[...]nates 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 detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective visual experience* ~~--> precinematic forms of moving images

(@apass: hand drawing is not about being “trapped in older artisanal modes of production” --?--> “performance =/= projection”)

to assess (the relationships between):
•your own technological products
•makeup of your audience
•economical realities of the marketplace
}==> inventor of 19th century (Raynaud, Edison, )
--> modify your machines in terms of:
•performance
•shifting audience needs (and possibilities)

phantasmagoric: occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product (creating an experience for a solitary and immobile spectator)

(spectral) atopic image: literally not there

shimmering --> effect of detachment from the environment

Reynaud's projected moving images --> elastic and reversible temporalities (that had little to do with Lumieres's “real time”)

Cheret's posters (joyful modern women, advertisement for cosmetics, lighting fixtures, department stores, ballets, and so on) --> a technology of attention + a specific ornamental representation of commodity culture
(--> practical functionings of consumption culture in the 1870s) @OSP
*Cheret's “personal style” in graphic design = an abstract luster جلوه a decorative formula that could be applied promiscuously to any possible object of consumption* =/= Seurat's dream of universal style

****rich textures of entertainment and visual spectacle****

-which range of optical apparatuses are available for public consumption now?
[in 1880s: peep show, magic lantern, shadow theater, large-scale stethoscope, zeotropes, etc.]

my links with Seurat --> his interest in:
•contemporary popular visual culture
•perceptual modernization
•

Crary's reading of Seurat's cirque: new experience of form deployed in time --> kinematic (=/= semantic, iconographic significance of the clown and acrobat in the painting) --> *the illusion of movement*
beginning with the phenakistoscope and zoetrope in the 1830s --through--> innumerable optical devices all the way into 1890s --> endlessly fascinating and repetitive --> sites of attentiveness (~= attraction)

{ Seurat + Reynaud + Edison (~ producers of the ***machines of the visible***, allowing the constructed and synthetic nature of machine vision to coincide with their own rationalization of perceptual process) + forms of machinic vision developing through 1880s }--> (examples of an emerging) *****industrial art***** : from *artisanal practices* --to--> standardizing industrial modes of image-making

Crary reading Seurat without isolating him from the effects of what Raynaud, Edison and many others (Muybridge, Fuhrmann,) were developing through out the 1880s

{ the audience in Seurat's painting = the audience of the static backgrounds used in Reynaud's machines }--> the unchanging, unreflective, even unseeing nature of modern spectatorship : *a crowd of spectators permanently in place, installed as a fundamental component of the social world* (in which the specific content displayed to them is the matter of absolute inconsequence)

shadow show
clown as magician-engineer who with his right hand opens the curtains onto an illuminated and abstractly assembled plane of visual stimulation

(Seurat were disclosed to the) congruence of an immaterial, atopic and evanescent image with powerful reality effects and techniques of attraction

techniques of perceptual modernization --constituting--> an autonomous space of invention --> imposing its own constructed visions and truths on viewers

(Crary shows how) the mechanization of vision had no intrinsic link to objectivity, but rather to new capacities for simulation, illusion, conjuration

(my paintings? ...early) dreams of an impossible and inhuman vision, of a desire for perceptual ubiquity exceeding the spacial and temporal limits of human faculties --?--> remake the self into a sovereign eye would create and impose its own truths
-the horses of Gericault and Seurat, in their airborne oneiric trajectories, incarnate a deeper truth of the body: they become abstract correlates of psychological and kinetic response to perceived movement --> ideomotor experience (=/= truth of mechanical spatial movement)
(--> ajayeb description movement animal in motion)

***animal is arrested --> presence is not directly accessible to human vision, but can only be the product of technical procedures of simulation*** --> “nature = scenographic space” (--collapse--> precondition for the impossible unseeable apparition specter --Seurat--> spectacle)

phantasmal homeostasis
detemporalization of experience

management of attention <--> techniques of attraction

(Foad and) Seurat's efforts (in Cirque): abstract conceptualization of perceptual experience

(possibility of spectacle)
differed
displaced
denied
(image of spectacle)
derealized
drained of presence

*attentiveness of an observing subject* = site of increasingly specialized operations of power

...a twilight state of restricted consciousness ==> (Durkheimian solidarity --> what is at stake is that) the autonomy of the individual is reduced

--Crary--> importance of Seurat's work : to have intuited **how the collapse of scenic space allowed new imaginary figuration of immediacy** (of a regressive unity based on a corporeal engagement of the spectator) @Esther, apass, OSP, Femke

Seurat sensed something fundamental about the industrialization of contemplation (--> now fully matured in Hollywood cinema) + (he anticipated, like Wagner) the *effects of a phantasmatic luminous image on which essence had been displaced by appearance*

(you can still) escape into the psychological time (but don't erase the sense of the obdurate historical conditions out of which your dreams of equilibrium emerges)

Seurat's resisted the temptation of the phantasmagoric and of myth (=/= Wagner)
(--> are we the hairs of Seurat?)
•exposure of technical premises
•subversion of any stable “formation” (or Gestalt, on which the allure of the myth depends)
--Buchloh--> ***avant-garde: a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistence against the tendency of the ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and control all practices and spaces of representation*** (--> that is why i am interested in Walt Disney and Hollywood and Qur'an)
--> *to produce incompatibilities* (as an artistic strategy, visual or epistemic and otherwise; to make opacity, hostility to virtuosity and expressionism, )

your work could be adjacent to ____
but not identical to ____

your work might be built out if mechanisms for the production of subjective response --but--> it is never reducible to them
@OSP, Femke



Cezanne --> (nonoptical) art of attention
music --> a mode of experience =/= an art of time

(unstable status of an apprentice observer in 1900s) Cezanne = reinvention of synthesis (=/= Manet and Seurat's strategies of binding, homeostasis, fixation)

Crary highlighting the highly contested nature of the questions of attention (possibly of pure perception, presence, etc. in 1890s) --> recreation of attentive presence amid the impact of new conceptualizations and organizations of motion, memory, temporality (+ emerging technological arrangements)

[one of many sites in the late 19th century where a crisis in perception is diagnosed:]
Cezanne + Husserl: attempt to bypass the accumulated cultural and commonsense assumptions about the world as it appears in consciousness (heritage of phenomenology --> Sina, Foad... ~~> and fable of the artist:)
•Cezanne --> forgetting everything and make an image of what you see *beneath the imposed order of humanity* (19th century preoccupation with “innocent vision” <== to be completely estranged from the world <-- Schopenhauer) ==> access to things-in-themselves
•Husserl --> pure form of consciousness *stripped of all accretions of habit and socialization* ==> “seeing essences”
--> their work challenged (sought to exceed) features of perception that apparatuses (of production and consumption) regulated and standardized

Husserl
attempt of description of objectivists in a certain atemporal fixedness =/={attention: heightened awareness of a narrowed or focused range of perception, operation of selection, question of existence of content in consciousness, empathic function which belongs in the sense of intuitional experience ~= psychophysical, associationist, sensationalist, atomistic accounts of perception and cognition ==> how reliable and consistent the knowledge about the world is possible + (classical model of vision:) privileged point of view of a perceiving subject from which the objectivity of the world could be apprehended}
issue of cognitive and perceptual synthesis
•to resecure an unconditional basis for logic and science
•to escape from refined habitual patterns of perception inherent in various aspects of rationalization and compassion of experience in 1890s and 1900s (--> dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
 --Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]

what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?

