[...]g) proper witness***

the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking

‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same

#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•

[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary

belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)

...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”

(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous


#[nodes and notes]

the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]

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

the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative

(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the explicit unpacking of the activity : what was formerly tacit [zemni, khamush, =/= habit] becomes dredged into explicit [=/= expressive] consciousness, precisely because there is a resistance, that there is something not right for the musician ==> reconsidering, reexploring --> the technique then again disappears into the tacit realm --> technique becomes variegated)
**tacit --> explicit (~= that which becomes available for reconsideration)**

when one masters a skill it is about being equipped to address a whole new set of problems
{expertise/mastery: problem solving}=/={craft: problem finding}--> when other things become problematic---the condition (in the craft work) that when you learn how to do one thing you see other things that need to be explored [-> question for Eunkyung's drawing skills and practice]

*craft is more important than art(?) (Sennett)
...the notion that the work art breaks the conventions of practice, that it is something that makes an epistemic break. --> emphasis on innovation (something new)--that is a reflection of sort of 19th century bourgeois ideas of about making art.
•privileging the cre[...]

[...]las's notion of “leaking” has to do with marginal non-textual non-accounted-for moments that bleed in absolute non-contractual and non-appropriable event? (the so-called moment when we show things to each other)
•his ‘climate of creativity'~~~_[what does ‘criticism’ mean for him?]
•when he says “gesture,” is he accessing ‘gesture’ having an uncalculable semiotic value =/= ‘performance’ that can be measured in economical terms? [but, what kind of consequential work is gesture doing?]
(Nicolas's order of inquiry and discovery)
(--> what is at stake is how do you locate the effects of your work. for Nicolas it is locate at the “sides” [which is already problematically prepositioned outside of him] --Ahmed--> ab object can be affective by virtue of its own *location* [...] and the *timing* of its appearence)
[the ‘image of the rigid’ in his presentation]

Kristien's chart:
questions <--> symptoms
answers <--> openings
past <--> diary

for Lilia: apparatus = score
for Eszter: apparatus = preparation {--?--> everything depends on the ways we prepare}
for Sina: apparatus = (chaotic/strange) attractor
for Hoda: apparatus = negative feelings
for
for
(other non-Agambenian notions of apparatus: Katie King's, Barad's, Wark's)
[Agamben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,

Vladimir's tether on disambiguity

Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)


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

[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman[...]

[...]> #my Rigs? simulate a course of action of description
•near the object?
•near sphere (<== happiness)
•core sphere
•orientation
--> practical action
•course of action

we come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. the bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]

[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body

(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”


[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”

things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...

@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)

what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)


in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?

[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)

history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”


bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of valu[...]

[...] />
one confuses the term “examine” with that of “neutralize” --> (Watson, scientist) removed the rat's eyes, olfactory bulb, and whikers, which are essential to the sense of touch in rats, before throwing it into the exploration of the maze...
--Despret--> if the world had probably lost all meaning for this de-sensed rat, the rat itself had lost all meaning for its experimenter (if it ever had one for him)
-this is the goal of the procedure: search out the lowest common denominator, the left-over, the automation, the behavior that from one species to another will render all organisms commensurable تناسب پذير [<-- no!!!!]

the tacit assumption that an animal could ever enter into a relationship with an object is false <--Uexküll-- (to have in mind) to study the most different kinds of animals in their relations to a maze


her attic, Cinderella in the universe of meanings

an epistemological problem --> it is not straightforward to enter into the subjective universe of an animal in interrogating it through an experimental dispositive thought up by a human

[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]

maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of view of the rat (Uexküll calls “familiar path”)? how rats in pretending to respond to the questions of the behaviorists respond in fact to another question?
-behaviorist's question: what is the abstract relation of a being, whatever it may be (that which the behaviorists call an organism) to a natural object?

why do rats always touch the walls as they go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?

***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***

the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*

(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer

...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar path” nor that of the meaning of the wall


artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her

hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account t[...]

