[...]h animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.

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

infrastructure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”

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

آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak

حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)

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

#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•

#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•

I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.

unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
 --0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing


(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling

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

my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?

topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?

•in ajayeb.net the so-called url address or location bar, is itself a control panel, a graphical user interface widget; how did i come to use “?q=” : rhetorics of technologized inquiry in place before i even could think about how do I allow my objects constituted by “?”, “q” and “=” of the language and grammar of internet
•(when i uploaded my hypertext i faced immediately the big data:) google webmasters tools is my first readership, it communicates its reading with me; (did i have a desire to make the hypertext for a machine?) who/what is doing the reading (in the world of big data)? the interpretive work that is going on, in a writing and reading done by computers ==> ethical and social values
•url pased in facebook post, results into a link to فلزیاب، مطالب علمی و آموزشی / مدار فلزیاب و دستگاه فلزیاب تضمینی, a series of websites for selling treasure finders, finding metal under the ground, ganj, and so on...

the English (since second world war) --> (1) international lingua franca of high technology, (2) the language of computers
-in ajayeb.net the enforcement of standard spelling and even grammar is week or nonexistent
-the amount of linguistic replicators that circulate through my ajayeb hypertext are bound to a colloquial English, they are nevertheless “English”. but this English is being changed and adapted by my foreign use in different ways
-a flourishing of a neo-English and Farsi miniaturization of Eng


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

sometimes the answer to the question is to investigate the question itself
Despret asking with Rowell: how can we be sure that primates have a more complex social life? --> how did we build the comparison?*** --Latour--> if they are so intelligent, how did they get the ‘chance’ to become so ‘well equipped’?
(in this question can be raised an unexpected animal)
[(how) the makhlughat/مخلوقات/creatures/beings of ajayeb were well equipped (with agency, will, intention,)]


sheep, ‘the epitome of the silly animal’

(همگون دوستی hamgune-dusti, khod-no dusti خود نوع دوستی) altruism, in birds (and humans)

Zahavi calling his birds, ‘refugees,’ non-territorial individuals

quest for social ‘status’ and prestige in Babblers
(birds know that) signals for prestige are costly

inclusive fitness

porousness of the (semiotic) demarcation [wild/domesticated --> quasi-wild/quasi-domesticated] --> (successively and recursively) unstable and living tropes* --> we should probably redefine our (creaturely) subjects in correspondence to (Leibnizian) ‘quasi-causes’
quasi-feral

the ‘unexpected’ often unfolds in an unexpected way. (Despert > Leibniz)

anthropomorphism is always someone's anthropomorphism
anthropomorphism is always someone's common sense


{(becoming interested in) individual (detailed nuances of) difference =/= when “model” becomes the goal}--> standard model (of natural science) --> a presupposed specific idea of “science” --> use a technical, highly theoretical language ==> epistemological objectification of animals (--> representation of animals as natural objects) ~= desubjectified animals


(safeguards of) authorship and meaning (won't allow Attar) ==ask==> |X| what is your “subject” interested in? what matters to them?
(Attar never looked for varieties--in anecdotes, in little stories, in individual bird biographies -->{these are the materials that I am collecting from my family telegram group posted animal videos})

thinking with the bird
looking with it (=/= looking at it) --and--> and knowing its intentions

both humans and nonhumans create narratives, rather than just telling them. (there are socialities in which) they both create/disclose new scripts ~~--> inhabiting an existential world ~-> full of actors and living adventures, that give them:
•a history
•a bibliography
•a personality
•
(and) a full repertoire of:
•will
•intention
•agency
•


to recreate similarities between scientific and mundane practices (<-- neccesory for making companionship)

*agency is an equipment

*(greeting) rituals ~=perform==> social links* --> assess reliability
--> I am interested in ritual in its mundane sense =/= performance-art ritual {*}--> who are they in the (becoming in) ritual? (--> who is “Evamaria” in her performance-art ritual?) --> which meaning you embody?


the difference between response and reaction (not so clear [as I thought]) #passive reacting beings...
(this difference) structures the way we see “passivity”

