[...]br />
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization

عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people

in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena


we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”

•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?


(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation


enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)

(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)


(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)


(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.

...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality


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

kinetic, energies expressed in variables


integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero


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

metallurgy concerns matter in movement

matter-flow

what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?

form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default


[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter


*skill and ontoloical risk [--> question at CG artist]
-becoming subject to the processes they are involved in --(this commitment)--> involves them in both the task and its ongoing material consequence

skilled practices situated as the mediator between one realm and the other =/= (in Amazonia) where natural and cultural processes are not distinguished in the same way, skill is conceived far more broadly and is not an exclusively human capacity
(for Kuna) [*]skill: a mark of the maker's openness to alterity, learned in dreams from animals that lost the ability to perform those activities in mythic times, it not only acts upon surfaces or moulds forms; it also transfers qualities


skill matters (=/= gauge of technical action applied to raw material--like the case of The Magicians)

hackers and potters
(potters’ identities were vulnerable, how about hackers after a millennium?)

CG artist's intervensions in 3D materials (concidered active)

(we are living in) an inconstant world in which materials (including computers?) were lively and equally capable of subjectivity

(conventionally conceived) polygon modeling: reproducing, or representing a mental image of a completed body-pot

*?how CG artist can learn, like La Candelaria potters ****to take part in an aesthetics of care that is also a response to the threat of the inconstancy of all forms****, responding to perturbations in the movement of materials, to include knowledge of its inconstancy and of materials always capable of subjectivity
(this is significant for my research on ajayeb, due to the ways iranian culture is attracted to the image, and my self to CG and digital form making)

my relationship with the digital (articulated with Alberti:) that body-polys (body-pots) are ambivalent responses to the threat of inconstancy in a world wherein forms (like statues of myrtle) were only ever apparent --> each making of a body-poly (or pot) is a performance and an improvisation, unscripted and therefore cab go wronge
[Alberti + Budden + Sofaer + Ingold + Hallam]


3D model = partial subject

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

in Maya particles are as little ping-pong balls --✕--> relativity theory destroyed the idea of consistent objects
--> extreme forms of realism



Hitchcock's vertigo effect --> a tool i built years ago: https://www.highend3d.com/maya/script/vertigotool-for-maya
simultaneously zooming and pulling away : we apear to be in the same place, yet the place seems to distort beyond our control ==reestablishing==> the way we experience “here”
the vertigo tool doens't do away with human experience, it drastically modifies it in a dizzing manner
--> a dangerous knowledge zoom lens tool, a vertiginous antirealist/antiliteral abyss (=/=? irony device ==> presenting us with intimacy with existing nonhumans)

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

#veil
@Janina
@Ale


Nicole Archer: ‘textile’: a material formed at the intersections of desire and modern politics
•textile's ‘textility' = texture
•textile's ‘textuality' = readability

to be prepared to address relations consistencies ==> (hope to) meaningfully reform them

*(Archer lingering in the textile's volatile gum) to develop forms of critique that can account for the peculiar textiles ‘we’ are currently wrapped-up in* [globalized economies, militarized laboratories, etc. (BioSteel and so on)]

text +/& textile
•in metaphor: the social fabric, the Internet, the Fold, etc.
•in myth: Arachne's textiles, or Penelope's epic loom
}--✕-->? to account for neo-liberal and transgenic subjects

(traditionally:) textile (racialized and gendered, as “woman's work”) “=/=” text

*fabric conditions and binds our desires and bodies ---@Janina

(Archer >) Gernreich exposed how the fashion system instrumentalized the body's desire to move” while inscribing it within the time-signatures of modern capitalism

uniform = contemporary fashion's other

digi-camo (redesigned and digitally remixed camouflage fatigues worn by the US military)

desire for “freedom” and for alternative temporalities + desire for discipline and physical restraint
}--> *tight spaces our desires are prone to work themselves into*

textures and taxonomies of fashion and uniformity

Abu Ghraib --> (in the pursuit of a) perverse desire for justice (a desire that many feel is best met in the violent erasure of certain subjects)



(let's) stop pretending that “we” weren't already caught-up in the messy circuits of desire

“[...]Freud's figure of the woman who has nothing better to do than but braid her pubic hair into a futile simulation of the phallus, and who (interestingly enough) accidentally invents weaving as an outcome of this inherently fetishistic gesture” (Archer > Barthes > Freud)


Gernreich working with “the future” as a medium and not as a destination***
-he was keen to work with fashion as a ‘time-based medium’(~ deliver us onto alternative temporalities)

[*]fashion: a distinctly modern clothing regime engineered to materially manipulate “the past” so it may serve as a springboard into “the time to come”, an attempt to create the perfect tension between “right now” and “back then” ==> (fashion serving as one of modern culture's main engines catapults the wearers) towards a time and place where present-day problems can no longer reach them and unknown pleasures are made manifest & continually converting the erratic power of our desires into a kind of motion that can be effectively capitalized upon

(brackets and bracelets)

...momentary and marvelous sensations of free fall (by way of design)

