[...]nowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]


after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?

another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’

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

because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext

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

committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•

(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)

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

towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibliography, wonder, ongoingness, ontology,
•productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern
•talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding living with contradiction” : making choices without necessarily turning the other choices into something an enemy does --> important for collective research life; “[we] need each other's extremes”; *our activisms are not the same*: to open up to our extremes, to open up to what you are not sure of --> to find ways to be in productive alliance (=/= the notion that everybody has to do everything [tell Xiri])
•(educating oneself) actually know how to explain what somebody else said and not just what you said*** --> figuring out how to disagree with each other as well as agree, that no statement is going to be taken as evidence of being the enemy (--> we face this in apass)
•learning how to recognize authority (as a mentor and participant) (the problem of the inability to deal with authority, common in early feminist movement, traces in Xiri) --> being alert to how hierarchy shut people up that one don't acknowledge the hierarchies that emerge out of that *{alarm ==> hierarchy}*
•in apass i am trying to remember what my peers are doing, and when i see things i think of them, and they are in my citation network (they are all over ajayeb.net) and i am aware of what they have told me. words they are inventing are in my vocabulary too (that is why i am so energetic calling in Xiri's category change --> for example “generous suspicion”)
•collective research environment works by networks* (--> a problem with apass)


[*]epistemology = stories knowledges tell


sometimes practices demand:
•exclusive expertise (~ focus)
•extensive scholarship ==> linking and speculating
•attaching unexpected agencies and territories to each other


(better) understanding the mechanisms and affects of inclusion and exclusion in communities of practice
for example in apass (we are dealing with):
•suffer <== mutual incomprehensions
•pain <== heterogeneous knowledge worlds
•anger <== unevenly distributed power
•fatigue <== exposure to intensity
•tension <== different styles of knowing

unacknowledged suffering --(in past and present)@Hoda--> as well as pleasures


(what do you make out of reading your gender material?)


Greek brainwomb


feminism  ~/= feminist theory-->{highly diverse, located in many domains of practices in and out of the university, and understood to be this highly diverse activity}


the talks i have been giving are done by someone with a kind of mind and soul that just makes connections fast. i work orally. the lectures are heavily prepared (and some important ways unprepared in the manner of its performance: all those connections happening during the talk not knowing them beforehand, they happen by the encounter*) and full of cue (سخن رهنما، ايماء، اشارت) and quirk (تزئينات، تناقض گويى، تغيير ناگهانى فکر). my notes and scripting are invisible to my audience, but they are there at work. and it gets people excited. and that's the point. i work with confusion and excitement. i have not been good at laying out groundwork of skills, going to next level and so on. i am working with that feeling of “i am not sure what i am getting, by i think i am getting it”. i also always come back, loop again through the same material, go back to the question we were raising before and ***“watch what is happening to the language”***(Haraway). these are the ways my connections work. artistic and scholarly work works by **modes of attention** [--remember--> your mode of attention (= your mode of abstraction) is doing the foregrounding and the world is not actually built that way. so you make ‘your mode of attention = world’ to inhabit something for a certain time only to do a certain kind of work)] --(because)--> you are always jumping into the middle of something that is ongoing before you, into the middle of many conversations. you are learning how to get it in several ways at once. the hypertext that i have been building also characterizes these kinds of layering upon layering of textual work. teaching myself how to write and how to play with ideas.
working with (Haraway's) kind of good-enough approach to a body of scholarship --> inhabiting many things that i have only got half-digested (=/= through digestion, particular bodies of reading that people need to have mastered in order to argue)

(after five years now i am) feeling myself (a little bit more) competent and confident in (some) scientific literacy and in (some of) the skills of the arts and literature --> ?

after apass: apass was a safe-enough space for my inventive processes, to make interesting mistakes, but do i need a real scholarly undertaking with ajayeb?
i had a lousy education, don't know still how to write well and coherently and sustain a project. i don't have the skills to pull off my research as a phd, as a scholar. i need someone to work with me line-by-line. i need to go people who have serious educations in my subject, and ask them questions, and read.
and i am missing that kind of connectivity that your writing being read performs. do i need an atmosphere in which my kind of writerly activities are honored and foregrounded, and expected?

can my ajayeb beome a real scholarly project with seriously labor-intensive student work?


hostility =/= indigestibility {they cannot recognize it, it is something else}--> it is not personal, but a historical state of a discourse, and the nature of the kinds of possibilities that being opened up or closed


(in apass) all of us fail each other in different ways all the time*

we can barely read each other's works/books. but we do, and we struggle with each other's works/books


(in apass i am catching my self giving “advice” to others---risk of the advice:) violation of their integrity

*taxonomy: (constantly morphing) tools, they work and get worked, *they are part of situated conversations* (~ “theory conversations” Katie King < Haraway)
(=/= some kind of enemy that you never do)


***almost everybody is organically part of more than one conversation at a time*** (Haraway)
(this is so important to recognize specially in collaborative research environments such as apass)


(in political movement:) working to a kind of clarity of ideological position ==> to do certain kinds of things (that are harder to do if you don't have them [those ideological positions] in the world) --> they are used as *tools* to produce what got called *political correctness* --> always producing those who count and those who don't count*
=/=? feminist movement = ***a kind of vulnerability to not being who you thought you were*** : openness to risk, less of a defensiveness, less of an attack mentality, not shaping each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)


“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten


[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)


metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh


to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated


*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*

(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•


*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges


*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)

*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other

(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are


(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)


to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*


*transf[...]