[...]here; 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”

Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle

[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationist marketing theory* [=/= correlationism: humans doing things in the world to inanimate objects to make immaterial effects happen ~-> access]

interobjective consumption

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

ask anyone to give a definition of ‘food’ --> ‘a source of fuel or energy for the body’ --> most people will give you the engineer's perspective of the world when they are asked =/= the marketers know that everything we buy has a deeper, emotional motivation behind it
innocuous purchase:
•pleasure-seeking
•status seeking
•identity-building benefit
•

ask anyone to give a definition of ‘clothes’ --> ‘textile materials that we use on our skin to provide protection from heat and cold’ =/= marketer will tell you that clothes are portals to different realities

*we don't buy bread --> we buy sustenance for the soul
*we don't buy lightbulbs --> we buy illumination
*we don't buy lipstick --> we buy dreams

****food is not fuel, but fashion****
that means:
•food is a psycho-social comfort blanket
•we use it to compete for status
•we use it to define boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’


obesogenic
obesity


‘superwicked’ problem (in social policy):
-those who are causing the problem are attempting to solve it [for example food marketing's power trying to solve obesity (~= putting Dracula in charge of the blood bank)]
-time is running out

(this is absolute bullshit -->) “we simply need more education to finally understand that X (for example junk food) is bad for us”


(Campbell:) fashion brands (with their 400% growth in the last 20 years) have intensified their campaign to change the perception of clothing: from a functional investment in practical shelter to a vital projection, extension and affirmation of one's very identity

(shift in manufacturing and delivering) *fast fashion* (spearheaded by the Italian design house Benetton, but perfected by fashion brands Zara, H&M and Forever 21) mimics luxury fashion trends at very low costs

increasing efficiencies in production ==> increasing inefficiencies in consumption

*psychological dissonance*: the uneasy feeling that your laptop, car, trainers or coffee machine is no longer ‘right’ [stimulated in two principal ways in marketing:]
-1- physical obsolescence (<== down-grading the quality of product)
-2- psychological obsolescence (<== acceleration of the ‘fashion cycle’: the social phenomenon whereby a design moves through bleeding edge to mainstream to despised mainstream)
-3- ***to make clothing (or any product) a vital prop that is needed to create authentic sense of who we are*** (<== protagonist: Chanel-clad Parisian on the rain-soaked cobbles of a Montmartre morning, the sweat-soaked Nikes of a determined athlete in an empty basketball court in the Bronx, etc. disseminated through Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. [--> this works together but in reverse in film industry the protagonists wearings and style are used to sell that specific identity who wears them])
}==> *every single person cares about the clothes they wear*
-4- *to re-categorize clothing* (perceptual categories are critical to marketers, for example tourism brands worked hard for decades to change the idea of a holiday abroad from the category of luxury to that of necessity, clothes have moved to the status of a coffee to grab and go) <== equivalencing: degraded quality of the garment allows a decrease in the price [==> powerful psychological effect compounded by the retailscape: shoes in are sold on rails like packets of sweets, T-shirts offered in basins at the check-out, etc.]

***advertising (images) = secular magic***
==inducing==> a powerful desire to indulge in the fantasy of being:
•a solitary and steely-gazed athlete
•a sophisticated and urbane Parisian girl
•

Campbell: “The moment that I say that fashion brands do not affect me is the very moment that they have”

pleasurable daydreaming innate to us all

marketing is often a practice of *breaking taboos* ==guarantees==> brand success

detergent, apparel, car or cosmetics brands ==produce==> the monolithic, repetitive idea of ‘clean flawlessness’ that infiltrates our value systems

clothes = portals to different realities

*enclothed cognition*: the influential way clothes change psychological mood, the way clothes allow us to take up certain social roles more authentically

Alessi: fashion is social (its Latin root ‘factio’: a group of people acting together) =/= Campbell: i use clothes (fashion) as a social grammar to communicate with these others

universal clothing in sci-fi is such a lie, because that would remove one of the primary ways in our culture that we have for expressing ourselves


we need to change the manifestation rather than deny the yearning }--> Campbell proposes: slow fashion, re-categorization of clothing back to investment in long-term, high-quality items

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

[title]
nonhuman rationality

(Meillassoux's) speculative realism ==> climate change = a new world (for which we do not have categories)

