[...]ination 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 time --> clock time
•intensive model of time ==> movement across the “real” axis


effectively panpsychist: every entity is conscious, has a soul, and potential to intensify; minds in a world of minds


Whitehead's concept of transformative togetherness
ontological vitalism: exist ==> consciousness


reality precedes abstraction -->
for Sadra “point of view” is a distraction (for vojud وجود)
•perspectives
•names
•quiddity
--> because the positing of names and description is in correspondence to concepts and universal meanings, not in correspondence to existential identities and external/concrete forms (Sadra)
=/= Avital and Kohn --> but they do in amazonian forest semiotics
--> my point of departure with Sadra. i am tracing transfigurative signs of the flesh in practices of storytelling --(or not)--> Sadra emphasizes that imagination is better able to grasp Being: concepts are too static to capture/grasp the act of being (--> are they?! we have to deal with them anyway: wild facts, fables of practice, images are concepts, etc.)

ماهيت quiddity --> that which is understood (=/= being --> that which is experienced)
quiddity in Sadra is like the habits that Peirce and Bergson grudgingly accept as necessary for thought, though they need to be swept away for creativity to emerge. hence the importance of intuition for Bergson and Sadra, and of induction for Peirce. (Marks)
}--> (my departure:) a point of research branch for me: “to swept away quiddity”, is another story possible?


images have the power to multiply --> and other “sticky” things?

(like Sadra and Marks) i also prefer images that do not simply confirm general categories of what can be thought but undermine them with singularities that stimulate the imagination (=/= The Black Mirror tv series)


(destructive delusions, ideological images,) true visions and hallucinations --> the disappointment in hearing the deja vu
-deja vu is the dream of remembering


the divine outside
an immanentized imaginal real to be the source of truthful visions


to read Qur'an (or any text) as if it has been revealed to you


the visions of the imaginal are nonstatice images of things in their act of becoming


-is my ajayeb a modern interpreter of the islamic imaginal realm?
the ajayeb is about the lesser elite stances of the islamicated imagination --> the imaginal ecological consciousness
[title]


*imagination in rational thought [logocentrism]:
myth, symbol, and metaphors used as part of rational dialogue
--✕--> other ways of bringing the unthought [beyond] into the thinkable }--> tasavof
--✕--> other ways of bringing the far into the wondrous (~ the active imaginal) ==> as a basis for practical concepts }--> ajayeb
}--> beyond the official discourse


a time-specific (contingent) truth that intensifies as more people engage with it
[like all the concepts and metaphors we are working and patterning in apass]

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

Malabou's plasticity (<--✕-- différance)
the subject is plastic (~= malleable, =/= elastic), it never springs back into its original form, it can explode
[we are now dealing with a (highly adaptable, flexible, and disciplined) rational autonomous subject in a post-industrial and global world]
neuronal subject
mojud-e dahri-e ma'ghul

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

[...] اسم اعظمِ
esme a'zam

reality has an autor --> author always has a proper name

Alice (in wonderland): words can have many meanings
Haraway: the question is: which one (of many meanings) is to be {the master (meaning)}--> problem of art criticism in iran --> *let's resource aesthetics* / in iran we need more “making-with” and “make-kin” rather than “criticize” or “grounding” (of criticism) or...

[*]master: one with power to dispose something, male head of house, conqueror, a man skilled in something --> *one holding this title*
-->[*]to author: to have the power to originate, to name [#Beyzai seeking to produce natural iranian knowledge] (Sohrevardi who learned to write and speak, also must decipher a text, the book of nature, authored legitimately by islamicated inheritances...)
-Haraway discussing women's travail to construct a voice, to have authority, to author a text, to tell a story
-modes of telling (that we adopt in our attempt to produce authority)

(اسم اعظم esme a'zam -->) knowers--on top --> (usual tricks) to recede while substituting a fetish (of self) --✕--> subject and object can cohabit without the master-slave domination


sexist science


?am i laying: a foundation for an epistemological [...]

