[...]ir work of “translation,” of invention.

refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values

*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover or learn something for themselves. (a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning)
[(in computing:) proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.]
-from Greek heuriskein ‘find’

*contingent: using it with ‘historical’ always produces interesting ways --> contingency relates to a nonteleological [a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purpose] and nonhierarchical multiplicity [when i say ‘dud’ and ‘cauphing’ and interupting ‘tracing’ i am asking for contingent modes of relating and thinking. conceptualizing in terms of the origin of the dud is about hierarchical relations between past and present and teleological reasoning: where is the dud coming from. when i asked ‘who told the first joke?’ i am trying to break and joke with teleological mode of thinking about the category of ‘origin’.]
contingent =/=? analytical (--> Contingent propositions depend on some kind of epistemoloy, whereas analytic propositions are true without regard to any facts about which they speak.) {telos, ghasd قصد --> ghaside قصیده =/= ghazal غزل}
-We call a truth contingent when it *depends on something else* for its truth.
-has to do a lot with our material world
contingent ~= containing-agent*
--Tautological propositions, which must be true
--Contradictions which must necessarily be untrue
--possible propositions

never use contingency alone in a sentence --> historical contingency
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}

Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth


*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?

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

(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there i[...]

[...]] and nonhierarchical multiplicity [when i say ‘dud’ and ‘cauphing’ and interupting ‘tracing’ i am asking for contingent modes of relating and thinking. conceptualizing in terms of the origin of the dud is about hierarchical relations between past and present and teleological reasoning: where is the dud coming from. when i asked ‘who told the first joke?’ i am trying to break and joke with teleological mode of thinking about the category of ‘origin’.]
contingent =/=? analytical (--> Contingent propositions depend on some kind of epistemoloy, whereas analytic propositions are true without regard to any facts about which they speak.) {telos, ghasd قصد --> ghaside قصیده =/= ghazal غزل}
-We call a truth contingent when it *depends on something else* for its truth.
-has to do a lot with our material world
contingent ~= containing-agent*
--Tautological propositions, which must be true
--Contradictions which must necessarily be untrue
--possible propositions

never use contingency alone in a sentence --> historical contingency
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}

Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth


*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?

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

(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)

از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presum[...]

[...]odness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*

urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams

technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific


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

Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]

futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture

--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition t[...]

[...]pocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

to change stories so that they are more livable
we live stories

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


situated stories
they can't tell everything, but what is needed here


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refugium_(population_biology)

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

ontological choreography
vital sort of play that the participants invent out of a history of body and mind they inherit

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

possible performances
*two doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties

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

seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?

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

[Haraway]

the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necessity
(the real does/did not have to be or happen that way. the ‘real’ is the result of contingencies and it can be undone by working the contingencies, with skill.)
laboring bodies, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order to know what is not knowable, is a very helpful tradition


when it comes to language we, humans, will always win over the animals.
we will always be the ones who control the law, the database.
(all is bad news both for the charismatic endangered Bangali tiger and the individual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman

can we do without instrumentalization?

categories of killable--the question of how we kill

the question of one's-own-old-hat

regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling

for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity


disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional

(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts [...]

[...] tool
(in studying natural history)

in critique, contrast between effect and affect, is a tool
(assumed quality of the object and one's own named experience)
[these tools are perhaps cognitive objects]

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

Enlightenment as cultural European phenomenon versus a scientific British one

(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)

the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.

(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)

William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of heavens

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

*i can't give you a direct grasp but i hope i can give slowly accuracy

*the ‘details’ of grasping
(zoom in the ‘grasp’)



from contingencies to certainties


i spend so much time with painting and computers, which were about compositions and hacks

i think there are few fields/figurations/skills we need to get good at: rhetoric, biology, aesthetics

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

trope - something other than its literal form

adding an adjective or replacing a name, (one-way movements?) -- let me tell you the story of:
*knowledge --to--> expressed knowledge
*knowledge --to--> knowing
*reality --to--> manifest realities
*real --to--> real enough
*islamic --to--> islamicate (“islamic” has always been a ‘range’ rather than a ‘binary switch’. things become more or less “islamic” in popular/proper belief)
*nature --to--> visual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)


ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive a[...]

[...]~=? trope

*my actual interest is in “the place of study”
which is embodied by its participants, is shared and full of stories that hold foster curiosity and learning. a place where hybrid agents of interpretation are alive and at work, partly technological partly human partly animal shared knowing processes.
-one of our strongest ethical obligations is curiosity


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

[Nietzsche]

(in writing) if i could choose i would promote something that comes close to the texture of the softening that opens and glides, allowing for sudden shocks and slippages.

the personality needs to be able to flow in order to move past anything that establishes itself firmly

Submitted to constant critique and revision

(Nietzsche) “We can destroy only as creators--But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new ‘things’”

invention's power over new things

work on aphorism and irony
radical critique of reason and truth
will to X ---- feeling of power, primitive form of the will  (=/=? play)
arguing that knowledge is contingent and conditional


Nietzsche's campaign against morality :

(contrast between good and evil -->) *master-morality : charity, submission to the other, selflessness, etc. --> you hate yourself

(denying the inherent inequality -->) *slave-morality --> weakness is a matter of choice ==> nihilism


*transvaluation
(Nietzsche hated christianity for its non-affirmation of life. for him sex was a fundamental affirmation of life, christianity's elevation of chastity (including, for example, the story of Mary's virginal pregnancy) is counter to the natural instincts of humanity, and therefore a contradiction of “natural values”.)
•promise of an illustrious afterlife
•desires would be the product of stimuli rather than the product of “will”


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

to *adjust (our/your) question


...to have no positive knowledge claim


appropriate ~= zabt o rabt ضبط و ربط



(let me) fast forward to ‘nowhere’
chance-encounters in your/my efforts of ecriture (in San'an text)
(it is not possible to choreograph chance, we can only report our encounters with it)

like San'an, many of us are facing an anxiety of withdrawal from the world that claims us

i am interested in to-link to that which (suddenly) interupts my reveries


to sharpen my capacity for incapacitation


not being afraid to look into many archives of mistakes (ajayeb?)


‘will to scientific kn[...]

[...]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 [...]

[...]ned forces.”

*animal (in zoological terminology) : a composite of individual organisms, an enclosure of zoons, a company of critters infolded into a one.

compound = composite + enclosure
camera: the technological eye --> philosophical pretension and self-certainty (=/= Christian's camera)
-- camera as a black-box with which to register pictures of the outside world in a representational, mentalist semiotic economy

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

Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, ”_how they make their subjects interesting,_“
to tell the story of their work of “translation,” of invention.

refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values

*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover or learn something for themselves. (a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning)
[(in computing:) proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined.]
-from Greek heuriskein ‘find’

*contingent: using it with ‘historical’ always produces interesting ways --> contingency relates to a nonteleological [a doctrine explaining phenomena by their ends or purpose] and nonhierarchical multiplicity [when i say ‘dud’ and ‘cauphing’ and interupting ‘tracing’ i am asking for contingent modes of relating and thinking. conceptualizing in terms of the origin of the dud is about hierarchical relations between past and present and teleological reasoning: where is the dud coming from. when i asked ‘who told the first joke?’ i am trying to break and joke with teleological mode of thinking about the category of ‘origin’.]
contingent =/=? analytical (--> Contingent propositions depend on some kind of epistemoloy, whereas analytic propositions are true without regard to any facts about which they speak.) {telos, ghasd قصد --> ghaside قصیده =/= ghazal غزل}
-We call a truth contingent when it *depends on something else* for its truth.
-has to do a lot with our material world
contingent ~= containing-agent*
--Tautological propositions, which must be true
--Contradictions which must necessarily be untrue
--possible propositions

never use contingency alone in a sentence --> historical contingency
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}

Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rh[...]

[...]you don't even know if there is an injury anymore at the root of it.
(we are traveling behind its possible meaning-fields)

de-shamanization and translation /(non-transparency should rule?!)


are we trapped in a grid of grievance?

different forms of ‘maybe’ (i am trying to install?)

how complaint is then situated in ‘becoming’?

[...] complaint haunts our era of desperate justice (Xiri, Sana, Varinia)
. a calling-system? a GPS that has lost its signal?

maternal super-ego
political passion emerging as a defensive strategy
(@Xiri, is she trying to add-on the super-ego for her concern of social justice?)

so, does complaint prevent the arrival of change or make way for new forms of sociality?

