[...] 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?)
[...]