[...] 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 presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text,[...]
(1)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...]ventive lectures in outdoor spaces in order to sabotage ‘what is meant to signify’ of the spatial subject-supposed-to-know?)
*sss is one of the effects of subjectivity -- a scenography of transferential intensity : we credit that being with having knowledge to transmit, and then we might also resist it.
---let's get out of this space!!?
--%--in the context of pedagogy, students regards their teachers as sujet supposé savoir, that they should know something. “it is the students’ supposition of an art teacher who knows, who have something more than they have in themselves, that initiates the teaching and learning process rather than the art knowledge actually possessed by the teacher” (Hetrick). (is it the architectural gesture--the center--that produces the recognition of the teacher situated as “teacher”?) *“the spell of transference.” / at some point some gesture is taken by the student as a sign of hidden knowledge and intention ==> transference establishing itself; (how education [and love?] without transference looks like? --> Julia Scher, ‘post-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)
according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])
-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]
in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.
@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on this planet, then we kave to learn “a whole new set of techniques.” [La Guin])
--the meter of ‘time,’ that essential element, matrix and measure of all kown human-animal art. what if there are other m[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.2[...]utually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process
asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage
war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war
...................................
@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a garden full of indirections, snakes?
...................................
#my trope-findings, (bilingual nonsystematic comparative thinking for storytelling) (work with Avital?):
•پیر Pir / sujet supposé savoir (--✕-->? پیر فلک Pir-e falak in Hafez)
•غر Ghor / complaint (--> shekayat شکایت, and then, khamush خموش in Hafez)
•تعارف Tarof / greeting
•transcend <--> darajat درجات (-> Attar)
•super-ego <--> Div-mardom دیو مردم (-> Nezami)
•NatureZolmat (ظلمت --> ajayeb)
•آبرو Aberu / economy of value
•طیالارض tey-ol-arz / body scale, intensity and excess
•نگرانی negarani <--> practices of care
on Aberu, I became interested due to my lack of Aberu in presentationl quality and its abundance in other area's of my psychosomatic becoming.
Aberu traverses, calls itself in, animates, and exists for later visits.
-when you are devalued by the marked of bi-aberu, you are less tied to the strictures of shame, and ‘your behaviour’ becomes performance material
...................................
agency =? boresh برش, jahd جهد (in Farsi), “agential cut enacts a local causal structure” (Barad)
agency of ‘hemat’ همّت
hemate shahi همّت شاهی, lavazeme hemat لوازم همّت --> apparatus
sufi's hemat ~= magic
...................................
@Seba after accelerate manifesto reading: (what is and how can we not pivot on our work) the measure of the meaningfulness of action. (Seba's notion of losing hope is because he put himself unconsciously in a cost-benefit analysis? “what is the effect of my actions?”) [in practice it is difficult to embody speculative thinking. we are still in the space of thinking in terms of the p[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.6[...] ♥
(brittlestar, the plant in my room, ajayeb's creatures,) ...their being is a flexible distributed growing and regenerating multi-oriented shape-shifting topologically variant dynamical system of diffraction gratings
(rhetoric of) re-veiling, which provokes the seeming need for a revealing of nature
entanglement --> inseparability --> spatially separated particles in an entangled state do not have separate identities
there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”
who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”
[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering
...................................
Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,
our resistance and breakdance
(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه
moshtaghe bandegi مشتاق بندگی
(~? the advanced level of) ‘wannabe slave’
...................................
the dangerous suffixial worlders, prehensile adjective-builder, natural-inhabitant-makers of “-ian” or “-i” or “-isch” to the name of a nation/country ==> Iranian, Afgani, etc. --> makes subjects
in the case of the podcast https://soundcloud.com/norient/afghanistan-sucht-seine-musikalische-identitat-podcast listen to the way the story of the Afgani music is told by norient (“music in the globe”, “multi-modally”) --> art-> articulation of western human rights & disarticulation of other ecology of stories
=/= Charles Amirkhanian radio programm Ode to Gravity
...................................
the protector of spiders who dies by the bite of a spider
-susceptible bodies entagled in networks of care, life and death, that are not always harmonious to popular narratives of nonviolence
...................................
ajayeb: mythoepic literature in translation from a Middle Persian corpus
-when i say ‘Middle Persian corpus’ what i actually mean is a shared world of ritual, religion, and mythology between Iranian, Urdu, Turkish, Zoroastrianism in Iran and Vedic Hinduism in India, Indo-European inheritance in ancient Iranian culture, South-Southeast Asian literatures, translations and transcreations (and transliteration) of stories (prose, poetry, drama, epic, jokes, parables, figures [that are not always part of the canon], the irreverent بى ادب, ) in Indian and S[...]
(5)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21[...] />
my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically
*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?
{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance
what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis; loss of authority and the loss of the enemy opens up abysses in boundaries that have kept the world recognizable
maternal (runs of) interference (or motherly Wechsel) --?--> still pumping effects of authority
authority of the breast
to slave tyranny
(who? insists in remaining a) non-reader = solid descriptor (sharh-dahande شرح دهنده) ~-> transparent utterance ~ rhetorically uncluttered argument
literature is snafu
how authorship (dead or alive) feeds authority?
What has been packaged as terror can be in fact misleading.
authority is the most elusive of terms that inform relations, and yet no politics, no family, no pride of accomplishment can exist without it
for Arendt, authority is an undeletable term, key to any grasp of politics
authority =/= rhetoric of persuasion
Plato's authority of philosophy: in an effort both to memorialize and to exact revenge for the verdict on Socrates. (as if Socrates didn't have any bullying tendencies in his persuasive energies.)
a recovery operation
the ‘need’ for authority
(Arendt:) “It was after Socrates’ death that Plato began to discount persuasion (and argument) as insufficient for the guidance of men and to seek for something liable to compel them without using externa[...]
(6)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.5[...]means of violence.” ==> a power that renounces power; coercion without violence, (invention of hell, is it nonviolent?! a more earthbound rhetoric of persuasion?!)
(when we are out of master/slave relationship) expert knowledge commands confidence and obtains compliance (without force nor persuasion); soft coercion associated with reason --> Plato's philosopher-king --> **“Authority establishes relationality prior to command, promising compliance in the absence of force or argument”** (Avital)
aspects of the authority that might take in or shake up the other without harm
historical comfort zones ...and ...the ongoing torment of worldlessness
(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover?
Greek way of handling:
domestic affairs --> persuasion
foreign affairs --> force and violence
*authority of the Father
ontological proof of God's existence (Kojeve contends) rests on the metaphysical placement of divine authority as the authority of the Father, who is seen as cause*
--> paternal authority in power and political authority --> as author of a work who exerts authority over the ‘Oeuvre’
father/judge/Pir: the principal figure holding together political and ethical qualities of existence ~ imago (in psychoanalysis is an idealized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?
(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness
Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion
God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”
where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?
the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)
is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?
%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)
Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]
(where do we go with helplessness directed by the des[...]
(7)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.6[...] worldlessness
(Avital,) are the mourners of authority masking another loss for which “authority” would be a cover?
Greek way of handling:
domestic affairs --> persuasion
foreign affairs --> force and violence
*authority of the Father
ontological proof of God's existence (Kojeve contends) rests on the metaphysical placement of divine authority as the authority of the Father, who is seen as cause*
--> paternal authority in power and political authority --> as author of a work who exerts authority over the ‘Oeuvre’
father/judge/Pir: the principal figure holding together political and ethical qualities of existence ~ imago (in psychoanalysis is an idealized image of someone--usually a parent--formed in childhood), firm but benevolent caretaking, funding sources of divine authority, hierarchical hold, categorical imperative, a secure ground from which commands can be issued, “Achtung!”,
-authority subsists on borrowed transcendence
-authority produces effects of respectful adherence
-softening the space of committed citizenry (ground for political relatedness)
-is it possible to keep authority separate from respect? what this seclusion assures?
(Pir's authority nearing the) sublime regions of human relatedness
Kojeve > What accounts for the unconditional surrender of human reactivity?
legitimate principle of coercion
God is always the God of our ancestors --> character of “tradition”
where violence begins or what gets counted as violence?
the discourse of effacement (امحاء emha’, self-effacement: withdrawing into the background, making yourself inconspicuous)
is there an authority outside inequality? responsible asymmetry, the egological space, tropes of domination?
%this is anout the quality of asymmetry----(are we still in the realm of the human?)
Levinas tactics is spectacular, he runs down patriarchy and meets the majestic escalade of the absolute other, he doesn't escape internment (toghif توقیف)
[patriarchy: when it is “of course” obvious who is the mother]
(where do we go with helplessness directed by the destruction of the world?)
...................................
[Sennett] on authority, trust and cooperation
...in both a subtle and a coherent social structure
inequality makes a profound difference in the lives of children
“earned authority” manages the everyday experience of inequality
cultures in which the *dramaturgical display of yourself* is foregrounded =/= diplomacy as model for social relationships
facebook, an engineered social network organized for display =/= communication
in capitalism, in firms people at the top has more power bu[...]
(8)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.6[...]br />
what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)
(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion
Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez
#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*
(Pir's) heaven of value
(Bergson's) supplementary soul
there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy
“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)
national aestheticism
over-educated ~=? brainwashed
[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a certain way,’ and that ‘certain way’ touches me and i hope touches my audience, even if one don't understand much of it at the time of lecture. i am trying to think by the outside, what comes from outside, being touched by it. right now in apass this outside consists of my (living) peers, getting their quantity of imposed ideas and try to work with that. to ‘take part']
...................................
(how?) the exposure of violence becomes the origin of violence (@Mona)
...................................
a preoccupation (of someone/yours) --into--> analytical solution/terms (for example ‘aesthetics’ and ‘gender’ for Strathern)
gift (produced to be seen) --> moments of performance --> *creating a context of display*
[*]gift: participate in and generate internal relations <--> commodities: participate in and generate external relations
you gain prestige in what you give
*there is a lot of ambiguity about what can be seen and what cannot be seen* (<-- this must be understood for any one who is invested in ‘showi[...]
(9)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.9[...]e idealized as grandiose <-- (chief) to “work on his children” like an ancestor, he must state that he could never do so
*parallelism*
enchainment of repeated verses and themes ==> the shaman is symbolically identified as a paradoxical character (human & nonhuman, here & there, in the present time & in the mythic time)
--> transfer properties from one being to another
(formal =/=) ‘performative parallelism’ between the actual chief and those before him ==> attenuate past & present
-he speaks about ancestors, as an ancestor (using their language), and on ancestors’ behalf (since they are gone)
(antonymic affirmation of) “past =/= present” ~=> shame in the listeners ==> act as the ancient chiefs’ own children
--Austin--> illocutionary force ==gives==> capacity to perform an act in saying something
*hyperbole (contrast) ==> the audience could be aesthetically and morally compelled
to act in some way (perlocutionary acts)
that which had once been human (--> mythical human origin of the plant corn)
chief is weakened ==> people tend to be more egoistic --> “go crazy” + forget about their relatives = (the first step in) producing a witch
(Pir ~= chief's) foundations of kinship = thinking about kin =/= forgetting kin :
•generating and raising children
•producing food
•avoiding witchcraft
==> fabrication of a collective body of kin
imperfections of the present + ideal of social life ==encourage==> people to behave like kin (<-- needs to be actively produced)
[we have to be carefull in art with performances of] words hold within them the positive moral and creative element of power; and contain meaningfulness, value, artistry and affective mass (--> carrying the weight of an order without appearing as such) =/= authoritarian discourse
@Inga
--> ***a brief moment, a world where the difference between chiefs (leader-like speaker, am i like that in my performance lectures?) and nonchiefs (listeners, his children) can be effective***
xxxxxx
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theory (is either): *powerful* (accounting for a limited number of features valid for a great number of cases) {extensionally oriented, for example comparative or statistical analysis} =/= *expressive* (accounting for a great number of features belonging to a limited number of cases) {intentionally oriented, for example clinical case studies}
extensional --> generalizing
‘ethnography ==> reduction of complexity’ =/= complexity is precisely what characterizes ethnography
counterintuitive ==give==> representation its psychological salience
the experience of dreaming is full of counterintuitive representations (rapidly forgotten)
counterintuit[...]
(10)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.3[...]order”) --Crary--> historical crisis in the nature of experience: *attention = simulation of + compensation for a chimerical real experience*
(in my text rigging demons --> reconciliation of:)
•individual attentiveness to the fringes, transitions, pulses of one's own particular “pure experience”
•“experience” as immersion in the tangled density of a shared mutually inhabited world
James's conception of selfhood: private property (--in--> Tasavof: the most radical of all possible alienation and disconnection) --Lentricchia--> deployed to preserve a human space of freedom interiorized from the vicissitudes and coercions of the marketplace
**modern attention** + individual evasion of memory (and history) --> habitual & commodified : an imaginary deletion of all that is unbearable in collective and individual experience
in Corridor Crew the perceptual selectivity of the CG hackers sustains efficiency of animation tools + tangled social and psychic machinery of sublimation
(?do i have) agoraphobia --> Simmel
(destructive transformation of) *modernization always preserve and carry over nonsynchronous components of past moments*
Crary, Lefebvre
Piranesi's etching of Rone = foctive and atmospheric prison
Freud's description of piazza: patchwork texture of screens and flashing signs (formless field of attraction @Foad, Sina; multidimensional field of stimuli, urban space: “a theater of memory and a theater of prophecy”) =/= Piranesian dissolution of the axial city (organized views around a coherent even if mobile subjective orientation)
Freud's technique of attention: gleichschwebende Aufmerksamkeit
‘evenly suspended attention’ (giving equal notice to everything, everything in low-level focus without the risk of schizophrenic overload) --define--> **a state of receptivity in the analyst that eill be commensurate with the spoken free association of the patient** --> dealing with a stream of information that has no evident structure or coherence + extracting from that disjunct texture (artwork, chaotic syntax of dreams, indecipherable present,) some interpretive clarity (feedback)
Freud + Cezzaine --> design a countermodel of attentiveness that surmounts an ***inhibition of the peripheral*** (=/= notion of selection ~=> finding out what one already knows)
****diffuse attention =/= critical attention**** (a faculty in which the observer is led to reject some of the ideas that occur to him after perceiving them)
(at the turn of the century) experience: compulsory consumption of information
(from) the experience of deindividualtion (in piazza) --to--> a more controllable form of loneliness (bedroom)
[this] plural hybrid space of Roman square (Crary on Freud's representation) ~= a spectacle societ[...]
(11)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.8[...]
temporal displacements [in his frames pictures]
inscriptions, conveying a sense of movement
scorpion bites Olearius (“Ich vom Scorpion gestochen” --> oriental danger) --> specimen scorpion (--> immobilized and tamed) --> back in the Kunstkammer --> Duke's cabinet of curiosities (--> on display)
["his” experience =/= Sa'di's technologies of writing]
Olearius + Hakwirdi --> Golestan of Sa'di
Sa'di's influence on German baroque literature:
•Grimmelshausen (Simplicissimus)
•Lohenstein (Ibrahim Bassa and Ibrahim Sultan)
•Gryphius (Catherina von Georgien)
•Montesquieu (Letters Persanes)
•Goethe (West-östlicher Divan)
Jens from Kiel library, like Olearius, is appointed court librarian, by state/Duke, given the task of cataloging and expanding the ducal/official collection, and developing the Duke's Kunstkammer/Wunderkammer
Gotterffische Kunstkammer --> “Wunderbuch” (book of wonders), with its insistence on the concepts of writing + drawing
Olearius's genre of frontispiece, his engraved title pages --follow--> Norbert: kluger Vater or fleissiger Praeceptor
clever father / industrious preceptor مرشد مربى #Pir [--> “our common father in heaven"], wants to introduce his children and students to something in arts or sciences, “make them understand” by means of his mouth + pen :
*analogy/simile: showing something grand by showing them something small --> an astronomer shows on a small hand-globe (*globo coelesti*) the make-up of the great heaven with all its visible bodies, where a point means a star ~(in the same way)~> the geographer represents on a small terestrial globe (*globo terrestri*) the entire circle of the earth with all its landscapes ~(in the same way)~> “our common father in heaven,” the Lord, his revealed Word, he wrote for us (his children and students) the great book of wonders --recognize--> Himself
}--> (the concepts of) microcosm & macrocosm : something small (a dot on a globe) stands for something else, larger than itself (a city) ==> individual objects of study or curiosities of nature, that are collected and presented to a reader/observer, represent a greater whole ==> interconnectedness --> “the great chain of being” ~-> God teaches humans by means of natural wonders #ajayeb
}==> (microcosmic world of the) frontispiece = visual macrocosm of the larger book, *the textual macrocosm* that it introduces
[my video atlas in Eckernförde was reworking with frontispiece as it is meant to intrigue the reader with its complex set of visual images (taken from classical coins and medals, from devices and emblems), to be decoded after reading the book that follows. Olearius brings all desciplines onto the stage of his's world: ethnography, history, natural science, geography, architecture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]
[...]
(13)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.3[...]ity?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,
...................................
to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the table (that thing which i can't stop following)
who/what are you pregnant with?
(that is what you are proposing)
(that is to play with the ‘histories of body and mind’ [Haraway] you inherit --> for me is to play with the pre-subjective singularities)
[inheritance is of great importance for our research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)
serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)
**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**
crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)
where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)
what animates us rather than what civilizes us
(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-abo[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.2[...][the House TV series, the issue of the protagonist is] the distinguish between the figure of the expert and the figure of the diplomat.
*expert: ones whose practice is not threatend by the issue under discussion --> knowledge = relevance
*diplomat: ones who provide a voice for those whose practice, mode of existence, (and what is offen called) identity are threatened by a decision. to cause the experts second thoughts. --> knowledge ~= decision
[this is core in storytelling] [then, i am political. i used to use the word embassador, but it means also ‘diplomat.’ stories that can hold another story hanging. Sina's shy embassador ~=? ] (but what about the weak ones, the idiot, the one's who ‘rather not’ contribute to the political project?)
-diplomats are situated*
[for *Lili this is also a delima, she is torn apart between her expert self and diplomat who crafts relevance
diplomat--the relevance of feelings --> what is the knowledge in the kiss? (the kiss that she rendered as ‘irrelevant’)] [for me kiss is essentialy important. “it (everything) started with a kiss."]
universal knowledge =/= relevant knowledge
‘trust’ is one of many names for love
“you can never be indifferent to the trust you inspire” (Stengers)
...................................
#workshop: “the magic of the right word”
(against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth
(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)
1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?
[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]
...................................
#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary s[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.3[...]
(against Sherlock Holmes)
(12-step recovery program for people suffering from) addiction to the truth
(to energize the connections to the things that animate us.)
1. gathering, basckets of concepts, objects, things, words, etc.
2. excersises, physical to-dos (cleaning, cooking, sport, sawing, etc.) while telling (this is about removing the codes of acting and representation process that interupt the telling)
3. everyday mundane talks, no stage. ‘you’ in it. (is it a one-to-one mentoring?)
4. convert into language the objects from the basket, write them down. since we are going to work with sign-language
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?
[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]
...................................
#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?
staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)
solidity of found objects, in[...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.4[...] />
5. make the connections (probably together)
6. special activities during the workshop? (cooking, drinking, etc.)
7. ending of the workshop. what would be the closure? what do we build? how do we evaluate?
[what are you summoned by? write about the person you see in the light of reverie? how to survive humanism?]
...................................
#workshop, fables
fable seen as a site where one formulates concepts and narratives that reorient one within one's own research practices
-(how can we) participate in shaping our objects of knowledge (--> relational empiricism)
-learn through participating in different (though not fixed nor mutually exclusive) *microworlds* [microworld: a space where protocols and equipments are standardized to facilitate the emergence and stabilization of new objects. (Kenney)]
-“banal and ordinary sites of getting on in collective life” (Verran)
-bring your ‘found objects’ (objects, categories, stories, concepts, insights, writing under influence, etc.) and put them in ‘telling’ (telling stories about the lives of your found objects =/= insisting on the solidity of our found objects----[solidity = stability + authority] and in telling practices => (re)materializing your empirical objects =/= generating reliably-managed microworld)
-found objects are objects with which we inhabit worlds (or microworlds of our practices)
-(not claiming to occupy an) ontological no-man's-land outside of the microworlds --> my frame is no more free of metaphysics than any other
-towards an ongoing untidy recursive theory --> keeping our objects, concepts, and insights in a state of generative transformation
-which “affective economies” animate our own bodies as artist and as people?
-what feelings inform our works?
staying with linguistic differences (in each of our stories or praxiography) is a way of investigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to.” (Verran)
solidity of found objects, in my case, the graphs and images i am making about ajayeb --> the graphs now reiterate for me as rituals in my research microworld.
with these graphs i am trying different ways of arranging space, time and matter when speaking a *sentence*. ...each language figures space, time, and matter into different kinds of objects. in my writing tools with ajayeb, what type of material objects my language, or Hemedani or Qazwini's language, commits us to? my graphs are “spatiotemporal particulars” and “sortal particulars”. trying to talk about ontological assumptions embedded in the English (and any other) language. the diagrams are *rigs*. i am using rigging instead o[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.4[...]e live with, not finding of matters of fact
◦asking about particularizations (تخصیص) and generalizations (تعمیم)
**literature begins, Blanchot writes, “at the moment when literature becomes a question”** (this is completely different than asking or question-marking in literature) [...] this question “is posed to language by language that has become literature” (the question that the meaning of the text asks is the question asked by literature; [of course at the moment of reading]) [then what is a text before becoming a question? complaining? revolution?]--%(negation wishes to realize itself.)
--> Rorty's critique of Descartes's way of asking questions
we have to be careful with our practice of questioning, because we often end up privileging a group of people by attributing it to “higher” levels cognition and of being “critically” in the world (=/= animal, nonpeople, other people with other ways of being in/with the apperceptive world that don't use the technology of questioning, as it is crafted historically and naturalized in the west for the univerasal method of ‘knowing more’)
...................................
#workshop, reading group
•reading as passionate betrayal. (hunting for precious empirical details, refigurative, reparative, poaching, reading can be a betrayal of textual authority and an act of survival)
•addressing /present* differences, not already pre-figured differences
•(condition of friendship, staying close to the text) staying close as a reader, as someone who could hold the text of the Other, receiving it in the withdrawal / Entzug (drug rehabilitation)
•i am in no position of ‘understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”
my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to [...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.7[...]
(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy
(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)
the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity
“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)
...practical effectivity of literature
•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*
...the rhetorical event of a comparison
#[the theater of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the p[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...] of example]
the threat of example's excess
fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)
(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master
(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system”
(system never has only one interior [=/= conspiracy: system's singular interiority])
•literature's (ir)responsibility to philosophy
•art's (ir)responsibility to journalism
Xanthus the philosopher decides to buy a slave, goes with his students to the slave market, and encounters the disfigured Phrygian Aesop (recently granted the power of speech after assisting a priestess of Isis and hence become too difficult for his previous master to handle). Their first exchange is exemplary, as the philosopher interrogates the slave in order to determine whether “he knows anything,” receives equivocal replies, and finishes by asking, “Do you want me to buy you?”
(Life of Aesop)
thinking fable as language : ‘Fabula’ (narration or account), derived as it is from the Latin root ‘fari’ (to speak) and linked to the Greek ‘phanai’ (to speak or to say), finally implies nothing other than language as such
Mythos and logos, the one is not more true (or more false, deceptive, fictive, etc.) than the other
(to open to the) alterity of an ungoverned figuration
hero: the adventure of an identification that can only occur in the comparison that a fable demands
Horace's dictum: “with a change of names, the fable is told about you” (a trans-subjective movement, a tropological system =/= metaphor or metonymy, )
(for Nietzsche) responsibility: the ability to make and keep one's promises = being (able to be) held accountable (not simply by another but) already in advance by and for oneself : to answer to oneself in the place of the other
•Nietzsche's fable[...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.5[...]stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.
“An artwork executed from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensity.” (Peran)
A “tired” artwork
(Marti Peran)
a minority that wishes to be a majority
the semiotic body disciplined to daily exercise and beautification
fatigue, unlike melancholy's passivity, implies performativity.
a way of being ill
(capital gains concentrated in the) self-production of identity
subject occupied full time in itself
the logic of “do it yourself”
obliged to make countless small decisions in all areas
subject mixed up with the incessant movement of its own alienation
*hyperactive life --> poverty of experience*
the banality of “i Like”
(maybe interesting for Laura:) *fatigue* is the instant of stopping and pausing [of exercise and beautification] (after which a diversity might be possible)
[*]fatigue: capable tiredness --> politicizes discomfort
[#we are in the domain of passivity, disappearance and inaction]
Peran suggests a position of fatigue where (some time ago) was occupied by melancholy
“is this not a mere “don't like” that re-enters the spiral of our mobilization?”
“we are left with just the option of making an index, a collection of trails and marks [...]”
sunday: “empty time that forces us to fill it through apparently free decisions that, if they are resolved properly, please us and re-constitute us” (Peran)
*freedom of action for self-realization* --> unstoppable egocentric machine
space of perpetual connection (@ERG's website)
(pseudo) communicative action by way of technological devices --> camouflaged alienation
“The promise of self-realization and the demand for visibility organize the mobilization of desire, turning it into work.”
do we need to formulize and formalize our uncomfortable concerns and experiences?
@apass, artist research
i want to *give connections*
...................................
#semester/seminar on destruction
-care, suffer, fubar,
[fubar: “fucked up beyond all recognition"--a term from veterans returning to the United States in 1960s]
#semester on Hojum
(surge,) on performance, media, sculpture, and surplus
Hojum has to do with the hojum (~=? ‘bodies’) of people to get in front of the line, the hojum of enemy, of friend, of information, also includes the plural form of ‘hajm’ (حجم)
#seminar on the history of translation
archaeology, interpretation, spaces of difficult translation, reading out of time, technology and transformational studies, semiotics, poetry, writing,
...................................
#on Situated Knowledges
-approach the text b[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.1[...]or Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)
(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)
...................................
my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,
...................................
the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)
...................................
sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)
...................................
*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter
*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two
...................................
[with Kenney]
-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?
speculation is all about pragmatism
capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating
scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on [...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]y]
-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?
speculation is all about pragmatism
capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating
scientific speculation & venture capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]
(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction
*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)
speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)
for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth
*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres
...................................
the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)
what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?