Meillassoux's concepts { nonhuman + rational --Campbell--> ontologically think about climate change =/= (despondency & passivity) equivocal status of climate change }==> bleak optimism: climate change has already happened + human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a *creative and just foreclosure of the earth's organizational forms*


organization: an environment-making process
--> drawing of ‘general lines’ in the fabric of the whole ==constitute==> most basic mode of existence
--> making of some sort of cut in the universe to simultaneously create & order an inside from an outside [~ *bracket ‘a’ reality out from an undifferentiated plasmic whole* ~= framing]
==produce==> elements of a reality that can be controlled by human intervention

*how we frame climate change will determine the future of life on earth*
[--Sina--> that is why we need more curatorial skills: variational + organizational]


frame: strategic device, a mode of coping with the hugeness of reality (framing moves:)
1- bounding --> defining, separating, assimilating
2- stabilizing --> fixing, delimiting, controlling
3- bring into view --> empirical, technologies of representation, controlling

frame:
•useful models for viewing reality
•recursive lenses through which that phenomenon is measured and acted upon

climate change and new frames emerge side-by-side:
climate change as:
•externality
•superwicked problem
•anthropocene


**what if climate change is unframeable?** [<-- art is good at dealing with this]
climate change qualities:
•unboundedness: hard to separate what is climate change and what is not
•incalculability: intotalizable effects ==> emergencies and materialities that are beyond known forms of planning and organizing
•unthinkability: it escapes each time we try to capture it empirically, organizationally, psychologically

}--> *questions that have no logical or empirical answer ==> ontological* (they concern its ontology) ~ we do not see its fundamental being

end of empirical/logical = beginning of ontological (secular)
                                           =/=
end of empirical/logical =? beginning of eschatological (nonsecular)


}--Campbell--> **ontologization of climate change**
*climate change = the world we live in =/= a problem within the world*

[*]climate change: the absolute context that determines what is possible + what has replaced a previous world
(i find Meillassoux + Campbell argumentation more convincing than Morton's hyperobject)


climate change as “problem” (that can be framed), “thing”, “within the world” [=/= the world: generative context from where problems emerge ==> forms of organization without precedent] ==problem==>
1. epistemological assumptions (+ expectations + responses)
2. unable to encompass (the qualities of climate change)
3. misrecognition of climate change


speculative realist idea of world

[*]speculative realism: a strategy for thinking, organizing, solving at the *widest rational angle: a form of thinking and acting that is concerned with the fundamental structure of reality in its absolute and unconditioned form (=/= manifestations of phenomena) ==> to deliver metaphysical truths unto the world without deforming them with the forceps انبر جراحى of one's own epistemic apparatus
(as) ontological threat ==Campbell==> escalation and absolutization of ethics (*that is necessary to aithentically occupy it*)
@apass: constant investigation of one's epistemology (=/= ontology) in artistic research
--Sina--> the danger of ontologization...

**massively expansive vista of rationality** =/= disavowing rationality

(the old philosophical idea of) the absolute =/= equivocal status

bleak optimism: organizing without hope <== climate change has already happened
--> how to die : a creative form of foreclosure that unlocks a justice that cannot exist without realizing the ontological dimensions of climate change


frame: general organizing device ==>
•define problems
•diagnose causes
•suggest solutions
(their) argumentative strength ==influence==> organization

frame --> define climate change ==> produce climate change --through--> (the work of:)
•problem-identification
•claim-making
•attribution-laying
•boundary delineation
•counter-framing
•bridging
•amplification
•constructing identity-forming vocabularies and discourses
==> *alter an audience's ideological beliefs*

climate change literature has been dominated by economics, (geo)engineering, legal theory/policy studies ==> solutions (to climate change) --invoke--> markets, technologies, policies (with differing criteria about what constitutes legitimacy, authority, efficacy) }<--Campbell-- *before they get a solution, the phenomenon has already been scientized, politicized, mediatized, organized*

indigenous framing of climate change
drawing from indigenous cultures in the hope that a deeper emotional maturity might lead to a deep engagement with the environment which ultimately bestows life }--> framed as an existential threat ==> (question what it means to be) an ecologically interdependent species with moral agency @Chloe2

eschatological cliche --> “existentially significant activities are no longer possible ==> the loss of meaning” (=/= Cinderella)

