[...]ernal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action (~ human operator linked to a machine as an exterior object) [~/=? companion species]


irresistible imperative of communication ~~--> continuous effects of control

panoptic techniques & attentive imperatives (function reciprocally)

classical power:
•repression
•ideology
•
modern power:
•normalization
•modulation
•modelling
•*information that bear on:
◦language
◦perception
◦desire
◦movement
--> by way of microassemblages
(= *subjectification*)

-the shape of absentmindedness in my performances is skewed by the attentive imperative of modern subjectification? something unfocused, **something folds back against itself** =/= “processing” a stream of heterogeneous stimuli (in film, radio, television, cyberspace)
-my audience felt an uncomfortable sense of their own inattentiveness (in my performances of the experience of dissociation, of temporality incompatible with capitalist patterns of flow). what is they are asking me is to give a stream of heterogeneous stimuli --> ****how temporality is inhabited****


to diffuse (societies of spectacle) into (a single) integrated society of spectacle (==> separate, isolated, but not introspective individuals)


(film and television in competition with) *daydream* --> a domain of resistance internal to any system of coercion [?]-->
(?is capitalism's contemporary arrangement allowing/playing an) oscillation between spectacular attentiveness and the free play of subjective absorption
~ info/telematic systems simulating the possibility of drift ==> modes of sedentarization
--> (Crary asks) how creative modes of trance, inattention, daydream, and fixation can flourish in the interstices of these circuits? @Sven ...amid technological forms of boredom ~ *modern boredom* [--> cognitive and perceptual synthesis. boredom is involved with the intensification of a sense of selfhood? ~~--> romantic (turned inside out?)]


*perception without awareness* (vilified in art and criticism)
--?--> automaticity: performance under conditions of divided attention

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

Manet: disengagement of perception from a model of interiority
Manet's painting discloses some of the important reconfigurations of the status of the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)

my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?

...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence

=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]

(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...

Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
(finely assembled) architecture of solitude and separation [...] in a space of a newly modern individual autonomy


modernization of urban space --> (crucial component of the) regime of perceptual adaptability


diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)


*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*

uncertain content of the interior

(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)


Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)

Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence


fastening together and grounding narrative content


[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis

achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” things, ***to ward of experiences of disintegration***
(the reality-effect is processed and achieved differently in Iran. how? how iranian artists differ from the perceptual logic of modernity?)

([Elmira and Foad's] engagement with the) ambiguities of visual attentiveness

perceptual logic of modernity (: two powerful tendencies at work):
•*binding together of vision* {an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain the viability of a functional real world}--> sealed
•*dynamic of (psychic/economic) exchange* {dynamic of flux/dispersal}--> barely contained


(Manet's) faciality (a site of pictorial effect): casual amorphousness, a surface that no longer discloses interiority or self-reflection
(within 19th + 20th century modernity) face: (par excellence) the substance of expression of the signifier --(D+G)--> **capitalist faciality** (exists to serve a signifying formula): the means by which the signifier takes control, the ways it organizes a certain mode of individuated subjectification and collective madness of a *machine without any content* (Crary > Guattari)

-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)

indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication

fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization



study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad

{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression


“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)

subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}


(the state of) the seated woman


[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (= Manet's blanks), fashion would keep one's face from any identity (==> ‘the look’: public, outward, blase, impassive, not bored, not tired, not disdainful, not quite focused on anything)
impersonality -->(Benjamin's modernity:) public space in which, for the first time, individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other [~-> “chi dadash!?” or “was guckst du?!"]
-for three centuries, the meaning of human face was explained in terms of rhetoric of language. in 19th century suddenly face occupies a precarious position: it is belonging to a human being as a:
•physiological organism
•privatized, socialized individual subject
--Darwin--> split status of face:
•symptom of an organism's anatomical and physiological functioning
•the mark of the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control (in the social construction of a normative individual)

*face: (sign of a disquieting) continuum between the somatic and the social*


boarded on a trance

(Bachelard:) reverie: irreality function --> keep the psyche on the fringe of all the brutality of a hostile and foreign nonself (!)
--✕--> reality function --> adapt to reality: to manufacture works which are realities

modern flirtation: refusal and the withdrawal of the self are fused with the phenomenon of drawing attention to the self (in one indivisible act)
-Simmel

Poetics of Reverie (by Bachelard) @Eszter


how Sina works
(in my more recent works i play with) [no] enactment of visual mastery
[no] ocular potency
-my storytelling operates in a state of distraction, in which the stability of the story begin to erode ==> breakdown of normative attentive narratives --> the audience finds themselves in a trancelike state ==> condition for mobile and transient synthesis
-i mobilize a set of associative chains that are part of a libidinal economy (that i am part of) --> *exceeding the binding logic of the work*


effectively
cross-eyed figure
sees
if anything at all
(it is a disunified field)
with two
disparate optical axes.
into the eclipse mental
the environment grows dim


attentive subject --Ricoeur--> part of the open state of the universe of signs --> juncture of the erotic & the semantic

symbols, in their overloaded semiotic banality, is where the ruse of desire is expressed

(a diagram:) parallel lines --> a principle of nonconvergence --> the binocularity of vision is not united or synthesized on a specific plane or point --> a spliting apart : *unreconciled binocular disparity* (--situates--> difference and nonidentity within the midst of perception)
[=/= convergence (without which a normative attention would be impossible ==> world of focused clarity)]


...as if a single object is seen by two nonreconciled eyes


seamless modulation of normative attention into a dispersed distraction ==?!==> (reassemblage and rebinding into the) *repetitive laws of the unconscious*

...the image of conjugality and adultery simultaneously
-fixed position of limits