[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror
(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)
“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”
a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, whi[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]X--> future --> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)
@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-in her criticism of “eurocentrism” how are afrofuturism and arabfuturism located? (curatorial) let's invite them as her allies in Hansaring Studio.
countermemorial mediated practices
...................................
خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)
(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)
Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]
sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?
in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.
auto-erotic solipsism
باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the r[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.2[...]ountermemorial mediated practices
...................................
خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)
(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)
Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]
sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
do)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?
in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.
auto-erotic solipsism
باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)
auto-erotic economy
the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation
“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)
{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.2[...]r />
* landscape ==>? optic -->? way of disembodied seeing
[artificial perspective {--> (objects are in) proportional variations in a seamless continuum}, gaze of the spectator, exterior space, homogeneous, infinite, systematic,] --> (this is all) *symbolic form*
[(tele/micro)scope <==] landscape <== perspective <-- arbitrary point of the observer
(Descola:) such “objectification of the subjective” ==>
(1) a distance between man and the world
(2) systematizes and stabilizes the external universe
***factuality is not intrinsic, it is rhetoric (that we live with)
history of the idea of nature
‘ajayeb's architects of a naturalistic cosmology who establish hierarchies and discontinuities among them =/= cosmogenesis of modernity's subjectivity's illusions of continuity
[Descola's “configurations of continuity"]
(ajayeb creates) hierarchical order according to the levels of the exchange of information that is reputed to be possible.
-which parties are set on the same level of reality (in ajayeb)?
(what are the human and nonhuman) proliferation of forms in ajayeb (?)
who are the “mothers of games” there? snake, Div, etc. (spirits that protect the game)
technical know-how to create intersubjective ambience/ambivalence --> regulated relations between one person and another }--these are--> cultivated plots
how can i, starting with apass, learn to create theaters of a subtle sociability (in which beings with different forms of language and physical aspect are ontologically indistinguishable)?
the category of “persons”: variations in the modes of communication that are made possible by an apprehension of perceived qualities that are unequally distributed
whose dialects are mutually intelligible?
human narcissism : that if a being possess a soul is only then capable of recognizing humans
---then let's give everyone souls!
...................................
(Massumi > Deleuze's) critique ~= modulation --> actively modulated from within the situation, immanent to it {
-augmenting* (taking a certain tendency to the limit)
-diverting* (deflecting it into a different tendency)
-transmutational* (interacting with other tendencies in a way that invents a whole new direction as a kind of surplus value of interaction)
-or, it can lead to a clash that stops the process
asking people “to be true to what they represent” ==> having them “encapsulated in already arrived-at opinion and judgment” ==> blockage
war of “disqualification” ~ Stengersian non-event
being (represented and) legitimated in proxy war
...................................
@Zoumana; “decadent gardener” that connot keep distinction between kin and pest, nature and culture
what is a[...]
(28)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.5[...]throwing it out *** (=/= capitalist logic of progress, creativity in the sense that ‘something’ where before was ‘nothing’) ---> a different way of building quality (into practices and objects)
...................................
Bakhtin's dialogic, to become a skilled listener : listening = response (=/= simply answering) --> (when we speak) we give other people talismans that are not (perfectly) clear to us----we penetrate and unpack what someone doesn't have the words clearly and response to what they intend --✕--> “common understanding,” “make something work,”
cooperation is about getting deeper into something
conditions that more skills are required (and not the opposite)
in modernity everything seams to need to be verbalized. what happens to the unverbalized, the unprogrammatic? --> can you have an implicit right which can't be verbalized? maybe no, maybe this is the limit of the social...
purposiveness: when you hear somebody go “i am going to put clearly what we all want...” you have submitted to that person (almost erotic) --> “they really know who they are” ==> you become a spectator to their definiteness
...................................
who the fuck = theology
how the fuck = empiricism
what the fuck = ontology
how the what the fuck = epistemology
why what the fuck = metaphysics
why the fuck = ethics
why give a fuck = teleology
the fuck itself = phenomenology
fucked up = pathology
fuck all = nihilism
...................................
Aela to Sven: “everytime you disappoint me you gain in depth” (5 April 2017)
...................................
(06.04.2017) %notes after my apass endweek presentation:
•my implicit focus and energy on the body and its organs of gesture that animates us
•loving telling you what i read
•giving you what i don't fully understand =/= gift from above
•(in lecture) to allow language greet the unverbalized
(it is about) organizing my memory
(it is about) that which comes to (my) mind, and “things” coming to minds
(it is about) the things I am told
__[these are perhaps other names of cognition, affect, memory, semiotics, history, inheritance, figuration, interface, thing-relations, huntology,]
__in our shared space where we let eachother in the effect of our languages, I want to practice what comes to mind when I stand in front of you and your work, ask myself ‘what else’ comes to mind? in a sense, my project on ajayeb is that kind of training
also in apass i want “to catch you in your acts”
it is my privilege to recognize you (as...)
asking:
1- what do I know?
2- what am I told?
3- (how getting good at to) explain what somebody else said
1- the first question has no clear answer, what i know is not pl[...]
(29)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.1[...]sa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence
material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad
(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}
movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)
(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being
...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic act itself (and not as metaphor) --> experienced directly =/= imagined
--> احشايى the viscera (ahsha), visceral theory: affect and embodiment, transmissible physical charges, porous bodies,
@Luisa
kP_AfO7Ms4I
how to create a condition in which she can herself later give access to her thinking and making?
1- propose a curatorial gesture of an assembly: Luisa, Mondrian, Zen master, Malevich; with Bocola and Ahmed;
2- to open an investigation of affec[...]
(30)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was the label of “animal” that was passed around as a form of mock, instead of provocations for more conversation, I was stupefied. --how can we go on together and not render each other commitments nonsense?]
“point of view” is an important metaphor
#in my work in apass i am working on descriptive practices [poetics of animal description, histories of nonhuman inscription, etc.] to learn to name latent (and therefore emergent) ontologies, to name ‘what we are doing in new ways,’ which are hard to name. (also refusing not to name the violences of others and yourself. to reckon the nature and scope of the erasures we do in our works.) % why do you think that is important?
#and my shift of attention to peer's works is about that: our domain of practices must make claim on each other <== we inhabit differences together (--> attention and work on:) ‘local category abstractions’ (how do we talk and make each other feel our subjects of interest in apass for example) --> (the cumulative, associated and sensed) routines, gestures, and (inter)surfaces of our everyday life in apass, as a group of researchers, that don't necessarily align ==> worlding comes from these things.
[attunement =/= argument]
the name of the world is “detail”
***translation (essentailly imperfect) is the very condition of signification --> trope is the very condition of language
...................................
don't be docile bodies or innocent bystander, do what you have to do to constitute your courage
all i am say[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...]multaneity]
(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)
“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”
...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers
*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)
(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision
*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> aesthetic event of the senses [@Hoda]
spectacular graphics of disaster
watching: inhabiting the power of the tuned-in spectator; becoming an active participant in [TV's] logic of image (production and) recognition
--✕--> catharsis of mean-spirited
--✕--> festering (cherkin چرکین) alienation
--*--> vitality of the game itself
the image on the screen <--(game)--> the walking simulacrum of social life
the loop of the citizen as consumer
***Mimesis in a State of Shock*** @Hoda
-the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic
“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)
@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma
cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence
spectrality and concrete substance
(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect
*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal
-what to wear as the magic of affect itself
copy ~= contact
movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,
modernity's mimetic machine
(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and inte[...]
(32)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.9[...]ative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,
[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning emerges as network, something new must be interconnected to others, cognition works in the network: a subject matter must be linked to dozen other things in order to be congnized ==> something disconnected from their network is something meaningless موضوعها به صورت ارتباطات ذهنی مرتبط با هم [--?--> mental intelligence: cannot learn something random]
=/=
**learing through syllable, unconnected unit of something new (an arbitrary syllables هجاهای بیمعنی) can be cognized without previous links [--?--> linguistic intelligence هوش زبانی, can learn new language easy]
}--> [although i am against and strongly hate arbitrary syllables] perhaps we need both, because sometimes internalizing an alien syllable (via linguistic intelligence) might nest and flower their own random meaning networks, in a way that is not possible in mental intelligence
according to behavioral neuroscience, psychology soon will have been a myth
the move to the “hard” and biologically inspired science about consciousness-related processes {constitutive reductionism: ‘brain activity ==> mental processes'} =? end of psychology (and therefore: end of art? -because both always create *speculative molds*) --> which discipline will install an *understanding the psyche*
economically--> neuroscience will grow while psychology shrinks
[everything will depend on which reductionism you ascribe to them]
...................................
ideology: wrong questions
[parable of two side of a coin] tolerance = other side of harassment
(--Zizek--> the pseudo concept of) tolerance actually means “don't harassment me”
when you lack concrete politics ==> moralizations
we are no longer interpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic
(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)
...................................
[*]d[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.5[...]ever 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 --> worki 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 engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experien[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...]ing cool and correct)
how do you (not, and why not) tell the tale of your adventures and achievements? or, how can we respond to the ‘demand for the mobilization of desire’ in the economy of attention that Manning brought with herself? and how that economy is different from that of apass?
in the spectrum of ‘auto-ism’ (not the pathological term for developmental disorder) ['auto-’: from Greek αὐτo-, “self"] ‘being socially inept, being with oneself,’ we can also locate ‘allism’ ['allo’: from Greek ἄλλος, állos, “other”, “else"] --> allistic: ‘to be skilled at being with the different other (assumed human)’
...................................
eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans
...................................
#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)
“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime
...................................
researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?
a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,
...................................
few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
[...]
(35)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.2[...]ld as much as a frame for viewing it
industry working also on affect, push confidently ahead, operationalizing their own idiosyncratic theories of affect toward the manufacturing of new regimes of technological knowledge on how bodies feel (Apple buying Emotient, SoftBank's emotional robot, collective AI cloud)
spread of populist anti-establishment sentiments
feelings increasingly become the primary field for strategizing, measuring, and experiencing politics with global precarity
•anger on the right
•fear on the left
•anxiety at large
affect: nonconscious intensities variously activating and deactivating bodies
emotion: those feelings that fix into place through a variety of discursive practices
methods of mining feeling
projects of knowing become projects of power : narratives seeking to close the affect-emotion gap
The Flash TV series character's motivation are more experienced as a story, for example, a goal, a personal pep talk, a collective call to arms--and not as momentum and force --> affect's sheer momentum
...effect as affect's long history breaking on a shore
countervailing forces of sense and story
to inspire a sense of critical urgency
affect ==> theory is of the world it so describes
...................................
contemporary tendencies in participatory art:
•**ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions**
•tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship
•sub-themes of education and therapy
***invention of a popular mass audience (in Italian Futurist serate 1910 onwards)
the gaps between: theory, practice, cultural policy, audience reception
anarchic and eroticised happening-art
“participation = collectivism =/= capitalism”
@Eszter: (?the “ideological” in) participation in a welfare state social democracy
the ‘project’ as a privileged vehicle of utopian experimentation at a time when a leftist project seemed to have vanished from the political imaginary (in Europe)
*changing identity of the audience across the 20th century* (Bishop & Crary on this topic)
*artistic models of democracy* --tenuous?--> actual forms of democracy
to refute the commodity-object in favour of an elusive experience
(Bishop:) today's participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.
hit-and-miss field trips
the more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of [...]
(36)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.4[...]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, give way to more ‘sophisticated’ means of trade
•Malinowski (study of the Kula ring) --> form of producing and reifying power relations
•Mauss (gift economies) --> gifts as stand alone systems + other kinds of economic structures
•Strathern (Melanesian gift exchange) --> how personhood is a malleable concept that is both implicated in, and created by, conceptions of individuality (tripartite views of people as constituted of a mind, body and spirit), or dividuality (persons as constituted from multiple essences and social relations, including the giving and receiving of gifts) + how gender is both studied and understood in the acts leading up to the performance of gift exchange
•Appadurai () --> ‘things’ have ‘social lives'that can be studied in relation to the different spheres of use
•
}--> (our understanding of) the human capacity for unlimited modes of developing creative forms of exchange and economic systems
...................................
https://mapmagazine.co.uk/notes-contemporary-art-and-anthropology
operations of statecraft:
•queuing in social security offices
•filling in tax forms
•circulation and arrival of letters demanding council tax payments
•census taking
-
}--> social organization that seems so habitual (mundane and ordinary) ==> unreflexively experienced
state's ordinariness --> irresistible enchantment --> overwhelming power ~~> supernatural trance-like experiences state seem to engender in populations =/= state as a rational entity
*capitalist market is a faith-based system* <== concealed practices of divination and the ‘conjuring’ of value and capital from what in many cases are immaterial voids
unmasking of its practices (~= faith + skepticism) ==> state power
mutant forms of technological self-subjugation
(Weber's) magic: coercive proceduralism --> managerial practices that characterise biopolitics
[*]census taking: pre-determined categories (like race, nationality, gender and political persuasion) are set out [...]
(37)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.7[...]stentialism is irrelevant
if in art we have affinities with unknowing and we are comfortable with misunderstanding and partial comprehensions --then--> let's use that to direct our readerly activities to texts that are difficult and different to us --> this is why I don't accept it when artists in research environment withdraw from reading certain positions by saying “this text is too academic.”
what is the state of art after Goya?
sites where political meaning is produced (the impulse to resist or correct inequality, injustice, lack, damage, tension, etc.) =/= attachment site (languages charged with power, inequality)
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of their practice and the question they pursue
-the horrific and dangerous idea that I hear under “I am now reading only women authors”
two visualized increases in the industry, science, and popular culture:
1. “how troubled we are” --> world simulation (catastrophic planet)
2. “how amazing we are” --> brain simulation (networks)
world is fubar ==> is interesting and is work to be done =/= paranoia conspiracy
something I learnt from my KHM study --> that technologies are ambiguous =/= Black Mirror TV series
hollywood =? hyperrealism
(art --?--> idealism)
poor cognition <--> boring environment
another sign of illiteracy:
•popping up of dialects or specialized languages (you walk to the next village and there they speak an almost different language than here)
romantic relationship:
dopamine --> love + hot sex [--> pleasure-related cognition]
anterior cingulate cortex --> empathy + comfort [--> impulse control]
برون افکن بنه زیندار نه در مگر کایمن شوی زین مار نه سر
revisit sanaat tashbih simile
tashbih not as alude but as description (literal)
مار نه سر mar-e noh-sar ~/= world
mar-e noh-sar is not a simile for the world (of the reader) but it describes a particular world that is in the image of mar-e noh-sar
haft modaber هفت مدبر
jealousy as affect --underlying--> Farsi ghazal
ابومعشر بلخی Abu Ma'shar Balkhi
الهی - فلک نور
اثیری - ۸ فلک آسمانی
هیولانی - جزء زیر قمر
...................................
***don't read (or make) theory as a means of empowerment*** (a tool to fight or flight oppression)
...................................
[title]
king real
...................................
my problem with
•co[...]
(38)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.4[...]lective
•tars ترس fear =/= ezterab اضطراب anxiety
•sharm شرم shame =/= khejalat خجالت shyness
آتش آب خشک را پر میکرد از آتش تر
ab-e khosht = piale
atash-e tar = sharab
tar تر = allude آلوده = sabok سبک
khosro shirin
tarof ghabl az bad o bira goftan
shenidan (niushidan) ~= fahmidan فهمیدن
...................................
*negative bias = the negative is more ture*
negative bias: negative stimuli elicit a larger brain response than positive ones
(can then negative bias explain racism? <-- we are shaped by negativity)
positive-negative asymmetry
(in trying to) make sense of the world --> focus more on the negative
bad ==> attention
negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful
ambiguous stimuli rated as threatening --> survive
(gestalt) law of closure: we perceive pieces of objects as part of a whole when grouped together
to produce counter-knowledge [~= to contest a problem] =/= (we need more) to *seduce our evacuation from the terms that establish the problem*
(Shapiro)
•stressor ==> emotion (short, intense)
•emotion + meaning (cognitively processed repeatedly) = feeling (lasting, less intense, combined)
•emotions هیجانی + feelings احساسی = [*]affect ~= mood
(in apass)
•concept: a medium of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing
three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map
*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes[...]
(39)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.6[...] of conversation
•narcissistic research
◦understanding narcissism is the key to understanding mental health --> *(the experience of) being in a cult = being in relation with a narcissist*
•mode of attention that is didactic and forensic
•(in artistic research environments) most of time we don't have questions
we have games of language --> illiteracy
◦exam: pose your questions =/= answer to my questions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing
three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map
*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world
science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)
...................................
[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’
...................................
...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)
two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)
(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]
...................................
government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)
morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages
...................................
#cat's cradle
nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)
paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway
[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning
language --> material-semiotic flesh
liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•
(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strateg[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%12.6[...] of a positive essence = ultimate suture (بخيه bakhie)
•nonrecognition of any positivity =/= ultimate suture
(society institutes itself <==) closure: nonrecognition of the infinite play of differences }--> ‘ideological ==> social’ ~(the social is impossible without some fixation of meaning) : “utopia is the essence of any communication and social practice” --!,]
[--Delanda--> (the mode of ‘downward thinking’ when we think in terms of) ideology (~ the established relations of a particular society constitutes people's identities) ~= intrinsic: the identity is created by relations {the fantasy of ‘seamless totality'} =/= (Deleuzian) extrinsic: the relations are real but don't determine identities]
what are artists (particular <-=> general) propositions (Angebot)?
•proposition: a declarative that can be right or wrong =/= a sentence, grammatical entities
•exposition: a systematic interpretation/explanation of a specific topic
•disposition: an affective orientation, knowledge attitude
[Marx's ruthlessness: criticism must not be afraid of its own conclusions]
what are the sources of “value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration
ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?
rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)
... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”
Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”
--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.
one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge
Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).
reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.
The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.
...................................
[...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13[...]translation interest makes the (quasi) subject of a (quasi) object grow. --and vice versa--
radical position of *semiotics* on the issues of context, referent, and enunciation (that anthropology is able to escape)
(i am talking about a semiotics that is not obsessed with the search for “structure”)
{ (fictional beings ~=>) semiotic ~=? ontology }--> science of “sense” (=/= science of “signs”)
-the world itself is articulated
{ the study of sense =?=> extrication from language }--> this bifurcation (enshe'ab), as old as philosophy itself, used the discovery of “reference” as an opportunity to expel the referent to a position outside language.
(Aristotle's narrative : “the imitation of an action” -->) Ricoeur's three types of *mimesis:
1. prefiguration ()
2. configuration (kingdom of the “as if”)
3. refiguration (integration of the imaginative or “fictive” or “as if” into actual) of the field of action;
‘reading’ is configuration (Ricoeurian)
•use of symbols : being able to grasp one thing as standing for something else;
•narrative: competency in the temporal structures governing the syntagmatic order of “followability”
...empirical means to locate the boundaries of capitalism
(to enclose something -->) ontology of the Accounts Book --> Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya's story of the boy, bird, butcher, accounts book, and the theme of repayment, quittance.
to place everything it does not take into account outside the enclosure and everything it does take into account and that properly belongs to him inside
--> origins of property
...................................
growing interest in *ecology* ==> growing interest in *theology* (--> granted a new relevant)
(Latour's notion of) ecotheology [~= ajayeb]
(how not to consider your self secretly--even under the self-reflectivity--as) the chosen people
renegotiation of values and features:
(if) recently european stopped having been modern ==> the ‘others’ have also stopped having been ‘other’
*the planet will no longer be modernized* (Latour shouting)
geopolitics of difference
“europe" = the modernist great narrative --or--> produce an alternative great narrative of what european cultures (and natures) have been
}--✕--> *contrasting *traits* (that have been elaborated in the course of european history)
“here is my *treasure*, here is my *heart*, if you deprive us of one of these contrasts, we are no longer humans”
to be sensitive to different original origins (=/= eurocentrism)
[different origins that speak also truthfully]
(Olearius drama:) dramatic encounter between the (early) anthropologist's gaze and the various cultures (and natures) h[...]
(44)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.5[...] same as ‘what took place.’ . . . What took place is indeed the past, yet there is something that . . . takes place but does not wholly recede into the past, a constantly returning present.”
...................................
[Corbin]
it is so dangerous to say any thinker, writer, artist, or phiosopher ‘was of his/her own time.’ nobody has ever been in their own time, never. we are constantly out of time.
things occur in Malakut, not in the time of this world.
it is a matter of interior history, exoteric in the etymological sense of the word, subtle history whose events do not take place in the exterior world of objects, but in the subtle world of lived states, events in the Malakut, in the world of the ‘Soul,’ in the ‘Heaven’ or the ‘Hell’ which man carries within himself.
(and this is precisely what is ‘changing someone's story’ is about. ‘let me change the rhythm of your story. let me change your history.’ ~= storytelling)
this history----interior wild facts----intermingles with his wills, and objectives itself in the web of exterior facts. these are events of ajayebnameh, Shahname شاهنامه, Qur'an قرآن, Grail Cycle and so on, the events of this history (inspire parables? and) make up sacred history (tarikh-e ghodsi تاریخ قدسی) =/= empirical historicity
*the question always remains:
-what *is of this world?
-what is the organ of perception?
-does oneself need to ‘belong’ to this sacred history in order to come to pass (in the Malakut ملکوت)? (being born in it, etc.)
[what was your fetish again? what was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]
platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history
ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.
(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انساننما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)
Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحالهها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیزها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*
there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable fro[...]
(45)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.9[...]was your Qibla قبله? what would be...]
platonic ideals, periodization of sacred history
ملا صدرا Mullah Sadra revolutionized the metaphysics of being, in reversing the order of priority of essence (mahiat ماهیت). he gives priority to existence (vojud وجود) : that means, it is the act and mode of existing that determine the nature of essence. the act of existing is in effect capable of multitude of degrees of intensification or of degradation.
(عجایبِ ajayeb-e) man: human-faced demon (ajene ensan-nama اجنه انساننما) / ... / ... / sublime state of perfect Man
-and body passing through a multitude of states : Hayula هیولا? / ... / jesm (جسم corruptible worldly body) / ... / divine body (jesm-e elahi جسم الهی)
Mullah Sadra is the philosopher of metamorphoses and palingenesis (estehaleh-ha استحالهها & rastakhiz-ha رستاخیزها)
*phenomenology of the act of existing*
there was a time (12th century--my favorite) when Avicenna ابن سینا was translated into Latin (in Toledo,) a moment when our cultures in east and west corresponded to the same type, a moment when the concept of science was inseparable from its spiritual context. ----> think of the alchemists for whom the operation undertaken in the laboratory only attained its end if it was accompanied by an interior transmutation of the man--that is to say only if it effected the interior birth (of spiritual man)
Alchemist's chemistry
Nicolas Oresme's geometry
[out of history]
Descartes’ geometry is also out of history, discontinuous
(for Corbin) Modern / Western venture = application of the intelligence to the scientific investigation of a nature that has been desacralised, which must be violated in order to find out its laws (and to subject its forces to the human will)
the dichotomies or dissociation of thought/being, being/action
حیدر آملی Haydar Amuli's delinkings (destroying precisely certain dialectics or dichotomies:)
...................................
Holul حلول, Sodur صدور, Tajasod تجسد
(immanence, transcendence, incarnation)
(the eidos reflected in the mirror--divine in the prophet--remains untouched by the mirror, because the real is not ‘incarnated’ in the eidos, the reflected image)
-alame khiali عالم خیالی: imaginaire/Hollywood
-khiale khallagh خیال خلاق (--> alame mesal عالم مثال =/= alame ajsad عالم اجساد) :
1-khiale mottasel خیال متصل: imagining inherent in human
2-khiale monfasel خیال منفصل: imaginal apart from human
-alame hess عالم حسس: molk ملک --> universe of forgetfulness
Tonekaboni, is against: “mojudate moghayade vahmi faghede tagharor mi[...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14[...]ه جسمانی عالم آخرت)
(baghaye) badane okhravie alame made (بقای بدن اخروی عالم ماده) --> hades zamanie (حادث زمانی)
لطیف latif ~= immaterial
actual/real ~= a dream between earth and sky
asemanhaye napeydaye nojumi آسمانهای ناپیدای نجومی (celectial skies invisible)
dadehaye vahyi دادههای وحی (data of revelation)
Avicenna (selselemaratebe ebn-sinaie oghul سلسله مراتب ابن سینایی عقول):
[each aghl عقل or angle with its own sky and nafs نفس ==> a whole universe for itself]
sending from one aghl to the other, till the 10th aghl = unlimited human nafs
10th aghl ~= philosopher's active aghl ~= ruh al ghodos روح القدس
(سهروردی) in Sohrevardi: angle and nafs are in the same trip
aghle hayulayi عقل هیولایی
/>
[Averroesian/ابن رشدی =/= Avicennian/ishraghi/اشراقی] ==> destruction of the intermediate world of angles ==> secularization :
sociology <-- theology <-- angelology
(divine materiliazation --> social materialization)
totalitarianism <== ideology <-- spirituality (~=? intellectual immaterialism)
(?signing in iran:)
ghodsi shodane nahadha = orfi shodane maba'adotabi
قدسی شدن نهادها = عرفی شدن مابعدالطبیعه
sacredization of institutions = secularization of metaphysics
the tragedy is not the affirmation of individualism, it is rather the forgetting of the infinite entity :
non-mystic monotheism ==> a personalized (incarnation of) God (--> everything ‘personal’ is subject to death and negation) ==> entrance of God in collectivism
تغییر ماهیت عالم taghyire mahiate alam (change in the essence of the universe) is the suthe subject of study for iranian ancient philosophies and cosmologies
contemplation (moshahede nazari مشاهده نظری) ~= action
knowledge ~= creating (that insensible speculative world) (the world of ajayeb and its siblings is created and stated in my inner vision)
[hush-e nazari هوش نظری, ability to abstract, is the ability to look from above]
[(jaleb budan-e) heja-e bimani هجای بیمعنی, interest for meaningless morpheme]
(human's function:) the transfigurative function of the transcendental machine (karkhaneye mojarad-sazi کارخانه مجردسازی, by Sheikh Muhammad Tabatabayi)
*ta'vil bayad dar jahate axe harkate jami va moshtarek bashad تأویل باید در جهت عکس حرکت جمعی و مشترک باشد
(interpretation/hermeneutics =/= commons/collectivism)
(according to Sohrevardi:) haghighate lafzi حقیقت لفظی (verbal/literal truth)[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.1[...] of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)
(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions
testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)
Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy
Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”
the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective
your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability
{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}
destructive (and artistic) modes of production.
test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?
