[...] of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind

{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”

trials and tryouts

[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)

...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.

what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?

[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****

[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]

what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)

...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**

knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.

(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself

The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”

...generous failure, productive of disclosure

...treaties suspend violence only momentarily, artificially

----only with the help of a discussion of rhetorical codes strong enough to scan the paradoxical logic of testing can we begin to analyze the problem of its unstoppability

...Platonic shredders, what allows us to know whether something is “good” if it has not been put to the test.
Can there be a human being without a test?

If Mary Shelley had seen the discovery of America as an event that occurred too suddenly, without the stops and protections of gradual inquiry--in sum, as a world-historical shock of intrusive violence that disrupted all sorts of ecologies, material and immaterial, conscious and unconscious--Nietzsche studies the profound disruption to thought that the experimental theater of America directed. (Ronell)

uninterrogated durability (as a first-rate value on earth)

(American) athleticism of identity switching----it means that anyone can in principle try anything out

Dr. Frankenstein's new *experimental jouissance*

experimenting inhabiting acts of promising (calculating or anticipation----acts by which the future can be nailed down)


It is thus that the maddest and most interesting ages of history always emerge, when the “actors,” all kinds of actors, become the real masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going

...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone

register(s) of understanding


A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.

A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات


ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی‌ ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine

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

Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.


Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)


...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,

...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...

ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty

There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.


The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*

the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)

(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective

your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability

{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}


destructive (and artistic) modes of production.

test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?



Avital's “speculative telephonics”

Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit

the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]

emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier


in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?

how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuou[...]