[...]he 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 subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synesthetically (visual or tactile) organized and represented


postural schema وضعى

postural model (of the body): a three-dimensional image that both registers and organizes the information provided by the senses regarding:
•the subject's body
•the subject's location in space (~ its posture)
•the subject's relation to other objects
--> body image registers *current* sensation also preserves a *record of past* impressions

the *body schema* is plastic, kinesthetically and synergetically organized sensations
= physiological dispositions + physiological processes


Schilder's model of body image
social and interpersonal attachments and investments, as well as libidinal energy, from a major part of one's self-image and conception of the body (--Grosz--> more amenable to the kind of sociohistorical and cultural analysis of the body feminists are interested in)
*body schema: experience of the “unity of the body” (self-appearance of the body), an anticipatory plan of (future) action in which a knowledge of the body's current position and capacities for action must be registered, perception + mental pictures + representations
*image of the human body = the picture of our own body which we form in our mind
--Freud--> somatic compliance: the organic body's amenability تمايل to psychical takeover, (impelled by the organic disturbance) psychological processes take over and *adopt the biological disturbance as their own and utilize it to epress psychical whishes and significances* (both conscious and unconscious)

whenever difficulty occurs regarding the recognition of different parts of the body (or the position of the body) it occurs not only in the subject's self-perception but also always in the perception of other's bodies as well (<-- is that why i perceive other bodies in the street like i do? my relation with fashion, blondies)


amputation of moveable functional extremities (almost every part of the body) ==> phantom limb (<-- Weir Mitchell)

{the greater the passage of time since the amputation, the more distorted and phantomlike the sensations become:}
loss of the eye ==> ?
loss of the rectum==> ?
loss of parts of the face ==> ?
loss of the penic ==> phantom errection --> phantom orgasm

case of medical clitoridectomies (to cure “chronic masturbation” in women) in the 19th century (and still today) --> the psychoanalytic understanding of female sexuality as castrated ==> surgical removal of an organ already designated as lacking is not registered? --> the nigmatic paradoxical status of the female body : (vagina, cervix, clitoris, and other) female sexual organs already **codified paradoxically as “missing” organs**

body phantom --> *distorted* (=/= an image of the limb which is now *absent*)

the phantom moves spontaneously in accordance with the movement of the rest of the body and is sometimes amenable to voluntary movement
*phantom limb ==> artificial limb --> prosthesis* (it is only through the controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can gradually take the place of the lost limb)

various psychical mechanism:
•a displacement of sensory experience from the limb (now missing)
•the phantom
•the denial that the amputation has taken place
•process of disavowal
•

phantom limb:
•is felt to be a living, moving organic part of the body in coordination with the rest of the body
•behaves as if it were autonomous, with qualities and requirements of its own
{reality of the phantom limb =/= perceptual reality}==> (patient's) ambivalent contradictory experience

...it is the object of sensory, tactile, optical attention

*artist = amputee avows two realities:
1. the reality of a living limb
2. the reality of its destruction
}--> these two “limbs” occupy the same space and time --> **one the ghostly double of the other's absence** [~ condition of the art] @Mohaghegh


****the phantom: expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body (its completion)**** = a psychical delegate ==> physical + psychical wound and scar in the amputation or surgical intervension into any part of the body
[*]phantom: narcissistic reassertion of the limb's presence in the face of its manifest biological loss --> (an attempt to preserve) the subject's narcissistic sense of bodily wholeness [--Lacan--> an images developed through the mirror stage]
--> artist's dream and relation to the wound(= cumbersome narcissistic compensation for the broken unity of the biological body) @Elen
#archive: a psychical attempt to reactivate a past body image in place of the present reality [--> how can we accept the reality? @Pierre, Sina, Hoda,]

(Grosz raising the general question of:) the status of the *body image of woman*--insofar as women are considered and consider themselves to have suffered an amputation (implied by castration) more debilitating than most --> *do women have a phantom phallus?* what is the women's status of a fantasized amputation?

Grosz: “amputee's relations to the phantom limb =?! woman's mourning for what has been lost (the freedom, self-determination, autonomy accorded to the male body, etc. #harem)”
--> ***until female genitals (women's bodies) are inscribed and lived (by the subject and by others) as a positivity, there will always remain paradoxes and upsetting implication for any notion of femininity***



infant's body not yet a self-contained entity, not yet distinct and separate from the world --> child: a body and its various sensations are projected onto the world, and conversly the world and its vicissitudes are introjected into the body of the subject-to-be ==> child: slowly and gradually the body image IS constructed and invested in stages of libidinal developement:
•oral stage ==> mouth
•anal stage ==> anus
•
each stage augmenting and reorienting the preceding stages: anal take over the intensity of the oral, but the mouth remains significant even it no longer dominates the child's sensations ==> each stage participants in the production and differentiation of the body image)

libidinalization of bodily zones, organs, and functions ==builds==> body image particular form

child's body, an already sexually designated body (which culture's desires, wishes, fears, hopes are projected and internalized, mother/nurturer's successes and failures, ambitions and disappointments are most readily projected and played out = sources for self-worth and sexual value)

[*]puberty: greatest discord between the body image (psychical idealized self-image) and the lived body (bodily changes) --> the adolescent body is commonly experienced as awkward, alienating, an undesired biological imposition : *pubertal developement (date of teenagehood) ==> philosophical desire to transcend corporeality and its urges*

-it is only in adolescence that it becomes clear (wanted or not) that the subject has a sexual position (~ genital position)
-during puberty, gentials and secondary sexual characteristics become definitive objects of consciousness and only bit by bit acquire representation in the body image

***in the refusal of sexual roles ordinated by heterosexuality,(for example gay men and lesbians) -->
•may perversely cling to preadolescent body images (--> to remain ambiguous regarding the differences between the sexes)
•invest greater intensity in erotogenic sites, making them the center of libidinal attention and narcissistic investment (Janina's room) (--> in effect reinscribing them in *a mode of resistance*)
}--> oral, anal, sadistic impulses, tactility, scopophilia, “sexual perversions” =? (to emphasize and cultivate) a mode of defiance to heterosexist requirements
[@Sina, the images that i have been clinging to are in the body image that i think i am refusing or inscribing: pony, unicorn, rainbow, skull, the childish bracelet i found in the park, etc.]