[*]frame, framing: enfold audiences into an enclosure that is conceptually accessible

for example
•*ecological modernization* : a frame for climate change that seems to enclose the grreatest number of diverse stakeholders --- uses carbon as a way to engage diverse stakeholders, a centrifugal locus that is calculable, non-political, scientific ==> presents opportunities for innovation }--Campbell--> short-term strategy: a reification process that transforms climate change into “the carbon problem” ==> production of carbon markets that ironically serve as creative new modes of accumulation <-- reifies ecological maladaptation
•*catastrophic framing* of climate change --> backfires, moomerang effects, causing audiences to disbelieve the entire message
•*frame-bridging* --> when two issues ostensibly different are linked in complementariness in the same sphere as the concept in question (for example emphasizing the religious and moral dimensions of climate change ==> environment central to faith
•*emotional framing* --> we are suffering from a deficiency of *emotional knowledge* about climate change (=/= deficit of information) ==> locus of problem moves to the psychological affective realm ==> elevation of the problem to an existential threat or trauma --> (climate change becomes a factor in *identity formation*) we become more ecological in our cognition behaviour, affect
◦managers in organizations perform complex ‘affect-based’ work to translate the broader social emotions of climate change into the *local emotional landscape* ==establish==> new norms ==> alter the emotional salience of climate change (in the workplace) [<-- 26/06/2021 this has become the dominant framing in artistic research environments @apass, Pierre, Chloe2]

*(successful) frames: work through the integration of the phenomenon into a reality that is manageable* (=/= Campbell)
focus on the sustainability of discourses that are imaginable and thinkable and connectable with people's existing world =/= focus on the reality of the moving target


‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles

discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective action dilemma, common property dilemma, non-commitment =/= responsibility, transnational commons dilemma, historical versus new emitters, fossil fuel lobby and corporate power }--response-->{ develop techniques for more thorough understanding of ecological interdependencies, manage multi-stakeholder interests, unite common goals in public bad game, transnational issue-spanning, pragmatic incremental gains, address value-action gaps in individual consumption regimes
•1990 --> risk --> mathematics
•1990 --> war --> political economy
•1990 --> crisis --> science
•1990 --> catastrophe --> mathematics (used differently in public imaginary)
◦“dnd of days”, worst-case scenario, complete system collapse, extreme events, irreversible, non-calculative, non-gradual }--response-->{ use catastrophe framing to induce immediate action, fix temporal focus on visualization of the possible aftermath to prevent it Disrupt business-as-usual regimes, use urgency and fear to engage immediate action, emotional re-education, emergency planning
•2007 --> super wicked problem --> policy studies
◦time is running out, those who cause the problem are also seeking to provide a solution, the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent, current responses discount the future irrationally, psychological short-termism =/= long-termis }--response-->{ incentivize organizations, create path-dependent organizational interventions, progressive incremental trajectory, consensus-building, small coalitions
•2002 --> anthropocene --> geology
◦human-geological epoch (following holocene), new temporalities and spatialities, re-purposed as capitalocene, necrocene,, chthulucene etc. to incorporate political economy dimension of planetary terraforming, plantation, hyperobject }--response-->{ re-settlement of populations, adaption, repurposing the frame: capitalism to blame, not humans; capitalism surviving through exploitation


•negative externality --> should be internalized
•wicked problem --> climate change as threat
•emotional frame --> focus on values and morality
•debate frame --> balance-as-bias: dedicating half of the frame to counter-evidence of climate change --> fundamental paradox of collective action @Chloe2 --> tragedy of the commons @Nicolas
•risk framing --> forgrounding the endemic nature of the problem --> a logic of translatability : ‘risk خطر ==> commensurability توافق’
•war frame (turf wars of positions) --> a problem framing that rhetorically amplifies climate change --> logic of outsideness : ‘climate change = an enemy that is fought against’, (drawing from) emergency logic ==urge==> single-shot unified geotechnical solutions
•crisis frame --> emotional framing --leverage--> temporal logic : a climax point (peak oil, peak carbon, etc.) points to the narrowing window of opportunity to act -->
•catastrophic framing --> (using emotional language) locates the frame in the aftermath of a climate changed [<-- a popular public framing of the problem]
•super wicked problem --> temporal logic of time running out --pointing-->
◦irrational future disounting
◦lack of a central organizing authority
◦
•anthropocene --> temporal logic + pervasive spatiality ==> situating the category in deep time + planetary scale [<-- a frame used by organizations]


