[...]turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•



**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers

*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)

***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses of an implicit reader/viewer)
•a keyword search for “anger” will tend to turn up set pieces on how to control it --> discussions of where it is not
•reactions such as wonder, delight, or terror (do not simply occur) they are *evoked*, sometimes even *staged* --> we can explore what evoked them

finding wonder-words =/= finding wonder (complex semantic field)

wonder-reaction:
•terror
•disgust
•solemn astonishment
•playful delight

in medieval accounts wonder often has:
•a mischievous quality
Bernard of Clairvaux --> spice of stories
11th century --> (naughtily) impish girl saint jokes
Gerald of Wales --> nature's pranks
}--> moralizing bestiary tradition (taking more pleasure in the animal tales than in theology)
analogies between animals and humans are anything but solemn and didactic
•a dreadful quality
(Attar's accounts of saint torture)
Gerald of Wales --> recounting some of the earliest warewold stories to survive in european literature, he glosses the admiratio felt by those inside the story as stupor خرفتی, timor بیم, horror خوف
◦shape-shifting violating nature
◦tales of metamorphoses --> the real change of substance in the eucharist عشاربانى + the terrifying possibility that sexual intercourse between humans and animals might produce monsters


(Bynum asking) what in medieval accounts or artistic representations tends to trigger wonder? *where do the surviving source give us access either to intensely heightened reactions or to events and objects calculated to evoke or stage such reactions?*
--> where wonder is not?


(didactic purposes of) miracle collections
*hovering significance* (of unusual natural events: eclipse, earthquakes, famines) --> sometimes listed as clipped matter-of-fact prose
William Auvergne + Oresme --> natural causes can be found for marvels tend to flatten the language of some accounts of natural world as well
}==> miracles, portents فال بد, oddities are sites and stagings of wonder less often than we might suppose


12th - 14th century --> narrative accounts tell us of objects and events carefully constructed to elicit awe, delight, dread
*rulers (secular + ecclesiastical) --competed--> display of power and splender including tricks and automata --calculated--> to amaze and tantalize:
•(13th century) خانه وحشت 🏰 evidence of a count of Artois who built an elaborate funhouse with distorting mirrors, rooms that simulated thunderstorms, hidden pipes for wetting unsuspecting visitors and covering them with flour
•puppet shows in pastry (sotelties)
•food was often planned as an illusion or trick for the eye (---> go to instagram cake baked in the shape of ordinary objects)
•changes in church architecture in liturgy (آئین نماز) + fabrication of monstrances --> define the moment in the Mass when *the consecrated host (the devine installed in food or flesh or matter) was elevated as a sudden revelation of the unexpected and paradoxical*
◦collection of relics and their **elaborate containers** (reliquaries محفظه عتیقه) [--> similarity and historical connection to wunderkammer of early medieval princes]
•
--> theologians and many of the ordinary faithful continued *to value the supernatural power mediated through bone chips or dust* more than the intricate workmanship or sheer novelty of the container --> *object = a means of access to an other tham as a singularity fascinating in itself*
--> *relic cabinets ~= cabinets of novelties*
}--underlying--> ***impulse to collect***

mirabile visu!
****(12th century) abbot Suger of St. Denis describes the crowd (more desperate to touch, possess, appropriate) that is frantic over access to a power not only *beyond* but also in its nature *other than* what contains it
(God lodged in decayed body, manifested and hidden behind the crystal and gold)

narrative accounts not only described objects and events that were staged or constructed to produce wonder + they also *teemed with complex wonder-reactions*
--> hagiographer (Attar's) detailed in emotional sensual language the extravagant asceticism and para-mystical manifestations holy women experienced + the amazement such manifestations engendered in others {beauty was not merely referred to as wonderful, *it was also described in loving and lyrical language* as signaling a deeper pattern or purpose}

(old Augustinian idea that) the world itself is a miracle --> (homilist Aelfric) wundra (marvels) of God
•it requires no sorcery that the moon waxes and wanes, that the sea agrees with it, that the earth greens in response to its power 🌙
•(recounting the migration of salmon upstream to spawn) they leap from bottom to top with a leap that is marvellous, and except that is is proper to the nature of fish, marvellous