ماليخوليا
hypochondria خودبيمارانگارى
a Freudian problem: to describe the transference of libido from the external world and love objects to the subject's own body in illness
-treating nongenital zones as if they had taken on genital meaning = (in the case of hysteria) hysterogenic zone takes on a sexual, usually phallic, function
*hypochondria: chronic and abnormal anxiety abour imaginary symptoms = a flight against narcissim* (the individual defends himself against the libidinous overtension of the hypochondriac organ --> to treat it like a foreign bosdy in the body image)
[hypochondria =/= narcissim]
hypochondriac tries to expel from the body image but cannot because the zone is overinvested with libido =/= خوددگربینی depersonalization = psychical transformation of the body image*, subject lose interest in the whole body, they refuse or are afraid to invest any narcissistic libido in the body image
-depersonalization might account for the phenomenon of out-of-body experience (the outside world is also experienced as flat and disinvested از خود بی خود / فنا؟)
depersonalization: a kind of psychical mimicry of the organic structure of dizziness --> narcissistic decathexis [withdrawal of psychic energy] of the subject's own inclination to voyeurism (<-- disinvestment in the processes of self-observation) ==> seeing has no longer any value : the subject now seen or sees itself with no libidinal investment in looking (or being looked at) @Sina, Foad

_*hysteria --> transformation of body image (of the meaning of the sexual zones to other organs which are not usually associated with genitality)
_*hypochondria --> transposition of libido (displacement, from one organ to another, from the genital to other parts of the body)
_*depersonalization --> withdrawal of libido from privileged zones (often from the whole body)

}==> ****تغيير پذيرى lability of meaning for bodily organs**** : any zone of the bady can (under certain circumstances) take on the meaning of any other zone
[stabil =/= labil: transient, apt to slip]

neurosis & psychosis: subject's sexual life is transposed from its socially expected locations, aims, and onjects to elsewhere

-life history of the subject: the systems of psychical meaning and the events rendered meaningful
-body: the history of the subject's explorations and practices + its various accidents and illnesses

(@Sina) breathing difficulties --> (hysterical symptoms for) significance of the public/private division ~ inside/outside division
•visible disorders --> some kind of message *to others* is being transmittes
•invisible disorders --> some kind of message *to another signifier* is being transmittes #Lacan


hypochondria + depersonalization + hysteria ==[through the mediation of body image]==> *the biological or organic body is open to psychical meanings* ~ psychic processes rely on various organic connections (it takes them as its raw material, as its model of expression)

disease (<==)transforms==> body image (<==)affects==> subject's psychological state

body image: mediating position between the organic and the psychical : it is by affecting, modifying, transforming the body image that each (organic & psychical) is able to effect transformation in the other


***Freud's prediction: man would become a prosthetic god*** [~= Iron Man]

body image = (function of) psychology + sociohistorical context + anatomy
the body image is extremely fluid and dynamic : its borders, edges, and contours are osmotic (تراوش کننده), they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange --> *social*

Schilder's “zones of sensitivity”: bodily orifices + its sensation experienced about one centimeter from the opening (-for example how the diseases of internal organs are not experienced in their precise anatomical locations)
*zones outside the body* --> intrusion into this bodily space is considered as much a violation as penetration of the body itself, the size and form of this surrounding space of safety is individually, sexually, racially, and culturally variable [--> #clean and dirt for my mother; my body image outside space surrounding it when i am in my room is the room itself, every corner, every niche accumulates senses and thoughts...]
the space surrounding the body is not uniform:
•thinner in some places (which more readily tolerate body contact)
•thicker in some places (which are particularly psychically, socially, and culturally “privatized”)
•

-acting uses body image --> body image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself
-playing setar --> (part of the difficulty of learning how to use instruments, such as setar) the libidinal problem of how they become psychically invested (=/= simply the technical problem of how they are used)

surgeon's body image

in driving, trying to fit into a small parking spot <-- experienced in the body image of the driver (and sometimes, to their horror, in that of the passengers) [--> by inability to drive is related to a bad body image?]

body image is capable of accommodating and incorporating an extremely wide range of objects:
•clothing
•jewelry
•other bodies
•objects
•nail polish
•jets, ships, cars
•bodily zones:
◦orifices
◦curves
◦convex spaces
◦concave spaces
•“detachable” or intermediate category of objects, midway between the inanimate and the bodily [~= Lacanian objet a, Kristeva's abject]:
◦body's excretions
◦body's waste products
◦bodily byproducts
◾urine
◾faeces
◾saliva
◾sperm
◾blood
◾vomit
◾hair
◾nails
◾skin
  }--> retain something of the cathexis and value of the body (--> keeping my chopped nails, old toys, art-works... ?! --?--> ‘detachment = your work (art, etc.) is not bound up with your body image’), they remain magically linked to the body --> narcissistic investment in the body image