(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]

Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world

(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as intelligible form ==> invention and discovery of previously unknown religions and organizations of forces

dissolution inherent in attentiveness ==support==> (Cezanne's) radical desymbolization of the world + perpetually modulating set of relations between the exterior and sensations

Cezanne attentive to:
•activity of the eye
•visual sensation
•myriad intricacies of subjective vision
•(physiological) limitations of sensory experience
•the body (its pulsation, temporalities, intersection of that body with a world of transitions, of events, of becomings)
•discontinuous composition of visual field (to its “concentric” format)

19th century scientific research ==>
•comprehensive account of human perception
•disjointed nature of the visual field
•central area of retina: photoreceptor cells
◦peripheral area of retina: sensitive to movement
•subjective visual field <== complex aggregate processes of the eye movement (“short fast jumps” =/= instantaneous intake of an image) --> a new psychological model of the human subject

acuity did not correspond strictly to localized anatomy but rather was the product of a dynamic relation of fovea and periphery as well as external luminous factors

hearing: aggregate perpetual process

Wundt's optical model (polarity between:)
•Blickfeld: field of consciousness
•Blickpunkt: focus of consciousness (where apperception occur) ~= attention

=/=
Locke, Descartes, Leibniz
consciousness = camera obscura

apperception: focalization of some content in consciousness ==> structure experience

--Crary--> what is at stake (with Wundt) is a cognitive modality part of a larger ***modern process of decentering***

(+ James -->) a question of the primacy of ‘transitive’ states in which the shifting fringes of perception were constitutive features of psychic “reality”


modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response

(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]


...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*

...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*

(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body to the world, into a stream of change, of time, *undoing the immediacy of the world* [<-- my reexamination of the composition of the epistemological world of fables in West Asia, my work's relationship with knowledge is like that. to gain control of myself in the midst of moving concepts, the circulation of concerns, jumble of paths and knots, whirlpool of velocities, and recourse to my capacity for forgetting...]

perceptual consistency is a phantom

(Lucretius:) [*]world: infinite Cascades of self-differentiation

-the question is: how to make aesthetic constructions [the task of the artist] (if the world is so fragile)?

-how to go back and forth between attention and reverie?

perplexity of the eye (related to a deeper and metaphysical perplexity)
an imageless vision
...a mind for which no visible form is visible enough


the fixed and monocular eye has been posed (in recent theatrical writing) as the formative element of classical system of representation **functioning to arrest duration and change in order to achieve a conceptual matey mastery of phenomena** {==> zoocentric animal anatomy =/= ajayeb}
--✕--> (Crary's suggestion that) ***the fixed immobile eye is what annihilates the “naturalness” of the world*** (disclosing the provisional and fluid nature of visual experience) =/= mobile glancing eye is what preserves the preconstructed character of the world

•moving eye --> habitually familiarly caresses objects (extracting previously established relations among them)
•fixed eye --> (immobile eye triggers a ferment of activity ==>) trance and perceptual disintegration --> dissolving the physiognomy of the everyday world [~=>? bestiary's perceptual uncanniness]

fixed truth-taking stare ==> perceptual uncanniness

the idea of un undistorted original perception ==> objects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation

fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability

the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically


perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them

Cezanne ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)


reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)



production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•

tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time

}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world

}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*


“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness

20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor of data resulted from objective external controlled observation)
 ==Cattel==> application of systematized knowledge to the control of human nature
--Crary--> **accommodation of subjective life to machine operations** (+ speeds, temporalities)



new objective world: decomposed into autonomous and abstract stimuli (+ machine rythmes that differed dramatically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular consumption

*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life

computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)

}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision


instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision

Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events


19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**


*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century

reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> preparation of motor response)
•one of the ways in which attention was positioned within knowledge of human behavior
==producing==> new forms of sensory experience outside of (various myth of) organic wholeness of subjectivity (--> distinction between “natural” & “artificial” sensation [---> go to my work in WIELS bestiary characters: what was individual experience in middle ages?])
•practical reconfiguration of behavior + possibility of external intervention and control
=/= Dewey's (galvanic image of) subject in a perpetual sensory interface with the world = uninterrupted mass motion --> unity of activity -->{*continuity* ==sustain==> an ideal of unity and wholeness =/= disintegration of individual experience, *disconnected nature of reality*}

(domain of experience in urban capitalist lifeworld:)
•industrial production
•spectacular condonation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control

(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions

(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception might also have the capacity for *revivifying or expanding the limits of thought or cognitive awareness* [<-- and today 2020 many don't consider our contemporary media culture has this capacity]
--> what if our fragmented nature is one of the forms the discontinuous nature of reality can be apprehended?

celestial camera obscura

Dewey was deeply interested in practical ways of mind-body unity
rhythm, eurhythmy
alexander technique


unwavering model of pure contemplation
“pure knowing subject = forget your own personality, lose oneself in perception" = clear eye of the world (Schopenhauerian model of knowing in Doctor Strange movie, seeing the world directly and leave entirely one's own interests, the premodern idea of *perception = presence*)



Bergson (+ Cezanne) --> deepest forms of perception are mixed and composite

(in Matter and Memory) Bergson: establish a model of perception =/= routinized and reified forms of perceptual experience within western urban and scientific culture of the late 19th century

[*]externality = dream of inhuman immediacy: a vision of matter both immediate and instantaneous
---> go to Lucy movie primordial and fundamental act of perception

Bergson (+ Dewey's ideal of coordination)
(the role of the) *body: reproduce in action the life of the mind*
(the role of the) *mind: hindering the thought from being lost in dream, an organ of ‘attention to life’
--> how memory and perception interpret each other
*memory coincides (diverge, intersect) with the “present” perception*
{ [*]determine: the more habitual and repetitive one's perceptual response to one's environment ==> the less autonomy and freedom characterize that individual experience }--> creativity = (zone of) indetermination

--again--> Bergson (disturbed by new arrangement of spectacular consumption posed as novelty within a mass society ==> redundancy and habit + decay of traditional forms of collective memory) his work is a response to:
•general standardization of experience
•automation of perceptual response
(<--Sina-- typical problem of life-philosophers lebensphilosophie at the turn of the century reaction to the “intrusion of the mechanical”)

*preconditions of a free and autonomous subject* + *endangered (coherent) system of meaning*

(weak evolutionary assumptions of Bergson's elaboration of) human subject (= the most developed organism) = potential (for indetermination) = escape from a relationship of constraint and necessity in one's lived milieu [=/= animal]


Helmholtz (research on physiological optics) ==> غیر واقعی nonveridical status of vision (and perception) ~= there is no direct correspondence between sense experience and objects in the world ==>
•uprooting: rationalization and instrumentalization of senses (--> technical prostheses)
•displacing: reterritorializing of perception

Helmholtz (~/= Bergson) committed to expanding and optimizing the productive functioning of socioeconomic world (of imperial Germany) --> vision of capitalist industrialization (exchangeability, convertibility, etc.)