(tracing) “objectivity(s)” (in one's own culture's dominant epistemologies) --> “audience” poker-face in art & science (-adviced to be as neutral as possible, to be unavailable, to be no one) [=/= harem --(is about)--> domesticating practices] [--> (in order to query the ways) audience habituating the performer / scientists habituating their animals*], --> scientists are getting it, why the artists and their audience don't get it!? }--(ontological risk)--> ***the performer is a social subject*** : (category changes in everyday life)
•when I am by myself: I am an orangutan, sometimes snake, I am ‘something’
•when I am with others: I turn to human
•when I am “objective”: I am off-category, I am not ‘something’ (-super strange!)
}==> the ‘Other’ [not only the police officer,] always estizah (interpellation استيضاح) you(?)

it is very interesting the way Despret is working (on the field) with Haraway's (intuitive genius) analysis

scientist's will to be ‘no-one’ that would prevent any interaction

(Despret's constructivist and non-relativist translation of ‘the ways animals act are the consequences of the observer's gaze’:) *animal actions are responsible consequences*
[(*)performance: the responsible consequence of a (no less) responsible gaze]

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

Verran, knowledge economy
knowledger always authored
cross-cultural knowledge practices



-physis, “I bring forth”, “I produce”, “I make to grow” (=/= “techne” in Aristotlian sense)
X-physis: a process which sticks out in the direction X --> how this morpheme has come to mean (since mid-15th century) “form” and “nature”? (this is about thinking of making)
“physis” requires the different perspectives of the four causes (aitia):
•material --> source of matter
•efficient --> power/motion
•formal --> containing its form
•final --> end


zoopoiesis --> zoopoetics, explorations of how animals (zoo) shape the making of text, study of ‘the literary animal’

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

Katie King

“flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity ♥ (--> almost invalid*)

fantasy of education
culture wars
intellectual enterpreneurs
upheavals and connectivities of globalization

changing patterns of interaction

(aren't we here to) change the patterns of interaction
(aren't we here to) change the faith of letters and love stories

reenactments (are fantasy practices and realities) =/= simple, accessible, and democratized (knowledge)

“layers of locals and globals”

[somehow I couldn't feel in his long term project what is Kobe's relation to] (processes and their product that require) developing and learning new skills, pleasures, and communities

-at the end many of us (are busy with or) want to (or inhabit the “will to”) modelling reality
this is also what ajayeb was busy with

***we are always doing both “purification” and “hybridization”
[]we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization ==> we immediately stop being wholly modern --> *our future begins to change* / *our past begins to change*
[my work on ajayeb (“hybrids down below” {Latour}) is precisely about (this kind of) transformation of pasts and futures] ==> meeting companion species {if my work on ajayeb doesn't teach me how to meet the dog in my street, the pigeon on my window, the juju on the edge of my paper, what is it good for then?!}

(*)companion species: assemblages of living and non-living ‘species’***
(Janina is all along engaged with companion species)


(an strategy:) allocation of responsibility for grasping information

assemblage at various levels and sublevels characterizes *explanations* and *practices*

technoscientific tsunami that will obliterate prior practices and cultures...

(learning to) see old and new forms of confusions, docility, subjectivity, morality, agency, empowerment (when we are together)
(to recognize and make) new sites of negotiation


Alberti: bodies of Minoan figurines “wear” the appropriate gender for a specific ritual practice, they don't “bear” gender (as their essential feature) ==> gender salience is always in question, not a propor presupposition
“sex has emerged as a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]


museum studies


(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)


deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت


glocalizing


Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشه‌دار) bodies

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

technologies of the literal

grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]

***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time

***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...


(Leigh Star > Katie King > Sina) “comparing the incomparable”

here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address

ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning

myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)

“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts

continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**


relative universalization

prescrptions for speech and silence


what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)

prescriptions for speech and silence

“politeness phenomena”

‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control

(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”

“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style


preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars


How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658


realized eschatology

انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}

pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign

(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*


(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)

gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)


leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper


•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*


black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Haraway appropriating the idea of modest witness for her own feminist purpose
•

three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social

Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying to enable that kind of “optically dense” and “less elegant” kind of corporeality in our work on Olearius#]
(Haraway + Potter + Shapin + Schaffer:) elaboration on the idea of modest witness in which “modesty” might flip between either two sides:
1- historically masking a masculine solipsism as a preciously unmarked category: modest witness =/= haec vir : God forbid that the experimental way of life have queer foundations
2- (working across partialities) to create “a more adequate, self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges”


a nameless sin about which, without describing, he sought counsel

oratory

tension between dedication and prevarication (zaban bazi زبان بازی)