سندباد Sinbad
[fantastical] travelers’ tales (recounted) the *fearsome* and the *ugly* --as--> *wonderful*
to Marco Polo almost every animal he met was a marvel (the horrible crocodile, beautiful giraffe) [described with an earnest and urgent facticity --> ajayeb's tone]

in later middle ages (and in toda popular media) *strangeness appealed* --> stories abounded:
•of fabulous palces
•of stones with marvellous powers
•of monsters
•of mermaids
•of fairies
•of bizarre races with eyes in their chests or enormous umbrella feet

•Marco Polo's awkward and impoverished prose
•Mandeville's credulous tale-telling
•Sinbad: [a powerful sense that] what is wonderful: (is not chickens and peacocks, even cyclopses and cannibals per se, but) **a world that encompasses such staggering diversity** --Bynum--> ******the impulse to chronicle (such things) ~= a critique of the impulse to possess them******

“If you [Alexander the Great] had a body that matched your greedy mind and heart that know no bounds in their desires, or if your body equaled your great cupidity, the great world itself would not suffice to contain you ... Your right hand would hold the East, the left the West. Not content with this, in all your prayers you would be consumed with desire to investigate and find out where that amazing light hid itself, and would dare to climb into the sun’s chariot and ... control its wandering beams. So, too, you desire much that you cannot possess. Having subdued the world and conquered the human race, delighting in blood, you will wage war against trees, wild beasts, rocks and mountain snows. *You will not allow the strange creatures that lurk in the caves to be untouched. Even senseless elements will be compelled to experience your rages.*
--> ***Chatillon's powerful prose understands that marveling at diversity can be the prelude to appropriation***
*marveling at diversity ~=> appropriation*


*impulse to collect/chronicle/list --(critique[sublimated?])-->~?=>(<--)(~/=!!) impulse to posses*


beautiful + horrible + skillfully made ==induce==> wonder
bizzar + rare (~= that which challenges or suddenly illuminates our expectations) + *range of differences* found in the world ==> wonder

admirabiles mixturae: events or phenomena in which ontological and moral boundaries are crossed, confused, erased

[*]singularity: absence of cause [--> is enough to induce wonder]


human body appearing as meat to be masticated is an aweful condescension (in worldly terms: an assuming of an inappropriate nature) for God


Peter the Venerable (12th century collection of miracle stories)
reverents (those who returned from the dead)
...a monk who has been poisoned appears in a dream while the murder is under investigation: “When I saw him [the murdered monk], I got up full of joy and began to embrace and kiss him with much affection. Although a deep stupor [sopor] took the place of my outward senses,... I was not unaware that I was sleeping ... And what is more wonderful [mirum], it occurred to me immediately ... that the dead could not remain long with the living ... So I decided to question him quickly, for the vision seemed not a phantasm but true [non fantastica sed verax] ... [The monk attests his faith and affirms that he has been murdered; then he disappears.] I wondered greatly ... then rested my head again ... and immediately he reappeared ... I rushed toward him and ... began to kiss him as before ... I heard the same answers as above concerning his state, his vision of God, the certitude of the Christian faith, and his death ... [Then] I woke up and found my eyes wet and my cheeks warmed by fresh tears.
=/= Hamlet's experience with his father's ghost (--> has no epistemological wonder)

Peter of Tarentaise
confronted with a deformed man, questioned him closely and sent him away unhealed but with a new sense of self-worth

**moral reaction described in heightened emotion-language**
(we see) *the response enacted inside the story*

Julian of Norwich
her most wonder-filled language
because of the incarnation we are a marvelous mixture (medle se mervelous) of sin and grace

the unheards-of... عجایبِ (ajayeb-e)
describing unheard-of prodigy (of green children born from the earth)


👉
William of Newburgh
what he cannot grasp (attingere or rimari) [there must be a “reason"] ==> forced to marvel at (mirari) --means--> a significance or moral use (utilitas)
•mysterious dog discovered in a stone
•a crucifix in the sky
•
}--> rarity + (they have a) secret reason
}--Bynum--> *wonder-reaction = significance-reaction* ~= ****things are signs or portents (not because of their natures or their causes but [from their ontology]) because they indicate or point [from their utility]****
#telegram bestiary
#index finger

monster <-- monstrare: to know

(for theologians, chroniclers, preachers) wonderful = strange + rare + inexplicable (never merely strange or simply inexplicable)
--> it was ***a strange that mattered, that pointed beyond itself to meaning*** (--> #wonders of pits)