Janina's wardrobe malfunctions

*the fine line between sexual liberation and sexual exploitation (in Space 1999 and Star Trek uniforms)*
(Archer:) “Star Trek's futuristic costumes assert their ‘other-worldliness’ by emphatically exposing as much of a woman's body as possible to a relatively prudish American public during the peak of the sexual revolution. Theiss’ garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”

() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms

easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity

*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)

...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed


*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability


textile screens

textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities

(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’


textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire

capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable



embodied politics of impropriety

rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines

the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)

...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference

sartorial scheme

abstracting the concept of ‘the body’

attire

(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations


{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...


the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)

and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (like the warp and weft of a textile) to remain discreet, always perpendicular

modern aesthetic theory --> contradictory structure of difference of “fashion =/= art” : “fashion design = art's constitutive other” (= that mode of creative production that is beholden to the market and to the manufactured whims of the embodied, consumer passions =/={ art's singularity, extraordinariness, [Nietzschean ethics of] standing alone ==> timeless or universal knowledge =/= ‘everyday culture'})

radical beauty of the quotidian

mundane material culture is repeatedly *elevated* and “translated” into art --> “losing its place within lived reality ==> to become critically meaningful” =/= (Gernreich's) art and fashion critically transformed so that they run parallel and start to resonate with one another

(for Benjamin) translation [~= criticism]: allowing (translatior's) language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue [=/= preserves the state in which (translatior's own) language happens to be]
-to transform “the original” text/thing through the medium of the other, echoes that are produced in the space that opens up between an “original” and “secondary” text --> [*]translation: inconsequentiality of original/secondary separation
--Gernreich--> to make clothes in-between art and fashion (now and the future, the self and the other)


it-girl

Beatlesque escape

new paths that young people are charting requires clothes



(Archer is making me interested in fashion by helping me go through the) economic and scopophilic grains of the fashion industry

the idea of the ‘new look’ absolutely dominating the fashion scene during the mid 21st century
‘new look’ fashion strictly obeying the laws and divisions of optically delineated Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**

[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]

relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns


couture خياط زنانه

animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made

perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)

social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**

***oppression =/= passivity***

Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*

{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)


Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”

Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify

“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”

(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali

(Zizek:) through fashion we learn how to desire --> how to desire our own subjugation, as well as the possibilities of our own freedom

*political potency of desire* (--> do we need to recognize and manipulate it to our advantage? @Foad)
توان سیاسی میل


[looking for?] proper names --> quickly recognized for offering some sense of sonic semblance in a sea of deconstructed phonemes in Anglo-shaped mouths

#wear my lecture


*fantastic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)

[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]

people who don't care about *dressing up* are situating dress reform (fashion) in a type of neutered and disembodied utilitarianism (--Janina--> ignorant to fashion's textures and to the ways that fashion's formal dimensions could motivate the body to move beyond the pleasure principle)

politics and feelings of pleasure and displeasure --Gernreich--> absolutely central to any critical understanding or experience of the world

@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray

(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)


post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as movements and so on)
that is why i cannot simply critique existing forms for their morality nor simply offer humanist solutions to the problems (of capitalism, Iran, etc.) like Gernreich, i am recognizing that by reinforcing or relaxing shapes and materials of the there-is, i could direct the ways our desires became caught-up in the system's works, or that certain materials only worked in certain ways



affordable (double)knit fabrics: made of variable columns of inter-looping yarns, [they] are made to stretch in a variety of directions =/= non-elasticated woven fabrics
--> texture of the night, (use it) to drape oneself over the arm of a couch, or to run after someone leaving a party a little too early

paths and forms of pleasure that Gernreich hoped to see all young people exploring

[...] Meanwhile ‘Man’ is temporarily bereaved. But they will find a new way. ***And the new way will have important consequences for clothes*** -Gernreich

capitalize: transformation of unexpected --into--> simple --into--> expectable --into--> convention/style

images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp

plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico

vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth


xxxx

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

(we are in) style wars***

critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices

*aesthetics of mending*

mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)

Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*

literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation

to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending

...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference


business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism

how each of us work to fix identities

to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us

relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity

(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)

conspicuous ornaments of legend

masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings


(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip


towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations

which relics in contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?

...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repairing

*we need to imagine how to restyle the relation between wounding and care so we can start to transform the fabric of our society*
(Archer)

@Sina: deconstructing the work of mending ajayeb


[stitches] pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality
(Mark Newport)

linger in the cut produced by the suture (=/= patch over the proper wound)

(what kind of mending dares us?) to consider different, less clear-cut paths of relation and being (--✕--> masculinity's wounded duty)

Freud's fold of castration anxiety, fetishism, and Oedipus complex unfold in feminized form of labor to stitch and sew, to mark the wounds that “men must suffer” --> fashion material ritual, transforming and ideologically reinforcing femininity

