


out of reach moon was an object of pure observation =/= Moghana’s moon

scorching missiles of Helios
allurement
cheerfulness
harmlessness


Lucretius on the nature of things
look upward yonder at the bright clear sky
and what it holds
the moon, the radiance of the splendour-sun

moon-dwellers

icaromenippus Lucian’s satire about the moon lamenting the lack of imagination of ancient astronomers

trans-lunar celestial spheres

great intellectual abstraction is necessary to explain the appearances in the sky

Plato creates an image if completely harmonious world structure which makes circular rotating movements by means of spindles


Aristotle’s design gave a mechanical explanation for celestial phenomena (both terrestrial & astral physics)

Copernicus (+ Kepler + Galilei) ==> anthropocentric view of the world (=/= catholics church)


ibn Heisam --> visible light originates only from the moon
moonlight to be studies

ketab al manazir

size of the angle of deflection is so small that moonlight cannot be explained as sunlight

in 1609 Galilei’s telescope had 20x magnification

(moon’s) traces and spots

rough and full cavities and prominences
“let us not thing it an offence to suppose that she is earth and that for this which appears to be her face, just as our earth has certain great guilds, so that earth yawns with great depths and clefs which contain water or murky air, the interior of these the light of the sun doe not plump or even touch but it fails and the reflection which it send back here is discontinuous”

moon and the face of the observer

“there are people who believe that they are seeing a mirror image of the oceans on earth, and others say they are the traces of the mountains and mountain ranges of our earth; there are also people who believe that what they see is a figure that has been cut out of the reflecting rays that fall upon the earth”

optical homogeneity of the regions of the moon

ibn Heisam --> the color of the body has the effect of darkening the light
*color is a result of density*
“you will not find any color without density, because a body that s extremely transparent is not dense and therefor it has no color. for this reason we maintain that the color of a body can be equated with its density”

eclipse of the moon --> “this color is dark, its nature is blackish and comparable to red”


da Vinci's report
1. vapours rise from the moon, after the manner of clouds and are interposed between the moon and our eyes
2. moon composes of more or less transparent parts
3. moon = [...]