?do iranians need this:
•theories which are the heritage of Greek science (and of the scientific revolution of the 17th century)
•an epistemology (informing our inquiries) be a family member to existing theories (of representation and philosophical-realism [that which Holakouee promotes for “modern” iranian]) (--> to avoid the problem of epistemological anarchism: an epistemology that justifies not taking a stand on the nature of things is of little use to women trying **to build a shared politics** [Mehdi is angry at the sculpture community because they embody that failure])
•(to adopt) a radical form of epistemology that denies the possibility of access to a real world and an objective standpoint
•noninvasive knowing (such as Sa'di) and prediction and control (#Olearius)
•(authority and power, as Beyzai is after,) to name/give the world a new identity, a new story
•accurate rendering of an idiosyncratic process of sensory overlap and association
•
•


[*]biology: modern origin story
biology tell tales about origins, about genesis, and about nature

biologizing


[what is the word made of, what is the flesh made of]
***(Haraway highlights) an inherited knowledge through the paternal line: the *word* was Aristotle's Galileo's Bacon's Newton's Linnaeus's Darwin's; the *flesh* was woman's --> and the word was made flesh, naturally

(in Europe, from 15th to 18th century, transformations of [both] metaphors [and social systems]:) female nature --from--> nurturing mother --to--> patient-resournce
--> capitalist forms of patriarchy: *merchant تاجر seeing dialectic of apocalypse* (TV series such as West World, etc.)


[the book of nature]
nature is authored (by somebody)

(power +) autorship ==(fabricates)==> reality


Milton's justification of the ways of God, [to tell stories]

*(how many times we[?] are) forced to read a book in a language that signifies our lack, our difference*

two rhetorical strategies for contesting (جنگیدن برای) a voice (-to set the terms of speech that define good knowledge):
1- reinterpreted the origin story to get it right the second time
2- rebelliously proclaimed a totally new story


(Olearius does the same with iran and his european audience,) [Haraway on] Barash “reveal to the popular audience the inner voice of biology, the cake of nature under the icing of culture, the biogrammer of genes structuring the message of the organism--all that modern people structuring the message of the organism--all so that modern people might come to know themselves and fulfill their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.”


phallic language


sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)

Star Trek --> sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture
in the (rhetoric of persuasion by) patriline [/ patrilineal naming] of sociobiology --> [the “ultimate message” of sociobiology in] (Planet of The Apes, Terminator,) Star Trek:
•a doctrine of necessary biological determinism of all the chief forms of domination which are especially driven by the motors of ruthless competition and dominance
•(the identification of) the proper expert
•cracking the code of nature's secret voice
•*knowing how to read the word, how to access the value of the coin ==gives==> the power of determination to those who use those tools*
***(?how and which objects of knowledge become/are) a tool in the search for the self --> ending regularly in the discovery of the totalitarian object: nature, gene, word

@Nicolas {(the question of) sulf-fulfillment made possible by revealing the common coin, the medium of exchange, the equivalent that defines reality, the generator of meaning}

skin-encapsulated egos
(epidermis)

code-gene-coin-word

(in Barash's evolutionary biology:) parental investment <--> cost-benefit analysis

(capillarity of power relations)

the import of the questions

****
the rhetoric of expert --> the expert touching the elephant -->{"the experts, then, were assembled to mediate and interpret the marital squabble between scince and humanism and to show their higher unity. and they spoke--individually, authoratively, joined in debate by the power of editors and panel moderators--in the rhetoric to which we have his version of the history of science adopted, so that the legitimate lineage could be established.”


logic of __[domination, determinism, , ,] embeded in (fashioning) the tool of __[word, , ,]


red-baiting: those who oppose the truth of a selfish world are self-deceiving MArxists


setting the original terms of discourse <-- dont't!

rhetorical inheritance (<-- my research)


somatize our oppression. @Hoda

“what we must begin to give voice to as scientists and feminists is that there is no such thing, or place, as underneath it all.” (Leigh Star)
(@apass) locus for research: us who speak to each other is the changing, moving, complex web of our interactions, in light of the language, power structures, natural environments (internal and external), and beliefs that weave it in time


@Marialena, (strategies emerging from/for) ...feminists to begin with the heritage of names in a patriarchal voice


Museum of Comparative Zoology


* facts are theory laden --> theories are value laden --> values are history laden *

