[...] 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 An[...]