([let's not] being a member of) a “class” of those whose truth-telling was privileged
in certain sorts of people credibility was embodied


ajayeb.net's style of writing =/= a style of writing driven by the needs of readers who are relatively unskilled (in practical divinity, casuistry, or theology, and so on)


*** what kind of classification work, work of historical representation, is necessary now to show over time with greater clarity, in cooperation with more and more communities of practice, that in the best of all possible worlds, at any given moment, the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then? ***
(Katie King + Bowker + Leigh Star)

[my ajayeb-making is about] partial connections (across time) ==> communities


([my point in work on ajayeb:] we need) the possbility of competing and shifting claims on individuals (=/= self-making individual), rather persons with partial connections (across time) and queer relations with pastpresent ==> negotiating forms of evidence ==> units of analysis ==> past reordered

[with the help of Katie King's figure of writing technologies:] i am interested in and interested to help make historical representations of nonhuman iranians in writing technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning)

with ajayeb this became immediately my concern: *infrastructures of historical representation*

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

(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, accumulating affects, contagious مسرى? it tends to pick up whatever comes near, or gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near*]
•wonder
•cause ==> ?
•
}--> social bond is always rather sensational*

(Ahmed suggests) thinking through affect as “sticky”: affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects
{ affects as contagious =/= (inside/outside) “outside in” model of emotions (for axample, when we say: atmosphere “getting into the individual”)-->[part of the intellectual history of (crowd) psychology and the sociology of emotions] }--> affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected
“what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation” --> Julia's post-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]

(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]

to get along =? to share direction


politics of good feelings

(slide between) affective and moral economies

*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things

[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency

“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what you do

happiness is
•intentional: directed toward objects --> phenomenological sense
•affective: contanct with objects


happiness puts us into intimate contact with things, [...] even if that something does not present itself as an object of consciousness (Ahmed) --> *coming and going of objects*

“to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing”


#my Rigs? simulate a course of action of description
•near the object?
•near sphere (<== happiness)
•core sphere
•orientation
--> practical action
•course of action

we come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. the bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]

[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body

(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”


[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”

things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...

@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)

what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)


in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?

[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)

history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”


bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•

in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility

self-exclusion

to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”

(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference

fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”

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

how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their relational nature) is or may be (usefully) (con)figured as *specific connectivity*? [the question of specific connectivites of ajayeb]--> this requires from me poetics: diffractive descriptive acts
-what are the ajayeb's beings and mine intertwined practices of knowing and being?

the agential cut of the brittlestar is a survival kit: the arm is “cut” and becomes part of the other (predator)

Barad is reading the brittlestar to rework (challenge conventional conceptions of) her discipline's ontologies and boundaries =/= scientist's usual frame of application and amusement of “discovery” that feeds technological advancement, “the excitement and romantic overtones that inevitably accompany the story of the scientist as explorer breaking into new frontiers” (Barad)


(embodiment-->) *bodies are not situated in the world. They are ‘of’ the world (in its dynamic specificity)* (Barad) (@Femke)

[*]objectivity
=/= occupying a determinate position in a given environment
=/= occupying a particular coordinates in space and time, in culture, and in history
=/= seeing from somewhere [=/= “objectivism” (view from nowhere) or “everywhere” (relativism)]
=/=


(like Barad's brittlestars) which ajayeb's being's bodily dynamism resists (or constructs) the familiar notion that space is preexisting container:
•space: a stage on which actors take their place
•time: the mere uniform ticking of clock
(how ajayeb's worlding is similar or different than the familiar notion of Shakespeare's “world is a stage...”?)

