[...]br /> 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[...]