[...]ye --> 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

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Planthroposcene, the age of gardens

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[...] 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

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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 modes of representation

creating (your own) autonomous decolonized cultures
dynamics of creole self-fashioning

Pratt's “contact zone”: the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.

“contact language”: an improvised language that develops among speakers of different tongues who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.

“colonial frontier” --> “contact zone” shifts the center of gravity and the point of view
...the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their trajectories now intersect

a “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other


* travelers and travelees *
in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power


***strategies of innocence*** (constructed in relation to older imperial rhetorics of conquest)
--> main protagonist of the anti-conquest is a figure (Pratt sometimes calls) the “seeing-man”: (an admittedly unfriendly label for) the white male subject of European landscape discourse--he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess


the idioms of travel and exploration


two processes in Northern Europe (“planetary consciousness”):
•the emergence of natural history as a structure of knowledge
•the turn toward interior exploration
+
•Bourgeois forms of subjectivity consolidated themselves
•new territorial phase of capitalism propelled by searches for raw materials began
•coastal trade extended inland
•


ways of reading and focusing rhetorical analysis

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[Brancaforte]

word + image
art + science
visual + discursive

the reality that he [Olearius] has experienced

Conley: “the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble [por harf پر‌حرف], copious, emphatic, printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words”

questions of
•authorship
•political power
•intellectual influence


Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea


“we were about a gun-shot's distance”

in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion

a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time




proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
 }--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionalism of event)
•things, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist
•(affect --Deleuze-->) differential ontology: the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. affect studies now hitting:
◦anthropology
◦new materialism
◦object-oriented ontology
◦naturecultures
◦multispecies work
◦science studies
◦new ecologies
 --> “the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos.”
[...] it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents.
[...] affect-inflected [study] leans into its descriptive objects with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable (=/= what is often called ‘critical thinking’: habits of snapping, to catch the world in a lie, dualist dead ends of modernist humanist social science, independent logic of data, the conviction that something is wrong --> paranoid approaches to the world)
•ethnographic method of mattering, [why conceptuality might take radically different forms in Iran?] attention to the still unfolding [--> Foad's (mental habit of) describing the fixed object of destiny (of Iran).] how to move in the manner of things slipping in and out of existence? the way a world (in this case: Iran) elaborates in prolific forms, taking off in directions. the Iranian real is alchemical, traveling in circuits of impact and reaction, in which things happen. we must train ourselves on an effort to describe the iterations/durations/modes of “being taking place.”




Said: “the idea of representation is a theatrical one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. on this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate...”
[when we use “theater” in a cartographic sense it refers to the dynamic space where the “I” or the “self” sees itself engaged in a public space (of kin, of others, of economic and political forces)]

the theatrical arts: spoken work + visual spectacle --> rise of opera
[--> rise of natural history]


observers of the differences between their civilization and that of the Persians, their standards of measure were those of the West:
Xenophon
Herodotus
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Strabo
Pausanias
Ammianus Marcellinus
Barnabas Brissonius
Pietro Bizzarri
Johannes de Laet
Thomas Herbert
Hans Schiltberger
Hans Christoph von Teufel
Stefan Kakasch
Anthony Jenkinson
Anthony and Robert Sherley
Thomas Coryat
Pietro della Valle
Garcai de Silva y Figueroa
Jean Babtiste Tavernier
Raphael du Mans
Olearius (1636)
Engelbert Kaempfer

a Greek invented dichotomy:
(Greek) small democracies =/= (Persian) powerful empire
modestia (cult of the simple and good) =/= superbid (pride)
law =/= monarch


‘conflict’ is a theme


Europe/Persia reasons for contact according to Cambridge History of Iran:
1- religious incentive (moharek محرک)
2- both against the Ottoman Turks
3- commercial incentive
4- travelers passed through Persia


Duke Frederick's commercial venture that would put the tiny territory on the map, as it were, and eliminate all its debts [...] with Adam Olearius chosen to chronicle the mission as its official secretary
“Duke's stated aim in sending the embassy to Persia was to establish a trade route with Persia and obtain exclusive rights to export silk from the area, thus squeezing out the other European competition, especially the Dutch”

his methodology
(Olearius's citational mobilization) a typical Baroque writer, he cites classical and Renaissance sources copiously and compares them to each other, thus paying homage to the scholarly tradition
•list the main features of a subject under discussion
•quote classical and contemporary authorities --> elicit different opinions
•

*correction of faulty source material imperative*

Harvey's new theory of the circulation of blood

Olearius:
•seasickness could be caused by motion of the waves
•“monsters” living along the Siberian coast are wrong
•

Olearius's methodology is that of a comparatist
he juxtaposes (the customs and social structures of the people he meets with those of his native land)

Olearius's trip ==> production of (superior maps)
Olearius ==> maps
Qazwini ==> lists
Sa'di ==> de-vice

Olearius's The Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung includes large, detailed, fold-out maps describing...
as well our technique in our work, with Sana
-our work/contribution includes placing maps and figures with the flux of discourse (=/= Olearius)

description of (the Persian) “natives” and their “nature” --> a codification of his human hosts


traditional western stereotypes regarding exotic eroticism

Shah Safi's banquet (sur سور) corresponds fully to a European's notion of what an oriental feast should entail

he marks the poles of Persian culture: as the site, on the one hand, of voluptuous, erotic encounters, and of unnatural cruelty and despotism on the other hand --> meant for the moral edification/codification of its western readers. (readers were taught about different countries + taught to be better European persons [with proper differences])


Baroque's excess of information
(as Pierre also noted in my style of language)

Beschreibung

*** the customs of the observed peoples ***
-->(language of pictorial representation emphasized)

temporal displacements [in his frames pictures]
inscriptions, conveying a sense of movement


scorpion bites Olearius (“Ich vom Scorpion gestochen” --> oriental danger) --> specimen scorpion (--> immobilized and tamed) --> back in the Kunstkammer --> Duke's cabinet of curiosities (--> on display)
["his” experience =/= Sa'di's technologies of writing]

Olearius + Hakwirdi --> Golestan of Sa'di

Sa'di's influence on German baroque literature:
•Grimmelshausen (Simplicissimus)
•Lohenstein (Ibrahim Bassa and Ibrahim Sultan)
•Gryphius (Catherina von Georgien)
•Montesquieu (Letters Persanes)
•Goethe (West-östlicher Divan)


Jens from Kiel library, like Olearius, is appointed court librarian, by state/Duke, given the task of cataloging and expanding the ducal/official collection, and developing the Duke's Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer

Gotterffische Kunstkammer --> “Wunderbuch” (book of wonders), with its insistence on the concepts of writing + drawing

Olearius's genre of frontispiece, his engraved title pages --follow--> Norbert: kluger Vater or fleissiger Praeceptor
clever father / industrious preceptor مرشد مربى #Pir [--> “our common father in heaven"], wants to introduce his children and students to something in arts or sciences, “make them understand” by means of his mouth + pen :
*analogy/simile: showing something grand by showing them something small --> an astronomer shows on a small hand-globe (*globo coelesti*) the make-up of the great heaven with all its visible bodies, where a point means a star ~(in the same way)~> the geographer represents on a small terestrial globe (*globo terrestri*) the entire circle of the earth with all its landscapes ~(in the same way)~> “our common father in heaven,” the Lord, his revealed Word, he wrote for us (his children and students) the great book of wonders --recognize--> Himself
}--> (the concepts of) microcosm & macrocosm : something small (a dot on a globe) stands for something else, larger than itself (a city) ==> individual objects of study or curiosities of nature, that are collected and presented to a reader/observer, represent a greater whole ==> interconnectedness --> “the great chain of being” ~-> God teaches humans by means of natural wonders #ajayeb
}==> (microcosmic world of the) frontispiece = visual macrocosm of the larger book, *the textual macrocosm* that it introduces
[my video atlas in Eckernförde was reworking with frontispiece as it is meant to intrigue the reader with its complex set of visual images (taken from classical coins and medals, from devices and emblems), to be decoded after reading the book that follows. Olearius brings all desciplines onto the stage of his's world: ethnography, history, natural science, geography, architecture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]

