[...]ce =/=? joyous festivity [----the issue and point in project Persische Abend PARS VIDEO 2014]

the minute you see in a text (@Hoda, Sana, Ali having even) one memory that is clear and guaranteed --> your signals should go on: there is one unrevised (in an original form), no secondary revision, *pure memory* <-- this is a memory that is unnegotiable for them

*on Wind
wind, is a coming that arrives from the future
(compare “going” [staying behind] in Attar, Hafez, and Holderlin) [in San'an nobody is greeting, there is no greet-event. Attar misses: Greeting as pure letting go**]
(Avital on Holderlin:) “[...] in going, comes. Parting is not a mere leave-taking and empty staying behind. Parting is also not a mere going away and disappearing. The poet remains in the rustling wind. to the extent that he goes with its going. [...] Nonetheless. the poet stays with the wind. Accompaniment now shapes the Greeting. As the gusting wind is alternately a coming and a going. so is the Greeting a staying behind that nonetheless flutters away. becoming a going with. [...] The poet's staying behind is crucial. Staying behind is not meant to mark the isolation or even desolation of the poetic act. [...] Neither passive nor active, remaining behind indicates a way of going back, a returning to the source.”
-traveling to the impossible place of the other
-(wind) come and go without touching down or dropping anchor
-the agency, animacy and sentience of the wind is described by ajayeb's sensuous subjects within the wind. one feels enwrapped, enveloped in a sentient being that moves across vast distances, it comes and goes --> the materially textured poetics of description in the ajayeb-e bad باد

the poesy (~ fictional =/= truth, real) (Wahrheit und Dichtung) of ajayeb (are no longer distinguished from each other)

(greeting is the poet/artist's most essential mode of being)

a designed closure or reappropriation that locks the Other into a schema of subjectivity ---- at once promoted and subjected
*(re)fastened to the Greek origin
promoting the ousider to insider (who now holds an Ursprung and origin)

re-appropriation ~=?! an end to alienation {~=?=> the condition of possibility for totalitarianism} [Fynsk]

the illusion (and comfort) of noncastration

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

duty of deconstruction: the practice of non-avoidance
(duty =/= your nature)--> the duty of being unwelcomed

vomiting ~= healing



*after the 18th century (seems) all art (artists) wants to be:
•in the privileged place of nonrepresentational work. trying its self with the sublime, that which disturbs and devastates being
•performative = being + doing ~= becoming what it is

() parentheses:
•parental parenthetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping the text to its opposite meaning
•turns everything around --> a noble feeling
•

(Avital > Nietzsche:) destruction: commitment to futurity
affirms life, clears out the nonsense
=/= devastation: destruction without future
-if you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward




the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام

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

(the word) wonder, it worlds.

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

work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)

in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...

(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

history of truth


*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving


(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی‌ fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه‌ moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth
-also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive approach to the knowledge milieu that he lived in, set the secular registers of truth
گفتم اگر از تو در خواهم شکافته شوی چه کنی؟ گفت شکافته شوم. بدو اشارت کرد و ماه به دو پاره شد

(ajayeb-e aab) عجایب آب
آشنا ashena (=/= stranger) in Farsi comes from the relationship with water and swimming, somehow knowing the water
cognition (in Greek cogn, ‘having learned’), in Farsi shenakht (شناخت) is rooted in water, ashena: shenavar dar bahr budan شناور در بهر بودن, floating body, -shenasi شناسی‌-

(ajayeb-e donya) عجایب دنیا
wonders of earth(?) --> ghul (غول), serial killer, house full of bones (horror story)
(after donya/earth comes immidiatly, ghiamat قیامت)
donya: the temporal world (~=? cthulu) (--?--> material-semiotic time-space of donya)
-search ‘donya’ and its semiotic network in Ferdosi and others
-search ‘alam’ (in Nezami: dar alam alam afaridan در عالم عالم آفریدن)
-‘zamin’ or zamini (زمین، زمینی‌), what is meant when we say one thinks zamini in ajayeb? which zamin?

