[...]kshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description?
•How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world?
•What does it mean to add density and texture to description?


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armies of metaphors and metonymies that are to justify war

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


which hyperobject you are caught in?

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


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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

visist = visit + resist


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

Descartes uncritically importing the very scholasticism his work undermined

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


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


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

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


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

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

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

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

causal factoid


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


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


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


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

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


speculative realism, a rogue machinery

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

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


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

a threatening proximity

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


one's normal sense of time as a container


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


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


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


weather as monster

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


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

back-to-nature festivals

nihilistic princes of darkness

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my work is *to mix stories*

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)


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

readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive r[...]