[...]

**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)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Calvert) the ways the digital apparatuses are working, and the kinds of tensions and creativities between the cyber infrastructures and the other kinds informational management discourses displace other book discourses *** --> categories explode in library practice
[Calvert donig brilliant discourse analysis of library sciences --> has direct impact on practices of reading#, different kinds of knowers]
techno-biblio-capital: techno-capital and library practices embedded in each other -->{ [*]technology: assemblages of people, computers, software, discourses, techniques and workarounds that make them function; [*]capital: a social arrangement in which buyers of labor power are entitled to profits and the sellers of labor power to wages and all the effects entailed in that arrangement; [*]techno-capital: techniques, discourse and technologies used to naturalize and derive capital from information and information technologies}
*curiosity = a small and local kind of *freedom[= agency within constrain ==enabling==> skillful meanings], curiosity resists control and has the power to defeat one's favourite self-certainties, can also be commodified for consumer culture specializing in providing private pleasure,
techno-capital objectivism: (neutrality of) collection developemnt and format choices --> power-sensitive judgments
“we will engineer ourselves out of that” --> naive technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers

-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]

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

(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***


you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*


(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.

there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)


up-to-the-minute technologies

complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles

histories of dispossession and genocide


“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?


[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places): you could be here, you could succeed here, but never belong here


Haraway's ‘literal’ makings:
•“companion” is about whom you are at table literally*
•to be homo sapiens is to be in multispecies interdependencies literally*


my issue with the image of the free floating meaning network popular in artists’ thinking: yes meanings foreground and background. they swirl, but they don't swirl at random

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

MOU (memorandum of understanding)-->{@Esta + Zoumana + Hoda
*memorandum: memo, reminder, note, تذکره --?--> passport : آنچه موجب یادآوری شود --> آنچه موجب دخول شود
a legal document describing an agreement between parties less formal than a contract
[1994 U.S.-North Korea nuclear pact, the MOU between Bush and Kerry for 2004 debates,]

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

batlagh باتلاق



it is (perhaps the most) important to help transform (your or my) ‘wounded-child’ to ‘wonder-child’ (--> @Hoda)
[the image of the wonder-child in all my workings]***

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

•accumulative: gradual increase as a whole, someone/something doing the accumulating, emphasis on the process of accumulating
•cumulative: nongradual successive additives, associated with that which is accumulated, emphasis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”

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

[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality

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

Stewart

surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image

images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]

spectacular graphics of disaster

watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition

--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself

the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life

the loop of the citizen as consumer

***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself


تأثر ta'asor, نتیجه‌ی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy

the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in

in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march


(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date

the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams


the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact


“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”

(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream


[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path

traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}

(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia

a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)

(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye

“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact

surged toward the scene of their confident excitement

impact ==> the social

#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses



a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass

(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?


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

armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war

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

“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force

hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”


high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time

[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism

[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing

[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile

imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine


which hyperobject you are caught in?

image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow


figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex

my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark

situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner


*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)


the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of the world’?

(Morton asking for) a geophilosophy that doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance

Morton: global warming =/= climate change
if one takes the ‘climate change’ as a substitute for ‘global warming’ is like “cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust


