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

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

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#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

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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:) “man: a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, which freely traverses the surface of the earth, which appears at the head of all other animals over which it reigns, which lives in society, which has invented the sciences and the arts, which has its own notions of good and evil, which gives itself masters, which makes its own laws, etc.”
•anthropocentrism of modern thought (Diderot --> “why do we not introduce man into our work the way he is placed in the universe? why do we not make him a common center?”)
•(18th and 19th century) offering a hierarchy and linking the human to a privileged one among them--to reason, understanding, sensation, the passions, consciousness, the intellect

he can no longer claim to be capable of scientifically understanding the entire world

(Kant in Logic, @apass, three core questions guiding his critical project:)
•what do i know?
•what may i hope for?
•what ought i do?
•what is man?

}--> [*]humanism: mobilization of a foundationalist concept of man

=/= tradition of identifying man with a certain feature, aspect, or property that embodies or expresses his nature
=/= the Platonic-christian idea that man possesses an eternal soul
=/= Feuerbachian-Marxist approach that sees Man as his own goal
=/= the idea of a human nature that is given, foundational, single, or readily available

“death of man”
Heidegger's Letter on Humanism
Kojeve's second note on “the end of history”
Althusser
Foucault's concluding chapter to The Order of Things
Derrida's The Ends of Man

(existentialist entrapment of man in his world, #alienation)

(in Being and Time) Heidegger's Dasein ==>
•stripping man's shared element down to its being-there
•subsumes and displaces the humanity of man
•rejection of the I as an absolute, independent subject that approaches a world largely separate from it
--> from ontic determination --to--> ontico-ontological determination [of human]
*the humanity of Dasein remains and must be understood as derivative of both its ontic and ontological status

metaphysical presupposition (that he cannot claim to be capable of fully describing or understanding natur) -->
(human approached and understood only in terms of) *results* or *side-effects* (of language, existence, history, phenomena):
•in phenomena: man finds himself thrown in the world of phenomena and life; he is not grounded in some transcendental fashion (Heidegger, Kojeve, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret)
•in language: he is an interpreter of signs and symbols that form part of greater systems independent of his individual will
•in history: he is constructed and operates within cultural, religious, and philosophical limits imposed on him
•
[and] these systems are not consequences of man's creative activity, desire, or will
they are domains in which he finds himself
}--> *the human in man comes to mean less and less* ==> *we can only know what his approach to others (and other things) can reveal*



emergence of the new nonhumanist atheism + the negative philosophical anthropology --> French antihumanism's assault on:
•contemporary humanisms
•the legacies and utopian hopes of the Enlightenment
•liberal-bourgeois thinking grounded in human rights and individual autonomy
•Marxist humanism with its critique of liberalism and its expectations of a superior
humanity
•(human perfection & social harmony)


(Geroulanos's account of primary constellations of) humanism:
•christian humanism
•Renaissance educational humanism (founded on a return to ancient Greek models)
•Humboldt's reconceptualization of Renaissance humanism (in 19th century Germany)
•Enlightenment humanism (from Montesquieu through Rousseau and Condorcet)
•19th century liberal humanism (frequently based on natural law, autonomy over one's own body and mind, and human rights)
•socialist humanisms (with its commitment to contractarian social theory)

Encyclopedie's attack on theological knowledge

19th century construction of modern humanism (sociopolitical goals of a “human nature”) --> left-leaning, often democratic, (but certainly) utopian sociopolitical mentality

[*]ideology: a thinking that does not critique, nor even think its provenance from and proper relation to reality --Nancy--> humanism = the machine par excellence through which a community produces meaning for itself, “the system that produces meaning” ==> “we” (community's raison d'etre)
--> [humanism is] arbitrary, auto-productive, and all but tautological


{every political/philosophical movement:
1. rejected bourgeois humanism as insufficient, egotistical, and corrupt
2. claimed for itself a privileged access to the dignity of man
}--Geroulanos--> structure of a *rejection of mainstream thought and policy* for not taking into account (and hence devaluing) the goals of one's anthropo-theologico-political commitment

wreckage of WWII ==> man could not find meaning either in faith or in his own knowledge and construction of the world

_...dive into the depths of human solitude and suffering


(like existentialism and the Western Marxist tradition,) human rights came to operate as a “humanism from below” =/= generic and top-down humanisms (~ monopoly of violence that states held over their individual subjects)

