[...]>
([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 [...]