[...]pecificity]
(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

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(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.
[...]