[...]elop 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’

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

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
•


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

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
•


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

(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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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 and'>& 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--> disintegration of borders between ‘us’ (bounded) and ‘them’ (unbounded) --implies--> loss of control
◦ajayeb-e spider // links the world (of primitive + high-technology), its metamorphosis into automobile ==> its multiple and contradictory genealogy; sight of spider --Freud--> induce crisis of neurotic anxiety (arguing that this fear comes from an unconscious association of the spider with the image of the phallic mother and the web --> threatens to engulf us --> mpnstrous feminine, Ridley Scott's alien = technologized embodiment of the phallic mother)
◾ancient activity of weaving [computer emerges out of the history of weaving; the first computers were based on the logic of the loom, quintessence of women's work (Plant, Babbage, Campbell)] --> *contemporary technoculture is an era of insectophilia* (love of insects and arachnids, spiders ants bees worms etc.)<== these insects embody the logic of high-technology which values decenterdness, microprocessing, and swarm intelligence. colonies, swarms, teems ==acts==> *metaphor and'>& epistemology and'>& ontology* to understand decenterdness, rhizomaticity, distribution and microprocessing ==> *insect aesthetic* [#use the term collapse as marketing storytelling, divided entities now mixed with eachother to induce mixed feelings in the audience --> chimera in advertisement]
◽matrix, from the latin ‘mater' = womb, the term matrix possessing the potential to nurture and'>& to trap (---> go to Matrix film series)
◽Arachne: a younge woman, was so skilful at weaving that she was rash enough to challenge the goddess Athene to a contest. she was transformed into a spider and was doomed to weave forever
•Nike mutant foot; to convey the feeling that running with these shoes is like running in bare feet (--> chimera?); the mutant foot evokes a worn and labored transition from human to posthuman which leaves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countryside ~ *an affront to a humanist sensibility of integral bounded being*; filled with tiny selves --> genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms (Matrix 3rd episode the machine face) --> *visualization of the idea that the self possesses no central consciousness* [<-- posthuman: all mental thought, all consciousness and spirit, can be attributed to the operation of micro-material processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website

metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)

Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)

mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effor[...]