(my work for WIELS, Wonders of the Moon – A Thousand Years of Sleepwalking 2020)
•*not* all medieval statements about wonder were synonymous or compatible
•how people acted and reacted necessarily were *not* in very close synchrony with the definition they gave or the ابتذال platitudes they propounded


wonder in medieval texts
=/= increasingly rare exception to an enlightenment sense of unbreachable laws of nature
=/= startle reflex of early modern psychology
=/= appropriation practiced by early modern rulers, explores, conquistadors (adventurer)


(Bynum making the point that) although by late 15th century medieval artists had begun to paint wondering faces with the startle reflex --✕--> it is more difficult to be sure whether a figure confronted with stupendous, bizarre, or dread-filled news is amzed or not
--> ***the amazement had a strong cognitive component*** : you could wonder only were you knew that you failed to understand --entailed--> a passionate desire for the scientia it lacked, it was a stimulus and incentive to investigation

significance-reaction: a flooding with awe, pleasure, dread owing to something deeper *lurking in the phenomenon*

wonder was situated
wonder was perspectival (even if miracles were not)


(medieval theories of) wonder: nonappropriative (empathically not to consume and incorporate), yet based in facticity + singularity
*wonder: to give back the goblet after draining the potion ♥ [--> my mood on telegram animals, to receive their concreteness and specificity]
(Bernard of Clairvaux:) if you do not believe the event, you will not marvel at it {you can marvel only at something that is (at least to some sense) [*]there: concreteness + specificity} [--> wonder at the object of doom, cat videos, popular media]

admiratio: (a medieval sense) cognitive, perspectival, nonappropriative, deeply respectful of *the specificity of the world*
=/= investigate
=/= imitate
=/= generalize
=/= postmodern anxiety:
◦we emphasize how hard it is to knwo
◦we are aware that any response involves some appropriation
◦we suspect the awareness (of collectors of marvels: awe and dread are situated) shatters the possibility of writing any coherent account of the world
◦we fear that the particular is the trivial and that significance is merely the projection of our own values onto the past

amazement is suppressed by:
•citing of too many cases
•formulation of general laws
•inductio exemplorum


medieval --> wonder ==> knowledge
postmodern --> politics ==> knowledge


Bynum --> our research is better when we move only cautiously to understanding, when fear that we may appropriate the “other” leads us not so much to writing about ourselves and our fears as to *crafting our stories with attentive wondering care*

strange view of things --Aquinas--> teaching
==> students:
•gaze in wonder at texts and artifacts
•quick to puzzle over a translation
•slow to project
•slow to appropriate
•quick to assume there is a significance*


(sometimes you need to be binocular: see your society on its own terms + to take a step back and see it as something as realy bizarre and odd --> “strange view of things” [<-- 19th century French poets] =/= normal modes of perception about things)
--?--> they way i feel extremely alienated by politics, journalism, fashoin, marketing

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

(in the style of temporal and spatial complexity) learning from tv series --> interweaving of:
•flash-backs
•flash-sideways from parallel worlds
•jumping chronologies
•plotlines
•mental images
•uncanny relations of characters to each other
•

***time travel series --signal--> national memory-crisis***

(spatiotemporal) jigsaw ==> audience engagement (in trying to solve the pozzels --> you solve =/= watch)

television =/= realist-modernist-postmodernist cultural trajectories of art

main traidemarks of postmodernity:
•self-reflexivity
•intertextuality
•visual and narrative disorientation
•fragmentation
•contamination of genres
•irony
•pastiche
•hypertextual travel

Batori

consumer capitalism ==Jameson==> erase/lack of history ==> nostalgic revisitation of the past

traumatic events of the past --> self-critical memory-culture --> (in Dark TV series) German national self-understanding [visiting Third Reich + Nietzschean eternal return + wormhole = floating state of identity <-- this is the achievement of the Dark TV series: selling the German nation to their international audience as a commodity]

