[...] 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
•compositions at work


my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account of the modification and reciprocity of bodies and actions, environs, senses, rhythms, tones, and proprioceptions"[: sense of the position of parts of the body, relative to other neighbouring parts of the body]
•objects of database: “are soicialy, poetically, materially compositional”


the social, the subject, matter and event are comprised of:
•affects
•potentialities
•energetics
•attunements
•orientations
•disorientations
•atmospheres
=/= finished actualities*


ajayeb is compositional, that means something reaches a point of expressivity, something throws itself together as matter already configured yet enigmatic and provocative
(Stewart helping me talk ajayeb)

(am i working to) bridge between more compositions (?)


“watching a spider negotiate its unlikely territory”


(useless concentration)


Foad, Sina, we were a slipstream of sensations made of all the ways that world impressed itself upon us


[*]world: a partial stabilization of practices, capacities, tendencies and affordances in the form of a recursive patterning (Anderson + Harrison > Stewart)
•mixed-media compositions of matter and thought-feeling
•the world of ajayeb magnetizes materialities and forms of alertness for me to what's singular and prolific. i am circling through a heritage of (iranian) romanticism and pragmatism to arrive (with Stewart) at “the precision of a worldly composition's mattering forms”
◦*worlding: happens as matter poems composed of sensations, motion, bodies, and objects (--@Luisa)
•an attachment to the forms and forces of emergence and concrescence itself [...] in the actuality of this and that

learning from my mother by moving in the manner of her

we become *sentient* in making massages that courses in-between self and world

[*]pragmatist (thought): a moment like the front edge of an advancing wave crest always becoming more than itself

[*]writing: an experiment that can register years of living out the thing that is just then froming up the world as “...”


love folters and blows


Janina, teaching me, being in love with the surface of the world

@Elen, she shouts: drive! and see what happens to your senses.


Taussig's “I Swear I saw This” is the stuff of ajayeb. he wrote a book about a drawing he made in his notebook when he saw what might have been a woman leaning over what looked like a man lying down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.

**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**

#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions


possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings


life is germinaly جرثومه‌ای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney

[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms


(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)


ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage

ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events


lostness or reslessness of drifters

fantasies of potential “home”

(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future


(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject


Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices


what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,


a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred

pursuit of see-it-yourselfness

a spectacular form of amnesia *


(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes


Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity


shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete


my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)

(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions

textures give way to qualities of form


*before the blizzard: the sea monster

______________


Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیع‌بند (poetic fixed form)

--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography


[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundamentally divergent nature of things that happen --prompting-->
•the mode of social poiesis
•a path into continuous variation of matter and form, word and world
•(pop-up book made of) mobile and immobile flickering
•a thing that can be physical if the eye is quick enough
•a crystalline image of the deforming of a form
•bending itself (myself?) in refraction (=/= intimate register of knowledge and power)
•a conceptual machinery of cutting edges
•a compositional jumping off point; a ‘lifted out of’; a ‘being-moved in’
•...the ajayeb pop-up book two parallel spreading qualities and scenes across a cartography, registers differences in motion
•a compositional writing (=/= representational method) in the effort to keep up with the distributed agencies of *what is throwing together and what is falling apart* (~ ajayeb) [--> it is a practice of trying, in line with my lectures, to follow where things (might) go that habits of attunement become as associational logic***]
•particulars to become a hinge لولاى در (opening onto a world throwing together and falling apart)
•mixing of shiny elements: *flickering ontologies* the expansive mapping of elements in paly
•a cartography of compositional elements, formal compositions and unmarked ways of being loop around each other

(27.08.2017 my work on ajayeb is an inquiry into description:) ***it is about many different forms that something can take and does take*** + the things that can be perceived and thought with those things

(attuning to) details in ajayeb loaded with intensities both strange and recognizable (=/= stable real)
a mode of perception that walks around an enigmatic object
an hour
a river
a walk
a deflating frog

far from being “after the fact,” my pop-up book involves multiplicity of bodies, characters and materialities to approach ‘description’ as “speculative theory in practice of how a world works” like ajayeb's work of “engendering a plane of prolific expressivity”