•animal model research is full of illogical shoddy evidence and special pleading (Lila Leibowitz & Ruth Bleier)
•relations of aggression and gender (Freda Salzman)
•similarities in sociobiology and biosociology (Marian Lowe & Ruth Habbard)
•lateralization in neurophysiology (Leigh Star)
•medicalization of moral-political issues through transsexual surgery (Janice Raymond)

•**everything is a cultural institution** (animal studies applied to humans, science is a cultural institution)
•upright stance and times of divergence between ape and hominid lines have been arenas of mortal combat in evolutionary theory more than once


how science becomes official

“evidence becomes a hero of mine”

the heavy hero's burden of telling the hard truth --> a story sold well in iran's intellectualism
(i have become interested instead in extended bibliographies, *to see our alternatives*)


خیس خیس

language plays a major role in generating reality --> what plays major role in generating reality and legitimator of new realities in iran?

research question of storytelling:
***what are the rules of interpretation that make any story unequivocally readable?


(Haraway shows) the epistemological and political problems of humanism and realism latent (or patent) in feminism


two things i am teaching myself (since 3 or 4 years):
1- how to hold someone else's speech --> دیگری چه گفت؟
2- how to sustain a discussion --> چطور بحث را عوض نکردن؟


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

*bad geography: insult, tohin, similar to trauma, they don't have an concret external object (yet they create them), it is a register of an event, affectual implosion of a percept
insult dones't exist out there, (tohin kardan vojud khareji nadarad), it is in the inside --> is that why tasavof works and labors with insult?

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

(also in apass, dancers and choreographers, are the children of modernism art of De Kooning) reaching inward to find within the body that sublime thing (Deleuze calls) the *figural* [=/= (iranian miniature's) sublimity of the infinite (<-- Aela testing this, under ‘mysticism'~-> state of constant openness ==> transformative relation between self and other)]

we can trace the (seductive power of) fana فنا in contemporary media art (Hoda's sublime digital-rhythmic embodiments? --> transcendental desires remain questionable)

doctrine of the minimal: smallest unit is the atom or point =/=
doctrine of Zaher/Baten: smallest unit is the fold*** ==> zoomorphic writing, infinitesimal

(mysticism:) a system of measurement based (not on the point, rather) on the fold

Star Trek --> extensive universe of the infinite =/=
tasavof --> intensive universe of the infinitesimal

apotropaic, turning away evil ~=
memory sticks, ward off the fear of data loss

...the letter ceases to be a *figure* and becomes a *field*

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

#comparative reading of Hedayat's The Benedictions (Afringan آفرینگان) and Sohrevardi's ghorbat gharbia (رساله غربةالغربیة)

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

@Ali's knowledge is like ‘face recognition’ (~ cannot say how he cognizes a “know” yet he does)
Ali: daneshe hozuri + politics (which is a secular knowedge, Sachlich, based on scales, measures, and divisions)
*intellect (? can never be merely:)
non-propositional knowledge ~= daneshe hozuri دانش حضوری
~-> the idea of non-mediation and direct awareness ~-> internal memory (~->? belief)
=/= descriptive knowledge, propositional knowledge, knowledge of propositions (“know-that”) ~-> explicit knowing <-- why am i practicing this? (i say things like “this is this...”) and yet not transfering without the ‘knowing subject’ (depending on close interaction, shared understanding, trust, and even love. in combination with my performances that are like that, thinking on the fly =/= storage and retrieval of conceptual knowledge) [in ajayeb.net i pretend i am coding articulated knowledge in explicit aggregation and appropriable without the ‘knowing subject’ but it is not. it is also part of something personal, distributive, and contextual], [my education in setar was tacit and cognitive apprenticeship, situated cognition,]
=/= “know-how”, procedural knowledge, tacit --> embodied characteristic of the expert who acts without explicitly reflecting on conditions of its involvement (body's nervous system + endocrine system دستگاه درون‌ریز)
“know-who” (knowledge of networks)


(Gibson's) affordance --> relational account of perception (=/= encoding of environmental features into the perceiver's mind), preconditions for activity

(effects =/=) effectivity: abilities that determines what one could do and the interactions that could take place

‘perceived affordance’: perception of an object's utility =/= object's itself

affordance <--?--> mental representations (models, schemata, etc.)

