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

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

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


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

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

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

harshly half-formed world

germinal aesthetics

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

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

(to sharpen) realist attention to things


[*]life: ontological entertainment

unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere

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


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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique

so ordinary and problematic

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



*valuing
*facting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


rumors travel
facts travel
practices travel


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

can we trace consumption as it unfolds?

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)

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

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

this assemblage-thinking is against[?]:
•Virilio's way of ‘questioning technology'--for him: “to be a subject or to be subjected, that is the question.” he sees crisis in the temporal dimensions of the present moment: the lack of a future-oriented longer time-frame connects “real time”, pollution, and economic inequalities. All of them result from a lack of shared responsibility for the future. (<-- noted by Hubert); or: “The now immaterial environment is connected to the “terminal” body of men and women with interactive prostheses who become the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid.”
•Guattari's machinic (=/= simple construction partes extra partes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing himself into the war machine (hero on heroin) --> technically calibrated culture
‘chemical prosthesis’ (a technology of the human) has been part of man-machinic hybridizations
-hallucinated exteriority
-stimulant, opening another hallucinogenre in life, at the edge of being
-our culture is bascially the history of ‘high culture’
(Avital suggests) drugs [master object of considerable libidinal investment] have been about exploring ‘fractal interiorities’ (and not exterior dimensions)
ecstasy of intoxication, forgetfulness, mimetic poisoning (of literature [= singular staging of the imaginary]): as sedative, as cure, as escape [= forced decision upon the subject]
-for Baudelaire opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
-(Emma Bovary had busted) a logic of reappropriation, collapsing the dreams of restoring a self
@constantvzw's investment in the critique of hallucinated plenitude and pure communication (enabled by digital media) --> transcendental telepathy (being online/connected over distances in a Facebook sense)
-pleasure and liberty values freely exercised upon a coded body
*hallucinator: a creature of simulacrum*
-what is wrong with the social media stream addict? a transport going nowhere; addictive, artificial, and beside oneself; [genuinely clean or drug free ~=? being exposed to existence, placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains]; phantasm of lack in abstinence; (like drugs they are) linked to *a mode of departing*, to desocialization, (like the activity of writing) nonproductive and somehow irresponsible, being-in-drugs (being-in-Facebook) supposedly resists the production of real value (incapable of stabilizing the truth of a real world); figure of drifter/dissident: obsessed and entranced, narcissistic, private, unable to achieve transference; movement of the simulacrum without address;
speed: going nowhere fast

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

[Campbell] on marketing theory

bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness

our ideas of bacteria are shaped through the filter of advertisements for antibacterial products


[*]climate change: “[t]he moment I turn the engine of a car and ignite the 165 million-year-old microscopic fossil faunae, connecting me to the 35 billion ancient barrels that are drilled, fracked, refined, and transported every single year. Climate change is in the 100 trillion objects that are in, that are the Earth, traversing the stomach lining of the Burmese python and the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which churns a quarter of the planet’s heat flux. Climate change is the daily operations of simplification, extraction, purification, replication, and acceleration--all of which are needed to create the philosophy of ‘progress’ that is embodied by nearly every human in this world.” -Campbell
= *a context which will last for thousands of years and will be the fundamental starting point of every action, every thought, every expression of organization*
==> irreversible *death of difference* (biodiversity), end of “human project” (--✕--> despondency دلسردى)

creative foreclosure of the old World
preparing for an end without apocalypse @Jassem
(we need to) experiment with (organizational forms of) justice, ethics, politics, reason**

Holocene ==> fundamental modes through which we organize still today:
•births of language and religion
•concept of resources and exchange
•invention of all known technology
•development of agriculture
•development of domestication
•development of urbanization


Campbell's posthuman
•computation of life
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life


relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory

(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]

Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought

lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe

“Everything in the universe is without reason and is therefore capable of becorning otherwise without reason.” --> this has happened already at least 3 times (where new sets of laws enlerge from nowhere):
•Big Bang
•life from non-life (==> new laws of biological life)
•thought


absolute is wider

“two billiard balls strike into each other, resulting in both balls flying off into the air, or fusing together, or turning into two immaculate but rather grumpy mares, or into two maroon but rather affable lilies”


(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims

--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation

social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism


understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality

inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)


service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people

Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans

objects  withdraw  infinitely  from  humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?

Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology

[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an  extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”
[...]