Avital's “speculative telephonics”
Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit
the place where a call can break into a body[=? orificial openings of a subject]
emergency verification: we are still trying to cut into the emergency line (that we are on) after the crashing down of the transcendental signifier
in the (technologically enabled) disappearance of long-distance what happens to the ‘elsewhere’ calling to the schizobody?
how our pretechnological ears were (trained) before the telephone?
the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just a[...]
(50)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.7[...]
Telephonics coils itself around a concept of “being there” supported by the recognition that contact has been broken. Still, the break is never clean, just as contact was never continuous. The entire metaphysics of identity, presence and locality is scrambled, bringing with it a certain historical mutation in the relationship of the “self’ to other, to the irreducible precedence, as Derrida puts it in ‘Memoires,’ of the other. The other calls; you answer. But “you” have not yet been constituted, gathered or pulled together prior to the call.
Wortsalad ---- Opheilia's kind of mouth that shoots poesy, one has the feeling that no one is there.
/ precisely when ophelia is about to become the poet Shakespeare strangles her in water to make place for hamlet's tragic autopoiesis /
it is (generally) very difficult to know “who” is talking --> “whom” is being addressed
endure the agony of the being called (a being-on-call, an answering device)
modeling different styles of irony
(what are we) telehearing (?)
language is the history of index finger (“...even when it is placed on the mouth to silence a speaking. The teacher points, the God and the schizophrenic speak through or to the spiritual forefinger [sababe سبابه, angoshte shahadat انگشت شهادت].”)
-Heidegger traces the route of saying from rumor to the spiritualized digitals. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency).
-making the marionette come alive
-history of index finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading Heidegger)
-Heidegger shows, “Speaking must have speakers” (not merely in the same way as an effect must have a cause)
(...what must remain unspoken in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking)
...decisive disconnectedness in all language tracings.
schizophrenogenic understanding of language (and of anything)
[this is related to the story of the fox and sound, accidental essencing of the index...]
“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often we do not see what is there. In the first place because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as if we cannot see a thing.” (Avital)
(focus the lense on being)
the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe[...]
(51)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14.8[...]name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]
immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.
“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)
“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria
to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest
thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense
scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice
theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument
“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***
(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)
significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being
*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales
differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography
category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)
off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia
(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individua[...]
(55)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.6[...] />
in our questioning and studies we (must) remain enmeshed, in a historical conjunction, in a situated way of being “this way” and not “that way”
...................................
[Stengers]
[a kind of] writing (not writing down)
writing is an experience of metamorphic transformation
to discover how to be compromised by ajayeb Nameh
the ways we can be lured into desiring and trusting it
how the assemblages of ajayeb generate metamorphic transformations in our capacity to affect and be affected? --> to feel, think, and imagine
...................................
[Serres]
ajayeb, a time when transport and itinerary were only myth
...................................
[Anand]
the sanctity and blessing of Muslim saints was integrally linked to local ecology and topography
that sanctification of birds and stones alerts us to an Indic and Islamic vision of humans in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.
The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.
There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62)."
description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms
where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])
the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)
“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of understandi[...]
(56)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16[...]ratives
as careful scrutiny of wonders and marvels becomes a mainstay in European intellectual life, 17th century natural philosophers began to understand *wonder, *curiosity, and *attention as cloesly aligned and mutually defining.
epistemological beast fable
unnatural history
knowledge-making practices of other times and places
tracing the web of horror and delight
Serres reminds us the beast fable tradition is as much about biomimicry as anthropomorphizing.
finding ways of “going-on together” (Verran)
“by experience and by affinity, some of us begin not with Pasteur, but with the monster, the outcast” (S. Leigh Star)
(ajayeb's) (politics of) administering discrete objects ----(number sys)
(why should we engage in refiguration?)
(there are always a) multitude of agencies unfolding as the world is continuously reconfigured (=/= to explain away: when multiple objects are collapsed into one.)
-“Within this dynamic world it is impossible to imagine that one single story or one narrative style can capture all of the liveliness and exuberance; ***we need to deploy multiple stories about agency. Some meticulously empirical, some imaginative. Some on the quantum scale, some on the people scale. Different agential narratives enable different ways of responding and relating.” (Kenney)
postcolonial moments: “occasions for theorizing, for telling differences and samenesses in new ways” (Verran)
#to create ‘aerating’ (tahviyeh تهویه) in ajayeb, this includes:
/ crafting translations with ontological traction (enghebaz انقباض)
/ building empirical tools that make ajayeb's translation-work visible {#pop-up book}
/ translation --> *reconfigure sameness and difference*
/ staying with linguistic differences (in ajayeb) is a way of investigatitigating the ontological commitments embedded in language.
◽ontological --> worlding --> how language participates in shaping our lived worlds in some ways and not others.*** “it is not common for speakers of a language to examine what type of material objects their language commits them to. [this also my question in iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)
(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)
[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-c[...]
(57)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]iranian mystic mix,] rather the difference will be to notice as difficulty in translation.” (Verran)
(for me working on ajayeb is) **lingering in the space of difficult translations**
==> making recourse (motevasel shodan be متوسل شدن به) to a *world of common referents* (space, time, and matter)
[to continue thinking with Verran] on *durations*, *extensions*, and *resistances* (in ajayeb's case)
these three foundation objects need not to be saddled with the history of Western metaphysics and do noy require that common ground be located only in Western territory. “Therefore they offer more promise for cross-cultural translation than the more conceptually nimble [tardast تردست, zerang زرنگ -- like the CEN or google] space, time, and matter. Newborn and awkward to our ears, these strange terms announce themselves as translation tools.” (Kenney)
(thinking with Kenney / Verran:)
workflow on ajayeb:
1- tracing social connections (for which subjects is this useful? which ecology of practices?)
2- making equipment list (materials and methods, an expanded and complicated version of equipment-list, providing accounts of the material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing my empirical objects, =/= exercise in representation or audit hesab-rasi حساب رسی)
3- narrating the relation (re-materializing my found empirical objects, re-enacting the objects)
interpretive cosmology
(ajayeb's objects,) “They represent different storytelling practices that contribute to different kinds of worldings.” [...] (through my engagement,) “They stimulate more compositions and decompositions--stories that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی موجود شناختی): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)
[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]
(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Bo[...]
(59)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.3[...]authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)
ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی موجود شناختی): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)
[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]
(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)
(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)
knowledge industry or “scientific factory”
how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power
“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)
(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)
talking is also thinking
speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)
ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?
[...]
(61)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.4[...] (=/=? Delanda's materialism)
ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity
i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric
(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual selection =/=) social selection : “...selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a species within which offspring are produced and reared”
co-parenting, animal friendships, same-sex sex, non-reproductive sex, and other reproductive social behaviors
*physio-semiotics: physical traits that have social functions, that communicate to other members of the social group
(Darwin sexual selection : claims that in humans, men are more jealous about sexual infidelity of their partners, whereas woman are more jealous of emotional infidelity. their theories based on a sexual conflict model, is that this is an evolutionary adaptation that helps males ensure that they raise their own offspring and helps females ensure that the males will stick around to provide for their children.) --> is there another story? (this is a speculative + empirical question) --> multiple evolutionary stories are possible
(Roughgarden demands) a more rigorous relationship between narrative and evidence (=/= prevalence of studies where the “[raw] data are mined to effect an appearance of the confirmation of [a single] hypothesis”) ----she returns to the most potent fables of sexual selection and re-tells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared
***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge
(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.
Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects
(her schol[...]
(62)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.6[...]ells them --> these new stories make real species-shaping difference by contributing to the social infrastructure within which offspring are produced and reared
***how many plots can the data hold?*** --> pragmatic---the answer is many not infinite [Strathern: “more than one but less than many"]
-practices of *doing accuracy* --> storytellers
relationships between story and evidence --> an invitation to invent new forms of accuracy that might be unfamiliar or awkward but could be epistemologically narrativelly politically generative (Kenney)
(sometimes: story ==> data) the work to craft just one good story from the chaos of the data is (not only political challenge @Jassem, but also) an epistemological challenge
(Lynn Margulis)
*endosymbiosis: the theory that eukaryotic cells evolved by incorporating free-swimming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.
Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects
(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)
/science is an interpretative adventure
(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the innee inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”
re-thinking consciousness
(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered
(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomi[...]
(63)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.6[...]imming bacteria, which later became organelles (cell organ) such as plastids and mitochondria
(ladder =/=) horizontal gene transfer : that the evolution and speciation are driven not by random genetic mutation and natural selection, but by symbiogenesis.
Margulis's attention to bacteria rather than attention to animals ==> different research questions and metaphors, and different empirical objects
(her scholarly crafts are amazing:) “was the moon that pulled the tide of life from its oceanic depths to dry land and up into the air.” (1998)
/science is an interpretative adventure
(Margulis's insight into) the history of consciousness --> the components that fused in symbiogenesis are already conscious entities***, already able to sense light and motion --> we are made through our endosymbiotic histories : our own “sensitivities to wafting (nasim نسیم) plant scents, tasty salted mixtures, police cruiser sirens, loving touches and star light” (2005)
[...] “These avant guard cells of the nasal passages, the taste buds, the inner ear, the touch receptors in the skin and the retinal rods and cones all have in common the presence at their tips of projections (‘cell processes’) called cilia.”
[...] “The spirochete group of bacteria includes many harmless mud-dwellers but it also contains a few scary freaks: the treponeme of syphilis and the borrelias of Lyme disease. We animals got our exquisite ability to sense our surroundings--to tell light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”
re-thinking consciousness
(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered
(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another
(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***
(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)
(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts
ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are[...]
(64)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.7[...] light from dark, noise from silence, motion from stillness and fresh water from brackish brine--from a kind of bacterium whose relatives we despise.”
re-thinking consciousness
(Kenney) Margulis's speculations: they mattered, they worlded, they gathered
(Williamson:) larvae and adult insects of the same species do not have a common ancestor(!)
(how ?, the capacity for) drastic morphological change --> what would it be like to emerge as a moth with a new body, a new sensorium, with your caterpillar-self only a genomic memory?
reincarnation from one species to another
(need less?) just-so stories --> facts to live with
(need more?) what-if stories --> speculations to savor --(gives taste to)--> *paradigms* --> incommensurable ways of seeing the world and practicing science in it (Kohn) --> seeds for sowing worlds (Haraway) ~--> possibilities for thinking life***
(Kenney's proposal of) “bureau of what-if stories”
(--> Fables of Attention - Wonder in Feminist Theory and Scientific Practice 2013)
(Margulis's) holobiont: multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts
ajayeb's craft and undisciplined tradition can be called empirical, it is an example of an archival research (done by historian.) i wan to highlight the aesthetic quality of this activity.
*aesthetics: how elements are arranged together, how they are composed, how they are brought into relation in the space of a text (Kenney > Latour, Stengers, Bellacasa) (--> La Guin's bag, bundle) }--> rigs
**aesthetics are political because they do consequential relational work**
novels, poetry, feminist theory, speculative fiction, bestiary list categories--these genres of composition *gather together* and *stage* their “matters of care” in ways that perform relations between things and teach their readers to inhabit sometimes unfamiliar, agential world. they are practices of sf worlding.
fiction ==> attitude --> holds things
(emphasis on) worlds that come together through dispersal (vofur وفور), induction (makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,
the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing
(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the rel[...]
(65)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.7[...]d. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species
*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics
poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)
(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)
**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?
(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”
evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives
(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)
“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective ecologies, intimate encounters, articulate orchids
(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick description
•refiguring
•reading against the grain
•citational poaching (shekar-e gheir-mojaz شکار غیر مجاز) (also, i am trying to quote Muhammad, Sa'di, ajayeb, the bird sometimes, and something is called in)
•speculative ficti[...]
(66)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.8[...] />
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]
**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)
*** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.
(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care
i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of composition and form
}--(attention to)--> form + composition + influence
“i am rubied by your attention”
(ruby: yaghute sorkh یاقوت سرخ) ~-> to describe the effect of an encounter between two
...shifting verbs to nouns and nouns to verb }--> practical
*relational properties of language:
•viscosity (chasbandegi چسبندگی)
•conductivity
•velocity
(=/= daunting)
-collective
-exploratory
-supportive
(what to do with) the unavoidable childishness (and girlish) of wonder and of fables
-does wonder need to grow up?
there is a risk that that which awakens our epistemological appetite will ultimately be unfriendly, unseemly, unsophisticated, unsuitable
•wonder goes beyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality
the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “ac[...]
(68)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...]eyond what is suitable (Irigaray,) even threatens our status as “serious, adult thinkers” (Stengers)
hoax ==> compels us to do work that is sober and bound closer to reality
the bifurcation of childhood and adulthood gets in the way of thinking
-the child/adult divide as an “achievement” of the Vicorian Era
the context of my ajayeb:
“The Science War”
epistemological differences between sciences
...................................
[Lorraine J. Daston]
the evolving collective sensibility of naturalists
objective order and subjective sensibility
...celestial apparitions, monsters,
how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals
(webs of cultural significance, material practices, and theoretical derivations)
(cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge) Galison
...................................
*passion maintains a path between (--corporal impressions and movements toward an object):
philosophers <----> physicists
metaphysical research <----> cosmological research
transcendental <----> empirical
architecture of ideality : (sociofamilial) stratification of desire --> ideal ego ==> religiosity, slogans, publicity, terror, --✕--> roots {vegetal, earthly, ideal, heavenly,)
[Irigaray]
(@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move
the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle
“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)
surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known
energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities
*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)
mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one
(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )
(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion
places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions
***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***
Irigaray:[...]
(69)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.1[...]@Ali , what is the source of movement? what is the motivating force behind mobility if not wonder?---in all dimensions)
(both active & passive) wonder ==> move
the “man” (in Nietzsche and Heidegger) thinks he is at the end of his growth, has completed a cycle
“can we look at, contemplate, wonder at the machine from a place where it does not see us?” *** --> the issue is how to be able to wonder at the face of something/somebody that is looking (back) at us. ,,,(@Lili)
surprise: not yet assimilated or disassimilated to known
energy tied to the dimension of the story =/= mobilization of new energies --> (still) blind to their horizon, or qualities
*desire: vectorialization of space and time (=/= Deleuze and Guattari notion of desire) --> movement toward, (not yet qualified)
mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one
(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )
(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion
places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions
***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> 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.
[...]
(70)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.2[...]ction theory + fluid animation research
•Noah: Nolan + Creation Bible + Darwin + motion graphic research
--> solving a problem proposed by _?_ }--> “the dream catcher” !!!
(in these cinematic examples we see the society imposed to the same spatiotemporal representational framework that science “discovers” in nature)
the insistent entanglements of physicality with the metaphysical
soil: earth rendered in the scientific register
“The alluvial sediments that come in the waters of the Jamuna river either become deposited as silt across floodplains or fall in the river to become ‘chars’” (Naveeda Khan 2014)
...the time of the arrival of clay is not assured
the inability to perpetuate human life*
the materialist metaphysics of Creation in non-elite belief
“you should not let a dog lick you.”
or “pigeon feather containing 40 different microbial diseases.” #clean
or “they are very dirty and will pass their germs to you.”
cross-species fraternity to the assertion of superiority over all animals
pragmatic + theological spoke:
1- divine privileging of humans
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?”
[...]
(71)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.6[...]aterially and semiotically--of conjoined forces that matter.
“dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted” (Barad)
(now ontologically) spectatorship =/= representation =/= referent
(still? in ajayeb) reader ~= representation ~= citational non-evidence
(Hayward-->) if we recognize that clear vision is always predicated on distorted, bent, and otherwise refracted (and diffracted) light, how might we reconsider theoretical investigations (filmic, philosophical, etc.) that *rely exclusively on untroubled reflectivity*. yes, “clear” vision is secured by corrective measures in the eye (and elsewhere) but conversely sight is always multiply altered and realtered by transmedium movement of light.
there is an embedded conceptual tension in refraction between *lucidity* and *degradation*
“as it is” --> the object is always troubled by obscuration
***things do not have fully determinate boundaries or properties. things happen ‘in’ and ‘by’ encounter--refraction is one critical mode of encounter
object is altered by *scale* and *encounter* (through refraction)
--> “empirical perspective” : the *altered scale* also allows the object to reveal its specificity, its particularity; boundaries are rendered indeterminate and exist only to the extent that they are continually enacted.
(Hayward > Barad:)
Phenomena do not merely mark the epistemological inseparability of “observer” and “observed”; rather, phenomena are the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting ‘components.’ That is, phenomena are ontologically primitive relations--relations without preexisting relata. [*relatum: one of the objects between which a relation is said to hold. *relata: would-be antecedent (tabar تبار) components of relations.]
reverie of reflectivity =/= refraction (--> makes explicit transforms the tendency of the image to orient representation, foregrounding the threaded visual space between the image and the spectator.)
***dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted***
(Kaja Silverman, the subject of semiotics)
spectatorships =/=! representations =/=! referents
(ontological distinction: “=/=!”)
the surreal technoscientific look --?--> allowing wondrous but material extensions into the ajayeb domain
in creating a “look” for ajayeb: whether or not a used/user interaction can have ethical dimensions?
refraction is not framework, but a pathway. it engages patterns of interference and exchange
the xeno-sensual in the ajayeb
different differences that are sensed a[...]
(72)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.8[...]is not an end product, rather an active factor in further materializations
(*** matter materializes ***)
matter's ongoing historicity
precise causal nature of productive practices ==> differential constitutions are marked
ajayeb: a host of material-discursive forces
*for ajayeb i need to rework notions of:
•discursive practices
•materialization
•agency
•causality
*without:
•resorting to the optics of transparency
•the geometric of absolute exteriority or interiority
•theorization of human as either pure cause or pure effect
*any entity's ontology (its cast identity) is always open for future's reworkings* (Barad)
adding a Greek fused syntactical molding to the individual, ‘trans-’ is not enough, we have to make the postulation of individuality unthinkable, and that needs work
{how to make things unthinkable? not available to think with. what should be an “unthinkable” theory of relations?}
(Descartes's epistemology --> representationalist structure of words, knowers, and things)--> transparency of measurement (transparency of language) =/= Bohr's epistemological framework (after his empirical findings of an inherent discontinuity in measurement ----%> wave-particle duality paradox) ~-> Barad's “causal relationship between specific exclusionary practices embodied as specific material configurations of the world [~= discursive practices, (con)figurations rather than “words"] and specific material phenomena [~= relations rather than “things"]”
(*)position (~ specific physical arguments, [=/= well-defined abstract concepts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]
(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘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
(*)apparat[...]
(73)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.5[...]b-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}
--0--> ‘count’ is also a word technologically tethered, origin of computing
(Kirksey > Leigh Star) to begin with the question, ‘cui bono?’ (for whose benefit?) =/= to begin with a celebration of the fact of human/nonhuman mingling
...................................
my Rigs diagrams are ‘swarms’? -a multitude of different creative agents
ajayeb.net (how can it be:) not a website but a “para-site”
•am i creating an ego (for ajayeb) in my ajayeb.net? if yes, that would be interesting how?
topos/topic of hypertext, spatial character of electronic writing
topic [from Greek ‘topos’: a place, in ancient rhetoric used to refer to commonplaces, conventional units, or methods of thought] exist in a writing space that is not only a visual surface but also a data structure in the computer --> Hypertext: “is not the writing of a place, but rather a writing with places, spatially realized topics.” (Bolter < Hubert)
-in my hypertext, which writing materials, cognitive mappings, itineraries of reading, textual stability, loops and reductions are addressed?
•i[...]
(74)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.6[...]umental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control
(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”
“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style
preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars
How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658
realized eschatology
انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served to authenticate it.
*the function of the sign was to bear prophetic witness rather than to get practical results; it fulfilled its purpose simply by being performed*
#shath, shathiat ==> tazkirat, --->{ what the saints of Tasavof (reported by Attar-{his “virtual witnessing” of “awliya” اولیا as a “realized"}, Quakers [as illegal nonconformist sect]) put together was their own writing technology infrastructure** ==> **routinization of charisma** <-- organizational structure ["advices and queries” نفحات الانس nafahat ~-> rationalized systematic intellectualizations]}
pattern of suffering that the believer literally and personally relives
(is Tasavof developed Christian modality of sacrifice? is *passivity imported from elsewhere in Islam*?)
a protagonist, like San'an, like an actor in a mystery play, enacting in a deliberately challenging form, internalized and lived as a potent sign
(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*
(stories of) a small group of powerful and v[...]
(75)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]
(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy
cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)
(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*
***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***
‘question of power' = do you go along with it?
sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”
bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }
...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•
in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility
self-exclusion
to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”
(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.
idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance
Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference
fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”
...................................
how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their det[...]
(76)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.7[...]ildhood and strangely satisfying, like a loop i had to make, *an emotive-agentive place i had to check in with* --?--> Janina + Sina forms of belonging
(sometimes that place is a fully-invested connection and weighted, like home)
***forms of belonging: tactile + full of force + tentative + risky /--{"+” : are, and, yet}
--> an ecology of paths that matter by means of the things that happen in a present in which we are *lost yet attuned*
--> all the ways that people and things venture out into reals [my mother, Sina, Janina, ...]
[*]town: currents of difference, affiliation, history, ordinary dullness and comforts, characters and their stories
psyching out ethnicity
(my old attunement:) the fear of cockroaches
the miracle mile of computer technology
the elitism of the historical societies
localness nests in:
•tastes
•bodies
•neigborhoods
•a valley
•a state
•a geographical region
“in each scene of the production of history there are events that are storied or otherwise pulled into play” (Stewart)
Stewart on salem witch trials
the accusations spiraled through families, catching people up like magnetic strips
“wicked little sorceries” -->{jumpy moments that suddenly lay the charge of a half-known intensity onto ordinary people and roads, regionality becomes a wicked little sorcery. a vortex that pulls possible forms into life into a moment's alignment}, {the adjective ‘wicked’ marking *excess* of all kinds}
astrology
fortune-telling
*an attunement to specters*
-a farmer admitted getting into ‘the snare of the devil’ because he had a large family and ‘the world went hard with him.’
robustness in cold weather
[title]
making of edges and scenes in ajayeb
character or texture of an edge
(ajayeb is made of elements that were) a thing sensed with certainty (yet made up of a shifting, edgy composite)
[a sentient shadow called jinn, God, darkness of a pit, a cycle, etc.]
--or--> made scenic *as a site of a world's potential* (= ajayeb)
--the scene of a thing's demise
an edgy irruptive event
rules and edges are OK when separate, but together, a bad combination
(Karin + Sina + Hanno) we were humans together
--we adjust ourselves to the done deal that things happen--
(we find ourselve being) “from here” in a world made intimate through forgiveness, denial, detachment flowing in after a surge of something bad--a close call [Stewart]
*what are ajayeb's turns (and turn backs) to the inarticulate real?
hallucinogenically down-to-earth (Aela)
what are a[...]
(77)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.5[...]ce” or “soul” is human : they see themselves as human and others as animals
*to occupy a body = to have a perspective on the world*
•an intensive difference that carries the human/nonhuman difference to the inside of every existing thing --> there is no a priori reason for everything not being a subject [--> also Sadra]
[*]bodies:
•bundles of affect : collection of affects bundled into an unstable bodily form
•carrying out specific tasks
•sensing the world in particular way
•sharing capacities and habits with others in what keeps a body as it is and maintains its similarity to other bodies in a group
•coincident with subjectivity* --> you need a body to know
--> (particular differentiation of a body:) body ornaments, clothing, sex, and other so-called cultural markings are no different in kind from the so-called natural markers of bodily difference and capacity: ***clothes ~= claws ~= affects*** --> “sign and substance of capacities and dispositions” (Alberti > Hugh-Jones > Viveiros de Castro)
*marking, molding, painting, adorning, clothing, piercing, and otherwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طیالارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *
*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies
dead --> ancestor
(transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []
ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change
“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretations correspond with stable ontologies’
(this we must take things as -->) ontological =/= analogical (<-- representation of a world, an ego, etc.)
how to approach (iranian miniatur and) miniaturization?
miniaturization have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines)[...]
(78)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.6[...]rwise working on body ~=> to fix a body ==> to stabilize an otherwise wildly unpredictable perspective and world*
*body surfaces of spirits and humans are often brilliant and intensely marked* --> excessive corporeality --> potency of the embodied subject: their “scale” [in timespace tey-ol-arz] as efficacious beings, dense with affective capacities, (the body that is marked with tey-ol-arz incites embodied subjects)--> *trap* (operates along scale) [sufi's termporal “scale” (in tey-ol-arz طیالارض) as her/his efficacious being, dense with affective capacities for Attar in Tazkirat al-Awliya (--> also relevant for pit-story #measurement) --> the figure of the moving sufi across scales of spacetime on geo, works as a trap precisely along this scale --> materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity]
* bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity *
*soul: the capacity to transform: a matter of chaning bodies
dead --> ancestor
>
(transformation is an ontological event: “-->”), @Hoda
for Wari to have a soul is a sign of danger, a sign that some transformation (of perspective) is imminent []
ajayeb is full of stories of instability: one's soul is always vulnerable to ontological predation by another spirit or person ==> one's perspective can always change
“correspond” is keyword in working with ontologies : ‘interpretations correspond with stable ontologies’
(this we must take things as -->) ontological =/= analogical (<-- representation of a world, an ego, etc.)
how to approach (iranian miniatur and) miniaturization?
miniaturization have powerful and often unsettling (because paradoxical) cognitive and perceptual effects* --> these effects (in the case of figurines) enable people to enter “other worlds” (to think, manipulate and influence)
(in figurines) all the senses are implicated ==> “perceptually explosive objects” (Bailey)
•onto-transformative effect of miniaturization
*anthropocentrism of the scale of the human --> default ontological scale, self-evident human-sized body (-->?! the little bike i gave Elen, did i propose that kind of critique?)
-which organs are emphasized in iranian miniature?
