[...]e 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 (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli (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[...]