Dark TV series = national narratives + global postmodern visual practices

space: gray
force: violence
interrelation: neglect

(Dark's stylistic) labyrinthine time-memory mosaic (protagonists meeting with their elder/younger selves, memory images, time travel etc.) --> locate the spectator ==> viewer is encouraged to find a way out of the labyrinth [~=> care for the German characters with their double burden (Nazi + GDR) of traumatic recollections ~=> a positive affirmative identity for contemporary Germany (~~> nationalism =/= sense of existential homelessness)]
}--> *TV series becomes a form of memory* (protagonist = German nation)


(serial poetic of) cliff-hanger structure
maintaining an (absolute) aesthetic continuity

{time: liquid realm =/= history: fixed realm}<--Dark-- protagonists must face when looking for their own identity


new German Cinema (Berlin School) --> ghostliness, constant travel, national division, alienation, rootlessness, inbetween-identity of the protagonists, stuckness in time =/= Heimat: the idea of stable secured community

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

labyrinth is architecture at it's best?
space as a limit and space as an environment
the relation of ornament to void space (background)
entering the space (pointing, direction) versus filling the space

in purely perceptual terms, all that is seen is the surface, but as an idea the building involves the whole of its inner, hidden structure; hence not only what is seen, but what alse is known appears.

concept of transparency: is a charachteristic feature of intellectual realism. in a drawing, transparency means the demonstration of knowledge about -or disclosure of- that which is inside, behind and under visible surfaces. (stimulant to the imagination of grave robbers)

is labyrinth or architecture a visual system (window etc.) or a spatial construction (direction, distinction etc.)? when we look at it in this text with the object of cloud...


labyrinth ~=? architecture's ornamental activity
[*]ornament: epression of an excessive force of form, the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve --> fecundity
-ornament shifts among different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth

labyrinth --(Deleuze and Guattari)--> “smooth space” [can be explored only by legwork]
labyrinth --> immersion & navigation [--> descriptions of technology]
labyrinth --> texture field (a form of emerging visuality)

Jassem + Sina's labyrinthine polychromic activities (==> underlying artistic creation) --> interpret form symbolically through the visual residues of the technical operations

fetish: unnatural participation with things

*field theory*
behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space
all fields in nature are quantum fields
•[*]matter: energy bound within fields
•[=/= classical magic --> action at a distance]
•system --> a relation-concept [=/= additive whole]
--> ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force

self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously


topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.

According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.

The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation

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

(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.

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

(Corbin)

Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology

psalms and invocations to the beings of light

the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences

victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت‎‎

(arch)angelic vectors

to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.

ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being

appearance = unveiling

Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splendor of the morning, the first radiance of the star, in the intelligible Heaven of the soul it signifies the epiphanic moment of knowledge.

the Presence of the philosopher at the mutational appearance of the intelligible Lights
“estrangement from their bodies” was for them a philosophical question



(for hayula proj.:)

primordial Flame which is their source, and which Sohrevardi claims to have seen in a vision that revealed to him the authentic ‘Oriental source’. This is the ‘Light of Glory’ that the Avesta names as the Xvarnah (khurrah in Persian, or in the Parsi form fan, farrah فره). Its function is primordial in Mazdean (مزدایی) cosmology and anthropology. It is the effulgent majesty of the beings of light, and it is also the energy which conjoins the being of each being, its vital Fire, its ‘personal angel’ and its destiny...

... the ‘negative’ intelligible dimensions of the ‘longitudinal Order’ (dependence, passive illumination, love as indigence)
produce the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which accords with them. The innumerable stellar individuations of this Heaven {as in the Avicennan schema, each celestial orb is celestial in relation to the Intelligence from which it emanates) are so many emanations which materialize, in a still wholly subtle celestial matter, that part of non-being which conceals--if one thinks of it hypothetically as isolated from its Principle--their being that emanates from the Light of Lights.
... from this second order of Archangels there emanates a new Order of Lights, through the intermediary of which the Archangelarchetypes govern and rule over the Species, at least in the case of the higher Species. These are the Angel-Souls, the ‘Animae caelestes’ and ‘Animae humanae’ of Avicenna's angelology.