(ajayeb-e mardom) عجایب مردم
look at the word ‘mardom’ in Shahname and how it (dis)articulates Div (دیو), animal, demon, dad (دد), janevar (جانور), etc.
‘mardom o janevar’ مردم و جانور (--> Shahname)
other name of mardom: folan فلان (unkown), yaru یارو (known),

(ajayeb-e jan) عجایب جان
jan-parvar جان پرور (Nezami)

(Mehran Rad)
andakhtan (انداختن) --> andaze (اندازه) --> hendese (هندسه) --> mohandes (مهندس) =/= engineer (in english from engine)
andakhtan: to throw two things close to each other (two lovers in the bed)
=/= (catapult) manjenigh منجنیق ~ mechanic [two different ontologies of geometry and measurement]

(ajayeb-e khasf) عجایب خسف
ecological disasters
فرورفتگی و پستی و مغاکی ظاهر زمین
فرورفتن در زمین
--> page 150, Haman story, fire not burning Haman's heart, an example that God has no special privilege, is not located in addition to or beyond other beings

(ajayeb-e gur) عجایب گور
graves -- material and ecological deaths, earth related passings
main actor: Malek al-mot (ملک الموت Angel of death)
ashabe kahf (اصحاب کهف), ashabe raghim (اصحاب رقیم) --> immortality

(ajayeb-e kuh) عجایب کوه
om-ol-jebal (ام الجبال), ghaf (قاف): mother of mountains, all mountains link to her, earth
ecologically significant --> holders of water and Ganj (گنج), nailed the earth, they are your cradles
az ganj be ganj (فرستم به گنج تو از گنج خویش, Ferdosi)


*Ghiamat and Climate

[Haraway]
the metaphysical problem of (our) scale
(what are the scales in ajayeb? what is people in ajayeb? what it means to be animal? and what is their scale?)
ecologies that have many scales (in temporality and physicality): river scale, mountain scale, molecular times, Jinn's time, Ghiamat times, sense scale, ...

the ajayeb's model is (always?) the global scale?
--> how can i seek and describe multiple situated worldings and multiple sorts of translations to engage ajayeb's globalism? (using Haraway's word on Tsing)
-attention to friction ==> (ethnographic accounts of) global interconnection

(some metaphors:) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions (*? of ajayeb's histories)
relational, sympoietic, consequential,
in ajayeb, what is cosmic, what is terran, what is cursed, *?

in ajayeb:
•what are the figures of finitude, destruction, astralized hearing, enactments of generation, the figures that take action, take heart?
•what are the chthonic entities? {the finite complex material systems that can break down =/= stories that personify (Mother Earth) are *misplaced concreteness*. [(i am against) personified =/= figurative (which i love. figures can be tentacular, patterns, processes, stories.) what Foad would say?]}
•what are the gorgeous, luring, dangerous precarities (of the terra)?
•what are (its specific) art science worldings?

*those creatures across taxa (taxon, categorical classification, taxonomic group)
taxonomic conveniences


[with Haraway]

what is the optics of ajayeb?
[that is entertaining being reductive for a moment, but that is productive]
(to help with that, the optics of the anthropocene is the image of the earth from space, Gaia?)
-a cybernetic, systems-theoretic entity, studied in different scales
-various reports (on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?

what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?

the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)

industrial agriculture and plantation


to be storied and studied

the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]


(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses


planet =/= terrestrial planet


(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief


the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.



#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’

“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality

I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...

*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings

the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages

nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)

foundation is always contingent (Haraway > Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent

bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings

in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency

on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)

what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?

*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what would or could trouble ‘biological kind,’ ‘categories of organism’?)
{ machinic + textual + organic ~-=> species }--> causality-story, origin-story, Real-Presence-story (~transubstantiated signs of the flesh),
•species is about defining difference, rooted in polyvocal fugues of **doctrines of cause**
•one thinks of species as logical category, logical type, visual impression, members of a category that have the same characteristics. but you also say “be specific!” you want the opposite. you want a list of relentless particularities.
•(for Haraway species is about) a particular kind of semiotics where sign and flesh are tangled

Marx and Freud in shit and gold, primitive scat and civilized metal, in specie

[title]
**ajayeb's technologies of (Persian) subject/object-making**

nature and culture implode into one another (in the relentlessly historically specific ways)

(Haraway > Althusser) **interpellation** (estizah استیضاح) ==> concrete individuals (in the modern state)
*the ideologically loaded narratives ==> life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction, etc.
{how not to do estizah (our objects, peers)? latent individualization in apass's requirement of ‘intentionality’ from its participants: “no sleep-walking!” [--> art as “explicit intentional act.” Merleau-Ponty's account the body-schema.] [estizah is the site of encounter with the ‘man of law’ in which one becomes a man of law: by asking what is your “name and business,” demanding “proof” of me. one way of responding to that demand of name is to give your name as a performance in an amerindian mode: “three were dead before they knew.” that's my name.] The material ritual practice of ‘recognition’ : “Who is there?” and “It's me!” of the everyday life ==> makes us concrete subject (in the ideology in democracy and law) --> independent agents with self-produced identities. (in capitalist societies) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselves outside of ideology?)} (Foucauldian/Althusserian: passively defined by identity ==> mobilizing around these identities --?--> potential for resistance)
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??