}--> ****human subjects never simply have a body****
the body is always necessarily the object and subject of attitudes and judgments, psychically invested, never a matter of indifference
-the body never has merely instrumental or utilitarian value for the subject --Grosz--> which organs are libidinally invested and the kinds of investments that animate them are functions of the subject's psychical, interpersonal, and sociohistorical relations and are malleable and continually changing --> *always potentially open to new meanings and investments*

body image: (to a large extent) function of socially shared significance
-(for example) male and female genitals have a particular social meaning in western patriarchal cultures that the individual alone or even in groups is unable to transform (-these meanings are deeply etched into and lived as part of the body image) [=/= Frankenstein]
==> () very different self-perception and very different organic body =/= dichotomous division of sexed bodies

Grosz generally finds Schilder useful --but-->
•he writes in terms of a sexually neutral subject who experiences cerebral lesions and neurological or psychological disorders in a sexually neutral way
•he develops a single frame of reference (not so clearly relevant for women and female sexuality)
•he does not specify that male experience is taken as the norm and woman's experience is discussed only insofar as it deviates from or compares to this referential framework (<== influence that studies of war injuries had on the developement of this field + vast disproportion of male subjects in active war)

Schilder: attainment of a stable genital form of sexuality ==>
•unification of the body image
•cohesion of our self-identities
--> phallic = genital phallic sexuality hierarchically *subordinates the pregenital drives* =/= female sexuality is already genitality multilocational, plural, ambiguous, polymorphous, and *not clearly able to subordinate the earlier stages*

shared sociocultural conceptions of bodies in general and shared familial and interpersonal fantasy about particular bodies ==> [*]body image: unifies and coordinates postural, tactile, kinesthetic, and visual sensations ==> (so that these are experienced as) the *sensations of a subject coordinated into a single space*

***any willful action requires a plan of bodily action --> the function of the body image*** (--> this explains my fucked up body image!)

-we cannot talk about space whithout body image <== the body image determines both the localization of sensations in different concrete regions of the body and the position of the body as a whole within space


body image ==> “=/=” :
•figure =/= ground
•central action =/= peripheral action
•(subject's) body =/= (background of) forces
•movement of limbs =/= corporeal context (of the rest of the body)
•outside (skin) =/= inside (organs [=/= process])
•active relations =/= passive relationship
•position of subject =/= position of object


moving from a state of amorphousness to increasing differentiation and specialization

a single movement reorients the whole of the body, creating what might be called a gait or posture, an individual and cultural bodily style

appersonization: treatment of one's own body as an outside object:
+ psychical vampirism: identification with the symptoms, actions, and fantasies of othe people
--> identification, incorporation, introjection

example of aging
-body image seems resistant to the changes brought about by aging
-they seem to have aged, whereas the subject feels as if he or she has not
--> condition of continual transformation + time lag in the perception and registeration of real changes in the body image

body image: condition of the subject's access to spatiality (including built environments) = a postural schema of the body [=/= mapping a biological body onto a psychological domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity


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

Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania

female fetishism --> lesbianism

fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)

[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure

Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)

sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality

fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pay” for his desire by facing the oedipal prohibition (give up the mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerable as sexual objects + saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual}
[*]fetish: (a substitute for or) *a talisman of the phallus*

(most significant one in the child's erotic life -->) mother's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority

fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own

disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)

negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression

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

Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari

problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity

*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes

appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X

problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others


our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)

Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)


rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges

four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)


Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved

[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices

[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)

from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage

Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)

(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*

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

(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}

Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another

erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?

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

Chen on animacy

animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways

[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns

change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)

animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character

animating principle [--> rigging]

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

Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)

Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology

...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)

Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***

*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication



“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts

(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)



matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle

(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability


Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities that are both cultural & natural (for example material technologies are both “real” & “constructed”)


Ihde --> technologies are in *mediating positions*

interrelational relativistic ontologies : there is interaction and mutual “non-neutral” and “noninnocent” productive and emergent shaping between humans + technologies + animals --> knowledge is “situated” and particular, not “transcendentally” true ==> putative symmetry between the human & nonhuman


bestiality (interrelational, sin?) is embedded in what has to appear to us today as an antiquated or surpassed stability

•(Merleau-Ponty + Ihde) embodiment is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated + embodied]
•(Pickering) cybernetic (self-organizing set) is the location of all intelligent behavior [situated]


---> go to Galison's Einstein


(the old notion that) ***phenomenology is primarily descriptive =/= prescriptive

[ethicalization of knowledge, in Iran, in artists reading choices based on gender, etc. turning research into applied ethics]
•contemporary ethics of a cosmopolitan pluricultural tolerant sort
•absolutisms of politically incarnated groups had to transform absolute beliefs into “private” ones (taken off the streets and battlegrounds) <--now-- returning!


****technologies are multistable: having unpredictable side-effects and embeddable in different ways in different cultures****

[technology + embodied -->] abstract philosophical reflects + mundane work practices

to incarnate a material agency-ethic --> are also multistable: can belong to any number of contexts


...to recognizes that X plays an important role in defining Y-ic meaning

Merleau-Ponty's implicit body is a sort of sports body (active and transparent in action) --Iris--> fringe awareness of wearing glasses in sports activities


visualization of phantom limbs

hermeneutic-cultural body

embodiment through technologies

Andy Clark Natural Born Cyborgs
echnology of telepresence
the measurement of time ==> changes in human existence


the idea of *science = intervention + grasping*
•grasping ==> active dimension of acquiring knowledge is a genuinely contstructive activity (=/= a representational task of trying to represent external structures)
--> experiment & instruments (==> how theoretical entities come to be proven as real)
◦experimental-manipulative realism (Hacking)
◦modelistic constructive realism (Giere)
◦instrumental realism (Ihde)


