[...] -“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 resi[...]