[...]nce of immanent (catastrophic) future history

calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis

discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse

•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope

unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]

apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog

mystical response
spasmodic irrationality

the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)

deathbed demons
hell in art
religious anxiety
mechanism of social control

(from) collective --to--> individual
(from) temporal --to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self

(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self

purgatory: in-between time and space

afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person

somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)

the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages

eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)

}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•


medical eschatology

eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming

Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impoverish)

(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->

purgation

purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•

{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***

torment: individual glimpse of the end


Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate

suffering: means of salvation (of we join the agony of Chris on the cross)
pain in this life : inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are indication of the approach of death

an era of exile --promise--> a new exodus from human failure and corruption


[title]
beautitude

Bernard's heaven

painted embodiedness of the blessed (<-- problematic + powerful)

out of time heaven in which the soul is already body-shaped --> somatomorphic selves before judgement


apocalyptic moment --> self-referentiality: when the author reflects on the limits of their knowledge and expression

(all) eschatological texts (poems) in some way reflect their status as fiction --assert--> their nature as mediating and contingent


xxxxxx


Trans-ing xeno- unsettles the oversimplified Others necessary for the production of stratification and disallowance, without in the process destroying difference and the ethics of encounter.

the ontological primacy of centers in general
the refracted image

myths of belonging as an anthropocentric narrative, one is worthy of personhood if she is placed in home.
[in the political and fantasy practices of the most inheritors of traditions of white (or not-white, the actual color is not the point) settler colonialism and its ecologies, the introducing species--including ourselves--are always bad --> the extraordinary practice of disavowal (of the ‘creatures of the empire’ #Haraway) --> inheriting the notion of ‘belonging’ and ‘not-belonging’ (in this tradition) disavowal is almost the only way you can “keep” belonging. and one of the ways you practice disavowal and belonging is to exterminate the other (feral pigs, etc.) who “really” don't belong.]
•(which) *practices of belonging* (are not part of (whose?) dreaming?) --> they always turn up in family stories {feral =/= pest}
•how various kinds of species can and cannot get on together?
•who should be killed and lived-with?
•(who exists only under the) categories that come from the cunning of recognition [categories of the traditional, of the subsistence food (ma'ash معاش), of the enacting of a culture in view of tourist public,]
•managed belongingness


In Jean Genet's portrayal of dusk (quoted by Minh-ha 1996:101-102), he captures the ambiguity of this transitional time in the expression ‘entre chien et loup,’ between dog and wolf, that is, a time of day when one cannot be distinguished from the other, and he also describes it as ‘the hour of metamorphoses when people ‘half hope, half fear’ that a dog will become a wolf’ (our emphasis). This quotation exemplifies the ambiguously ‘unheimlich,’ [...]


security is never secure enough


Jesus knocks at your heart's door


(history's or pig's) happy ending


absence of ambivalence (in animals)

conditions of admission ---> artistic, sexual, natural *selections*
tickets to power-holding cliques that control the resources


phantoms of non-destruction
or
phantoms of ‘constructed adequately’


pausing dogs
mixed messages
who is wanted for dinner?
the moment when the message is finally received --> tech, magic, ethic, morph

poetic historiography

pivotal reading of ancient Greece --- out of day-dream fantasy


[Rickels]
*beauty is interested in action
(pure) beauty re-lingering on primary narcissism, that's why beauty must be administrated, in proper doses.

(my) animal-findings and fairy-tale associations

if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.

meeting the cat half-way



[Ingraham]
the house, passed over in history, brings with it a great many dangers
architecture (never touches the object) is enchanted with object discourse
...all of us have been asked to “instrumentalize” architectural [or art] theory according to a particular building
material given a structure

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

Q & A ?, interactivity, swarovski party, servants and robots interacting with foreign bodies --> feeling at home? excited... --> disco without bouncers and borders without border check, spaces you can seamlessly in and out, labyrinthine

i am generating some vocabularies
parsite and parasitical, not all of them are predatory like the wolf



(Karen Barad)
With all mirroring practices, biomimcry has built-in optics on the geometry of distance from what which is other.