(Geroulanos not arguing that antihumanism was the driving force or the secret heart of intellectual movements and philosophies, nor claiming that it was a single movement, concept, idea, or trend; rather) antihumanism is what emerged from, shaped, and configured a major matrix of concerns


problem with secular humanist utopias --> forging of a ‘new man’ through the mobilization of a specific a priori definition of man required (both):
•man's divinization خداسازى
•man's purge پاکسازى

essentialist definitions of man ==> biologistic, scientistic, political, religious, moralist projects ==>
•lay claim on universality
•prioritize themselves over any such universality

ideologies continue to disguise a *politics of the will* as a universalism

antihumanism = antiredemptive, antimoralist, antimessianist worldview

+ proliferation of tropes --> dooming contemporary man to an existence without meaning or future:
•last man (Nietzsche, Camus, Blanchot)
•death of Man (Malraux, Kojeve, Blanchot, Foucault)
•devirilization of man (Kojeve, Bataille, Queneau)
•terror (Marlaux, Bataille, Kojeve, Merleau-Ponty)
•

Kojeve and Jean Wahl --> antifoundational realism --> new anthropology

antihumanism
a precondition of thought
a fluid matrix of ideas
a philosophical attitude

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Malraux's (literary-metaphysical pursuits [echoes Nietzsche + intellectual Left]) heritage to us (to artists): the alternative to bourgeois individualism [can be achieved] through commitment to a justice based on a quasi-Marxist notion of human dignity --> the *uprooted, cultured, and powerless individual* who struggled against the nation-driven, science-executed destruction wrought by (arid and morally bankrupt) modern warfare [---> go to forensic architecture, apass] --> (the idea that death of man can be averted through) ***a recognition of the heroism of the resistance*** + turn to human creativity

how i have used a non-western voice (“i am from outside the west”) to provide for myself an escape from political categorization + claiming the knowledge of an insider and enjoying the analytical clarity of distance --> i make claims both *expertise in* and cool-headed *distance from* the essence of europe

(technique of) epistolary exchange


(to think of Kantian cosmopolitanism a) a genuine model for commitment =/= outdated illusion

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

research method (a heritage of surrealism:) exquisite corpse technique --> (unpredictable and) innocent inventiveness

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

for Sohrevardi and Avicenna: nature = chah چاه shahr gheyravan (material of nature/world: ghir قیر) --> zolmatkade ظلمت کده 

#comparative reading of stranded
ghorbat gharbia --> Crusoe

•daryaye sabz دریای سبز  (green sea) = donyaye mahsusat دنیای محسوسات (phenomenological world)
•دایه daye = nafse nabati (vegetal self)- khahar sister = alame made عالم ماده (hayula هیولا) --> (you should) wrap it in azab عذاب
•woman = shahvani شهوانی carnal, pas-mandani پسماندنی (the one who stays, Lot's wife leaving the catastrophic city ~= mashmul-e azab مشمول عذاب) =/= salek سالک wonderer==> ba shahvat nemitavan soluk kard =/= queer mysticism
•maghak مغاک ghaar chah قعر چاه (where abe hayat is آب حیات =/= abe heyvan آب حیوان) = riazat ریاضت

from the spiritual point of view we are always at the bottom of the pit




rigid bodies
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?=contextId=BULLETNODES
A rigid body is a polygonal or NURBS surface converted to an unyielding shape. Unlike conventional surfaces, rigid bodies collide rather than pass through each other during animation. To animate rigid body motion, you use fields, keys, expressions, rigid body constraints, or collisions with particles.
Maya has two kinds of rigid bodies--active and passive. An active rigid body reacts to dynamics--fields, collisions, and springs--not to keys. A passive rigid body can have active rigid bodies collide with it. You can key its Translate and Rotate attributes, but dynamics have no effect on it.



notes on The Rigid Bodies / (metaphysics of 3D)
the simulacrum / ideal / image --> Plato
mystic geometry --> Pythagoras (--> mathematization of the real, real ‘is’ math)
}--> what does it mean to perform 3D for these two thinkers?

fire simulation in Maya <--> cotton touching fire in Islamic philosophy

(<)>  -->{
() manifest image --> shader/topology/raytracing
<> underlying (scientific?) image --> C++ / physics engine / object oriented programming

the mode of production in current 3D-biz creates a sort of cultural collateral or collateral culture (term by Lazzarato). 3D practices are arising as series of activities, not recognized as “work,” rather involved in defining and fixing artistic/cultural standards, tastes, norms, and strategically public opinion.
“is this real or fake?” (you have to click)
--> when the productive mediation is smashed to pieces and replaced by this question.
either it is ‘made’ or ‘real’
[structural imposibility, a double bind, ...]
}--> the image-warrior who violently asks us to choose between the visible and the inv[...]