[*]problem: analytical techniques that lend themselves to core framing tasks of “what, who, why, when, where” of a particular issue (<-- ‘research problem’ is a foundation of this technique)

define boundaries of climate change --to-->
•focus on who is responsible
•ask why is it happening
•identify when is it happening
•locate where

(Campbell's) meta-observation ==> more each field discovers about climate change ==> category expansion (the more it seems to grow in scale)

*what Campbell finds in the discursive evolution of climate change*: a manifestation of (what the philosophical movement known as speculative realism criticizes as) [*]correlationism: we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking & being, a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to


Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*

(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***

to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)

correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors,  multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***


correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]


speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3. (‘climate change = world’ ==>) we can begin to theorize the escalation and absolutization of ethics that is necessary to authentically occupy it --Campbell--> bleak optimism: acceptance of ecological collapse + begin the necessary work to organize within the new world of climate change (@Inga)


dialectical process of critique and reassessment <-- absorbed by organizations
•strategic agenda
•framed as an opportunity
•how climate change is always conceived as something “outside” that needs to be internalized by the organization


(Campbell thinking with Meillassoux) laws of nature changing (~ *forms of emergence without precedent* [three cases/advents --> *radical discontinuities rupture the fabric of what has come before*]):
**world of material =/= world of life =/= world of thought**
1. matter: reducible to what can be theorized in physico-mathematical terms
2. life: (understood more specifically as a set of terms:) affections, sensations, qualitative perceptions, etc. (--> cannot be reduced to material processes)
3. thought: understood as a capacity to arrive at the ‘intelligible content’ bearers of eternity (--> cannot be reduced to life processes)
}--> ****n the transition from non-life to life : the laws of biological life were not contained in the pre-life world --> they emerged ex nihilo (they were not immanent in [nor emerged from] the previous laws)****
--> (Meillassoux:) reality can generate advents on its own =/= the idea of vitalism: the idea that reality contains a hidden organization guided by transcendent intervention


to think of an ontological core for climate change where it is regarded as a world (in the Meillassouxian sense) --> situate climate change as a discontinuity --> *new world will create novelty in organization that exceeds thinkability today*

(from the position of speculative realism) what is important is (the “=/=” of) ‘holocene =/= anthropocene’ (and not the anthropocene)
•what did the world look like at the beginning of holocene?
holocene ==created==> epistemological categories that lasted thousands of years and became the most fundamental modes through which we understand & organize:
◦birth of language
◦birth of religion
◦concept of resources
◦concept of exchange
◦concept of exchange
◦invention of all known technology
◦development of agriculture
◦domestication
◦urbanization
==(by this metric)==> ‘climate change = world’ marks the end of organization as we can think it 😱


(let's widen rationality rather than abandoning it)

speculative realism --Campbell--> (a strategy for thinking at the) widest rational angle

example of speculative realism --> Meillassoux's spectral dilemma: [theist] resurrection of the dead (to provide justice for unjust deaths) + [atheist] inexistence of God (to absolve God of past injustices ~ meaningless deaths) ==> it is possible that God might emerge in the future --> complete justice has an ontological & real basis }-->
•the possibility of living according to *absolutizating thoughts* (one of Meillassoux's main tactics is to raise the stakes extremely high to show that *ethical commitments are either absolute or not* [--Campbell--> to speak in absolutizating ways about climate change]) (=/= focus on rthical dilemmas as epistemological conundrums and escalation of ethics to the status of a universal absence of justice ==> despondency + cynicism)

(the problem of) critical philosophy wants to avoid dogmatism, but it also incubates dogmatism because in abandoning any ratinoal access to the absolute (they want to be devoid of the slightest pretension to rationality) it renders this space accessible only by dogmatic faith and irrationality
--> (an unintentional and undesirable by-product of healthy scientific scepticism:) the mild sensible scepticism we hold towards “reality” cab be exlpoited to undermine any and all belief in it : climate change ==> logic schism =/= object of/for knowledge (both sceptics and believers use knowledge to deepen their differing positions =/= to elucidate the situation) [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]


correlationism ==activate==> a deeply seeted belief that *we are a necessary part of reality* (a permanent fixture), even when we know rationally that we have not always been
=/= (more ontologically authentic) non-correlationist perspective --> we are a moment in time
--> speculative realism: تدارکی preparatory device, an attitude engine, a strategic lens (to see ‘climate change = world’):
1. climate change has already happened
2. climate change marks the end of human civilization
}--> how do we adjust?