“I can't complain.” --> (a blockbuster;) those in stubborn destitution ----that there is no address in the era of the becoming anonymous of God. ‘Who would pick up your call?’
however, “the friend, whether ghostly, futural, or closely bound in time, receives the brunt of the complaint” --friends structurally listens to disappointed expectation, disappointed worldliness

what-should-have-been

On what approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates could I possibly befriend another?

metaphysical heritage of friendship (... reconfigured personhood)

(how can I do things without being a psycho about it?)
(How do I know by which politics of friendship, grid or writing practice I am being called up?)
a vocabulary existed to designate, approximate certain routines


R_dzvJYDZXM

CrGJIS3quYY


(30.03.2017) Rabih Mroue and Hito Steyerl duo: concern for injustice and conservative justice call disguised under an elaborated and augmented complaint (in the aesthetic terms of contemporary art market), non-researchers of their subjects and topics, they have no ‘topic’ only ‘resource’ (in the making of their own myth of the figure of artist,) [=/= when something becomes a topic for you, it bounds you to the unsettling commitments of curiosity and research and hard work.]
-in their notion of “Artist in the Reign of Terror” they ask disturbingly “but many individuals have died and it means nothing?!” with a sneer (artwork as puzkhand پوزخند --> @Ali )
[**“sneer” is a contemptuous or mocking smile, remark, or tone, coming from a family of sarcastic tropes of complaint and ironizated complaining]
-their art-work finds and flourishes in a terrain of terror. in their nonspeculative work there is no “but, what if” or “but, not yet” and therefore no ‘becomings’
-for Hito and Rabih: zeitgenössisch (contemporary) = grausam (atrocious)
-they dichotomize (fact/fiction, real/unreal, etc.), rather than allowing a novel and interesting question to [...]

[...]owledge }--> this is about ‘ongoing’

note to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (for example ‘human intentionality,’ ‘human rights,’ etc) *but to hold on (while knowing how contaminated it is) to any concept (which are always unsettled) until it gets a particular (situated) job done
(which job i am try to get done with my good and bad concepts?)

where are we headed with our syntax?

“-scene” : the ‘now’ of the species [--> pleistocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]

Sa'di, thinking not with the capital T, rather with the flower, with the cut tail of the animaux

competency + competency (of different animal, human, machine, pigeon, etc) [=/= subtraction, taboo, obligation --> deficiency*]
(additive competencies)

“excess” is the name of the world
there is always more that we don't know; what yet has to come; the world is constantly doing stuff; (--✕--> accelerate manifesto, apocalyptic narratives)
(i am drawn to and by excess, and i am engaged in it: in my lectures, talkings, writings, and I take it up also visually in my drawings. my ajayeb hypertext search is contingent and opportunistic, and its searches are non-systematic)

in apass what my project is all about: *loving to tell you about what i am reading* (why it seams too difficult, complicated and impossible to understand!?)
-“to provides a feast of reading pleasures”

holding each other's unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)

•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•

anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing

[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)

does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?

the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis[...]

[...]sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?

temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her

incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference

anger, pain, misery, ...

which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخم‌بندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?

my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry

what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?

somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation

Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?

sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج<br />
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’

historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings”  ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception

her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)

ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that ligion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive

how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling

Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?

within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed

bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past


she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been ri[...]

[...] that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]

(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])

-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)

-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by [...]

[...]xchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-early 19th century modern public space was reinventing and operating with impersonality: individuals are systematically habituated not to return the gaze of the other.
=/= i am actually very much attracted to persons. i am interested in their personality. the “you” is what i fall in love with, not the ‘abstract link'--> (Manning's) peripheral perceptivity =/= (i am trying to learn) to describe what is in front of me (which is never easy)]

-Manning's notion of “the problem gives the question to be asked of it” =/= the question problematizes

-focus on “sedimentation” (--> where is the coexistence of contrasts for them?)

“decontextualization”: their technique of concept-making (==> claims of reality, of nunhuman, etc.)
[decontextualization is a very dangerous way of crafting concepts. there are other ways, committed to the contingencies of the historical material world of multispecies. rigor of conceptualization that i am learning from Stewart is about the *quality of an access to part of a world* =/= decontextualization]--so--> i say we need ‘concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work

“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)

Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]

-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]

for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they eng[...]

[...]hor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)

mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*

root metaphor of psychology (?)

(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search for our patron: the father who creates and is the creative principle in us

[because] [we are uncertain of what we are:] we are uncertain of our author, from whom would come both our authority and our authenticity

tracing things back --> preserves of the mother-childhood and family (dominanting psychology) --> we come to her: ***materialism = maternalism (in acceptable disguise)***

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

(with the critical bestiaries magazine idea) is my work about defining a new mode of cultural discourse?


>



-philosophy (like mathematics) is a priori disciplines (or has an a priori methodology) at its core
-the posibility of *true answers* for “artistic questions”(?) --? can anybody outside your field be made to care whether you're right?
a priori =/= contingent
higher-order truths of...
self-supporting community of experts (= trap)
“philosophy is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship” -Burton Dreben

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

act of cultural and economic exchange
act of reciprocal exchange, of creative mutuality (to benefit in a myriad of ways related to our professional status, our institutional ‘worth,’ the social and cultural capital perceived to be attached to the ‘networks’ in which we operate)
[to interrogate] concepts of artistic labor and value
time, labor, and the creative investment that was embodied within [the object that you make]
[you might sight start with] requiring a catalogue containing critical essays to institutionally ‘legitimate’ your exhibition --yet--> sophisticated, playful and interesting ways to comment on and engage
*numerous ways in which cultural forms (in this case contemporary art) are simultaneously entangled in a number of spheres of meaning, value and mediation* ==> activate ongoing dialogue
[*]capitalist marketplace:
•people in both established and emerging ‘global’ economies forced to fulfill their everyday needs
•‘the market’ is naturalised and reified within social relations in ways we don't necessarily always recognise or acknowledge --> suffused and sublimated within creative production, our lexicon and gestures
(19th century anthropology's) the idea of [*]alterity: understanding how ‘other,’ ‘primitive’ societies operated ‘outside’ of modernity --assumption--> ‘small scale’ societies exchange (barter, gift exchange, and so on) would always, with evolution, g[...]

[...]ce of *worldly thinking* with Stewart
vivid pragmatics
weird robust realism of deobjectified deliteralized things =/= ajayeb
to correspond with #telegram media
constitutive differings

teenage: self-division between the move to surge out in a risky worlding and the labor of return alone and weighted

festering + sheltering

“When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all of this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.” Dillard > Stewart

rock-solid otherness

sitting on the granite curb... --Stewart--> sitting on a threshold of expressivity
(Stewart's) intercorporeal intermundane world =/= dull naturalism

(dead matter =/=) the capacity to correspond with a multiplicity of continuous worldings that are both plastic and dense --> grounds us

indeterminate lines of force ripple across the phenomena of a field --> materiality ==> ‘our thought: multidimensional contingent overdetermined’

**we remember in stories of accidents, sledding, and labors**


emerging in circulations (or)
resting in stone (or)
the facades of strip malls

compositional writing: an associational register (of connections and differences) that worlds object-reals [real: a tangle of elements thrown together in a radical composition]

social-material world = composition = prismatic --> for people who are:
•attuned to them (or)
•identified with them (or)
•hostile to their existence (or)
•tired of them (or)
•excited to see their outline on the horizon (or)
•sharply excluded from them (or)
•

the way Attar (in the labor of a worlding) write in Tazkirat al-Awliya : describing a saint's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects

accrual and loss

...realm of killed off things

perception, context and cause
located nowhere in particular (or)
in some paranoid hyper-place

under what spell did things happen or half-happen or start to happen and fail?

Stewart: theory (drawn through writing) = compositional attunement

difference and repetition (+ potentiality and loss) ==> reals

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

knowledge: view from nowhere onto the world =/= knowin[...]

[...]ion (+ potentiality and loss) ==> reals

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

knowledge: view from nowhere onto the world =/= knowing: participation in ongoing mutually constitutive processes in the world

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

رواقى
stoicism: “detachment ==> clear thinking”
psychological independence <== *stoicism* (<~~)--> causality =/= anxiety

philosophy shows many ‘theories about causality = ways to reduce anxiety’ --Despret--> our experience sometimes require us *to go farther than the instrumental (causal)* and to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction

*anecdotic causality*
([in apass we constantly do] the practice of using) [*]anecdote: expressive causalities*
anecdote: the intersection between the artist (patient) and feedback (therapist) --> circular causality --> (helps the feedbacker or therapist) *to understand and create another way of thinking about disorder and confusion*


stoic distinction: event which are dependent on one's *will* =/= events which are in the realm of one's *desires* (one which one has no control)
--> closely related to the (Seligman's) *causal attribution: a theory of contingent causality affecting the subject in her or his interpretation*

•نسبت دادن attribution =/= explanation (behavior assigned to its cause) =/= inference (quality/attribute assigned to the agent's observed behavior)
◦can we do without *explanatory style*? (a person's causal dimensions of stability and globality) --> past dealing (optimism, pessimism, etc.)
◦can we do without *locus of control*? (a person's locus conceptualized as internal) --> future dealing (fate, hope, etc.)

stoic philosophy ==resulting==> therapy
([Holakouee's] stoic conception of) ****therapy: it is not the events which make people suffer but rather the perception they have of the events****


Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (the created)
•[(let's say) Aristotle is creating an] anecdotic causality: the search for a remote event, apparently insignificant, which has as much impact as the material event which is efficient, formal, or final

Antique law --> effort to reduce the event to an equation ==permit==> determination of the responsibility: the primary cause ==> to reduce the overwhelming richness of reality in movement
--> in obsessional perspective of scientific research: reduce the quantity of information to make the reality clearer (more coherent) --> (a series of signs in hermeneutical perspective ==permit==>) “the image (the event) =/= the background (the sum of the events)”

(anecdote ~=) myth:[...]

