[...]r... 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)--> yo[...]