[...] 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 withi[...]