[...]ion, 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 detachme[...]