[*]performance: conception + production + witnessing of material events, the experience of which is meaning generating in that these events give us back more than what we put into them
(Crease > Ihde)

experimentation need to be both:
•[*]hermeneutical: who experimental intentions and practices arise and evolve out of and already existing involvement with, and understanding of a concrete situation
•[*]phenomenology: (taking its point of departure from what is called embodiment) the experiences of a unified being, which cannot be understood apart from concrete human experience


philosopher --> values experts --> (fit into various) applied ethics contexts

Ihde rejecting a normativity that is predetermined by a dystopian/utopian cast

“let the things speak for themselves” (after they have been critically interrogated)

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

Galison
(employing) kinesthetic-tactile body experiences in Einstein's Gedanken-experimenten --> notions of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration
perceptual experience in relative train movement
clock watching in different space-time particularities

“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
Einstein's special relativity --> begins with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion

Einstein's rethinking of *distant simultaneity* (part philosophy & part physics)
-judgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”

electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force

1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines

piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military

means of consistent calibration

🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)

electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements

}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)

distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism

#title
international bureau of measurement

Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories

kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force

metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity

*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire

turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper

Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality

post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)

Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”

1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)

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

James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects

[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful

*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)

rigging
the code space of the software environment +  embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that environment)

*structural determination + emergent practice*

a key aspect of media today --Stiegler--> [*]selection: a decision is made to broadcast one story over another

testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event

the actual practices of riggers (technical animator)

animation industry
the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services and good

***technologies are affectively engineered*** <--Thrift--Ash-- microbiopolitics of the subliminal: doing without thinking, practices of anticipatory manipulation ==> position consumers of media as passive dupes (<-- زیرپوستی *hypodermic model of media power*)
--✕--> Ash: affective manipulation is necessarily a fragile achievement that is prone to failure and always reliant upon being continually reworked in the creative responses users develop in relation to the designed environments with which they interact [---> go to fandom and fan culture]

animation design (videogame): is a complex, problematic, and ongoing struggle between:
•the openness and performative play of contingency & chance (which emerge through the techniques and intelligences that users develop as they become skilled at these games)
•the mechanical systems and calculative rationalities through which these environments are designed

affective properties of contingency ==> commercially and critically successful

rig: assemblage of human and nonhuman actor
staging, managing, and controlling event [movement] within the limited computational architecture

(asking with Ash) how agency is distributed in the assemblages of various human and technical actors that make up rigging?

rig =/= architecture
shaping corporeal dispositions

(entertainment industry does work) to maintain and guard the contingent as a positive force

contingency: the unexpected, the random, the singular, the unrepeatable, or the surprising (that which cannot be pinned down by any process that attempts to pin it down) =/= boring
(Dastur, Dewsbury, Delanda)
--> you need *open skill: contingent tactically oriented understanding* (contextually-appropriate responsiveness, context-dependent ways, regulated improvisation) <-- hacker's talent

(Deleuzian) [*]affect: the outcome of an encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action

captivation --> the specificity of the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment

(game) design
cultivation of the right kinds of affects through quantitative variables in the game's database ~= (Latour's) laboratories: theatres of proof (through a process of decontextualization, the scientific experiment which isolates the factors it wants to study, an entity becomes nameable & calculable ==> predictable & knowable)
•Latour's laboratory --render--> a particular object/process =/=
•game develop --render--> contingency (contingent events [within an already existing horizon of expectation / coded structure])

emergence of intelligences (of the users) --> (Massumi's) analogue: something that cannot be purely reduced to measurement through quantitative states or mathematical modelling (for example vision --into--> imagination, noise in the ear --into--> music in the heart [body operating as transducer] --> *transduce energy*) =/= digital: exhaustively possibilistic (control represented and manipulated through discrete quantitative states)

game design as an essentially the *anticipatory practice* (practices that attempt to plan, preempt, and rationalise the potentiality of future events in order to bring this potentiality within a logic of calculation -Anderson)
•shape the potential actions of potential users --> rendering contingency visible

somatic bodily techniques + analytical ways of conceptualizing and responding to situations (within the game, or animation task in a software) --> reduce them to abstract and codified tendencies ~= rig

(design:) rendering contingency visible through the practices of testing --> build affect into anticipatory practices

airport: rigged architecture (passenger is faced with a situation in which forwards or backwards are the only directions they may go)

3D animation --> [using] digital (a form of calculative abstraction) + [to create positive encounter with] analogue body subject (irreducible to purely digital or discrete mathematical states)

rigging ~~--> envelopment: complex forms of difference (between the analogue and the digital) are transduced and rendered visible

event as a process of ecological emergence (outcome of a material assemblage of various entities, forces, and rules working together to encourage and prohibit specific forms of movement and action) --help--> *how the potential for events to happen are being designed into environments* (preemption, both digital and physical)

mania for what is surprising, for what immediately sweeps us away and impresses us for fleetingness as the basic law of constancy <--Heidegger-- a logic that is central to our experience of modern technology
~/=
games involve the development of techniques for interacting with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body

•(gamer's) body <==shaped== through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they experience
•(game's) responses ==bring==> into being different bodily capacities and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined (by those who produce the images through the processes of design)

correct mixture of contingency and structure

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

prosthesis + castration complex --> “cyberspace: having your everything amputated”

prosthetic skill ~= mastery of the phantom limb
--> rigging

prosthetic --> vivid illustration of the human-technology relations in terms of the body [=/=? hyperobjects]

(set of) architectural metaphors --provide--> foundation of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies

prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***



rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe

homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)

philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist

rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)

--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)


automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]

(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules


Galileo --> geometrical concept of space (=/= differentiated qualitatively)


principles
1. rigging --> a form of understanding =/= form of sensibility
2. in animation (physics) the choice of geometry is pragmatic (=/= analytic, a priori) ---> go to visualization: empiricist conception of geometry