The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: *understanding that this civilization is already dead*. The sooner we confront our situation and realize that there is nothing we can do to *save* ourselves, the sooner we can get down to the difficult task of *adapting*, with mortal humility, to our new reality. [=/= declare urgency]
-Scranton

hope =/= optimism
  |(?)       |(?)
saving =/= adopting
(the world) (to the world)


!!!☠️
[bleak mood]
(climate change -->) multi-leveled death:
•loss of a civilization
•irreversible death of difference (biodiversity)
•ultimate limit of the human project
•
=/= (modernity -->) secret belief that this civilization will last forever

(what could be opportunities for) **creative foreclosure** of the old world --> space for optimism ♥
--> ****preparing for an end without apocalypse**** [= foreclosure, @Goda and Sina dictionaryofapocalypse.com] ([curatorial?] organizing for the end of the world that is an escalated absolutizing commitment to divest justly) --> ****organizing without hope*** [=/=? death drive]

(we need دورویی) two-faced {<-- I think artists from Iran and former Soviet Union countries with *double consciousness* تجربه چندگانگی تجربه دوگانگی are good at *hopeless optimism* خوش بین ناامید}
1. acknowledge the unbounded unthinkabile incalculable nature of this new reality
2. a chance to experiment with organizational forms of justice, ethics, politics, reason (that are without precedent)


{(examining growing boundaries of) climate change ==> increasing category expansion ==> epistemologies cannot encompass climage change reality}--Campbell--> (we are) afforded a chance to ontologize it

speculative realism: a mode of commitment to a non-correlated reality --Campbell--> an organizational strategy ==> a mood --> bleak optimism


unthinkability: refusal to let framing occur

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

how mythology is being used in consumer research
[...]
[Tillotson and Martin offering various myth typologies to support theorists in evaluation of myth theories and appropriate integration of theoretical advancements in the field of consumer culture theory:] --> how consumer researchers have sailed though every discipline--from psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, to literary criticism, history and political economy...
myth has been understood in consumer research from five perspective:
•symbolic
•functionalist
•semiotic
•structuralist
•critical theory
•monomythic


Weber{ modern bureaucratization and intellectualization ==> disenchantment of the world }--> modern experience = rationalization and mythological mysticism ==> marketplace, *no institution has been more willing and able to respond to this (Weberian) desire for enchantment than the modern marketplace* ~=> ***normative preference for enchantment = consumption***
--problem--> *the market remains firmly in charge of myth of consumption, its rewards and its consequences* : marketplace mythology has increasingly become an all-encompassing construct of assorted descriptions and theoretical advancements including the sacred, extraordinary, symbolic and transcendental

myth: a way of organizing perceptions of realities


consumer culture theory

{[Mead & Blumer's] symbolic perspective of myth: how symbols are adorned with meaning and that affect social interaction --> symbolic myth research: verbal/nonverbal forms of communication, with an emphasis on how people behave in day-to-day circumstances in the context of socio-historical structure and ideological of their environment ==> “mythology = narrative” }=/= Joseph Campbell: “interaction with the symbolic ==> mythology”