[...]l of synthesis: a conflict of opposites or the negation of the negation. Deleuze and Guattari, on the other hand, replace that model of synthesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.

(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’

[singular entities:]

The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.


..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)



we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!

in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب‌, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?



...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.

Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic appr[...]

[...], animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’

“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality

I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...

*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> beings do not preexist their relatings

the verb of reality is full of nouns with appendages

nature/culture: *local category abstractions* (=/= universal: misplaced concreteness)
subject/object: *potent consequences* (=/= preexisting foundations)

foundation is always contingent (Haraway > Butler)
•scale is contingent
•mutability is contingent

bestiary of agencies
kinds of relatings

in my work on ajayeb i am trying to carefully approach the notions of:
emergence, process, historicity, difference, specificity
-and by that teach myself an artful practice rich with:
co-habitation, co-constitution, contingency

on-the-ground work:
-Verran # Nigeria Yoruba --> “emergent ontologies,” “get on together” (...how can *general* knowledge be nurtured in postcolonial worlds committed to taking *difference* seriously?”)
-Thompson # Kenya --> “ontological choreographies” (...bodies, human and nonhuman, are taken apart and put together in processes)
-Strathern # Papua New Guinean --> “partial connections” (...patterns within which the players are neither wholes nor parts ... necessary counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations)

what kind of refigurations i need for the tropic work that feel is required for the for ontological choreography of ajayeb (in technoscience or elsewhere? other societies with liberal or non-liberal individual or state, with other techno-monsters, automated warriors, terrorists, and all the waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss that comes with, as well as joy, play, labor, and invention--)?
-how do i narrate this (ajayeb and non-ajayeb, the wondrous and the mundane) co-history?
-how do i embody an art of relating (as is never done once and for all)?

*species : biological kind of reality + scientific expertise necessary to that kind of reality
(what wo[...]

[...] --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***

Irigaray: *wonder* = passion of encounter (between the most material and the most metaphysical)

wonder:
•passion (of already born) --✕--> reenveloped in love
•touched and moves toward and within the attraction --✕--> nostalgia for the first dwelling
•passion of first encounter --✕--> repetition




[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]

(Derrida understood that this structure, this) logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal

the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human

(Derrida)"The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”

the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.

multispecies contingency

In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.

the capacity to respond and to recognize response

We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.

Engage them [the dogs] as mindful bodies, in relationships of response?

the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)

[we make ‘knowing’. knowing is always a practice of making, and always embodied. the idea that thinking involves disembodiment of the knowing organ is just insane.]

"articulating bodies to other bodies” ----> disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies

entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not

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

ajayeb is system imagination

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

[Naveeda Khan]

Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?

is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?

‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)

It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes th[...]

[...]
2- human right to transcend the ordinary (--> to aspire to God's position)

...lush growth of eucalyptus trees at the edge of the market
--> yesssss things that grow on the edges <-- my life-long attention (the cat who entered the house, the ants, the plants in Tehran, ...) [<== because of my own marginalized being?]


being fated (together)

...although the earth breaks, it reconstitutes
people find themselves in diminished form, or occupying a lesser form of life, or having the status of the resurrected dead, but they will nonetheless always find themselves here at this place in this moment****

...End Times bringing a fearful apocalyptic future into the present, evoking the eternal quest for union with a beloved without end, while not focused on a specific horizon


*foreshprtended horizons*


intensification of existing scenes of suffering


/>

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

[Delanda]
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.2/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext

topology =/= Aristotle's geometry (his “genus” and his “species.” )
genus =/= species as a contingent historical individual
species =/= topological animal (a body-plan)

topological properties like connectivity (=/= metric space)

“[...]I surely reject the idea that morphogenesis needs any “mind” to operate. I also reject the neo-Kantian thesis of the linguisticality of experience. [...] Are we to assume that those ancient hunter gatherers lived in an amorphous world waiting for language to give it form?”

“rejecting the linguisticality of experience (according to which every culture lives in its own world) leads to a conception of a shared human experience in which the variation comes not from differences in signification (which is a linguistic istic notion), but of significance (which is a pragmatic one).”

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

*refraction* (vajje.com/search/کسر)

it is insane how the cold-blooded fact of the modern science has singled out individuals and species in a manner of objective study. the idea that one must individualize the subject of research is unacceptable. how we have allowed ourselves to separate the whale from the spontaneous whirlpools that surround it, from its larger group of species. the difference between environment and species is a constructed fabulated “fact” by frontiers of science since the 19th century. the book of ajayeb cultivates its objects with their stories, it fosters compounds and assemblages. not excluding the refractions, fantasying the illusion of so-called objective clarity that tends to categorize life into its own brand of differences (individual and environment, object and subject, live and dead, etc.), but including the ways agents [...]

[...]he ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

“How to disrupt patterns of thinking that see the past as finished and the future as not ours or only ours?”



*measurement
** the nature of nature depends on the apparatus that measure it
***--> which measurements are at use in ajayeb?
(what constitutes a measurement for what?)

the strangest idea: that we have access to cultural representations and their content (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being the deep origin of high philosophy) actually comes originally from (the writings of) Aristotle on physics, rearranged three centuries after his death by Andronicus of Rhodes}]

materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much power, tendency to take grammar too seriously : allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding {--> rigs}
believing that ‘subject’ + ‘predicate structure of language’ (~ grammatical categories) --reflects--> (a prior ontological reality of) substance and attribute (~ underlying structure of the world) (=/= *contingency *rhetoric);, --> still in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]

*performativity (the way i am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ou[...]

[...] (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being the deep origin of high philosophy) actually comes originally from (the writings of) Aristotle on physics, rearranged three centuries after his death by Andronicus of Rhodes}]

materiality itself is always already figured within a linguistic domain as its condition of possibility(?(!))
[ (?(!)) : a contingent question pregnant with wonder]
[my starting point in my lecture/performance is with the concern (warned by Nietzsche) that language is being granted too much power, tendency to take grammar too seriously : allowing linguistic structure to shape or determine our understanding {--> rigs}
believing that ‘subject’ + ‘predicate structure of language’ (~ grammatical categories) --reflects--> (a prior ontological reality of) substance and attribute (~ underlying structure of the world) (=/= *contingency *rhetoric);, --> still in the 16th century europe (pointed by Foucault) language was simply “one of the figurations of the world” =/= “language as medium"]

*performativity (the way i am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” --> with this regard what questions should Xiri ask her subjects?}

{ practice of representation =/= represented entity }--> this “=/=” is ontological ==> question of accuracy (of representation) --> scientific knowledge objectivity

focus on the nature & production of scientific knowledge (--> mediates our access to the material world) -[...]

[...]'relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)

(boundaries are always ‘enacted,’ not ‘made')

(*)reality: “things"-in-phenomena, ongoing ebb and flow of agency *****
-shifting boundaries and properties that stabilize and destabilize

(*)world: a dynamic process of intra-activity in the “ongoing reconfiguring of locally determinate causal structures” [~= contingency] with determinate boundaries, properties, meanings, and patterns of marks on bodies *****

(*)universe: agential intra-activity in its becoming

(*)word: material-discursive practices ==> boundaries are constituted (for example the differential constitution of “humans” and “nonhumans”; @Varinia)
==> meaning (=/= ideational, andisheyi اندیشه‌ای‌) --> specific material (re)configuring of the world

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] material conditions that enable and constrain disciplinary knowledge practices) *actual historically situated social conditions:
•speaking
•writing
•thinking
•calculating
•measuring
•filtering
•concentrating
•
--> statements + subjects emerge from a field of possibilities =/= statement as utterance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject

(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted

(*)meaning: ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility (=/= a property of individual/groups of words)

**local causal structures --> one component {effect} is marked by another component {cause} (in their ‘differential articulation’ [~= intelligibility]) }--> in science this is called “measurement”

[...]