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

transcend the ‘two-dimensional’ space {of the necessary and the possible) of Avicenna's theory of the hierarchical Intelligences.

Intimated beyond the heaven of the Fixed Stars of Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astrology lie innumerable marvelous universes.
In opposition to what was to happen in the West, where the development of astronomy eliminated angelology, here it is angelology which takes astronomy beyond the classical schema within which it was confined.

...there proceeds eternally the universe of the Primordial Ruling Lights



... which marks the boundary between the celestial world and the material world of becoming. It is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which now symbolizes the boundary between the angelic universe of Light and Spirit (Ruh-abad روح آباد) and the dark, material universe of the ‘barzakh’ (برزخ).

The characteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.

That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if the Light were to withdraw. Thus, it is not even a potential light, a virtuality in the Aristotlian sense; in relation to Light it is pure negativity, Ahrimanian (اهریمنی) negativity as Sohrevardi understood it. It would be a mistake, then, to attempt to base the causal explanation of a positive fact on this negativity. Every species is an ‘icon’ of its Angel, a theurgy effected by this Angel in the barzakh which in itself is death and absolute night.


the schema of Mazdean cosmology, in which the universe of being is divided into menuk {celestial, subtle) and getik {terrestrial, dense);


{سهروردی}--{*} In Sohrevardi, the perception of the world includes, in structural terms, a metaphysics of essences; existence is simply a way of regarding {e'tebar اعتبار) essence or quiddity--it does not add anything to it in concrete.

The schema of the universe, then, is arranged according to a fourfold plan:
... (4) There is the mundus imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manifest themselves like the image ‘in suspension’ in a mirror. This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.


It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.



stories:

The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.

We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.



سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.

crypto-Shiism شیعه

prophetic philosophy

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

Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.

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

analogy of the cave


man with the x-ray vision

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

nowhere prosperous
ruinous prosperous

accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)

light, self, presence, knowledge


One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.

After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.

I was holding a candle.

has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door

tailors of divine words

I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.

The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.

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

{Laura Marks}--[her method of description, “affective analysis”: act of describing, what is going on in your body, prior to the body, and prior to perception--i have to describe well and simply. (sometimes even doesn't go back to the object we are describing) --> to tribute imagination to people]

muslim majority countries (! instead of ‘muslim countries’)
occasional and atomist fabulation --> agency of God
(Occasionalism: God as the cause of things)
Islam's atomism it is not coming from Greek atomism

Mullah Sadra --> Process philosophy: Whitehead, Deleuze, etc.
تشخص tashakhos --> Gilbert Simondon theory of individuation

...so perception does not give complete access to the world (this is Foucauldian)
=> perception seems to have a more protective role (from unnecessary stimuli--in order to safe guard our survival) --Bergson: “it is grass in general that interests the herbivore” --> ‘sensory-motor schema’ is an agent of abstraction (Deleuze)
[@Varinia's “could/should/would”; ‘line of flight’ --> becoming; disturbing the virtual, in her work how is actual/virtual (made impossible to?) distinguished?]

sensory-motor schema:
Within constructivist theories, the sensorimotor schema is held to be the principal unit of knowledge in use during infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which the behavior was performed as well as expectations about the effects. Sensorimotor schemas are central to Jean Piaget's explanation of infant development.
[http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_463]


(motions, gestures:)
purposeful =/=? communicative



(Marks on) Invisibility, Legibility (khanayi خوانایی), and Aniconism (that the artist should or must avoid depictions of human beings or icons; an art that refuses to unfold its code, asserting that relationships need not be interpreted--a view developed in the conservative Sunni thought of the later Abbasid caliphate)

(عقل سرخ aghl-e sorkh --> Ulf Langheinrich's works)
the ways ambiguity stimulates imagination
“rubied mind-body”

(...ruined main body)


sense-perceptibles: images, etc. --> matter that is processed by information --> in new media (as Gilbert Simondon put it,) ‘form’ arises almost symptomatically from a ground modulated by information processes

a new level of invisibility--though not immateriality: information

cognitive attention as information to be processed =/=? sensuous material to be experienced --> is this a shift (predicted by Deleuze) from visual to information culture? (--> Trevor Paglen's works characterizes arts of the information age in general---image is the trace, effect, or document.)

the perceptible =/= the legible

aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”

enfold & unfold


(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes


you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...