•Freud's use of mythic stories as metaphors in psychoanalysis ==> (early) symbolic perspective
•Jung's archetype: embodiment beliefs/images ==collectively==> myth and religion }==> “mythology = extension of the collective unconscious into society”
•Blumer's social life: construction built up by the actor (=/= relationship of structures directing human life); ability to act toward oneself, ability to internally define themselves as objects [self with goal] as the symbols of their own actions
--McAdams--> personal myth: narrative storyline as a means to organize meaning in their lives --in--> context <==forms== historical, religious and state-influenced belief systems, culturally specific themes and ideology
}--> identity and society --responsible-for--> life story --negotiated--> personal myth as interpretive strategy
}==> concepts of ‘consumption’ and ‘identity’ in consumer culture theory

identity work =/= personal myth
[Velliquette + Murray + Creyer:] example of tattoo culture: private and public burrs physically with the attachment of personal meaning to physical marking of the skin and symbolically through the personal stories attached to public brands --> *individuals attach meaning to consumption* <== negotiating the cultural tensions <==throu== perception of self contrasted with the influence of institutional structures (race, class, gender, age) and ideological pressure }==> “meaning = dialectic of object and consumer”

•(Jung's archetype ==>) Joseph Campbell's monomyth: universally applicable narrative of mythology (like in Hollywood films about the hero's rites of passage --> experience of life in accordance with the phenomena of time)
myths/dreams find expression in symbolic form --> “participating in ritual == engaging myth”
}--> **consumer research as hero's journey** : Consumer Behavior Odyssey's travelling across America in a motorhome to learn about self, the world, and other people [@Jassme and Mia] --> transcendental knowledge of the American consumer ==> academic literature
(consumer Odyssey found that) ‘the journey’ holds a sacred status that transforms knowledge generation into new mythological epistemologies and opens up new doors to understanding (of consumption)
&
‘extraordinary experiences as rites of passage’ [--example: white water river rafting --> (emergent themes of) personal growth, communitas harmony with nature translated to other consumer experiences]

‘rites of passage’ [~= ‘monomyth']:
•separation [~= departure]
•transition [~= initiation]
•reintegration [~= return]

(river rafting ~=) ritual ~= enactment of myth

}--(Arnould & Price)--> narrative of service embodies the initiation of the journey
‘extraordinary experience' = event & *enchanted temporal period*

liminality: the threshold of a ritual where ambiguity and disorientation occurs before the ritual has been completed [Van Gennep, Turner]

[Dobscha and Foxman:] how a joyous activity is actually stressful and invokes *transcendent experiences of a mythic journey* --> ‘call to adventure’ in a chaotic retail setting rife with conflict [~= buying (the quintessential perfect) wedding dress at Filene]

consumers engage and overcome conflicts (by enacting power, achievement, and mastery ~ mythic agency) and cross the mythic threshold ==> transform consumption process into extraordinary event


Saussure's “words considered as signifiers to signs where meaning is held” & meaning is dependent on difference (and not on concepts outside language) --structuralism--> “myth = a form of speech that exists before ideas”
==> Strauss: [speech and remembrance ==>] pre-literary societies produce images and narratives that resembled nature and the meaning of the mind --> mythic narrative = embodied resolution of contradiction [=/= archives of achievements]
--Doja--> mythic structures: generalizable forms (common in all types of societies and universal categories of the human mind) ~ “collective structures ==> superstructures = myth”
Strauss: “myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact”
[for example Mauss's gift: obligation of reciprocation = power-relationship creating a binary of giver and receiver ==reciprocity==> synthesis of the gift]

•Geertz's ‘thick description’ (--> an antidote, symbolic anthropology =/= technocratic, mechanistic means of understanding cultures and settings, exercise of bridging perceived binary oppositions and creating triadic arrays of meaning)
•Derrida's random movement of signifiers (=/= origin as a transcendental anchor to build signification, Strauss's concept of the exemplar model)

Saussure ==>
•Barthes: “myth = manifestation of ideological tendencies of cultures” --> distorts history, depoliticizes speech ==> “language of the bourgeoisie becomes the myth of universal truths, obscuring the power relations and blocking the perspective of power between class, race, gender and other marginalized people” --> perpetuate existing social conditions
=/= Peirce: systems of signification create discourses (~ practices create the meaning behind an individual's interaction with a sign)
}--> ‘advertisers and marketers use signs and symbols to create meaning surrounding their brands. consumers interpret these signs and symbols in different ways’

‘perspective theory’
naturalization of ideological assumptions and how consumers problematize those assumptions in creating individual identity (shared identity and symbolic significance through consumer narratives)
[Thompson and Haytko]

problematization --highlight--> ideological subtexts --formulate--> binary opposition --naturalization--> constructed consumption meaning

four major imaginaries within stock shows:
1. ‘symbolic freedom and independence of rancher life =/= commercial ranching’ ==> mythically relieve anxiety
2. ‘ove and respect for nature =/= need for food and control over nature’
3. ‘community =/= competitive realities of ranching life’
4. mythologising ‘family unification =/= male domination and female subordination’