[...]and intensifies the prehensile (گیرکننده), prefixial (pishvandi پیشوندی) nature of ‘trans-’ and implies a suffixial (pasvandi پسوندی) space of attachment that is simultaneously generalizable and abstract yet its function can be enacted only when taken up by particular objects (Hayward & Weinstein)
trans* (prepositionally oriented) “is the process through which thingness and beingness are constituted” [...] “marking the ‘with,’ ‘through,’ ‘of,’ ‘in,’ and ‘across’ that make life possible”
•materializes prepositional movements

the ‘human on board’ no longer possesses critical purchase, it no longer “delineates a normative standard of legibility,” “the elite status of being considered fully human” (how is it in ajayeb?)
(biopolitics of) de-, in-, non-, trans-

a ‘turn’ (= a cause to move, a difference in position ==> a change in nature) enables creatures to migrate from the margins to the center of theoretical interrogatives

Haraway prefering (the energetic expressive capacity of) ‘with’ over ‘and’
-syntactical problem of ‘and’ raised to the power of n
-she puts the emphasis on with-ness --> to reinvigorate (tajdide niru تجدید نیرو) attention to materiality but also matter's contingent force --> intersectional demands of assemblage
“and...and...and”
trans, speciating technology, the drive for suffixial endpoints


(prepositional operations on suffixiated) assemblages of spacetimematterings


**** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed


‘*’ (the asterisk) is paratactic (faghede ravabet فاقد روابط) (=/= conjunction,) it designates multiplication, it repurposes, displaces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture, increased vitalization
-it is a sensuous node
-making (my points) a composite of affects and percepts --> speciation is always a cultivated response ***

*trap: “means also mouth, or mode of utterance; it is the “O” curve of lips and throat that makes sounds phonic and names the apprehension of becoming bodily. A trap, in weaving, is also a break in the threads, an unraveling, loosening, unwinding that opens up space. When we think of spider webs, trap is a silk net, a sticky mesh that registers sensation. For the spider, its trap is its nearby-ness, its where-ness, its with-ness. [--> lure;] (Hayward & Weinstein)
-how, then, might we hear the phrase “trapped in the wrong body” as less about authenticity (fixity and normativity) than about *textures of spacetime* (prefixial movements)?

[harkate johari حرکت جوهری ~/=? harkate pishvandi حرکت پیشوندی]._/'--> Sadra


(Susan Stryker warns) that transsexuals, in their capacity to be monstrous, arise, like Frankenstein's creature, from the operating tables of thei[...]

[...]t not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet chaste and modest woman --> *female modesty was of the body; the new masculine virtue had to be of the mind* [women's presence turns out to disrupt the experiment (of the scientist or sufi) altogether] (“[...]best of women, pious, chaste, modest, and compassionate, are rendered unfit for science by the very qualities that make them the best of women”)
(Haraway, why credible witnessing is still at stake:) “this is the culture within which contingent facts [= the real case about the world, the object world] can be established with all the authority, but none of the considerable problems, of transcendental truth. this self-invisibility is the specifically modern, European, masculine, scientific form of the virtue of modesty. this is the form of modesty that pays off its practitioners in the coin of epistemological and social power. *this kind of modesty is one of the founding virtues of what we call modernity.* [...] and so he is endowed with the remarkable power to establish the facts.”
-“he [the civic man of reason] bears witness”: he is objective, he guarantees the clarity and purity of objects, as contestable representations, or as construced documents in their potent capacity to define the facts =/= queering confidence: enable a more corporal, inflected, and optically dense, if less elegant, kind of witness (to the matters of fact to emerge in the worlds of technoscience) [--> this is why i was trying to enable that kind of “optically dense” and “less elegant” kind of corporeality in our work on Olearius#]
(Haraway + Potter + Shapin + Schaffer:) elaboration on the idea of modest witness in which “modesty” might flip between either two sides:
1- historically masking a masculine solipsism as a preciously unmarked category: modest witness =/= haec vir : God forbid that the experimental way of life have queer foundations
2- (working across partialities) to create “a more adequate, self-critical technoscience committed to situated knowledges”


a nameless sin about which, without describing, he sought counsel

oratory

tension between dedica[...]

[...]figure of writing technologies:] i am interested in and interested to help make historical representations of nonhuman iranians in writing technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning)

with ajayeb this became immediately my concern: *infrastructures of historical representation*

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

(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, accumulating affects, contagious مسرى? it tends to pick up whatever comes near, or gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near*]
•wonder
•cause ==> ?
•
}--> social bond is always rather sensational*

(Ahmed suggests) thinking through affect as “sticky”: affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects
{ affects as contagious =/= (inside/outside) “outside in” model of emotions (for axample, when we say: atmosphere “getting into the individual”)-->[part of the intellectual history of (crowd) psychology and the sociology of emotions] }--> affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected
“what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation” --> Julia's post-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]

(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]

to get along =? to share direction


politics of good feelings

(slide between) affective and moral economies

*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things

[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency

“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what[...]

[...]-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]

(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]

to get along =? to share direction


politics of good feelings

(slide between) affective and moral economies

*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things

[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency

“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what you do

happiness is
•intentional: directed toward objects --> phenomenological sense
•affective: contanct with objects


happiness puts us into intimate contact with things, [...] even if that something does not present itself as an object of consciousness (Ahmed) --> *coming and going of objects*

“to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing”


#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 [...]

[...]ality of things
•de-dramatization of academic thought
•to approach the thing that throws itself together *slowly and enigmatically*--> #andakhtan, andaze
•a descriptive detour (with Latour)
•a lyrical evocation (with Stewart)
•a method of awkwardly approaching an object by attuning to it as a thing of *promise and contact* (with Berlant)
•

concept: that which attunes itself to things coming into form; is both abstract & concrete; actual & unfolding

highly fractured stone of a collective intensity (--> Iran, and most other places)

______________


ajayeb was/is very much committed to the concrete: that means committed to speculation and curiosity (and not the demystification and uncovering truths that support a well-known picture of the world) (it was only to a certain degree in support of the middle age islamic picture)

*a something both animated and inhabitable

how to approach a weighted and reeling [walk as if unable to control one's movements] present?
(to name)

(Stewart > Berlant:) objects and scenes of desire hold promise, keeping whole clusters of affects magnetized to them
-an individual's abstract yet contingent desire to feel like he or she is “in” something or can recognize something [@Lili, Aela]

***promise is always promise to be present to the scene


i am reading in ajayeb the actual lines of potential that a something coming together calls to mind an sets in motion

exert palpable pressures

(working with ajayen equip me with recognizing the) immanent نافذ, obtuse پخ, erratic ويلان (=/= “obvious meaning” of semantic message and symbolic signification;) to pick up density and texture
(in tasavof, in iranian poetry, in ajayeb, in my peer's works, )
-asking: what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow persent in them --> potentiality & resonance


(according to Stewart) ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meaning*** (in short: canon of “Thinking”) --> “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities
-Sven's ordinary affects and DJings --> his noncoherent singularity ==> a nonrepresentational theory is needed to address them
asking Sven:
•what needs attending to (for you)?
•what/who are you in conversation with?



[scenes and selves]***
•layered textures of a scene



(paying attention to pressure points of ajayeb ==>)
in ajayeb, what is
•maintained as a prized possession
•left to rot
•hardened into lit[...]

[...]an 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.[...]

[...]oda mistook for ideology]

*problem with pluralizing “reality” is that it might appear to be a form of cultural relativism, (demotion of) “ontology ~= culture (~ cultural beliefs about reality =/= reality)” ==back==> cultural construction


anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism


[a] Heideggerian idea: *the world we encounter is preinterpretive*

posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism

(realism: an ontological approach)

•Latour's network
•Ingold's meshwork (commonality of processes across the ‘life =/= not life’) --> processes ~ becoming ~ growth ~ decay
•Barad's entanglement (relations are primary and relata are a consequence of relating ==dynamics==> intra-action {phenomenon = experiment + measuring device + techician + previous results + setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•

**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]

[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded

flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being

ruin memories

nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}

(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty

theories + apparatuses + material remains

ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust

archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded

(it is precisely the) past --endures-in--> assemblage


interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)

Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argenti[...]

[...]setting + ...})
•DeLanda's assemblage (how humans and nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time... =/= linguistic model of context)
•

**relational ontology : stronger your “allies” are, the more reality you can claim** [= (Latour's notion of) truth]

[critique of human exceptionalism ==>] open ontology --> contingent categories: phenomena and assemblages are temporary, contingent, and unbounded

flat ontology: one made exclusively of unique, singular individuals, differing in spatio-temporal scale but not in ontological status --symmetry--> *to get at differences without determining what they are in advance* (<-- useful for ajayeb studies)
•archaeological types/objects: reified sets of relations
•job of the archaeologists: establish alternative taxonomies of being

ruin memories

nonrepresentational =/={"world of ideas =/= world of things” ~= the ideas must correspond to a truth demonstrable in the world of things}

(Lucas's) materialization: we can still say things about the past with great certainty

theories + apparatuses + material remains

ontological realism --claim--> objectivity and truth may be contingent but are nonetheless demonstrable and robust

archaeologist ontological approach: working on “material pasts in the present” ~= ‘how past actually gathers in the present’ =/= “material record = fragmentary evidence of history”
•(material's temporary sensitivity ==>) [*]residue: the idea of memory objects, material entities in which the memory of a moment in time is recorded

(it is precisely the) past --endures-in--> assemblage


interpretive endeavors <--characterize-- extension of the meaning of the social
•ontology as a new interpretive tool
•additive (=/= reconstructive)

Alberti's approach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]

ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body


influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies

(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)

what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples

(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record

investigations of personhood

(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique

(Alberti >) Viv[...]

[...]social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples

(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record

investigations of personhood

(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique

(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics



ontological realism ==>{

new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age

assemblage --replace--> context

assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded

Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism

pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction

archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains

ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe


material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)

past continuously unfolding and therefore changing


Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)

archeological accounts of other's ontologies

animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret material patterning in archeological records --> [*]animism: an ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies
•blurring between nature and culture
•relationship with other-than-human agencies (animal, spirit, artifact)
==✕==> ontological critique

Viveiros de Castro --> systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics ==> to have an reciprocal effect on anthropological thought (western naturalist metaphysics)[...]