Bindung --> figuration of an adulterous liaison

[*]adultery (in the context of modernization): “a cynicism of forms,” merely another effect of a dominant system of exchange (circulation and equivalence)
Tanner

[*]infidelity: capacity to decompose oneself into the plurality of distinctly different essential tendencies, to detach the periphery from the center, and to make interests and activities independent of their integral interconnection [=/=? my work]
Simmel

in Duchampian terminology: (Manet's painting In The Conservatory) blossoming bride and bachelor enmeshed in a verdant anticonjugal machine of perpetual nonfulfilment

cultural corrosion of conjugality <== (one of) larger disintegration of premodern positions (of male and female):
•violent insertion of women into the process of commodity production

*labor and society assume a mass character ==> “women = mass articles” & lose:
•their “natural” qualities (female essence defined by the production of life)
•their poetic aura

traditional positions disrupted by the logic of exchangeability***


greenhouses in 19th century, extended the dwelling and bore witness to the expansion of the private sphere. greenhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity

(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]

incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]


smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their sexual metabolism <-- Freud


D+G becoming woman
*man: molar entity par excellence (=/= becomings are molecular), man constitutes the majority, the standard in which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational ~ the average european, the subject of enunciation
@Leo
(--> problematized by Grosz ---> go to ajayeb.net/?q=Grosz%2BDeleuze%2BGuattari)


the perpetual self-invention of “free subjectivity” --defining--> modernity
cycle of decoding & recoding :
daring innovation --> hyperanxious self-consolidation --> renewed innovation --> ...


Manet =/= Caravaggio:
•intense optical contact
•tactile contact
•a reciprocal system of investment in the transactional nature of the encounter--infused with the interplay of the social, libidinal, and economic difference

hands as:
•expression of individual consciousness (in Caravaggio)
•instrument of active gesture (in Manet)


activity ~=? simulation of gesture

pointing index finger
confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, impossibility of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object (--> Sa'di pointing out to the moon and his lover...)--> every point of fixation is deferral
--✕--> (once?) functioned to denote a plane of transcendence


figuration of utopia --> simultaneous mapping out of death, absence, and finitude of historical subjectivity


Peirce's (nonoptical operation of attentive consciousness =/= Descartes) --> impossibility of direct intuition, of interpretive process
**cognition and perception could only occur indirectly**
index: exercising a real physiological force over the attention -- mesmerized into its particular object of sense.
= *everything that focuses the attention*, (everything that startles us into an index)
--> make something conceptually present which is perceptually absent


installed economy of attraction(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]


fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity

against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive

(supreme cult of the commodity:) fashion: a blossoming forth into a luminous apparition of the new
[==>? withdrawal from fashion = a strategy of freedom]

Adorno: in the age of growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis a vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exist purely within itself. against its detractors, fashion's most powerful response is that it participates in the individual's impulse, which is saturated with history. (“Aesthetic Theory” p316)


(?what are my time's) rhythms of attentiveness


*mask: a means of mental survival

mask (of masculinity) --> the ability to keep a secret --> *all secrets are (at the end) sexual*


[]should our artistic practices comment or be continuous with the (emerging) world of consumer culture? #make a fashion magazine with Ali and Janina: excursion into the stultifying and emancipatory effects of the fashion commodity. discussion on: jewellery, decoration, women's bodies, show, travel, glitter, ----> kaleidoscopic decomposition and displacement of the glitter object
-Mallarme's La Derniere Mode
==> luminosity of a single object is lost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
•internal movement of its text


artisanal craft


(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity


(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)

(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*

attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord


for the hysteric: objects are too present --> excess of presence make representation impossible
(for Deleuze history of painting has been about warding off hysteria*)


organization of perceptual binding and synthesis (taking place while Monet was working)


determined by
different libidinal setup
other category of perceptual dispersion
potential site of fixation


Freud (+ Klinger) --> inseparability of attention from dream process & aesthetic production

(Freud is testing) psychical energy = mobile attention

***observer = a kinetic seeing body set in movement*** (to glide along undeterminated social and durational trajectories)

place: that ordinary anxiety, the expectancy, the sublimated precariousness of a modernizing urban world in which the individual is adrift on a smoothed-out surface devoid of any markers

*origins of aesthetic sentiments*
of skating --> movement of the body pleasurable to self and associated with the consciousness of gracefulnes, as in skating: movement of a kind that bring many muscles into harmonious action and strain none
(Spencer, Principles of Psychology)


*the facts of the case
Sachverhalten
the detective, collector, consumer, and the fetishist (are same figures)
--> idea fixe
--> pathological disorders of attentiveness
[according to Freud] when attention isolates a particular content from a larger cognitive field, the act of dissociation can be the initiation of a productive process
[---> go to Sherlock Holmes]


Weltpanorama
a 19th century attraction: sweeping *comprehensive view*

stereoscopic peep show

a consumer would pay to observe a mechanized series of photographic images

Fuhrmann + Daguerre: illusory three-dimensional scenes whose reality-effects were augmented by concealed lighting and translucent painting

Kaiserpanorama <-- (a site [in which the *automation of perception* occurs] among many of) industrialization of visual consumption
~ a space in which the physical and temporal alignment of body and machine correspond to the rhythms of factory production (: the way novelty and interruptions were introduced into assembly-line labor in order to prevent attention from veering into trance and daydream. -Crary) this is common to:
•precinematic devices in 1880s
•cinematic devices in 1890s
--> (fragmentation of perception inherent to the apparatus presented in terms of) **a mechanically produced continuum that “naturalizes” the disjunctions**
(Crary asks:) by what logic of temporal sequence or spatial continuity does one move from the interior of papal apartments in Rome to the Great Wall of China to the Italian Alps in 120-seconds intervals?
[--?--> visual equivalence of political imperialism? slogans such as “Reisen durch die ganze Welt.” German colonialism of the 1880s --Sternberger--> “the views from European windows had lost their depth, becoming part and parcel of the same panorama world surrounding them and constituting a painted surface every where.” #Olearius; tourism + forms of visual consumption]