[symbolic perspective of mythology ==>] “narrative performance = ideology --> allowing people to act without logic, facts or values through illusion or myth” --> mythology: a storyline crafted by the process of individuals’ incorporation of symbolic resources provided through the marketplace, which then must be negotiated between the cultural contradictions and sphere of the dominant and public viewpoints


functionalism: each part of society is dependent on other parts of society ==> social cohesion
~ “whatever is happening in society is what is supposed to happen” --> “myth: a collective representation that empowers and supports social solidarity”
•Durkheim: “knowledge is socially constructed and the world exists through collected representations”
“personal desire =/= community obligation ==> mythology”

•Eliade: “myth = an account of a creation,” of that which ‘really’ happened --> religion

}--(Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry)--> sacred and profane consumption
•sacred consumption inherent in material objects that embody myth helps to develop social cohesion.
sonsumers resist commodification of cultural resources that in Eliade's view are the embodiment of myth
*consumers’ sacred creation*
[example: temporary consumption community Burning Man: synthesis of community and markets through the exchange of goods and creative acts of art and performance --> community narratives embodying mythological creativity as art and performance ‘construct a temporary cohesiveness']
functionalist perspective of social cohesion: “consumption = means of consumer conformity to culture” --> (cohesion perspective:) ***a positive feeling through the appropriation of creative agency and resistance to challenge the unreflexive consumption at the heart of the marketplace myth***

Barthes ==>
•critical theory: “myth = naturalising socially constructed and historical discourse” ~ dominant societal actors oppress subordinates by normalising markers of segregation and subordination --> the concern is to take the side of the oppressed's language and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capitalist ideology conceals and naturalizes managerial power and implicit subordination of workers) --> either side of a power duality can become valorised
•Hegel: “mythology = ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society” --> “ideology = an imaginary map”; political breakdowns ==> ideologies become apparent (independent of mythology)
-(Murray and Ozanne:) meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves --> reality[= the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures] is contradictory <== *inconsistency between subject and object* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture

(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of right and wrong
*moral systems are inherently ideological* in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur***
@constant and apass: ***consumers don't escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state

(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dynamic for consumers)***

mythology --> consumer resistance, emancipation and identity projects

neoliberalism:
•community-based meaning of goods
•individuals (able of) attaching meaning to objects in their own self-expressive way

mythology research: shifted from ‘myth as organizational cohesion’ to ‘understanding agency and emancipatory consumption practices in oppressive situations’

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with Ereshefsky
how to do scientific metaphysics?
•conduct piecewise and local metaphysics (not universalist metaphysics, not science fiction)
•balance naturalism and normativity
◦naturalism --> learn about different scientific practices that have different aims
◦normativity --> evaluate how well those practices achieve those (epistemic and pragmatic) aims
•


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filial piety --> family formation + consumption behaviours (in Asian context)
(public policymakers and) social marketers addressing family dissatisfaction

understanding family identity has important implications for consumption --western-->
•how meal consumption helps to maintain family bonds
•how home-made meals are useful in constructing and communicating family identity (@apass, Leo, Sarah, food-ing, ‘formulations of family identity ~=!? collective’)
•how families preserve identity through the transfer of inalienable possessions
•how families navigate complex consumption choices such as involving parenthood
•


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(Campbell + Saren -->) [*]posthumanism: an aesthetic (not just an epistemology) that blends:
1. the primitive
2. technology
3. horror

[*]metamorphosis: (an engine that encourages the viewer) to recognize life not as being, but as perpetual becoming =/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’

(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating

primal technology

proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***

Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)


Golem --> perennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]

Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind

*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman

*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological

(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror


(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life

(let's have atavism instead of activism)

Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}


primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific technologies has often been read as a marker of cultural ‘backwardness’ <== “technology = something that comes from the West (rich-world technologies) and does something to other people in other places such as the “third world” (a well-intentioned framework that denies both agency and contemporaneity to the ‘other’ --> for example Eliasson's Little Sun)

technological progress is not a force unique to modern ‘civilized’ society; it is intimately bound with art and antiquity
•Heidegger (seeks the origin of technology in ancient Greece) --> technology referred to the ways in which realities are brought into the world, a mode of unconcealing reality (hervorbringen) [=/= mere means or instrument]
+ every unconcealment of reality is also by necessity a concealment of another reality
*poiesis: bring hither out of concealment forth into unconcealment* --> techne = tech + art

paleolithic hunters (so-called primitive societies) have been shown to have been affluent and technologically advanced

technological primitivism, as aesthetic in subcultures of high-technology, incorporating into their philosophies icons of: shamanism, esotericism, hermeticism, the occult, mythology
=/= my ajayeb.net


horror in commercial images (Campbell's investigation =/= fear appeals that act to discourage or warn)
horror (like primitive) is a historically specific form =/= an eternal constant (~ whay is horrific today might be completely unhorrific tomorrow --> for example ajayeb's horror)
horror = science fiction + primitivism

liberatory/avant-garde horror
female-as-victim
female-as-horror
--> apparatus of phallogocentrism
--Campbell--> *horror works to produce figures that contain within them an overflow of contradictory signs*


20th century high-tech machines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive & technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of history, social change, political movements, collapse of communism, fundamentalism, feminism, post-communist nationalism, global immigration flows, transnational projects such as human genome, digital human}***

•mothers
•machine: the scientific, political and discursive field of technology
•monster: emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference and different bodies

enlightenment ==> a comprehensive philosophical and scientific discourse of positioning “people of color, native australians, females, slaves (+ scaipods, cynocephali, tailed men, giants) = nearly-human =/=liberal human subject (white male)
-in the interstices between humans and apes, there was plenty of space to locate speculative or imaginary creatures: *similititudines huminis* (beast-men, monsters with human resemblances, degeneracy)


posthuman
•celebratory declaration of the end of humanity as we know it
•heralding an era of:
◦human being will be superseded by technical being (+ ironically promissing to vouchsafe human being for eternity)
◦(liberatory seeks to) displace the arrogance of the human (as the ultimate and sole authorities of meaning)
•replete with ideological positions (ranging from horrific to hopeful)
•concerned with deconstruting the human as an ancient concept [~?~> dissatisfied and alienated by nature]

ectogenetic foetus (growth of an organism in an artificial environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation

(crossing:)
animal
  human
inanimate
   technologies
    }==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)



[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb

monstrous =/= neat categories

teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories

[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams


(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means of thinking otherwise
-event of the Derridean text signalling a rupture with the discourses in which it is gestated
--Campbell--> both Derrida and Darwin were engaged in the *practice of revealing monstrosity to the world*


***contemporary Iran = postmodern gothic***
آخوند‎ akhoond: social imaginary of post-industrial society producing teratological monstrous formations <== their technological character transgresses conventions of taxonomical description --Braidotti--> cyber-teratological (fascinatino with grotesque + technological)
-what are the non-unitary subjectivities in Tehran today? (monster = horror + marvel)

monster =/= demonstrate, de-monstrate <-- vision + monstrosity
*monster: sites of otherworldliness* --used--> teratoscopy

1- Greek and Roman --> race of monsters: ethnic entity horrific & fantastic
2- baroque and enlightenment --> began to produce a scientific, wondrous, fantastic, rare, entertaining --(such as: madmen and dwarfs and other marvels participated in the life of his or her town and enjoys certain privileges [...] jesters and fools can transgress social conventions and do things that “normal” human beings cannot afford -Braidotti)
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]


experience of the world of high-technology

artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style jagged, suspended cobwebs {<-- Ridley Scott's alien's technology as dirty; a lair swathed in a thick cobweb-like substance --> *technology as life* <== the dirt and dampness of *dirty technology* suggest an animate, sweating, breathing life-force [~ an aesthetic]} --> horror <== damp dark leaking space containing moulding cocoons of spider --Campbell--> motivation, goals or logic of this life form cannot be recovered within the economy of the human (=/= clean cold untouched technological artefact)
◦***technology covered in its own dirt --implies--> life --implies--> disorganization --implies--> disintegrat[...]