[...] be detached from the coordinates that mark its point of view, its history, its formation, and the aesthetics (and politics) of its signature. [and with Sana, through Sa'di, we start with this position, rehearsing criticism studies in terms of the birth of the subject and of subjectivity in early modern Europe]


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

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

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

spectral presence of death

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

artificial self-birthing and self-monumentalization

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


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

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


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


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


...to produce a great geography of introspection

cosmic and affective space


illusion of a universe of infinite curvature

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



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

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


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


excess of mastery
absolute quest of power

*to make meaning enigmatic(?)

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


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


*the cartographic project invents a relation with the past

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

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


plastic and lexical attributes

confused pictorial and lexical properties

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


fragments of remembered writing


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


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

a childhood experience

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



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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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


topophilia


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

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


motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents

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

Allegories of the Continent

Persianisch, Persiae,

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

[Mary Louis Pratt]

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

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

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

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

the rise of natural history

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

codifications of reality

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

(it habitually blinds itself to) the reverse dynamic

obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries

It becomes dependent on its others to know itself

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

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

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

tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history


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


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

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

[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[...]