Olearius's didactic program: to entertain while instructing

(tasavof's) world as *mundus symbolicus* <== cosmos of significance (~= art + history + nature)

[Das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt]

*theatrum mundi*
staging of nature (~ ajayeb) : nature in all its various manifestations (animal, vegetable, and mineral) must be displayed on a stage (of the title page, on the compartments of Kunstkammer)
•an arch of gateway resting on a platform or plinth (--> a basic model provided by classical architecture for the majority of Renaissance and Baroque stagings), a design that recalls the structures of allegorical tableaux used for triumphal entries into Italian and Dutch Renaissance cities, on order to honor the hero of the day
•(early modern title page *iconographic program*) incorporating the feature of the triumphal arch in order to signify the symbolic entry into the written work [<-- we don't need to do this!!] --> *formal monumental opening* (leading the “reader” to the ‘interior of’)--> Olearius's frontispiece (monumental, awe-inspiring works that aimed to spark the viewer's interest):
◦(to commemorate) official functions at the court
◦literary activities

[*]baroque: ***the art of not rejecting anything*** (el arte de no renunciar a nada -Montesinos)
(am i baroque?)

different types of frontispiece:
1. divided into geometrical compartments (german origin?)
2. depicting a particular scene (german invention) [images/elements chosen/included for doctrinal and controversial significance]
3. single cartouche (school of Fontainebleau), a predilection for Mannerist irrationality and illusionism; interlocking, complicated scroll-work and strapwork; imitating the three-dimensional scrolling, with edges curling forward around the inscription; fantastic architectural structures, and grotesque figures and monsters taken from classical mythology
4. architectural title page (with the most monumental and most three-dimensional character), arrangement of sculpture-like allegorical figures or personifications


shifts from the techniques of woodcut --to--> engraving (--to-->? digital) ==> greater pictorial detail & better illusionism


*Sa'di's advice and devices* [title]
(Sa'di's relationship to) ‘the accumulated knowledge’(==> device)
[*]device (symbolum): a combination of a picture and a personal motto. a private adage (امثال و حکم) or clever aphorism --> heraldic image --fusion~=> device: a personal message by means of which a knight would define himself--developed from the chivalric tradition** ==?==> Sa'di's moral devices
-theoretical advice and examples of devices
-a craftsmann, a painter or goldsmith, would then supply the visual form of the idea that the learned scholar created
(moral) device --discuss--> general qualities and characteristics such as courage, nobility, obligation ==> (genre of) [*]emblem: --(pictorial + verbal)-striving--> for *universal applicability*
*emblem <-- the desire to understand the mysteries of antiquity, especially ancient Edgyptian hieroglyphs (in obelisks, sphinxes, lions), which were thought to represent a secret language [original wisdom of early man] (<== concerns of Renaissance [for example Hieroglyphica written in Greek by Horapollo 14th century])
(what are my ‘hieroglyphics’ in ajayeb?) Renaissance humanists wanting to research and understand antiquity, also wiched to *make it come alive*, by using hieroglyphics + Pythogorean symbols (were added, since metaphors and allegories of the ancients supposedly derived from the wisdom of Edgyptian priests)
ancient mythologies and medieval allegories in Renaissance applied hieroglyphic science:
•ancient coins (interpreted as hieroglyphics)
•biblical imagery
•medieval animal
•plant books
•cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life

spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]

Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius



Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision

“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”

‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union

symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)


the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time

“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”

his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*

horn of plenty

cupid is astride (with a leg on each side of)
astrilized

*winged sphere*
winged fame trumpets the deceased's accomplishments

christian mastery over the infidel--who is blinded to the true faith

a group of international admirers


**methods used in Europe to disseminate information about foreign people** during the early modern era:
•Flugblatt (broad-sheet or broadside, 14th century), a medium directed at the illiterate classes (that needed visual cue) [included: news about battles, astrological prediction, sighting of comet, birth of a monstrous creature (animal or human), execution of a famous criminal, tales of witches, devils, religious or political propaganda]
Flugblatt counterparts:
◦Flugshrift (flying writ, flying pamphlet), popularized by Martin Luther, four pages with woodcut gracing, for audience with ability and leisure to read longer tracts
•illustrated costume book. with Mannerist strapwork, grotesque, garlands, allegorical personifications; in scenes representing the original reason why humans need to wear clothing
•(Norbert when he uses “we” in his language) --> *author*: active, nude, individual with his scissors, not dressed for battle, who will actively clothe the other figures ... [in frontispiece to Hans Weigel's Trachtenbuch the personifications of the non-Europeans are all prepared for battle] (male warriors in female continents [continents are usually represented by female figures, derived from biblical and classical sources such as Roman coins]) {Amerindian's headdress once was removed from its original ethnographic context, “decontextualized,” and then “recontextualized in a different setting --> europeans might have thought that it was a skirt. the reverse is the story of shalite شلیته?}

mid 16th century also saw the development of the periodical newssheet (adapted from broadside)
consisting of image and text--work together in order to provide meaning for the design --> view needed to combine ==> a composing/composer subjectivity

allegorical putti (symbolizing industry)
inscription at their feet
flora beside each of them

Olearius's frontispiece for Orientalischen Reise:
•mixture of realistic and fantastic
•illusionistic cloths denote a process not only of uncovering, but of discovery as well (theatrical curtains pulled back to reveal the true subject: the paradisical scene of “natives”) [the scenic event of arrival in any civilized zone is embodied by the monument of the natives]
•flora and fauna of Paradise



to place the viewer in (an atrium-like building)

monumental inscription

(our anti-globe video in the exhibition =/=?) a scene showing a robed man standing on a globe ~-> “You lead me through your counsel”

the explorer writes his observation into his *magnum opus*, the traveler account (just as God writes in “das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt”)
=/= my amazon project

textual proclamation of the author's faith



Olearius's translation of the sufi lore collected by the celebrated Persian poet Sa'di, in a condensed visual form, (acknowledged later by Goethe) with the help of Hakwirdi

Brancaforte: Golestan speaks to an audience that has recently suffered from the ravages of war (or predicting it?!)
-Golestan (“valley of roses”) written soon after the bloodbath is therefore a document of its time composed by a man of reason who always stresses the practical [praised by Olearius as a “lustiger Kopff” (funloving spirit)]--appealing to a classical authority
-blending personal experience, humorous insights, and aphorisms (of an ethical/didactic nature)
-Muhammadian like the manner of Virgil-->{the past as legacy, disposing with the divine mechanism, purchase Virgil's tomb and worshipped it, poetry as a tool of divination, embodiment of experience, pastoral and erotic, attraction toward people of any gender, agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, way of a comparison with foreign marvels,}

religious relativism in Olearius's orientalism --> in deference to his christian audience and as a dependent of the Gottorf court--he disparages islam (verführischer Glauben, seductive belief)
-he is also a forerunner to the comparative religious studies (when he uses the word “Gott/God” rather than the name “Allah”)
-manipulating Hakwirdi's voice in the propagandistic confrontation between the great religions --> Olearius speaking for his persian friend: who feels the customs of his homeland do not measure up to those of his adopted country [like Norbert!]
‘other's blindness’: (a *textual disclaimer* of) the other who exists in spiritual and religious darkness =/= pictorial depiction
(in Persianischer Rosenthal the entire) ***enterprise of translation*** (from Farsi to German) is cloaked in highly metaphoric language, charged with fostering the development of the german language + nationalized sentiment, “our German language that used to lie beneath the dust of contempt now shines forth once again” (<-- i meet this all the time when i was living and working in Germany)