(organs of knowledge: eyes, ears, mouths, skin)
-properties of materials and their relationship to form only ever emerge relationally }--> how can i construct an approach for iranian miniatur, or radif in these terms
◦countors --> decomposes to the shape of horses
◦gold
◦fields
--> and these forms emerged for people *who knew how to see it*
iranians experienced everything about the world as ‘...’ ? (جای خالی را پر کنید) --*-- the growth of children in an unreliable world نگرانی (#modalities of negarani)
inconstant and unreliable, continually threatening to transform ==> ontology involving matter[...]
(79)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.6[...] proliferating ajayebnameh, make belief in images, make thinking about kharej خارج, loving America, etc.]
}--> this was also why i couldn't think with Pierre's “other future” proposal; i am already living it
Alberti asks: will an ontological shift in scale reveal new ways of cenceptualizing the miniatures (the patterns)?
in Miyazaki the figure's size are part of an instantiation of scale rather than respond to an imposed scale
a scale must grow indiginously
Amazonian soul <~~--> harkat johari <~~--> tey-ol-arz طیالارض --> teleportation and tazkie nafs ?!
-designating a condition of transformability: all bodies contain the potential to transform into other bodies --> intrinsic capacity to be something else --> harkat johari حرکت جوهری
*tey-ol-arz --> intrinsic capacity to be somewhere else; [is tey-ol-arz in tasavof also about scale, body? (intensive difference) (condition of transformability is articulated in tey-ol-arz in terms of geo-temporal scale shift...)--> a moment of indiscernibility between “here” and “there” --> a super-divided being (intensive multiplicity) --> *(a specific form emerges:) a dynamic and intensive corporeality* (--> excessive intensity of all spirits) --> my argument is that tasavof is not the negation of body in favor of soul --> the key is not size or time but intensity or excess ==> to think tey-ol-arz: to think in many kinds of times, flesh, vulnerability, etc.]
tey-ol-arz metaphysics is based on the idea of a radical and infinite superposition of states: insides and outsides ~= heres and theres : are figures and ground to each other (--> #beyond)
--> there is no interior space to the body (~ there is no there/beyond to the body,) just an invisible body
#work on an exposure of work with tey-ol-arz with other interested artists
in Tehran, maybe in my parents house, informal space for opening a discussion in Farsi-English
(involve Pierre? where to get money?)
*campus: (a place where) new kinds of conversations are being invented in stabilized and social forms (sometimes departments, sometimes just research clusters)
i need to make that kind of mini-scale of quasi-organization between Tehran and Brussels: workshops, episodic and travel-mediated knots of practice
**(Alberti 2013 argues that) anything in the immediate, intimate vicinity of people can be subjectivized or personified through exchange and shared affects** --> an argument for ajayeb
‘to know a thing' = 'to subjectivize it’ : to add the maximum amount of intentionality to them (--> #equip them to talk well)
pots made to:
•to communicate (to an audience)
•to establish (relationships)
•to persuade (others of their point of view)
de-subjectivization: sometimes (objects) left deliberatel[...]
(80)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.7[...]ive 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)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture
Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a im[...]
(81)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]y 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)
reference to a “common world”
new animism ==> ontology becomes another name for culture
Alebrti outlining:
•anthropological project that considers ontology as a critical question productive of conceptual engagement
•work of archeologists who theorize and practice archeology on the basis of indigenous theories
}--> where new animists turn to animism for a source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
[...]
(82)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...] source of analogies, critical ontology turns to animism for a source of theory
perspectivism: multiple natures (worlds) + singular culture (way of knowing those worlds) [~ working from *commonality* rather than *alterity*] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
•openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
[...]
(83)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]fference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart
coalescing of language & concept & ...
[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality
to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession
[*]art: risk of something new
archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)
my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*
...................................
(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective universality of body and substance] }
-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)
Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity
possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject
==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)
[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject
“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremoniremonial house”
(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone
-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his rendition of objectification is insufficient and not specified (in which discipline by who and when how ---> go to Barad)
-[in contemporary performance art: “becoming animal” --> a modality of narcissistic ego-formation]
“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”
perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is
(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent r[...]
(84)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.7[...]rmation]
“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”
perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is
(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent relational universe ==> everything is primary fact (-then how would Viveiros de Castro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)
multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature
(different specificity of) bodies ==> perspectives
[*]affect: dispositions or capacities that render the body of each species unique ==> [*]body: assemblage of affects (ways of being) that constitute a habitus, bundle of affects and capacities
**humanity: a moral condition that excludes animals**
human-animal has a physical continuity [==> natural sciences] and a metaphysical discontinuity [==> humanities]
(what would be a *nonanimistic metaphysical continuity* between human-animal and other things? --> we need categorical mistakes and catachresis)
spirit/mind --> distinguisher (of cultures, species, etc.)
body --> connector (of material beings)
(Amerindian) spirit/mind =? reflexive form =/= immaterial inner substance
the neophenomenological appeal to the body as the site of subjective singularity
projects of “embodying” (the spirit) --?--> eliminative materialism
(culture: modern name for Spirit)
integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators
integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis
(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined
transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention
*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*
poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (tra[...]
(87)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.7[...]br />
conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it
...................................
There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.
...................................
evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی
...................................
باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}
...................................
[body politics]
Greeks -[...]
(94)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.2[...]s the wind as a “destroyer”
*world of fused duality
‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing
*the project of being alive* (is little understood)
([my project is perhaps] to become) a person whom the ancient world is remarkably vivid*** ♥
to have gossiped about figures of ancient Persia
to believe that the *world is queer* (=/= Mobed, Foad, Reza)
(we need -->) a window of doupt through which all creative possbility comes into being
(Forster:) “[...] standing absolutly motionless at a sight angle to the universe”
(queer =?) an oblique مورب position in relation to the real (=/= buisiness as usual)
queer to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace
queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of (poetry, ajayeb, etc.)
>
description --> *providing the particular evidence of specificity*
not everything can/need to be described --> **the choice of what to evoke**, to make any scene seem ‘real’ vagheyi. look at USA film industry and all the efforts put in scenic description of the WWII, vampire stories, teenage life, nation; or in iran in Iran-Iraq war (Iranq)
lush, sensuous, flowering
parallel text to the creature
“you are gorgeous and i am coming” ♥
an approximation, unstoppable as an approachoig sound of approaching organism
testing and smelling
insight and sound --> Lili
an aphrodisiac and a chastening reminder: getting sidetracked by grief
“my portion this time”
*art is a house that tries to be haunted* ♥ (Doty > Dickinson)
قافیه به تنگ آمد ghafie tang, (when a choice is) driven more by re by sonic than by logic
what kind of game is the sea? @Marialena
lap and drag. crag and gleam
(monosyllables --> are we reading nouns or verbs? tough, playful ocean)
syntactical ambiguity disorients
(Khayam's) desire to die into the world (~ to surrender into the life of things)
[title]
*describer's art*
autumn
a kind of logarithn of decay and rekindling
to describe description
a work of advocacy
to go description-hunting in ajayeb
evocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)
...................................
Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathin[...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.4[...]thod and its dignity
(naturalist traveler -->) *Humboldt's “Kosmos” [~ synthesis of knowledge, not aiming to be encyclopedic, but strives ***to arrive at an intuition of the universe***] combining:
•(“oikoumene” tradition of Greek geography:) *the science of the entire human world* [--> ajayeb]
•(“mathematical geography” founded by Eratosthenes, Hipparchus, Ptolemy:) *the science of coordination of human space in relation with the celectial configuration and movements* [--> Olearius]
}==> Earth [considered as a whole]: (stable support for the) *فراز و نشيب vicissitude of history* --> ‘terrestrial space + its configurations’ : object of geographical, geological, sociological, biological knowledge
(Humboldt) applied a whole system of barometric, thermometric in his investigation. *division of plants* according to different climates ==> “botanical geography” & “zoological geography”
history of the Weltanschauung
*****how Humboldt (and Ritter, [even Simondon does that too]) apply the *category of totality* to their object --> the relations between historical man and the environment ==> *determination of historical relationships*
the relations between the geographical environment and man ==> a spirit
(-->) *doing history*: reading a map, understanding by map the representation of a set of metrical, geodesic, geological, climatological, and descriptive biogeographical data
Loeb + Watson (phototropism in animals):
every movement of the organism in the environment = a movement into which the environment forces the organism ==> **animal = reflex** <-->{Darwinism + Cartesianism ==> behaviorist psychology*}
(Watson:) [*]psychology: program of the analytical investigation of the ‘stimulus-response couple'[= conditions of the living being's adaptation to the environment through the experimental production of relations between stimulation and response] (<-- one of physical determinism) ==> consciousness nullified as illusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)
process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)
the perfect work of behaviorist psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines
Condillac's fable of the statue: in the rose's perfume, the statue is the rose's perfume ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)
(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn
==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”
we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --bu[...]
(96)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.8[...]llusory
(the living being's situation:) “its being = a conditioning” (--> as artists we still have to deal with this idea or image, it is about the reality the artist receives and what they make of it)
process of reduction:
(ajayeb --to-->) biology --to--> behavior --to--> neurology --to--> energetics (--to--> electronics)
the perfect work of behaviorist psychology: construct man as a machine reacting to machines
Condillac's fable of the statue: in the rose's perfume, the statue is the rose's perfume ==> living organism = respond to sensory stimulation (the physical mileu, light and heat, carbon and oxygen, calcium and gravity)
(Canguilhem asking) where is the living being? <-- Kohn
==> subjects “taking action” =/= objects “in movement”
we see individuals --but--> these are objects
we see centers --but--> these are environments
we see machinists --but--> these are machines
environment of behavior --coincides-with--> geographical environment --coincides-with--> physical environment
“in a human environment, man is obviously subject to a form of determinism, but it is the determinism of artificial creations in which the spirit of invention which calls them into existence is alienated.”
*psycho-technique of engineers*
...to grasp the presence in man of his own originality --> @Maarten, Mobed
as an irreducible center of resistance
“man, even when subordinated to the machine, never manages to grasp himself as a machine. his efficiency is greater the more he is aware of his central situation with regard to the mechanisms intended to serve him” [<-- *a bad story (of The Terminator, The 100, The Magicians, etc.)]
(Darwin, Laeb's) pragmatism: generalization of the notion of adaptation to the theory of knowledge
reference of organis movement to the organims itself as essential
(prepared by Kantor, Tolmann's) teleological behaviorism: recognizing the sense and intention of animal movement
(where, for whom, the individuality of the living organism stops?)
•at its ectodermic borders
•at the cell
•
cell: an environment of infra-cellular elements, it lives in an internal environment which sometimes has the dimensions of an *organ* and sometimes of the *organism*
Uexküll --> Umwelt =/= Umgebung =/= Welt
•*Umwelt* distinguishes the environment of behavior specific to an organism
•*Umgebung*: the ordinary geographical environment
•*Welt*: the universe of science
Umwelt ~ the specific environment of behavior (for the living being): a set of excitations
to be effective it must be anticipated by an attitude of the subject ~ ‘if the living being is not seeking, it won't [...]
(97)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.9[...]sal sympathy*** [~/=? ajayeb] : vitalist intuition of universal determinism ==> geographical theory of environments (= milieu): biocentric conception of the cosmos (crossed over the Middle Ages to bloom in the Renaissance)
the idea of the cosmos:
(with Copernicus and Kepler:) Earth of living beings and man : the privileged center of reference of the ancient world
**(with Galielo and Descartes -->) two theories:
•a centered qualitative space in which the mi-lieu is a center
•a decentered homogeneous space in which the mi-lieu is an intermediary field
need for expansionist security + requirements of scientific knowledge
Pascal --> we drift over a vast mileu ["we are floating in a medium of vast extent"]
he needs a place to contain him
he needs time to exist --> *durer*
(Pascal's) image of the world as a *finite totality* --> a permanent myth of originally Neo-Platonist mystical thought in which the intuition of the spherical world centered on and by the living being is combined with the already heliocentric cosmology of the Pythagoreans
(Newtonian:)
space --> means of God's omnipresence
ether --> support and medium of forces
*empiricism hides the theological foundations* ==Canguilhem==> the natural philosophy which is the source of the positivist and mechanistic conception of the environment in fact turns out to be supported by the mystical intuition of a sphere of energy whose central action is identically present and effective at every point
a story: the ideal of the objectivity of knowledge requires a *decentring of the view of things* <-- seams normal to any find formed in the mathematical and physical discipline
(Canguilhem > Haldane:) man's specific environment is the world of his perception, that is to say, the field of his pragmatic experience in which his actions, orientated and governed by values immanent to tendencies, separate out qualified objects and situate them in relation to each other and all of them in relation to himself (---> go to Barthes's discussion on the notion of operative language/tool)
--> that is why we need a different language to relate to environment
the inhuman environment =/=? ajayeb
kinds of “recognitions” that were established by disqualification of all specific subjectively centered environment [such as ajayeb], including that of man, as vital illusions or errors
*ajayeb = (one of many past) *centers of organization, adaptation, and invention* (now dissolved by science: to dissolve living beings in the anonymity of the mechanical, physical, and chemical environment ==> encompass the man)
(ajayeb's hesitate or) bold undertaking for life
[*]ajayeb's science (using Canguilhem's words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlighted by knowle[...]
(98)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.1[...]emical environment ==> encompass the man)
(ajayeb's hesitate or) bold undertaking for life
[*]ajayeb's science (using Canguilhem's words): the work of a humanity rooted in life before being enlighted by knowledge, (if) it is a fact in the world at the same time as *a vision of the world* ==> it sustains a permanent and necessary relation with perception [--> Barad] & “a living being is not reducible to a meeting point of influences” [--> Kenney]
(a meaning from the biological and physiological point of view:) *need*: an irreducible and thereby absolute system of reference (for the living being who experiences it)
how to do *reconsideration of meaning* in biological sciences?
...................................
i am torn apart between describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization's vast “improvements” and my own country's revolutionary consciousness to emerge fanatically from those ruins
catachresis استعمال غلط کلمه
a figure of speech in which words are misused from their conventional usages
***to use language out of place*** [~~--> oxymoron]
•Marianne Lien's “homeless salmon”
•Hokkaido's “frontier spirit”
•
(i constantly use catachresis in my own language, the abuse of language in describing things. did the mice “speak,” “wrote”? “The choices we make [of words] matter. Words make worlds.” [creatures] are enacted in the semiotic and material practices we weave through them ==opening==> new grounds for conversation)
world's misplacements
catachresis helps Tsing as she grope for language to describe an impossible program: a program dedicated to confusing disciplinary boundaries and to describing the challenges of life within the ruins created by modernization’ vast “improvements” --requires--> a crisis in language
Tsing's non-threatening descriptive biology
multiple rendering of salmon
U.S. and Japanese frontier technologies
(human and nonhuman) enactments of the mixed-up
*landscape*: a lens that refuses the abstraction of human-nonhuman relations in a vacuum
talking fish
acting landscapes
the still-living (~ still-kicking) as a series of misplacements
world produces its own catachresis
Tsing asks “so why is anything still alive?” (in the time of massive human disturbance)
your willingness + my dreaming
•social scientists tried to be more “scientific”: by counting and putting things into boxes (missing the interesting stuff in the sciences, including our relations with other species)
•scientists tried to be more like humanities: decoration (missing the important insights of these fields, such as the fact that ethics is useless as long as the [...]
(99)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.2[...]>
**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 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
[...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.6[...]over haunted landscapes ... ghosts are the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade
*haunted --> presence of past
*landscapes --> arrangement of living spaces
*ghosts --> disturb us in their indeterminacy
-cracked cement
-worlds have ended many times before @Jassem
-which ‘endings’ come with which ‘death of’?
•a leaf
•a city
•a friendship
•a small promise
•a small story
•
***endings ==grow==> landscapes***
[title]
shadow biology
Jassem: make sami complicated
project's two categories:
•nature --> perverse
•culture --> endangered (--therefore?--> innocent, pure)
-homesick
-seasick
-sickened in home
چیقزستن
شخصیت توصیفی --> descriptive? (drift in describing)
شخصیت حاشیهای --> digressive نامربوط پرت, excursions superficial relevances, off the subject [=/= انحرافی]
شخصیت خود محور --> rotating along the axis of ego, tangled subjective schemas with objective reality, talking regardless of the listener [egoist: vampire without self-reflection =/= narcissistic personality]
شخصیت مقایسهای --> comparing?
}=/= (always asking) how do you make a subject of conversation out of what you are concerned with --> make ‘your subjects’ into ‘subjects of conversation’ with others --> موضوع
•غیر قابل حل کردن =/=
•تفکیک کردن
(مطرح کردن به صورت که تکه تکه کرد)
[*]research: problem 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 dr />
-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’ -->[...]
(101)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.6[...]acy 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 (--> it has the structure of trace)
[@Marialena's summoning to life =/= (living) beings who can be summoned to death]
}~~?--> (Freud's) death drive (<==[...]
(102)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.8[...]pt that responds to and covers over a gap in the human capacity to inhabit a world of accident
--Freud--> sudden, unexpected event incapacitates the psyche (and its maturation) to such an extent that it will relate to the world only as accidentally existing --> [*]accident/trauma: the experience of the occurrence as having no reason [--causality as a principle of understanding]
accident ~=&==>
•trauma
•condition of possibility of a political opening to the future (one whose form is not determined a priori)
•condition of possibility of en ethical opening to the future (without guarantee)
•
}--Morris--> *accident: the name of a certain kind of freedom*
(it is initially tempting to suggest:) ghosts: symptoms of trauma, particular form of a repetition compulsion, externalized and made public, (untimeliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts
•recognition does not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma
reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation
dissociation (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) <--[...]
(103)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.9[...]sult 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 curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to 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, eve[...]
(104)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28[...]fference (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)
•
(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 pos[...]
(105)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.1[...]قدم 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 thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge
bearers of popular political agency
mediatized neoliberalizing world
(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness
spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costu[...]
(106)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.1[...]ther 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 prisonersr />
consciousness as reason --> double sense of being unmoored from explanatory and thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge
bearers of popular political agency
mediatized neoliberalizing world
(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness
spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests
inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies
the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy
(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and polit[...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.2[...]=/= 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 thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge
bearers of popular political agency
mediatized neoliberalizing world
(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness
spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests
inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies
the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy
(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)
-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]
crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form
the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere
[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)
*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*
an antecedent rendered as cause
when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured [...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.2[...]nsciousness as reason --> double sense of being unmoored from explanatory and thus causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge
bearers of popular political agency
mediatized neoliberalizing world
(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness
spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests
inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies
the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy
(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)
>
-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]
crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form
the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere
[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)
*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*
an antecedent rendered as cause
when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)
(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice
ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental
Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)
(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture [...]
(110)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.2[...]less question about appearances and the problem of knowing what they disclose
doubling of genitalia and mouth in Buli dream imagery
(marriage: to manage witchcraft)
tradition “establishes the ideal format for conviviality” ==ensuring==> sexuality and consumption are made the basis of sociality =/= witchcraft (as a perversion of marriage)
in Buli (against mistranslation or misrecognition of the foreign modern):
•Christian missionization (19th and early 20th century, and again in the 1930s)
•modernist developmentalism and statism under Suharto
•technologization associated with natural resource-based capitalism
}--scenario--> effort to become modern ==> enter an order of truth and knowledge (=/= dissimulation and doubt)
valorization of reciprocity (in Halmahera)
Morris asks: is not the coimbrication of doubt/belief precisely what the discourses of the Enlightenment science, namely knowledge through revelation of what is, promised to replace?
(Bubandt's assumptions in Kant/Morris terms:)
•doubt <== anxiety, fear, suspicion, rage (--> affective dimension)
•doubt <== an incapacity to transcend the aporia that defines the relation between the empirical and the transcendental (--> epistemological dimension)
“I have never seen a cannibal witch” --> anthropology's epistemological conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)
Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”
Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)
James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)
-he links the crisis of recognition brought on by the collapse of an authoritarian state that *had appropriated for itself the function of recognition*, to the rise of witchcraft accusations, to efforts to name a witch --> witches and not witchcraft were seen to proliferate after the fall of Suharto
•how the labor to designate the source of a menace that exceeds the empirical and that fails to explain the singular is inevitably failed
•the misrecognizing belief that eliminating witches could eliminate witchcraft
discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death
[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.5[...]l conundrum (an a priori postulate) --Kant--> an irreducible impasse between the empirical and the transcendental, of the incapacity of sensory experience (intuition) to provide the basis of absolute knowledge (=/= merely general knowledge)
Foucault --> intuition cannot ground knowledge of the absolute ~=> knowledge of individual human beings and their empirical histories cannot provide knowledge of “the human”
Evans-Pritchard --> witchcraft satisfies the demands for an explanation of the singular event: this death, of this individual, in this moment (not death in general)
~-> for Bubandt, witchcraft: reproduction and valorization of this aporia (between the transcendental and the empirical)
James Siegel naming the witch (not only a political history but an investigation into the entire history of anthropological discourse on witchcraft and sorcery)
-he links the crisis of recognition brought on by the collapse of an authoritarian state that *had appropriated for itself the function of recognition*, to the rise of witchcraft accusations, to efforts to name a witch --> witches and not witchcraft were seen to proliferate after the fall of Suharto
•how the labor to designate the source of a menace that exceeds the empirical and that fails to explain the singular is inevitably failed
•the misrecognizing belief that eliminating witches could eliminate witchcraft
discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death
{ radical empiricism = close reading }==> attentive listening
...................................
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689012
(two competing conceptions and aspirations,) two paradigms of communication:
•an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement
•to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)
Morris: the social scene is technologically heterogeneous ==> epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought
structure: an eruption of the mediaticity of the medium onto the horizon of reflexive consciousness (Kittler)
(in still decolonizing nations) the function of mediation has implicitly emerged as an agonistic exchange about the very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism
..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa
aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real vi[...]
(116)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.5[...]
discern death drive in the very place that there is an effort to escape death
{ radical empiricism = close reading }==> attentive listening
...................................
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/689012
(two competing conceptions and aspirations,) two paradigms of communication:
•an ideal public sphere that recognizes the task of mediation but also requires its effacement
•to bypass mediation through apparently immediate forms of speech that range from visual slogans to messianic utterances that can be heard even by the dead (--> frustrated by deferral)
Morris: the social scene is technologically heterogeneous ==> epochal and ontological schemata of mediatic displacement must thus be rethought
structure: an eruption of the mediaticity of the medium onto the horizon of reflexive consciousness (Kittler)
(in still decolonizing nations) the function of mediation has implicitly emerged as an agonistic exchange about the very possibility of exchange (not of deliberation) --> possibility of political representationalism
..stranded in its imaginary between the twin phantasms of the mining town in postapartheid South Africa
aspiring to a radical openness and threatened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)
[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the r[...]
(119)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]ened by it...
limits and the contradictions of democratic consciousness
environment as a monstrous hybrid of statistical hysteria and narrative compulsion as well as real violence (that takes its shape under conditions of largely racialized economic inequality)
[i have been working and listening to that which] call our attention to ***other spaces, identities, and structures of obligation*** (=/= defensive strategies)
cell phones
•technological mediums of absent voices
•lighting up, buzzing, or ringing
•ciphers of a profane immanence
•fetishes in which are concealed the histories of mining and labor elsewhere
•promise contact with elsewhere + obstacles to the desire for full presence and the performative power of words ==> frustrated desire
a public whose membership cannot be known in advance--even when exclusionary limits are constitutive of its domain --> [*]public sphere: social formations enabled by technomedia phenomena (=/= spaces of rational deliberation and consensus making--as in liberal political theory, public sphere characterized by deliberative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of c[...]
(120)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]ative processes)
*scenes of overhearing* --> public speaking makes that overhearing its goal
“migrant pirates of deindustrialization” (speak only to threaten) --> liberal opposition between language and violence ~~--> the rhetorical grace appropriate to leadership (inauguration speech of Obama, his charisma emanated from his identification with a righteous struggle --> *his being more than himself* [<-- young artist selflessness syndrome in aspiration with the right politcal cause])
zamazamas’ illiteracy, not eligible for a public sphere that depends on literacy. for without literacy, they cannot submit to the law. *defined in its essence by legality* (sustained by a desired opposition between language and violence)
a signature (sign your own name): a form of writing recognizable across all (mainly romanized) languages and is the ideal condition of possibility of recognition from within its constitutional order
mimic the address of someone wit charisma (~= authority)
(Morris on) mediaticity of speech (and not merely of media technologies)
Morris reading of a scene (of quotidian exchange) in HIV/AIDS NGO office: a metonym and a metaphor for a kind of South African public sphere that aspires to inclusiveness but is terrorized by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and v[...]
(122)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]zed by its incapacity to know what that opens it up to
•arms itself against potentially aggressive others
•narratives of violence work *to reinforce the sense of necessity* (for a general securitization)
•work in the mode of a **negative meritocracy** (= those who would violate the rights of others are to be excluded, but no others --but--> how to know in advance who has perpetrated or intends to perpetrate such a violation?)
...in the shadow of communicational technology's fashion industry
...bountiful banality of the technologies and artifacts of mass reproducibility
[...] --> lithography --(superseded by)--> photography --(gives way to)--> cinema --(transformed by)--> sound technology --(displaced by)--> integrated and multiplatform digital media --> [...]
(teleological fantasy:) ontologized in epochal schema (these sequences become something more and different) --> analog media are said to be displaced by digital media ==> logic of representation gives way to that of information
=/= (Morris questioning) the conflation of media with mediation, which is itself symptomatic of both a technological determinism and an effort to ontologize technology --> a crises of mediation (not media): the communicative aspiration and the presumptive unity of medium and message in language are brought to their limit (--> media technologies play a role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)
-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence
(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality
witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen
zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)
...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism
rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral
fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)
*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)
(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space
transmission and iden[...]
(123)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]s of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]
the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
◾typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment
(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circuiting to which the slogan aspires with language that is stripped of ambiguity
messianism: the drive to transcend mediation altogether
(Jassem's mode of) explaining what had happened with all the art of a storyteller and truly Spartican authority
-[Spartan athlete: marked by simplicity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]
(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation
performance of moral righteousness
exclusion at the threshold of liberation
unconscnconscious mythopoetic structures
insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance
offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy
strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation
Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eighteenth Brumaire, that *the identity of the workers’ interests does not automatically become the basis of a sense of community* --> workers are blocked in their capacities for self-representation ==> ***eloquent appropriation of the workers’ possible but interrupted capacity for self-representation***
~~> messianism & sublime
(in liberal electoral democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond
(sensation of presence and immediacy [...]