(عجایب المخلوقات / عجایب نامه) [*]ajayeb: a once percepted thing on the threshold of sense in the prisma of social poiesis producing a cartography of what might be happening in a world as an object of composition

firefly: a condensed point of precision one after another

ajayeb is made in citing repetitions and differences

(with Stewart:) ajayeb was once “the cutting edges of a harsh world in a state of uneven emergence, an ambient mapping of the not-yet or as-if of things becoming phenomenon” which itself became a repetitive impulse to story

i can't find a better kind of description of what ajayeb does than Stewart describing ‘description’ that literally puts a point things: “the expressivity of what happens to things throwing together in words is a kind of description attuned to what does not completely unfold but instead melds together with other unnamed but palpable things collected like a field of mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts.”

things throwing together in words ==> expressivity
ajayeb: collected (unnamed but palpable) things like mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts

پس انديشه

______________


[*]perspective: (an attending, enduring presence, a compositional node,) perspectival agency in which things jump into relation but remain unglued*** (Stewart)

...across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects


realm of killed off things


new figures i am learning from Stewart's
•“throwing together”
•“manner of”
•


(in ajayeb) the whale: throwing together of the phenomena of fish and water, sailing, mood, atmosphere, and sensory charge

*ajayeb's descriptive apparauses: a mutating realism of a certain vision of light meeting movement

[*]ajayeb: things that were once named, perhaps written down, (differently than now,) through some kind of trickery (called citation,) and then metastasized (spread throughout a body) into circulation (readings, translations, etc.) are raised, incised, made singular and charged
•ajayeb's stories/reports ~= forms of co-recognition, something witnessed that gets cooked down into something saucy***
•ajayeb's writing: a more-than-representational method of writing attuned to the qualities of phenomena
•ajayeb's fabulations (appear as:)
◦(atmospheric) traces
◦(momentary) might-have-beens

ajayeb = people + matter + real --> *point of figuring compositional reals*


fast-forwarded throught great arcs of *history-in-itelf* or *place-in-itself* in The Time Machine (2002 film)


what are the river and field doing now?


[*]theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into [*]reals:
•a recursive haeccity (Deleuze and Guattari)
•transversal arrays of qualities or activities which, like musical refrains, give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and bone senses (Anderson + Harrison)
•a mattering that is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning (Barad)
•built out of difference and repetition (Deleuze)
•composed of potentiality and loss (Berlant)
•lean toward that which exists singularly as event, or as a gap, without ground or against the background of nothing (Dewsbury)

[*]reality: a rhythmic alteration between objects, events, and words---an uncreated world---{reverb between word and world --> [*]worling: a transposition of the existing knowledges already possible in a joke or a gesture --> singularities gathering and dissolving, #tools:
•snapshots (shoot of an affect)
•fictocriticism (fiction + theory + criticism; a name for those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits)
•sensory ethnography (ethnographic engagement based on curiosity and attachment) --> drawing
--> paths lit up in a rhythm interrupted
(as an aritist) you can make anything of anything, the questions is, what is it, what is it doing, what is in this consistency of rhythm?}

[*]social: comprised of entities that are both present and absent (==> ajayeb), atmospheres, affects, virtual memories, hauntings, and that these are themselves moments of endurance (or not?), instants of the holding together of the disparate itself
(Stewart > Doel)


[!* Stewart describing the color] *red: “it moves through streams and tendrils into an associational register of connections and differences, materials and noumena وجود مجرد, the coagulation دلمه شدن and diffusions of lines of influence and bits of matter.”
(in my visual art studies we were given redness as a symbolic element in a representational order and a matter-of-fact) =/= state-of-sensory-alert, redness as an actual composition spun into representations, objects, and states of sensory alert
“[...] a germinal aesthetic. a tendril of practices and sensibilities gathered into an energetics of form
•black sky and ocean --> limit, outline, elemental flux, matter waiting formlessly
•white ice and snow --> stasis, shape and form, a blankness that challenges composition, the transitoriness
•red --> the feebly real, the long, low-frequency wave-lenght of the dying stars, the past, the effort to fix dead reality in a cast *
•green --> plants that glare with a harsh reality, the violence at the heart of the world we inhabite
•blue --> a limited, temporary success in fixing experience in a pattern
•


a landscape animated by the primariness of color =/= Molenbeek

american indians became “red” through a complex semiotics of encounters with colonists


