[...]be treasured for their beauty as opposed to
their utility or their numinousness.


(Martha Kenney's) “wild facts”
facts that won't hold still
fables
fables of ajayeb, creatures of imaginations, (im)possible worlds

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

your institutional hacks


three things to consider in my work:
projection, immersion, and synthesis

seeking to be at once inside and outside the topic

the issue of topology -- what remains invariant as a result of transformation

suggestive power of the figure

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

synthesis =/=? genesis (to originate something, to design)
genesis =/=? apocalypse

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

in research, contrast between method and subject, is a tool
(in studying natural history)

in critique, contrast between effect and affect, is a tool
(assumed quality of the object and one's own named experience)
[these tools are perhaps cognitive objects]

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

Enlightenment as cultural European phenomenon versus a scientific British one

(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)

the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.

(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)

William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens

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

*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy

*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)



from contingencies to certainties


i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks

i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics

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

trope - something other than its literal form

adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me tell you the story of:
*knowledge --to--> expressed knowledge
*knowledge --to--> knowing
*reality --to--> manifest realities
*real --to--> real enough
*islamic --to--> islamicate (“islamic” has always been a ‘range’ rather than a ‘binary switch’. things become more or less “islamic” in popular/proper belief)
*nature --to--> visual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)


ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)

i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies department, through a low-voice critical mildly blasphemic rant about imagination
(anthropology of non-experimental imagination in the islamicated worlds)
[there is a difference between **experimental imagination** and imagination]

we are at the edge of extinctions
many species and lives are migrating to “where” and nowheres, pushing to the oblivion.

my issue with the ‘timing of understanding’ --> i don't want to be understood by you, i want to be loved by you ==> messenger + message --> so how do i produce lovers? (=/= Don Juan's type of love) --> there is a genius in your everyday talks that transforms me and has nothing to do with understanding (with the information that i grasp)


(using Martha Kenney thinking:)
i am interested in crafting words, phrases, and languages that reworlds us. (reworlding is about reorienting us in the world differently. --> is that what i meant by changing the rhythm of somebody's story?) what is important for me is ***what words ‘do’ rather what words ‘point at.’*** --> if not evidence then ‘what’?! *****the magic of the right word*****

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

communicating knowledge is always also making it
(false: backstage making knowledge, finding truths, connections etc. and then all of this gonna be communicated by publication, teaching, exhibition, etc.)
all the useful ideas i ever had, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging, and so on.
**trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge
(i don't make, i communicate)

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

from paf:
-lunching a counter-exotic movement toward the Book of Wonders: (1) postponing immediate information. (2) ...
•if everything is not exotic then nothing is.
•framing as ‘tool,’ every tool is and has power, and is built in a discourse of power. tools are not innocent, nor can we do without them. they make us. what would be an idea of the ‘worst tool’ you can work with? poetics for me? [to write-about =/= to write-with the Book of Wonders. to use a language-tool that produces the most ambiguities and most misunderstandings, but that is the only way, there is no tool that can prommis clarity. evey tool produces its own ‘clear'--for someone, for some purpose. these makings are all tool-specific: making dichotomies, making similarities, making diferences, stc.]
•how far your research can host an encounter with alterity? and how this encounter can help you undo your prommises of communication, positionality, and conceptual buildings? weave new worldling entanglements with the problem--not to solve it, but stay with it. dissolve essential differences between dichitomies such as: knowledge and expression (or ‘knowledge’ and the ‘communication of knowledge’), experimental and ethical, joke and seriousness, interiority and exteriority, mysterious and clear, uncovering and veiling. produce creative impossibilities that do not resolve to bionary answers easily, that unstable possitionality for good, that open for forms of consiounesses to experience thoughts which differ from itself. to think and entertain both particularities and generalities (of logic, ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc.) encounter can be both infinitly singular and general. that is a form of suggestive work that can deal with the specific as well. (think about ‘chicken’ as an anstract idea in our semiotic world and as an individual being in our material world)
•using the notion of delinking (reminded by Juan) with my research on the Book of Wonders. going from parable-thinking --to--> religious-thinking --to--> poststructuralist-thinking --to--> poetic-thinking --to--> riddle-thinking --to--> biological-thinking --to--> deconstructionist-thinking --to--> ...
•this other universe is always at the beyond--the other cosmos is a lure (?)
•all cages have wheels
•boat, as an image for both construction and destruction
•i don't need to be alone in destroying the boat
•how to move the boat =/= destination