Helmholtz's ontology --> physics
Helmholtz's epistemology --> semiotics: representational and quasilogical order of signs


(Helmholtz +) Bergson's attention:
1. condition of relative motor arrest (Ribot)
2. gives up the useful effect of present perception
3. backward movement of the mind

Bergson's attention: a binding together of reality to ward off both perceptual and psychic disintegration


endosmosis: process of remaking an object of perception

Deleuze's attention: gives back to duration its true characteristic... a very special coexistence (=/= succession), a simultaneity of fluxes, in which the body was always implicated --> “freedom = awareness of that coexistence”,


“reality function”
(psychic+) sensorimotor grounding in the reality

in early 20th century --> clinic designation of a condition called “the feeling of unreality” : failure of an apperceptive attention : when present impressions do not link up with memory association ==> sense of unfamiliarity of the present objects


*(inconsistent and anxious treatment of) Bergson sketching out the marvels of a multidimensional perception* (capable of apprehending and creativity engaging the immanence of the past and present) <-- fantast of artistic research
---Crary--> for Bergson attention is one that does not waver, oscillate, or drift in and out of focus [---> go to Avital drug] --> his privileging of fusion, interpenetration, and continuity does not apply to borderline states: insanity, dreaming, etc. piercing forms of nonspatialized experiences: dreamwork, trance, forms of hypnagogic visions (==> powerful penetration of the present by memory)

Bergson's indetermination: a human attentive concentration, an abortion that would never lose its conscious connection to the willed activity of the body (<-- fantasy of wakeful critical subject) =/= (Crary's well argued) indetermination encompassing fluctuations in and out of trancelike states in which disassociated phenomenal might occur


Bergson's work is typical of his period --> ***great fear of perceptual behavior that is either passive or automatic***
}--historically--> construction of various forms of automatic perception in cinema, recorded sound, and other technological attachments ==> the idea of **premade images consumed passively** (...depreciation of experience when individual memory images are stiffened into ready-made things)

(for Bergson, Janet, Foad, and many others:) automatic behavior ==> dissolution of ego boundaries (in which the individual will cease to exert itself), contraction of personality, scattering of the self

drift
reverie
trance
dream

**Bergson's work = refashioning of the Rousseauian conviction of the truth and authenticity of (inner) subjective experience, without grasping how that experience is determined by forces external to the subject**
--trying--> to overcome the degradation and devaluation of experience within a modernizing culture founded on amnesia and obsolescence = collaptof auratic perception

--Crary--> Bergson and others could not see the ways in which *****capitalism itself was a nonfixable duree, a nonrepresentable variation ==> an endless chain of dislocations and destabilizations ==> its own virtual realm of novelty*****

...................................

(Cezanne and Sina's attraction to) rock motifs
various splintering and dispersal of rocks
intermingled with ruins of man-made stone structure
(rock's) precarious status as object

rock = (incarnated) resistance to drift and entropy :
forces of gravity
geological erosion
inexorable disintegration of substance
...


(?like many artists i am looking for incarnations too, for) procedures of binding : transformed representational logic
*operation of fixing, of fastening, within a world in which position no longer has its former meanings*

interpretation of tentatively scenic spaces

(BOZAR Tehran tree project)
•flickering screen of sky and trees
•one stone lies nested or wedged within the embrace of another element
--> (logic of the [phantom]) limbs

eroticized enclosure (seek to grasp and be grasped) --becomes--> diagram of perception (seek to envelope and be enveloped)

Cezanne's discovery: any attempt to stabilize perception ==> disintegration and transformation

•Cezanne --> dispersed perceptual processes
•Freud --> dispersed psychic processes {perception = interface of the nervous system with the world <=~ interface between consciousness and the stored stimuli of wishes, memories, anticipations}

(mid 1890s) Bergson + Freud ==> sustained and original consideration of the anti-optical functioning of subjectivity perceptual experience as a nondirectional, acentric, multitemporal event
--> empathic decentering of the observer
+ (widespread) practical and discursive remaking of the observer as subject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon


Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’

Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]


vertigo: auto-movement of chaos

“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities

accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in your own provence)

**Cezanne's imaginative refiguration of himself as machine = translate automatically** ==> release from grounded condition of human perception : to become an apparatus = implacability apprehend a world outside of the terms (that the artist wants out) ==> novelty (~= to overcome the gravity of one's own interiority) --Cezanne--> primordial image (of irreducible formlessness, of ***world in process without horizon***, without position, of slowly vibrating colors...) [<-- *apparatus becoming* is now the cliche of contemporary artist]

glow of a geological dawn
archaic + inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) --> (its compatible) uprooted nonorientable subject

nature experienced as vibrations, animations, chromatic reverberation (+ seeking a “logic” to clarify its unfolding)

hideous sign of progress (for Cezanne: electric light, cinema, )

artistic modernism <==Adorno== (the fact that) the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate (---> go to incarnation)

demotivated subjectivity
wants something that is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual ==> substitute a mode of consciousness that is predominantly intuitive : the awareness of touch


historical adjacency (<-- Crary's knowledge zoom)

*late work of Cezanne (in spite of apparent social isolation of its production) = a site where modernization of subject occurs (of late 19th century)* --> dynamization of perception (occurring in many different domains around the year 1900 --introducing--> new techniques of vision)

Cezanne =/= contemplative distance
Cezanne =/= perceptual autonomy
Cezanne = nervous system interfacing with (a continually transforming) external environment
Cezanne = an example of a contemporary conceptualization of reality (as a dynamic aggregate of sensations)

--> emerging industries of spectacle


(fundamentally distinct) machinic visual technologies --Deleuze--> cinema =/= previous historical forms of simulation (some continuous western mode of representation, with its origins in Renaissance), represent the world
cinema --constitutes--> *an autonomous world* made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are in themselves no longer the center of their own perception

percipiens
percipi

nonselectivity of cinema eye =/= texture of human attentiveness

cinema = fusion = dream of the functional integrity of the world

film = validation of the authenticity of the perceptual disorientation

}--✕--> Crary's analysis of Edison's train robbery scene : serial reconfiguration of a kinesthetic constellation of moving forces (+ additional system of movements and forces: bodies, bullets, explosion) =/= question of mobile point of view

Cezanne <--> cinema camera --Dziga-->
i am a mechanical eye
i, a machine, show you the world as only i can see it
now and forever, i free myself from human immobility
i am in constant motion, i draw near, then far away objects, i crawl under, i climb onto them... i plug and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies
now, i, a camera, fling myself along their resultant maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movement of the most complex combinations


Sherrington --> stimuli in the external world are selected and fashioned by the organism
=/= Pavlov: stimuli = alien shocks encountered and responded to
=/= Cartesian res extensa, res cogitans
“the great physical process of attention”
inhibition: an active process
anticipatory behavior
exploratory locomotor behavior
“integrative function” of nervous system ==> binding
(integrative: incorporation of the exterior world)
“human perception = possibility of motor activity”

...................................