...who knows what kinds of desires, fears and dead ends

(pay attention to Stewart list making narrative:)
events, sites, actors, stakes, consequences, properties, competences, modalities, attunements, velocities


... a world ==> ephemeral sparks ==> an atmosphere ==pulled==> qualities of sociality, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror


the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, something strongly obvious (but not to most people!) that meanings can be automatically assigned to things and are the basis of those things’ value -->!@Ali

the effect of context

matters of composition, each with a “we”:
•feeble نحيف
•experimental
•eccentric --> Elen
•habitual --> my mother
•generous
•gestural -->
•half turned away
•reached the expressivity of a mood, a tone of voice
•do they lighten things or load them down?

...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect sensory input
•*insubordinateness: the world has a life of its own; things moved by themselves
•*grabbiness: sensory impacts matter apart from their cognition
--> having a phenomenal experience is having skills with these qualities** [@Hoda]


an ecology of potentialy marked by violence and care

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

[Alberti]

we might:
•provide a better understanding
•provoke novel realities/ontologoes (to emerge from material)
•provoke an understanding in the context of the everyday

*(Latour, Whitehead, Law:) archeological entity = ontological entity (by nature) }==> productive of reality


to focus on practices in which all possible elements of the process must be understood as active and creative (--> # equipment list)

*“to take seriously" = to accept at a fundamental level the truth of a claim and to doggedly follow its consequences
(form an ontological and conceptual perspective)
(--> dogs follow consequences)
(indigenous thought is treated as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [our] concepts


multiculturalism: a single objective universe and many cultural interpretations of it
multinaturalism: multiple universes and a single mode of interpretation (Viveiros de Castro)
==> perspective =/= a different “point of view” on (the same way of knowing or seeing) qualitatively different worlds }-->* situated knowledges, #elephant parable


no: no --> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)


*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology


(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...” (Alberti)

*ontology: the sense of a real, solid world
for example the question of “the substance of the world”, everyone has answered that already (reiterating that which makes sense) ==> concept of real --(invent)--> *cosmology (<-- this is not a relativizing gesture) ==(force)==> production of new concepts and materialities
@Eszter: importance of asking the right questions: unless we do, the answers make no difference (Grosz)


scopes and scales ()--> “dimensionally manifold weave of knowledge worlds” (Haraway + Katie) are at stake in:
•science display
•TV series
•ajayeb
•pet video
•emergent transdisciplinary scholarship
•transmedia commercial apparatuses
•
*with reading/enacting ajayeb what is at stake is the “effectivities in realizing knowledge stories” --> epistemological affects


[*]scale
•operates through intensity and not size
•emergent and performative (Jones), (juxtapositions of) scales ==> “interesting psychological and phenomenological effects”
•a flat approach to scale does not separate the social and material, or the micro from the macro ==> [*]size: (emerges as a possibility, as) one means of enacting the potential of another scale; accidental effect of intensity: materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity***
•is about intensity and excess --> potential for visibility/invisibility and proximity to the original condition of undifferentiated, intensive difference (~=? hayula; perfect formless form)***; intensive different “h” of hayula هیولا...
◦ه
◦‍ه‍
◦‍ه
◦ه‍


Alberti argues for a form of ontological symmetry between the theory we bring to bear on our evidence and the way that material acts as evidence (@Seba)


*[mesopotamia] chronically unstable bodies
a corpus of zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts and traps
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه

all sorts of dualism are at work in the archaeological imaginary of the region from Amazon to the Andes

marking a body =/= representation of that act

Alberti's arguments”
•the fantastic forms, bulges, protuberances برامدگى, and other modifications of bodies and pots express a general concern with “shoring up” or “fixing” a world conceived of as inherently volatile فرار --> bodies (pots and people) were considered “chronically unstable”* {pots --> intentional activation of affective capacities in the clay; pots and bodies are “grown” in he same way}
•chaotically scale-changing, their scale is one of intensity and excessiveness (--> figure-ground relationship between visible/invisible, body/soul)

