[...]umer pleasures

theoretical apparatus:
space-plus-time (space + time) =/= spacetime
-the additive understanding of “+” pictures time and space as two geometric planes that intersect =/= ‘spacetime’ there is no need to explain how they come together, because nothing stands between them

“a woman's survival depends upon calling people into classification”
“...hair-trigger judgments about gender lead to romance as well as lethal exchange.”

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

Verran in her work with Yoruba (West African) and Yolngu (Aboriginal Australian)

=/= thinking of numbers used in enumerating the real world as helping us to work relation ==> numbers (and mathematical objects) as cognitive tools
elements of schooling --> learning to use mathematical tools

*can number be considered as an inventive frontier in social, cultural, political and moral life?* --Verran--> *number = materialized relations*, enumerated materiality

people having kin relations
people are relations (in an embodied sense + semiotic in the sense of expressing a formal relation [for example wife/husband])

example:
•in river water --> taking numbers as semiotic = to identify numbers as the formal relation unity/plurality
•in working markets --> numbers enact generalizing iconically in the whole/parts mode

--**--> numbers as particulars, in place and time, in situ, realized in specific practical ways

Platonist account of number
intuitionist account of number
instrumentalist account of number
Iranian accounr of number

(Verran's rhetoric --> the term) semiotic (an opaque term, both vague and highly technical) + material modifies

(Verran not refering to) [*]semiotic: the summoning up the baroque complexity of French structuralist and post-structuralist thought, and alternatively the specific categorical proposals of Peirce's philosophy and its offspring, american pragmatism.

the paradox of worlds as already/always meaningful, recognizing that doing worlds as knowable (whether by science or by trading) or for that matter through Yoruba, or Yolngu knowledge traditions --involves--> engaging with the world as it is here and now --accepts--> *studying ‘forms of life’ and ‘language games’ as complex clots of signs and collective actions*

--Peirce--> numbers can be:
•iconic (icons are deeply coconstitutive with clots of collective actions that generate entities)
•indexical
•symbolic (symbols and their objects enact a relation of supervenience امر غير مترقبه, objects are accepted as affecting and effecting their signs but not vice-versa)
--> degrees of reciprocal co-constitution of signs and collective embodied and embedded actions in which objects come to life
--Verran--> ethnographically found forms of the workings of signs

(depending on) how one understands ethnography ==> names work as icons, indexes, or symbols

removing the stigma of Yoruba number as primitive

numbers as working indexically or symbolically --> for examine: are being used to represent the ecological health of Australia's creeks and rivers, lakes and billabongs


difference between these relational forms:
the first thing we need to know about a number is whether:
•it takes the one/many form (potentially containing unity within the plurality of a many) [cardinal number --> conserve value]
•the whole/parts form (having plurality contained within a unity) [ordinal number --> conserve order]

(in) shape-shifting between:
one/many form
whole/parts form
symbolic/indexical mode of semiosis
indexical/iconic mode of semiosis
}--> number works in inventive ways


thousands of Australians regularly attending their streams with bottles, thermometers, and pH meters, peering at tiny creatures they have scooped up with a net, trying to identify what they are and count their numbers

(the slogan) “you can't sustain what you haven't measured”

numbers so enthusiastically generated by volunteers --also--> contribute to constituting water as commodity, expanding possibilities for ‘doing business with water’


cordon sanitaire --> consistency must be quantifiable
two databases, separate institutions and websites, is counter-productive in a project assembling and disseminating information on the state of the nation's water resources?
@apass

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

patterns of behavior
forms of style
--emerge--> ?

(Rai researching the materiality of the ecology of sensation of mobile phones in India helps me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns

perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake

each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•

an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station


(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy

all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets

photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject


a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies


like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy

my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore

(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)

[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it

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

Ticineto Clough

media technological developements ==> (often and perhaps necessarily) put the transformation of being and the transformation of knowing out of sync with one another

why Hollywood concerns me:
•reconceptualization of labor from the cinematic mode of production to the affective mode
•the colossal projection of cinema as a guarantor of a culturally uniform memory

relevant for artists too (they cannot ignore this) --> to rethink the ontological grounds of knowing [and representation] (in the wake of) deprivileging or decentering human perception and cognition (and reconcider these artistic tools and episteme:) sensation, affect, matter, energy

*digital media technology is being redefined in terms of a subtraction of human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling* @apass

(media understood in terms of) *nonanthropocentric affect* --> affect = transition, gateway, passages between dimensions ==> ‘everything = media’ (~ entities can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities)
affect --> [*]media: contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus

**mediation = modulation = (vibration =) intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces, below and above human perception**

[*]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)

(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing

(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)