acronyms, abbreviations:
dialoc دیالوک --> decrease in appropriate levels of concern
tomas توماس --> terrain of media and the sociopolitical realm
cohhatg کوهاج --> coincidence of human history and terrestrial geology
hhatg حج --> human history and terrestrial geology
pb پی بی --> philosophy's bandwidth
sdwa صدوا --> substances decorated with accidents -->
ldwa لدوا --> lumps decorated with accidents --> featureless lumps, and those things have accidental properties, like cupcakes decorated with colored sprinkles (arayesh آرایش) }--> this thinking still continues, despite the fact that ‘thought has already made it irrelevant’ --> thamii تامی, (for example birds for Attar are merely decorative features of Attar's social, psychic, and philosophical space)
soth صوث --> speculating outside of the human
sim سیم --> small island of meaning
etimom اتیموم --> everything is made of mind
hhbn هبن --> hand-holding benevolent narrator (-which is vanished)
(auto) cad کد --> (automatic) comforting aesthetic distances
iockat --> intentional objects commonly known as thoughts
atot آتو --> (you only ever perceive your particular) anthropomorphic translations of things
ejich جیش --> exhilarating jump into cognitive hyperspace --> displacement that Copernicus or Derrida does
foe --> fantasies of embeddedness [<-- phenomenology <== grounding of Kant (begining in 1900)]
avaa اوا --> a vertiginous antiliteral abyss
iwen --> intimacy with existing nonhumans
mok --> mathematization of knowing (--> Descartes, Newton) ==> hiding philosophical and ideological decisions made in acts of knowing =/= ontology (as a vital and contested political terrain)
icad --> ideology of “the consumer” and its “demands” (that capital then “meets”) --> adventure of modernity
fvod --> from the viewpoint of “objective” description (a bad way of explicating the objects that are already here)
toc --> troops of critique
towwk توک --> ‘technology of what we know’ (techniques that decide the differences between ‘what we know’ and ‘what is’. Morton's hyperobject is a towwk)
usoc --> uncanny strangeness of existence (work of Heidegger)
lawot --> (something is) ‘laying around in the workshop of thinking’ (let's reuse what appears to be broken lawot)

visist = visit + resist


correlationism: the notion that philosophy can only talk within a narrow bandwidth, restricted to the human-world correlate : meaning is only possible between a human mind and ‘what it thinks' = its “objects” (flimsy شل و ول and tenuous رفيق as they are) ~-> the light on in the fridge when you close the door
-Heidegger (towering through) is a correlationist who asserts that without Dasein, it makes no sense whatsoever to talk of the truth of things, which for him implies their very existence--for him idealism, not realism, holds the key to philosophy. (Heidegger's tool-analysis: when equipment--which for all intents and purposes could be anything at all--is functioning, or “executing” [Vollzug], it withdraws from access [Entzug]; that it is only when a tool is broken that it seems to become present-at-hand [vorhanden] --> is this what Femke is proposing to apass?)

Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined

[*]epistemology:
•how can i know what there are (or are not) real things?
•what gives me (or denies me) access to the real?
•what defines the possibility of access?
•what defines the possibility of possibility?


•Einstein discovered a rippling, flowing spacetime
•Tarkovsky discovered the ‘sensuous material of film stock’ --> ssoci
•Husserl discovered something strange about the objects: no matter how many times you turned around a cion, you never saw the other side as the other side --> the #coin had a dark side that was seemingly irreducible


Morton's (technology of what we know) hyperobject is his sense of an asymmetry between the infinite powers of cognition and the infinite bening of things, yet he doesn't evoke descriptive practices, which could be helpfull--he is missing something, here: “the gap between phenomenon and thing yawns open, disturbing my sense of presence and being in the world.”
“[...] i cannot locate the gap between phenomenon and thing anywhere in my given, phenomenal, experiential, or indeed scientific space” --> Xiri's problem
he disagrees with: (from Plato up until Hume and Kant) that there is some kind of dotted line somewhere on a thing, saying “cut here” --so he concludes: “things are themselves, but we can't point to them directly.” =/= nonrepresentational theory, Stewart is much more useful. we can see Morton's taste for (a masculine) sublime in modeling his hyperobjects

flat ontology: there is hardly any difference between a person and a pincushion. and relationships between them, including causal ones, must be vicarious (نيابتى) and hence aesthetic in nature


(no) realism that only bases its findings on “ontic” data

scientific discoveries are necessarily based on a decision about what real things are

*disaster [ontologic] taking place against a stable background [ontic]*

causality after Hume and Kant : causality as a feature of phenomena, rather than things in themselves ==> humans are not totally in charge of assigning significance and value to events that can be statistically measured
entities that become visible through post-Humean and post-Kantian statistical causality --> anthropogenic global warming

causal factoid


humiliators [there is no center and we don't inhabit it]:
•Copernicus
•Darwin
•Freud (displacing the human from the very center of psychic activity)
•Marx (displacing human social life with economic organization)
•Heidegger
•Derrida (displacing the human from the center of meaning-making)
•Nietzsche
•Deleuze and Guattari
•
~= there is no edge =/= (film Lucy or Neil Tyson series suggesting that) there is an edge (of time to see everything perfectly), in some (privilaged) transcendental sphere of pure freedom, Lucy's chair literally sitting a VIP box beyond the edge --> anthropocentrism: the idea of a privilaged transcendental sphere
Kant --> (although we are limited in finitude) our transcendental faculties are at least metaphorically floating in space beyond the edge of the universe --> #milieu #tasavof #sufism