“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an ambiguous term, it could stand for either Sa'di or the text of the Golestan, or Hakwirdi, but this “Persians” is to be “let inside, wearing a German coat,” Olearius's body is charged with teaching “the Persian to speak German” (--> integration)

other translations of Golestan:
•Andre du Ryer
•Johan Ochsenbach
•Georg Gentius


*Golestan
taut and well-translated epigrams
end-rhyme poems
a ‘treasury’ of rhetorical and poetical motifs
a voluminous index of sayings
-*short and astute speeches* (ایجاز ijaz ناقلا naghola)
*the genre of aphorism* = "apophthegma” (concise saying --> fit for advice, --> emblem)
(clever and) *sharp* ==> memorable
practical advice for individuals (members of the bourgeois, merchants) who wanted to climb the social ladder and learn *how to behave at court*
Golestan was considered a rich sourch of (such) “oriental wisdom”
(why Olearius is so into Sa'di's Golestan:) the aphorisms try to convey mental images or pictures [...] the apophthegma are the verbal equivalent of the images of the frontispiece --Brancaforte--> both genres try to convey a great deal of information in a condensed form (verbal or pictorial) [--> this is also why i am into Olearius and Sa'di #baroque]
(frontispiece + Golestan's) architectural framework --serving--> organizing structure; formal entrance to the scene

[]
relation to the soverign in Sa'di

in Golestan, the tales speak of the love or affection between a man and a young male. however, in the introduction to his translation, Olearius notes that he has subsituted the term “girl, lover, person, or human being” for “youth,” so that it will not offend young people who read the book --> (resisting the) jocular moralistic-didactic use of the momoerotic motif a much deeper understanding of Sufi terminology and motivation than one can expect from a 17th century translator
Olearius normalizes the discourse (of sufi) for fear of offending the sensibilities of his reading public

angelic piety
Englische Frömmigkeit

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

the lionskin story

lion symbolizing the element of fire as well as purification
astrological relationship between lion and sun, in the image of Mithras, entwined by snake, symbolizing the path of the sun

mithraic influences survived into the islamic era as well, and became even more prevalent with the safavid dynasty --> lion imagery became strongly associated with Ali, the fist imam in twelver shi'ism

cosmic imagery and forms of address

the persian sun/lion symbol becomes intelligible for a european audience, when it is represented as a symbol of royalty

the lionskin, in Olearius's title, Persianischer Rosenthal
the animal's interior surface contains the writing, which provides the information about Persian society

Finn and Jake (given to wanderlust and creative risk) in Adventure Time --> “more powerful through spoils”
(this tradition goes back to Hercules, trophy, skin of the beast,)

“slain and flayed, exposed to the European audience, the lion/skin serves as a background on which the German author inscribes the story[/history]” (Brancaforte)



[Brancaforte studying] the early modern European frontispieces that were associated with the Orient


...superfluity of details mannered and cluttered with unread decorative motifs set in an unreadable space
[16th century frontispiece; my work is sometimes like that]
=/= (Rubin's title pages:) portrayed in an intelligible space, imbued with dramatic light effects, with a sense of movement, monumental architecture with three-dimensional figures moving in a readable illusionistic space

‘stretched-out animal skin with the head in the top center’ --> Rubin's artistic vocabulary [--> followed in today way of layout]
lion = saint's attribute --transformed--> medium for writing
--> (underscoring the) significance of **trophy**: subjugating a wild dangerous animal and then displaying it proudly for all to admire
Olearius's choice of lionskin:
1- dramatic visual introduction (to Golestan)
2- piques the reader's interest in the work
3- stands for dangerous exotic land (Persia) that has been symbolically tamed and displayed for the Western viewer
4- material of writing + material being written about


deictic

the rigor mortis of the body


the dramatic pose of the Persian husband
the curtain-like skin
the “emblematic corpse” on a “stage”
to serve as ‘exemplum’ tamsil تمثيل
+ martyr-like European hero who suffers the slings and arrows of outrageous Tatars
}--> theater of cruelty


bellicosity (amade be jang آماده به جنگ)

reader/viewer is horrified & fascinated --provide--> a tale of *oriental atrocities* --set-for--> stage adventure stories that follow...

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

less obviously, from standard geographical texts of the Islamic world. yet with its emphasis on direct observation and critical objectivity, the map also points the way toward the more exacting “scientific” standards of the Enlightenment.

maps are cultural artifacts
Persia: exotic + faraway

map ==> analysis
a map--like a frontispiece--is comprised of both visual and textual elements, combining word and image; it represents a type of text, or discourse, that needs to be analyzed in detail in order to be “read” correctly


maps are never completely translatable (nor readable)

language translates into historical practice

carto-literacy

rhetorical device, ekphrasis: description

graph-o suggests both picture and writing *

the cartographic enterprises under Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf

mathematical principles + projection methods

14th century, seeks to include “ancient and modern discoveries in one verbal and visual description”


early modern age military and strategic situation of europe

establish fortifications

(Harley:) behind most cartographers there is a patron
mapping so became the business of the state and cartography is early nationalized
-global empire building
-preservation of the nation-state
-local assertion of individual property rights
}--> in each of these contexts the dimensions of polity and territory were fused in images which were part of the intellectual apparatus of power **


individual niches [on] architectural plinth

in Newe Landesbeschreibung: “in the beginning of the world, God created everything at once, with his clever/intelligent finger, using measure, weight and number ... because God is not a God of disorder, but wants everything to proceed in a proper manner and with the proper differentiation.” (translated in Vision of Persia, p.123)


illustrious predecessors
through their patronage and linked to the noble art of geography

the map is framed by scale bars (the cartouche [of title] rests on a kind of architectural base in which a scale bar is contained)***
(graticules, more details,)
typography plays a role in emphasizing (novelty?)
geographical purview (meydan-e did, چشم رس، ميدان ديد) of the rulers

map and approval

different layers of information in the map: by looking at it all at once, it is difficult to comprehend the entire story that the author/artist are trying to tell. by examining individual visual elements in the map, and then linking them to the text, one can trace the different narratives extant--manifest and latent--in the work (Brancaforte on Olearius cartographic work)
(this visual rhetoric is also what i am using in my storytellings) (i also need to be careful with my collages: (not?) to map out creations that are totalities much greater than its author's own appreciation or conscious knowledge of them; to emerge an often confused and paradoxical but signatory “self” in the liminal/marginal areas of the page)
•“the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble (por-harf پرحرف، روان، سليس، چرب و نرم، خوش زبان), copious (mofasal مفصل), emphatic (mo'akad تاکيد شده), printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)


grid, superimposed on the map

a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; treasures + giant snakes]
this continues today: the image of an iranian woman in native dress

on the Persians’ inner nature and customs

the dedicatory cartouche's [special effects]: ruler's name, capitalized, special style of italics
establishing the Duke's geographical purview --> linked to foreign territories


through ‘knowledge’ and ‘discovery’ --> learn about Safavid Persia

(Conley)
(cartography during early modern age afforded to) the emerging self and the self's relation to the idea of national space
between raw perception and creative imagination
surveying and plotting the world
the drama of european literature: an unforeseen theatricalization of the self in the 15th-17th century
-the self seems to be produced in the form of a subject, as a paradoxical being divided between a representation of the conditional relations it is producing and the composite nature of the simultaneously aural and visual medium of print
-growth of cartography parallels that of the coming of autobiography --> mapping is responsible for the consciousness that leads to the production of the fashioned self

rise of:
•autobiography
•opera
•natural history


Olearius multiplicity of roles
artist, geographer, historian, tourist, merchant, diplomat,