[...] in our common world

what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced

context-dependent --?--> the way things are

architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking

noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world

(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*

(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*

“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters


ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)


#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by individual subjectification:) the shadowy monster from the Upside Down in The Stranger Things, possessing the character. [the story is based on non-intra-active models and mode of being in the world of multispecies in multi-dimensions, it wants clear boundried subjects encapsulated by psychological ego and self-possession persons, ideas of identity and power --> life insurance system]
•(intra-action resisted by the political modern concrete individualism:) relationship with the phantom of state in The Handmaid's Tale. [overlapping a flat image of totalitarian society into religion]





technosphere: (conceptualized as) an unintended muddle of multispecies relationships emerging from contaminated landscapes, dumps
--reconsider-with-> feral technologies: novel and weedy capacities for materially significant change

invasive artificial intelligence

anthropocene: a multidimensional puzzle structured around complexities and ruptures --> when ways of being & ways of belonging can no longer be studied exclusively
(human-nonhuman-machine)

•who orders the technosphere?
•who inhabits the technosphere?
•


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

“unmediated experience” --(signals a danger)--> naive realism (+ its polar opposite: naive subjectivism)


soup operatic
operatic (--> opera)
aporetic (--> aporia)
operative (--> secret agent)

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

‘learning’ in biology: (how to overco[...]

[...]epted: pets are models for family devotion. but the model of the loving and the beloved pet does not spread love; it holds tight inside the family (-Tsing)

[biosocial plan:] other people & other species are judged by their ability to live up to one standard of domestic intimacy (USA or iran):
they love their children and pets ==> imagine themselves as compassionate and moral --> makes them ‘good people’ ==> equip them to make decisions for the whole world ==> moral hierarchy (~ your goodness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*

urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams

technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
•what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific


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

Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]

futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the[...]

[...]> (a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]

futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)

*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”


**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of principles of progress and rationality
•driving force of technology will transform society
•ideal of democracy will be progressively encoded in law
=/=
**anti-progress prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•national genius of a chosen people will blossom
•human nature will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture

--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire


ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection



principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story of this coalescence, and if your fellow players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins.

you (tell stories in which you) are free to:
•make the world a better place
•hatch a nefarious scheme
•narrate a true stor[...]

[...]ure will reestablish historic gender roles and racial hierarchies
•the essence of ancient civilizations will rise again to vie and clash

}--> There is no room for contingent connections in any of these predictions


(most important story of our time:) *the story of globalization*:
•the world is entering a global era without political or economic rifts
•nation-states and cultures are increasingly irrelevant
•a global menu of consumerdesires and entrepreneurial standards frames identity and sets individual and collective goals

--> since the end of the Cold War:
•global expansion of a few giant corporations
•the great flows of people from one continent to another
•forging of transnational standards for economics and politics
•development of widely spread audiences for once parochial forms of popular culture

--> Global capitalism is not seamless:
•leapfrogging financial crises
•“antiglobalization” politics springing up
•deflating policymakers’ hopes for a smooth transition to corporate empire


ultimate fantasy of an *era without politics*
ultimate fantasy of a *more complex evolutionary plan*
=/= contingency & interconnection



principles of (Tsing and Pollman's) Global Futures game:
you tell the story of this coalescence, and if your fellow players accept the story, it makes history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins.

you (tell stories in which you) are free to:
•make the world a better place
•hatch a nefarious scheme
•narrate a true story

[*]coalescence: the historical force that arises from a transformative coming together of disparate groups, institutions, or things:
an unexpected connection ==> a “historical force"[= something that might change the world]
(parties might be: groups, institutions, ideas, identities, things, or beings. chili peppers and Thai cuisine; African rice producers and the Carolina coast; astrolabes, compasses, and plane tables)

[contemplative mode of togetherness: (in Europe) coalescence انعقاد =/= (in Middle East) confluence تلاقى }--> transnationalism =/= internationalism }~-> forms of alliance that are possible and needed that can be created differentially with “trans-” =/= “inter-“]--> *coalescence is not meaningful nor possible in Middle East?*

example:
•not coalescence story: to say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals. or to imagine a pet store that sells both
•coalescence story: a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become [...]

[...]ity, repetition

the material despair of a colonial capital modern condition leading in high speed to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics, under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery --(Jassem and Mia)--> cognize the immediate material urgency of the endangered subjectivity



--faceless--
nonanimal --> nonhuman + nonanimal ==> destabilizing effects
with their flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance --> subjectivity's disassociation from the world
[in no (or which) calculus of assurance are they moving?]


ruined main body (of the performance)
ruin is (a fictional being) adding additional variety to technical being (frontier technologies) of Norway
-obsolescence (and why not adjustment? =/= extremist position ==> to emerge fanatically from the ruins)--(can we use our imagination not for world scale future speculation, and rather for small adjustment of this space?)
-give expression and meaning to the material culture


--landscape--
using it in the performance: a lens that refuses the abstraction of elements relation in a vacuum (as its optics, not a Blickmaschin)
show us: big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy

(with “stranger within” [=? ‘desire within']) are we at the space of complain? <-- dispositions of Beschwerde
a form of protest --> (disenfranchized language of) *mutated rage* --> always innocent ==> agent of delivery
(protest part of) the proud and brutal history of break-out syntax of civic responsibility (=/= adjustment)

rage & ecstasy

ruin --> doom --> rage --> innocence --> delivery: performance


--ruin--
we can and should ***navigate the ruin***
(navigate =/= asset-production)
-capitalist (owning the rhetoric of progress) telling uling us / teach us to ignore ruins (in the making)
-is there life in ruin? --Tsing--> place of unsettled identities, *in it each of us become ourselves with the help of a less-than ideal collaboration*

bring your curiosity


contaminated diversity [=/= doom: a form of missing that which is contaminated, (an affect typical of Tehran,) one has lost the pulse of the world]
(hard to clasify)
*cultures and species that don't adjust well to disturbance* (<-- we shouldn't lose hope on them)
--> **precarious survival** : in order to live you need help, always subject to the indeterminacy of self and other's transformations (=/= MacGyver selfish gene story) [Sina and Agnes hiking in the need for sticks to walk], ==>? “kinds” and “types” emerge; and you need multiple forms of curiosity


*neoclassical economics (which is today's economic model) (<== modern economy):
•theory of supply and demand
•[...]

[...]ing like udyr)

[*]ghosts: phantoms inside [your] (natural) history, layered temporalities of living and dying (==shape==> landscapes), creatures of ambivalent entanglement --> (help us read) *life's enmeshment in landscapes*


suffering from the ill of another species (or people):
•bacteria inside (<== pollution, radiation)
•people next door (<== war, politics)
}--> this is the condition of anthropocene entanglement



[productive horror of our civil performance--Kirsten, Sina, Jassem and Mia:]

temporalities of ruin, body, optics
                   |     |     |
       matrix of rage, lure, desire

rage (violently affective contact)
--> ghosts: [--> Jassem and Mia's performance ~ “big story"]
•**histories tumbled into histories** (“ghosts” <== bad death <== settler colonialism + expansive capitalism --> they brought with them a peculiar kind of time: looking straight ahead to the future [==> optimization & salvation of a *single past*] --> ruthless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

lures
--> monsters: [--> Kirsten's objects ~ small stories, little niches with ghostly contours (like a car's tire) ~ things growing in abundant]
•**bodies tumbled into bodies** (“monsters” <== assets and wastes (animal entanglement with the burning man) <-- bad symbiosis)
* unspectacular afterlife of discarded things * (debris of capitalist waste)
•weaving magical figures, conjuring fictions
•constant speculation, that are fed and touched, reparative and tender
•textured, formful, colorful
*lure: things that evoke or capture feelings and responses ==> to lure out relational responses

desire (superposition)
--> optics: (a form of distance) [--> Sina's stories ~ superposition [different scales] of dispersed times [~ unruly temporalities], multiple practice of knowing smallbig spacetime mattering]
•**positions tumbled into positions** (tumbled into politics: some instruments of seeing producing perspectives are more guilty than others)
* (disembodied) multiple practices of knowing --> landscapes: arrangement of life and afterlife, space that grows from ‘endings’ <== ‘death of’(s) ~~> contaminated (stories/diversities)
--> diagram: http://ajayeb.net/?q=rationalizable
(Sina performing) diffractive optics of knowing ==> ongoing articulation [=/= perspective]


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost membe[...]

[...]lem of entering a culture from outside


points of the lecture:
-a nano-expose
-of kicking off this...
-not dramatically pitched at you
-cartography of collapse and sublime
-coming down or crushing down the watching post
-(disclosures and) promises of frontier technology
-


ghosts of the project:
/poltergeist --> not really capable of knowing different things and different types of relations they are entered into, bad at perspectival communication
/Hamlet's father --> wanting you to remember ~= revenge
/Cinderella --> doesn't show any psychological symptoms (she has no psychology?), she is not the master of anything, not even her name
/ruin --> place of unsettled identities

questions of:
•doom [=/= adjustment, management]: “contamination = end”
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
◾traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]

[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves

poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism


(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it intit into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
[...]

