[...] europeans go out of their center to east it is adventure (or anthropology), that means othering and feeling the differences of the other in order to feel outside. but when, for example iranians go to Europe, they never feel they are there for “adventure,” they are there to learn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”

(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]


-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?

rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “emerged” in the participants? (apply emergence-thinking to the participants)
-how hierarchies “emerged” in the workshop? and what are they?

to be ungraspable for the market ==> ? (marketing the self)
to be unintelligible for the university ==> ? (devitalizing the university)


questions:
•decontextualization, as an artistic ready-at-hand tool of concept-making, does it do good or bad to knowledge and imagination (as it is practiced by the people who use it) and how?
•facing the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction to our objects of attention, how do we build nontranscendental abstractions?
•and, why self-promoting is such a turn-off? (projecting a self-image of being cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?



in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’

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eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans


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#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)


“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime

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researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?

a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,

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few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)


i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behaviour concealed


***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***

‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless

impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subjectivity]
deflection --> dodging: not giving meaningful answers : gradations of non-answers you are receiving
taking a keyword, repeating it, sounds like answering the question, introducing a nonsequitur to trip up the host
==> more confused & less informed

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#project Puchberg landscape Austria
shifting baseline syndrome: reshaping the landscape and forgetting what was before ==>{ (new) reality = shaped and ruined landscapes
(Emirates was for me such reality of shaped ruin)
admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements (Puchberg Austrian meadows, with it cows and horses, place of beauty and leisure) ==entails==> forgetting many others --> ‘forgetting’ (~ privileging one assemblage over others) ==remakes==> landscapes
(yet) ghosts point to forgetting, show how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces
( specters in grasslands...)


in apass (i can't pose problems until) we must address these question:
•European heritage of creating conviviality شادمانی قابل آمیزش (and very good at it)
•the idea of democracy as a political project اکثريت نجيب (soft ways of being together)
◦secularism of artistic research دين ناوابستگى (registers of logos)

[most of the times our collaborative research artistic practices explicate ‘soft ways of being together’ ==> a condition in which no one knows better than the other]

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the accelerationist fable of “running before walking”
ask any scientist and it comes to this. any problem caused by progress is because it has been going too fast. but the direction of its movement remains intrinsic to the idea of human
...

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@Hoda: to be very careful with the fetish of “refugee's suffering” --> turning a serious political problem (geopolitics of western intervention, europe's economic neocolonialism) into a (sentimental liberal) humanitarian concern ==> avoiding critical political analysis

?a different program: not to be yourself
to bring our struggles together (not our so-called cultural differences)

refusal to integration is problematic as integration (into host's pleasure principle)

authentic imperialism has always been multicultural

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on affect
affective character practice of retrospection: a bit pensive and passive, a bit slow and solemn?

1970s and 1980s anthropology of emotion: how feelings variously fix and stick through different compositions of language and discourse =/= anthropology of affect: how some feelings slip, evade, and overflow capture ==> *creative methods to collect evidence of environments making and shaping bodies in ways more complex than and ontologically distinct from the poetics on hand to describe it*

**poetics may quite possibly be all that we have, it certainly isn't all that we are**

[*]politics: permutations of evolving power relations and our reflexive attempts to negotiate and manage them

*affect theory: an effect of the world as much as a frame for viewing it

industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)

spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large

affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices

methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap

The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum

...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore

countervailing forces of sense and story

to inspire a sense of critical urgency

affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes

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contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy

***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)

the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience reception

anarchic and eroticised happening-art

“participation = collectivism =/= capitalism”

@Eszter: (?the “ideological” in) participation in a welfare state social democracy

the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)

*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)

*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy

to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience

(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

hit-and-miss field trips

the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships

comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority

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only working with (that seems to be) your idea

(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious

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Hillman

like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.

what are art's investments in psychology today?

all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)

“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*

(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**

(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul

symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality

“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses

♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)

the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science

recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•

[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***

analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual

mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego

****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*

-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?

-please let's have a darker kind of light...



(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world

(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)

(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes

(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function


Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)

mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*

root metaphor of psychology (?)

(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us

[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity

tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***

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(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?

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-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben

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act of cultural and economic exchange
act of reciprocal exchange, of creative mutuality (to benefit in a myriad of ways related to our professional status, our institutional ‘worth,’ the social and cultural capital perceived to be attached to the ‘networks’ in which we operate)
[to interrogate] concepts of artistic labor and value
time, labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems

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https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology

operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced

state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity

*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids

unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power

mutant forms of technological self-subjugation

(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics

[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out as objectively existing taxonomies (+ ‘data’ manually gathered from individuals to ‘fit’ those categories) and thus summon [a term with magical implications purposefully employed here] a population into being
-McClanahan

census ==> statistics: factish object: hybrid and unstable (possibly inaccurate) yet fetishised and faith-based technologies that possess the ability to transform (the individual parts of social and cultural groups into a sacred somatic whole [~ people/nation])--> biopolitics
-can art succeed in transforming such a ‘whole’ into free and autonomous individual beings?

references to panopticon society
(?which camera angles suggest) naturalization of surveillance culture



[title]
*observational aesthetic* <== convergences of contemporary art and anthropology

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[ajayeb -->] concept or theory --> (a training in) absorption + attention + framing =/= truth effect

[title]
Whatever Professor

[why apass asked me to do their website's] indexing: (a shrewd and thoughtful creativity in) the first interpretation of a content's body =/= presuming a standard taxonomic form
==>
•surprises
•styles of critical thought generates power in twists of voice and craft
•
allows one please to demonstrate the wonder
“We ask our readers to perform the jamb when language overruns the mental breathing that reading entails.” (Lepselter)
•or, nothing disappears --> You breathe the air you're given. (“I felt ripples from a rape in the seventeenth century, behind a barn somewhere in Romania, where generations later my bitter grandmother disparaged her children without knowing why.”)
•or, words sediment next to something laid low
•or, (index as in) to point sideways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}


things that do the reading, editing, assembling

*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps

[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*

#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units

theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)

aftershocks of a shock you can't point out

(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”

designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out

evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)

proliferation of little worlds...

story = relay, weiterleiten, رله

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in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology



score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia



wry --> wryly کج معوج شده

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paleonymy (use of a preexisting word in a new context) --> we are stuck with old skeletons neurotic words [that are not mutating] (for example man, woman, animal, black, etc.) [=/= hope for mutation, random emergence, sudden epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)

a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, (instead of jumping on it and tagging it out,) first say why it is right, what necessitated and motivated it, why it had to be there = rigor: locate the problem zone + say why it had to be there (why it rhymes with what)

(mistake or glitch =/=) error: an exemplary error that teaches you, that had to be made to get where you are going, you had to get into this zone (and as traumatic as it might be) it was neccesory and necessitated by the system that was pushing you forward, it pushed you toward a place of error and blindness and forgetting

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practice of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings

[...]