Muybridge's 1879 work on sequential photography ==> atomized field + not “truthful” syntax --> segmentation--opening--> onto an abstract order of continuities and uninterrupted circuits

...we are in a specific historical phase in the reduction of the time and cost of movement <==> circulating capital
}--Marx--> “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier” ==>
•creation of the physical condition of exchange
•creation of the means of communication and transport
•*eradication of space by time*

instantaneity of vision from which space is deleted

vision compatible with the smooth space of the global marketplace

uprooting of perception from any stable space-time coordination

the history of capitalism is the history of (effective operation of) overcoming obstacles of:
•anything with a permanent stable location (incapable of being inserted into circulation)
•anything that is part of a code (traditional or established pattern of behaviour, resisting deployment in networks of abstract relations)


(images productive of labor usually end up intermingling the representation of that land as a *tranquil earthly paradise*)


an image: self-evident presence of native workers on the coffee plantation; they remain invisible except as abstract components within flow of capital or as “naturalized” elements within an imaginary landscape

an image: workers gathering and packing beans under midday clouds; a fraudulently homogenous and static image of elements (bodies and land) which have become quantified and exchangeable, part of an unstable system *incapable of immobilization*. it discloses the antinomic coexistence of living labor power (with its irreducible existential temporalities) and the tendency of capital to “circulation without circulation time.” the violence and social devastation underlying this all over distribution of human being within the lush vegetation of an apparently premodern landscape...


(my period of abstract digital image glitch: play of machinic objectivity -->) Muybridge's 1870s photograph of The Horse Motion ==> “*to be outside of* a syntactical and semantic organization that supported historical narrative”
-the machinic objectivity in play does not stake out a subjective position from which a “this happened” or a sense of “having been there” could be authenticated’ [=/= my later lecture-performances]. they are instances of *combinatorial logic* in which the individual images, although ostensibly part of a linear sequence and syntax [--> the way Julia noted ‘adjacency’ in the way i was presenting my image series], have a (‘newly’ in 19th century) ***autonomous, floating identity.*** their immobilization and groundlessness and mutable temporality is also the condition of their detachment from any binding continuities or trajectories, in a *decoding of perceptual experience*[--> also relevant for Foad's ahistorical “intuition"]. {this is could be related to a deeper relation with my youth's reality and its perceptions =/= attachment to binding continuities and trajectories are central to my recent work****}
==>
•rationalization and quantification of movement and time (==> mechanization of the body)
•posing plural scattering of attention (--> Sina)
•possibility of unforeseen perceptual synthesis (outside of any disciplinary imperatives --> Foad)


Kaiserpanorama --> industrialized sequence of disconnected images
Muybridge's work --> repetitive but disjunct series

(Crary shows:) demise of the punctual or anchored classical observer begins in the early 19th century --> a new unstable attentive subject (with a *vision refigured as dynamic, temporal, composite*) ==> consumer/agent of/in synthesis of a proliferating diversity of reality-effects (~=> digital and cybernetic imperatives of our present time)


invention
dissolution
creative synthesis

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

antimony: contradiction between two equally reasonable statements

the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an object outside its logical control*
-charged with antagonistic forces, like Seurat, my lectures (since now 2018) negate a possibility of an attentive closure, even as it fervently attempts to generate its own internal formula for perceptual presence and unity. like Seurat's Parade de Cirque, it operates in a ceaseless play of disclosure and concealment. [is it time to change?])

Seurat preoccupation with nonspecific temporalities

(estrangement from) a dream of instinctual wholeness

harmonious sensory utopia

-my lecture-performances constitute a provisional realm of freedom for an individual observer [~ myself: a psychic, social, imaginary position called being an Iranian--] of a prismatic past, coinciding with a proliferation of discourse [~= shifting plurality of ‘centers']
--> dream of subjective freedom + effects of power

perhaps my work is inseparable from (the consequences of the emergence of) *models of subjective vision*

-use of optical mixture in my work.
how important is the retina (for any artist)? -->(the question of) the seeing body in all of its physiological density + ambiguous position of that body within conceptions of visuality
•chromatic or luminous effects on the body

physiological regime of visuality (beginning with Thomas Young and Goethe, developed by Johannes Müller, Helmholtz and others) =/= renaissance-based pictorial order


collapse of *camera obscura* model of vision --> emergence of *psychological optics*


1890s
construction of various nonreferential models of perception
+
pragmatic functions of an observing subject

--> status of vision and mind
--> nature and value of sensation
--> representation of social facts


central to many developments in the visual culture in the West in late 19th century: *questions of perceptual and cognitive synthesis*


Gestalt theory ==> essential primacy and ethical value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition within 20th century spectacular culture) ~~-->[preparing for the perceptual logic of high capitalism:] it was not the attentive subject who identified form from a larger background, but rather the reverse, that “good” form had the capacity to produce attentiveness in a subject
(Gestalt theory was a dream of:)
the reciprocal affirmation of the unity of the individual subject & the unified object of perception
[--> bisect visual filed into: significant “figure” and insignificant “background"]


impression ادراک/برداشت =/= inference استنباط/استنتاج
(Peirce:) color is not an impression, but an inference


(the last kind of) “natural” sign available to a visual artist


Seurat (like many others around that time) was testing the limits and possibilities of an observer attentive to a heterogeneity and simultaneity of sensory data
[specifically:] how an irreducible plurality of luminous information could be organized and perceived coherently ... rearranged and made exchangeable