Olearius's production of self
mantle of artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individual [artist/cartographer], and the image opts instead to emphasize the professional activity of the geographer [==> *expert: a new subject ruled by laws of classification or ideology, an expert cosmographer or topographer]
+ beautiful theories of a fire that burned in the human heart



he stick to his calculations despite the criticism he receives from colleagues and friends

Olearius's scientific reticence (kam-guyi کم گويى)
he quotes (without attribution) Athanasius Kircher: “some think that the earth, as well as the heavens have their intelligent angels or spirits which move inside them and thus bring the waters out of their depth” (Vision of Persia p.153)
therefore the waters were driven by a natural power through the hidden veins of the earth and rose up into the mountains, just as in a human being the blood rises from the liver to the heart and moves upward to the head through the vena cava. --?--> Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood


...cartographic literature both reflected and brought about changing perceptions of the world

about Marco Polo
Gabriel: Marco Polo did not have the influence on geography that one might have expected [...] he had no corresponding education, had been unable to make astronomical observation, and the results of these thrown-together maps was complete chaos [!]


the shape-shifting Caspian sea


*** Tabula Asiae ***

Olearius's travel account also seeks to be encyclopedic
...describe and judges the deviations from the European norm

common
barbarous
destruction of the body itself

Munster's final judgment:
“[Perisans] do not speak much and are more apt to act than to speak. they like the uncleanness or lust of the body; they are measured in their eating habits; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans


discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence

a book of others

the ways it fashions received information

“Ortelius's innovation in the science of cartography is that he attends less to the “big picture” of the world than to putting together an illustrated summery of possibly infinite number of fragmentary parts (Conley)
--> “segmentable” units of an infinite possibility of scale and focus (#Goolge maps)


[]
Blue Map of Persia


influence of Ptolemy on the early islamic cartographers, in the time of Ma'mun

the notion of the inhabitable world being divided into seven horizontal bands called ‘climata’ or agalim/aghalim/ اقلیم(a geographical model derived probably from Persia)

*encircling ocean* surrounded the known world, and that usually have south at the top, probably to emphasize the importance of Mecca

system of Climes

(book of) notification: tanbih تنبیه


...pioneer on the road toward a (geographically) correct picture of Persia
_Persienbild_

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

“drawn from life”

the imagery and allegorical figures found on the frontispiece are learned signifiers belonging to a visual world that reflects and prefigures the verbal description that forms the body of the work

Olearius designs a brilliant visual program
visual table of contents
his nascent (dar tavalod درحال تولد) nationalist feelings
he translates both:
•the literature of the Persian poet
•the visual code of the land (he has visited)

traces of the author within the map
signs of the hidden power relation
depiction of the exotic “other” --> represented visually and typologically categorized, be it within the map itself, or in the boundary areas, in the margins of the representational space**

--?--> Timuri jiz

patronage
naming


“es gab eine lustige perspective”

of note in this scene [shah Safi's banquet for the Hostein embassy] is the woman alongside the right wall, who seems to be flirting coquettishly with a German looking in her direction, thus establishing a kind of contact between the two cultures

the monarch's true nature is laid bare

“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”

the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or even 21st century) Westerner's conception of an Oriental court

oriental stage

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

صورت الأرض  surate al-arz (face of earth)

اصطخری Istakhri, 10th century, translated into German by Mordtmann
he met another celebrated traveler, Ibn Haukul ابن حوقل

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

Verran: *innovating to effect the discipline of deductive proof in ancient Greek*

(i found out--Pierre also noted--that in my work i tend to) inspire a baroque style of empirical analysis

[*]baroque
--> now you see it, now you don't
--> (a thread of innovation in) mixing words and visuals
--> wonder-filled difference
--> sensibility concerned with collective way finding through complexity
*baroque sensibility* loves unlikely juxtaposition
*baroque form lives with passionate intensity*

****forms of non-explanation [=/= to reflect of ‘what is’ from a meta position****]:
•juxtaposition
•stories
•framing
•reframing
•folds --> working within the ‘folds’
•working on the edge
-
--> *pushing and pulling at the interfaces we feel ourselves enmeshed in* [<-- that is exactly the description of what i do. #amazon project]


to recognize stories of entrepreneurship as stories of working relations between people, technology, and nature
@Setareh


acknowledge our “understanding of”(s)


(taking diagrams as involved only in) epistemic practices linking the mess of the actual and the ideal of the future =/= (account of diagrams that focuses on their unique) contribution in rhetoric --> *collective way-finding* (that #Olearius works agains for iranians and german, and Sa'di's version)
[diagrams:]
•(graphs, images, visuals that fill the) two-dimensional physical spaces
•screened images that cover the surfaces of a *tapestry*
•visuals performing in a graphic register in *tension* with linguistic registers (Verran) --> figurations designed to work with text --> open up a space for imagining their capacities as *agential devices* --> (how) diagrams intervene in the organization and governance of institutions --> *diagrams as objects of governance and organization* embeding working imaginaries (such as in the imperial enterprise of the Duke Frederick that Olearius worked for) --and--> diagramatic devices of technoscience ==> enforcing *non-equivocation* and *non-contradiction* : the standard rhetoric of Western scientific thought and argument - - --> ***devices enacting norm***

[*]diagrams: a juncture: text-graphic / graphic-text as an ephemeral clot لخته of material semiotic resources where words are embedded in graphics as much as graphics are buried in words


...not collaborate enough to benefit from each other's insights


[representing passage of a domain of innovation from past to future]
is there a way representing the many differences at play? are there other ways apart from one arrow pointing towards one futre? the answer was swift: “no, that would not be wise. we need to demonstrate that we stand united [as an industry, nation, family,,,]” --> it was mutually and tacitly agreed that this is how innovation happens : man-made devices ride into the future on arrows of progressive tinkering with heterogeneous things


(Verran reading/naming of) normative iconography of technological innovation

assumptions of technological innovation:
•physics as fundamental knowledge (--> the translation of kinetic energy to electrical energy and the variables that influence the efficiency of that translation) [--(this is)--> knowledge relating to environmental and social contextualization of the techniques described by physics ==> constitution of environmental robustness ==achieving==> social acceptability] --> the rhetoric of a diagram embeding that assumption:
◦‘additive’ : that knowledge becomes relevant at ‘later’ stages in the life of the model asserted by the diagram. the purview of the ‘additive’ diagram : negotiation and strategy reside in the realm of subjectivity, therefore cannot be represented }==> subjects, those who do the organizing and the giverbing, do not belonge to the ‘core’ that the diagram claims to represent : [subject]--[emptiness]--[dieagram]
--> rendering innovation as a ‘general event’ of an ‘unspecifiable future’ that is progressed towards + idealizing sites [= times and places (of these affairs)] [not allowing the questioning of these sites as obligatory passage points (for innovation)]
--> claiming for itself a capacity to realistically map a stable system
(diagram of technological innovation: a cartography of stable entities and stable relations) =/= a complex and emergent system embedding ambiguity and contradiction
--> promoting an organizational regime that proceeds by conforming to standards of non-contradiction and non-equivocation in its rhetoric =/= baroque baldachin (arshe عرشه) (with other than representation capacities) explicitly recognizing complexity, openness, and emergence --offering--> [enabling graphics to offer] pilotage خلبانى