(124)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.8[...]act of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]
the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment
(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circuiting to which the slogan aspires with language that is stripped of ambiguity
messianism: the drive to transcend mediation altogether
(Jassem's mode of) explaining what had happened with all the art of a storyteller and truly Spartican authority
-[Spartan athlete: marked by simplicity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]
(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation
performance of moral righteousness
exclusion at the threshold of liberation
unconscious mythopoetic structures
insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance
offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy
strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation
Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eighteenth Brumaire, that *the identity of the workers’ interests does not automatically become the basis of a sense of community* --> workers are blocked in their capacities for self-representation ==> ***eloquent appropriation of the workers’ possible but interrupted capacity for self-representation***
~~> messianism & sublime
(in liberal electoral democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond
(sensation of presence and immediacy heightened in) face-to-face --> transcendent experience of communication --> that “there be no loss or dissipation between speaking and being heard”
(messianic utterance of) slogan <--> immediacy
-->? banishing ambiguity at the expensive of signification
aspiration to immediacy + communicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies
(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea[...]
(125)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.8[...] />
unconscious mythopoetic structures
insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance
offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy
strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation
Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eighteenth Brumaire, that *the identity of the workers’ interests does not automatically become the basis of a sense of community* --> workers are blocked in their capacities for self-representation ==> ***eloquent appropriation of the workers’ possible but interrupted capacity for self-representation***
~~> messianism & sublime
(in liberal electoral democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond
(sensation of presence and immediacy heightened in) face-to-face --> transcendent experience of communication --> that “there be no loss or dissipation between speaking and being heard”
(messianic utterance of) slogan <--> immediacy
-->? banishing ambiguity at the expensive of signification
aspiration to immediacy + communicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies
(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea of) “perfect transmission of intention ==> production of consensus”
...................................
[explosion of accuracies]
...................................
after death there is:
•rumer
•afterlife
•
...................................
(Nicholas Shapiro shows in his research on) people in ordinary toxic homes: *their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposure was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*
(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)
silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes
somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is si[...]
(126)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]es for self-representation ==> ***eloquent appropriation of the workers’ possible but interrupted capacity for self-representation***
~~> messianism & sublime
(in liberal electoral democratic order:) “having a voice = the mark of political subjectivity” --> (a very bad definition of) power: making oneself heard and heard in a manner to which others must respond
(sensation of presence and immediacy heightened in) face-to-face --> transcendent experience of communication --> that “there be no loss or dissipation between speaking and being heard”
(messianic utterance of) slogan <--> immediacy
-->? banishing ambiguity at the expensive of signification
aspiration to immediacy + communicative fullness --> simple *oppositional corrective*
a substantialized, corporealized figuration of power vs. EFF make themselves into pure proxies
(pedagogy, a horrible and wrong idea of) “perfect transmission of intention ==> production of consensus”
...................................
[explosion of accuracies]
...................................
after death there is:
•rumer
•afterlife
•
...................................
(Nicholas Shapiro shows in his research on) people in ordinary toxic homes: *their apprehension of conventionally insensible domestic chemical exposure was informed by sustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*
(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)
silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes
somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])
‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability
**som[...]
(127)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]ustained attention to barely perceptible alteration of somatic function and atmosphere*
(Sloterdijk, Latour, Anderson, Berlant, Stewart, Shapiro) to explain body's relation to the world --> ancillary process of being a living body as:
•becoming sensitive
•embodying atmospheres
•somatically judging environments
•becoming corporeal aware of nonhumans
•protracted low-level encounter with domestic chemicals --accumulate--> *chemical sublime* <== (indistinct and distributed harm of) late industrial material ecologies (=/= enlightenment sublime: spectacle material threat with transcendence of immaterial reason)
silent and invisible microemissions accrue within the envelope of the home --> residents reckon with how their homes are decomposing into them as they decompose in their homes
somatic work of the chemically concerned is enmeshed with an *apprehension of their own bodies that is simultaneously sensuous and epistemological* (~ “bodily knowledge” situated within a process of “bodily reasoning” that tempers not just what one knows but what one becomes with or is estranged from [=/= forensic architecture notion of knowledge])
‘sustained bodily reasoning ==> chemical sublime’
Shapiro + Kim Fortune --> call for ways to differently know and reimagine our ongoing late industrial present, which is marked by deteriorating sociotechnical systems and economic, climate, and infrastructural instability
**somatic susceptibility and epistemic capacity** common to human life --(informed by nonhuman life)--> molecular and relational appreciation --Shapiro--> domestically exposed (the ‘chemically wounded’ attuning to their own effects and affects ~ discerning the barely perceptible constituents of their environment [=/= “deviant agents,” diagnosed, resistors]
toxic = potency --implicate--> vulnerability of a living body
years of exposure --> biochemically magnified effects --> semiotically enflamed
somatic cognizance
(Shapiro on affect and phenomenological studies of environmental exposure -->) formaldehyde indicators and agents of social abandonment and precarity
(growing literature on) the body as existential, pedagogical, and ethical grounds of (cultures of) science
Shapiro: “how can expanding the avenues and temporality of sensing yield an appreciation of what many of us are abbreviating from our own sense of the world?”
Shapiro ethnographically elucidates the *somatic mode of attention*
--> bodies are sites for both actively absorbing the world and being put into motion by its constituent medley of humans and nonhumans
-becoming with (Haraway)
-orienting toward (Ahmed)
-bodily reasoning (Shapiro): the dynamic process through which knowledge of individual spaces of chronic exposure is somat[...]
(129)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]ts as primary indicators of environmental contamination
--but--> smell recede from perception over time as they become incorporated into new senatorial norms (sensitivity down-regulates in a process of olfactory adaptation)
microscopic encounters --sensed--> less nameable and more diffuse sensory practices
exposure: an affective space, at the limit of the phenomenal, the somatic proceeds and then is entangled with the rational
sublime (in chemistry): transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form
*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air
(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object[...]
(136)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29[...]: transform from solid to gas bypassing the intermediate liquid form
*nuclear sublime*
weapons scientists felt the blast bore into the being, into their faces, register of the power of the bomb
spectacular, brutal, and lightening-fast sensorial pummeling, tossing them to the ground
=/=
*chemical sublime*
formaldehyde sedate speed of chemical off-gassing and the regular human breathing; (not signalled by overwhelming sensory stimuli rather) indicated by a thickening veil of indistinction as perceptual faculties became occluded
...the bodywork employed to apprehend the qualities of indoor air
(Masco & Kant's privileging of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diver[...]
(137)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29[...]of) sublimity's correlation with public, spectacular, and violent events =/= (Shapiro's sublimity:) *profundity and density of widespread, private, indistinct, chronic, and fragmented phenomena*
chemical sublime = انباشت استدلالهای جسمانی accrual of bodily reasoning
irritations --> agitations ==> attenuate the effects of vast toxic infrastructure
(masco nuclear) sublime ==translate==> resounding ethical call
chemical sublime ==> ?
...industry's mobilization of law, science, capital
Shapiro: we must look at how the sublime has brokered relations between exposure and the status quo since at least down of the enlightenment
(quintessential of enlightenment project) Kant's sublime: the immensity/might first overwhelms our imaginative capacity (or indicating the fragility of human body yielding a sense of helplessness and distress) then this feeling is countered and ultimately overcome by reassuring one's self of power of the mind ==> reason sets humanity apart and above the physical world
[*]sublime: *internal turmoil and sensuous displeasure is elevated into the delight and superiority of reason* --> humanity's continued progressing
(Shapiro + Gene Ray: ideological function of the aesthetic category of the) sublime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventf[...]
(138)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]blime within Kant's critical system is anxiously bound up with deep *metaphysical optimism*
formulation of sublime:
•form (space, time, and intensity) of exposure
•the relation between the supersensible (mind) and the sensible (matter)
•orientational movement (from without to within or vice versa)
•political reckoning
*bodily reasoning =/= object (of sublime) held at a distance
*sublimation of toxicity =/= mental mastery (over perceived threats)
*amplify =/= extinguish (the tensions, agitations, dissident potentiality of large-scale hazards)
*coalescing of underrecognized disturbances =/= compensation
*beginning of a confrontation =/= resolution
foil of human triumph: “transforming the worst into the best” <-- not possible anymore
...~->? potentiality of living otherwise (---> go to Tsing's contaminated diversity, Chen's queer toxicity)
...in these spaces where *enduring and knowing* are coterminous, the feeling of a living dead seeped into the margins of life for those with even minimal symptoms
(chemical phenomenology)
molecular cohabitants who physically hold our world together also encourage our unravelling*** [Shapiro] becoming a pupil of the air [Sloterdijk] is to attune to the aerostolized material culture and more-than-human semiotics [Kohn] within which one is immersed
***
chemical sublime (does not merely refigure a form of sublime in philosophical discourse but) poses an alternative **schema of eventfulness** (or call to action)
...................................
[title]
kulturgeist
...................................
Zizek - Organs without Bodies. Deleuze and Consequences
(i am still at the title:) in your efforts to make ‘body without organ’ (the emergent, non-hierarchical, inclusive, flexible, smart, liquid good object) you might end up creating ‘organ without body’ (monstrous, hierarchical, authoritative, soulless, archaic bad object)
functional specificity of organs =/= to release the decoded and deterritorialized flows of [*]desire: a process of production without reference to any exterior agency (--although--> ‘fascism = desire’)]
an example of body without organ is the ‘ocean’ for Marialena
(for Marialena) ocean [~=? fluid women] (an unstratificated, non-coded flow, sex organs sprout everywhere, no organ is constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body
(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *poten[...]
(139)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]istemology of] Luther:) faith = a commitment to the representation of a truth --> Western Christianity's own efforts to discern truth and the nature of the world
proliferation of witches in 15th century Europe
reassuring relief for the pious believer: force Satan (and his followers) from the shadows through an interpretive expertise over the concrete secondary manifestations of God's reality --✕--> (most had no luxury to imagine) *the embrace of life that the devil urges in binary opposition to that of the good*
--> Devil interfering with the most intimate communications with the Divine
-how does one really know who is speaking when prayer is returned?
[for] the demonologists of the 15th and 16th century --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front of me!” : reality of witches ==> Satan
Institoris, Sprenger, Johannes Nider,
the name of the witch ~=> sacrilegious and inhuman deeds (subject to verification)
*inquisitors believed that what was reported to them was possible* (still they desired proof) <== interweaving of learned demonology into the fabric of a dominant theology (<-- sovereignty of God ratified primarily through the worldly evidence of Satan) + invisibility of the spiritual world was expressed as an essential given
{for the inquisitor (witch hunter) it was never enough to simply “believe” <==> a narrative must be produced that at least partially satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*
truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices
ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to representing the “primitive” reality in order to interpret it in its true picture
-Marcel Griaule's approach to fieldwork: “The crime is the fact, the guilty party the interlocutor, and accomplices are all the members of this society. [...]the abundance of pieces of evidence serving to convict appear to facilitate the inquest, but in reality they guide it into labyrinths--labyrinths that are often organized. [...]The inquest must be treated like a strategic operation.”
--> nonsense to be mastered had shifted from the demonic, incredible forces at play for the inquisitor to the misguided tall tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of the manifestations of misogyny, aggressively frames the scene of a feminist encounter with witch-hunt as a kind of antagonistic trial of social organization of the Middle Ages in transition to early capitalism... a mode of attention that is equally didactic and forensic as the witch inquisitors]
recognition of the struggle that lay at the heart of raising testimony to the status of the “really real” --A[...]
(140)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.4[...] as a kind of antagonistic trial (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the anthropologist)
*fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings that is itself haunted*
imaginative result of “I-witnessing”
*paradoxical necessity of an expressive element within an objective test in relation to what would other wise be nonsense* is evident in many of the examples of 16th century visual culture --> ajayeb bestiary
trial by ordeal
(illustrated in Eduard Fuchs)
the case: if the woman floats she is clearly able to contravene the nature and is therefore a witch or heretic; if she sinks, she has made no such pact with Satan
-procedural expertise --> trial by water here functions as *experiment as much as a punishment* designed to reveal an other wise invisible truth
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers
(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**
**medicalization of the invisible**
possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)
witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria
*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status[...]
(141)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.5[...]al results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> early version of the ‘case study’ (synthesized as evidence in service of accounting for variation that exceeded general laws regarding relations and phenomenon in the world)
Baxstrom + Meyers
(ajayeb's) individual cases: an effective strategy in providing analytic (and empirical) purchase for phenomenon that were other wise invisible to even the discerning eye of the expert <-- **to move away from a reliance on metaphysics**
**medicalization of the invisible**
possession
set the stage for the explicit medicalization of the mobile invisible forces that experts had been struggling to master, explain, and take measures against --> a new mode that was equally *didactic and forensic* (as the theological frameworks deployed by inquisitors and the exorcise of demons by Church)
witchcraft, faith healing, and demonic possession
Bibliotheque diabolique --> case studies to demonstrate the precariousness of misrepresentation and the consequences of ignorance ~= investigations collected by Charcot and his students in their studies of hysteria
•clarifying the link between witchcraft and hysteria
*witch hunting and the exorcism of spirits in the 16th century (--> antiquated forms of inquiry) ~=?! clinical studies of nervous illness in the 19th century --> conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science*:
•fascination with the secondary visible effects of primary invisible forces
•long-term labor of social interpretation that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones
==> “witch = misdiagnosed”
epilepsy, the sacred disease, erroneously perceived as resulting from hostile magic
=/= hysteria (hold a special place in the moral imaginary)
the special susceptibility of women to witchcraft mirrored the “feminine weakness” associated with the hysteric, exacerbated by low social status
-in countless accounts of possession, we find descriptions of demons speaking through the mouths of girls
[Baxstrom + Meyers =/= Federici's flat analysis of witch hunt as the tool of subjugation of the local population or of woman by men]
tableau vivant --into--> tableau clinique --into--> tableau critique
hysterical reliving of the original symptom --> reframed trauma: an attempt to suspend the two temporalities (real and reimagined) in the same image
@Hoda
one element of fascination with hysteria was its “look” --> hysteria's aesthetic link to forms of possession
possession --> aneasthesias, amnesias, subconscious acts, somnambulisms, fixed ideas
a scaffolding: conceptually arranged chasm between outer and inner states ==>
•exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across t[...]
(142)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.6[...] thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions
Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages
Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)
Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
>
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•
...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge
attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises
(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”
(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alted alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe
[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)
...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats
Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]
when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticula[...]
(143)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.7[...]is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
◾twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and soand societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)
(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for t[...]
(144)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...] witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in the company of the goddess Diana
}--> conjoining of witch image to demonological discourse [<-- an empirically verifiable invention in the late medieval period and the Renaissance]
*the oscillating value of the non-fictive* (of its discrete artifacts)
hybrid human–animal creatures with each “natural” species being traceable within the complete appearance of the demonic creature
(coming into contemporary performance art -->) figures from antiquity:
•Saturn @Ale
•Circe @Bryana (changing men into beasts, games of chance, gambling, tricks, slight of hand, illusion, hybrid animal–human forms of the demons dancing around the “grandmother” with surprisingly young and beautiful appearance --melancholy--> general sense of sexual and societal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->
pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau
(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]
Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)
(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology
(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to desc[...]
(145)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...]+ Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”
transgressive approach to the archive:
◦Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences ances across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface
promiscuous: neither wholly artistic nor scientific =/=? hybrid artistic and scientific
traverse steep slope between past and future in the form of an event =/= plot
inability to automatically categorize Häxan (or any work of art) <== ***formal strategy rooted in an epistemic virtue***
***(in later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual [...]
(146)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30[...] by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*
(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power"
/>
question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world
sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her
proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence
(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning
...so it is no stretch to suggest that...
subject and subtext
dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch
•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind
(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another
/>
stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization
Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)
Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
m[...]
(147)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.1[...] who embraces her
proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence
(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning
...so it is no stretch to suggest that...
subject and subtext
dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch
•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind
(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another
stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization
Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot that is intensive =/= introspective)
Häxan film --> progressive unfolding of the material world through the style of a lecture
-exploration of the wonders and “errors” of the past (with near-messianic belief in the perfectibility of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into sup[...]
(148)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]y of man)
magnified form of realist cinema + rooted in a naturalist impulse --> Christensen's witch is not only here now, it has always been here: “witch = a figure of nature”
-Häxan begins with woodcuts, drawings, and paintings that originate from *an act of touch* ==> haptic vision ==> to present figurative cliched givens ==> establish the ground
-seizes (the audience) and is seized (by the witch)
-seeing and touching *virtual beings* (such as devils)
--> rigorously logical structure + expressing the tangible singularity of the power of the witch
*(from) tales --to--> theology --to--> diagnosis*
“advancement” of natural knowledge <--> demonology
witch: a viral character
witch hunters's trial by water *is not a “trial” but rather an experiment* (to identify evidence of evil's presence---in the absence of direct unmotivated proof) --operating--> though a form of non-knowledge <-- mastery of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan<br />
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcra[...]
(149)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.2[...]might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)
Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images
maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)
saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches
(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments
(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**
mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)
line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)
Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)
*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->
(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stupidity
the inquisitor priest/friar (wit[...]
(151)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.3[...]e)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)
inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)
to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently
unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations
the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice
a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched
following satan's idiom...
Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence
*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves
Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”
working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)
etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight
beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space
totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor
(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot
sense of corporeal alienat[...]
(152)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.4[...]==> geo
[*]Renaissance: the age of demonology, the age of cosmographic revolution (--> nature of causality)
-presence of the devil in geographical space
-composite and cross-disciplinary network of nonhuman causality and transmedia writing [demonologists + cosmographers + travellers]
•demonology: identifiable shared discursive field ---> go to Baxstrom
•demon --> gunpowder (according to Rabelais and others) is the diabolical element amongst the classic tricolon: gunpowder, the nautical compass, and the printing press
emergence of a Christian science of the devil (in the medieval West) --> liberation of demons (from supralunar to sublunar --> into earthly realms)
Sabbat: an outpost of hell very much belonging to this world
...................................
*finding ghost is what we are all here for*
...nagging mischief they cause can turn deadly
violently jerks the body of the medium around
occasionally threatening or attacking onlookers
“keep filming” one of the old women whispers behind me --> i do what i am told = i do exactly what i want to do
anthropologist = i cannot directly “see” the demon or the spirit [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there
(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life
[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of the “native”
(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life
[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire t[...]
(153)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.6[...]o
anthropologist = i cannot directly “see” the demon or the spirit [~ what i am told to see, @apass #feedback], but i am convinced that they are there
(ajayeb --?-->) older practices of defining social facts and the discovery, interpretation, and definition of the read ==> (roots of the predisposition of research:) to sense, interpret, and eventually master forces that appear to be nonsensical and yet are held to be essential to the reality of everyday social life
[mad:] the notion of *irrational* as a privileged space in medical discourses (in France in the 19th century) ==> a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of the “native”
(Baxstrom's work on witch craze [in 16th century] --arguing-->) the problem of establishing proof in reference to the invisible forces has durably shaped our modes of investigating human social and cultural life
[ajayebnameh =/=]
social or cultural anthropology in the 21st century = (human sciences’ contemporary equivalent of the) *old efforts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense
[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in[...]
(154)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.6[...]ts to master the invisible* -->{test ==> felicitous information as to the “true” nature of obscure forces and their operations within empirical real-world contexts}
[ajayeb: (part of the histories of)] systematic, empirical investigation of strange events, singularities, miracles, and other types of staple phenomena ~~--> scientific method and the forms of knowledge that emerged as the foundation of an ensemble of *sciences proper to humans* --> yet has been unable to expel (the unprovable forces) considering the origins and forms of human diversity
[*]anthropology: the desire to credibly master nonsense
[with ajayeb studies i am learing to be] able to argue for a world below the threshold of perception (of medicine, biology, physics --> defined their relation to the nonsensical via a *visibility to come* ==> [embodied in new technologies:] photograph, microscope, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)
(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*
fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)
fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by[...]
(156)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.7[...]pe, telescope)
Deleuze --> when writing of communication between heterogeneous systems --> [we must pay attention to] what is this agent, this force which ensures communication? (<-- role of difference and resemblance)
forensic anthropology
[title]
imaging and imagining technologies
the confusion of the empirical (knowledge traversed by our everyday observations, sensations, passions) and the transcendental (construction of an ideal knower, now it is the queer) in apass
figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)
(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*
fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)
fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking
...the field-worker must, under the signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with the unknown [of the other artist to whom one gives feedback])
(Baxstrom:) witch hunt = experiential engagement with nonsense
Malinowski --> how can the invisible be forced into visibility or sensibility? ==>
•connect the study of diverse human[...]
(158)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.7[...]man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)
(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*
fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)
fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking
...the field-worker must, under the sighe signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with the unknown [of the other artist to whom one gives feedback])
(Baxstrom:) witch hunt = experiential engagement with nonsense
Malinowski --> how can the invisible be forced into visibility or sensibility? ==>
•connect the study of diverse human social practices to the seemingly nonsensical worlds of gods, spirits, and witches that were offered as explanations
•countering hierarchical and polygenetic theories of diversity
•appropriate empirical tests in the face of the doubled, impossible object of knowledge
*method = cultivated ability to craft experience and testimony into a “sensible” explanation of what otherwise would simply be ruled out as “nonsense”
15th century Europe ecclesiastical crisis:
•demons going viral (the viral proliferation of demonic po[...]
(159)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.7[...]tely, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking
...the field-worker must, under the signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with the unknown [of the other artist to whom one gives feedback])
(Baxstrom:) witch hunt = experiential engagement with nonsense
Malinowski --> how can the invisible be forced into visibility or sensibility? ==>
•connect the study of diverse human social practices to the seemingly nonsensical worlds of gods, spirits, and witches that were offered as explanations
•countering hierarchical and polygenetic theories of diversity
•appropriate empirical tests in the face of the doubled, impossible object of knowledge
*method = cultivated ability to craft experience and testimony into a “sensible” explanation of what otherwise would simply be ruled out as “nonsense”
15th century Europe ecclesiastical crisis:
•demons going viral (the viral proliferation of demonic power beyond the grasp of human intuition and thought)
•proliferation of witches (within the general population)
}==> growing power of Satan on earth --> (sign of impending) apocalypse
==> growing fear and great doubt [--> like today!]
Malleus Maleficarum (on witchcraft, a revolution in early middle ages) -->
1. local relation between investigative procedures
2. constitution of evidence
3. assertion of a fact
--> expertise in matters real but invisible
16th century notions of the positive element of seeing witches, sorcerers, and Satan himself
God's apparent absence *in times of great change and strife* --> an *interpretive expertise* over the concrete, secondary manifestation of God's reality (was reassuring) ==> a relief to the pious believer : “God's embrace of life =/= devil's embrace of life” =/= Heretics managed God's absence without that opposition (a luxury to imagine such a world was denied to most of the people in that period, also denied to the modern subject of the secular present)
how does one know who is really hearing the prayers [of the faithful]?
[...]
(161)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.8[...]itnessing = a form of truth* }~-> Boyle's New Experiments 1660 revolutionized practical experimental procedures in the laboratory (for gernerations to come...)
•experiments such as the trial by water demonstrates a deep (if not misguided) *appreciation of cause-and-effect relations* relative to the invisible forces at work in the natural world (=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition) ~=> rendering of such procedures in expressive works of *art* (indispensable to nascent protoscience --today--> an essential element of science's ability to express truth)
_+***'`~~/!=-~>
***the logic of gathering evidence***
(fundamental assumption of anthropology:)
[asserted by Levy-Bruhl:] ontological difference between the nonsensical world of “primitives” and the science of Western research ==> *“natives” could not (or would not) produce a “proper” explanation of the forces around them or their own beliefs and motivations in relation to these forces* (==> testimony + experience became essential tools for ethnographers)
--> ***encounter between researcher and subject*** [was never that of good faith intercultural sharing] ==constituted==> a series of severe tests (by which the researcher could gather necessary empirical evidence in order to make a felicitous truth statement regarding what was “really” at play)
}--> the nonsense to be mastered shifted from the demonic (~ incredible forces at play for the inquisitor ديوى) --to--> ديوانه the misguided tall tales fo the native
---->{this is relevant for artistic research environment, encounter/friction between different styles of knowing
#feedback: mastering the nonsense of the other artist-researcher
@apass, research presentation: misguided tall tales artists tell themselves}
[#feedback as passion]
Avital --> a passion or experience without mastery, without subjectivity, testimony, as passion, always renders itself vulnerable to doubt
([?can we think of] artistic feedback as a) *scene of ethnographic encounter* --> a kind of *antagonistic trial* (whereby the ghosts and gods of the natives are forced out of the shadows and made concretely apparent to the senses of the ethnographer)
--> (in this context) fieldwork ==> knowledge of hauntings + other nonsense that is itself haunted ~-> what gives testimony its power of fact {--Derrida--> if testimony truly resolves as certainty or mere information, it would lose its function as testimony --> testimony must allow itself to be haunted}--> [*]testimony: visualization of what cannot normally be seen
[my misunderstanding of ethnography ==> my approach to giving and receiving feedback --> the workshop i gave ‘little fables of practice'] *(your) ‘fact’ must allow itself to be parasitized by precisely what it excludes from its inner depths, of being a fable*
the picture of researcher's humanity [...]
(163)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.9[...]esults of “I witnessing”**
@apass [what we do mainly is] witnessing eachother's works and mode of existence
+ paradoxical necessity of an expressive element
testimony + experimental results + expert inquisitorial interpretation ==> (an early versoin of) ‘case study’ ==> formation of ‘general law’
*inquisitorial strategies* (developed in the human sciences from the 19th century onward): جزء به کل ”(close analysis of) salient individual cases ==> hidden tendencies visible” [--> and is abused in storytelling]
[in both science and art] seeking to move away from *reliance on metaphysics* to a *reliance on verifiable details* (in their own expressions)
acknowledging satan's unquestioned power <--doubt--> truth-value of statements made by unlearned witnesses
*possession* (confessions of another sort)
confessions that were not ‘procured’ [ritualized torture of the witch trial to generate evidence] but rather ‘volunteered’ and ‘enacted’ (without the aid of inquisitor)
<== individual turmoil (=/= juridical manipulation)
==> medicalization (of the invisible forces) --> (a new mode) *didactic & forensic*
17th century --> a shift in the empirical approach to invisible forces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer
@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]
Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation
now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of t[...]