@Laura: *designated bodies* (are never permanent[!!?])
-is she actually busy with destiny and destined bodies? (for Laura:) design = destiny
-is she going to redesignate? how can she not? if she believes that the designated bodies are already on a fixed destiny or destination
[designate: appointed or made clear which place or direction spatially or figuratively. related to *design --> destine*]


early 1890s
the time when western science accepts the notion “that there might be several ways to represent the same fact” [--> elephant parable =/= situated knowledges]

1850s and 1860s
construction of models of the reflex functioning of the human nervous system --> nature of human response to external stimulation


dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement

some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**

(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination


Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)

biological romanticism

anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion


attention --> Nietzsche's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim


(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body

(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!


a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)

putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)

}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and represented (~ my paintings) is inseparable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*

what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations

(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”

in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations

Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become apprehensible


my paintings
•(unstatistical) distribution of isolated and categorized units <== additive principle of formal adjacency <-- (my belief:) depleted atomic relations [should] predominate beneath the spurious appearance of social concord [in my world: Iran]
}-->? holistic mode of association (=/= my performances) -->? desire for (modern forms of) cohesion (in the absence of inflexible forms [~ disintegration of the mechanical solidarity of tradition, religion, myth, consanguinity]) -->? wanting an *original solidarity* (---> go to the image of the ‘harmonious vision of industrial society’ in my early paintings, self-regulating landscapes of feedback loops --> *state of equilibrium* that i wanted to achieve in the painting not symbolically)

(i prefer *pseudo solidarity*)

emergence of aggregates
manifestations of complexities

(this is happening in)
late 19th century is also the age of attempting to validate a relatively stable and domesticated image of the dynamism and destructiveness of capital

modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)


anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and feedback (=/= solidarity) }--> thermodynamic framework

anomie (used to be) a celebrated passage is when the individual worker is no longer the living cell moved by continual contact with neighboring cells (=/= now in late liberal capitalism anomie is the mode of labor)

anomie (in thermodynamic framework) describes a statistical distribution of elements in which insufficient contact or adjacency prevents the flow of messages our information within the system as a whole. systemwide increase of local zones of dissociation and disintegration <-- Durkheim



(Durkheim was writing at the time of) crisis of social cohesion within a transitional period ==> a systematic response was being shaped (foreshadowed in several of Seurat's major works) -*-*-*--> the making of a society whose effective unity was founded on the ubiquity of *spectacular consumption through mass media and technologies of illusion*
if *religion* was the key “collective representation” (in Durkheim premodern mechanical solidarity) --> *spectacle* was to become the primary simulation of cohesion and unification within 20th century modernity****
--> (Debord:) capitalism's solidarity: unity of subjects in their very separatedness


(Crary >) Seurat's entire visual output: [systematic movement between:]
•large engineered representation of social collectivities (~ crowds)
•images of isolation and separation

“[...]the unity of his optical aggregates was always an ephemeral subjective construction that never objectively modified the abstract and segmented status of his dots, so his assembling of provisional social aggregates never alters the obdurately insular character of their individual human character.”

Seurat stakes out a darker and more skeptical position than Durkheim about the possibility of *positive knowledge of “social reality”* --> his works are determined by a sense of **impalpability and evanescence of the social itself**


(what is my “sociology” in my works?)


{ great social catastrophes of the 19th century + accumulated bourgeois anxiety over the disorders of revolution (1848 and 1871) }==> (emergence of French 1890s of) “science” of sociology


let's stop mourning about the earlier model of political theater being displaced by by the modernized forms of spectacle (--> my critic on Kurzgesagt is outdated?)


(for Seurat:) *art work = solicitation of attention*

play of attraction and absence (in Sina and Foad's work):
a visual or performative work designed around the cancellation and suspension of what it promises

Seurat --> (Sina and) Foad's obliteration of the scenographic conditions of the work even as he simulates their persistence

Seurat --> my work has always been scenic, positioning its viewers before an apparently stagelike space [without orthogonal guides ==> assemblage of disjunct planner elements]
my (painting before and even more now) mimics a classical theatrical space, and (in play with that) at the same time it establishes an illusory world extending away from the spectator (collapsing that “stage,” dramatically sealing off possible avenues of entry into the work for our eyes) ==?==> a world related to the viewer's own point of view

deliberate archaism
(--> medieval mystery plays)
closed-off antiscenic space --> forms of popular display (shadow figure, puppet theatre,) that only simulate or evoke the “cube” of theatrical space


to be careful with *grid*
[*--stories that the grid tells--*]
(Crary > Krauss:) by its very abstraction, grid conveys one of the basic laws of knowledge: *punctuality* [---> go to apass psychological optics and image of knowledge incorporated in presentation of projects, #workshop on topology] --> the separation of the perceptual screen from that of the “real” world
[*]grid: (19th century) emblem of the infrastructure of vision --> becoming an increasingly insistent and visible feature of neo-impressionist painting
(~/= Crary is hesitant to characterize Seurat's flatness structurally as grid)
-tabular field with rows and columns making impossible a point to point (= punctual) relation between spectator and image

(Martin Jay:) two scopic regimes:
•metric and homogenous tableau loosely synonymous with classical space
•decentered and destabilized perceptual regime with its mobile and embodied observer

the evocation of a scenographic setup in Seurat (Parade de cirque) is a veil over the desiccated, nonhomogenous, and additive construction of the work


frontality and unity of framing (of “primitive” cinema...)


[?do we need to] (in an illusionist mode) satisfy the principle of unitary organization of the scenic space


(how should you be concerned with [public record] of your intellectual and aesthetic formations?)



