[...]eed to bring the reader in touchwith the materiality and the autonomy of language


we never read just once

logos: the word that names and relates properly --> great truths are told in the light of day and discourse

Sade --Blanchot--> search of a new lucidity (pursued by clear assured decisive aifrma­tiom =/= interrogatory mode)

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[D+G]

the intersection of concrete forms ==> abstract figure
[bringing objects close to each other produces story*]

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my engagement with other apass participants, a form of critique as part of an ‘ecology of practice’ (Stengers)
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-to feel what questions, passions, modes of attention animate one another
-to find yourself moved by their concerns
-what we articulate with our bodies? --> what do our gestures mean?
-what do they activate? ----> they don't always enact a precise language --(rather)--> gestures as organs for feeding, feeling, and grasping***
-(sensing) the trajectories, moods, and intensities the other apass participants get caught up in, attached to, inhabit, to catch you in your acts,
(why knowing together?) **worlds come together through collective action and how they attract, repel, enroll, animate, and incite (tahrik تحریک, eghva اغوا) us. [...] worlds are “lived [compositions] with tempos, sensory knowledge, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields.” (Stewart)
-(engaging) in a form of critique that detour into descriptive eddies (گرداب کوچک مخالف) and attach to trajectories
-(through this i am making myself interested in) what (theoretical, philosophical, artistic,) storytelling, as one ***consequential practice*** among many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.



critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”

affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people



(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In this situation, the political task is to return to the linguistic battlefield. It won't be possible to do things differently if we do not start talking differently. The most urgent imperative is a language inventiveness.”


(atomism)
-constant and precarious self-management of molecular projects in a horizon-less future
-artists in the operation of self-making ourselves


#the image i made for Sohrevardi; allegory of Sohrevardi; the image's discursive architecture and its diverse inventiveness; (being careful with being) seductive in staging diversity; --> “an ecology of monologues”? (Renan);
-“The monologue is a linguistic space freed from negotiation.” [...]  “Now, it seems that everything could be solved by the universal application of mediation, participation, collaboration processes [etc.] without realizing that this entails the strengthening of the social cohesion model that becomes universally inclusive.” [...] “The monologue, in this perspective, is a form of silence, a way of disappearing. One way to cease-to-be when we are forced to be.” (Peran)

how can i stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.

“An artwork executed from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensity.” (Peran)
A “tired” artwork

(Marti Peran)
a minority that wishes to be a majority
the semiotic body disciplined to daily exercise and beautification
fatigue, unlike melancholy's passivity, implies performativity.
a way of being ill


(capital gains concentrated in the) self-production of identity
subject occupied full time in itself
the logic of “do it yourself”
obliged to make countless small decisions in all areas
subject mixed up with the incessant movement of its own alienation
*hyperactive life --> poverty of experience*
the banality of “i Like”
(maybe interesting for Laura:) *fatigue* is the instant of stopping and pausing [of exercise and beautification] (after which a diversity might be possible)
[*]fatigue: capable tiredness --> politicizes discomfort
[#we are in the domain of passivity, disappearance and inaction]
Peran suggests a position of fatigue where (some time ago) was occupied by melancholy
“is this not a mere “don't like” that re-enters the spiral of our mobilization?”
“we are left with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”



do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research



i want to *give connections*

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#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]



#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front of the line, the hojum of enemy, of friend, of information, also includes the plural form of ‘hajm’ (حجم)



#seminar on the history of translation
archaeology, interpretation, spaces of difficult translation, reading out of time, technology and transformational studies, semiotics, poetry, writing,

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#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text by creating intensity and my own partial perspective
-the elephant parable (against it)
-objectivity (disembodied view from nowhere)
-neutrality (biologically insane)
-marked people (my own story)
-situatedness of the situated
-The cyborg is a figure in which situatedness makes possible adventures with the beyond.
-globalization-as-situatedness: global is precisely space/place/time/situation
-the figure of the so-called scientist gathered around certain metaphors since the begining of the 17th cebtury, namely ‘objectivity’ and all its related adjectives: neutrality, perspective, universality, disembodiment (for certain race and sex), etc.
-metaphors create perspectives [the view that looks at blind men looking at the elephant]
-situatedness is different than ‘positionality’: a way of systematic error correction
-(resolving) specificity of vision --> scientific objectivity (is achievable)
-Haraway expresses her informed dissatisfaction with (the metaphysical substrate that supports) ‘social constrctivism’ and ‘traditional realism’ --> representationalist belief in the power of the words to mirror preexisting phenomena. they both believe that scientific knowledge (in its representational formats: theoretical concepts, graphs, particle tracks, photographic images, etc.) mediates our access to the material world, whether it represents “nature” or “objects” of science both groups are subscribed to representationalism.
focus on the nature and production of scientific knowledge --(shift to science studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> on ongoing pattern of situated activity

-(disembodied scietific) objectivity: that only certain people are allowed to have no body (Gender, race, etc.) and that high science in practice is not acting on textbook objectivity at all.

absent referents, deferred signifieds, split subjects, and the endless play of signifier

Haraway is feeling nervous with two views on objectivity:
(1)the ‘social constructionist’ view on this: getting to know the world ‘effectively’ by practicing the sciences --> knowledge is knowledge-game (on an agonistic power field) ==> science is rhetoric : artifacts and facts are parts of the powerful art of rhetoric ~=  practice is persuasion. {this view will use the nasty tools of semiology and deconstruction to insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])

--> “chance for life”

science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality

money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science

...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts

*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)

unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies

(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”

(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)

a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness

unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent

***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent

“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”

‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversations in epistemology
-to unfold the problem of relativism: ‘the elephant parable’ promisses seeing equally and fully. “equality” of positioning: relativism (another “god trick”) (!=/= single-vision, totalization) =/= partial locatable] [mythic cartoon of pluralism] [myth of exact knowledges, dream of perfectly known, and politics of closure] --> positioning is at stake here

“all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing”

how to see ‘faithfully’... (what does she mean by that?)

appropriating the vision of the less powerful:
to see from the peripheries
to see from the depths

...this not unproblemat (why she uses double negation so often?)

“But how to see from below is a problem requiring at least as much skill with bodies and language, with the mediations of vision, as the ‘highest’ technoscientific visualizations.”

“Science has been utopian and visionary from the start; that is one reason “we” need it.” (what does she mean?)
(“utopian,” “visionary,” other old metaphors in science)

“Passionate detachment” requires more than ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality. (being acknowledged and self-critical is not enough!!! how deos she mean?)
-‘perspective’ can never be known in advance --> knowledge potent for constructing worlds less organized by axes/axis of domination
-One cannot “be” either a cell or molecule--or a woman, colonized person, laborer, and so on. ‘passionate detachment’ is about the impossibility of entertaining innocent “identity” politics : seeing from their perspective in order to see well.
-problem with “positionality”: {testimony from the position of ‘oneself'} We are not immediately present to ourselves and the self is assumed finished and whole simply there and original and its (grounding) knowledge is organized around the imagery of vision --✕--> Self-knowledge requires a semiotic-material technology to link meanings and bodies. ***Self-identity is a bad visual system*** --> ‘positionality’ (meaning: ‘acknowledged and self-critical’ partiality) [at best showing in which ways one is not unmarked] is therefore insufficient. {Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science!}
-instead we need a *split and contradictory self* (one who can interrogate positionings and be accountable) [~~/?-> shath شطح (=/= shar’ شرع, or even sharh شرح?), shathiat (شطحیات) in Tasavof (تصوف), rend رند, rendane رندانه]
-so, instead of “being” she proposes “splitting”: heterogeneous multiplicities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==>  join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain”  (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorde[...]