(rigging --> transformations are applied to) geometrical properties: characterized by an invariance with respect to certain transformations [for example a line] --> make it ready for action or animation

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

railway
primary symbolic artifacts of the 19th century
railroad + its carriages should be considered as one machine : “a railway, like a vast machine”

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

(affective arousal) images of beauty amid urgencies of death =/=> trigger the responses one hopes

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

(Deleuzian) [*]event: impact of chaos on the body

most problems don't have solutions --Grosz-->
concepts =/= solutions to problems
problems ==> ways of living =/= answers
concepts: align materiality with incorporeality

identify politics =/= the right to speak about the world, matter, nature
the reign of the i --> who am i, who recognizes me, what can i become --> the right to consumption

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


process ontology of transing : one of many reembodied sensory arts in transgender practices
--> viral vectoring

*flexible global cognition*

discrete threats of knowing
discrete threats of mattering

[*]trans: materialization of process
[*]transdisciplinary: materialization of labors (in & beyond academia) ==Katie==> possibility of care

animal studies --often--> encodes & decodes human

~
relational
trans
multiple
chimeric
liminal
--> relationships that bind humans to their nonhuman companions [...to virtual explosive demons of Charmed TV series --> how we embody animals and how they embody us? rigging demons (my digital folk tale), rigging as sensory medium (a mode of nearness), bodies bound through appropriation]

(in apass:)
zoosemiotic registers
meaning making registers
bodily contact zones

(Charmed demons state of trans:) modes of incorporation, intimacy, inhabitation
--> tranimals: trans animals, range of kinds of sapience and being in various distributed cognitions, syntaxes,and embodiments (and affects)

animals become “animals” not just in terms of plurality but in terms of a plurality that is located within spatiotemporal coordinations
(Kelley, Hayward > Katie)

‘here’ and ‘there’ ~ material partials

...
sensuous trafficking
from inorganic to organic
transcode sensoria
as refrain
by which life gets lived
play enjoyed
augmented states of being emerge


*distributed cognitions* (populated digitalities) ==Hayles==> abandonment of mastery (anthropomorphic fantasies of control)

my text rigging demons = (an unmetabolized knowledge,) play between technical animator programming + CG interface + soap opera + my affective involvement --> speciation bestiary style


not only tranimals, but national restructuring, political economies of sciences, images, culture industries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*

Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)

part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb

--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities

demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text

the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•

play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)

commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)

Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding

3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies

exosome explosive demons, as significant other?

we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)

careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)

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

(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives

emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> within culture industries + transnational educational restructuring projects

writing technologie (~= activities + skills + devices in layered assemblages + material + conceptual inscription) --literalize--> tensions in grammatology:
•between writing's many possible referent/sign relationships in historical progression <-- Ignace Gelb
•call to account of assumptions about writing's derivations from speech built into the assertion of these relationships <-- Derrida


my writing on Charmed and rigging --> a mime of writing, mime understanding [#simulacra of knowledge], (using Katie's word) a literalizing attempt to work/write in the middle of writing technologies

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

lord of the rings (and similar movies) ~= new forms of evangelization
---> go to propaganda


temporality, time, day & night:

in ajayeb:
گویند که در حدود مغرب حیوانی است. چون آفتاب برآید، حالی بچّه بزاید و بچّه را در آفتاب نهد. به یک روز بزرگ گردد. چون آفتاب فرو رود، بمیرد و بچّه آبستن گردد. دیگر روز که آفتاب برآید، بمیرد وعمر وی یک شب و دو روز بود.

به حدود مکران وتیردابه یست بزرگ از دریا براید و در آفتاب مینگرد و بیهوش گردد تا به وقت زوال چنان شود که مرده، ملاحان با وی بازی کنند، چو آفتاب فرو رود زنده گردد، در آفتاب جان بدهد و از وی سیر نگردد

از اسکندر رومی پرسیدند که در عالم چه دیدی از عجایب؟ گفت در مشارق و مغارب گردیدم اعجوبه دیدم به چین و ماچین. در مفازهٔ درختها دیدم رسته، بوی مشک از آن‌ میدمید و از بامداد که آفتاب برآمدی تا وقت زوال از زمین برمیخاستی و پس از زوال به زمین فرو شدی، به وقت غروب تمام به زمین فرو رفته بودی، روز دگر که آفتاب بر آمدی درختها سر از آب بر آوردی.

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

in Nezami (with the notion of bamdad بامداد morning):

چو برزد بامدادان خازن چین به درج گوهرین بر قفل زرین

چو بر زد بامدادن بور گلرنگ غبار آتشین از نعل بر سنگ

بامدادان که صبح زرین تاج کرسی از زر نهاد و تخت از عاج

بامدادان که روز روشن گشت شب تاریک فرش خود بنوشت
صبح یک زخمی دو شمشیری داد مه را ز خون خود سیری

چو صبح از دم گرگ برزد زبان به خفتن درآمد سگ پاسبان
خروس غنوده فرو کوفت بال دهل زن بزد بر تبیره دوال

که چون بامدادان چراغ سپهر جمال جهان را برافروخت چهر
به جلوه برآورد خورشید دست عروسانه بر کرسی زر نشست

به نیک اختری روزی از بامداد که شب روز را تاج بر سر نهاد

چو آمد زلف شب در عطر رسائی به تاریکی فرو شد روشنائی
برون آمد ز پرده سحر سازی شش اندازی بجای شیشه بازی

چو مشگین جعد شب را شانه کردند چراغ روز را پروانه کردند
به زیر تخته‌نرد آبنوسی نهان شد کعبتین سندروسی
بر آمد مشتری منشور بر دست که شاه از بند و شاپور از بلا رست