Seurat's Parade de cirque =/= Leonardo's Last Supper
(Seurat broke free from Leonardo, and i should from Seurat)

both of these paintings are concerned with the revelation of a mystery:
•Leonardo: the mystery of Christian sacrifice as it coincides with a lucid apprehension of infinite extension
•Seurat: the “mystery” of the disenchanted and quantitative order of capitalist exchange (and its overturning of homogeneity and legibility of space)

witness to:
-holy communion -Leonardo
-rituals intrinsic to modernity -Seurat

in terms of orthogonal illustrated in Leonardo is precisely what Seurat dismantles in Parade de Cirque

the question of value
movement of abstract quantities
(transactional dimensions of Seurat's work)

lost transparency:
how the use of money within modernity transformed the social character of exchange ***from something interpersonal to an anonymous transaction*** at the distance (--> Reza's hold-up of values, the dream of interpersonal transaction and resistance of anonymity and distance)
[the problem that all artists have with money --Simmel-->] *a priori equivalence of price (for all commodities) ==> eliminate:
•deliberations and examinations of the buyer
•effects and elucidations of the seller
==> quick and indifferent economic transaction

“selling tickets”: accumulated social experience of separation = *depersonalized exchange* (--> that which many artists are dealing with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of value* (the libidinal, the intersubjective, the semantic are completely divorced from the economic relation ==> economic sector =/= semantic affective investment)

Seurat's meditation on the emptiness of a modern relation of display and consumption

cost of admission at two different rates:
-Leonardo: head of Jesus at the vanishing point of the window opening onto infinite celestial space (--> regime of signs that possess intrinsic value =/=)
-Seurat: price tag, grid space (--> regime of signs that are symbols of value)


[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer


ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle

‘price tag’: (one of the vanishing points of modernity,) the draining away of the illusion of reference or stability

Poe's stranger itinerary, a paradigmatic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”

process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)

(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”


(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)


(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange

[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality --> ****in Last Supper the miraculous becomes the direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural visual space****

effects of vanishing point

(in all my image assemblages there is a system of fluid relations in which subjectivity is imagined [not in terms of coincidence with a quantifiable point of view])--> in every image and diagram subjectivity (~ identity and reference) is imagined in a system of relations @Eszter's binding order

zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•

my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)


a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,

suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)

opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination

Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extinction of his society) [==implying==> an unstable domination] =/= administrated and rationalized order of a money economy

priestly status of Elen in her performances implying an pathos and metaphysics of distance (and dismantling it?)

be careful with this liminal positions:
•activation of a broken collective memory
•imposition of modern oblivion on the other


presenting music:
socialized activity, indicating the *superficial appearance of a collective reception*
immediacy of an audience
“physicality of music making itself” --Leppert--> the sight of the body's labor to produce sound
19th century ideal of a musical performer as a quasi-sexual virtuoso

performing music --> suggestion of collective participation --evoke--> harmonic relationships and premodern mysteries [implicit in music and geometrical forms (even as they are collapsed into modern abstraction and the image of a fully administrated world)]
@Ali, KHM sound department

...remnant of what once might have the living Dionysian reality (of the antique chorus)


*score* (coming from the boredom of a third-rate military music band after 1850 in Europe) aligned with the rationalizing imperatives of industrial production: hierarchically ranked states *executing an external algorithm* ~= partition: allocating its parts
[*]score: the image of programmed labor in our society (@Lilia) --> logic of combination


-in apass i have been fighting against artists ambivalent characterization of themselves. i want my peers particular figuration of measurement, quantities, and ratios of their diagnosis of crisis of value and of devaluation of life and the world (when they perceive as such... negation and inversion)


(Aristotle's metaphysics ==>) Pythagorian: art = harmony = analogy between opposites
~~--> **social project of reconciliation through the use of aesthetic forms** (from the 4th century and still popular today)--> “training of the people begins with the senses” : music and rhythm from which came healing of human temperaments and passions

Pythagoranism: number =/= infinite
•infinite = void of knowledge, limitless and undetermined
•number = rational limit and determination

Pythagorean =/= premodern mystic values
*some of the great disenchanters at the origin of modern western science are deeply Pythagorean:
***number is the essence of reality ==today==> “nature must be studied quantitatively” (=/= ajayeb's quality of descriptive nature of the world)
...and appeal to mathematics in artmaking still comes from the hope of establishing clear and distinct ideas, which as such are necessarily true

Pythagorean primal cosmogenic principle: breath --> repression's binary rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, the mutual interaction of contraries (like sex) : the original generative force
(the union of the limited and the unlimited) --> still operating today in the year 2018


theories of dynamogeny on iranian traditional music radif, that certain musical proportions poses cheerful or bitter qualities, influence the person's emotional state
to transcend from quantitative number of dastgah --to--> a mysterious qualitative dimension of pardeh


(Crary's) Seurat's anarchism: (painting of the) world of mere empirical relations, cut off from the infinite (loss of the vanishing point) and from the light of either sun or moon (gaslight illuminates the scene)


Leo's primitive communism


pictorial generation of meaning


the keystone of Foad's technique:
purity of the spectral element


(Burgin >) fantasy: an arrest that domesticates the unruly movements of desire --> it takes on hieratic and tableau-like forms : phantasmatic figuration


*reconciliation*
(a formal idea, of) abstract functionings of binary oppositions {typographical distribution of energy}
=/= elevation in terms of “opposites” or “contraries” (colors, lines, forces, sexes, numbers)

technocratic dream of a quantifiable harmony that a machinic world installs or restores --> *ataraxie*: emphatically reduction of tensions into zero --Seurat--> homeostasis --> preindividuated unity : theater of equilibrium ==> erasure of both individual and historical temporality
(Nattiez:) the illusion that humanity could reach a stable point [...] at which time can be arrested. it is for this reason that androgyny and death so often appear together: social utopias end in massacres and that the structuralist utopias of an allembracing explanation of mankind reducible to torrents of binary oppositions result in “nothingness”