possible workshops for Einat's project:
•moonwalk dance
•database programing --> how to live well with databases, not waging a quixotic war on database designers. we must learn how to read and understand database early in elementary school. databases are fundamental parts of our political social ethical cultural processes...
•regular expression --> how computer programming reads and patterns text
•text-based internet --> cyberfeminism
•intervention in the digital hegemonies (digital ==> cultural ==> material) (changes to the built digital environments, possiblities of reconfiguration --> production of space, articulations about ‘us’)
•what does it mean to look at a code? (a critical introduction to computer programming for artists)
•How to implement a programming language in (JavaScript?)--parsing, regexps, (http://lisperator.net/)
•teaching German with Holderlin's “Andenken” poem
•to create a *feast* (to celebrate is to become free of the habitual, becoming inhabitual. celebration is the tensional coming together of the unlikes --> through which human beings and gods could meet and greet. The festiveness that the celebration encourages constitutes the original Greeting. [Avital])


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

what i have beeing trying to mean by saying that i have been dependent on others to create spaces that a telling can happen, is actually a fundamnetal ellement of storytelling: the ***community. i need and depend on community in my tellings. (this has noting to do with the imperative of “communication” or having a “message”)
(is it what Stengers calls to promote an “oikos”?)


[Stengers]
“the *predominance* of the *concern for relevance* (-rabt-) builds up memory and experience”

political ecology : there is NO knowledge that is (both) relevant and detached
political ecology : relevance + attachment = knowledge

art of staging = designing a scene

[the House TV series, the issue of the protagonist is] the distinguish between the figure of the expert and the figure of the diplomat.
*expert: ones whose practice is not threatend by the issue under discussion --> knowledge = relevance
*diplomat: ones who provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence, (and what is offen called) identity are threatened by a decision. to cause the experts second thoughts. --> knowledge ~= decision
[this is core in storytelling] [then, i am political. i used to use the word embassador, but it means also ‘diplomat.’ stories that can hold another story hanging. Sina's shy embassador ~=? ] (but what about the weak ones, the idiot, the one's who ‘rather not’ contribute to the political project?)
-diplomats are situated*
[for *Lili this is also a delima, she is torn apart between her expert self and diplomat who crafts relevance
diplomat--the relevance of feelings --> what is the knowledge in the kiss? (the kiss that she rendered as ‘irrelevant’)] [for me kiss is essentialy important. “it (everything) started with a kiss."]

universal knowledge =/= relevant knowledge


‘trust’ is one of many names for love
“you can never be indifferent to the trust you inspire” (Stengers)

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#workshop: “the magic of the right word”
(against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth

(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)

1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?


[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]

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#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?

staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)

solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead of framework. --> clever technological rigs, are provisional constructions, setup for a specific myth and dismantled after. sometimes old rigs are reused or repurposed for new rigs.
-resist peaceful naturalization
-uncomfortable software
-building/creating technologies as one way to do ontological politics (in postcolonial context)
-my experiments with ajayeb:
 -(the danger in using) computer software to archive ajayeb's or ajib knowledge =/= lively collective memory tool
 -the software that is slick and seamless runs the risk of the digital media appear as *self-sufficient representations* (<--✕--> living context)
 -archived and frozen in time
-sorting operations

(if i continue with digital tech in reading ajayeb i have to ask) how the digitized ajib knowledge can resist appropriation and translation into an idiom that will not sustain its metaphysics****
◦powerful relational work that numbers (also? = =/= --> => etc.) perform -> “numbers are a particularly smooth and manipulable meaning-making tools. they hide their seams well. they are slick and trustworthy” (Porter) --> they are “materialized relations” (how can we tell a story of relations that for example numbers/math materialize?)
◦highlighting parts of ajayeb: as part of a material reading practice --> “highlighting” could easily be understood as metaphor of disembodied vision; highlighting is not about making things clear but about scribbling (bad-khat بدخط) as a mode of attention =/= (Descartes’) “natural light of reason”


%report on fables of objects #workshop (22.02.2017 HWD apass): attention to the sense and feeling of disparity, dispersity, stability, sublimity, authority, epicness, weakness, severity, solidity, scale, (a)social connections, and tangibility in the character of the object of each participants in the stories we wrote. where were active and passive qualities located? how were agencies distributed?
•origin story --> evolution story, love story [the object falls in love with...]
•daily story
•beast feeding story --> training story
evoking temporality of evolutionary time, face-to-face time, historical time, tiny scale time,
 -each story has a music, texture of colors, pattern of meaning and affect
•bodyguard --> fantastic creature invented to protect an organism (your “object”). this bodyguard can be organic, nonorganic, cyborg, any form, but always an agent. tell us why/how this or that feature helps the bodyguard with its task
•generation stories, describe and follow your object in three generations, its child and grandchild
•[for the second day or warm-up first day?] constraint based writing: (Kenney > Christian Bök's “literary genetics” poetics of encryption of data; poetic vectors, to “infect” the language;) describe/story your object (or an operative “verb” within your discourse) with univocalics: without using “e” or only using a single vowel. or, first write with 3, then 2, then 1 vowel.