چو شد دوران سنجابی وشق دوز سمور شب نهفت از قاقم روز
سر از البرز بر زد جرم خورشید جهان را تازه کرد آیین جمشید

شباهنگام کاین عنقای فرتوت شکم پر کرد ازین یک دانه یاقوت
به دشت انجرک آرام کردند بنوشانوش می‌در جام کردند
در آن صحرا فرو خفتند سرمست ریاحین زیر پای و باده بر دست
چو روز از دامن شب سر برآورد زمانه تاج زرین بر سر آورد
بر آن پیروزه تخت آن تاجداران رها کردند می بر جرعه خواران

سپیده دم چو دم بر زد سپیدی سیاهی خواند حرف ناامیدی
هزاران نرگس از چرخ جهانگرد فرو شد تا بر آمد یک گل زرد

چو شب زلف سیاه افکند بر دوش نهاد از ماه زرین حلقه در گوش

شبا هنگام کز صحرای اندوه رسیدی آفتابش بر سر کوه
سیاهی بر سپیدی نقش بستی علم برخاستی سلطان نشستی

چو شب روی از ولایت در کشیدی سپاه روز رایت بر کشیدی


night in Nezami's Khamse:
فرو زنده شبی روشنتر از روز جهان روشن به مهتاب شب‌افروز
شبی باد مسیحا در دماغش نه آن بادی که بنشاند چراغش
ز تاریکی در آن شب یک نشان بود که آب زندگی دروی نهان بود
سوادی نه بر آن شبگون عماری جز آن عصمت که باشد پرده‌داری
صبا گرد از جبین جان زدوده ستاره صبح را دندان نموده
شبی بود از در مقصود جوئی مراد آن شب ز مادر زاد گوئی
ازین سو زهره در گوهر گسستن وز آن سو مه به مروارید بستن
زمین در مشک پیمودن به خروار هوا در غالیه سودن صدف‌وار
ز مشک افشانی باد طربناک عبیرآمیز گشته نافه خاک
دماغ عالم از باد بهاری هوا را ساخته عود قماری
سماع زهره شب را در گرفته مه یک هفته نصفی بر گرفته
ثریا بر ندیمی خاص گشته عطارد بر افق رقاص گشته
جرس جنبانی مرغان شب‌خیز جرسها بسته در مرغ شب‌آویز
دد و دام از نشاط دانه خویش همه مطرب شده در خانه خویش
اگر چه مختلف آواز بودند همه با ساز شب دمساز بودند

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

climate in Nezami:

یکی شب از شب نوروز خوشتر چه شب کز روز عید اندوه کش‌تر
سماع خرگهی در خرگه شاه ندیمی چند موزون طبع و دلخواه

زمستان گشته چون ریحان ازو خوش که ریحان زمستان آمد آتش

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

in Shahnameh (night):

چو شب گردش روز پرگار زد  فروزنده را مهره در قار زد

سوی خانه رفتند هر سه چوباد شب آمد بخفتند پیروز و شاد
چو خورشید زد عکس برآسمان پراگند بر لاژورد ارغوان

به شادی درآمد شب دیریاز چو خورشید رخشنده بگشاد راز

شب تیره تا شد بلند آفتاب همی گشت با نوذر افراسیاب

شب تیره تا برکشد روز چاک نیایش کنم پیش یزدان پاک

شب تیره چون روی زنگی سیاه ستاره نه پیدا نه خورشید و ماه
تو خورشید گفتی به بند اندرست ستاره به خم کمند اندرست

ز شبگیر تا تیره شد آفتاب همی خون به جوی اندر آمد چو آب

به روز درخشان شب آمد سیاه چپ و راست لشکر بیاراستند

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

in old Farsi:
پرچم = دم گاو بزرگ
خانه = اتاق
هیجان = مستی جنسی (حیوان نر)، جنبش دریا
دانستن to know = توانستن to be able to
خسته شدن getting tired = مجروح شدن getting injured
سرشتن to create = مخلوط کردن to mix, compose
راه بردن = شناختن، بلد بودن
raftan = eshal gerftan
dashtan = motevaghef kardan
afzudan = toghyan kardan



TRAVEL*

-Adam Olearius (ambassador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )

world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,

traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration

investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies

trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity

which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?

pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?


(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius

an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)

intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***

Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)

--> separation ??? =/=? compose

media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video

why video: using performative materials, enactments and staging of speculative narratives, experimental film making, editing, cheap visual effects, animation and drawing. by using the local geography and landscape of Eckernförde, employment of fragmented scores and modest embodiment, experimental acting and storytelling, the video as a generous medium holds and hosts all our gathered materials, and enables a linear but expansive experience. we will write short scripts based on stories from Olearius's travel logs in Iran and Sa'di's Golestan in order to put them into tests after 8 and 3 centuries, and produce intensity and curiosity for a richer way of relating to our shared cultural heritages and literacies.

practical: we will explore all the mentioned ideas and storylines as starting points to create interest for material-discursive practices of ‘worlding’ and ‘encountering’ in cross-techno-cultural intersections.

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

[working] title:
Das Gesicht des Paradies
the cast of one Globe to another
Globe of Gottorf of Golestan
“Each serving diligently in its own appointed place”
“Deliverance from the yoke of bondage”
The Globe of Gottorf and deliverance from the yoke of bondage
The cast of Golestan and the magnitude prison of Globe



Das Gesicht des Paradies und schlichtendes Gottorfer Riesenglobus
Adam Olearius and Sa'di in bondage

magnetic fields of

intermediate category
contiguous mass of flowers and tulips
magnitude prison
Others adopt Hell
...instead you are in paradise


traveling
post travel

Paradise Roads

Gesicht
Globe of Gottorf and Golestan of Sa'di


foreign affairs

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

Planthroposcene, the age of gardens

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

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”

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

When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

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

the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way

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

Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)

dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere

the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line

the hand that sees
a hand that perceives

the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)

study of the Persian object

gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near

(an) art of viewing

how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other

optical visuality

erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed


*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open


a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)


celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye

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

[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]


(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer

is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing

a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.

an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators

When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.