Freud's nirvana principle: to remove interval tension due to stimuli (--> death instinct)


Sina:
(painted and visible philosophy)
in my image assemblages what are and how they work:
•mimes of meaning
•full of graphic gestation
•figural groupings
•architecture
•compositional thinking
what sorts of structural rightness do my image assemblages make inevitable? (innocently indicating the sweet source of truth)
or, what kinds of geometric simplicities (purity of form and efficiency of expression) does it betray?
what is the ‘status of idea’ in there?
what are the allegorical abstractions? (in Sohrevardi image: the mediation between heaven and earth) (horizons, vanishing points, grids, orthogonals, heavenward movements, gestures, axis or axiomatic geometry,,,)
[my performances are teachings on how to read the figural language of my image assemblages (?)]
the particular geometry of pictorial structure in my image assemblages testifies to which truth?
which pictorial realizations (knowledge of things) do they epitomize?
which metaphysical polarities translated into geometric contrasts? (integral part of revealed truth) [or that there is a or no central truth...?]
which allusions ground the abstract truth of the image in a certain reality?
(----David Rosand's) Raphael: theological truth <--> axiomatic geometry (~ congruence of simple structures) --> divinity of the circle
supernatural status of the form, reaffirmed by gold (<-- an archaic and discounseled technique) ==> *put ‘form’ beyond the reach of pictorial illusion and beyond the realm of nature*
*pictorial truth sometimes lies in the painter's choice in working on the surface* (acknowledging the powerful claims of the axis of the field and the determining control of its shape, recognizing the dialectic of circle and square, the signifying tension between picture plane and orthogonal recession, etc.) --> in the case of Raphael: theology becomes a commentary on painting : pictorial structure (directly semiotic and not mimetic) = meaning

(always?) *faithfuls need their originals*


in Helmholtz's 1856 comprehensive account of human vision, the eye emerges *empathically embedded in the thinness and opacity of the body*
eye (=/= a marvelous apparatus) : an apparatus with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in is processing of visual information --> entoptical phenomenon --James--> subjective optical sensation: example of selective attention excludes from consciousness sensations that are *nonreferential* (= irrelevant to the knowledge about the world)
(~= Ernst Mach's sight phantasms)

arborescent vocabulary of the scientific literature on the eye in the 1880s

*new diagram of the eye: photoreceptors in the human eye are placed at the back of retina, behind the blood vessels (that literally intervene seeing) --Seurat--> inseparable mix of an abstract mathematically constructed & a physiological perception more subjectivity determined, “domain of vision has been integrated Iin the field of desire” (Lacan), “phantasmatic events that occur on the surface of the bodies” (Crary)
=/= older diagram of the eye: the ideal unobstructed functioning of camera obscura --> ‘scene of representation’

‘dream of immediacy’ --to--> (Seurat's refusal of scenography ==> nondisclosure ~) fantasy of a theatre without representation

Rousseau's affirmation of *political self-sovereignty* in the ‘festival’: a stage which presents nothing to the sight --Derrida--> a place where the spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be seer or voyeur *** (<-- what i learned from Phill) ==> presence will be full as the intimacy of a self-presence, as the sentiment of self-proximity, of self-sameness


Lyotard: theatrically fold --> a box closed upon itself --> only those to appear on the stage which come from what will be known as the ‘exterior’

*zero: the sign of the empty center, the place where everything is supposed to be visible and intelligible : the place of knowledge --> god, organized body, society, capital, the ego, platonic forms, etc.

Grosz: construction of embodied subjectivity --> mobius strip (a 19th century invention), inflection of mind and body to one another through a kind of twisting or inversion --> rethinking relations of the inside and the outside of the subject psychical interior and corporeal exterior)
-sides of the mobius strip are not fundamental identities, the drift from one to the other side is uncontrollable

currents
and surfaces of this body
is coalescence of energy into phantasms
deceptive semblance
of a theater of representation

Ali's speech (and Jassem): تاثیر گذاشتن (making what one knows into an effect on audience)
=/=
Sina's speech: به صورت موضوع درآوردن
(making what one guesses into a subject of discussion to be rethought)

irreducible composite of properties belonging to the observer

perspective: transforming psychophysiological space into mathematical space ==> sum of all parts of space and its contents are absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’
-Panofsky perspective as symbolic


analysis of sensation
“one coherent mass of sensations”
(Mach's legitimate and functional) scientific impressionism

*modernization (and rationalization) of perceptual (and aesthetic) response* <-- preoccupation of Seurat, Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, Schoenberg


(Crary > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms (lines, colors, directions) which answered to a double and deliberately compound ambition, at once *****archaic regression and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****

-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?

troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Brown:) the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism, and *symbolism is (not the mark of rationality, as Simmel thought, but) the mark of sacred* @Luiza's diagrams [--> this is important for apass, “aesthetic experience occurs within, not above, the opposition of the symbolic and the economy, and within the lived conflict between self-activity and reification” -Brenkman]
==> undialectical disjunction of sacred and secular


silent reflective monk

mechanical assemblage of never quite integrated elements

Seurat's texture of work <== an intuition of the loss of art's immediacy --> shift of (what might have been) contemplation into mere attentiveness