[...]ed memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella

it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved


animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥

(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique


animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them

(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)

why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”

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

Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)

normative moral claims

(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, even of they are not prescribed or proscribed in state or in customary law


*to write nonmorally about [*]ethics: a mode of relatedness, even if the relation is as ephemeral as a mood that may escape measure or description, lying somewhere between mourning and indifference
[=/= to have an a priori moral code based on which we might justify (or predict ahead) our emotional responses to particular killing ~= what constitutes a good life or death]

(mourning =/= indifference)

concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India

everyday affects (while witnessing or executing the death of animals)
doubts and pleasures
cruelties and indifferences
chicken shops
decimated forests of central India


moods:
•ambivalence
•cruelty and pleasure
•senses of devastation

modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in T[...]

[...]diou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory

postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics

to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and nonnegotiable indebtedness
•expressed relations of power
•other modes of spiritual and material relatedness (that would be lost if i were to tell a story that was only a variant of a master-slave dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*

how do we piece together a world?

ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)

encroachment tajavoz تجاوز


super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
•are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•

(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy


khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must ex[...]

[...]s a *fluctuation between forms of strength and vulnerability*
(condition of life itself:) our particular strengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution


how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)


[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***

agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future


jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness


[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گام‌های ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)


the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?


(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital ani[...]

[...]turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])

from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter

pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself

in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound

--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self


in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control

(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?

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

Naveeda chapter 5 mulla


graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect

participation in change

(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality



Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties

large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]

skepticism shadows striving (?)


the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
•shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج


mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts
[...]

[...]y: capacity to decompose oneself into the plurality of distinctly different essential tendencies, to detach the periphery from the center, and to make interests and activities independent of their integral interconnection [=/=? my work]
Simmel

in Duchampian terminology: (Manet's painting In The Conservatory) blossoming bride and bachelor enmeshed in a verdant anticonjugal machine of perpetual nonfulfilment

cultural corrosion of conjugality <== (one of) larger disintegration of premodern positions (of male and female):
•violent insertion of women into the process of commodity production

*labor and society assume a mass character ==> “women = mass articles” & lose:
•their “natural” qualities (female essence defined by the production of life)
•their poetic aura

traditional positions disrupted by the logic of exchangeability***


greenhouses in 19th century, extended the dwelling and bore witness to the expansion of the private sphere. greenhouse provided a place to stroll in all weathers
--> frozen temporality ~=> memory and history excluded =(congealed present)==> dehistorisized subjectivity

(fundamental) withdrawal of the possibility of *gesture* --Agamben--> part of the particularly modern failure of ethos, of character
[gesture <-->? ethos]

incapacitation: renunciation of *potentia*[~= capacity for being affected, any expansion of practical being <-- Spinoza]


smell of flowers = disintegrated product of their sexual metabolism <-- Freud


D+G becoming woman
*man: molar entity par excellence (=/= becomings are molecular), man constitutes the majority, the standard in which the majority is based: white, male, adult, rational ~ the average european, the subject of enunciation
@Leo
(--> problematized by Grosz ---> go to ajayeb.net/?q=Grosz%2BDeleuze%2BGuattari)


the perpetual self-invention of “free subjectivity” --defining--> modernity
cycle of decoding & recoding :
daring innovation --> hyperanxious self-consolidation --> renewed innovation --> ...


Manet =/= Caravaggio:
•intense optical contact
•tactile contact
•a reciprocal system of investment in the transactional nature of the encounter--infused with the interplay of the social, libidinal, and economic difference

hands as:
•expression of individual consciousness (in Caravaggio)
•instrument of active gesture (in Manet)


activity ~=? simulation of gesture

pointing index finger
confirmation of the impossibility of a direct perception, impossibility of an attention that was an immediate possession of its object (--> Sa'di pointing out to the moon and his lover...)--> every point of fixation is deferral
--✕--> (once?) functioned [...]