(164)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]rces
clinical hysteria --> fascination with a power that (by definition) destabilizes binaries such as inner/outer
@Pierre, apass? #feedback
****symptomology: discovering without learning****
--> physicians in relation to haunted nun, mobilized by attention, considers the deployment of a knowledge in the new and visible form of an appearing [of the other's nonsenses (~ artwork --> the object of feedback: an inconsistent invisible object of inquiry renamed and reimagined by the feedback)]
Charcot [in his storied career of the father of modern neurology] dealing with relations between religious ecstasy, magic, witchcraft, and “nervous disease” <-- great doctor's decision to compile <-- discernible
•weyer --> appealed to people's better nature and reason
•Bourneville --> appealed to an appraisal of history in service of a project on modernity
}--> to demonstrate the precariousness of interpretation & the consequences of ignorance
}--> (errors of) demonologists and exorcists rooted in (what was characterized as) the mistaken conceptualization of their object of investigation
now antiquated *forms of inquiry* --> 16th century's witch-hunting and exorcism of spirits ~/= 19th century's clinical studies of nervous illness <-- conceptual scaffolding of the emergent science (by Charcot and his students) --> *visible effects of primary invisible forces* involved a *long term labor of social interpretation* that required the mutation of old categories and the creation of new ones...
}==> (19th century's new definition of the) witch: misdiagnosed hysterics of the middle ages <--{ susceptibility of women to witchcraft <== “feminine weakness” }
physical signs of witchcraft recorded centuries earlier --> detailed indexing of symptoms such as:
•religious ferver and stigmatization
•psychosomatic indicators such as blue edema or swelling with local cyanosis and hypothermia and autographic skin (that would appear intensely red after touch)
primitive practices ==> the word “medicine” (derived from the name Medea: the mother of witchcraft)
•epilepsy --> the sacred disease ([perceived] to result from hostile magic --rethought--> to result in terms of individual physiological disorder)
•hysteria [from the greek “uterus"] --> hold a special place in the moral imaginary
indigent madwoman: in the 17th century nearly 10000 women (destitute women, the insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a second Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin
***(Ulrich Baer > Baxstrom:) Charcot ==> transformation of *[...]
(165)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...]e insane, “idiots,” epileptics, and Parisian society's “least favored classes” [---> go to Foucault]) were kept in La Force prison, a second Bastille, in Paris
=/= the nuns and devoted female members of the church, who raised special concern when they were “possessed” by unexplained forces of demonic or neurologic origin
***(Ulrich Baer > Baxstrom:) Charcot ==> transformation of *tableau vivant* --to--> *tableau clinique* : a hysterical reliving of the original symptom and reframed trauma that attempted to suspend the two temporalities (real + imagined) in the same image***
[Sina ==> --to--> *tableau critique* : ??]
--> Freud and Breuer's efforts (in “reliving” with hypnosis) to isolate the mechanisms of hysteria
Acta Sanctorum [---> go to Attar's tazkirat ~ hagiography]
countless early descriptions of entities speaking through the mouths of girls and of the manifestation of “external signs” in the possessed @Bryana
(associated with) possession:
•anesthesias
•amnesias
•subconscious acts
•somnambulisms
•fixed ideas
•
***conceptually arranged abyss between outer and inner states ==> *literal mastery of nonsense* ==> gaining empirical purchase over forces openly acknowledged to be invisible and insensible in themselves***
•the exorcists (building upon the techniques of inquisitors and witch-hunters) take on possession acted as the *bridge across this abyss*
•the neurologists and psychologists draw unknowable forces out of the inner voids via the *symptom* --Malinowski--> witches, spirits, demons acting as middlemen and guids (=/= explicit target of inquiry) in the field of worker's journey to the dark cornerss of the real
----> (Baxstrom's anthropological insight is useful in artistic feedback, for) in apass: (we use exorcist technique + clinical symptomology) to bridge across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) *[...]
(166)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...]unters) take on possession acted as the *bridge across this abyss*
•the neurologists and psychologists draw unknowable forces out of the inner voids via the *symptom* --Malinowski--> witches, spirits, demons acting as middlemen and guids (=/= explicit target of inquiry) in the field of worker's journey to the dark cornerss of the real
----> (Baxstrom's anthropological insight is useful in artistic feedback, for) in apass: (we use exorcist technique + clinical symptomology) to bridge across the abyss between the artwork and artist (~ the enunciation and enunciator) --Sina--> ‘enunciation is the guide to an enunciator’ #feedback
Levy-Bruhl's haughty binarized “us and them” (his focus on “the primitive” as a category of social analysis and his insistence upon an unbridgeable epistemic gap) --> darker history of human sciences: an embarrassing historical curiosity... *an unsunstainable position* --Baxstrom--> Levy-Bruhl lost his position in th canon because the logic of his arguments regarding the forces that shaped the life-worlds of non-western people denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]
(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*
in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself
grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]
(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences
*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form of mastery demands a closeness to things unseen, unprovable, indeed ‘nonsensical,’ yet unquestionably ‘there’* -Baxstrom
[...]
(168)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.2[...]sequences are suddenly considered to be a monstrosity (#apocalyptic) ==> abstain & repent --> Leo:
environmentalist logic: “precaution = abstention”
‘global warming’ is an unintended consequence (like anything in earth) <-- narrative of attachment =/= an scandal, end of the world (<-- apocalyptic narrative of emancipation, modernist myth of mastery)
pristine nature =/= our nature ~= national park: a rural ecosystem complete with post offices, well-tended roads, highly subsidized cows, and handsome villages
(Latour giving the example of theology:) ‘mastery ==> attachment’ : “the christian God gets folded into, involved with, implicated with, and incarnated into his creation.” =/= a master who is freed from dependents
}--Latour--> dominion means attachment
...................................
Mi You
modernization process of European societies ==> secularity ==> “religion = only one option among other ways of self-fulfilment and human flourishing”
*self-sufficient humanism has never existed on the same scale before in European societies before the Enlightenment*
...................................
#writing for mini-series bestiaries
inspired by the https://www.instagram.com/ajayebedidani/
1. https://www.instagram.com/p/CPYnbZnH2w3/ short episode at night in country X there is a talking apple that speeks in unknown language. character acting, location garden, animation, play with mixed CG architecture
2.
...................................
borderline animals --in--> medieval bestiary
...................................
*alegorical world* --> eastern fables + easter & western animal lore + christian Physiologus [not ancient sciences?!] ~=> bestiary
Physiologus, bestiary --> popular source for sermon writers [<-- relevance for lecture performance]
[email to Mona]
bebin man ye chizi cherto pert sareham kardam. in gharare bere tu catalog alan
*working title for the lecture at Mona's project “Rat Race”:
The Pray and The Visible -- An animal escape case
*short description:
the lecture-performance approaches the idea of the animals’ “friendship” in a historical and speculative look at the anthropomorphic geography of fables from middle-south Asian bestiary till pettube.com uploads.
...................................
...political satire
Obeyd Zakani - mush o gorbe
some of us are woman, child, animal
(coded as a girl)
(man up! woman up! child up! animal up! etc.)
the world that is claiming me, recruiting me, ...
if you are an iranian child you would know some violences...
endangered being, endangered animal, if you are then you know what is a violent care.
*leaving [...]
(171)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%32[...] emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials. Latour's work to relocate qualities.)
(--> New Materialism; radical constructionism, all world is a poem)
(--> nonrepresentational theory; Anderson, Harrison, Stewart; critique become vitalist: to watch grass grow, or curious and experimental to face an overbundance of things to be described or imagined; concepts are lived; the subject is present as witness to the moment in which some worlding is about to disclose itself in some form or event. the result is a subject attached to worlds throwing together in a sensory refrain, a literally unbelievable image, or a muscle of sociality or belief. theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into reals. a world in the present tense is always other than its representation [<-- another argument for #excess]. nonrepresentational writing : *a phenomenal method of attending and composing* =/= epiphenomenal: an expression of knowledge already garnered انبار from scholarship. to spin out of critical thinking's bad habits: the prizing of prefabricated good objects over bad objects.)
(--> Singh, Anand; agency as a threshold of life with its own immanent forms of movement and flux, studying spirits and shifts in intensity)
(--> )
(--> )
(the dangerous and bizzar idea of) a pure ‘human’ society
‘anthropomorphism’ actually ‘underestimates our humanity,’ in that the ‘anthropos’ and the ‘morphos’ together mean both that which has human shape and that which gives shape to humans (Philo + Wilbert > Latour)
technomorphism, zoomorphism, ...
anthropocentrism of the standard anthropomorphism critique --> human-referenced starting-point
trophies, stuffed parts, drawings
urine, faeces and other dirts
feral =/= wild =/= tame =/= feral
in-between animal-findings and animals finding
appropriate places of animals: in zoo or animations
(the 2016 film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is about proper zoology and not animal epistemology. here what comes after “Find Them” is crucial.)
(the developement moral identities and psychological interiorities for Pixar's human teller in anthropomorphist films such as Ratatouille.)
-we need to imagine a new animal geography
*territory: “...sites of a completed cycle of parentage and exchanges [...] spaces of insurmountable reciprocity.” (Baudrillard)
(is Baudrillard sentimentalizing animal territoriality? and giving them ‘psychic life’?)
...................................
[Michael Woods]
...through representation an entity becomes ‘immutable mobiles’ (Latour) that allow political debate to take place by presenting to decision-makers convincing representations of things which they have not directly experienced. ([...]
(172)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.3[...] have different
loyalties to (linguistic differences). Germany, lacking direct experience of others, because of lesser colonial encounters in its history, falls back on fearful fantasies with the new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]
(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate
attitudes
actual behaviour
[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
- are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition
rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice
in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic
...................................
what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)
(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion
Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez
#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*
(Pir's) heaven of value
([...]
(173)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.8[...]nized by others as appropriate
[*]aesthetic = a proper form (at the moment of revelation) that other people have to respond
(--✕--> european notion of aesthetic = eliciting a sense of appreciation of beauty)
(my sister's wedding had/created) an appropriate form
**** exchange situations [shows, exhibitions, events, weddings, etc.] has to appear in a certain form, otherwise people will not recognize it, otherwise they fail to impress people ****
@Foad
-what are Tehran's contemporary contexts in which we can see exchanges working?
younger people are impressing one another in terms of consuming or participation in sports, or mobile phones, or whatever --> they create different kinds of relations (#telegram iran?)
(how among my freinds we impress one another?)
younger people, invest value in different things from what older people do
money does not have anything else but number
things that shine, things that glisten, things that sparkle --> a sense in which these objects *give off a presence* [@Janina] and people are affected by this
*quality of shininess* indicates the successful intervention of ancestral spirits --> a spiritual condition (acquainted with health)
they must display to be regarded as worthwhile
with mobile phones: what is going on here, what is their value, how are they circulating, how do people regard them?
(ibn ebn ابن) people belong because their fathers belonged and so forth + what they give away, the (gift) shells, can be regarded as female : items that have come into men's possessions (=/= Karin's gifts)
-so the shells are passive objects, women are/were (traditionally), classically regarded as objects in a similar way and were given the names of shells
***how to think about vocabulary:***<br />
-i cannot start using economics of the market to describe what i am talking about
-in the vocabulary of gift exchange (Strathern) may be able to find the vocabulary of analysis (like an artist choosing the color)
-Strathern choice: the vocabulary of gift exchange might give her the vocabulary by which to start describing, is an *artificial choice*. the vocabulary of the gift economy gives her a lot of terms in which to understand. but those terms are only useful for the purposes of understanding that particular set of data, and if i then leave that data, and if i follow these objects as they move out of the highlands, and if they became, if they came into an art market, then absolutely what we would be dealing with is commodities[...] --> situated knowledges [#SK], #import function
...................................
*literature = the question of reading* (=/= matter of novels and poems)
...................................
[...]
(174)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34[...]e collapse of hermeneutic (in any discourse) --> the labor of transparency [@Mona @Ali ]
(the very strange claim [made by political leaders] that) force is a kind of language, and not just any language. It is one which solves the problem that seems endemic to all things linguistic, namely: failure, indirection, misunderstanding, drift. [...]that the language of force actively and successfully delivers its message --> a fable: “everybody understands the language of force” (unlike ordinary, diplomatic, political language) --> the readability or communicative power of the utterance, violence is seen as continuous with discourse --@Mona
[*]violence: “speaking the (only) language of the other” --> (very strange fable:) that violence is noninterpretive direct(~ umediated) and nonanalytic, that it is unmisunderstandable, that it takes hold and transforms its listener [--> fantasy of affective communication], hermeneutic and cognitive of the language is effaced and what is left is only *delivery* itself [@Ali's way of talking has a hint of this (a self-erasing speech,) he “delivers” his (political) message to me #tattooing me }--> the silencing/elimination of his interlocutor, **the little annihilatory gestures** of my friends], that it [violence] aspires to a *pure present*
•this is a translational problem? Keenan
•how do we know when things cannot get any worse?
•when/where the translation should stop? @Ali @Sina --> this is about the ethical risks (we are making all the time) in mistaking an annihilatory gesture for a discursive or political one
there is no language which needs no translation (not even violence)
*translation: an active relation between and within languages =/= to overcome language --> is exaclty where the name politics ought to be reserve (Ranciere) (--> that is why i am doing political work [my work on: discordant objects of reference, misunderstanding, active deconstruction, etc. my ‘personal responsibility’ to insist on space of difficult translation])
unilateralism of an imposition: universality of human rights
(Keenan:) human rights = standardization of the rhetorics of claims we make on each other --therefore--> an open and undefined field of operation (and not some essence about humanity, nor law. Keenan is helping me not to think of human rights as an old fashioned, transcendental, essentialist, ontological discourse, grounding definitional basis, categorically an enemy's discourse)
military urban research (employing critical theory) --> use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’
-Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres --> a form of discourse between enemies
contemporary military theorists (in US TV series, re-conceptualizing the urban domain)
...military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation [...]
(176)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.2[...]>
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves
Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of traumatic loss functions as:
•an event
•a figure of thought
20th century as the century of genocides : the story of collective violence from the point of view of victims and survivors <-- we must contest this story
•(Kleinman & Kleinman, Mookherjee:) victim stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
•
•
category of the victim is not transparent =/= bureaucratic legal forms through which the victim status is produced aligns with very different kinds of knowledge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects
1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons
his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)
[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...
(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces
(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to) transitional justice and the global form of truth
unknown dead imagined as hungry and thirsty ghosts
*the living cannot offer the dead solace because the unknown dead cannot be placed within the grid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*<br />
-the difference between kin and strangers, ancestors and ghosts
**hospitality being offered to the stranger could also become a way of reincorporating the estranged kin**(? -iranian hospitality?)
the intertwined nature of bureaucratic power and ritual action
the dead are haphazardly buried that have to be then contained or transformed through shamanic knowledge and ritual manipulations? -Veena
modern bureaucratic procedures ==> tear apart the continuity of generational connections <-~ the work of ritual to restore connections is engaged
the different ways we come to know something =/= the experience of ‘carrying’ a knowledge
...unknown dead in a milieu in which ancestors and ghosts are not simply distant and abstract concepts but are felt with every sinew of the body, who come to haunt the descendants through dreams and apparitions =/= Ta'zieh: ancestors in contexts in which the rel[...]
(177)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.7[...]
captivity ==> animal against themselves, “animal = qualified noun, adjectival” [=/= *ajayeb's wilderness* was articulated in a time before the modern zoo]
--Acampora--> zone of species contact mediated by an interruption that voids actual encounter
--✕--> Sina: there has never been an “actual encounter”
--✕--> Hayward: does face-to-face “seeing” matter for organisms of a radically different scale and for whom “eyes” are light receptors rather than picture makers?
-how can we see mediation as a dynamic of encounter, even an ethical one?
(captivity is always mediated)
captivity diffracted
*(telegram's) [*]encounter: sensuous rapport or energetic cadence*
aquariums engage a story of looking + deep roots in imperialism and the process of nation building --> aquarium: a stage of an unspoiled garden in nature, بوته hearth for learning human self from animal other + (clarification of) ontological and epistemological disorders of nature and culture [=/= Tsing's contaminated landscapes]
-18th century: the ocean was taboo, a place of great fear, a cursed world full of monsters lurking in shadowy fathoms, (waters: low and deep =/= air: domain of morality and aspiration, closer to heaven)
-19th century europe victorian glass *aqua vivarium* --> windows that interfaced between human sight and subaqueous scenes (the unknown provoked feelings of bot curiosity and apprehension)--Stott--> for the naturalist the marine or freshwater aquarium provided a constantly changing, glass-fronted theater of bizarre and exotic bodies, moving, metamorphosing, interacting and breeding in sensational ways
-aquariums became sacred spaces where cohabited forces of godliness and nature were contained, compartmentalized, and studied --> animal = metonymic of particularly nonhuman environments --> victorian sensibilities
(Darwinan trope...) monstrously minute, potent and parasitic, characterized by missing body parts
efforts to know, classify, and conquer the oceanic (--> capture for visual pleasure) ==> counter-conquest of the home by monsters and sexual deviants
the most prized organisms were “exotics” from non-european environments that fueled ongoing colonialism in the mode of animal husbandry
Hayward:
differences in display technologies
variations in viewer experience and perception
alterations in cross-species encounters
aquarium's promise of immediacy(?)
the rhetoric of animal domination is not the only discourse at work (in aquarium display, telegram, in ajayeb, in zoo, etc.)
Hayward's attention to the expressiveness of sensation, display technologies, and the animals themselves =/=? my attention to telegram animal media
(modern) aquarium: turning toward the monstrous oceanic but updated for a te[...]
(179)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.5[...] moral complicity ==> a reductionist social ontology of guilt and victimization -->{
•bad idea of the whole (liberalism) is historically associated with, for example, colonialism ==> all of its parts (people, ideas, etc.) are equally associated with colonialism
•the idea of modernity + the rise of the individual ==> (a sense of) loss of community
==>
•participation
•horizontalism
•institutional distrust
•ad hoc organizations
forensic architecture: purifying itself of (and overcome) injustice =/= meaningful progressive change
(Occupy movement, protest mentality --> how left-wing purity politics missed the) consequences electoral capacity, electoral politics
(not knowing how to use) liberal institutions
•(thinking with Bruzzone -->) we need more *impure politics* : (reform & compromise mentality)
◦how to transform knowledge into *electoral mobilization* (=/= Pierre's interest in fiction, Leo's interest in a morally pure collective future)
◦how to form alliances with groups whom you have grave doubts
•we don't need *hoard of like-minded people sharing collective anger and disgust at injustice*
postmodern conservatism: empirical / ideological
neoliberal societies: hierarchies tolerated by citizens so long as the economy continues to prosper
something happens ==> together --> social group
entitative: the quality of groupiness, a perception that the people together are a group : *perception of similarity*
interaction based on interdependence ==> social group
[*]group: experience of social identity
...................................
[*]embody: empathetically experience situations ‘from outside’
(Despret raising the question) *what can we do or what are we allowed to do with our bodies when we are with our animals?*
[*]empathy: bodies that undo and redo each other (reciprocally though not symmetrically) [=/= experiencing with one's own body what the other experiences]
==> possibilites of an embodied communication
feeling & emotions are not alone in making up what life is all about
(Despret researching) ways in which scientists’ bodies are actively being involved while they are observing animals
--Sina--> becoming describable as a body [that moves, walks, bears, diffuses, smells, makes noise, follows, ...]
the old rule of “human bodies shouldn't interfere in a properly scientific research process =/= Lorenz:
...feed his jackdaw with worms
...attempted to teach him to fly
...swam with the geese
--Despret--> Lorenz aimed at elucidating ‘meaning’ in and through the relationships he sustained with the animals he was studying ==>
•he understood for a little goose what m[...]
(180)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.4[...]nemarie--> yet they perform or enact reality together --> they *do the reality of a disease [problem, artwork]*
++{Annemarie uses the term “enact” to show that objects (such as body and disease) exist as articulations of the practices that produce them (~= Butler's performance), enacting (not explained by what went before, present remains unstable, patterns and routines and surprises) =/= making (‘causes’ lie when ‘making’ happened)}
[*]theory: conversations about the realities our words help to explore (=/= seeking to fix concepts)
in knowledge practice realities are various brought into being (+ limits of that adaptability) --> *ontology:
--anthropology--> people order “reality” seriously differently
--biomedical--> why, when, where is this truth realized? what does it depend on? what are its alternatives? --> *ontology does not precede knowledge practices* (various practices are closely linked ==> ontologies are linked [for example a patient who talks to a doctor in a consulting room may receive a clinical diagnosis, while laboratory measurements ‘do’ her disease in a different way. or in artistic research environments such as apass.])
(Annemarie's) praxiography --> asking what are the techniques that make things (their empirical, epistemological found objects) visible, audible, tangible, knowable (for this artist in front of me #feedback @apass)**
‘empathy’ is a word that is often recruited when bodies are involved --> resonances with troublesome romantic meanings (magic, fold knowledge)
embodied empathy shifts its meaning from one situation to another --> different meanings ==> different outcomes
[*]empathy: the process by which one delegates to one's body a question, or a problem, that matters and that involves other beings’ bodies --> bodies are articulating and become articulated in the asking and in its responses
= making the body available for the response of another being (=/= feeling what the other feels)
==create==> possibility of an embodied communication (=/= experiencing with one's body what the other experiences)
---> go to Cinderella's empathy: make one think with & with the body
--Despret--> *empathy becomes a scientific tool* that need to be shaped, forged, refined, embodied, a tool that attunes bodies
[*]care: it matters for them that it matters for their animals (***what matters for the other person becomes your matters***)
how to act in a polite manner in a baboon's world? (or in an artist's world, when we give feedbacks)
{seeing like a baboon =/= acting like a baboon = corresponding with a baboon}--> *they transform themselves in order to create partial connections* (James’ “acting as if”) =/= performative
•to act with the baboons (learn how a tree gives you dirty looks, how it resists the proposition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Des[...]
(181)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37[...]ve traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position
city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.
agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat
[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protagonists of merchants (often thrift sons of rich merchants, who embark on travel after they have wasted their fortune with false friends)
•save himself by his inventiveness, strong determination, physical strength
•there is no single predestined future but a variety of options whose eventual practical course depends on the protagonist's active intervention
•(Sinbad left behind on an island where) the Ruhh has laid its eggs (spirit's eggs تخم های روح 🥚🥚🥚)
•althought most of them kill other people in order to survive, their action is spontaneously motivated by the needs of the moment
•
با هزار زحمت with a thousand efforts
customary formal “hearing is obeying”
pitfalls
“[...]When I returned home, my wife had died. They lifted her up, took me along, and brought us to that cave. With a rope they let me down and blocked the entrance of the cave. After they had lowered the [body of my dead] wife and the [bundle of] clothes and I had regained my senses, I got up and saw a tremendously large cave. I installed the wick and lit the lamp, chose a place by the side, cleaned it and made a bedstead. And when every two days they threw somebody down there alive, I killed that person with my knife and took the supplies of three days bread and water, until one day they deposited in that cave my former wife’s sister alive, together with her dead husband. When she saw me, she recognized me and consented to marry me. I slept with her and had several children with her. Some time later I started to dig the ground in a corner of the cave with my knife until I had made a [large] hole to the side of the sea. Every day I would sit there, until I finally saw a ship. I attached a piece of cloth to a stick and waved it, until the ship came close and took me and my children aboard. They also asked me the same question [i. e. why my children had heads like horses], I told them my story, and they delivered me to my country. I had many more children with that woman. This is the story of my children and their ancestry.[...]
(182)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.7[...] that would indiscriminately غيرمشخص lump together all kinds of material ==> belittling the creative act of a single individual
*intertextual allusions (to themes, motifs, concepts familiar to the audience) : a highly effective narative technique for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*
...................................
*~._
all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's
عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)
[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)
[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire
}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?
the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo
sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness
(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects
•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation
(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere” =/=? ajayeb premodern
zoo
one of the most ancient institutions
transformed by the event horizon of modernity
(Fanon dramatizing) colonialization is animated by zoonomia as phantasy: “when the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary”
*we = sadism's children*
how imaginary beings and *fantastic zoology* always carry a colonial logic
biological essentialism : a dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic
...racial and colonial violence of slavery
prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
[...]
(183)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.8[...] and pleasure
•senses of devastation
modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)
--> ***how does (and does not) killability shade into vitality?***
what does it mean for animals to be alive in a severely depleted habitat?
(what it means to be alive in contemporary Tehran?)
profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value
-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)
animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)
آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism
#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he accepted only from one person and not others. the issue is still unresolved.
religiously infused conscience
banality of secular cruelty
long-standing intimacy between violence and the sacred
#story
Nitin is jinn and no jinn wants to marry their daughter to someone who sells chicken for a living. Nitin has debilitating nightmares about dying chickens.
•poultry industry
•cage-free farming
(there is no “irreducible” ontological gap, disjuncture of temporality, ontological untranslatability, between:)
time of history/capital ~= time of the gods/ritual
both ritual and capital --involve--> exchange relations ==> unpredictable forms of movement (across domains)
•(show of being halal) recitation of kalma with the first bird and the last, assuming comprehensive coverage for the ones who fall between
•Skylard slaughterhouse building hospitals and temples
--> emotional, ritual, commercial traffic across sacred and profane
consumption of neighboring species
*cruelty as play*
(a less cultivated form of pleaser?)
deadended bird
ceased-but-not-killed mouse
not dead, not killed, but not quite a being either
the power to turn animals into things, as of they were never anything else
recognition of playful actually --Singh--> ethics of immanent obligation
([*]collaboration: interrupt each other's train of though[...]