(Irigaray)
surprise (to be new): not yet assimilated or disassimilated as known
our attention to that which is not yet (en)coded

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

(something to consider, regarding the pigs and wolf story, also an interest for performances that happen in closed space;) there is a standard account that says ‘interiors’ and ‘interiority’ are linked, that the articulation of interior physical space enabled the development of certain kind of (initially bourgeois European) sense of subjective life--as something sheltered and enclosed.
=/= interiority (subjectivity) is linked to the exterior [Sennett]

O-- still in the 15th century (when sex and sleeping was not veiled under curtains) there was no correlation between the notion of privacy and the interior
O-- in the mid 18th century (among European bourgeoisie) a new ideal of domesticity appeared which dictates a new interior space --> separate room separate functions, segregation of domestic activities
O-- Rousseau: in the shelter of private domestic space subjectivity is set free (--> a different kind of subjectivity (one which guards the self, something to be protected from the outside) is enabled by the development of the division of labor in interior space) [this is not merely architectural, it is also something about the clothing people wore: wearing different clothes in family or in the realm of strangers. houses became warmer]

(Simmel's) “urban subjectivity”: street physical over-stimulation ==> wearing a mask, you show nothing to people, you are not there. and behind this mask there is the feelings you are having, and these sensations behind the mask are your subjectivity.
it is a reaction to being exposed to difference and complexity
the subject is divided: neutral on the outside / stimulated in the inside

(i don't want to become a camera)
observe (without interacting)
observational cruising
[the standard account:] interiority ~= reflexive detachment, reflexive withdraw

social media and exteriority

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

Sennett, “3rd world” SPeCo62Mz2Q : condition in which centralized space or distributed communication networks are missing
-a public space that is officially organized
*parks: open space that are reserved for the public: “where informal economy wants to be but is banned”

*public space: (@Selma on st.open project)
(21st century) modern thought <-- *two traditions of thinking about public realm:
1- as a dialogical condition (of exchange, of political engagement) --> Arendt & Habermas; --->{a communicative immaterial space} : “more talk ==> more agreement, common understanding” ---[dialogic & immaterial]
2- as a space of spectacle --> (goes back to 19th century) Baudelaire's ‘individual passers-by’ watching something on the fold (--> [old Greek idea of spectacle:] “unfolding of narrative.” a bad idea of ‘how people should be physically in space’ for example, a landscape architect that creates a scenography in a park ==> a witness in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}

3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]

***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle

public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)


(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•




the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular

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

*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary

looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment

Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli

{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years

the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”

attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction


imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity

a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+
a factory worker concentrating on the performance of some repetitive task

--> institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity + purified aesthetic perception
["+” : inseparability]

==> experience of subjective autonomy (for example in Jassem)
+ ambivalent limits and failures of an attentive individual

19th century emergence of new technological forms of spectacle and recording




...set of terms and positions that cannot be construed simply as questions of opacity

vision is not an autonomous and self-justifying problem

(we have to rework the) forces of specialization and separation that allowed the notion of visuality to become the intellectually available concept that it is today
(we should do that with all our ready at hand concepts)

what is the genealogy of attention in Persian subjectivity?
•an embodied subject is both the location of operations of power and the potential for resistance
•vision is only one part of a body capable of evading institutional capture

social economic representational shifts and practices
visual/auditory culture

...richer and more historically determined notions of “embodiment”

spectator culture is not founded on the necessity of making a subject ‘see’ (Crary)
rather, individuals are isolated, separated, and inhabit time as disempowered.
counter-forms of attention are constituted as other temporalities and states (--> my lectures, reverie)

for Crary, “perception”: a way of indicating a subject definable in terms of more than the single-sense modality of sight

•fundamental absence at the heart of seeing
•impossibility of the perception of presence
•impossibility of an unmediated visual access to a plentitude of being
•

historical obliteration of the possibility of thinking the idea of presence in perception

*attention: simulation of presence, a pragmatic substitute in the face of its impossibility

atemporal nature of perception

? direct perceptual access to self-presdenceex

(newly) designated “pathologies” of attention and creative, intensive states of deep absorption and daydreaming

(subjective conception of vision ==>) *attention: the means by which an individual observer can transcend those subjective limitations and make perception ‘its own’ [&] the means by which a perceiver becomes open to control and annexation b[...]