[...]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 en[...]