(184)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.6[...]ve endings in the present
national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)
television as a massive archaeological site
polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (and popular internet media) so confusing
(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media
(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium
communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past
{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]
(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> evasion of television allows for nostalgia to be misframed and misappropriated as a sentiment that marks the end of socialism [temporally and clearly demarcates backward-looking postsocialist populations from forward-looking (Western) observers]
----> takes into account television's (and internet social media) relevance to collective memory
post-X nostalgia: a near-visceral yearning for the false sense of safety derived from the memory of X (fetishistically attached to public personas or consumer products of the past)
nostalgia: an interpretive framework }<-- **sense of intimate sociality disrupted by the collapse of a centralized system of governance and the influx of globalization**
nostalgia is a discourse (that is not specific to Eastern Europe) populations disappointed with and unequipped to deal with the advent of market democracy
there are more than one way of (content of) longing
television: a medium whose chief mode of operation is in reruns, recombinations, circulating formats and generic adaptations that constantly interweave national, regional and global scales ~= digital social media
(Imre > Boyer) to trace nostalgia back to the intellectual origins of European cultural nationalisms
...diverse and contradictory sentiments that make us see European cultures conjoined in mutual relationships of dependence, rather than separation
(Imre -->) *nostalgia as something by definition national at its core*
nostalgia --foreground--> c[...]
(185)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39[...]atives (a danger that has been ascribed to women’s inferior psychosocial needs and tastes =/= cerebral modernist masculinity of art) ---> go to Baxstrom's realizing the witch
Western European cultural nationalisms
the notion of nostalgic and premodern postsocialist population ==> Western Europe as the epicentre of progressive scientific modernity
West’s fanning of East European nostalgia --> a post-imperial symptom = (expression of a growing Western European awareness that) modernity is plurinodal rather than centred in European metropolitan headquarters
(postimperial European dimension of) *cultural nationalism <~÷+-> nostalgia*
...utopian national rebirth scenarios for a united Germany --> (promoted by intellectual artists) the bad idea that suppression of German nationalism ==open==> influx of American audio-visual culture (that muat be resisted in order to preserve and nourish German culture in its purest literary manifestation)
= logocentric return to the ethos of German Romanticism [Kulturnation --> certain cultural identity --> cliche-ridden elitist racist implications] + new nationalism =/= results of Western integration over the last forty years
aspirational narrative (of nation...)
postimperial power dynamic:
•western researcher --> has the political capital to afford studying popular media
•eastern researcher --> has to faithfully fulfill the role to represent their national culture (elite achievement)
(Bourdon >Imre) the most obvious European commonality --> **a focus on high culture**
national specificities of memory systems developed around television
nostalgia machine
•Putin --> TV programming to a literary Soviet heritage
•Hungarian FIDESZ --> children’s channel of socialist children’s programmes
•showcase oeuvre of popular performers from the past
•rerunning vintage highbrow content: old films, television series and documentaries
•popular music's capacity to call up depoliticized affective memories
•commercials (--trigger--> postsocialist nostalgia)
•
}--> depoliticized reminiscences ==> an image of (socialist) sociality as a natural connecting glue among citizens gathered around the warm glow of their favourite singers and cabaret actors
FIDESZ = alarming racism + anti-Semitism + drastic neoliberal economic restructuring --> television = interfaces of official state nationalism + commercial purposes of a nostalgia industry
(ghost of dictators in) humorous commercial context:
•Tito in post-Yugoslav republic commercials (as anti-capitalist and anti-commercialist hero)
•Ceausescu in commercials in Romania (old footage of him walking his dog in car tires ads)
•
}--Imre--> (blending[...]
(186)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.1[...] already nostalgic for the unrealized transformative potential (of real socialism)
(Yurchak's) *frozen present* = the time of nostalgia
}<== late socialist culture itself lived in a nostalgic mode, at a certain ironic, knowing distance from what it was supposed to be according to the memories of the heroic 40s-50s and the remnants of socialist propaganda --> *a familiar ironic mode of experiencing history vicariously* (in a way that is experienced in the imagination through the actions of another person)
(looking at televisual nostalgia -->) late socialism ==> an affect & epistemology that can only access the “authentic” through contradiction ambivalence self-reflective irony
<--Holdsworth-- expression of present anxieties about history and memory in general
...................................
___[notes Tehran 2023]___
semiotics: study of the differnce between “what you say ~/= what they understand”
(my fundamentals:)
*sharing =/= communicating*
آشپز دیو سپید
it is said that the White Div had a cook --> exploring the cosmology of Div (in Shahnameh) with food, hunting for eating, bestiary, cooking technology, taste
(inspired by anime JYfdfDU9JUY)
#short story: narrartor describes the story after the defeat of the White Div (Div-e Sefid) by Rostam. “rather than worring about the kingsmen X, he was more interested in what is for dinner...”. there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...” “immediately asked for more”
dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by not having a map (or guide) --> are we in a dungeon?
...................................
journalism: professional discursive pursuit (of truth, of propaganda, etc.)
=/= journalism: proximity to the event + the risks that that entails
(Ghazzi's notion of) *affective proximity* : (a mode of consideration, a way) to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country
--> a media practitioner =/= the event they are representing and participating in
affective proximity : what locals navigate to reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country =/= discursive
*emotional labour* of media practices of local reporters and witnesses
what the word “revolution” mediates (in Syria, Iran, etc.) [~/?= civil war]
1. an indication of commitment to a desired goal
2. an identity marker based on a past-oriented lament over what was sought but no[...]
(187)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.3[...] ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]
...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others
(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor
[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)
journalism = represent + narrate
(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them
(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***
proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)
*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals
*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•
(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence
(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events a[...]
(188)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...] />
(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them
(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***
proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)
*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals
*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a word to galvanise their emotions and bodies**** and inspired them to take actions they would not have imagined to pursue [use of words --> what people hope =/= descriptive]
◦word (for example “revolution”): a marker of an *inward-looking description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•
(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence
(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”
...................................
collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood
global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolut[...]
(189)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]rm our archiological readings of old fires and we like its light becsuse it helps us to push through and constatly make-imagine-lighten the future, i this model the present is untouchable.] --> the beyond is beginning to loosen its materiality --> accumulation of synonyms (before language) --> metaphors given birth slowly --> from the Pleistocene to Ordovician --> the accumulation of oxygen --> fire was permitted to exist --> etc.
(keeping a fire burring for a long time is a very strange thing to do. it is utterly Paleolithic to do keep fire, making it stone. it was Muhammad who turned off the lights, literally. when he was born, one the oldest Zoroastrians fire temples suddenly extinguished for no apparent reason. the blessed dark. the box, fire, both are means to have access to the inaccessible. #Muhammad inception/birth had to be connected to a supernatural event.)
(talking) fire --> speech
(telling) stone --> written
in the history, the leg-less-stone and the lying-visage have been together. a study of apparition must include the physical material as well, not as counterparts, rather as its play-mate.
(fire suppressing) an older ecology of reflection (namely the stone)
the telling stone is the same as spirit stone(?)---non-animal container (@Karin)
(stone is related to the spirits of the ground. the prisoner who throw a pebble into the pit, the pebble's sound is going to tell about the depths and darknesses that the human, on death sentence, does not have a long enough rope to carry too. so the rope is never enough, the linear connection, the closed chain of links, but the throwing stone can risk a disjunction between that mother->king->prisoner->darkness)
--> sending a guy into the pit is not typical for the cultures of Pleistocene: (using linear connection, darkness ~= unkown, and so on)
[Shepard] Prehistoric humans were autochthonous, that is, “native to their place.” (related to the earthly stone =/= fire that perpetually evacuates) (it is not that of the introvert stone and the extrovert fire, but the opposite, stone was social and fire allied interiority, it sent/banished the subject to the land of the mediated, ‘from now on you are coming from mediation.’ (Where the subject comes from? it comes from the mediation.) --> use me --> industrialize with me --> technologize with me --> stone-tech are 1.5 million years earlier than fire-tech --> with stone you can't reach the sky but by controlling combustion you can go up ==> alienation as the touchstone of humankind --> then comes the “reflective consciousness” of humankind --> and later the invention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychologic[...]
(190)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.1[...]nvention of the very strange object: the mirror [---> go to amazon#2DifficultForests] ==> a change in the “structure of existence” --> then the idea of “selftranscendence” by monotheist religions --> adventures of power and ideology --> then a very bad idea called “history” was introduced---an active, psychological force that separates humankind from the rest of nature because of its disregard for the deep connections to the past.[Shepard 2004] --- Lévi-Strauss points out, historical thought is analytical and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)
we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)
“After you die, others live.” (Sina)
old world's arboreal simians, monkeys
Anthropos
cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.
Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality
ontogenesis---extended in human (the s[...]
(192)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.2[...]l and concerned with continuity and “closing gaps and dissolving differences” to the point that it “transcends original discontinuity.”)
[in east mirror was never used as mean to self reflect, rather it was weaponized agains evil, although this evil was female and men used mirror to defeat it. unlike the western thought since the greeks in the Narcissus story where mirror is the foundation of self-absorbance and knowledge and madness, the easterns since they did not posses the same brand of selfhood they found mirror strange and uttelized it in curious ways, another optical problem ---> go to mirror and the laughing snake - mar-e ghahghahezan, img]
...through the speaking fire, events “on earth” were finished except for a final judgment by fire --> invention of sin, spiritual existence : selftranscendence. anthropoce separating themselves from earth and its processes
-‘essence’, ‘appearance’, and ‘change’ became sources of anxiety
-other forms of life are now irrelevant to humans
-from now on “you cannot be two things, in two places, or in two times, at once.” , no more overlapping identity ==> alienation from (the domains of) nonhuman life
-the “Persian” new mind, (intanced by fire,) divided the world into material creation and infinite spirit that would shape the philosophy of the civilized world. (Shepard 2004)
(-in my amazon book i am pointing out: Esthetic distancing also made possible the landscape arts and connoisseurship and commercialization as scenery painting, tourism, and recreation. To the credit of the Greeks, they resisted converting the landscape into scenery and wilderness into an aesthetic experience.)
we are not directed towards a measured location, (as his-story tries to make belief)
“After you die, others live.” (Sina)
old world's arboreal simians, monkeys
Anthropos
cultures of Pleistocene
-Pleistocene was the time of glaciation and ice. Much of the world's temperate zones were alternately covered by glaciers during cool periods and uncovered during the warmer interglacial periods when the glaciers retreated. it is when the evolution and expansion of Homo sapiens and by the close of the Pleistocene, humans had spread through most of the world.
Agonic / Hedonic --> my Köln group, agonistic doctrine challenges that mode of personality
ontogenesis---extended in human (the specialized and scheduled development of physical and psychological traits that appear, disappear, or stagnate during the life cycle of the individual.) --> Neoteny (a “state of newness"--a retardation of certain parts of the maturing process.) preprograms life stages, so that our becoming is a lifelong process.
-developement of the self in terms of harmonious relations to other species and nunhumans.
-ontogenetic agenda --- (The agenda is a given; the support depends on a social readiness t[...]
(193)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.2[...]s taking a nap on a billion-years-old stromatolite. Is the div’s self a form of fossilization story of the now? “Do you want to go to the mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”
The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.
The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.
...................................
“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy
more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*
[*]euphemism: roads that are too[...]
(194)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.6[...]y the worshipers of an individual culture or cultural period in their common response to the numinous is summed and crystallized
-choice of central metaphor: wants to recapture and transmit, the primary meaning on which it builds, which underlines and determines the *total character of its response* = the total character of its religion
-major religious metaphors of the ancient mesopotamians have a double nature as pointing beyond themselves to things not of this world & yet being and remaining very much of the world
in attempting to interpret religious metaphors, one must seek to bring out as fully as possible its *powers to suggest and recall* the numinous
-to one generations is fresh and powerful may be to another seem old and trite
suggestiveness =/= representaive of its period --> literalness: attention to human purposes and values ==> [flase] sense that all has been explained and understood
human's recognition of dependency upon power not of this world --> religious expressino = transcendent hope and trust (=/= Nietzsche)
*(mesopotamian) numinous = immanence (in feature of confrontation) =/= all transcendence
mesopotamian experience of numinous power = revelation of *indwelling spirit* --> power at the center of something that caused it to be and thrive and flourish =/= Old Testament's numinous = transcendent {---> go to the experience of Moses with the burning bush: ‘God =/= bush’ --> **God happened as it were sojourn there موقتا but he is altogether transcendent, and there is nothing but a purely situational ephemeral relation with the bush}
--✕--> a mesopotamian would have experienced the burning bush differently: numinous power of the bush's being (not just “in” it) --> numinous = immanent =/= transcendent
power speaking to Moses in the desert disassociates itself from the bush and identifies itself as the god of Moses's father --> needs introduction =/= numinous power speaking to the mesopotamian Enkidu in Gilgamesh Epis does not choose to disassociate itself from it locus and so needs no introduction. --{"the sun god heard the word of his mouth; from afar, from the midst of heaven, he kept calling to him.” <-- the power is here seen as immanent in the visible sun, is what animates it and motivates it, *is the god who informs it*}
in Akkadian (the language in which epic of Gilgamesh is written): ‘the word for X = the numinous power in X’
•(word for) visible sun = sun god
•the sumerian word for sky, the visible blue dome overhead, which turns black and full of stars that make their wat across it at night = the name of the numinous power in the sky, its power and its will to be, the sky god
the form given to numinous encounter may adjust to the content revealed in it
*sometimes the form-giving imagination reads details and meaning into a form beyond what is giv[...]
(195)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.9[...])
(ancient mesopotamian saw) numinous as immanent ==> name that power and attribut form to it in terms of the phenomena
[Jacobsen's well articulation to pose a question -->] *the characteristic of mesopotamian boundness to the externals of situation in which the numinous was encountered...* ==>
•intransitiveness
•differentiation ==> pluralistic aspect (--> polytheism) --> divine aspects that it recognized
plurality ==> ability to:
•distinguish
•evaluate
•choose
“No god went by, why are my muscles paralyzed” (Gilgamesh) --> ‘god = paralyzing fear’
uncannily good luck
sudden realization of having come to harm
numinous power experienced in sudden illness
*no allegiance was invented* ==> no cult developed
they are gloomy, their shadow dark,
no light is in their bodies,
ever they slink along covertly,
walk not upright,
from their claws drips bitter gall,
their footprints are (full of) evil venom.
(from [more primitive?]) dread --to--> fascination
the shivers and chills (of death)
that fritter the sun of things,
spawn of the god of heavens,
spawned on an evil spirit,
the death warrants, beloved sons of the storm god,
born of the queen of the netherworld,
who were torn out of heaven and hurled from the earth as castoffs,
are creatures of hell, all
we are not determined, we are engendered
numinous as immanent --> external habituation: inviting (or magically enforcing) the presence of the power within
efforts of such habituation:
•cult dramatic
•fashioning or appropriate divine images
•religious literature
•temples
*cult drama: the form fills with its content*
literally re-present god, presenting his external form, (bring about the god's presence through ritual representation of him) --> beneficent results for the community [--> still works today]
•sacred marriage
•yearly lamentations
•battle drama (primeval contest for world order against the forces of chaos)
fashioning of images (of the god) --> to achive lasting presence
poetry: means of invoking the presence of powers [--> we are doing this still?! bad poetry]
creative power of the word underlines all mesopotamian (religious) literature
•works of praise
•works of lament (specialized lamentation-priest @Sana, Ali )
*lament: influencing and swaying the divine heart by reminding the god of past happiness, rather than by magically recreating that past*
(mesopotamian:) *temple = house*
(implication between) the divine owner and his house --> emotional closeness of a human owner and his home + the *closeness of essence* (of being) --amounting--> to [...]
(196)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42[...] = the place where the owner could be found (or felt)***
--> that god (the owner) was present and available
the god's retainers --> because the temple was god's home, was not only near and approachable, he was involved with the fortunes of the community and commited ti maintaining it --> *mesopotamian temple was profoundly awesome* (it carried awesome aura, awesome or angry nimbus هاله)
-the temple was covered with loveliness
-the god's private apartment shrouded in darkness : the dark room (no eye is to see)
--> specific closeness of essence + the power inhabiting it
authoritative revelation
know what was “the proper thing”
house mountain
house rising sun
house causing light
he who issues forth from the thriving...
ancient =? ancient to us ~=? ancient to them
there is no living cultural tradition that connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further
older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings
religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents
[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity
...................................
(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties
(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)
***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***
}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)
to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•[...]
(197)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.1[...] has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of meaning remains --Alberti--> how are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? how different meanings can adhere to the same substances?
materials (water, parasite, etc.) lend themselves to conceptual innovation
often things are willed away (not by a more agentive segment of the population [<-- paranoiac understanding], but) due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere
(how not to) think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate (~ scheme transfer) --✕--> properties are imminent in embodied human engagement with that world [~ Baradian: there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object]
•body may be the first tool
•properties (or potentials [ajayeb style?]) cannot be listed
X as agent presents us, as shadow shows...
...................................
winds
روح ruh, spirit =/= wind: thermal expansion of air ~ air’s tendency to rarefy and expand under the influence of heat
(recognition of) thermal expansion of air ==> motor of global atmospheric circulation
explaining winds --Borrelli-->
•how rational thought could grasp
•how divine power descended to earth
pneumatic machines
gears, weights, levers, pulleys
****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things
varieties =/= causes
cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
| |
[-O-] ==> {t|/?#$^%V!~)&^} <-- premodern science and art today stays here (---> go to Stewart’s attunement to phenomena)
[*]navigation: negotiation between the direction one ‘witches’ to travel & the direction that is ‘possible’ to travel --> wind sense:
temperature
humidity
intensity
regularity
smell
knowledge of astronomy + geography
wind rose --> (connection between:) celestial + astronomical order + terrestrial variety (of land + living creature)
estimate the speed of the ship
throw a log with a rope attached to it overboard, and measure how much rope went overboard within a given period of time
Pliny the Elder --> historia naturalis
Seneca --> naturales quaestiones
air has a natural power of moving itself [==> agency باد]
}<== Seneca’s stoic worldview: conceived the cosmic principle of all life and movement (pneuma) as[...]
(199)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.2[...]nd movement (pneuma) as a subtle substance pervading everything and giving rise, among other things, to all weather phenomena
air = expression of pneuma (alive & live-giving)
all weather = manifestations as transmutations of air
(late medieval encyclopedia -->) *weather = a kind of alchemy of air*
(late medieval wind diagrams -->) wind: cosmic divine powers blowing from the celestial sphere onto earth
Aristotle + Albertus Magnus ==> explanation of the nature and origin of winds in Renaissance meteorological works
air and were then dragged along by the circular movement of the celestial spheres so that they ended up moving horizontally
hot and dry exhalations
aeolipila: a hollow metal sphere (shaped like the face of Aeolus) with a single tiny hole in it
air possessed a force (“vis”) that heat could awaken
16th century --increase--> interest in systematic explanation of meteorological phenomena
#workshop on wind poetry
epic battle, systems moving air, agency,
feature of Renaissance thought --> the idea of *a middle instance (neither fully corporal nor fully incorporeal) intervening between matter and soul* [+ fire as intermediator] ~ spiritus, pneum, quintessence ~ fire or air
...in schematic abstract structure of body-spirit-soul, spirit is somewhere in between
spirit: air-like substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)
*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures
effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization
pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)
(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours
ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise
air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument
Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion,[...]
(200)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.3[...]substance
air: preferred vehicle of spirit (conveyed the breath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)
*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures
effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization
pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)
(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours
ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise
air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument
Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena
wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated
منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings
*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures
Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*
innate heat of living bodies
wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours
16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was[...]
(209)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.4[...]of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise
air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument
Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena
wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated
منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings
*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures
Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*
innate heat of living bodies
wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours
16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب
orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system
Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons
sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)
...our sublunar world
gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”
visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)
(under the influence of) celestial fi[...]
(212)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.4[...]he East and West Indies about hitherto unknown meteorological phenomena عجایب
orderly majesty of God ==> encyclopedism about the universe + an analogue of a memory system
Jean Bodin
firm believer in and opponent of demonic magic
theater of the whole nature universe naturae theatrum
reason of wind (ratio ventorum):
•sun
•impulse (impulsus) of the angels or demons
sphere of sacrobosco
De sphaera mundi
(On the Sphere of the World, pre-Copernican astronomy)
...our sublunar world
gunpowder theory of thunder ⛈
compact earthly matter from underground whose expansion with expansion so fast that it moves large masses of air, like “salniter in fire or gunpowder which has caught fire”
visualization
making air visible
inverted glass experiment
linking thermal expansion & contraction of pure air to wind formation (Cardano)
(under the influence of) celestial fire ==> air (could become alive and active) acquiring motive force
on the transmutations of air
(typical of 16th century) steering the religious significance of the study of nature
spirit: a cosmic subtle substance, both recipient + vehicle of celestial influences ==allow==> elements to transmute into each other (+ meteorological phenomena)
(Drebbel’s favourite cosmic spirit:) fire = clearest of all elements ad top of the hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]
(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures
(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force
(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life
weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)
(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind
Galileo --> earth's rotation ==> (<--evidence--) wind
Bacon --> exhalations together with air [rarefaction and expansion of air / exhalation drawn up by sun] ==> wind
Fludd (meteorological cosmica) --> wind: principal meteorological phenomenon (princeps meteororum) and closest to God
“wind is an aerial spirit, of middle consistence, inspired or animated by the breath of Iehova, which he extracts from his treasure-case according to his will, to effect e[...]
(216)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.5[...] hierarchical order of elements (fire, air, water, earth), clarifying the other elements [such as Siavash]
(for Della Porta:) meteorological phenomena = transmutations of the air (in literal sense)
air becoming thinner or thicker ==rise==> winds, thunder, clouds, rain, snow, linking heaven + earth + bringing life to all animated creatures
(Della Porta conceived of) wind in vitalistic terms
...winds rising up from the mouth of the retort (boiling water)
how heat endowed air with motive force
(Drebbel presenting to the public) perpetuum mobile : expansion and contraction of air (which he claimed) demonstrated the force behind all movement and life
weatherglass (+ aeolipila) --demonstrated--> ****highly nontrivial natural phenomena**** (transformation of energy from heat into mechanical motion)
(ajayeb’s) theory about the origins of the wind
Galileo --> earth's rotation ==> (<--evidence--) wind
Bacon --> exhalations together with air [rarefaction and expansion of air / exhalation drawn up by sun] ==> wind
Fludd (meteorological cosmica) --> wind: principal meteorological phenomenon (princeps meteororum) and closest to God
“wind is an aerial spirit, of middle consistence, inspired or animated by the breath of Iehova, which he extracts from his treasure-case according to his will, to effect either a punishment or a benediction”
•angels: efficient cause of winds (in borg macro- and microcosmos)
•(changes in the air --corresponded-->) temperament of living creatures ==> wind
•pulse of the heart caused by the spirit of life
•thermal expansion
•vaporization (+ contraction) of air
•pneumatics
“wind = thermal expansion & contraction of air” --> a vitalistic-alchemical Rosicrucian conception of meteorology and cosmology =/= Descartes’ mechanical-corpuscular view of nature -->{wind <== vapours drawn up from earth and water by solar heat (vapours expanded when heated and when they encountered the opposition of other vapours clouds or mountains they ended up escaping in the one free direction)
•vapour: (made out of) small corpuscles together with even smaller particles filling the gaps between the corpuscles
Froidmont --> wind: (made of) dry and hot exhalations =/= animated (as the stoics dream)
{winds flow towards Earth because of their gravity, like streams and rivers in their beds} gravity ==> wind =/= (direct expression of) celestial power and caused by God’s angels
scorched by rays and reflexes of the sun
denser
Torricelli conceptualized the motion of the hot and cold air masses by thinking them as separated by the walls of a building and in this way he ignored the air’s life-like tendency to expand when heated. instead he reasoned in terms of change of we[...]
(218)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.5[...]
division's of life
-monolithic notion of the mind has been challanged by psychology and phenomenology
biology has been previously essentially zoocentric --> monolithic notion of the body --> medically proper animal body =/= if we zoom in the living canvas, organisms blend into a pointillist landscape in which each dot of paint is also alive --> symbiosis, gaia, prokaryotic sex (omnisexuality)
gaia --> biosphere und understood not as environmental home but as body (physiological process)
bacterial omnisexuality --> fluid genetic transfers = sexual
=/= unitary self assumed in the zoocentric model
medieval microcosmic
correspondences among prokaryotic, eukaryotic, zoological and geophysiological (gaian) levels
--> holonomic continuum --> *a type of individuality that is spatially and temporally more inclusive* [-my research on ajayeb has been more tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct
•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants
bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell
(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)
the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan
*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*
(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria
metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...
fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite
army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings
chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical dri[...]
(221)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.8[...]ore tended on the temporal inclusivity]
==> (in new biology) chimerical body: hybrid of bacterial species --Sagan--> like that many headed beast, the microbeast of the animal cell combines into one entity bacteria that were originally freely living, self-sufficient and metabolically distinct
•when respirers entered and did not kill but, rather, were incorporated by larger anaerobic archaebacteria
•mitochondria are the descendants of bacteria that had be come lodged within the cells of animals and plants
bacteria ==> eukaryotic cell
(the fable of) [Spencer's] animal world as a “gladiator's show” --> evidence for parasitism and competition (~ social progress in 19th century)
the grass-green photosynthetic organelles of all plants may be the descendants of a single, wildly successful bacterium, now shackled, albeit gently, in its cytoplasmic prison
-Sagan
*all cells with nuclei (a unicellular amoeba or amultibillion-cell anaconda) <== orgiastic encounters (eating, infecting, engulfing, feeding on, having sex with and so on) among quite different types of bacteria*
(plant cell) chimera = protective anaerobic host cell + internally multiplying photosynthetic bacterium + respiring bacteria
metabolic waste product of the mutation ==> atmospheric oxygen --> catastrophic --> energetic catalyst --> ...
fermenting bacteria (like trolls or elves in a cosmic fairy tale) dwelling underground --> stromatolite
army of mutants that evolved in the aftermath of the oxygen infusion (the greatest pollution crisis the earth) ==> human beings
chimerical eukaryotic system:
*spirochete* [...] at the edge of larger cell, sites of leakage supplying a constant flow of food [...] renounced their former freedom of movement in order to permanently attach ==> a means of locomotion and food acquisition
•spirochete and mad talent, lyrical drive, (tubercle patients were orators or grandios liars)
[*]human body: an architectonic compilation of millions of agencies of chimerical cells
eukaryotic cells leveling cytoplasmic calcium concentrations ==> [our] calcium phosphate of bone (mineral infrastructure of our bodies):
because seawater concentrations of calcium are often four orders of magnitude higher than [one in ten million], ocean-dwelling cells must exude calcium to avoid poisoning. in the full-fathomed sea did the bones of our ancestors and the shells of their eukaryote relatives evolve. skeletons dramatize an ancient waste, whispering a ghostly testimony to the useful internalization of hazardous waste sites. this givesa good indication of how life within the general economy evolves to deactivate, sacrifice and eventually incorporate the dangerous excesses that accrue from its solar growth. -Sagan
--> the body is multiple (even if orchestrated by vici[...]