Cezanne sitting in nature and studying motif, tilting his head ~-> intensity unfolding chromatically before him (a mode of physical being) --> *time of the body* [<-- this is typical of today art in european] = indefinite scalar time + intensity is experienced outside representation
•river stands for his engagement with a more primal flux
•sustained condition of vibrating instability
•apprehension of multiplicity
•world = turn of a kaleidoscope (prismatic)
•(when you look at a) landscape has its own weird anima, it changes like a living animal under our gaze (---> go to machine dreaming image learning 2020)
•to make yourself into a responsible productive organ
--> **incarnation of a contradictory enterprise of self-transformation, self-renewal** <-- (Cezanne's retrospective fulfilment of a tradition from which he could not fully acknowledge his own decisive departure)

...your intuition on the edge of the river


Cezanne = reformulation of natural world + broken hope of community (~= intimacy --> Rousseau's mode of attention contemplation: “thought =/= reverie” : the more sensitive the soul of the observer, the greater the ecstasy aroused in him. deep and delightful reverie : a state of blissful self-abandonment)
--> novelty of a smooth unorganized perceptual space
--Crary--> example of the nonsynchronous character of modernism (~ coexistence of realities from radically different moments of history) [<-- is my bestiary research on the same plural historical positioning?]
•termination of a romantic visionary tradition

(in the West) [*]image: decentered chrono-iconography, automatic self-movement

rise of cinema: body-machine assemblage --Deleuze--> new paradigm of *psycho-mechanics* ~ cinema is capable of touching the cerebral system directly ==>
•experimental forms of life = freedom (affirmative model of automatic behavior --> thought functions at a higher level with an arsenal of syntactic perceptual conceptual tools)
•management of attention (model of passive automatism)

(from) dreamer --to--> somnambulist --to--> hypnosis --to--> suggestion --to--> hallucination --to--> obsession

Deleuze + Benjamin + Virilio
the idea of *art of automatic movement coincide with fascism*
@Pierre, pass, Foad

scopophilia: a forced ecstatic abjection before the image
=/= mastery

[*]spectacle: (spectacular culture) attention would be made attentive to everything but itself

...................................

“my experience is what i aggree to attend to” (James) ~= affirmation of an autonomous self-choosing world-creating subject liberated from the receptive status of a subject for whom experience was “the mere presence to the senses of an outward order”) --Crary--> historical crisis in the nature of experience: *attention = simulation of + compensation for a chimerical real experience*

(in my text rigging demons --> reconciliation of:)
•individual attentiveness to the fringes, transitions, pulses of one's own particular “pure experience”
•“experience” as immersion in the tangled density of a shared mutually inhabited world

James's conception of selfhood: private property (--in--> Tasavof: the most radical of all possible alienation and disconnection) --Lentricchia--> deployed to preserve a human space of freedom interiorized from the vicissitudes and coercions of the marketplace

**modern attention** + individual evasion of memory (and history) --> habitual & commodified : an imaginary deletion of all that is unbearable in collective and individual experience

in Corridor Crew the perceptual selectivity of the CG hackers sustains efficiency of animation tools + tangled social and psychic machinery of sublimation


(?do i have) agoraphobia --> Simmel


(destructive transformation of) *modernization always preserve and carry over nonsynchronous components of past moments*
Crary, Lefebvre

Piranesi's etching of Rone = foctive and atmospheric prison
Freud's description of piazza: patchwork texture of screens and flashing signs (formless field of attraction @Foad, Sina; multidimensional field of stimuli, urban space: “a theater of memory and a theater of prophecy”) =/= Piranesian dissolution of the axial city (organized views around a coherent even if mobile subjective orientation)

Freud's technique of attention: gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit
‘evenly suspended attention’ (giving equal notice to everything, everything in low-level focus without the risk of schizophrenic overload) --define--> **a state of receptivity in the analyst that eill be commensurate with the spoken free association of the patient** --> dealing with a stream of information that has no evident structure or coherence + extracting from that disjunct texture (artwork, chaotic syntax of dreams, indecipherable present,) some interpretive clarity (feedback)

Freud + Cezzaine --> design a countermodel of attentiveness that surmounts an ***inhibition of the peripheral*** (=/= notion of selection ~=> finding out what one already knows)

****diffuse attention =/= critical attention**** (a faculty in which the observer is led to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them)


(at the turn of the century) experience: compulsory consumption of information


(from) the experience of deindividualtion (in piazza) --to--> a more controllable form of loneliness (bedroom)


[this] plural hybrid space of Roman square (Crary on Freud's representation) ~= a spectacle society : a patchwork of fluctuating effects in which individuals and groups continually reconstitute themselves (either creativity or reactively) =/= (Guy Debord's) seamless regime of separation, ominous collective mobilization

...................................

Deleuze and Guattari's Varuna and Mitra --> lacking a mythology of conflict (=/= Singh's analysis)
forming a milieu of interiority --> double articulation that makes the State apparatus into a stratum

State's operates by:
•seizes (immediate, magical capture)
•binds (preventing all combat --> presupposing a juridical integration of war)

“chess (pieces are coded) = a game of State”
chess: an institutionalized, regulated, coded war, pure strategy =/= Go: pure semiology
(what is game's form of interiority)

nonsubjectified machine assemblage

...returning from the outside with that inconceivable thing, an army

magical-despotic State (@Eszter)


Genghis Khan didn't understand the phenomenon of the city --> war machine: a pure form of exteriority

magic violence
military institution

Deleuze and Guattari: State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution

machine: ontology of production

State thinkers:
•Goethe
•Hegel
•Euclid (finding a foundation for the enterprise) --> logos: the law over the nomos (from Proto-Indo-European nem-: distribute)-->{Euclidian space: a sufficient number of dimensions, by which one reintroduces parallelism between two vectors, treating multiplicity as though it were immersed in this homogeneous and striated space of reproduction}
•Archimedes (an operative projective descriptive geometry)
•Durkheim --> to give the republic a secular model of thought
•
•

political differentiation ==> State ~= distinct organs of power (=/= chief رئیس قبیله) ==!?==> economic development

(Laura:) keep the social body from crystallizing =/= (concern of the State:) to conserve

[*]war: a mode of a social state that wards off and prevents the State; that which limits exchange, maintains them in the framework of alliances --> (critical epistemologies:) *war replaces “exchange” with “alliances”*

[sometimes leadership] inhibits the installation of stable powers, in favor of a fabric of immanent relations (--> could we say that about Iran today?)

diffusion of prestige

(Deleuze and Guattari:)
types/organs that center around organs of power:
•rhizome
•=/= aborescent
family (aborescent type that centers around organs of power --structuring--> centralized societies) =/= pack (bands, rhizome)

State =/= perpetual blackmail by abandonment or betrayal (--> Iran)
==>{
•large-scale projects
•constitution of surpluses
•organization of the corresponding public functions
•on-the-spot emergence (--> kinda magical, and monstrous, miraculous)

war machine: a counter-State mechanism
realized completely in: the “barbaric” assemblages of nomadic warriors (=/= “savages” assemblages of primitive societies)
-problem: it cannot relay

Deleuze and Guattari ask: so, why did the State triumph?

the fable of Urstaat: the State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity

law of the State --> interior and exterior, Sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally
=/= the rights of segmentary societies

_~*neoprimitivism*~_

polymorphous war machine

commercial circuit...
religious creation...