***every tool should pose not only technically complicated questions rather fundamental ones***

branched tree diagram: saying that knowledge of the ‘branches’ includes a conception of the truck, suggesting: to understand is to understand how the truck generates the branches, and that is what is learnt and transmitted by specialists (Stengers, @Eszter)


Verran > Stengers working on the “gods and demons that populate physics”


[...] rejection and enclosure within the domain of ‘nonscientific’ or ‘simply subjective’ (of anything that cannot be reduced to the canon of the ‘simple’ model)
[Stengers]


(Verran on) the capacities of numbers to interpellate (رسما سوال کردن، استيضاح کردن) their users


diptych قاب دو لوحى


model of meaning-making that diagrams initiate (spatially + linguistically)

articulated sets of relations

a particularly efficacious form of certainty-generating rhetoric by ancient Greek mathematicians (appropriated by thier politicians), according to Netz: meaning-making in geometry proceeds in a particular way, a way that generates deductive proof --> (Netz's notion of) oral performance origins of meaning-making with diagrammatic device =/= (Verran's) graphics embedded within flows of words --> relations graphically plotted frame the relations plotted in flows of words (and reversed): diagrams labile ناپايدار in their forms of participation in collectives***

{my research on premodern systematic investigation of strange singularities of the labile phenomena [lability: liable to err and fall, slip, glide, flow] in the middle ages --helps--> how in the absence of authoritative *source of knowledge* in artistic research environments such as apass, *styles of knowing* mime and intertwine in poetics, practice, and politics}

speaking from diagram (offering possibilities of pilotage of the emergent relations) =/= speaking to diagram (a form of presentation, a proposed ‘found’ past in an idealized future, proposing as a realistic map of a given)

@Eszter: the question of recognizing the complexity of manipulating sets of relations expressed graphically --> developing (in my self) a contrast which offers possibilities for rhetorically distinguishing between ‘speaking from’ and ‘speaking to’ ==> shifts that can effect moves in collective meaning-making

wordy texts

(Star Trek's) displaying “our” modern commonplaces out of the place they are coming from --> makes me vomit
-in US sci-fi TV series we face that we are still Aristotlian, in our regulation of speech, we live under the regime of non-contradiction and of non-equivocation (tie up our public life in it) (--> when i say this is not my story, i am talking about another tradition of speech regulation)


proto-Baroque theater


*ambiguous monarchy*

absolutism has never been a feature of Iran monarchies

(who?) put an end to the complex, emergent baroque polity

a baroque sensibility was no longer salient in the Danish monarchical context and the baldachin became war booty --> that is how Adventure Time's sensibility is now

[Verran & Winthereik briliant thinking and literature:] “baldachin was designed to perform within the tense shifting landscape of partnerships associated with an aristocracy vigorously reorganizing itself as it emerged out of the crisis of the late medieval.”

there was a shift from ‘vertical to horizontal social integration’ (Christianson) with a better-off peasantry and a surge in the urban middle classes, and secular magnate families (najibzade نجيب زاده)

the baldachin was a device that performed in a force field--a wary but indomitable alliance of crown and noble magnates --> baldachin as a diagram in association with texts, the speech, and bodily gesture of court events


diagram: ambiguously and ambivalently ‘spoken from’ (--> proposing how a just society might be achieved) and ‘spoken to’ (--> a vivid vision of a just polity)

a figuration that equivocates over what a just society is

baroque diagram's felicity and ability to assist **collective passage through complexity**


tapestry (فرش / منقوش --> is concerned with collective way-finding ~ pilotage) and diagram }--> has to do with the collective


baldachin and the (innovation) model as material semiotic devices that intervene in the ‘happening of the real’ (Lury & Wakeford, Winthereik & Verran)
-they press upon others their presence as *participating entities* and offer *pilotage*

the model perfroms by eschewing اجتناب contradiction and equivocation =/= the baldachin (my graphs, atlases) elaborately figures both equivocation and contradiction --> *it equivocates about contradiction*
[equivocate: in Medieval Latin perfect passive participle of aequivocō “I am called by the same name”, doubtful signification]

Verran (in baroque form juxtaposing an engineering object with an art object) identifies diagrams as capable of effecting *dual rhetorical shifts*, effect possibilities of moving between speaking from and speaking to --> open up possibilities for equivocatign our contradictions + (representing =) *equivocating over what exactly is represented*[<-- in apass this is what i always do, in a way my project]

(@apass, attending to iconography opens up a space for asking:)
****what are doing here together?
****what kind of pilotage does this diagram offer and to whom?


(a way of abandoning the idea that these objects are essentially different) --> attending an object as:
•story
•diagram
•


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

intermingling the sexuality and materiality of bodies with the transcendental concepts and questions of spirituality and religion

to re-insert the body back into religious imagery

queer religious imagery

culture-jam
weaving their desire and bodies back into an exclusionary narrative

(un)critical faith

sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation in ...


deep inextricability of religious and secular discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and sexual bodies and practices (Wetzel)

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

Saadia Toor

() within the neo-Orientalist discourse [~= liberal modernity as embodied by ‘the West’ and Barbarism as connoted by Islam] ‘the Muslim’ enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic (with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]


organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, in popular support for the Global War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam

a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews

liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women


when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality

‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter

(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic


part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]


return them to the ‘chardivari’


(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patriarchal structures from families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”

Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic and internally coherent thing.”
(--> understanding of) the ways in which ‘the law’ itself is constructed and operationalized; delightful colonial legacy called the “Family Laws” (part of the penal codes of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh);
•zina (zena, illicit sex, adultery, premarital sex) --> far from being an expression of religious piety at the familial or state level, the zina law is wielded as a potent weapon of control and extortion by families of ‘disobedient’ women + the rights that the moral authority of Islam grants the women against their families }=/= the manner in which the mainstream media in the West constructs the role of Islam in the lives of Muslim women (~ everything to do with Muslims is explained by ‘Islam’) =/= Khan's research on incarcerated women leads her to conclude that poverty is an important causal factor in the imprisonment of women under the charge of zina in Pakistan (structural adjustment policies imposed on Pakistan by the World Bank and IMF from the 1980s on) --> larger global political and economic processes
•a transgender couple charged with perjury under the Pakistan Penal Code, and not under ‘Islamic law.’ Supreme Court would rule in their favor, the judgment drew on the presence of the figure of Hermaphrodite in Ancient Greece to Islam + discussed with sympathy by mainstream media + well-organized and politically savvy hijra community in Pakista
}--> @Hoda, since she is interested in women's status under purportedly Islamic regimes
}==> Islam is not the overarching motor within purportedly Muslim societies that mainstream discourse would have us believe

(Rastegar > Toor:) “it is typical of much human rights discourse in the Third World to focus on [...] practices of regulating women's bodies, especially those identified with Islamic law, while ignoring socioeconomic concern.” @Hoda

Toor's two distinctions [=/= collapsing all forms of ‘Islamization’ resulting in a serious misunderstanding of the social processes at work]:
•‘Islamization from below’ : rise of (voluntary) public piety among Muslims, adoption of particular styles of facial hair by men and of various forms of hijab by women
•‘Islamization from above’ : the ways in which structures of power—from families to states—deploy ‘Islam’ in order to control women (and men)