[Barad, poet of matter, time and space:] “Matter does not move in space and time. Matter materializes and dynamically enfolds different spatialities and temporalities.”*

*there is only exteriority within*
--?--> models that position representation as the lens that mediates between the object world and the mind of the knowing subject --> (an optics that reflects) a geometry of absolute exteriority between ontologically and epistemologically distinct kinds =/= ajayeb's diffractive differential materializations

perhaps that arm that got detached from you, could have a chance of not becoming a jettison phantom limb forever haunting the missing amputated ‘you,’ rather, a part of “companion species being helping out”? --> *connectivity does not require physical contiguity* (@Luisa's string “theory”)
[*phantom limb* (a concept every theorist/artist should take seriously), in Descartes: used as an illustration of the deception to which the inner senses are prone.
“fossil images,” persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves. (the condition of ‘amputees’ for the one who re-members and builds archives for his phantasmatically lost limb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]


ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature

[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics

ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme

(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)

[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent

the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature

*connections and commitments (come together)*

the copyright symbol © should be a sign not of the right to copy but, if anything, of the responsibilities entailed in producing differential materialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥


(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings

(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature


entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities

there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”

who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

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

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,

our resistance and breakdance

(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’

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

the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity

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

the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence


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

ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and Southeast Asian contexts,

my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)

ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,

(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,

medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•


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

dense and textured stories

(generativity is fueled by) densely felt textures

worlding of the place:
•the material, sensory labor of attending to an emergent and enduring hum
•the force of things amassed of phantom limbs
•actual residue of people “making something of things”

direct materiality of people's shared sense = attending to what is happening

a racist violence in the dark
a space of condensed displacement

watching things arrive in the company of others

*nameable clarities:
•family
•friendship
•love
•collapse
•laughing
•telling stories
•violence
•place
•
--> all atmospherics*** : forms of attending to what's happening, sensing out, accreting attachments and detachments, differences and indifferences, losses and proliferating possibilities. [Stewart]

(Stewart's) curious pause to wonder *what analytic objects matter* in the singularity of a situation and what forms of writing and thinking might approach them****
-experimenting with forms of theory and writing that are responsive to the moving objects they are trying to trace or highlight or escape, or whatever --> #number of legs in ajayeb {
•trying to describe what is happening in little animal moments, scenes
•(the writers of ajayeb trying to) explore the intensity and plasticity of lived compositions--proliferating in their world
•the senses sharpen on the surfaces of things taking form
•a lived affect ==> pushing a present into a composition, an expressivity (--> ajayeb's body)
•(a non-horizontal plane of) incommensurate elements hanging together in a compositional atmosphere =/= holding objects in abeyance تعليق in order to evaluate them as good or bad, or, asserting oppositions between material and representational things
}


[*]attunement: a generative, compositional worlding
-particular attunements can become habitual

-(in the atmospheric of my ajayeb) what is recognized as worthy and knowable object
-what are the links [sensory & affective] between (my) ajayeb's worlding and other worlding

{ migraine ---> house }--> (an acute) sensory attunement (to the atmospherics of the house)
migraine: “black-furred creature beginning to stir”


Foad's atmospheric attunements, responses to the environment
(fully sensory, at once abstract and concrete)*
•a labor
•a sentience to a world's work
•ways of being in noise and light and space

intimacy with a world <----> world's imperative

*an imperative can:
•catch you up
•then deflate
•pop
•leave you standing, a fish out of water


“the sentience of a situation is filled with tracks of labor and attunement--a dwelling in the expressivity of something coming into existence” (Stewart)

we take the world for what it's up to

[*]atmospheric attunement: actual affects of modes of living being brought into being; labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries
-the lived spaces and temporalities of:
•home
•work
•school
•blame
•adventure
•illness
•rumination
•pleasure
•down time
•release
•phantasmatic or unthinkable situations
•
--> rhythms of the present /*/*/*/*\


ajayeb reports of world:
-dense entanglement of affect, attention, the senses, and matter
(everything depends on these entanglements)

a condition
a pacing
a scene of absorption
a dream
a being abandoned by the world
a serial immersion in some little world you never knew was there until you got cancer
a dog
a child
a hankering
the next thing