(Deleuze and Guattari's) space:
*smooth:
•vectorial ↗️⤴️↘️↞
•projective 📹
•topological 🐍 (=/= geometrical)
•
--> *space is occupied without being counted*
=/=
*striated:
•metric -|-|-|-|-
-
--> *space of counted without being occupied*



“minor science” (in which, model are:)
1. hydraulic =/= hylomorphic
2. of becoming and heterogeneity
3. goes from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane (=/= from straight line to its parallels) --> vortical
4. *****problematic(==> event --to go from a problem to the accidents that both condition and resolve it ==> [all kinds of] deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, each figure designates an “event”) =/= theorematic(==> essence --theorematic: to go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it) [--> make your model problematic, not affirmed by theoretical bullshit! --> my performances are about trying to find a way of not being theorematic while doing theory]***** (and they say ‘problematic’ the problem it is not an “obstacle”)
=/= “royal science”: reducing the “problem-element” and subordinate it to the “theorem-element.” State needs to subordinate hydraulic force ==> prevent turbulence (--✕--> Middle East =? distributed turbulence across a smooth space [<-- fucked up], [in smooth space:] vortical movement that can rise up at any point)
•civil
•static
•ordinal
/matter --assigned-to--> content
/form --assigned-to--> expression
~= hylomorphic: implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form (=/= hydraulic) <== *a society divided into governors and governed*
--> State science (appropriates and transforms the elements of:)
=/= “nomadic science” (Homeland TV series suggesting US government is a nomadic science: viewpoint of affections + nomadic operation of rogue CIA operatives + presidential decentralized power dynamic)
•becoming
•heterogeneity
•infinitesimal
•passage
--> in tune with the connection between content and expression, ***essentially laden with singularities*** (--> my lectures? an art, a technique, a science : following the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, they seize or determine singularities in the matter =/= constituting a general form)
=/= *chaotic science* (--> what kind of figure of engineer? @Sina)

*the problemata* --> vortices & projections [~~?--> chaotic imagination]
(projected into an abstract knowledge --?--> mapping knowledges)

State science --> Star Trek
imposes its form of Sovereignty on the inventinos of nomad sciencet

to administrate projections --> submit (war machine) to civil and metric rules that strictly limit, control, localize (nomad science)

“rhythm =/= turbulence”


cursing of a river*


Gothic conquered a smooth space --> the cutting of the stone (=/=? digital) + ‘plane of projection’: a plane limit, a series of successive approximations or placings-in-variations
=/= Romanesque remained striated space --> vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars


--D+G--> ***one does not represent, one engenders and traverses***
[*to engender: give you a baby from behind. *to traverse: zigzagging]
--democracy--> one represents visually
--Sina--> one suggests chaotically


roadways (well-centralized administration) =/= bridges (active, dynamic, collective experimentation)

lobby: a group with fluid contours, whose position is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to influence

(for Ibn Khaldun:) war machine: families or lineages + esprit de corps

pouvoir (monopoly of an organic power) =/= puissance (a vortical body in a nomad space)

(to address the) vague = vagabond, nomadic, morphological essences (=/= ideal, royal, imperial essences) = haecceities
{for example the circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both from the circle and things that are round (a vase, a wheel, a sun)}--> State is perpetually producing and reproducing ideal circles =/= war machine makes something round

Agnes drawings --> protogeometry
Agnes = drwaing and linking up smooth space

(is Finn in Adventure Time a man of State ot nomadic scientist? -->) journey-men's associations

nomadic <==form== masons, carpenters, smiths
labor <== regulating the movement of the flow of labor, assigning it channels and conduits, forming corporations, relying on forced manpower recruit

(plane of) consistency ~= composition =/= (place of) organization ~= formation

***everything is about the division of labor*** (--> this is the most critical about apass)

State:
•repress the nomad
•repress the minor science
•oppose vague essences (--> visa and integration)
•operative geometry of the trait
=/= nomad imply a division of labor opposed to the norms of State


Steven: a dynamic connection between support and ornament =/= Alex's hylomorphic schema (the search for laws in extracting constants --> an invariable form for variables [for Alex: the invariable definition of artistic research for variable artists])

compars =/= dispars

(let's go) from matter-form --to--> material-force(= placing the variables themselves in a state of continous variation)
[Sina: let's go instead of thinking about ‘flow’ --to--> ‘force']
force (is full of):
•equations “=”
•adequations (change in the meaning of a term depending upon context)
•inequations “=/=”
•differential equations (functions + derivatives --> useful for modeling and simulating physical phenomena) --> solution of a differential equation is a function =/= algebraic equations (solution of an algebraic equation is a value)
•


(distribution of matter in:)
space of pillars
striated by the fall of bodies
verticals of gravity
parallel layers

quantitative and scientific oppsositions (such as: speed/slowness, quick/weighty, celeritas/gravitas)
=/= qualitative oppsositions
=/= mythological structures


(i am basically interested in the law of falling bodies)

(my lectures: an art of) following =/= flowing
-one never follows in order to reproduce
-in following, one is in search of singularities of a matter
(my whole work has been about the art of being carried away by the vortical flow of texts)--> [*]ajayeb ~= a vertical field across which singularities are scattered like so many accidents (i see them as ‘problems,’ and my job is to follow them)


global theory of waves


(Deleuze and Guattari romanticizing the royal science:) “reproducing implies the performance of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced” (--no--> it is about saying what you say attached to a temporary fixed point [for example an identity], in order to be able to be proven wrong)


categorical apodictic apparatus
[category = intrinsic concepts]


content is (not?) always conformist (<-- Julia was never)

Alex: imperium of true thinking --> capture, seizure, binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (= myth) ==> [*]logos: sanction of a ground

modern state: *realized reason*, the rational and reasonable organization of a community
-what are the exchanges that take place between the State and reason
modern state reason --> “the more you obey, the more you will be master” (for you will be only obeying pure reason) --> philosophy assigned itself the role of ground

common sense: the unity of all faculties at center

(in the archaic model imperial State:) poet = image trainer =/= (toady's) artist: (Deleuzian) *private thinker* (making counterthought, destroy images) =/= public professor
-problem with private thinker is that it exaggerates interiority when it is a question of outside thought --> the question of how **to place the thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside** (to make thought a war machine?)

