[...]ity (i constantly criticize rationality, but as you can see, i am not at all throwing it out)
•omnivorous approach
•

wild facts amenable (تابع) to formal representation (formal modeling)

routine: practically enacted, having no existence outside its performance, embedded in the configuration of material resources that enable practical work

[#workshop fables] how, by traversing the routine, “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they were rearticulated in the different languages

uncertain activities of knowledge

(what i am learning in apass is that) modeling ontologies involves articulating knowledge in ways that sometimes appears alien to that domain community
[asking with Bowker:] for my ontology-building to appear representative, does my community itself have to learn the goals and language of my knowledge modeling? (the question i asked Sven, telling others ‘this or that is the language i am using.’) (i am using a language that is Harawayian, Ronellian, Sadrian)

______________


http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/actnet.html

...it is easy to get lost in Baudrillard's cool memories of simulacra (1990)

at stake: day to day work of building classification system

things to learnd from actor-network approach: (Latour, Callon > Bowker)
•regimes of delegation
•centrality of mediation
•the position that nature and society are not causes but consequences of human scientific and tachnical work
--> “technoscientific societies are powerful precisely because they are so good at delegating and distributing; and that actor-network theory is well position to track and describe the work of delegation and distribution.”

fact is a consequence
(Dewey)

(in a way, my work and interest in ajayeb is about histories of standards in knowledge production, which, i argue, is key to all sorts of other productions) (& the politics of remembrance : the politics and philosophy of classifying certain textual/material activities such that they have a chance of being part of the cultural *potential* memory)-->{Olga, Hoda, Sana}
artists are using a lot of standards (of representations or materials)
(out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?

Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”

standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications

what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wider scope of reading: rhetorics, semiotics, objectivity, analysis, architecture,)
•historically creation of the infrastructure
•ubiquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature

*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard

where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]

residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous

what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply

we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world

“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)

compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بی‌قرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]


(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power

(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)

“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996

lingua franca of the medical insurance companies


actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)

science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards

‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]

when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur

(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’

common language ~= standard language
(we can't talk about the commons without sorting out our understanding of our standard-saturated world)


(my hypertext is not data-driven [= a system with focus on the acquisition, management, processing, and presentation of ‘atomic-level’ data] nor a process-driven (or process-sensitive system, for example delivering a care), what is it then?) (also not systematically storing [my] “knowledge” for later access, storage of information in such long-term memory, no no no)
-is it a support for my various tasks and practices outside the computer? --> excess-driven storytellings =/= minimum data set
-a non-data-driven systems in this society are named secretive and mysterious in the name of transparency
#in a way i am building an adequate mode of encounter with the “Iranian scientist”

they draw from their secret[s]

a technical issue (for example about how to code process) is also a an organizational theory

social embeddedness of scientific truth

(authors of ajayeb approached nature not in a way to sketch the boundaries of a discrete animal event, therefore, a unit of analysis, (which is very natural at 21st century;) rather an infrastructure itself in flux, providing an unnatural hierarchy)--> this is my rhetorical reading of ajayeb

as long as you/God pays attention to them, they will continue to exist

‘uninventing X’: changing society and technology in such a way that the X becomes an impossibility. (Donald Mackenzie)
development and maintenance of technical standards is a site of political decisions and struggle

______________


against the idea that “past is a different country, they do things differently there”

***how we are creating different kinds of past (out of the information infrastructures that we build)?

(pointed out by Bowker) the whole notion of big data is coming from the invention of census (amar-giri آمارگیری) in late 18th century, as its predecessor in a genealogy of techniques of government. “big data is grown up around that idea of control” --> statistics: (etymologically) the science of the state*
“I” <== me + my data

heavily informated world

flashbulb memory*
‘what were you doing when #Bambi's mother got shot?’ people have vivid but 80% of the time wronge memories of that day --> we are good at creating certainty in memory, but not very good at recognizing the ways past is differently configured according to different kinds of *memory practice*

the eternal flame file type/format

the psychoanalyst of Tintin

active archiving is about the framing of the present, and not about the future record

*commemoration is behind a lot of the ways in which we create memories and histories (on the web): that there will be someone who has the time to go back and recognize the values we have created --> recognize ourselves as monuments in the world

(thinking with Bowker fL94LVYjhQQ) as new entities will come to being in the world, instead of creating access to what is reconfiguring of the past we lock ourselves into single unitary visions of the past totally unnecessary --> that is exactly what i am trying to do, providing and creating a kind of approach to what would be an access to a reconfiguring of the past, ajayeb as the case in a Farsi speaking world


on way or another, databases are structured objects, they constraint the forms of narrative you can take ==> a restrict set of stories --> when we are dealing with database we don't have an infinite sets of narrative space

i am taking a theological alterity discourse from pre-enlightenment (islamicated cosmology) and puting it in [...?]*** (Latour is putting it in scientific style of faith)
•artistic research practices/discourses
•modern Iran
•modern culture
•

non-contemplative intelligence basing the database in our time (=/= older traditions of sequencing)

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

*deterioration of the immanent (eco-, politico-,) ==> corruption of social relations ==> corruption of memory*** (of a shared existence, of coexistence with [Div, jinn, shadow, birds, Hindus, Arabs, ]) !!!--✕--> issues of historical injustice
-or-
corruption of a river : the entropy and deterioration immanent to it ==> conditions of possibility for corruption of intimate relations and of memory }--([this] experience of corruption)--> takes the nature of being defrauded (روزگار فريبکار) of one's own form of life, one's family or one's inheritance***


(Naveeda Khan talking about river's point of view in Bangladesh, but her keywords are all relevant for Iran's landscape as well)

***the muslim responses to entropy*** ==?==> eschatology
}--> muslim majority regions are more embeded in the world that what we know from islam

سازش
limits of “adaptation”

a rapport ~ ربط تقریباً همگام
or orientation جهتگيرى

a looming future


“[how] politics and policies of climate change stand to shortchange the present and the past”


Naveeda Khan exploring the perception of climate change within everyday life


those who live on such formations --[powerful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]


fret ترش کردن

مزروعى arable lands


thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total social fact’, to think holistically about water [Caton & Orlove] =/= [Naveeda's] climate thinking --> that there is specificity that needs attending: rivers are major conduits هادى of ‘connectivity’ --> domain of localized interactions
-to take the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)

a sufficient sense of the river

(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”


in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images


Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects


[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)

umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)

[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: discovered and originating) in moments of spontaneous action (---> go to Delanda#)


...village and kinship structures being flexible, there is a high value places on sexual normativity


absence of water --> human suffering --> the death of the river --> emergence of land as property


Naveeda examines 3 films:
•focus on corruption, melodramatic specificities of the film-scale, subtext of pain --> Titash Ekti Nodir Naam
•focus on entropy within the Padma river, *ambivalent expression over the necessity for migration that will undoubtedly be one of the strategies of adaptation for an ocean-facin[...]