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

(Janina's distinctive sartorial sensibilities)
(The Flash TV series charachers, each a free-agent entrepreneur, the personification of neoliberal agency)
-performing the affective venture and glamour labor, characteristic of the cultural industries today, (embodying the) hypermediated brand intrusion and suffusion
-using your own self-consciously branded personae to stand out in a cluttered field of visual noise
“famous for being famous” --> the fable of “that which captures our gaze, does not capture our respect”
-fame is built out of material human bodies moving through physical space, engaging and interacting with other material human bodies. it is forged in a social somewhere.
...photographed on the right sidewalks at the right times by the right photographers
-persistent logic of image accumulation and circulation
-photographer’s exceptional status: the ‘decisive moment
-making yourself into a street style sensation through sheer force of will
***practice of distinction*** (--> you have to make it appear that other people are more interested in you than you are in them)
...take someone’s photo, post it online, appropriate their social capital, then ditch them and move on (a game played throughout the fashion industry) <-- constant and well-managed visibility
(the misleading idea of) “style ==> to be picked out of a crowd” [style, that little something extra as vague and indeterminate as Weberian charisma that most people simply do not possess]
-the fashion photographer's eye: the affective instrument through which the photographers feels what she sees (intuitive, embodied, automatic, as a style radar)
street style star <== the right people like you
-what is new in new moment of public viewing? can we have a public moment (exhibition, etc.) and concider glamor and fashion and modernity coinciding with technology and digital platforms?
(for me still the inner thoughts and public life are not blured, that is why i cannot post so quick online)



why use design as a template for reworking ethnography?
*the design process is generally oriented toward transforming (or cooking) “raw” information into “useful knowledge,” a guided mutation of “mere ideas” into “workable concepts” or a “feasible design” that then becomes an “object” (in all possible meanings of the term) in the world*
design: techniques for “working out” and “working through”


charrette شارت
a balance between structure and flexibility
1. active deconstruction: (to arrive at collaboratively, of the work's otherwise obscured underlying composition) to focus on:
•ethnographic specifics
•theoretical frameworks
•(writing) style
•how arguments are constructed
•
2. projection: (to engage a bit more seriously in speculative, comparative, and synthetic thinking)
•sorting activity, posting on the wall
•identify clusters of concepts that could form new and potentially unexpected categories
•to select a few of the clusters that you feel (individually and collectively) are useful for generating possible new avenues for speculation
•
3. reconstruction: (dedicated to innovation)
to develop a “rapid prototype” for a new ethnographic/research form, method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using  pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on

developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials

slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text

https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”

•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.


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

“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time

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

many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”

juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose

an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*

positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)

-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, gravity]

she addresses ‘me’ ==> double address : oscillate between the personal and the impersonal ~ inclusion & exclusion --> to welcome...

personal pronouns ~-> ‘shifter’ ==allow==> speakers to ***shift from code to message*** (~ from the abstract to the concrete)

(for Barthes:) operation of messages of the mass media: ***to personalize all information, to make every utterance a direct challenge, not directed at the entire mass of readers, but at each reader in particular*** @constantvzw streaming hypothesis
(‘The Fashion System’)

(a too common) artistic strategy: *contradictory construction of the viewing subject by the stereotype*
(a too common) artistic address: *struggle over the control and positioning of the body in political and ideological terms* [--> in which stereotype plays a decisive role @Laura]

(?do you want me to be your)
worshiper
citizen
consumer
producer

(for Foad, and for most contemporary artists:) [*]stereotype: an instrument of subjection, to produce ideological subjects that can be smoothly inserted into existing institutions of government, economy, and sexual identity
“stereotype = to disavow agency”
(Owens on Kruger)

images of the nonproductive body
stereotype of action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family

for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*

[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)

stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them

(Foucault's notion of) power = effective immobilization of the social body

(the idea of) woman immobilized (turned to stone) by the power of the gaze

*medusa* had the power to turn to stone all who came within her purview (...is she the one who can turn stone back to person?)
to petrify, a producer of figures

Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)

medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:

Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive

(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life

(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)

Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)

[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope

artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator


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

Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's medusa effect ~~✕--> Calderwood's drawings *messy material semiotic* (figures that forcefully demand one's attention) --> queer pleasure to be caught in their dense but finely rendered patterns
-following the phallic loops & yonic openings (that obscure any semblance of a singular true body)

apotropaic stockings
جوراب زنانه بلاگردان

Kruger & Calderwood --Archer--> searing critique of gender identity and the ways that gendered stereotypes capture the body within a tight weave of politics and ideology

[*]medusa effect: a critical gesture located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)

Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits

find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”

[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes

flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’

(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]

*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance

(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)


•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance

stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --into--> today's signal*

***power is formally established and formally critiqued through the adaption or the obliteration of patterns*** ==> *pattern manipulation* so strategically necessary [@Laura, Elen] --> (Archer's) call to:
•to take advantage of those aesthetic practices that can direct attention away from a pattern's typical symbolic function (*or responsibilities to secure meaning and certain attending forms of power*)
•to aestheticize the pattern's capacity to function performatively (as a kind of critical figure that is always already inserted within the discourse of everyday life)

[in apass (we have to mark) how and where the negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available (#feedback)]
(de Man:) the figural dimension of a text “gives the language considerable freedom from referential restraint, but it also makes it epistemologically highly suspect and volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, or pleasure and pain”

(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”

the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)

(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood



spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)

[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production

using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire

“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)

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

phantom limb Grosz

(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*

body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]

==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification

Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology

•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*


(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb

[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the su[...]