(Alex in search of) maxim =/= aphorism (always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that utilizes it) <-- my interest

(?which) image inspired by State apparatus

[*]method: the striated space of the cogitatio universalis ==> path (=/= bridge)

thought ~= vampire (has no image)

(in the smooth space of Zen) the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target (#my bow and arrow --> it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere)
-whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or aim (#my bow and arrow joke @apass)

pathetic texts: thought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)


(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem


striating of mental space =/= Sina's textures and lectures

@Pierre: is horizon a striation?
Deleuze and Guattari: a horizonless milieu --> smooth space

the true name of race: bastard, mixed-blood
-a race is defined not by its purity but rather by the impurity conferred upon it by a system of domination


[(aspects of) war machine or] machine:
•spatiogeographic
•arithmatic
•affective


principle =/= consequence
-in nomads life what is a principle and what is only a consequence?
{migrant --> goes principally}=/={nomad --> goes as a consequence}
{(sedentary) road --> parcel out a closed space to people}=/={(nomadic) trajectory --> distributes people or animals in an open space, indifinite and noncommunicating}


(space) in the manner of a vortex

migrant leaves behind a milieu that has become amorphous or hostile

forest and house --> both striated?
pigs --> pragmatism or expertise

-the pigs story might not predict the coming of the nomad wolf, but it constitutes the principles of architecture for which an incoming is striated. striated space is the result of the pigs story

عرفان همیشه بیابانی است؟
does mysticism always requires deprivation of life? mysticism ~=? symbolism

[*]godzilla: dramatization of where the mountain recedes, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•

#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.

localized =/= delimited

[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان

.... .\ ____ _
  ... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _


assigned direction =/= direction of the crossing

(for Deleuze and Guattari) religion: a technique of converting the absolute, making the absolute appear in a particular place --> the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the *obscure nomos*[= Bayazid بایزید]


vagabond monotheism

Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed

از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine

/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]


...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture


three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)


animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries

orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)

oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine

revolution --western--> transformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State

the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State

psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality

(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence

Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counterpart --> nature dominated (battle to occupy the smooth space)

[what now people want in Iran: not the smooth space a deterritorializing State, rather:]
capture of flows
(need for) fixed paths
well-defined directions --> restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativized movement
--> polics = management of the public ways =/= fluidity of messages and masses

silk road...

Iran State = smooth + striated

State translates: “moving bodies” --to--> “moved bodies”

” ” --> ” “
Star Trek transportation system
sedentary kind of tey-ol-arz طی الارض

what homeless/drunk people do in cities --> reconstitution of a smooth space = a manner of being in space as though it were smooth

***rebellious space is always smooth space***

virtual space is neither striated nor smooth space

multiplication of relative movements ==> smooth space --> the sea becomes the place of the ‘fleet in being’ --> nomadism accompanying a worldwide war machine
@Jassem's rebellious nature =/= Pierre's staying with the striated space (with the trouble, with the institution, )

decimal grouping --> comes from the nomads

three major types of organization:
1. lineal
2. territorial
3. numerical

number ==> lineage

spatium (differentiated space with depth and levels) =/= extensio (immanent center, divisible homologous parts, and symmetrical and reversible relations)


[title]
numbering of numbers

census
taxation
election

(Deleuze and Guattari are wrong about numbers serving to gain mastery over matter --✕--> Verran's work on number in Africa)

State = a teritorial principle (of deterritorialization that links the number to metric magnitudes) --D+G--> “we don't believe that the conditions of independence or autonomy of the number can be found in the State (--> Deleuze and Guattari leftist tendency to purity the State)

(operating war machine -->) numbering number : autonomous arithmetic organization

*numbers appear as soon as one distribute something in space =/= distribution of space (that is more the State's business)*
independence of the number in relation to space --> concrete nature of smooth space
--> number: a means of moving =/= means of counting

*middle ages curse sheets and taxa:
•geometry of smooth space
•a minor, operative geometry
=? [*]ajayebnameh: geometry of the trait between the rumers of the world, senses, and writing

vector --> directional number =/= dimentional number =/=? metric number

directions are everywhere

rhythmic =/= harmonic (--> setar / is my whole work about harmonic? horror-nic)

order of displacement

concentration-camp society: ‘people = deterritorialized numbers’ (--> fantasy of full despotism in The Handmaid's Tale)

**the question is not one of good or bad but of specificity** (<-- when i say who what artists say could have a chance of being disputed)

complex = articulated

the Roman legion was a number made up of numbers, articulated in such a way that the segments become mobile, and the figures geometrical, changing, transformational


logistics: the art of external relations

Genghis Khan --> composition of the steppe
Moses --> composition of the desert


nomads as child stealers


(commissars, diplomats, spies, strategists, logisticians) cannot be explained away as a “whim of the sultan”

special numerical body

slave-infidel-foreigner is the one who becomes a soldier and believer while remaining deterritorialized in relation to the lineages and the State --> نظام‌الملک سیاست‌نامه

*nomads have no history, they only have geometry*

Iron Man's technological definition: “weapon (destroying people) =/= tool (producing goods)”

weapon --> projection, anything that throws or is thrown
@Pierre *the notion of “problem” is related to the war machine*

introjective: preparing a matter from a distance, in order to bring it to a state of equilibrium or to appropriate it for a form of interiority
(projection: appropriate it for a form of exteriority)


#bow and arrow --> hunt (when speed is associated primarily with the hunted animal) =/= war (speed is an independent variable)
prey =/= enemy
prey =/= motor
(#bow and arrow does --> *abstracts the idea of motor and applying it to itself* =/= generalize the idea of prey by applying it to the enemy)

the economy of hunted animal


ecosystem situated at the origin --> garden of eden / heaven
ecosystem situated at the end --> apocalypse / end-time

discovery of a projecting and projectile system ==> war machine

war machine
breeding + training
insitutes an entire economy of violence
--> *a way of making violence durable*



two ideal models motor:
work =/= free action
•(let's) work: tool meets resistance
•free action: operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect(?), continues from one moment to the next [--> style of artistic research]. the way in which the elements of the body escape gravitation to occupy absolutely a nonpunctuated space

weapon is moving
tool is moved
tool presupposes work, tool does not define work

***the principle behind all technology is to demonstrate that a technical element remains abstract***, remains entirely undetermined --> as long as one does not relate it to an assemblage it presupposes

tool
-one cannot speak of weapons or tools before defining the constituent assemblages they presuppose and enter into @OSP
the tool is essentially tied to a gensis, a displacement, and an expenditure of force (whose laws reside in work) =/= weapon concerns only the exercise or manifestation of force in space and time (in conformity with free action)

when speed added to displacement ==> ?

tools & weapons = consequences ~/=? causes


the morning star and the battle-axes

variable assemblages of human, animal, and thing

*assemblage*: (passional) compositions of desire[=/= natural determination, spontaneous determination] --D+G--> there is no desire, but assembling/assembled desire
assemblage ==(bring into play)==> [*]passion: effectuations of desire that differ according to the assemblage [=/= Germany]
man-animal-weapon
man-horse-bow
assemblage of speed
...

