[...]ience, 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*


*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]


**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)

the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other


prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything


*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of impossible thing. let's take that “being good at recognizing and affirming impossible things” and bring it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
•how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
[...]