(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)

A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.

*locational imaging*

As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or anticipated memory in dialogue with the names, places, and forms on the map[...]

(Olearius drawings and frontispieces) establishes a geography, manufactured from cartographic elements

When a geography is given a sense of identification, of difference, doubt, a discerning gaze, or a critical reverie [the people, animals, subjects in the map cannot see how they are being mapped]


(how certain places are made to become the) simulacra of others*

perspective, visual style, narrative economy, scale, [...], the stakes of mimesis, and reception


story about the demise of nation and its cartographer:
(Dreamtigers by J. L. Borges)
In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger: not the jaguar, the spotted “tiger” of the Amazonian tangles and the isles of vegetation that float down the Paraná, but that striped, Asiatic, royal tiger, that can only be faced by a man of war, on a castle atop an elephant. I used to linger endlessly before one of the cages at the zoo; I judged vast encyclopedias and books of natural history by the splendor of their tigers. (I still remember those illustrations: I who cannot rightly recall the brow or the smile of a woman.) Childhood passed away, and the tigers and my passion for them grew old, but still they are in my dreams. At that submerged or chaotic level they keep prevailing. And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I am dreaming. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; and now that I have unlimited power, I am going to cause a tiger.
Oh, incompetence! Never can my dreams engender the wild beast I long for. The tiger indeed appears, but stuffed or flimsy, or with impure variations of shape, or of an implausible size, or all too fleeting, or with a touch of the dog or the bird.

****
The one that is in the other forever betrays its differences with respect to its surrounding milieu in the field of the frame.


cartography at the time of its emergence in early modern print-culture [...] maps were tipped into books to call attention to the aspect and format of a medium for which seeing and reading were of a same character.


toward productive, critical, and even creative speculation


a map in a movie begs and baits us to ponder the fact that who we are or whomever we believe ourselves to be depends, whether or not our locus is fixed or moving, on often unconscious perceptions about where we come from and may be going.

To be able to say who one is depends on believing in the illusion that consciousness is in accord with where it is felt in respect at once to itself and to its milieus.***

maps ==> that we are naturally in the world

ontology is a function of geography

*** Figures in a topographic field are as they are because geography is destiny ***

(can be defined in a narrow sense) Identity: the consciousness of belonging (or longing to belong) to a place and of being at a distance from it.


map:
•a guarantee for “taking place”
•a sign of prevarication (a map is inserted both to establish a fallacious authenticity of a place and to invent new or other spaces)


We find ourselves immediately undone by the weightless fact that we have no reason to be where we are.


rhetoric of invisibility

maps are of a spatial scale

the history of cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power (as David Buisseret [1992], Michel Foucault [1975 and 1994 (1967)], J. Brian Harley [1988 and 2001], Denis Wood [1992], and others have shown)

symbolic and political effectiveness of cartographic diagrams

(to leave open) the art of living with space itself

what it means to be located and discerned in the world


they lead the viewer “all over the map”


regime of the “image-fact” --> implicit cartography
an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed

Conley > Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.



(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us

Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age

{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)

construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space

early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self

(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories

geographic literature


the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space

new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer

theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity

the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness

mimes the construction (of a world)

contemporary politics of statecraft

...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?

ingenieur du moi
medium engineers


imaginary space, nation, selfhood

*** the self-possessed individual ***

(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)


living conditions of vocal exchange


visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify

a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it


isolario: illustrating the islands of the world, a genre


“national” subjects attached to the geographies that they are both mapping and describing
graphic construction of the self
Olearius's globe of Gottorf (=/= Morton's hyperobject): the effect of totality, of having engineered a world through its own labors. [Ptolemaic-Aristotlian machinery of the spheres, which hold the fixed stars in place, stars in a trace on the relatively stable horizon of earth and sky (in which meteor deviation from this harmonious arrangement or celestial machinery was considered disastrous)]
**self become autonomous <== fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth, it can be detached from the coordinates that mark its point of view, its history, its formation, and the aesthetics (and politics) of its signature. [and with Sana, through Sa'di, we start with this position, rehearsing criticism studies in terms of the birth of the subject and of subjectivity in early modern Europe]


terrae incognitae: the unknown, graphically inscribed, and to be conquered

“nomination is a mode of symbolic appropriation that furnishes virgin territories with a memory, with a gridding that dispossesses space of its alterity and that makes of it an object of discovery subjected to the constraints of linguistic reference, that intends that at every identifiable site there correspond a name” (Conley > Christian Jacob > Mallarme)

lodged in the corporal space of an image of “man”

spectral presence of death

navel: construed to be a site where the relation of the unknown has its first noticeable, physical trace, [...] the site of a ruptured attachment
-as an embodiment of the relation to the unknown
-the subject desires to give birth to himself or herself

artificial self-birthing and self-monumentalization

--> creation of a universe of wise (hakimane حکیمانه)


it is so strange in Olearius: the process of detachment that constitutes every subject's psychogenesis inspires a geographic desire (to retrace one's tenuous “roots,” which are woven through the visible register of language, the audible areas of images...) -- with Conley

