[...]he 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 a[...]