[...] process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you


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

--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia

theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance

(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts

[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite literature
•rumor
•folklore
•

(Morris points that) such specters are densest in the places where the accidents of modernity are most like to occur

*the death that is caused by another death*

technologization of life and death, movement and war --> *making one vulnerable to death* <== (often) a function of technology (technologization of life and death, movement and war, etc.)

*ghostliness (in Southeast Asia): an idiom with which to address issues about the difficult delineation of a boundary between the living and the dead* (=/= matter of improper burial)

if the dead cannot join the living, the living can die and thereby mingle with the already deceased ~-> fright

the location (where ghostliness arises) is not spatial but temporal (“something happened”)--> in a strange way, for the “occurrence” has no place in time ==> stop time and to displace other narratives (-->[...]

[...]in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible

(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ wound) --to--> poorly anticipated encounter (~ accident)

(Caruth's argument:) **[*]trauma: a discourse that opens up ethical possibilities with its demand for a recognition of the need for historicization (of the relationship between destruction and survival)**

****(Morris as an anthropologist call for analysis of the accidental -->) to better comprehend *how history exceeds individual intentions* + how particular conceptions of history may enable more consequential action on the part of historical agents****
==> (to move from) affective symptoms of an overwhelming experience [@Hoda] --to--> the question of effectivity beyond representation
--> to construe an ethical relation to history--in terms of open relation to futurity [=/= an (impossible) mastery of the past]

every artist researcher should investigate:
•how anxiety is informing you
•how trauma is informing you

the question of the political understood as: (@Femke, OSP)
•the question of contingent factors
•the question of unexpected exposures
•the question of (relatively) unconscious processes
(and not of control)

neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]

inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)

(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjectivity* (=/= acceding to a fuller subjectivity)

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosi[...]

[...]spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

ephemeral mobilization (which later sets the stage for politicization) is a familiar instrument of power

the group:
•(has a) monopoly on violence
•manifestation of a will to democracy (for example the way Iranian movements were read by international bodies)

ahistoricism of conspiratorial orientation --> “powerful but secret instrumentalities ==> temporary formations” --misses--> the transformations of social consciousness and political possibility

(to open to the thought of a world beyond you)

narratives of accidental politicization (~ movements emerging from crowds without ever becoming masses or classes)
--✕--> from the state
--✕--> from the transnational media + whose circuits the images of these convergences travel
--> an experience of immediacy (as the origin of politics =/= encounter with representations of the world), sudden activation of an immediate presence in the public sphere --> political conceived as itself being contingent

to resignify and reorient the problem of the political in terms of civilizational difference (rather than ideological, and hence economic, difference)


the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome

rapacious female specter
in the fear of being killed by this nearly limitless desire for female dead, men (Thai constructor workers in Singapore) started to paint their nails, attired themselves as women before going to sleep
[seek to accomplish in advance what is feared, emasculation]--> **mimesis of a crisis foretold**

(khwan)
a thread of unspun cotton tied about the wrist --to--> prevent the dissipation of one's vital essence

(mostly men's) satisfaction of commodity desire --entails--> absence from home

woman's work in technology and textile manufacturing and in the tourism sector (whether as service worker or prostitute) --> is deemed lamentable, even contemptible, but still tolerable

anxiety over lost male potency ==?==> widow ghost

the queen had a dream (that all the men in Thailand had vanished)
--> anxiety expressed as *extreme anticipation* (and not as an opposition to the feared object)
-the phenomena materializes what they seek to differ and mime (the force thday the want to stave off)

collective spirit possession

periods of commodification --> waves of witchcraft (traversed Thailand in 1905)

•episodes of disruption
•social crisis
•economic transformation
•attended reordering of social relations (including those of class and gender)
[...]

[...]s of witchcraft (traversed Thailand in 1905)

•episodes of disruption
•social crisis
•economic transformation
•attended reordering of social relations (including those of class and gender)
•

(khwan) rite: a try to evade loss by soliciting misrecognition (on the part of the ghost), but they cannot cover over the fact of an already existent loss

working as a repetition compulsion --> the widow ghost (بختک bakhtak?) as an example of death drive
(waking up nightly having felt themselves robbed of breath and speech)
--Mills+Morris--> capital (not war) as the source of this trauma

trauma that arises in war ~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures

mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be addressed

(تقدم anteriority =/= causality عليت)

*discernment of cause is precisely the domain of political analysis*
|
in a history that is experienced as the space of contingency, or accident, symptoms are likely to be recognized as cause (<== the order of anteriority is no longer distinguished from causality)
|
older patriarchal orders might reassert their values

young people being possessed by crowds and then escaping that possession --> the labor to discern other possibilities in relation to the accidental...


accidental encounter as the basis of politicization --reiterates-transforms--> narrative of ghostly encounters ~=reveals==> *a fundamental but ultimately inexplicable antithesis exists* (between the way things exists and the possibility that they might be otherwise)

the “accident” makes visible the contingencies of everyday existence

[*]ghost: materialization of the spectral possibility of being absolutely otherwise (we give it a name “death” or “fiction”) and negates it by assuming a material form

...the ethical impulse constantly:
•risks disappearing into a mere chance affair
•risks disappearing in a rule

(Morris -->) spirit possession ==> *an individual learns to contain the effects of lost consciousness* (hence a certain kind of death)--by regularizing it and by surrendering her to his body to a voice that comes from without, almost always in the form of a commandment
*a mode of absolute comformity* --expresses--> desire =/= interest [Marx diagnosis: (how) the ‘interest’ of power appears as the ‘desire’ of the ones who are disenfranchised]
--> simulacrum of a dialogue, reciprocal sociality in a theater where the spirits respond to the questions of mortals
[crowds split between a desire [...]

[...]~/= injury that is the function of insertion into new and painful economic structures

mastering the wounds produced by capital, depend on:
•not the production of cathartic discharge through aberration or historisization through narrative
•on some kind of socialization or collectivization through which the source of injury can be addressed

(تقدم anteriority =/= causality عليت)

*discernment of cause is precisely the domain of political analysis*
|
in a history that is experienced as the space of contingency, or accident, symptoms are likely to be recognized as cause (<== the order of anteriority is no longer distinguished from causality)
|
older patriarchal orders might reassert their values

young people being possessed by crowds and then escaping that possession --> the labor to discern other possibilities in relation to the accidental...


accidental encounter as the basis of politicization --reiterates-transforms--> narrative of ghostly encounters ~=reveals==> *a fundamental but ultimately inexplicable antithesis exists* (between the way things exists and the possibility that they might be otherwise)

the “accident” makes visible the contingencies of everyday existence

[*]ghost: materialization of the spectral possibility of being absolutely otherwise (we give it a name “death” or “fiction”) and negates it by assuming a material form

...the ethical impulse constantly:
•risks disappearing into a mere chance affair
•risks disappearing in a rule

(Morris -->) spirit possession ==> *an individual learns to contain the effects of lost consciousness* (hence a certain kind of death)--by regularizing it and by surrendering her to his body to a voice that comes from without, almost always in the form of a commandment
*a mode of absolute comformity* --expresses--> desire =/= interest [Marx diagnosis: (how) the ‘interest’ of power appears as the ‘desire’ of the ones who are disenfranchised]
--> simulacrum of a dialogue, reciprocal sociality in a theater where the spirits respond to the questions of mortals
[crowds split between a desire to be in the place of power and an interest in its overthrowing]

the medium: always one called to her task, one who cannot refuse the demands made on her by a ghostly power. in her, power becomes visible.
-and is personal (in form of commandment--and not rule of law)
-the medium, in submitting, keeps alive *a memory of power before the bureaucratization of state*

young inmates entering into insurgent movement largely on the basis of contacts with older ideologues (with whom they had contact solely because they were incarcerated in spaces reserved for political prisoners

consciousness as reason --> double sense of being unmoored from explanatory and th[...]

[...]-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge

politics of friendship in Kelileo Demne:
undiscovered treasures...
constantly warning of fall on the asymmetry
nonreciprocity
Kelile-o Demne is about communal forms of fragile human existence
a project of (asserted) nonalienation
-destinal velocities (the Turtle, the storks, etc.)
fictioning totality of nature, therefore, state
States of security, nature of illusion,


finite essence of friendship

(is muslim paradice and general idea of akherat in the way of finitude of friendship? what would friendship for a mojud-e okhravi mean?)
octo-paradisic systems



animal husbandry
[husband: conserve, husband, economize, economise, spouse, mate,]
[husbandry: the practice of cultivating the land or raising stock]

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with this particular story and not that. (althought i have been changing the subject constantly myself...)
-the absence (minimum presence) of animal in my family, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats[...]