}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*


sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi


*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)

control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)

[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)

[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics

[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)

(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new forms of distraction, new forms of habit, new forms of practice
*politics of intervention: a matter of entering in the middle in order to *modulate* ~= (Rai's) counter-actualization (~= criticism): moving down from the extended, back to the intensive or potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)

media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications

to give criticism more specificity and width

measure and media technologies

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

(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblages of affect, matter, policy, culture, biology, perception, value, force, sensibilities, practices, and discourses
-sensorial, algorithmic, material, and territorial makeshift infrastructures enabling digital cultures in India today

cultures of pirated workarounds (jugaad) in digital technologies
emergent digital cultures

stratified data

*hacking empiricism: a self-reflective practice of linking a problem to both its ecology of sense and sensation and to its processes and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways

ecologies of workaround practices

...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation

...nodes of algorithmic capital

traverse and exceed

islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India

marketing and hacking of digital cultures


social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability

**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies

heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)

Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****

entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)

-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures

(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)

negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)

the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*

Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures

strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity

(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism

interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought

collective practices of habituation

([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages

transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia

(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously

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

*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*

(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a few index of evaluation for such practice:)
•*how well it learns and models how to be affected or moved*
•*how well it opens up unexpected elements of one's own embodiments in lively and re-sensitizing world*
•(what are) *its possibilities for immersive play among sensations and platforms amid media technologies*
•(what are) *its ways of participating in multispecies learning or self-organization across ecologies
•(what are its capacities for) *mattering without owning the action* [--> play]

transdisciplinary connections have been made on the basis of *play*--between: psychiatry, mathematical, logic, linguistic, histories and evolution of communication, ethology, biophysics, cybernetics, natural history + game industry, fine arts design, education, semiotics, animation, new media, children television, system collaborations
--play--> restructure and intermesh, are recruited in nationalisms, economies, political life
}--Katie--> ***what sorts of politics might allow us to scope and scale among these, to “play” with our own consciousness?***

culture industries


questions
-what does it take to be an intellectual actor across knowledge worlds & a trustworthy member of only some? @Jassem
-[what is] to practice knowledge beyond your control? @Lili
-[what is] to sift among forms of evidence requiring tools you do not have? @Lilia
-[what is] to be required to rank, evaluate, assess results of rules you have not played out (yet)? @Sana


Katie > Bateson's *double bind*
--clue--> meanings and causes of schizophrenia (--> may speak to various conditions of biosocial systems today)
(questions at using the word schizophrenia:)
-what of the sexism of those laying blame on the “schizophrenogenic mother”?
-what of the possiblity of gathering evidence for the effects of expressed emotion in family systems of those with possibly linked to bipolar disorder? (--> that is my problem with Eleanor's stuttering as aesthetics)

double bind: (super confusining) transactions, entire system of layered contradictions mobilized over a range of communication channels
•somthing is prohibited, punished (at one level of meaning or abstraction *within a particular communicating channel*)
•something else is required (at another level) that is impossible to effect if the prohibition is honored
}--> [this] happens over and over again ==until==> such *double bind patterning = (becomes experienced as) “reality”*

***they all deal with (some edges of) double bind:
•religious practices
•entertainment
•game design
•learning
•

intolerable conditions ==> creativities

(when crucial context markers distinguishing [one from another] become unrecognizable, contradictory, or fraudulant ==>) “abusive practices ~= challenging practices”
--> (terror & possibility are on the edge in double bind experience =) ***transcontextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)

“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”


(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*


[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)

playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]

-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)


(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions

tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition

*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*

in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?

@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•

elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)

an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره

odor kit
a device organized in a careful pallete of small differences
learning to be affected --entails--> a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of

body parts are progressively acquired --> world counter-parts are being registered in a new way (= my ajayeb studies)
*acquiring a body: a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world [---> go to Captain Marvel 2019 film]


what sort of project of multiplicity is transdisciplinarity?
what sort of double consciousness might it array in which political economies?

(Bateson's) distributed being = we don't end at our skin

***what does it mean to say to any particular group of people that we do not end at our skin?!***
what sort of boundary object is this “skin”?

(Keeling > Katie) a book is a wormhole --into--> transdisciplinary universe
*lyricism of surplus*
“the end of the world... work with me”

agencies of valorization (of pricing, of valuing, of mobilizing labor) : political economy of acquiring body parts from the skin's edge

*agencies of capital: worldly processes of economic systems articulating and distributed among, but not reproducing the powers of the state, or of community, family, or nation*

+ other agencies:
•sensory-motor apparatus and affectivities
•thinkings and memory-images distributed across people and media

(sometimes) layered double-bind systems ==> numbing out

queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production


phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute

national agendas for innovation and economic positioning

which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...

intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*

(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust

(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material was this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail

[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”


objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value

critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)

wir
(Katie --> one must wonder) who is being evoked by this ‘we’
to what extent this ‘we’ functions to interpellate the reader into a community that shares a common horizon? (@Sven and Chloe bookshop)
which side, which knowledge world, in what spacetime are ‘we’ on, inside and outside of, bonding and othering?