(what Game of Thrones TV series missed:) military of men --> homosexual eros replaces the zoosexual eros of horesman [--> اسب امام حسین]

State ==>{(training of) worker --to--> (apprenticeship of) soldier}

{affect: active discharge of emotion --> projectile ~ weapon}=/={feeling: displaced, retarded, resisting emotion --> introceptive ~ tool}


martial arts: the not-doing of the warrior ~ the undoing of the subject
effectuated in the void (=/= nothingness)


form-matter =/= motif-support
(the support is as mobile as the motif)


goldsmith's and silversmith's is the barbarian art par excellence


picto-ideographic

short war
live messages

[text that is] ornamental (a way of encoding) =/= scriptural (according to a sacred writing)


tools
weapons
signs
jewellery

jewellery/sign --> expression
model --> free action / work
direction --> projection / introception (#bow and arrow)


(for Deleuze and Guattari:) ***architecture and cooking have an affinity with the State =/= music and drugs have differential traits --> on the side of the nomadic war machine


schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and towards free action --> a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace (<-- i prefer not to do this)

everything is ambiguous

rebel: a transitional figure of worker-solder (drawing the worker, on the one hand, and the soldier, on the other), a shared line of flight: “i seek a weapon & i am looking for a tool”
‘line of flight’: communication with smooth space

my work on ajayeb: to figure a transhistorical assemblage (that is untimely =/= eternal =/= historical) ==> encounter the myth anew =/= demystification: re-conquer the myth


the empire
•communicates with
•conquer
•integrates with


communication (of secret) --?--> adaptation, propagation


saber =/= sword

the flow of matter-movement
conveying singularities and traints of expression

assemblage --differentiates--> phyla (major taxonomic class) ~= flow ==> division into many different phylas + introducing selective discontinuities


technological vitalism

*refract differentiates*, retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents

region of vague and material essences --> essences that are vagabond yet rigorous ==> situate fuzzy aggregates =/= fixed distinct and formed essences

corporeality = formed and perceived thinghood
•inseparable from processes of transformation
•inseparable from expressive qualities

vague = intermediary --> autonomous, stretching itself between things and thoughts --establish--> new relations (--> this is what Manning has adopted from Deleuze and Guattari)

variable intense affects

topological =/= geometrical

hylomorphic model =/= active and affective... (matter-flow can only be followed)
hylomorphic: imposing a form upon matter =/= materiality possessing a nomos : material traits of expression constituting affects (for example surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality...)
-the critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on the existence between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimension, of energetic... [and what about digital technology?]--> we need more artisan (follows the matter) =/= artist (invents/breaks the matter)
*artisan* --> one who is determined in such a way as to follow a flow of matter, of *machinic phylum* (@OSP, for example metallurgist = one who works inside the mold, the consciousness of thought of the matter-flow + metal the correlate of this consciousness)
[follow a flow of matter = to itinerate, to ambulate]
artisan =/= farmer
artisan =/= animal raiser
[*]artisan: take up craft activity + follow the matter-flow as pure productivity

continous development of form, chromaticism --> a form proper to matter [-->? not in middle east: metaphysics --> metallurgist =/= metamorphosist poet --> chaotic =/= harmonic, nomadic]

not everything is metal, but metal is everywhere (--> what would X-Men say about this)

--D+G--> *thought is born more from metal than from stone*(!!)
metallurgy is minor science, vague science, phenomenology of matter

metal is neither a thing not an organism, but a *body without organs*
(on the symbolic value of metal and its correspondence with an organic soul but on the immanent power of corporeality)


smiths (Sina, OSP?)
their space is neither the striated space of the sedentary nor the smooth space of the nomad (--> my room and computer desktop) --> #tent, in the manner of a cave or a hole
--> *they are cave dwellers not by nature by by artistry and need*
internal itinerancy, their vague essences ==> their relation to others
--> *smith* [follows the flow of matter ==> (surplus value:) ‘resist the State’, Tamar Yaen Pierre Sina Goda]
=/= *migrant* [existence depends upon and constrained by the logic of the State (with its boundaries and borders) ==> (surplus value:) ‘residual gold in the ruins’, Hoda Sana Rui Flavio Quinsy Elen]
=/= *nomad* [occupies and inhabits smooth space beyond or bellow the State ==> (surplus value:) ‘alternative’, Deborah Xiri Leo Isabel Aela Agnes]
=/= *pastoral transhuman* [rotates through a circuit ==> (surplus value:) ‘erotic inclusivity']


vital forms of nonorganic life

[title]
your strength and your nothingness

transpierce =/= scaling
excavate =/= striating

...vagabond sign of itinerancy سيارى

from hole to hole
a line of variation

***the hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads at the same time***

phylum:
--connected-to--> nomad space
--conjugates-with--> sedentary space

(we have both:)
*war machine*:
•opening
•rhizome
•gaps
•detours
•holes
•stems
=/=
*state apparatus*:
•capture phylum
•play the lines of flight
•into code
•into form


war machine collides with States and cities (forces of striation) ==> war

Deleuze and Guattari ask:
-how will the State appropriate the war machine?
(appropriate: subordinates it to its political aims)

from encasement قفسه --to--> (forms of) appropriation تصاحب

Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated

Timur who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine


the peace of terror or survival
-the postfascist figure that takes peace as its object directly
-we have seen war machine assign its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death
*the unspecified enemy* we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place


two poles of war machine:
1. it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe
2. when it, with infinitely lower qualities, has as its object not war but the drawing of a *creative line of flight* (the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space)

an ideological, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement

...................................

0.99993

Daston history of reason
Daston asking: how reason became rationality?

rationality (~= universal calculus of) =/= reasoning

•(a more) ancient ideal --> reasoning [with recourse to the faculty of judgement]
•modern ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a finite well-defined set of rules that can be applied unambiguously in specified settings without recourse to the faculty of judgement

cold war: crystalline + generality + conclusivess could cope with a world on the brink
--> algorithmic rules as the core of rationality
--> sacrifice of [precious to philosophers] ‘insight’ and ‘understanding’ ascpects of reason
--> automatic: you don't need to understand them to execute them

*the posiblity of a mechanical mind*

Turing's [*]programming: constructing instruction tables

(1794 early French revolution) universal school for future French citizen with arithmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm

first reliable calculator --> 1850

rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness

Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms

---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...

deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs

•game theory
•rational choice theory


(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*

reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى


the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason

Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge


Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others

our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic


...................................

[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)

...................................

metaphysics of natural law

Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•

devil = collective human imagination of chaos

formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance

the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]

[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•

1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical

(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity


(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization” (of citizen's tools or honors) <-- an order of nature]

rose wanna be skwerl ---> go to bestiary
“good consist in each being striving to be the best of its kind not the best of all”

(2)
[*]nature: the will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy


seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society

content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a justificatoin that gives any and all norms their force : the quality of telling us what should be (=/= describing how things actually are)

“the starry heavens above ~/= the moral law within” --> Kant's awe: the regularity (of both human law and natural law)
حيرت awe [<==evoke== the cosmic: all encompassing order & exquisitely designed ornament] =/= horror [<==evoke== the unnatural (ajayeb)]

**the recognition of an order** --Daston--> the key to all kinds of norms (--> awe = wonder + fear + respect)


(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it

•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*


why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...

are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****

terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]

•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])


...................................