(Crary) Seurat concretizes the *modern dilemma of the disappearance of aura*
...bringing into the work the forms of rationalization that eradicated aura in the first place --> appearance is privileged over essence, and technological rationality is deployed in the service of appearance

negotiating rapture

(ajayeb ~/=?) to produce a dialectic image: to criticize modernity (~ foregrounding of the aura) through an act of memory, and at the same time, to criticize archaism (~ nostalgia for the aura) through an act of essentially modern invention (substitution and designification)


color...
how forms of ‘synthesis’ (optical mixture, purely additive and accumulative functions of industrialized procedures) produce ‘qualitative’ change (pre-bourgeois non-quantitative connection to nature, for which color did not exist as an autonomous experience or as a separate and specialized science)

Seurat: surface fascinations consequences of a disappointment at the impossibility of immediacy and the historical inaccessibility of the dream of the ritual/magical practice of art --> Seurat's work's exhaustive denial of presence ==> (another kind of immediacy:) the ***fusing of image and eye*** @Foad
=/= art as a medium for disclosing essential truths
=/= redemptive optimism

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

a desiring system dependent on operations of rebinding and immobilization

the problem of *contrapposto* [and *chiaroscuro* (contrast of colors)]:
a Renaissance ideal, invoking a metaphysical dualism that found expression in rhetorical devices of contrast and antithesis --sumbsumed--> within the *larger ideal of opposition*

contrapposto could be decorative or structural, justified by its vividness, the clarity with which art could bring opposites into harmony

classical image (of the body) as an expression of a self-determining balance of internal forces



“authentic images” seem capable of action, seem to posses dynamis (supernatural power)



Universal Exposition of 1889 + international congresses of hypnosis:
•rationalizing ideological imperatives (concertized in the actual organization and layout of the Exposition --> rooted in the enlightenment's faith in man's limitless potential for mastery of his environment)
•hypnosis optimistically as the most effective entry into (previously inaccessible) territories and processes of human psychic life (and hopefully mastering this terrain)
•extensive presentation of colonial people and lifestyle as objects of spectacle in the 1889 Exposition (simulated villages inhabited by Congolese, Javanese, New Caledonians, Senegalese, and others) --> became contents of an imaginary immortal space, contents that were seemingly assimilable into the rationalizing taxonomy of the exposition's organizational schema [=/= Steven's schema in apass]
*both hypnosis (with its profoundly indecipherable trance states) & material life of colonial people (primitive cultures with their singular forms of exchange, of value and power relations) took on an exhibitionary existence at the threshold of their marginalization, assimilation, or disappearance --> (the unassimilable in both was) temporally refigured as the survival (or simulation) of an earlier stage of development (as a lower, regressive, or childlike state of mind or culture) [--> radically irreconcilable with dominant forms of western rationalism]

(for western rationality) hypnosis:
•influence without any logical foundation
•production of an illusory relation to the world
[--> similar to Foad's modality of freedom, wakefulness, and the notion of the intoxicated masses: loss of mastery, of ability to make decisions and reflect ==> the assertion that “hypnotic experience is formless” (---> go to Nancy)
*spectacle domination over passivity*
Foad: inner or subjective reality of a psychic state which could in fact involve residence and evasion of external authority]
=/= state of trance (as in other cultures) whether individual or collective conceived as an opening up or sharing

the 19th century exhibitions were part of a world in which people were beginning to live as tourists or anthropologists, addressing an object-world as the endless representation of some further meaning or reality
==Crary==> reality: that which presents itself as an exhibit before an observer

(Seurat's Parade de Cirque: ...a figuration of social territory where) techniques of fascination and attraction, of appearance and semblance, have the capacity to overpower an observer or audience

(شهر بازی fairground kinesthetic experiences,  such as:) *merry-go-round*: a fragmentary and mechanical recuperation of carnival energies --> controlled circumstances inciting of dynamogenic bodily sensation
&
cinema later would radically displace survivals of premodern forms like the circus [--> look at Hollywood today 2018]

different modes of regression and fantasy

***late 19th century shift from “viewing machine” to “vertigo machine”

19th century's interrelations between:
•photography
•hypnosis (both medically and mythically)
•cinema
•psychoanalysis
*strong epistemological configurations* ==> a new place of subject (in western culture) linked to formation of certain images of:
•time
•past
•memory


(for Brown Sequard) collective effect of acts of inhibition and dynamogeny ==> hypnotism ==(Charles Henry)==> demonstrating that perception is fundamentally unconscious (consisting of involuntary responses to stimuli) ==Seurat==> *indistinction between the automatism of a hypnotized subject and the perceptual experience of a so-called normal subject* --Foad--> [reading people in a contemporary social phenomena of suggestion and somnambulism (~ sleep-walking):] a bypassing of intellectual process (such as reason and judgement) in an attentive spectator
-{my discussion with Foad was perhaps about the question of social justice (= sufferings and causes are constant and self-evident, singularized principle of value [social injury] located in a particular product [political processes leading to social injustice]) and/against thinking with assemblages (= contextual relational uncertain concept of the social of things and people as system of objects, in which nothing merely rules itself or others, emphasizing heterogeneity and process)... finally saying that Tehran is a relational heterogeneous uncertain system [Sina] and not a destined coerced programmed doom-object [Foad]. question: can we oppose the ideas of suffering and injustice and their expressions as essential qualities in the context of Tehran? what conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is suffering)?
-my family dining table: space of arrangement of practices of objects of...
-this discussion for me was about the categories and classifications that we rely on to investigate the world.}

--> Bergson: “in the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measures spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis [...] an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”


1880s and 1890s is exactly the time where many different discourses considered the ways in which external forces and procedures could influence or control both individual and collective subject
-common in French sociological thinkers (Durkheim, Tarde, Le Bon): the primal fact of social life is some system of control or coercion that is imposed on the individual {for example Tarde: “stupefied and feverish beings [in] magical charm of their environment [...] it is always more fatiguing to think for oneself [...] man lives in an animated environment [...] he gradually refrains from all intellectual efforts [...] his mind becomes stultified and more and more excited [= somnambulistic] characteristic of many city dwellers [...]"}

the audience in many artworks still today has the sign of the distracted crowd (جمعیت خواب)

