[...]reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.

-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)

*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu

(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])

what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی‌, its ecology)


“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”

“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist


عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation


Earth =/= cradle


Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)

=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)


‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*

(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)

the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])

(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)

(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified



commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران


[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensi[...]

[...]ialization (for whom and at what costs?)*
Barad ♥


(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings

(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature


entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities

there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”

who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

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

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,

our resistance and breakdance

(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’

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

the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity

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

the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence


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

ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the c[...]

[...]/> 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...

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

(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[...]

[...]/>
economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life

•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}

many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer

Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions

intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)

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

(Mufti > Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination

***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism

intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism

[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment

[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence

my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis

subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of found[...]

[...]/>
producing the concrete environment within something to make it available to X : enabling =/= entailing

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

Naveeda chapter 3 law

Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]

Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice


munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)


(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered


Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer


something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)

khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims

(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation


institutionalizing blindness


Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference

striving =/= progress

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

Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
[...]

[...]taphores to move in a densely classified world

“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another - formal or informal, hierarchical or not” Bowker
•“in the 14th century” --> segmentation of time, system of calendar
•“Iranian” --> discourse of national genius only arose in the 19th century
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)

compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بی‌قرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]


(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power

(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)

“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996

lingua franca of the medical insurance companies


actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)

science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards

‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Ja[...]

[...] ~ reality)

hierarchy of nonexistent things


not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)


-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold

فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)

yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies

the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”

ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him

*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.


[logical death]


(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary information culture*
([aspects of] ‘enfoldment’ instead of ‘narrative’ @Seba)
(relying on the thoughts and calculations of many thinkers:) ‘deeply enfolded’ instead of ‘complexity’ (~=? ‘the obscured social world’ @Seba)

.finding the direction of Mecca in a complex network of signifiers --> the local value of the work of science or narratology / Islamic culture of astrological experimentation ----> logical depth and enfoldedness index Baten باطن
-(living in a time of animosity,) is Seba wanting to democratize Baten?

descriptive encounters with objects
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)

how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?

my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know wh[...]

[...]ation from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject

so persian subject wanted the  so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image


sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words


attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)

Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
>
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations

the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)


majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer


Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about thout that man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)

imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> extra-individual, suprasensory world
Frankfurt school + Althusser saw collective unconscious as fascistic


*(my) material practices of unlearning:
•pretending i don't know --> enactment / acting
•(to try) forgetting --> clearance / erasure
•sleep-walking --> closing the eyes of certain perceptive stories, and become available to another
•the “let's not assume...” --> “in advance” of a the assumption
•


contemporary Western thought, tired of the sovereign subject, is trying to conceive of an extra-subjective reality that binds individuals ethically to others and to history --> this is totally apass :)
-contemporary Western thought (evident in Butler, Fouca[...]

[...]bal War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam

a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews

liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women


when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality

‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter

(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic


part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]


return them to the ‘chardivari’


(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patriarchal structures from families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”

Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private, sacred/profane
*class struggle is itself always already a gendered process, both discursively and materially*
clash between different and competing patriarchies or patriarchal arrangements --> the status of women within kin-networks --> the role of marriage in consolidating class power ==hence==> the rhetoric of marriage as something too important to be left to the men and women concerned (in Pakistan: ‘marriages = cementing relations between men’) --> “controlling female sexuality across class lines” [--> a very specific anxiety over female (sexual) agency* + complexities of patriarchy within Pakistani society] }--> “Among other things, they demonstrate that ‘Islam'--whether as a basis for individual/national identity, as a religious and cultural system, or as a set of injunctions encoded in theological and juridical textual sources--is always/already an internally contested discourse rather than a monolithic a[...]

[...]tion + collecting + demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> searchable**)

(Apianus's early modern cognitive horizon -->) eye: another organ used to calibrate settings
activated eye --> new empirical pursuits

my epistemic images : work of an image fetishist

bestiary: animal character diagnosis

[horses]
(from) genre of taking care of the animal: veterinary --to--> chiromancy: profiling of the animal conditioned through the serial nature of list (==> control)

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

Brancaforte
readings of the apparatuses framing Olearius's books
tradition of representing Persia in the West (Xenophon and Herodotus)
narrative elements of Olearius’ works remain largely unexamined


Brentjes

elm naghli (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli (rationality)

(science) elm in Iran <== (10th century written in Persian:) limits of the world [hodud al-alam] + pharmacological medicine + (translated ~= adaptations of) astrology

10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences

rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna

روضة المنجمین

rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium


book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general


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

ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]

ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)

ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)

****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving[...]