[...]pen in a present in which we are *lost yet attuned*
--> all the ways that people and things venture out into reals [my mother, Sina, Janina, ...]
[*]town: currents of difference, affiliation, history, ordinary dullness and comforts, characters and their stories
psyching out ethnicity
(my old attunement:) the fear of cockroaches
the miracle mile of computer technology
the elitism of the historical societies
localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region
“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)
Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’
robustness in cold weather
[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb
character or texture of an edge
(ajayeb is made of elements that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise
an edgy irruptive event
rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad combination
(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together
--we adjust ourselves to the done deal that things happen--
(we find ourselve being) “from here” in a world made intimate through forgiveness, denial, detachment flowing in after a surge of something bad--a close call [Stewart]
*what are ajayeb's turns (and turn backs) to the inarticulate real?
hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)
what are ajayeb's state of emergent expressivity [today]? (that tries to guess and describe ‘what is happening’) **** things that happen are incitements to form ****
--> intensities become expressive --> an خونسرد impassive corporeality --> intensities pass from body to body --{
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena [a thing in itself, as distinguished from a phenomenon] spread out across a vast atmospheric field
sediments of ajayeb:
•obvious
•much remarked
•cryptic --> favored
•situationally precise
how ajayeb is an improvisatory conceptuality?
does ajayeb-writing takes place in singularity? (because every worlding is singular and precise ==> the pleasure of its recognition)
#my project in apass has been a practice of writing that is an experiment in attuning to ajayeb's tune
ajayeb reports of:
•affect that has become native***, attaching to bodies and socialities, to an ethos***
with ajayeb (with Stewart) i am learning:
•to approach the tactile compositionality of things
•de-dramatization of academic thought
•to approach the thing that throws itself together *slowly and enigmatically*--> #andakhtan, andaze
•a descriptive detour (with Latour)
•a lyrical evocation (with Stewart)
•a method of awkwardly approaching an object by attuning to it as a thing of *promise and contact* (with Berlant)
•
concept: that which attunes itself to things coming into form; is both abstract & concrete; actual & unfolding
highly fractured stone of a collective intensity (--> Iran, and most other places)
______________
ajayeb was/is very much committed to the concrete: that means committed to speculation and curiosity (and not the demystification and uncovering truths that support a well-known picture of the world) (it was only to a certain degree in support of the middle age islamic picture)
*a something both animated and inhabitable
how to approach a weighted and reeling [walk as if unable to control one's movements] present?
(to name)
(Stewart > Berlant:) objects and scenes of desire hold promise, keeping whole clusters of affects magnetized to them
-an individual's abstract yet contingent desire to feel like he or she is “in” something or can recognize something [@Lili, Aela]
***promise is always promise to be present to the scene
i am reading in ajayeb the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind an sets in motion
exert palpable pressures
(working with ajayen equip me with recognizing the) immanent نافذ, obtuse پخ, erratic ويلان (=/= “obvious meaning” of semantic message and symbolic signification;) to pick up density and texture
(in tasavof, in iranian poetry, in ajayeb, in my peer's works, )
-asking: what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow persent in them --> potentiality & resonance
(according to Stewart) ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meaning*** (in short: canon of “Thinking”) --> “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities
-Sven's ordinary affects and DJings --> his noncoherent singularity ==> a nonrepresentational theory is needed to address them
asking Sven:
•what needs attending to (for you)?
•what/who are you in conversation with?
[scenes and selves]***
•layered textures of a scene
(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into little mythic kernal
•morphed into a cold dark edge
•hopeful
•
•
--> things take place as [*]precisions: the pressure points that open onto potentialities are taken up as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms
my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer
#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact
?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•
watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us
______________
“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)
poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)
[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
[...]