-the workshop is about: what other stories (of your object) are possible?
-in the workshop (I take a temporary position to) challenge others to re-tell the story of their ((epistemological) found) objects
-a ‘generative constraint’ might help opening up paths before you, away from our habits of storytelling
-it is about getting a feeling for the resistances and potentials of language in our (sometimes mundane) descriptive practices, “strange richness of missing the letters we need” (Kenney)

the metaphors are dormant in our routines of talking and noticing each other. how then, by traversing the routine, our “knowledge” and “community” took on new meaning, as they get a chance of being rearticulated in different languages (or differenlty infected literature)
~-?==> changing the system of classification (of thought)

-in a way the workshop is about an *approach* to knowledge generation (and not necessarily a rigorous critique nor directly evaluating the production of our knowledges)


***nothing is never merely a metaphor***

[some fables from science studies:]
•Emily Martin's egg/sperm story --> stories of atomism, distribution of agency, ----[The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles]
•Hayward's microscope --> tropes of natural history docu, ----[Enfolded Vision: Refracting The Love Life of the Octopus]
•Kenney/Haraway's origin/nature fable --> the omnipotence of the “origin” story in our descriptions and interactions with the natural world
•Scott Gilbert's immunological “bouncer” story =/= immune systems as inclusive agents of symbiosis
•Lynn Margulis: life (made possible) by “combat” [the survival fable that TV series “The 100” and “Kelile Demne” for instance is based on] --✕--> life by networking
•Haraway: the tale of “organism = a system of division of labor with executive functions” (==> extraction of wealth among us)
•Morton's causality-story
•brain/body story --> where the “move” came from?
•Sina's “standing on the shoulders of giants” --> knowledge/continuity, role of authority and humility in science ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/giants.html]
•Sina's 3 little pigs --> architecture/tech/ echics of encounter --> story of the center and periphery ----[http://www.sinaseifee.com/pigs.html]
•“weapon fathered man” --> Kubrick's african genesis, technology + prehistory (in postwar period) “tool ==> man”
•
fables popular in apass:
•“a work [of art] should speak for itself”
•“the very last stage of the creative process is purely intuitive” --> when people say they stop “reading” or “knowing” when they want to create artwork
•“look really hard inside yourself for what you really want”
•“you are an agent of change” that means art or thinking or being ought to be operative, active, transformative, (even destructive) and that is “political” [--> this fable in found in language; ---> go to Barthes’ fable of the woodcutter]
•




no need for “conflict” nor “hero”
(in the way we give feedback, relate, narrate, story, and tell eachother our matters of care and concern, and where we create zones of attachment; both in your “art work” and the mundane everyday of ‘getting on together’ --> interrupting one's own framework)

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#workshop, on question, feedback method, to improve the questions we ask each other
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-the question that asks what are the good questions that offer an interesting becoming for those to whom the question is addressed
-to ask: does this apparatus has stakes in docility or availability?
-more interesting questions ==enable==> more articulated answers ==> more articulated identities
-asking (questions) (is not about ‘you want to know,’) is about constructing interest ==> chance of interesting answers
-asking about the differential productions,  “=/=” or “=” or “==>” in each other practices. these assessments are propositional and poetic remarks, guessing the artificialities that we live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)

**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)

--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions

we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)

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#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug  (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”

my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to be listened to. rather, in a post-Lacanian critique, i work the text like a pattern of language, an organization of space, text as word-sequencer. it is like looking at an image, still starting from top-left to bottom-right of the page, a process of highlighting or embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
•my second issue with ‘close reading’: there is no correlation between the speed of reading and comprehension/apprehension

*reading practices*
ontology usually decides what reading is --> *book-binding is reading. editorial compositional reformating and remodeling of the space of the text is reading.

(Stewartian) reading that happens in the writing: you can't do any kind of exegesis of the reading تفسير, rather: *you have to become related to the reading in what you are writing*


in research:
•skills of reading and writing
•(more abstract) skills of conceptualizing and analysing

@apass: begin with the generation of research question ==> importance of language
(you flag the importance of language whenever research is marked by question. “?” is a linguistic construct)

•the skill/craft is to select a research question that works better for certain descriptive purposes (than does previous tools)
•(realism:) research question <==outcome== different concerns and emphases

rigor of conceptualization : quality of an access to part of a world “out there”

research method:
•“mapping into knowledge” : co-fabrication between the researcher and the diverse others engaged in the process --> (problem of) ‘positionality ==> data’ (the idea that the researcher produces knowledge or “facts”)
◦positionality ==?==> politically correct jargon in artistic research environment [has positionality backfired into a language of trying to change a public opinion in your favour?]