*perspectivism: all species potentially share a way of knowing with humans. their “essence” or “soul” is human : they see themselves as human and others as animals
*to occupy a body = to have a perspective on the world*
•an intensive difference that carries the human/nonhuman difference to the inside of every existing thing --> there is no a priori reason for everything not being a subject [--> also Sadra]

[*]bodies:
•bundles of affect : collection of affects bundled into an unstable bodily form
•carrying out specific tasks
•sensing the world in particular way
•sharing capacities and habits with others in what keeps a body as it is and maintains its similarity to other bodies in a group
•coincident with subjectivity* --> you need a body to know
--> (particular differentiation of a body:) body ornaments, clothing, sex, and other so-called cultural markings are no different in kind from the so-called natural markers of bodily difference and capacity: ***clothes ~= claws ~= affects*** --> “sign and substance of capacities and dispositions” (Alberti > Hugh-Jones > Viveiros de Castro)
*marking, molding, painting, adorning, clothing, piercing, and otherwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *

*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies

dead --> ancestor
(transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []

ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change


“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretations correspond with stable ontologies’


(this we must take things as -->) ontological =/= analogical (<-- representation of a world, an ego, etc.)

how to approach (iranian miniatur and) miniaturization?
miniaturization have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines) enable people to enter “other worlds” (to think, manipulate and influence)
(in figurines) all the senses are implicated ==> “perceptually explosive objects” (Bailey)
•onto-transformative effect of miniaturization
*anthropocentrism of the scale of the human --> default ontological scale, self-evident human-sized body (-->?! the little bike i gave Elen, did i propose that kind of critique?)
-which organs are emphasized in iranian miniature?
(organs of knowledge: eyes, ears, mouths, skin)
-properties of materials and their relationship to form only ever emerge relationally }--> how can i construct an approach for iranian miniatur, or radif in these terms
◦countors --> decomposes to the shape of horses
◦gold
◦fields
 --> and these forms emerged for people *who knew how to see it*
iranians experienced everything about the world as ‘...’ ? (جای خالی را پر کنید) --*-- the growth of children in an unreliable world نگرانی (#modalities of negarani)
inconstant and unreliable, continually threatening to transform ==> ontology involving matter =? metaphysics

(the drama of) finding the correct scale


***(Bailey > Alberti:) (“paradox of multiple worlds”:) when “other worlds” are precisely what is expected by an audience for whom the world is inherently unstable *** [<-- this is an iranian mode: loving outsiders, construct metaphysics, proliferating ajayebnameh, make belief in images, make thinking about kharej خارج, loving America, etc.]
}--> this was also why i couldn't think with Pierre's “other future” proposal; i am already living it


Alberti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?

in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously


Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طی‌الارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
--> there is no interior space to the body (~ there is no there/beyond to the body,) just an invisible body


#work on an exposure of work with tey-ol-arz with other interested artists
in Tehran, maybe in my parents house, informal space for opening a discussion in Farsi-English
(involve Pierre? where to get money?)
*campus: (a place where) new kinds of conversations are being invented in stabilized and social forms (sometimes departments, sometimes just research clusters)
i need to make that kind of mini-scale of quasi-organization between Tehran and Brussels: workshops, episodic and travel-mediated knots of practice


**(Alberti 2013 argues that) anything in the immediate, intimate vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb


‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)


pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)

de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberately partially subjectivized, semi-potent in their potential to know and be known

the intensely subjectivized pots --> *impede activity and enable knowledge*

•convince
•avtivate
-
•persuade
•communicate
•establish

eyes wide open: inability to see the invisible

*to see is to be seen*

buried pots, relational bodies firmly in place, teaches the dead to see properly, to maintain a perspective (Albeti)


[title]
(with Alberti) trap-thinking for ajayeb storytelling --> to make capable of knowing different things, invoking, quoting, reciting, citing, exicing, inciting different kinds of knowledge [cit- : to call, start] --> mobilizing #citational apparatuses --> they enter into a ‘type’ of relation particular to each


