[...]ive 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

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*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

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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*****

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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)

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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])


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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 sce[...]