[...]tivating the land or raising stock]

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? the disappearance of Gonjecshk [Sparrows being replaced by Starlings], parks [numerous stories of devastation], and the anthropocentric state logic [condition of the zoos, hostility towards domestic dogs, etc.]?
-and as is the case with my family, they are so good at changing the subject, and all i have perhaps tried to performe is the ways we can stay with the subject of discussion around our lunch tables, to stay with this particular story and not that. (althought i have been changing the subject constantly myself...)
-the absence (minimum presence) of animal in my family, and the ways the animal story circulate and live there. what is the animal holding in my family?
-stories or fables that permit wonder, or allow perhaps to approach crows or cats as creatures who could be capable of contingent cooperation or multispecies companionship. [i am referring to the video of the wild animal taking care of the baby pet, the popular video in social media that triggered the discussion about wild and domesticity during the lunch between my family members. an object that captured the dialectic of desire and disgust in my human family's response to the animal.]--> this is what I call cosmology: beings that depends on their placing within a particular cosmology. cosmology is very much alive --- [animals fitting in the visual rhetoric of web-based digital media is itself to be investigated... social relations, social animal, contemporary cosmology]
-the minimum relationship with feral cats, and rats, and pigeons (and their material environment.) and ambiguity towards them. evoking responses of affection, disgust, fear, and indifference.
-relationships between people, animals and place**** [a place as complex as Tehran's urban environment with its politics, televised operations, its ‘wilderness,’ and technologically mediated stories and rumors that populate its landscape.] --> are we having a Historical change? in epistemic principles --> what is inside and what is outside [keep in mind the historical moment in iran's political isolation. is this reflecting the exclusion of feral animals of everyday life?]
-my family was able to talk differently and find other expressions about violence in the landscape of tehran by applying the animal story (to the head and heart.) [this is also Kelile o Demneh.] the video was a heart-breaker. it had a healing moment, and their resistance to its originality as a tale of friendship is meaningful, the violence is solid and[...]

[...]wing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build success according to one's goals, but unless the game engages the other, it is worthless. (* it is about) learning how to wit. (*) my bow and arrow in use, my tropes and abstractions, what are they good for if others don't play/engage with them? to recontextualize ‘method’ and methodology. (*) “incommensurable tacit knowledges of diverse communities of practice” --> “communication” across irreducible difference (where “method” is not what matters most;) (game of) “situated partial connection” ==> subjects
(not always the human language is the medium) two-way conversation =/= naming (~= intention-laden and consciousness-ascribing linguistic practice) --> sometimes not God, logos, or sujet suppose savoir, rather a dog makes you (in whose image?) --> this is about making our categorical labor harder}

it is about a politics disinterested in: self-identity, realization of intention, transcendence, ‘sweet and nice “feminine” worlds and knowledges free of the ravages and productivities of power’ (Haraway 2003), cultural relativism, master-slave discourse,

**mutuality is mutability is contingent is historic** (=/= reciprocity, mo'amele be mesl معامله به مثل)



(things to vandalize:)
•capital claims
•mystical foundations of authorship
•legally protected stores of knowledge
•desire for legitimacy
•control freak of the possibilities of comprehension
•narcissistic comfort of secured sense
•geometrical optics of reflection


(Burroughs:) “steal everything in sight.” (most authors transvaluate theft back into property --> ideologies of “influence”)

narcissistic reappropriation of/as friendship : operate a reduction of the friend to the same or to the friend as other
mystified oneness of the Volk (Germanic trope)
the desired erasure of difference

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

friendship in Qur'an:

[44:41] The day on which a friend shall not avail (his) friend aught, nor shall they be helped, (apocalypse is defined when friendship ends)

[42:9] Or have they chosen protecting friends besides Him? But Allah, He (alone) is the Protecting Friend. He quickeneth the dead, and He is Able to do all things. (God is jealous of friends)

[70:10]
And no familiar friend will ask a question of his friend
And friend shall not ask of friend

[32:4] ... Ye have not, beside Him, a protecting friend or mediator.
[29:22] & [42:31] Ye cannot escape in the earth, for beside Allah ye have no protecting friend nor any helper. (God has no friends. You only friends with him.)

[22:13] ...evil friend (friendship with the evil)[...]

[...]ear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relating to the care of the dead

the necessity of embracing a mismatch between harm and healing, between not knowing and shading your eyes from what you cannot but help know [-acceptance of a certain degree of ignorance as essential for life]

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

Ahmed, Sedgwick+Frank @apass
installation of an automatic “anti-” (for example antibiologism, as the unshifting tenet of ‘theory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***

immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)

interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency


*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*

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

Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation

*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species

envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”

aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”

biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immedi[...]

[...]iority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation

Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)

***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)


wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries


what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?

(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*

****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)


companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}



[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodied practices of knowing [of (Sina's) Cinderella]

**bodie[...]

[...]archy may internalize knowledge is by funding a research laboratory.


at some point urban societies would have reached a point of saturation, and the intensification would have ceased. but electricity simultaneously increased the flow of energy and the potential uses of that energy.


automated formal systems ==> victory of analytical over embodied knowledge (the self-taught inventor of the 19th century)
--> unbalance of power between informal and formal knowledge


(factory = planned autocatalytic loop)


the science of centralization
-powerful computers allow the centralized control of geographically dispersed activities---coordinate and monitor compliance with central plans ==> internalization of antimarket institutions


the fully coexistence of the autocatalytic loops:
the digital / the energetic / the material
==> accumulation of hierarchical structures


are computers evolving in the direction of routinization?
-eroding the combinatorial richness of knowledge and making flows of information ever more sterile?


future turns out to belong to hierarchies?
-human history is a narrative of contingencies, not necessities, of missed opportunities to follow different routes of development, not of a nonlinear succession of ways to convert energy, matter, and information into cultural products.



[...]

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

the gene tells the flesh: “you are a human” or “you are a...”
**the flesh does not know any organs, continues pulsing to its own rhythms

(how to understand) activities of processes in other spheres of reality

living creatures and their inorganic counterparts


(G. Simmons:) “the flow of energy and mineral nutrients through an ecosystem manifest themselves as actual animals and plants of a particular species.”


biomass = circulation of flesh

plants biting into the system of solar radiation---capturing its sugars

in a sense “higher” animals are just fancy decorations in an ecosystem
(decorative large predators)

ecosystem = succession of plant assemblages ==> stable states ==> climax

ecosystem = a blind groping from stable state to stable state in which each plant assemblage creates the conditions that stabilize the next one.


continental forest <--- stability {the capacity to maintain a state with relatively minor internal fluctuations}
islands <--- resilience {the capacity to absorb major external and internal fluctuations by switching between several alternative stable states}


cities interaction with microorganisms

medieval cities ---islands--> {-concentration of energies -low degree of species h[...]

[...]e to know her body as part of her memory. (her brain could not create a body image) She could not imagine, or create in her mind, images of parents or the houses where she had lived. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she could re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she had a body. (see Strange, Familiar and Forgotten pp 40-42)

“If all self-reference were destroyed, consciousness and understanding would not be possible.

“Meaning and understanding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a body image.” (p.55)

“Self-reference is not a hypothetical idea but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)



Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.

The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can become intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body image.



(Don Ihde:) “To embody one's praxis through technologies is ultimately an existential relation with the world.” (Technology and Lifeworld, p.72)

Embodied relations such as the experience of “seeing through” glasses (or the use of hearing aids, blind man's cane, or driving a car) take the technology into the perceptual-bodily self-experience. The mediating technology becomes part of the body image, and achieves “instrumental transparency”

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

(Giuliana Bruno)

This tangible, superficial contact, in fact, is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)

(materiality of) cultural surfaces

As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.

The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformati[...]

[...]up the earth before the apocalypse
2. the romantic view: we humans are the servants of the land, we are its eyes, we are its expression

we are becoming visitors of waste wilderness, most natural and unnatural land simultaneously

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

the moment the world enters my body it has already been transformed

for Elisa and me Bochum's forest was a location, with its decay, it's subtropical humidity and toxins, and because of the way it is trapped between the natural and the man-made.

“we are forever collecting ourselves” (Baudrillard)

we have always encountered the world via technology
(now internet)

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

(Zoe Todd)
Zapatista (a revolutionary leftist political and militant group based in Chiapas, the southernmost state of Mexico) principles of “walking the world into being” (as locus of thought and practice to decolonize posthumanist geographies)
(for Juanita Sundberg) the zapatista movement theorizes walking as an important practice in building the pluriversale, a world in which many worlds fit. [...] as we humans move, work, play, and narrate with multiplicity of beings in place, we enact historically contingent and radically distinct worlds/ontologies.

the epistemic violence inherent both in academic treatment and dance (they both bring things to life?) (is dance controlled form of violence? does violence always bring things to life contrary to the belief that it kills life?)

(i don't want to) trivialize (Amazon and my Amazon trip) as case-study and neutralize its indigenous ontologies

(John Hartingan:) Anthropocene as “charismatic mega-category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy)
(which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof?)

(indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore & Jolene Rickard:) material might act as a bridge, instead of a mirror
(narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)

(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)

(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)

(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”

(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)

ecological imaginat[...]

[...]story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.

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

close-range vision

how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)

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

forest's “space”

Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.

Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.

or instead of how a forest looks like, what is the forest made of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)

in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception:
1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
of course both questions are phenomenological positions, but that does not mean that we no longer need representation to understand relationality. (Konh words)

needing or not needing representation to understand relationality

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

(Latour)

not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”

... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)

(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)

christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.

redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to another image

are we really going to spend another century naively re-destroying and deconstructing images that are so intelligently and subtly destroyed already?

do we really have to spend another century alternating violently between constructivism and realism, between artificiality and authenticity?
science deserves better than naive worship and naive contempt. its regime of invisibility is uplifting as[...]

[...]tes the foedus, the contract, as an ego contiugo vos, Venus assembles the atoms, like the compounds. She is not transcendental like the other gods, but immanent in this world, the being of relation. Venus is identical to relation.”

Aphrodite governs

guarantee of repetition

parallel paths

pseudo returns

“Time itself would be nothing without objects situated in space [...] the clock that Lucretius placed right in the middle of nature cannot mark Newtonian time; as the clock is the totality of things, between their birth and death, it marks a Bergsonian, that is, thermodynamic, time--an irreversible and irrevocable time, marked like the endless flow of atoms, flowing, running, crumbling, (coulant, courant, croulant) toward their downfall and death. Things have weight: they fall, seeking their peaceful rest. Fluid, they flow; hot, they cool off. Downfall, death, dispersal; breaks, dichotomies, atoms. Atomic flow is residual : the background of being, white noise. This world set adrift never to return is bestrewn, here and there, at indefinet times and in indefinet places, with pockets, where vortices are born in pseudo returns. Clocks appear with these objects [=/= the universal absolute time standing outside contingency of everything else], spiraling, shifting clocks which from their moment of birth begin to mark the time of death. The Lucretian world is globally entropic, but negatively entropic in certain swirling pockets. Conjunction is negative entropy; the complex thus formed counts the quantity of information set adrift. The event which barely occurs and almost immediately disintegrates minimally resists the irreversible flow, carrying little information. Newtonian time, which is reversible, marks resistance to the irrevocable. It is absent from these sorts of physics, and that is why our forefathers were unable to imagine that Lucretian physics ever existed, with the possible exception of Bergson, who thrived on it. Irreversible time is the master here : the physics of things resists it in spots, but in the flow of the drift; history follows, barely a ripple in the flow. History flows around physics.” (Serres - Hermes p.116)

...events are all of the socio-political order

(if science or physics or episteme classifies things, what classifies physics?)
what classifies what?
Question of epidemiology

slave: material object
master: spatial object

Serres: Lucretius: dichotomies are symptoms of better-connected material things
•history symptom of nature
•time symptom of symptoms

“Mars is only an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit

a penis captive

(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable [...]

[...]ent from these sorts of physics, and that is why our forefathers were unable to imagine that Lucretian physics ever existed, with the possible exception of Bergson, who thrived on it. Irreversible time is the master here : the physics of things resists it in spots, but in the flow of the drift; history follows, barely a ripple in the flow. History flows around physics.” (Serres - Hermes p.116)

...events are all of the socio-political order

(if science or physics or episteme classifies things, what classifies physics?)
what classifies what?
Question of epidemiology

slave: material object
master: spatial object

Serres: Lucretius: dichotomies are symptoms of better-connected material things
•history symptom of nature
•time symptom of symptoms

“Mars is only an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit

a penis captive

(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable links, (and projections of the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”

that which disappears from definition, reappears metaphorically

the small amount of linkage between events

(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)

ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul made of atoms, unstable) a moral state ==> a physical state
(=/= aporia)
•not perturbed,
•the term was also used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle. [-->? the image of the ideal soldier: Keanu Reeves kind of coolness in The Matrix film, (the machines are made in the image of the emotional ones.) at the end of the first film, we have an aesthetics (of indifferent and silent:) transcendence + perfect warrior], [another theory is that the freedom from emotional attachment was developed since early middle ages for merchants in order to (in a meddieval sense) *trade* =/= melancholic introspective contemplative efforts of faith]
------[apatheia: eradicating the tendency to react emotionally or egotistically to external events, ~ equanimity, =/= indifference*@Sven; (metriopatheia: men between the excess and deficiency of emotions;) a form of response to the world? ]
@Sven:
•interdifference [open systems between or among (in)differences?] --> interindifference --> entering differences, enter in diff
•intradifference [closed system inside or within (in)differences?]


Nature is rivers and whirl winds

[...]

[...]ks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows

shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself



perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)

Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)

Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*

...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”

*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry

question of coherence = question of finding a grammar

difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence

(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)

[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us



Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?

*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*

-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge

گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof

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 Qura[...]

[...]ted memory system (for who?)
-(what blocks between) internal memory and external memory --> the time needed to work complex representations

(we are trying to) situate our activity visibly within an informational[?*] world ==> to be factored
*in an informational world: accountability = measurable, finite, packaged, <--✕--> (other modes of) invisible and articulation work

...when technicians/artists seeking new ways of writing (scientific/poetic) papers so that their work gets acknowledged ==(and yet)==> the nature of their (scientific/artistic) truth is not impeached***
--> and sometimes we restructure our work so that (organizational, informational or truth-related) challenges will not be necessary ----> (at the end of the day there will be [always?] an) information infrastructure for the kind of work which contains an account of your activity ==> “informational panoptica” (Bowker)

the classification systems we are giving to embed in the tools and reports we give in apass

(in apass problematically we are asked to) copy the transparency of our activity from one representational space (internal memory, nomenclature, past events, paper) to another (computerized record, giving a talk, time-framing) (=/= contingency) ==> an ecology of attention : ***what can be forgotten and what should be remembered*** ==> development of (information) infrastructure
what is remembered in the formal information systems ==> ontology of that system

...recorded on a form; and forms necessarily impose/naturalize classification systems (through the form's speed, rhythm, dimension, and how its specifications are implemented) ***
(how am i working this in my pop-up book and hypertex? --> classification scheme of relevant events for my research)
*informational space is (sufficiently well) pre-structured ==> some things/details can be assumed or are dropped out of the representational space
-in my pop-up book i am encoding a kind of memory in an organizational file ==>? “potential memory” (~= possible future reconstructions) <-- rejecting the ways in which memory is structured in the organization named Iran, or Middle East, or Germany, or Europe,
needed for development of potential memory:
•(forms of) erasure of local context --> to some degree this is always done
•(forms of) classification system --> computerized, affectual, or materially textured categories

* construction is always reconstruction *

artificial memory (characteristic of the 16th century:) “a search for the perfectly proportioned image containing the ‘soul’ of the knowledge to be remembered” --to--> discovery of the right logical category ==> classifying the memorization the world scientifically

classification system ==> filter --> encoding (of information about the environment) ==> coherent framework = memory (Schachter, 1996)
[...]

[...]br /> (out of) control standards
-there is a huge amount of standards i am depending on in my hypertext
-international diplomacy depends on manufacturing and enforcement of standard vocabulary --> how much are we really in diplomatic businesses?

Google: “To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”

standards are often:
•making things work together
•enforced by legal bodies
•have their own (significant) inertia --> hard to change, and is not about the technically superior standards winning [DOS, VHS, A4, etc.]
standards --> *aspect of acting in the world* ==> classifications

what are (or have been) the behind the scenes, boring, background processes of the “real” work of ajayeb (and any past and practical politics of knowledge production)? (==> becoming interested in a wider scope of reading: rhetorics, semiotics, objectivity, analysis, architecture,)
- historically creation of the infrastructure
•ubiquity and webbed saturation of classifying and standardizing
•materially textured (layered, tangled)
•their negotiated nature

*distribution of memory (and distribution of representation):
X --> historical contingencies --> a narrative --> practical politics --> standard narrative --> universal category --> erases its own narratological past, (employed internally+externally) deletion of modalities in the development of (scientific) texts; [a modality can be deleted in a number of different ways: [*] it might be distributed (held in another part of the organization than in that which produces the text), [*] built into the infrastructure (the work environment is changed such that the modality is never encountered), etc. =/= #accountability] ==> fact (+ single articulation, only one plot of data) --> mobilizing a set of black-boxes-->{Xiri's “queers,” Eszter's “participants,”: what goes inside these black-boxes and how they look like, is seen as irrelevant for them. [--> translating from the context of storage to the present situation (one might store a fact for reason X but recall it for reason Y) Latour + Bowker]}
X --> indeterminacy & multiplicity --> conflict --> negotiations --> standard

where to make the cuts in the system, for example, down to what level of detail one specifies a description of work, of an illness, of a setting, [of an animal, of a queerness, of a subjectivity, and so on.]

residual categories {rest, others, miscellaneous,} are ubiquitous

what are the mismatches between subsystems in ajayeb and Qur'an?
--> “cumulative mess trajectory” (Strauss) --> when the trajectories become so tangled that you can't return and the interactions multiply

we are riding on metaphores to move in a densely classified world

“There is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classi[...]

[...]uration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]

what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?

is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?

why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)

is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?

document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,



Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world

the question of the metaphors of the body

manuality
manual understanders

for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning

placement, world, Dasein, fall

in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?

she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?

ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors

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

Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness


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

to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual

the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)

vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)

the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affectiv[...]