[title]
itchy eyes

...................................

16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature has the freedom to experiment =/= God
--> ended by:
•18th century's *division of labor*
•19th century's *institution of science*

(two-headed cat's) deformations --> terrifying + electrifying
[*]bestiary = Telegram media from God:
•sign of end
•sign of fecundity, creativity, variety of nature

.../horror/wonder/horror/wonder/horror/wonder/...

“everyone was trafficking in marvels in the 17th century”
Daston

... --> premodern sci --> age of wonder --> modern science --> ...

cabinets of curiosity
(Daston's) chambers of wonders
•to overwhelm you
•to impress the ambassador


for Aristotle, philosophy starts with wonder, but you make it disappear as soon as possible (“wonder = sign of ignorance” of the unlettered and illiterate)

genre of natural history involving the marvels of insects --> domesticate the emotion of wonder for things we can explain

Daston =/= (early 20th century) morose and elegiac discourse about the disenchantment of the world

...................................

pessimism ~= realism
(optimism ~= idealism)

...................................

(to move from) eternal truths --to--> eternal archives
(an aesthetic:) archival monuments

despite computer's hype and undeniable capacity and flexibility of computerize databases, the practices of collecting, inventorying, describing, image-making, collating, and publishing have remaining stable since the monumental projects of 19th century: corpus inscriptionum latinarum, carte du ciel, botanical gardens, etc. --> archival projects

...................................

popular and learned interest in monsters

(in the 16th century & 17th century Baconian scientific programm:) treatments of nature and natural history must have included (with rigorous selection) monsters (~ aberrations in the natural order: new, rare, and unusual nature, both exotic & domestic)
[*]nature: an ingenious craftsman --> [*]monster: nature's most artful work (--> they bridged the natural & the artificial)
•corresponded to the activities of nature =/= types of subject matter, methods of investigation
•interest in irregularities (=/= end of 17th century interest in nature's uniformity and order)
•

Lazarus exhibition, the parasitic twin (the italian conjoined twins who toured freak shows in 17th century europe)

(Daston --> a case study of) the changing relationship between popular & learned culture

legal status of monsters
infanticide in antiquity


earlier tradition of interest in monster:
•Aristotle --> Albertus Magnus
•divine sign --> Cicero, Augustine, Isidore of Sevill
•cosmographical & anthropologic --> Solinus


monsters in a context of a whole natural phenomen (bestiary):
earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, celestial apparitions, strange rains (of blood), stones, and miscellanea

(monsters --> shift from) signs of God's wrat --to--> signs of nature's fertility
(by the end of 17th century) --to--> comparative anatomy and embryology (teratology)
(from) اعجوبه prodigy --to--> examples of medical pathology

*peasant and professional had participated to a significant extent in a shared culture of intellectual and religious interest* --✕-->{
(literate culture evolved far more rapidly ==> sharpening of social boundaries of)
city dwellers =/= peasants
urban literate elite =/= unlettered day laboure
--> for the educated layman: (religious associations of) monsters = another manifestation of popular ignorance and superstition --fostering--> uncritical wonder =/= sober investigation of natural cause


prodigy --> contrary to nature --> attributable directly to God (divine displeasure)
-the sunne shal suddenly shine againe in the night, and the moone thre times a day. blood shal drop out of the wood, and the stone shal give his voyce [...] There shalbe a confusion in many places, and the fyre shal oft breake forthe, and the wilde beastes shal change their places, and menstruous women shal beare monstres[...]

•monstrum = prodigium ==> monstrat [monstro: i wonder --> i indict --> i teach, demonstrate] = god's will
•apocalyptic association --> world reformation, the overthrow of the wicked --> vindication of god's elect

(bestiaries were a lot commentaries)

various bestial parts...

bestial vices and errors (of...)

ephemeral literature
displayed and recited publicly
characteristically illustrated
appeal through spoken word & image to the illiterate


Pierre Boaistuau [<== Peucer, Lycosthenes, Swiss surgeon Jakob Rueff, naturalist Konrad Gesner, Pierre Belon]
histoire tragique
histoire prodigieuse (monster literature, bestiary?)
•two-headed woman seen in Bavaria in 1541
•three-legged Siamese twins from 1552
•calf without forelegs reported in 1556
•celebrated monster of Cracow
•
ghoulish tone, religious didacticism, erudite آموزنده, monsters as polemical weapons
“nature's wonder?” --> to “discovre the secret judgment and scourge of the ire of God”

The Scripture sayth, before the ende
Of all thinges shall appeare,
God will wounders straunge thinges send,
As some is sene this yeare.
The selye infantes, voyde of shape,
The calues and pygges so straunge,
With other mo of suche mishape,
Declareth this worldes chaunge.


...monsters began to lose their religious resonance
it was unlawful to “delight” in the undesirable
portentous meaning of monster

(from) fear --to--> delight
(from) prodigy --to--> wonder
(from) sermon --to--> table-talk
(from) horrible, terrible, effrayable, espouventable --to--> strange, wonderful, merveilleux (marvelous جالب)
(from) final cause --to--> proximate cause (physical explanations and the natural order)
}==> nature began to assume the role of an autonomous entity with a will (and sense of humour of her own) ~~> natural wonder



wonder literature ([lavishly illustrated bestiary, cosmography, travel literature, geological curiosa, herbal and astrological lore,] of later 16th and 17th century Daston) --> secularization of an interest in (monsters as) prodigies
--part-of--> the great body of common culture
--affinity--> popular 16th century genre of diverses lefons (selections from famous authors)

catalogues of strange instances or hidden properties of animals, vegetables and mineral
(middle class culture in elizabethan england)

prodigies denuded of their supernatural aura & (presented) to surprise and entertain the reader =/= to acquaint the reader with imminent apocalypse and judgeme

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature

portentous events بد شگون

(crocodiles) to be granted honorary monstrous status by virtue of their rarit

many will reade them [monsters], heare them and haue profit by them, that otherwise whould neuer haue knowen them. For many (I suppose) will buye this Booke for the things whereto they are affectioned, that neuer coulde or would have bought, or looked on the bookes, wherein all they are. -Lupton

common and popular forms of escapist literature: *travel books* and *chivalric romanc*
(--> don Quixote)
monstrous races (men with a single giant foot, or huge ears, or their faces on their chests, giants and dwarfs)

medically oriented monster literature

[Daston:] Pare was forced to eliminate a section on lesbianism, with a graphic description of the female genitals, before including Des monstres in later editions of his collected work


A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein

little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)

popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)

[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda

monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar

(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”

Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)

shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature

transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things

nonanthropocentric zoological studies



Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts

nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship

nature imagery of the wonder book

renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
•nat[...]