[*]traps(/pots): bodies fully engage in perspectival communication and battles of will, variously constructed and provided with affects and capacities, capable of knowing different things and of inciting different kinds of knowledge through the types of relations they entered into


______________


archaeological material ~= myrtle (=/= marble)


[*]ontology: a theory and experience of what exists


*hylomorphic model of production (underlined by the substance ontology) ~= marble
=/= myrtle
=/= ajayeb's inscribings
a making which assumes that form is inscribed onto passive matter
that pots accrue (انباشتن منتج) meaning through their processes of manufacture and role in social relations
~ form is brought to matter by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold) --> a concept of material culture in which “brute matter” is shaped by cultural agency
traces of action --> skilled means of representing a mental image
~= ‘design’ (as conventionally conceived) : to ‘project’ future states


[*]perspectivist theory: the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view (Viveiros de Castro)
-it suggests that there is no interior space to the body, only superposition of body and soul: the human form is, as it were, the body within the body, the naked primordial body [hayula]--the soul of the body --> infinite superposition of states #tey-ol-arz
--> the body, not the mind (or ‘soul’), is the seat of knowledge, different parts of the body know in quite distinct ways: (loci/organ of knowledge:)
•hand knowledge (meken una)
•eye knowledge (bedu una) (particularly prominent sometimes...)
•ear knowledge (pabinki una)
•liver knowledge (taka una)
•skin knowledge (bitxi una) <-- knowledge of sun, rain and wind is acquired through the skin
(painting, ear piercing can also facilitate the absorption of knowledge into the body)

[*]bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity
•the body is fabricated, just like the pot [Alberti]
•as ‘lived experience’ performs, communicates and extends personhood through inscriptive and representational practices that fully incorporate material culture and the surrounding world. (Joyce)
•people are made: bodies are composite transformations of artefacts from the time of myth* [for example] Wari pay much attention to human bodies to ensure proper growth, which is regarded as a collective responsibility: they are moulded and shaped by kin from foetus through to adult. actions carried out on the body, such as massage, painting and piercing [and negarani of iranian mother] are seen to have profound and lasting effects
•each being is stabilized through acts of care --> what are babies for iranians (and iranian mothers)? {[*]affect: dispositions or capacities which render the body of every species unique: what it eats, how it moves, how it communicates, where it lives, whether it is gregarious دسته اى or solitary ==(such practices ensure that)==> **individuals act and see in the same ways as their kin** }--> is this what mother does? (has to do with the ability or threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds

a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)

let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural

archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”


****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)


we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•


(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth


(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)

*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object


(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*


in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”


“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro


[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective relations =/= a capacity that can be awakened in a seemingly inert thing
=/=?! transference, (is transference an object-oriented account?)


the active nature of materials refers to their recognized capacity to escape form : their untrustworthiness


(a paradime for creative arts:) artifactual production --> animal creativity

(in Amazonia, and) in ajayeb, no distinction is made between thoughts, feelings, body and mind --> thoughts and actions happen in the same ontological space
(Alberti > Viveiros de Castro)

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

shift from an epistemological to an ontological register in theoretical archaeology

critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project

(in archaeology:) ontology = reality (what there is) / peoples’ claims about reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> one can conceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)

Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization

conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]

*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction


anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism


[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*

posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism

(realism: an ontological approach)

•Latour's network
•Ingold's meshwork (commonality of processes across the ‘life =/= not life’) --> processes ~ becoming ~ growth ~ decay
•Barad's entanglement (relations are primary and relata are a consequence of relating ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•

**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]

[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded

flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being

ruin memories

nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}

(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty

theories + apparatuses + material remains

ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust

archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded

(it is precisely the) past --endures-in--> assemblage


interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)

Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]

ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body


influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies

(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)

what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples

(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record

investigations of personhood

(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique

(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics



ontological realism ==>{

new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age

assemblage --replace--> context

assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded

Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)

reference to a “common world”

new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture

Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory

perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content

spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque

the more intense ==> the more body it is

(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content

recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them

(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us


(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic

archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)

archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses

(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts


the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description

kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


[...]