(?how much ajayeb tells the stories of) unraveling of states of attending to what might be happening

not being able to sit still
being exhausted
being left behind
being ahead of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything


a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad

atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•

an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential

[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of something happening in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking


every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference


!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***

(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*


Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate envelopes that produce worlds (Sloterdijk)
-a form of worlding--an intimate, compositional process of dwelling that bears, gestures, gestates آبستن, worlds (Heidegger)
-the labored viscerality احشايى of being ‘in’ whatever's happening renders choices, aesthetics, surfaces and materialities *a part of something* (Stewart) ~~apass--> the sentience, of a worlding (lightened by soft scenes of the human condition [played out in:
•forms of pleasure @Sina
•weakness @Maarten
•fun @Elen
•humor @Eszter
•acquiescence رضايت ,تن در دادن @Leo
•self-deprecation اظهاربيميلى @Lili
•the intimacy of قبيح دانستن deprecating others @Xiri
•a bad but human habit @Aela
•some wicked little sorcery @קݙ
•])
-
-an attunement that takes form
-a milieu in which the mouth relaxes into a town accent (نواحی?)
-a disorientation in the face of what lies beyond (Janina)
-a love affair with light and color (Foad)
-uncurtained windows (my mother)
-
-
-->{
•one recognizable entity with qualities
•lived modalities
•a history of its social production and uses
 {elements, scenes, encounters, }--they-->{sediment, accrue, circulate, unfold, go flat, }-->{saturate a situation, fly under radar, pull into alignment, fall out of sync, }--> “a regional aesthetic hardens into iconic scenes of living”


calling to eachother in an intimacy of jokes about the things that can happen in their world

voice:
•the tone
•the timing
•the accent
•the phrasing
•the level of force
•the purposefulness of the way that voice lives in light, with trees, in the potentiality of a laugh
•

consistency of a laugh or an edge

***when the muteness of things metamorphoses into an aesthetic phenomenon*** --> singularities incite it

(an actual physical shadow of a state of being)
sing of something amiss:
•depression
•withdrawal
•indifference
•dysfunction


(my mother in Tehran:) a curtained house reduce the gestural economy of seeing and being seen to an occluded vision in which objects are dark, shadowy outlines with black cores, like a world seen through a ripe cataract آب مروارید -->(the house video project i did ‘city of domes’ 2008 http://www.sinaseifee.com/Cathedral.html was actually about that kind of attunement in my mother's house. i was committed to the description of interiority; my allegiance was inward. watchful consciousness in which one witnesses the procession of inner events of light perception <== a sense of lack. sensous grounding of the inner life)
window: a method of worlding in itself, a node of lines of sociality and mood
curtained house --> sign of something amiss (depression, withdrawal, indifference, dysfunction) but “the actual physical shadow of a state of being that broke the circuit of a *gestural economy of seeing and being seen*”
in the maner of my mother: you don't warm up to stranger, you know who you are talking to, you watch what is going on, you help those in the circle
(Stewart describing how in her town) lamps were strongly favored over overhead lighting, lending texture and specifity to the scenes
a pause at a window --> to check in with the unfolding and pleating of a world pulled in and out through the glass <-- this is not just a practice of looking but a mood*, ruminative or touched, for good or bad
•impulse to venture into a place that pulls watchful bodies out of windows


danger
hassle
inordinate distance


#on getting lost with Janina: “this is an adventure and I am not alone.” (anxious + hervorheben رهسپار شدن)
(with Janina ♥ we experienced) disorientation, displacement, and the experience of getting lost (are foundational sensory modes of living out regionality)
*wondering out: palpably unpredictable and seductive; a specific disorientation
•half-deliberate exercise of getting yourself lost
•direct link between intention and effect
* dragging agency into a منشور prismatic affective structure * [prismatic: flickering, gathered into lines, angles of light or motion to attune to, =/= simply present and knowable]
•lost in a loop
*run: fueld by (performed) anxiety, our trip was peppered with moments of disorientation
-the enactment of disorientation poised on the edge of the accidental
-with Janina somehow we found ourselves in an exercise of orientation/disorientation as it is attaching me to place, childhood, some buttom line humanity (called Ungeschicktheit) that depends on giving up competence*** (and often finding oursevels orienting with that rainbow caterpillar disoriented on your forehand)
---our shared ‘should-have-been-obvious'es with Janina
---Janina's misshapen forces*** --somehow--> reach a plane of expressivity (for me--because i love her?)
---the event, its affective structure, is familiar from childhood and strangely satisfying, like a loop i had to make, *an emotive-agentive place i had to check in with* --?--> Janina + Sina forms of belonging
(sometimes that place is a fully-invested connection and weighted, like home)
***forms of belonging: tactile + full of force + tentative + risky /--{"+” : are, and, yet}
--> an ecology of paths that matter by me[...]