[...]icity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]


(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation

performance of moral righteousness

exclusion at the threshold of liberation

unconscious mythopoetic structures

insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance

offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy

strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation


Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eighteenth Brumaire, that *the identity of the workers’ interests does not automatically become the basis of a sense of community* --> workers are blocked in their capacities for self-representation ==> ***eloquent appropriation of the workers’ possible but interrupted capacity for self-representation***
~~> messianism & sublime

(in liberal electoral democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond

(sensation of presence and immediacy heightened in) face-to-face --> transcendent experience of communication --> that “there be no loss or dissipation between speaking and being heard”

(messianic utterance of) slogan <--> immediacy
-->? banishing ambiguity at the expensive of signification

aspiration to immediacy + communicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies

(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea of) “perfect transmission of intention ==> production of consensus”

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[explosion of accuracies]

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after death there is:
•rumer
•afterlife
•


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(Nicholas Shapiro shows in his research on) people in ordinary toxic homes: *their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposure was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*

(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)

silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes

somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])

‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability


**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]


toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body

years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed

somatic cognizance

(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity

(growing literature on) the body as existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of (cultures of) science

Shapiro: “how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world?”

Shapiro ethnographically elucidates the *somatic mode of attention*
--> bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans

-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somatically attained

women's accounts of self-monitoring for bodily dysfunctions (--> feminization of body care)
[Shapiro discovered] men's active indifference to slight somatic abnormalities (rejecting the possibility that their bodies wear permeable --> masculine self-image)


olfaction --> take displeasing scents as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)


microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices

exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational


sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form

*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air

(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*

chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure


(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?

...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital


Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment

(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing

(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*

formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning

*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution

foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)


...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms


(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***


chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)

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[title]
kulturgeist

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Zizek - Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences

(i am still at the title:) in your efforts to make ‘body without organ’ (the emergent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, flexible, smart, liquid good object) you might end up creating ‘organ without body’ (monstrous, hierarchical, authoritative, soulless, archaic bad object)

functional specificity of organs =/= to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of [*]desire: a process of production without reference to any exterior agency (--although--> ‘fascism = desire’)]

an example of body without organ is the ‘ocean’ for Marialena
(for Marialena) ocean [~=? fluid women] (an unstratificated, non-coded flow, sex organs sprout everywhere, no organ is constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body

(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation

body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image

-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)

are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]

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(?we need) political metamorphosis

the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)

Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical

science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...

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(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for itself”

Häxan's reception in the 1920s --> to energize a negative, conceptually dogmatic discourse that formed and hardened cinematic taxonomies [particularly the division between “documentary” (nonfiction) and “feature” (fictional) films]

experimentation + evidence making

sexual intercourse, cannibalism, cauldron --solemnize--> pact with the devil

evidentiary thinking

elaborated visualization of the witch stereotype

--> complex nature of *sensual explorations of the flesh* through masochism and exorcism

demonic influence
genres of transfiguration and metamorphosis

Christensen shows how those who were once identified as witches are now the objects of medical and social concern in modern life --> shows the potency of her various forms over time


--> Baxstrom + Meyers
(my work on ajayeb is based on that) [there is a largely] unacknowledged historical tendency and predisposition within the human sciences with roots in much older practices of:
•defining social facts
•discovery, interpretation, production of the real itself
[such as bestiary]

method that allows the researcher to sense
interpret and master forces that appear to be nonsensical (yet held to be present: held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life) --> an epistemological concern

privileged space of the irrational in medical discourses in 19th century: (Jonathan Strauss -->) irrationality (nonsense) was a legitimizing force for medicine in that the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes

“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]

*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)

anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to [...]