(“man without qualities” =) de-individualized = suggestible, hypnotizable

(Fried:)
anti-rococo French painting: a painting had to first attract (call to someone) and then to arrest (bring him to a halt in front of itself) and finally to enthral (hold him there as if spellbound) = the modernizing instrumentality that is fulfilled in cinema today

for Tarde:
“social existence = somnambulism"[= heightened receptivity to suggestion, individuals apt to imitate one another] ==> “social = (a form of) dream”
--> hypnotic aspect of the life of crowds
•“intercerebration”: one brain fascinates the other
•“fashion's suggestibility”: half-conscious observation and mere physical proximity produce a functional social homogeneity
•“fascination”: a genuine neurosis, a kind of polarization of love and faith  --> effects of obedience and imitation
•“attention”: transformation of sensation by effort and desire --> the desire for an increase in personal believe
•“plateau”: a flexible figure for natural, social, and statistical processes and events (including desire) [--?--> Deleuze and Guattari's plateau]

Le Bon:
“social = a particular modality of perception,” as a specific social arrangement that conditions the limits of perceptual experience
(modern) crowd: a viewing machine capable of generating “collective hallucinations,” a place for consumption of illusion, (with a “psychological unity” that occupies spatially remote locations,)
•“observation”: a cognitive model predicated on workable notion of objective reality (a classical epistemological model) that begins to corrode within a field saturated by illusion, hallucination, and whole industries of simulation
-individual subsumed in crowd is incapable of observation --> modern spectacular culture (to be articulated 7 decades later by Guy Debord

the crowd (in Le Bon) is a generalized site on which the accumulated dread and hope associated in the 19th century with social insurrection collapse into am abstract countless mass onto which dream imaginary of any sort can be projected
-Crary

19th century ‘crowd psychology’ assumption that attention has no necessary connection to objective optical observation of the world --> *crowd: drift toward a more primitive order of consciousness*
-withdrawal from surroundings and refocusing on some real or symbolic figure
--> theatrical configuration: means for controlling crowds --> (La Bon's) image of theater exceeding its older place within models of mimetic relation --to--> new effects of subjectification


Wagner's volkish homogeneity --> uniform modes of perception and response --> (problem of) community formation

Wagner's optical metaphor (community could see itself reflected in the mirror of tragedy) of theatrical existence --> *sense of vision serves to reinforce one's place within the social whole*
[--> when i look at Brussels from the 14th floor...]

Wagner's cultural program for social reintegration and his belief in the transformative effects of the collective experience of music drama preformed and produced as a ritual communal event

(typical 19th century --> debates about the effects of mass culture --articulated--> “distraction =/= self-conscious contemplative perception” -->) Wagner's deploying the pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptual engagement) =/= lower (distracted)” forms of listening
-his dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that had allowed or encouraged audiences to look at each other at the diverse social texture of the theatre

an attentive, absorbed public (unthinkable in the 18th century ---> go to Sennett)

(still we are suffering -->) [to have] *control over the attentiveness of an audience* to subordinate it to the will of the artist ==> generate a *collective state of reception* (worthy of an art with such social aspiration @Hoda, Ali , Sina, --to which extent my mysticism in art was about my ideas about spectators incapacity for attention in contemporary Tehran?)

19th century theatre --(transform into)--> ***construction of visibility*** (structure the spectators perceptual experience)

“collective act of seeing ==> semblance of a community”

(phantasmagoric character of his work) Wagner:
•eliminating lateral views ==> frontal engagement
•near-complete darkness ==> preventing peripheral distraction
•lowering the orchestra out of sight
--> systematic concealing and mystification of the process of production
--> (Wagner stands for) will to mastery over all aspects of the spectacle ==allow==> calculated production of states of regression, fascination, dream (synchronized sound --> cinema's attentiveness half a century later)
-control over emotional response
-remaking of spectator experience
-production of dreamlike clairvoyant

(-can theater stage be a place of distraction? again)

intelligible relation of distance between viewer and illusory scene
--> the way diorama commanded visual attention

in my stage design drawings from 2009:
•standardized perspectival expectations
•metric relations
•position of spectator
•luminous detached rectangle
- 

Wagner's Ring cycle: the last expression of a 19th century fantasy of the recuperation of tragedy and myth ~ the dream that culture could make whole what capitalism has broken --Crary+Lacoue-Labarthe--> [disturbing conviction/dream:] in an age where transcendence is undone, (the vacations of) art can recover an ancient destination and establish the type of mythological figure (in which humanity or a people could recognize itself)


-verisimilitude: the quality of seeming to be true, gloss, semblance


composite imaginary of the 19th century

______________


crowd
theater
phantasmagoria

Crary --> Seurat's Parade de Cirque = disclosure of *the absence at the heart of modern spectacle and perception*

vivid opening into a light-filled action-filled arena

@apass, a common way of criticism:
•*evoke, then withhold*
(fir example: evoke ‘entertainment commodity’ but withhold it. Laura, Ale ,)
•*invest, and dismantle* (we are invested in what we dismantle)
•*desolation of older scenes of representation* @Sina

Crary on Seurat Cirque --> investigation of the conditions under which a subject could be activated as an attentive perceiver
(forensic aesthetics --> conditions under which a subject could be arrested as a witness)
(Sina ajayeb bestiary --> conditions under which a subject could be contested as a knowing agent)

“frame: an isolating agent” (<== Wagner ~ to make an *autonomous and luminous field of attraction* with a deliberately ambiguous spatial identity)
--> explicit renunciation of the classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches

(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images

(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)

to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•econ[...]