Olearius's being: at one with the local, national, global, and cosmic space in which he or she visualizes an origin associated with a site of birth --> womb: the reassuring rectitude of the map, which is both a material and paternal image of seemingly timeless symbolic order


tensions between the visible and the invisible
(what is taken to be evident or “visible” meets what remains invisible or outside of language; #amazon project)
to grid the relation of the visible and the invisible (in cartography and writing)
their certain mobility of flux and indeterminacy (in Descartes becomes a subliminal practice)
the ideological dimensions of known and unknown become crystallized
*the viewer is urged to look at things transversally [=/= tangency: having contact at a single point or along a line without crossing] --> reader invents the process of subjectivity when analyzing the differential patterns that are working in the cartographic document
--> *double bind: of cosmic and local space, of viewer included and excluded from the discourse, of weakened deixis [deictic, words or expressions that rely absolutely on context] (or dialogue) ---> mobilizes subjectivity


quasi-spatial conquest (through the extension of the delimited field of the known in the channel of a ‘polar relation with the unknown,’ according to mappings that envisage the progression of a deferred knowledge) [Conley > Rosolato --> technologies that construct early modern space (--also with Olearius)]


...to produce a great geography of introspection

cosmic and affective space


illusion of a universe of infinite curvature

*the impossible “point of view” given to the observer of early world maps*



map =/=? mystical narrative --?--> depends on an itinerary through space and language

mysticism
only adjectival forms of the term had occurred (in Renaissance and before), suggesting that the nonsubstantive status of mystical activities made them more ‘real’ than we might believe ** (de Certeau)
the development of atlas-structures and of two-dimensional --> attenuation (taz'if تضعيف) of the mixture of scientific and mystical dimensions
incunabulum --> Cartesian method
from a half-named sense of the unknown --to--> a clearly articulated relation with the unknown****


[*]perspectival object: the positioning and mapping of the self in and about the world in its ongoing construction of psychogenesis + aesthetics + history of perspective + clinical practice*--> a series of junctures between a viewer and what he or she sees, projects, fantasizes, and remembers
--> body's location in the world ***


excess of mastery
absolute quest of power

*to make meaning enigmatic(?)

with Sana, we are engaged in an anti-globe making, a transitional object rather than a ‘glory globe,’ “a field of diagonical or interdiscursive ‘play’ between impressions and memories”
in our exhibition, we are working the gridded/allegorized cartographic discourse/consciousness through appeal to spatial rhetoric
(reworking) the new form of a self-produced “geography” of writing (emerging in 16th century)
-we are perhaps inclined with the figure of Rhizome (from Deleuze and Guattari), the unifying lines and connections that produce an image of...
[in a fairly common obsession, amateurs of maps ofen seek to find the names of the places where they were born or raised. but when Sana's father wanted to erase his name from the map Sana made with his itineraries we betrayed this originary site]
-schizoanalytic cartographies, Guattari on: conditions of enunciation, structures of individual and collective subjectivity)
-we say (in our work with Olearius): reading can be an actively vagrant, nomadic examination of ideological materials


...an attempt to create in an ever recurring, mobile, and modular structures that endow themselves with renewed form


*the cartographic project invents a relation with the past

[*]projective identification: an illusion that tells who, where, and what these maps are about, and specifies the power that they wish to appropriate in diplomatic (and military) areas

[*]perspectival object: is the concept that shifts the spectator from a passive role to that of an engaged traveler who moves through the time and space of a given body of words, images, and sensation --passage-into--> vital and marginal areas where imagination, fact, history, and self are combined


plastic and lexical attributes

confused pictorial and lexical properties

[*]pictogram: alphabetical shapes + bodily form + memory of a seemingly archaic past of confusion and violence + +
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus [word puzzle representing form of pictures or symbols; (Latin: “by things”) a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, for example H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)


fragments of remembered writing


the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥


*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized

a childhood experience

the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place



signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary

authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature

Conley argues that: the individual who comes to be named as such can only do so when he or she gains the required illusion of having a real place in the world or, failing that, of experiencing movement in space and language that redeems the labor of living


cartography
•compass for verbal plotting
•turning the reader's gaze toward a productive consideration of its visible form


--*-- the dialogue and its dialogic echoes --*--


statecraft: fortification, centralization, extensive rebuilding (of national borders)
(Iran, Germany, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Times)
--> (perspectival signature) existential relation with space
-Princess Bubblegum naturalized story: total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future; (her jokingly horrible) mission to promote scientific management of every phase of society;
Princess Bubblegum = rational management in advanced monopoly capitalism


the cartographers create a “cultural entity” that, it is claimed, is only represented in the maps [...] also brought into being ... the authority that underwrote their own discourse ==> they make themselves

[*]colonialization is based on a culture's perceived need to acquire a protective zone between itself and the world in order to gain authority
(also) “it becomes increasingly difficult to find a stable signified to which the whole thesaurus of exotic signifiers may be referred” [Greenblatt]


topophilia


(i have been trying to reverse the movement of) transition from cosmography to topography

cartographic truth --> silent agenda (--> power structures)


motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents

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

Allegories of the Continent

Persianisch, Persiae,

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

[Mary Louis Pratt]

“Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. English Canada was still colonial in the 1950s: reality and history were somewhere else, embodied in British men.

The syllables wound through our lives, threading together by force of repetition things that were distant, discontinuous and unreal. Living stone. This is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.

...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.

The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it.  I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.

the rise of natural history

These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process?

codifications of reality

the emanating glow of the civilizing mission
the cash flow of development

(it habitually blinds itself to) the reverse dynamic

obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries

It becomes dependent on its others to know itself

important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people’s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in.

[...]how European travel writing interacted with enlightenment natural history to produce a Eurocentered form of global or “planetary” consciousness.

[Pratt considers] the classificatory schemes of natural history in relation to the vernacular peasant knowledges they sought to displace.

tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history


If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.


the passport: contact zone, like the flirting gaze of an Iranian woman with German ambassadors in Olearius images
Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
metropolitan m[...]