‘fantasy of the unproblematic mode’

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regarding biographical work according to Pierre, ok i am working even on the border of solipsism
what i am doing is not autopoiesis (self-making, making a poem out of yourself) rather sympoiesis (with-making, with people from different worlds and pasts)

trying to contain every available mode of interpretation in my work
(collecting all the modes of interpretation)

(for the psychoanalyst as writer,) the *unconscious functions as a *trope
unconscious ~=? trope

*my actual interest is in “the place of study”
which is embodied by its participants, is shared and full of stories that hold foster curiosity and learning. a place where hybrid agents of interpretation are alive and at work, partly technological partly human partly animal shared knowing processes.
-one of our strongest ethical obligations is curiosity


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[Nietzsche]

(in writing) if i could choose i would promote something that comes close to the texture of the softening that opens and glides, allowing for sudden shocks and slippages.

the personality needs to be able to flow in order to move past anything that establishes itself firmly

Submitted to constant critique and revision

(Nietzsche) “We can destroy only as creators--But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new ‘things’”

invention's power over new things

work on aphorism and irony
radical critique of reason and truth
will to X ---- feeling of power, primitive form of the will  (=/=? play)
arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional


Nietzsche's campaign against morality :

(contrast between good and evil -->) *master-morality : charity, submission to the other, selflessness, etc. --> you hate yourself

(denying the inherent inequality -->) *slave-morality --> weakness is a matter of choice ==> nihilism


*transvaluation
(Nietzsche hated christianity for its non-affirmation of life. for him sex was a fundamental affirmation of life, christianity's elevation of chastity (including, for example, the story of Mary's virginal pregnancy) is counter to the natural instincts of humanity, and therefore a contradiction of “natural values”.)
•promise of an illustrious afterlife
•desires would be the product of stimuli rather than the product of “will”


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

to *adjust (our/your) question


...to have no positive knowledge claim


appropriate ~= zabt o rabt ضبط و ربط



(let me) fast forward to ‘nowhere’
chance-encounters in your/my efforts of ecriture (in San'an text)
(it is not possible to choreograph chance, we can only report our encounters with it)

like San'an, many of us are facing an anxiety of withdrawal from the world that claims us

i am interested in to-link to that which (suddenly) interupts my reveries


to sharpen my capacity for incapacitation


not being afraid to look into many archives of mistakes (ajayeb?)


‘will to scientific knowledge’



[Latour]

(certain) seperation is political :
when we are talking about (re)uniting curricula, linking fields in humanities we are talking about not bringing together two things that are separate, but actually interogating the distribution of power, a way a distributing agancies.

it is not a “common world” to discover, it is a common world to be produced. and the only way to produce it, is through the usual tools that we have in our disposal, which are comming from ‘representation.’

compose =/= discover/uncover

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

enterances in ajayeb work, already generating form:
*-fire (talking fire)
*-darkness (Zolmat)
*-jinn
*-veil (pardeh)--purity of veiled origin; hidden matrix of signification (on which theoretical work secretly depends?) [also reading the secularization and the lifting of the veil, prostitute paradigm, conceptions of love,]
*-wall(?)


“truth” is veild, according to middle east (truth <----> pardeh پرده)
begining with the Greeks’ notion of basanos, relating truth to torture, a strictly constellated confluence of acts equally troubling to Aristotle and Aristophanes.

•pardeh-dari پرده دری, hajeb حاجب (after neghabat نقابت is hejabat حجابت [Beyhaghi]) (Nezami in Leili-o-majnun: haft arus-e noh emari bar dargah-e to be pardeh-dari (هفت عروس نو عماری بر درگه تو به پرده داری) --?--> angelology) =/=? hayula(ism) هیولی


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

hermeneutics regarding Jurisprudence (feghh فقه) and theology depend on the exegesis of written texts. in both cases the process of understanding is an act of application(?)

interpretation/hermenutice =/= commons/collectivsm
(ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad)

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

(Kohn) to “provincialize” (rustayi روستایی, bastani باستانی?) language in order to make room for another kind of thought--a kind of thought that is more capacious, one that holds and sustains the human.