(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*

wood grain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)

(what is thought's powerlessness at the heart of digital new media?)

calligraphy --(interface)--> Qur'an --(interface)--> the divine

(Gregory Bateson:) information = "the difference that makes a difference”
(@Anouk)

“in Islamic art and new media art, we have two triadic models in which the infinite is mediated to perception by some kind of information.”

worship !~/=>? transcendence
(Who can say what people are really experiencing when, in the course of worship, they gaze at a dome, kneel on a carpet, or let an allegorical painting dazzle their senses? -Marks)


(Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that) “every body of thought has its own plane of immanence, an unthought against which it struggles to give rise to new concepts”, still, they dismiss Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic “philosophy” as prephilosophical(!)
intellectual struggle ~= jahd جهد, ejtehad اجتهاد (Averroes) ==> to bring new concepts into the world

yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}

mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter
-Avicenna: all existence is contingent; God = 'the uncaused’
(Avicenna's conception of) the nonentity (or antimatter) as the virtual double of every existent ~= (Deleuze and Guattari's) concepts of the virtual and the actual
(Avicenna:) God ==> existence/nonexistence
(Deleuze:) existence <==> nonexistence; (mirror each other?)


virtual (حق hagh ~ truth) <--> actual (حقیقت haghighat ~ reality)

hierarchy of nonexistent things


not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)


-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold

فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)

yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies

the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”

ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him

*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.


[logical death]


(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary information culture*
([aspects of] ‘enfoldment’ instead of ‘narrative’ @Seba)
(relying on the thoughts and calculations of many thinkers:) ‘deeply enfolded’ instead of ‘complexity’ (~=? ‘the obscured social world’ @Seba)

.finding the direction of Mecca in a complex network of signifiers --> the local value of the work of science or narratology / Islamic culture of astrological experimentation ----> logical depth and enfoldedness index Baten باطن
-(living in a time of animosity,) is Seba wanting to democratize Baten?

descriptive encounters with objects
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)

how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?

my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know what is lost
**chaotic loss --> to process through a host of errors and phantasms
what is the carrier bag theory of infinite?
عجایب --> (ajayeb's) inexplicable historical objects that suddenly turn up and refuse to be accounted for “fossils” (--> rupture =/= fold: history is deeply enfolded)
[which histories objects of ajayeb enfold and unfold?]

the origin is always complex

(how to) invert the judgment of value that informs us

piecemeal fabrication from alien forms =/= essential secret in history

positivism (esbat-gara اثبات گرا) =/= speculation

transhistorical claims about Islamic art--its ahistorical approach to Islam can contribute to Orientalism, (Nasr's spirituality) =/= to situate Islamic art within the history of ideas of its period, portrayal of a cultural worldview when they succeed (Marks)

Interpreting a cultural artifact for what it might have meant for the people of a past time is always an imposition--(to give preference to certain meanings at the expense of others)

(Marks’) existential phenomenology : one's own experience, sensory and mental, is used as a basis for analysis (to investigate), but does not assume this experience can be generalized.


code: a writing that is executable : a writing whose very nature is to carry out an action

“We are at a point where the Islamic heritage latent in Western modernism can usefully inform efforts to make information culture meaningful and responsive” -Marks


(Marks notion of) “Islamic art” --> unity (tohid توحید) of sorts -->  unity of the code ==> multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity


“networks are the haptic space of our age”



qualities of latency

(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality


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

*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•

hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories


anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry

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

Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...


*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*

Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجم‌الدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی

[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism


suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism


history of imagination

world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination

ancient Greek idea of how the imagination can make contact with a supra-individual reality --{followed & developed}--> Neoplatonist (understading of the imagination as) receptive of divine images
=/= memory images
=/= fantasmatic images --> phantasia --{i am wotking against the idea of “fantastic beast” ~-> phantasmata: post-sensory images combined in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images

هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world

sensory-imaginal-intelligible

•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind

i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.

Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)

ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief

( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•


christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject

so persian subject wanted the  so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image


sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words


attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)

Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images

فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations

the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)


majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer


Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)

imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> extra-individual, suprasensory world
Frankfurt school + Althusser saw collective unconscious as fascistic


*(my) material practices of unlearning:
•pretending i don't know --> enactment / acting
•(to try) forgetting --> clearance / erasure
•sleep-walking --> closing the eyes of certain perceptive stories, and become available to another
•the “let's not assume...” --> “in advance” of a the assumption
•


contemporary Western thought, tired of the sovereign subject, is trying to conceive of an extra-subjective reality that binds individuals ethically to others and to history --> this is totally apass :)
-contemporary Western thought (evident in Butler, Foucault, and many others) is seeking a politically efficacious concept of the collective imaginary*** (a positive conception of alterity, of an outside that inspires the imagination to create)

ajayeb for me is an alterity (of an quasi outside--not quite inside) that inspires the imagination to create (--> imagination is always creative)
ajayeb: alterity of a world that inspired (and inspires) storytelling and imagination (to create beings)


since Sohrevardi the islamic philosophy has abandoned substantialism for process

Sadra's approach:
•process ontology
•critique of abstraction
•celebration of singularity

God = neccessary being واجب الوجود

(tashkhis-e vojud تشخیص وجود) modulation of being <--> individuation (تشخص tashakhos)
ذات مخصوص, فرد مشخص معین, وجود جزئی اشیاء --> موجودی است که از نظر قانونی می تواند موضوع حق قرار بگیرد
=/= شخص ناپیدا =/= hayula
[tashkhis (everyday gesture of recognition of something gheir-shakhsi) ==>? tashakhos]

(Simondon:) individuation is prior to individuals, and individuals are simply symptoms or effects of individuation --> very processual

harkat-e johari حرکت جوهریtranssubstantiation, trans-substantial movement
*harkat-e johari respects the potential for intensification [= the capacity to know, act, and fully participate in the flow of being --and--> continual intensification;] in all things (including hayula)--> Miyazaki's faceless monster's ‘act of beiong’ (is efficaciously real in a Sadrian way)--> *Sadra's great refiguration is that he formulates the ‘act of being’ itself as the most real
-Miyazaki's monster (and Attar's San'an) is moved by love, it is the energy that traverses and transforms them; it is the best thing to be moved by. before, they are, in themselves, illusory and perishing
-Miyazaki's monster episode animation expresses how substance yields to process --> خونابه اى plasmaticness of the animated line: freedom from ossification استخوانى شدن (#Rigs), the ability to dynamically assume any form (Gunning) --> change occurring واقع from within + propelled سوق from without

Sadra's matter: place of nonexistence and absence (=? hayula)
hayula: form of the natural, elemental body

in Sadra:
•the plant(‘s form) (= vegetal soul) is animal
•the animal(‘s form =? surat صورت) (= sensate substance) is human
•the human...


physical acts of perception

(a typical account:) the stronger the imaginal soul, the less distracted it is by the body, the more manifestly imaginal images will appear

fotuhat فتوحات  or tazkirat تذکره is the stories of the intensity of their being, actualization, and certainty of effect
(Attar's stuff, articulate Sadra)

saryan-e vojud سریان وجود, *flow of being* (across the perceptible entities we encounter:) [the imaginal power working through them:]
•hear a person's say
•notice a weed growing
•smelling a...
•cognizing an image...
•touching a pig's nose [San'anian]
•

bodily senses can contact the divine presence, make contact, make a call (in Hafez, San'an's miscall)


•the imaginal realm is populated by singularities, every changing and infinite
•the imaginal faculty is of extreme presence, of intensification
(in this case ‘realm’ and ‘faculty’ bleed into each other's categories)


(let's get) creatively imaginal

accurate and attractive

***imagination is (definitely) not closing your eyes and dreaming, but being completely present to the world, committed to it and affected by it*** (to perceive something in its intense singularity)


مشاهده moshahede = contemplation

the infinate flux of visible phenomena (Kracauer)

قلمکار calico-world
چلوار

kaleidoscopic mountains

what was Sadra looking (moshahede) at?

•linear modeling of t[...]