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

#idea for a performance for ghorbat gharbia
one performer eyes closed in a room or laboratory research lab speaking the text while engaging through touch (throwing, fixing, putting, dropping) with the different optics and technologies, objects and positioned tools in the room (color, catapult, optical systems, laser, array of transparencies and opacities, etc.)
performer: Sina
director: Foad

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

(prehistoric)
your mother: violence
your father: tool
==> human

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

Geroulanos on emergence of an atheism disengaged from humanism during the second quarter of the 20th century

1925 to 1950

...in nonsecular horizon of existence and thought
conceptual reorganization of human in atheism

(19th century was marked by) “death of god” = man after the era of catastrophe : the age of World War I, the rise of Nazism, Stalinism, World War II, and the immediate postwar period

(philosophical and political) centrality of man = a conception dating to Descartes and proceeding through the tradition of natural law, the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and nineteenth-century liberalism and Marxism

rejection of central premises of post-Enlightenment, liberal, and socialist European thought

(how?) approach anew the codes addressing human life and significance

new nonhumanist atheism came to be expressed at different times in existentialist, hyper-ethical, or cynical terms, in nondoctrinaire socialist, reactionary, ultramodernist, or even downright antipolitical principles

(shift away from classical atheism and humanism <==) three movements:
1. an *atheism that would not be humanist* : an atheism mistrustful of secular دنيوى, egalitarian تساوى, and transformative commitments
2. a *negative philosophical anthropology*
3. *critiques of humanism*


(1)
(traditionally) atheism = secularism + humanism
absence of god in 19th century thinkers Feuerbach, Comte, Marx, Proudhon:
--> possibility of a good life and proper society
•Feuerbach's anthropotheism: “god = projection of human nature onto the heavens,” nothing more than man's representation of his own essence --> the task of the modern era was the realization and humanization of god : (transformation and dissolution of) theology --into--> anthropology
•Comte: positivist project for science and knowledge --> religion of humanity, explicitly religious atheism
•Proudhon: humanisme

{liberalism: humanism, and idealism had become moral and political expectations of the secular education projects}--> [*]humanism: what could reach, reveal, and cultivate the *proper and ethical* humanum of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom

Levinas's ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone

opening up an apocalyptic imagination
destroying the cultural optimism that had marked the turn of the twentieth century

ground for ethics, knowledge, and hope

(Kojeve, Bataille, reconceiving) atheism: a way out of any and all ideological systems
theological questions + mistrust of political hopes
to replace god with a political messianism, nation or state,
“disenchantment of the world = death knell for man” (?)

nonhumanist atheism: determined opposition to foundational concepts of man, knowledge, and truth (=/= critically rethinking problems of anthropotheism, of transcendence, of finitude)

critique of idealism = critique of transcendence
1920s: atheist humanism = idealist arguments about the capacity of the human mind (to transcend and objectively pattern the things that compose the world around it)

might and violence of ideologies relied on definitions of humanity (that made this violence not only plausible and rational, but almost necessary --> communism and colonialism)

Sartre's postwar minimal humanist commitment --> “existentialism = humanism”
-call or claim to failure of foundations and of man's status in the universe ultimately called up a new ethical command --> call for man to decide and to commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)

atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheologica), Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Beckett (Endgame)
figuration of finitude
critique of dreams of transparency
replace transcendence with excess or escape (<-- mystical background...)
=/= un-self-conscious humanist mysticism

secular interwar Europe's raising the human subject to all-powerful status ==> techno-scientific apocalypse --> waste of hope in the self and in the rhetoric of equality and humanism


(2)
philosophical antihumanism
human in suspension and deny that it owns or controls his own specificity and particularity

--> negative theology
denial to man of positive knowledge of divine nature
withdrawal from the possibility of first defining what is specifically human
=/= world deemed anthropocentric and subjectivist
•*reformulates the question of man, locating him in conceptual systems led by notions, such as Being, reality, society, or language* (--> to define him “negatively”)
•problematization of human subjectivity

--> modern determinations of “the human”
(Diderot in Encyclopedie[...]