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

my point in animals without narrative is that the apparatus that is working for Attar in his representation of birds is the same as the narrative tool in the so-called wildlife documentary series which produces nature----a sy.


transcend is about traveling from trope to truth (obur az majaz be haghighat عبور از مجاز به حقیقت,) from virtual to concret. but that is too easily reversible. my point is to stop this transference and interrogate the trope itself. my work in amazon book is about this ‘majaz’ (مجاز), an interface that we are inhabiting.

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

the main (and only?) question in my work/performance/lecture is ‘when’ the gift will/have pass(ed) on.
--> holding on to, preparing, strategizing, spontaneity, and so on

-my texture aversion and preference in soft/hard fabric of language and material tonality? --> the “inanimate affections” (that give us pleasure in life) --> we often give each other soft gifts as a way to care for one another (@Janina)
*radical affection does not require intentional politics* (Chen)



[Shepard 2004] Stanner (W. E. H. Stanner, White Man Got No Dreaming) describes how the universe became a moral system and consists of three elements: marvels, species diversity, and institutions. Marvels refer to that presence of the unexpected that one always encounters sooner or later in nature, particularly when the terrain reflects something about the mind that implies a common structure. His second element, species diversity, coincides with one of the major moral issues of our time--the extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity.

-“marvels of affinity” is the key to reality, revealing how things are, what is known, and how to behave.

cosmogony (keyhan-zayi کیهان زایی‌)--how the universe became a moral system

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[modes of existence]

science studies --> science
what was science before science studies? it was engaged in a sort of stupefaction that prevented meaningful study.

we do not take the fight against X (religion, fetish, etc.) for the truth about X.

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

[Avital]

i am adding “mama's boy” (bache-nane بچه ننه) to my short bio (nothing is added by “me,” everything is told to me.)


thanks to all the people who have given me their ‘sides’ (didn't necessorily confronted me)


(book, ketabat کتابت)
to do something to resignify and breakup the serenity and the serene closure of the book, as the universiy values it and seals it
-what deals does it seal?
-the commitment to breaking up the book and its metaphysically laden pitch for closural sovereignty.
-linguistic pollutants
-dirty talks

#as a mode of writing, make a folding (fractal) book, style of children books, for ajayeb
(what would this structure mean? and how is that expandable?)

#making a cheap horror short-film from one of the ajayebs

#write a X-man short story in Tehran context with iranian everyday characters
•jurassic park --> ajayeb al makhlughat عجایب المخلوقات (horror, sublime, shivering water)
•nonapocalyptic stories and the otherworldly hauntingly familiar in the lost faces of forest (called Tehran?)

(accourding to Egyptian 1550 BCE,) book: a loose collection of magic spells intended to assist a dead person's journey through underworld, and into the afterlife and written by many priests
-are lists the origin of writing? (...way before the installation of the modern scriptural apparatus)



theory-minded academics have rigorously repudiated----or forgotten poetry. ----> poetic deprogrammmg

cohabitation of two sovereign linguistic attitudes----the grammars and behaviors that we associate with figures of literary performance and philosophical positing

18th century
rise of increasingly more mathematical and symbolic logics
more literary types of discursive formations,


Wordsworth, Rilke, and Keats disavowing Paul de Man?!
Freud without Goethe or Schiller?!
Benjamin off Baudelaire?!
Derrida deprived of Mallarme, Ponge, or Celan?!
Heidegger abandoned by Trakl or Holderlin?!


increasing technicization of critical language


colloquy, soliloquy
they are called to witness distinct regions of being ==> assuming the destiny of difference
% denken und dichten is at stake in the *theory of mourning

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[Stengers]

the storyteller : “some people love to divide and classify, while others are bridge-makers--weaving relations that **turn a divide into a living contrast**, one whose power is to affect, to produce thinking and feeling”

(regarding my footnote fetish) ... because writing such footnotes implies *feeling the text* as an *animating power*

philosophy =? a form of textual animation {--> approaching the work of ajayeb}

to turn the [ajayeb] (animist) modes of experience (existence), awareness, and knowledge into living contrasts (intensely powerful bridge-making tools)

can we reappropriate without reanimate? ----> i think if we deconstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.

-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)

*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu

(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])

what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی‌, its ecology)


“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”

“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist


عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation


Earth =/= cradle


Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)

=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)


‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*

(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)

the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])

(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)

(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified



commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران


[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”


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[Thomas Keenan]

reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty

rhetorical reading

who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans

“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”

literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution


(in Western ethical, political, and literary traditions:) responsibility: a matter of articulating what is known with what is done =/= (Keenan:) *responsibility*: an asymmetry or an interruption between the orders of cognition and action

fable --> an exemplary *allegory of d[...]