(Toor:) Shah's cogent critique of the fetishization of the ‘community’ in ethnographic literature


a society defined by ‘a history of’
•dictatorial regimes (with support of the U.S.)
•(under siege from joint pressures of) a corrupt ruling class
•a heavy debt burden
•predatory and conspicuous consumption
•ongoing (neo)colonial intervention
==> cultural identity becomes a contentious issue & women's bodies become sites (for these cultural politics and the class struggles they embody)
~=> regulation of women sexuality : the key hegemonic move through which consent across social classes can be secured**

the increasing interconnectedness of different parts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels (= globalization) ==>  intensification in the dynamics of social change ==> anxiety ==> (greater) regulation of women (in kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties under globalization)
[This was just as true of Europe during the period of capitalist modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of colonized and decolonizing societies in the mid-20th century =/= Islamic exceptionalism = a form of Orientalism operative today : an exclusive focus on ‘Islam']


haq bakhshwana (in rural Punjab): the daughter of a propertied family is ‘married’ to the Qur'an, or, in some cases, to a tree—so as to prevent her share of the family property transferring to her husband's family --> women are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves


Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘Muslim world’ --and asking how (in a Foucauldian sense) is ‘Islam'[~ the idea that something stable and immutable called ‘Islam’ exists anywhere] being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? “Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)


(unpack we must)

***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’

Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)

(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)

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

a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*

[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)

forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent

a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements

obvious: totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself

precarity can take the form of:
•fraility (living in it and through it)
•a sea change
•a darkening atmosphere
•a hard fall
•the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve
•

ordinary things (=/= melodrama) they matter because they shimmer precariously

...seasons magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light

place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)

(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, they suck the) *gestural sensory attachments of seeing and being seen* (into a world in which things are dark)

precarity ==?==> intimacy (of people in place)

(in winter with T-shirt and sandals) the townie body unfazed by the cold, endearing, a little heroic

an imaginary --> a logic of some sort --> abstracted ==> become a thing in itself
or, a thing simultaneously virtual and concrete
like the road, made not of dreams per se, but of laws, of ordinary practices, military surges, and construction technologies

...intensities pass from body to body:
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena
•histories
•the seamless habitus of supermarkets and credit cards
•

(Stewart's) precarity's form: compositional + decompositional

attachments, temps, materialities, states of being

[*]description: a writing culture lodged in emergence, generativity, potentiality

things that come into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, habits

what it means to meet the world:
(Stewart) *as a nearing* [=/= raw material for exploitation]
(Heidegger) as the ringing between composing subjects and objects
(McCormack) felt as ways of going on in the world
(Deleuze) as increases and decreases, brightening and darkening
() in a cartography distributed across a field of intensities and durations
[=/= rush to incorporate them into a representational order of political or moral significance]

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

[*]epistemology = stories of knowledge from before that somehow we are still living with now (#fable)
Geroulanos -->{ Ardrey --to--> Kubrick's african genesis : “weapon fathered man”
technology + prehistory (in postwar period)
“tool ==> man"}

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

knowing images
epistemic image : knowledge-based pictorial gestures (in my work without) --> organization + collecting + demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> searchable**)

(Apianus's early modern cognitive horizon -->) eye: another organ used to calibrate settings
activated eye --> new empirical pursuits

my epistemic images : work of an image fetishist

bestiary: animal character diagnosis

[horses]
(from) genre of taking care of the animal: veterinary --to--> chiromancy: profiling of the animal conditioned through the serial nature of list (==> control)

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

Brancaforte
readings of the apparatuses framing Olearius's books
tradition of representing Persia in the West (Xenophon and Herodotus)
narrative elements of Olearius’ works remain largely unexamined


Brentjes

elm naghli علم نقلی (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli علم عقلی (rationality)

(science) elm in Iran <== (10th century written in Persian:) limits of the world [hodud al-alam] + pharmacological medicine + (translated ~= adaptations of) astrology

10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences

rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna

روضة المنجمین

rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium


book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general


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

ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]

ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)

ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)

****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving voice to what my concern and interest is in artistic research environment)


the question of how to re-present others (their diverse practices) on good faith? <-- moral
~~> the bad idea of “good faith =/= bad faith” ==> assume a moral high ground that we have no reason to argue in favor of

altering oneself to good faith = altering oneself to the possibility of double vision

(in ethnography) good faith: writing generalizing stories that intervene, because of the partiality of research and analysis (not despite of it)
•good faith analysis: having faith in it being possible to write stories that are generative for *some of* the practices we study + for *some of* our peers

(stories --Verran-->) two moments of generalizing:
1. *onemany* form ==enable==> abstracting
2. *whole-parts* form ==bring==> a situating moment
~={ Star Wars apocalyptic stories (single vision) + lived social bodily realities = (Harawayian) many-headed monster }--> #Tehran index

ethnographic research is always embedded in multi-stakeholder situations

the Verran is proposing
=/= writing stories that narrate what collaborators hope to hear
=/= hardening the categories of the everyday

[*]generalization: (performative) ways of making and negotiating different realities

(Hinde -->) adequate story: objects that *find* audiences ~= *pointing to* (<-- performative) ~/= *pointing for* (<--Verran-- invite them to do work to see their own ontological commitments)
@apasa, research on performativity entailles when not to be performative

ethnographic story: re-performance / re-presentation of some here-now
•description: storytelling event


working indexically with an infinitely complex here-now

indexicality depends on posing a somewhere or something else that is real in a different manner ~= performativity


(Hacking:) we recognize the collective enactment of knowledge practices in devising re-presentations --Verran--> ethnographic story: (first ans foremost) making reality (=/= the idea that reality gives rise to re-presentations)

a generalization: a unified text, narrative, exemplifying and enacting a particular time and space --condense--> here-now
}--> recognizing how ethnographic stories deal with necessarily being just one of infinitely many possible stories of a herenow

(John Law:) ethnography: a method of assemblage : enactment of presence, manifest absence, and absence as otherness

#Tehran index
attending to indexes for herenow that embed two logics generalization: one-many & whole-parts
1. one kind of story embeds a logic of one-many generalization --> represents its here-now as an example of something in general [--> story = evidence base of a general statement about human, world, erc.]--Kwa--> *romantic*
3. one kind of story embeds a logic of whole-parts generalization --> presents its here-now by first building this world [--> story = an emergent entity on a vague whole]--Kwa--> *baroque*

20th century history of complexity theory

*romantic =/= baroque ways of doing complexity*
--Verran--> we should use both simultaneously ~= Haraway cyborg double vision

---> go to Latour's analysis of Ambassadors painting (~= illustration of an ethnographic story)
•technique of anamorphosis: invite the viewer to shift their perspective --> *they are invited to do the work of recognizing the alternative logics of generalization*
•agential instrumentality
•dual logic: ambassadors & skull
•skull/brownish object --signal--> a ‘viewer’ must ‘lean over’ in order to see the database (in Verran's example) as authoritative & as autonomous and *capable of making new kinds of knower* emerge (worker, storyteller, ethnographer)
-

my image assemblages are whole-part generalizations, one-many pictures, vague whole with emergent parts

#workshop on training two modes of generalization, use of drawing and image making, writing ethnographic stories


(artists typically make the mistake of making these two identical -->)
*indicator =/= outcome*
•indicator: for example you implement something
•outcome: a change in behavior (= accomplished indicator)

*one-many generalization*
x is one of many possible stories about X in general (--Latour--> purification:) spacetime specificities are transformed into general claims }--> abstracting
=/=
*whole-parts generalization*
x is a participant on an assemblage where all actors are somehow emerging parts --> one does not yet know what X is or may become (X remains a vague whole) (--Latour--> translation work:) working a number of herenows into the picture }--> situating