*tacit forgetting* =/= resolution
**what sorts of boundary objects value irritation?** @Leo
(my irritation in apass with tacit knowledge, spiritualism, Vivero, Manning, process philosophy,,,)

Katie accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attributed to somebody”


attention (in time) -->
•narrow the range of possibility of -ism(s)
•alter the grain of detail ==> *differential focus*


ajayeb.net: an intellectual infrastructure assemblaged and stacked (extensively scaled, intensely scoped) =/= disciplinized archives of references (a knowing that linkages exist and can be assumed and must be consciously made explicit as “new”)
•my “=/=” set the focus of lens unsed in examining --> alter the grain of detail (deliberately and dismissingly) --> a “we” is needed --to--> pull back --to--> include alternate knowledge worlds
ajayeb.net/bibli: bird's-eye view of the bibliographic growth

mobility and detachability of “nots” provoking frission

@ERG's new website: what if the worlding here needs to scope and scale along ranges of detail, indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?

routinized rhetoric about feminism

apparatus: open-ended practices

****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****

neutrality (<-- moral commitment) =/= relativism: forswearing claims to absolute epistemological authority

(learning from Katie) my technique in ajayeb study --> i brazenly detach words from their original context and mobilize then all together for my own irritating purposes [...] i both reduce and add to the complexity (of globals and locals)
**(my play:) double or multiple consciousness ==> [*]ajayeb: growing boundary objects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies

ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium

variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?


(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities

preemptive
proleptic
prophetic

(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds


(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit

(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment

(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****

(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices

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

origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance industry (==> operating our lives by technologies of information and computing)
[we can live with it differently]
logic of progress is not the issue, logic of acceleration is the problem
(idea of) frictionless economy ==> must go faster and faster
discourse of stasis =/= how to explore change?
not preserving endangered species, but preserving the possibility of change

desks are information technologies

Bowker > Sina: every critical work (today) must include the centrality of data (and calculation) in our lives

(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --> my interest in Olearius]

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

(Cameron's image of) Terminator: relentless unidirectional progress [that you can't negotiate with] (~= modernity) ==> destruction of cultures and communities --> destroy ourselves

how to live with Terminator = how to live with modernity --> postmodernity
(in the film the Terminator is finally terminated by a determined woman using rather old-fashioned technology)

absolutely will not stop
inside: hyperalloy combat chassis, microprocessor controlled, fully armoured, very tough
outside: living human tissue, flesh, skin, hair, blood --> controlled by a clinical logic: *it cannot be reasoned with*, it cannot be bargained with

its metal skeleton rises from the ashes and carries on with its mission. the skeleton too is chopped to bits, the individual bits come to life and continue with their goal

(for Sardar) modernity is the conceptual equivalent of the Terminator (incepted in European Enlightenment: modernize traditional cultures and relentlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)

modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts

modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity

--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology


(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]

(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse


(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness

--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same

(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and the world according to its own image and inner logic
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much of postmodernist thought is a sitnilar European construct and continues the old programme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism

-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?

religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)

[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***

(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very expression of] (Griffin's) postmodernism : a new relationship with the past (and the future) <-- postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism

[the strive for a new ‘enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity

(Falk's) Disneyland postmodernism:
•abstract affirmation of a holistic harmonious future
•homogenized uniformity (based on a colonizing logic and westernization of the globe)
•reinterpret science and natural reality as confirmatory of a spiritual grounding for human
•holistic possibilities of encompassing conflict
•***postmodernism as an expression of the privileged status of the West***


*greek gnosis is the Terminator in its guise of mystic* (which provided the Enlightenment with its springboard and modernity with its mission to subjugate non-western cultures)

arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)

new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus


*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*

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importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite

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*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*

inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)

SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary neurosis* of the history of science

all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)


[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)


{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft

**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why

(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)

for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***


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the more you study an environment the less your inheritiability of that environment will be (?)

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history: study of past as it it commemorate in traces (textual, physical, etc.) =/= [ajayeb studies =] memory studies: subjective commemoration of the past, collective forms of commemorations (for example the name of streets, or monuments, or unconscious way of navigating in Tajrish square, etc.) --> present in oral interviews
•how the past has[...]