...هزار و یک hezaro yek
universe of trillions of finitudes


[*]thing: a rift between what it is and how it appears


(Morton > Herman:) human consciousness wants *to preserve knowledge as a special kind of relation to the world quite different from the relations that raindrops and lizards have to the world* (<-- so dangerous and so difficult to resist [<-- next level of situated knowledges] -->) also want to claim that the very status of [his] utterance is somehow special <== (human) ‘thought’ is given a unique ability to negate and transcend immediate experience
(claims that the human doesn't exist ==>) elevating the strucure of human ‘thought’ to the ontological pinnacle سرمنزل

everything (such as modernity) banks on a certain forms of ontology and epistemology to secure its coordinates


speculative realism, a rogue machinery

saving power:
•expecting an eschatological solution from the sky
•a revolution in consciousness
•a people's army seizing control of the state
•

obsessive robots (that hold open the sliding doors of history just as they appear to be snapping shut, imprisoning us in modernity forever)


*distance*: (the schizophrenic defense, “object in mirror,”) a psychic and ideological construct designed to protect me from the nearness of things
-the concept of ‘nature’ is (such) an “object in mirror” (#amazon project)
بنداز دور mythical land away --> a dis-dimension called ‘away’ (door دور) in iran (door andakhtan دور انداختن)
(there is no away on this surface we are in) --> throw away: an optical effect : there is no loger distances our image from us in a nice, aesthetically manageable way, but sticks to us --> we are glued to our phenomenological situation (--> entanglement of equipment and quanta =/= three pigs)

a threatening proximity

“i do not feel ‘at home’ in the biosphere” (yet it surrounds them and penetrates them) --> most humans feel that way. how one's entire physical being is caught in its meshwork of narezayati نارضایتی
(physical existence carrying with it) a trace of unreality --> آمدنم بهر چه بود : “i am not sure where i am anymore. i am at home in feeling not at home.”


one's normal sense of time as a container


Ehsan's ghost/sheikh film --> demonic in that through them causalities flow like electricity


ambient, latin ‘ambo’ means ‘on both sides’


the old art theories that separated sweetness and power collapse
sweetness, it turns out, just is power: the most powerful thing


weather as monster

baby learns to distinguish between the vomit and the non-vomit, and comes to know the non-vomit as self


(a society in which) growing scientific *awareness of rish* ==changes==> the nature of democracy

back-to-nature festivals

nihilistic princes of darkness

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

my work is *to mix stories*

everyday engagements with other kinds of creatures (in my case: ajayeb) ==> opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding

cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)

‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*

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

on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)


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

basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers

my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading

each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading

literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]

i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art

all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)


catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)

readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation

a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•


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

learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose

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

(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the world of people and things?]
•beginning to grasp the concepts of space and time in more logical, practical ways
•causality
•reading (is an industrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about identity formation?) --> [according to Erikson] only when identity is established [~ experimentation stopped] the questions “What have I got?” and “What am I going to do with it?” can be asked
[*]identity: to identify the object of one's fidelity***
-identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently prolonged
-->? genital stage

-(20-39 years) Intimacy / Isolation --> Love
[Can I love?]
[*]distanciation: “the readiness to isolate and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to our own, and whose territory seems to encroach on the extent of one's intimate relations”

-(40-64 years) Generativity / Stagnation --> Care
[Can I make my life count?]
guiding the next generation

-(65-death) Ego Integrity / Despair --> Wisdom
[Is it okay to have been me?]
(only now is able to) develop integrity

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you have a ‘bad day’
(in Socrates:) because you are ignorant of geometry
(in Feminism:) because you are a man
(in communicative capitalism:) because you are ‘boring’


how to plot to take over the world?


(Rilke)
“I wish to help and expect to be helped. Everyone's eternal mistake is to take me for a healer when, in fact, I am only attracting others, for my own profit, in the trap of a simulated assistance.”