--> how to write (ethnographic) stories embedding the dual logic of generalization? = *how to arrive at a non-relativizing non-universalizing description that nevertheless works as a generalization?*
==constitute==> generalization: an irresolvable tension
<-- interventionist potentiel

narratives that allow both:
•information exchange (handling information correctly)
•unexpected cuts in information exchange (cutting the world)


what is gained in the interventionist potentiel [of stories; for example of the skull in Holbein's ambassadeur, magic database in Verran's ethnographic story]?
-enabling double vision

•the worker has to be equally magical about her own monitoring repertoires (apass cloud attitudes)
•to intervene the ideas of smooth and wellfunctioning development bureaucracy
•reflexivity: what the ethnographer sees as she is shifting her position and beginning to focus on a different (whole-parts) generalization [=/= simply a matter of being transparent about one's analytical choices]

(Sina:)
storytelling ~= bullshiting
storytelling ~= analytical social science

deflating claims (for example we have never been modern, etc.) do not afford possibilities for intervening


(why i use comparing stories in my lecture performances -->) the act of [*]comparing : a central aspect of seeking to contain the dual logic in one story --> (Strathern > Holbraad & Pedersen > Verran > ) peculiar intensification of the act of fieldwork


good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)

(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (biased)

lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work

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

Kwa

[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole

1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)

early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*

romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])


romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz --> every bit of matter can be conceived as a garden full of plants : each drop of its bodily fluid is also such a garden ==> ***it is the direction of looking that matters *** (mode of attention)
•Deleuze
•Whitehead
•Darwin
•Benjamin
•

bestiary = baroque + romantic

*romantic complexity (looks up) =/= baroque complexity (looks down)*
•looking up: integrate individuals (who appear to be a heterogeneous lot) at the phenomenological level to a single entity at a higher level of organization --> (plants and animals, individuals) are*functionality integrated* [<-- my problem with the notion of community]
◦looking up to the world of platonic forms <-- a process of abstraction
•looking down: a table of companions --> (plants and animals, individuals) are *cooperating*

(romantic conceptions of) society as organism =/= (baroque conception of) organism as society


(historic) baroque
-grand style of 17th century
-(insist on) strong phenomenological realness --> sensuous materiality
-materiality flows out in many directions (=/= confined within) ==> blurring “individual =/= environment”
-inventiveness:
--music--> the ability to produce lots of novel combinations out of a rather limited set of elements
--theater--> (logical development of plot =/=) sequence of monologues and allegories ==> action


Leibniz baroque philosophy --> monad: individuals not linked to form greater systems (they don't even communicate), but they affect each other
--Deleuze--> each monad had its context represented inside itself (as fold) [more important the monad --> richer its world]


metaphors of romanticism:
•organicism
•system --> (in graphical representation) depicted by connecting lives between constituent elements (=/= monad)
•

Whitehead --Deleuze--> a neobaroque philosopher --> possibility of a chaotic side-by-side existence of mutually exclusive realities
(baroque era) harmony: art of counterpoints (bringing together independent voices)


German baroque (Gryphius, Lohenstein) --> nature = [*]ruin: heap of highly significant fragments =/= seamless web (@ERG website)
•fragment: independent individual things with a monadological structure (~/= postmodern understanding of fragment)
•link (between them) = reciprocal reference =/= connection
◦(references remain in their) *allegorical immanence*
•


World War II ~=> systems theories (attempt to explain the structure and behavior of complex objects


Charney + von Neumann
deterministic description of the atmosphere
“long-range forecasting”
computer-based metrology
==> *field* became the essence of atmospheric state (field =/= structure, phenomena such as cyclones, fronts, cyclogenesis, frontogenesis)
<--Lorenz-- a given that the atmosphere is a single whole

romantic & nonromantic Darwin
evolutionary theory
phylogenetic tree
-“war of nature ==> higher animals directly follow”
-individual organisms engage in various interactions with each other ==> speciation

Tansley (fulfilling a romantic expectation with regard to complex systems) --1926--> maintenance of equilibrium by ecosystem ["life = equilibrium"]
=/= Schrödinger (showed that equilibrium is unfit as a metaphor for life) --> life = islands of low entropy (complex locations) in a sea of high entropy (of decreasing complexity)


Lokta
(evolution of) chemical systems = general systems


Patten
ecosystem ecologist
“ecosystem = natural control system” ~= (single equilibrium simple cybernetic) technical control device <-- the metaphor of *automatic machine* (taken literally)
representing whole ecosystems by (mathematized and fit for simulation on digital computers) models


1960s 70s --> system ecology
--lurck--> (romantic trope of) rigorous functionalism [every little plant or insect had its place as a cog on a giant machinery]


Rene Thom
chemical reaction kinetics
biological morphogenesis
catastrophe theory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria


Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems


Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)

local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)


Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small fluctuations (will be just large enough) to be critical
complexity ==> unstability
~~~~> chaos theory


(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]

turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic approach), but we have empirical certainty that they will appear

55BC --turbulence--> Lucretius’ De Rerum natura (philosophical poem on the nature of things)
(his basic metaphor of) nature: hydrodynamic flow of particles in free fall, in swirls, in vortexes
‘small cause ==> disproportional nonlinearity’ : ‘random collision of some falling atoms ==> constitution of world’
--Serres--> (Lucretius) heterodox tradition (=/= orthodoxe)


romantic & baroque are ***discourse =/= paradigm***
•discourse (available to draw from)
•paradigm (to succeed another paradigm) [<-- to be careful as an artist, the fantasy of genesis]

•since the 19th century romantic complexity had been the more orthodox discourse
•since 1975 baroque complexity became the focus of interest
}=/= new conception of reality

•romantic complexity --favor--> stable structural metaphors (self-correcting cybernetic machine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)


body = turbulent phenomena par excellence


*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject

the uncertainty (of the world) in the baroque case is ontological [=/= epistemological --> uncertainty is an effect of not knowing enough]

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

(i say in iran, instead of public jurnalism we need more) *public anthropology*

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

(Stenger > Stewart > vivid pragmatics ~=)
(McCormack > Stewart > radical) [*]empiricism: if you walk in the woods --encounter--> the unthinkable profusion of forms --> material-aesthetic registers of (mobile & immobile flickering of) is and was (=/= sensory details described)
•[*]description: accidental glimpse of what matters + what shifts its matter in a moment of recognizable though unnamed and partial significance

tonal differences
a spark of color
a modulation in tempo
half-patterned expressivity
--of--> a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter

when a tree is “charged and transfigured” by a violent sunset
Stewart + Dillard

a thing becomes a call to word

(Harman:) objects themselves, like voices or forms of writing, have style

Stewart > Dillard's causal logic of bizarre but categorical predation:
a small frog perched precariously on a lily pad in a pond, its back end already strangely slumped in the water. Then it suddenly deflates
its skin “ruck, and rumple, and fall’ and then “formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like blight scum on top of the water”
--suggest--> its style
=/= exempla of a generality
=/= embodiments of something

*points of precision* in moments, scenes, forms, and states of matter

an image synesthetically remembered --> engineered bridges of the purely social or thee purely natural imagine a flatly describable world composed of fully present states of being

...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page

description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizing

remainders

(distributed gap between residents’ reports and police determinations:) [examples of semi-events (half-witnessed):]
•a dangerous-looking animal moving about on a man's property turned out to be a black plastic trash bag blowing in the wind
•threatening graffiti on a lawn were markings made by phone company employees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)

[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)

(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)


A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?

([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground

(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered

harshly half-formed world

germinal aesthetics

channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*

the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses

(to sharpen) realist attention to things


[*]life: ontological entertainment

unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere

gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)


“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”


writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]

*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*

a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things

the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours

demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the energy of small things...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...


(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication

learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice


(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]

shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique

so ordinary and problematic

so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century

also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty

to have a little talk or jam on the notion of “clean” and “clean body”

i have been scribbling on its metaphorology for a while, thinking with it about the 20th century political thinking, institutional thinking, criminology, xenophobia, morality, and many other things. it is a key term for me.

•difference and indifference regarding the foreign body and urbanism
•clean's stakes in architecture, toilet, the primordial element of architecture
•the clean body in Marx and its geneology in the left
•origins of morality in Freud
•xenophobia in crosscultural histories, Islam on hygiene and kofr's dirt
•Nazism and racial cleansing --> aesthetics & politics
•Victorian sanitation, sanitas
•pollution
•anality
•animality --> domestic life (Tehran, Brussels, Cologne,)
•metaphorology of ‘fesad’
•loose analogies of clean/dirt
•pure bodies (being threatened by violation of impurities)
•


readings:
-Koolhaas, toilet
-Sennett, Flesh and Stone
-Ashenburg, Dirt on Clean
-Serres, Malfeasance
-Ahmed, pure bodies
-Vom kleinen Maulwurf
-


in terrestrial ecosystems:
detritus
dead particulate organic material (as opposed to dissolved organic material). It typically includes the bodies or fragments of dead organisms as well as fecal material
typically colonized by communities of microorganisms which act to decompose (or remineralize) the material

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

(in clinic)
each method enacts an object of its own =/= approaching a single object in different ways

in 19th century Western philosophy, ontology was coined as a powerful word for the given and fixed collection of what there is
(Annemarie Mol)

ontologies ==> there is no longer a singular “it” to look at from different sides
ontologies are not exclusive, they allow for interferences, partial connections, sharing practices =/= mono-realist singularities

[*]politics: (is not one of otherness,) it is about fights; not between people (a politics of who) but between versions of reality (a politics of what)

the value of “what is,” what western philosophy calls “normativity” and its counterfactuals suggesting “what could be” (--> are different ontologies?)

yet ‘ontologies’ is ill-suited for talking about many things:
•ways in which goods and bads are performed in practices --> Xiri
•conjunction with pleasures, pains, ecstasies, fears, ideals, dreams, passions --> apass
•various shapes that processes may take:
◦causal chains
◦back-and-forth conversations
◦tinkering and caring
•theorizing how fingers taste
•what drugs afford to bodies and bodies do with drugs
•migrant ambitions and guarded borders
•garment factories on fire
•soy for Dutch pigs being grown in the Amazon
•(or when we give feedback to eachother in apass??)
•
--Annemarie--> we need to be able to play with other words (other than ontology) @Sina



*valuing
*facting

(let's learn and engage more in valuing, and not facting. not that things or practices “have value” but how they are valued, given value or worth to them)

valuing (when done as ritual nothing follows), might include variations of:
•measuring
•assessing
•appreciating
•qualifying
•tasting
•judging
•critiquing
•praising
•caring
•

***(more than aften) a mode of value developed ‘here’ is put to work ‘there’ [= generalization]
--Annemarie--> (pertinence of) ‘where questions’
(costs of) generalization ==>
•stabilizes what counts ==> silences subjects (<-- do it, but pay the cost)
•fosters proving, not improving
•offers managerial solution, not citizen satisfaction
•
•

(a modern sentence:) people tend to think that their quality of life depends on themselves, that means: what ‘you’ are going to do about ‘you being miserable’

the (good or bad) worlding of university's counter-fact-ism and functionalism

(Manning's mistake:) “evaluation or valuation techniques ==> boosting” (=/= tinkering*)
(in rehabilitation clinic) scale of independence to map the condition of a person --> a process in which valuing is transformed from a ‘tool for improving’ into a ‘tool for proving’

(enough food)
shifts from ‘want’ to ‘need’

counting calories (=/= enjoying food) --> orchestrate guilt (=/= satisfaction) --> limit oneself --> hide hunger
[*counting* (a protestant value?) has been a behavioral technique to produce self-conscious being, still a way of making responsible persons, “counting the number of times they were hit...” *rhetoric of counting (a socio-material practice) ==> civic world witness*]


rumors travel
facts travel
practices travel


clean city --> (19th century quest, classic goal of) hygiene

what do citizens value? <-- let's (take a step back and) ask that (@NRW cultural fund, governmentality Regierungsfähigkeit, the city of Cologne)
[this question is asked by people in certain socio-material practices with stakes in producing citizens, such as professional of cleanness municipal responsibility ==often==> citizens disappear]
-maybe we like the lively dandelions (repertoire of green) and messy weeds (repertoire of clean) that grow in the cracks

being happy with cleanliness
being happy with seeing people cleaning --> seeing municipal care

leanring ‘where question’ from Annemarie: if you are local that doesn't mean you are local --> ***the local is not obvious*** : the local does not explain itself in its own terms, it is rather explained in terms that have traveled from elsewhere --> this is not to isolate the local, this is not against *traveling of terms*, rather, an argument for specificity: to ask ****which terms from elsewhere are relevant here?**** @Tehran:
what at stake there
what effected here
(what it means in my village?)

traveling of knowledge =/= traveling of repertoires of speeking
functions of import and embedding (something from another time or place in your present argument)

*there is no empirical without language*
there is no local without travel

(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”

[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)

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

*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties

(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems

(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]

can we trace consumption as it unfolds?

-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply there waiting for them)

an “I love you” --enter--> assemblages in manners that catalyse (or inhibit) ongoing hybrid relations

levels of analysis is always unexpected [=/= purification]


modern separation between ‘believing in unicorns’ and ‘managing environmental disasters’ [~/=? ajayeb] ~ modern separations/boundaries: science/mythology/politics/religion/leisure (<--Latour/Haraway-- this is a problem) ==> ***purify components of our cultures***

‘program of intervention’: a purposeful attempt to construct realities by enlisting various allies : intermediaries establishing alliances between products, institutions, celebrities and consumers in ways that improve sales and mobilize stable relationships --> institutions attempt to strategically shape assemblages
(Law, Moor, Araujo, Ruiz)

marketers may try to establish stable brand images by mobilising networks of celebrities, scientists, consumption communities and various media outlets --but--> are contested, there is no ‘lead actor’ in assemblages

[*]marketing: iterative attempts to weave together networks of products, services or brands with heterogeneous allies in order to extend the usefulness of a particular market offering across wider consumption assemblages in time and space
-marketers think in terms of catalyzing interactions and consistencies amongst stubborn, messy and dynamic assemblages of spaces, representations, things and consumers

knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)

[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity to represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about @constantvzw
(Winthereik and Verran)

in the case of data streaming: what are the people, objects, texts and practices that constitute processes of assembling?
-in our research let's not prioritize either people or things in advance ==> unexpected sources of influence in markets and consumer cultures @Foad
-to map together material/technological as well as linguistic aspects of consumer culture: narratives, phenomenological techniques, etc.
-consumers ‘become’ during consumption
*[?why become interested in] consumption/markets: hybrid networks of narratives, objects, devices and practices (that [it seems] are necessary to create conditions for any ‘human’ action)*
(still use other more old-fashioned research techniques: depth interviews [Xiri], phenomenological methods [], hermeneutic analysis [Sina], etc.)
-(how to account for) tech-mediated flows of information and knowledge that pass through the [...]