[...]fortable 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)

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

#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[...]