(your) interview and interruption


I would take a bullet for you
/////
you go for the knife and i prepar myself to die

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

duty ~= Dienst nach Vorschrift
(the problem is that it is not enough to have a duty, rather, you have to define what ‘duty’ is. that is the only duty)

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

MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy... Although, that kid, guy, he has a spark. He is a pure account man.
MADMAN#2: and what is that job all about?
MADMAN#1: i don't know. it's about listening to people and never saying what's really on your mind.
MADMAN#2: no. it's about letting things go so you can get what you want.


“I could tell the minute she saw who I realy was, she never wanted to look at me again, which is why I never told her.”
--> i am not telling you anything, because the minute you see who i realy am, you never want to look at me again.

“...but nobody knows what is wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away.”

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

is this an honour?


(a) better thug


so, one summer evening, I was wrong, ...

once when i was wrong...


thank you for that kind (of an) introduction



i like to make decorations for other people's work

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Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”



daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته



i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز


phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant --> for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,


subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring


[title]

might suffer

Freud's penis


ignoria


aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)



tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشت‌های مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
•train ==> skill

taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])



Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker



regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain

i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)

شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cannot be based on or created by mogheyiat, that means situatedness cannot make us feel/care/hate/commit]
شخصیت موقع بین shakhsiat moghe’ bin: situated subjectivity [--Haraway--> situated objectivity --> commitment based on care]

موقعیت mogheyiat (situtation, circumstance, condition) =/= واقعیت vagheyiat (reality)
(?one should) to live by vagheyiat, not mogheyiat
[i am educated to base research and knowledge both on mogheyiat and on vagheyiat --> crisis of situated knowledge in interpersonal relations: to feel about others based on mogheyiat/situation is a bad idea(?)]
@Hoda: turning mogheyiat into vagheyiat


(verb <--> adjective)
do the right thing (or take the right side) جانب حق را گرفتن [a form of closing off distance =/= disembodied seeing] <--> righteous حق به جانب [a form of embodiment, zero distanciation]



“your joke is the right of the other person”


you are hurt ==> “the other was bad” (is not the conclusion that is helpfull or capable of giving an opening, and it ends badly)
=/= people make mistakes

roshd رشد =/= pishraft پیشرفت
roshd --> shodan, becoming
pishraft --> to gain, progress,


selfishness =?=> being nice
khod khahi خود خواهی ==> nagozashtan-e tasvir/tasavor bad dar digari ["this is me, not you!"]
selfish = good at communication (do taraf-e miz khub harf zadan), bad at relating (nazdik shodan)
shakhsiat farasu-negar (cannot see themselves; ~=? selfish personality) =/= narcissistic pesonality (they have better chances for healing --> small doses of narcissism is necessity for self-interogation and integrated ego formation[?])


*anger is cheating*
(behaviour hal, negah be mozu-ha --> bazi بازی, hoghe حقه [transvaluated into innocence])


farar az ta'rif-haye ejtemayi فرار از تعریفهای اجتمایی ~-> farar az ejtema فرار از اجتماع

paying attention to others doesn't mean that you are understanding them (in the case of lonliness)

[title]
thousend and one questions

dark answers

why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?



negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)

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

savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note

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

being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness

ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement

narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up

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

“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]


liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)



takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)


تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking


the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بی‌عسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge


rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)

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

•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength, leadership
◾کناره گیر aloofness --> wisdom, independence
•*psychotic: makes a house, take it seriously, invites everyone to come (--> loss of touch with reality)
}=/= richer, more complex, more satisfying personality --> person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings

•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)




my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself


IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long


vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)

death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بی‌وفا, liabl)


put into words: have I been destroyed?


#workshop on Iranian elementary and post-elementary school books with adult artists


parde پرده ~= tasvir تصویر

damagh-sh دماغش
dar akhar -sh

حکمت مبتنی بر امور بین‌الذهانی
(hekmat mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense


[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•

(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)

‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*

issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,


[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوع‌ها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجا‌های بی‌معنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]

}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need both, because sometimes internalizing an alien syllable (via linguistic intelligence) might nest and flower their own random meaning networks, in a way that is not possible in mental intelligence



according to behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired s[...]