***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)

stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”

*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)

what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?

origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master

the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies

which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being

(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions

what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.

“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)

“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria


to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest


thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense


scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice

theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument

“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***

(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)

significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being

*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales

differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography

category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)


off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia


(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations, nations)

to tell (detailed love and training) stories at these levels

this is about distributed agencies in “layers of locals and globals,”

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

my interests lies really with the ecological cosmologies in my neighborhood (iran, old, middle east, far east, past, present,)
that is why i was interested in the birds of Attar, pig of san'an, wolf of the pigs, crow of the partridge, and so on.
so things take positions in our bigger semiotic material world, there is never just a life animal on the plate, the chicken has become killable first through linguistic interpretive representation network of semiotic relations. so my question in the birds performance was that how the excess of meaning is related in actuality to the removal of corporeality in Attar's non-birdness Simurgh (سیمرغ) till the chicken in khoresh-e morgh (خورشت مرغ).

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

[Scott Gilbert]

(all organic beings have been formed on two general laws, according to Darwin:)
(1) unity of type and (2) conditions of existence --> inorganic? fire?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)

inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)

Ontogeny or morphogenesis: organism's developmental lifespan
Phylogeny: evolutionary historical heritable traits

ontogeny ==> phylogeny
“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny: it creates it” (Garstang, 1922; p. 724)


evolution was not so much a branched chain as a ladder

molecular systematics

evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology)

each discipline has:
-its own rules of evidence
-its own professors
-its own journals
-its own vocabulary


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mollusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in it --> potentiality)

(new species originate as) ***hopeful monsters***
that result from mutations in developmentally important loci (-macromutations)

Goldschmidt: the gene wasn't a locus or an allele. Rather, it was a unit of development

“to convince evolutionists that evolution is not only a statistical genetical problem but also one of the developmental potentialities of organism”

(Waddington 1953 claimed:) ...in conventional studies of evolution, the animal is considered either as genotype (and studied by geneticists) or as phenotype [Erscheingungsbild ] (and is studied by taxonomists)
(Waddington then kaunched into a) critique of the notion of “random mutation,” noting that there are developmental constraints placed on what changes are possible.
•“we think of development as a cybernetic process, involving stablization through feed-back and other mechanisms.”


(Francois Jacob) “Evolution by tinkering” (sare-ham-bandi سرهم بندی)

(Leigh van Valen 1973) “evolution is the control of development by ecology”

phenotypic plasticity
developmental plasticity


organism: an epigenetic materialism****** (Hertwig 1894)
(Hertwig concludes: it has been shown [...] that much of what Weismann would explain by) determinants within the egg must have cause outside the egg.
[***egg and its outside]
[the causality drama is not that which came first, the chicken or the egg, but what inside the egg that has cause outside the egg]


context-dependent sex

genetic assimilation

life history strategies

teratology (kaj-rikht-shenasi کج ریخت شناسی‌, naghes-al-khelghe-shenasi ناقص الخلقه شناسی‌)

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

rewriting technique criteria (of the gene) [from new biological headquarters]

retro-transposon: a DNA sequence that can change its position within a genome, sometimes creating or reversing mutations and altering the cell's genetic identity and genome size
(we have uterus because of bacterial transposons)

intestinal

enzyme, macromolecular biological catalysts, accelerating chemical reaction

using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social

“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria

immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body

co-metabolism
host-diet

four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”



ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent

a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious

we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else

*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)

Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making

(Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]

(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]


(protestants that were never burnt enough)


we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]


in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”

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

[Stengers]

[a kind of] writing (not writing down)

writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation

to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it

how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine

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

[Serres]

ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth

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

[Anand]

the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography

that sanctification of birds and stones alerts us to an Indic and Islamic vision of humans in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.

The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.

There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62).”

description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms


where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])

the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)

“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of understanding the language of even of inert, petrified stones. But the righteous man, in Benjamin's imagination, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)

(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.

[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]

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[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins

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(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)

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[Martha Kenney]

(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)


just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination


the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.


[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.

storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]

[where there is a situated perspectives there is storytelling]

it is “practicing generous reading”

and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]


(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives


as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.

epistemological beast fable

unnatural history

knowledge-making practices of other times and places

tracing the web of horror and delight

Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.

finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)

“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)

(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)

(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)

postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)


#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) 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. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)

(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)

[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast تردست, zerang زرنگ -- like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)


(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)


interpretive cosmology

(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

[...]