(222)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.8[...]y]
--> *biocentrism* [of our time 2019] ~=> noble fictions
cross-disciplinary science
mythopoetic
atmospheric chemistry
earth: organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun
-Lovelock
--depending--> on the forever unfinished and eroticized nature of human symbolization
gaia <== narrative integration of cosmology and morality (<-- can we do without it?)
eukaryote made from prokaryotes and of the mesocosmic level of animal and plant bod-ies made from reproducing eukaryotes
(three billion years ago, the oldest type of sex on the planet:)
bacterial omnisexuality --> promiscuous: not delimiting sexual exchanges with species barriers (+ it needs intermediaries such as plasmids or viruses to do so)
--> lateral transfer
omnisexuality: a means of genetically “locking” together once-diverse groups (of prokaryotes)
bacterial crowding ==> life on earth
endosymbiosis: one organism swallow another without digesting it ==> origin of new species [<=/= gradual accumulation of mutations]
cancer <== rampant multiplication of the occasionally vampiric mitochondria
bacteria's bodies are so genetically open, that the very concept of species falsjfies their character as a unique life form
Sagan
this zoological “I” [is open to radical revision?]
model of zoocentrism: encased self
(?what are ajayeb) bestiary's aesthetic model of a difference (=/=? zoocentric model)
--Burgess--> interference patterns generated by a series of symbiotically living form ==> artist
as an organism's connections to the external envimnment grow, that environment becomes its body [=/= Sina]
snail
snail whose house is carried on his back, the “case” of the “self” has been moved, through an incorporation of what once would have been called inanimate matters--organically worked and reworked
-subjective identities always already und ergoing active (de)composition
-(relations of) physiological identity and psychological subjectivity link up
Sagan trying to relativize that zoocentric bedrock of “self”
...................................
political chimeras
chiefs’ talk
fluent in a verbal genre
formalized speeches directed either to leaders of other groups (Southern Amazon in multiethnic and multilingual system of Upper Xingu) or to their own people, depending on the context in which they are delivered
--Guerreiro--> both the chief and his audience are symbolically constructed as “paradoxical” subjects characterized by contradictory predicates
•*how uncertainty can enact an exchange of perspectives* (through which the ident[...]
(225)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43.9[...]ng that is out of control)
(Maslin, Global warming) [Global warming] requires nations and regions to plan for the next 50 years, something that most societies are unable to do because of the very short-term nature of politics.
Anthropocene was neither an ancient nor an inevitable happening
the crisis of climate change calls for thinking simultaneously on both registers, to mix together the immiscible chronologies of capital and species history.
as Gadamer pointed out, Dilthey saw “the individual's private world of experience as the starting point for an expansion that, in a living transposition, fills out the narrowness and fortuitousness of his private experience with the infinity of what is available by re-experiencing the historical world.”
...................................
(Peter Galison, in Image of Objectivity)
“let nature speak for itself” (!) a new brand of scientific objectivity that emerged in the 19th century => restrain themselves from imposing their hopes, expectations, generalization, aesthetics, even ordinary language on the image of nature. (the image of nature has never been objective)
the present usage of objectivity can be applied to everything from empirical reliability to procedural correctness to emotional detachment
each component of objectivity opposes a distinct form of subjectivity; each is defined by censuring some (by no means all) aspects of the personal.
personal idiosyncrasies
this ideal of objectivity attempts to eliminate the mediating presence of the observer
the phenomena never sleep and neither should the observer
heroic self-discipline
profoundly moralized vision
and like almost all forms of moral virtuosity it preaches asceticism
human worker whose attention wandered, whose pace slackened, whose hand trembled
the self-recording instrument promised to replace the weary artist
machines offered freedom from will
being true to nature:
-in its method (mechanical)
-in its moral (restrained)
-in its metaphysics (individualised)
early alternative approaches to creating picture that were true to nature, but not objective in the mechanical sense
atlases habituate the eye, they are perforce visual
(contrast to the scientific visual forms of photography where one is on the right place at the right time with the right equipment) the Kinect's total randomness
one problem of atlases is that they have to decide what nature is
they all have to solve the problem of choice: which objects should be presented and from which viewpoint (Kinect choosing mechanism and arbitrariness?) (can we not choose what nature is when we are at it? and when we are at nature?)<[...]
(226)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.6[...]atlas
my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).
..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.
An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.
Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]
language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.
Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized
interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.
(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)
my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.
Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.
If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.
Metaphysics of translation
translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.
My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation
obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.
Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house
in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?
Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.
Alpha & Aleph
...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages
‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse
not to contemplate a mechanical t[...]
(227)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.6[...]er ==> new world
fire delivers one from the ice***
steam engine triumphs over forced immobility, inertia
the cut of the reference
product of furnace, the cold product of fusion
old-style riddle
navigate between two pronouns
...................................
properly formed cluster (of letters) = standardization
standard compromises the non-essential, or inessential, those without meaning
what is a logician interested in?
Form --> pathology
misguided sciences
if static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication
pathology
spocken: stammering, mispronounciation, regiomil accents, dysphonia, cacophony
technical: background noise, jamming, static, cut-off, hyteresis, various interruptions
to communicate oraly (in performance work with Ali ) is to risk losing meaning in noise.
A successful communication is the exclusion of the third man, the demon, the interference.
Mathematics has triumphed so well over noise
the (un)logical beginning of logic
to render a form independent of its empirical realization --> universal
drawing a square on sand, i evoke an idea, i eliminate the empirical, dematerialise reasoning
(what is rematerialised reasoning? aesthetic form..?)
the inevitable fact of the historical existence of mathematics
(math's historicity)
(a different word for every yesterday)
...................................
... one had a discourse which often concluded either with the cosmos in general or with the organic life in particular.
19th century
negentropic islands in entropic sea, pockets of order in rising entropy, crystal depositions sunk in ashes, diamond in the rough
organism = meaning + direction
organism combines memory, invariance, plan, message, loss, redundancy, etc
it is old, mortal, and transmiter of new cycle
تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
to niki mikono dar dejle andaz...
(organism?) is a quasi stable turbulence that a flow produces, the eddy closed upon itself for an instance, which finds its balance in the middle of the current and appears to move upstream, but is in fact undone by the flow and re-formed else where.
Man is one at high temperatures
from the information point of view there is a tremendous background noise
the noise of a complex to which a receptor is linked
this unconsciousness
(no one can call that) information is fortunate
there must be noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
[...]
(228)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.2[...]ractical genesis: build a reduced model, have a notion of module, bring the distant to the immediate.
•a senatorial genesis: organize a visual representation of that which defies physical contact.
•a civil or epistemological genesis: take astronomy as a starting point, reverse the question of the gnomon.
•a genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
exchange of the stable and the variant
in a culture with oral tradition, story takes the place of schema, and theater equates intuition.
In Thales story, the schema is the invariant of the tale instead of the tale being the origin of the schema. To teach the theorem is to tell the pseudo-myth of the origin =/= mythical tales being the dramatization of content
Thales theorem is itself anecdotal in relation to the invariable concept that it expresses its own genre: that of similarity***
from a practice he gets another practice
which messages, and how, answers and questions was covered over the centuries by the scenography of shadow-light opposition?
Descartes story: perspectival geometry, theory of shadows.
Plato's story: the sun of the same, the other and empirical object, cast shadow on shaded surface, similarity, the cave of representation.
The tales of origin? --> origin of a technology? Of an optics? Of a geometry?
The ruse of applied mathematics
cultural settings of an architect and an expert builder...
Descartes followed by Descartes
archaic forms of pre-mathematics that run through history
(thinking with geometry must be careful because of its roots in engineering and ruse)
Plato's cave: even flat wall bright, light creates a shaded area; my knowledge is limited to these two shadows. And it is only a shadow of knowledge.
Conclusion of the story of confrontation with solid objects, compact volumes, objective indefinite unknowns.
recognizing the object by its shadow => geometry* (-- transparency and emptiness. the world they constitute is thoroughly knowable)
or
i allow a kernel of shadow within the object --> history of science: the solid always envelopes something that can be rendered explicit***
radical negation of interior shadows
pyramid is itself fire, sun passes through it
Plato kills the hen that laid the golden eggs
“the future of the square and the diagonal is decided as much on the sand where we describe them through the language that names them as it is decided in the sky of ideas.”
the realism of transparent idealities is still immersed in a philosophy of representation.
Iconography is replaced by scenography
the shadowless theatre
the inevitable realism is (still) an idealism
<[...]
(230)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.4[...]n 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 links, (and projections of t[...]
(231)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51[...]fire
•catastrophes
•violence of the elements
•
ajayeb: doxographies (, legends and allegories) composed in natural language (?)
=/= (the problem of) how to duplicate the cube ---,{thematized object of the complete intersubjective relation}
~=? alogon =/= logos: proportion, measured relation, discourse;
alogon prohibits speaking
crisis and recast, questions of archive
Luisa, Foad
(the space of the relation between) experience & abstract --> between sense & purity
(an inquiry line for Luisa: try to figure out the status of pure [which is impure? when history changes])
my allegorical covers
meaning of:
•non-disproportion
•nonviolence
Socrates: you are in crisis because you are ignorant of geometry
even: same
odd: other
برهان خلف borhane kholf, irrationality of the absurd
the irrational is mimetic
=======================
“before-after” temporality narrative
Serres's fabulous work on the effects of the style in science
--> styles profile from (a sort of) stability *** -they inspire disciplines and furtilize fields of research, they seizes what is at stake in sciences
who believes that the passage from local to global is always possible?!
Lucretius answer is immediately “no”
in apass each of us is somehow busy with the critique of unidimensional platitude characteristics of our milieus. / Is that the global notion in our researches?
I want to take it up, maybe fulfill, and modify the project sketched out in ajayeb al makhlughat 10 centuries ago.
#my reading act with ajayeb is like the practice of pencil monoprint on paper on a relief surface. The patterns of reading emerge as the pencil moves gently across the paper, pressing down or not. The paper, pencil, pressure, movement, the object behind, the touch of three elements, interactive interfacial patterns of readingwriting with ajayeb's textual corpus*
” [...] the industrialized world is frequently condemned to considering the concrete universe as its representation.”
Stengers + Prigogine
(?what do we have that helps us give up the idea of a) rational nature of the real
observation ==> generalization
measurement ==> precision
which precisions can be achieved by other than measurement?
How not to travel through the universe like free and self-determined gods? (#magicians)
Stengers > Leibniz @Luisa: “movement is produced within a full world, an interdependent world in which nothing can happen that has not been made possible by the state of the set of bodies according to a harmony that determines and checks at every moment the un[...]
(232)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.3[...]
according to Freud, when the work of mourning is completed the ego becomes free and uninhabited again. Funeral speeches and related writings, are possibilities that structures the movement of identification. Mourning is the interiorization of the dead other, also its contrary. Politics is figured as first and foremost an organization of the time and space of mourning.
After him, it is all war and crumbling.
We know better than ever today that the dead must be able to work. And to cause to work, perhaps more than ever.
The meaning of meaning [...]
...................................
[*]deconstruction: a sort of strategic device + opening onto its own abyss (one of the most influential approaches to texts) =/= method
Campbell --> Derridean deconstruction is visual
Derrida's thinking helps us take images seriously (as philosophical artefacts)
•organizational image: the aesthetic ambassador for the organization (it visualizes + gives aesthetic value to it)
•advertisement: preeminent image of production and consumption of the global economy
image = logocentric vision --need--> problematizing =/= solutionizing
-is there a spirit of critique that is not liberatory in purpose?
Derridean deconstruction: a critical approach --draw--> attention to the operations of method itself (=/= method):
[~? feedback types:]
1. interventionist --advocate--> different/contradictory readings (of images)
2. radical --interest--> roots of meaning-making activity
3. liberatory --seek--> evoke justice (forcing an image to account for itself)
4. ethical --concern--> what is overlooked
5. innovative (productive) --promote--> non-traditional ways of reading (of interpretting, of finding meaning)
intellectual climate in 1960s ==>
•Derrida's deconstruction --> bringing Saussure's own work to its own radical paradoxical conclusion
•Foucault's archeological approach [question the idea that human is an a priori --> how humans have been diagnosed in psychiatry and (ab)normalized in criminal and sexual *discourses* ==produce==> reality effects at the level of body]
•Barthes's semiology =/= the idea that the author is the single and authoritative source of meaning
Derrida's list of concepts:
differance
retrait
revenant
dissemination
deconstruction
hymen
invagination
archiécriture
supplement
khora
pharmakon
scrypt
parergon
subjectile
}--> levers applying torque گشتاور and displacement in the textual machinery
deconstruction
==> counter-intuitive analyses
--> presupposes a detailed knowledge of construction (one must become intimate with the ways something i[...]
(233)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.7[...]elatively undifferentiated and continuous topological space undergoing discontinuous transitions and progressively acquiring detail until it condenses into the measurable and divisible metric space which we inhabit, is a powerful metaphor for the cosmic genesis of spatial structure. (Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy)
baroque Trauerspiel, classical synthesis, ...
synthesis: synthetic thinking (the combination of ideas into a complex whole)
this is not a reasoning exercise (deducing particularity, etc.)
imagine you find a head. how do you search for the body? (research project)
graduating from ... and approaching ...
(from fairy tale ---> approach myth)
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html
becoming Amazon as the fear of the male.
(Amazon as male hunter symbol)
(symbol for) masculine gender principle
(to disavow sexual difference)
>
I am not bringing the text to you, or you to the text.
as you have already guessed we have to destroy both the notion of text and you, to some extent, in order to permit a reading to constitutes itself.
is San'an a prince charming?
(let's examine)
the spiritually established death-birth (death of birth and birth of death) at the end of story
Miyazaki's faceless monster (in Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し), with his flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance. he goes from loneliness, to love, to greed, and finally becomes a student body. he has great agency in the beginning and docile in the end, [اسیر صورت --?--> اسیر معنی]
San'an is determined to see it through, the whole process
the German super-ego
the German ego
to carefully inject some of German super-ego to the Iranian ego
(for Anastasia) what is the next war?
ترسا<br />
(to the audience:) you should feel free to make notes, because I am making notes while you are talking, and these kind of lectures I am doing are the process of those note-makings.
I like to interrupt you. the performance is itself an interruption of you, like when we say in a conversation “may I interrupt you” your pace, your velocity, your speech-acts, etc.
what is being ‘interested’ in the history of illusion?
in your process in becoming woman, you might end up becoming a female robot.
(Tarsaa's part)
whose testicles are smashed here?
to the less molested .... (body of the pupil)
psycho-history
human preparedness for inter-relations with technology and technologization
***test some failures
a different brand of anxiety (?)
walking on groundlessness, literature, house of literature?
<[...]
(234)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.1[...]f learning and thinking
(Maulwurf,) shit on your head, shit is the origin of all gifts, when a child offers his first donation, “look what I have produced!” I honor you with this Kacke.
--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/VomkleinenMaulwurf.html
how can we bring the variety of animals into the singular butterfly metaphor? (Attar's bird's butterfly effect)
Schmetterling! (parvaneh - پروانه)
(‘schmettern’ in German: v. smash, shatter, slam; blare, fanfare, bellow, roar) --- in schmettern you already have the ‘smashing,’ the butterfly smashing in the windshield, by that we are in the land of technology.
Schmetterlinghaus? (The Imperial Butterfly House in Vienna)
خرمن پروانه
Schmetterling is also a German (Reich Air Ministry) air-to-air missile project developed during the WWII, which is detonated by acoustic and photoelectric proximity fuses (Abstandszünder)
(Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh)
time, space, being, death, subversion, pain, transcendence, victory, blood, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Baudrillard,
•poetic violence, obscure elsewhere,
•imaginative reservoir.
•political, poetic, spiritual, or aesthetic sources of inspiration.
•the rebel factor
resistance-fight / ideological dictator
artist-forerunner / experimental thinker
constellation of desire
ambush of destruction =>
...internalization of toxicity
to assimilate the poisonous
mithridatic (“mehr-dad” معجون مهرداد)
what is the dominant information in San'an world?
(ideological and) literary apparatus
issues of belonging and desertion
to endure the direct
epistemic fear
I suggest we go through the rhetorical treatises of Middle East political past centuryr />
(mystic war:)
the decadent view of the obliterated
(swallowing partial glances of the)
“extinction of society”
drinking it
these signals of vanishing are forms of training?
a formula of continuation?
ancient models of defense****
مکانیزم دفاعی
other mature forms of defenses:
•sublimation
•projection: a characteristic that one perceives in oneself but seems unacceptable is instead attributed to another person, denial in attribution [still popular Feuerbach's idea of “religion = projection”, “God = outward projection of a human's inward nature” informing secular anthropological explanation] نسبت دادن احساس خود به دیگری
◦it changes the reality (for the person who projects)
◦it operates unconsciously (the person won't accept that they project)
•rationalization: irrationalities are explained in a see[...]
(236)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]ing time-zones, from quotidian to ontological, transcendental to experimental
his jet-lags
exhaustion of metaphysics
I am just alerting to a relation to time
(in a nano-structural sense---are we fast? slow? which all these classics and texts I am having here.)
how much time does it take or took for the San'an's students to hook on to the teacher, to the difficult philosophical program that each teaching brings to bear?
...................................
I am introducing myself to you
...................................
#postscript
***Sheikh-e-San'an*** was the Old Testament itself.
It was the perfection of whatever I say more.
(Was it she at the shrine of Sheikh for fifty years?)
Cherished with the perfect disciple. He was a disciple of Kahn, wow!! (Who is Kahn?!)
Ministry of austerity, day and night; Practiced the science of offspringing. Discovering the (secrets that are) revealed. *It was a life to be had* --->
But Hajj (حج) had claws instead of proximity. He didn't know the meaning of his own extremes. He did not sink any traditions.
•Leaders who were in love with him. Wild-gardens (باغ وحشها) themselves came to him.
*A hairy spiritual man.
trotzdem, in greatness and strong authorities, her illness and frailty found him. And he correctly found the tail—people's definitions of joy and sorrow—an idol in the world of science.
Although the Qibla (قبله) his compass could see, a few nights on still he dreamed, ‘the fall of a shrine in the center.’
Betty would prostrate on durability. (Who is Betty?).
He woke up to the world as a lifesaver, and said, “Alas!” this time, “Joseph has succeeded to fallen well.”
From behind he felt a difficult way.
“I do not know going from this sad life” John said “that if I left the faith.” Not a ton on all the ground.
Where is such Qibla---in Ra? (The ancient Egyptian sun god.)
While it cut the position of the Qibla, it became for him a clear path to justice, and stayed in the Qibla---after it opened.
The punishment be upon him in arboreal (baumig, gro?artig), period.
The master grew suddenly old. “With my *disciples” said he.
Go now! The early Going.
****It soon turned out to be ‘devised.’
Authentic disciple of four hundred men, were regressed on a journey with him; Would go to the ends of the Ka'ba (کعبه).
Time, variable, filter -- they go from head to foot.
It turned out to be an awesome perspective—a girl sitting on the landscape. (This is Tarsaa - ترسا).
**christian girl and with spiritual attributes.**
In Ra hundred knowledge Allah spirit. The sphere of Jamal Hassan Tower. It was sunny but she envied sun-shots. Yellow coy lovers in him. Here, heart of the hair of a dead lover, around her hair grip[...]
(238)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.2[...]w—an idol in the world of science.
Although the Qibla (قبله) his compass could see, a few nights on still he dreamed, ‘the fall of a shrine in the center.’
Betty would prostrate on durability. (Who is Betty?).
He woke up to the world as a lifesaver, and said, “Alas!” this time, “Joseph has succeeded to fallen well.”
From behind he felt a difficult way.
“I do not know going from this sad life” John said “that if I left the faith.” Not a ton on all the ground.
Where is such Qibla---in Ra? (The ancient Egyptian sun god.)
While it cut the position of the Qibla, it became for him a clear path to justice, and stayed in the Qibla---after it opened.
The punishment be upon him in arboreal (baumig, gro?artig), period.
The master grew suddenly old. “With my *disciples” said he.
Go now! The early Going.
****It soon turned out to be ‘devised.’
Authentic disciple of four hundred men, were regressed on a journey with him; Would go to the ends of the Ka'ba (کعبه).
Time, variable, filter -- they go from head to foot.
It turned out to be an awesome perspective—a girl sitting on the landscape. (This is Tarsaa - ترسا).
**christian girl and with spiritual attributes.**
In Ra hundred knowledge Allah spirit. The sphere of Jamal Hassan Tower. It was sunny but she envied sun-shots. Yellow coy lovers in him. Here, heart of the hair of a dead lover, around her hair gripping the imagination. Here, pomegranate lives on the beast that pees in Ra.
Saba (صبا) did her hair because he did Moshkin (مشکین). (He didn't have time to do the hair? --but the wind fucked up my hair.)
Leaving it wrinkled up a trait. Both eyes was intrigued lovers. Both eyebrows to arch, was good. Comments on Valentine's Day because he flocked. John, the coquetry, with his arch ‘flocked,’ was closed on May—eyebrow arched. Kurdish, she collected hundreds of human lives that would follow the twists of hair.
LOL, it was thirsty. Feed the hungry world!
“N has thousands of labels,” said he, because of the lack of his mouth. That said, if it was not any of her mouth.
Such eye needle-like mouth around the midst of package. Simin (سیمین) was well on his chin. (It was like Jesus in his speech.)
Joseph chewed hundreds of thousands of heart with blood. First in what he overthrew: Hair jewel in the sun.
Burqa (برقع) on the black poetry---Tarsaa took her Burqa off ==> Laden Sheikh's fire broke out, because of the Burqa and the following.
Then a hundred dead in their hair.
Although the Sheikh was far in advance, (Betty will love this:)
•Loss of the hands and feet
•Loss of fire, place, and left (=/= right)
All his heads were destroyed. He was melancholy because of the smoke from the fire. Love that girl! -looting her life.
**Hair on his faith (as disbeli[...]
(239)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.2[...]e.
Sheikh's commands will give pigs a year. In hundred pig's anywhere, around dead pigs. You're a nobody, so that's no suspicion.
He was an old-enough risk.
---This risk is within each person.
Meal, that comes out of head's trip. If you are aware of their pig-finals: a hard excuse, that the Ra-man is final.
If you step on the path of forbidding the working-man, (both Betty and nose pig hundred thousand,) catch pigs!
Idols burning The ‘Why’ of Love.
Sheikh shows notorious love.
...also unable so, center of John unable to stay down. Because it caught him, of his help. He fled as ‘The Bad.’
In sadness he took over the territory. (Was helping Among the chest.) Sheikh was already at work, loose: “Today we are going to open the Ka'ba.”
What is the command that must be said in secret?
•Or all the time, because you're christians.
“We, scandal of his altar. We, dislike such you, alone. Around us you are like barbarism. You also fail to your vision.” Saddle earth, early escape without you.
We stayed at the Ka'ba's sit.
Sheikh's speech of my life was filled with pain. “Want to go anywhere soon?” asked me, “I'm late, girl!” John increases all my fears.
(Both were inspired by my grief. )
Friends return, to what it will be. If they ask of us, right. From wandering to where is commonplace. Blood filled his eyes and mouth full of venom. Remained in the mouth of the dragon. Reza does not have any infidel in the world.
Ironically, old Islam is christian in her hair away.
He was a master of reason and religion.
His hair became ring in his throat.
“If someone is blaming me, tell him ‘Falls in this period are far. In such period, note the dead!’”
No one is safe from deception and danger, the pigs!
Insomuch that cried The Fellowship of Sadness!, the pain of living-shit shift dead.
Eventually they opened the Ka'ba.
John remained in the burning.
Their Sheikh in Rome alone. (Data for the christian faith.)
Then, the astonisheds with life, each one is hiding in the corner.
To assist Ka'ba, Sheikh hit it in the chest.
Devotion was in the hands of the thumb.
Enough was enough. @“You were not aware of the sheikh?! Sheikh's Ka'ba was (because of) the trip! As a disciple of Sheikh you return instead?!”
@“But Sheikh's deserted house was empty!” Open disciple of Sheikh asked.
Open the Sheikh all the time!
@“What happened to him was the center of a tiger. How much weight she came to head him? christians ‘hair to hair’ is the way of faith in him. *Love loses hair and tattoos forever. (Overall: the arrest of his obedience.) Pork watches him around the middle of the frame, although much on religion pursued our sheikh, ancient knowledge is anew.”
When disciples heard these stories, they surprised. And moan [...]
(241)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.7[...]/>
dionysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps
eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem
cologne center for social research
ccsr
ecotone
epitom
parc
performance and research center
cream
center for research in epistemology and matter
...................................
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antagonistic critical encounters between ordered conventions of knowing and chaotic textuality/imagination is possible. to take the mind where it does not belong. to the rogue arsenals of middle eastern reservoir of imagination and [...]
(242)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]tic tendencies --> that the declared east is plunged into a catastrophic epoch ==freed==> a “will to chaos”
•artistic visionaries (Naderi, Forough, iranian new-wave cinema neomystical) --> strategies of withdrawal, aims of disappearance, situated in obscure elsewheres of auditory and visual landscape
}--> #ideology #literature #mysticism #sectarianism
(from the middle eastern front) to (the issues of):
◦post-historical instant
◦catastrophic resistance
◦creative imagination
}--> issues of:
◾technology
◾representation
◾globalization
◾colonialism
+}--> drastic reinterpretations of:
◽time and being
◽death
◽pain
◽transcendence
◽victory
◽blood
~~(modernity is an extremist epoch)==> mithridatic approaches
anticultural visionaries
extreme --> resistance-fighter/ideological dictator, artistic forerunner/experimental thinker, different constellations of desire
***mithridatism مهردارو mehr-daru: *internalization of toxicity* (the gradual ingestion of lethal substances so as to gain immunity) --> an archaic protective tactic, an ancient model of defense, (subterranean practice of pirates, alchemists, cult leaders, shamans, guerrilla columns, spies, paranoid kings's *logic of encounter*)
(poetic extremism -->) mithridatic: dispensing fragmented verses, aphorisms, and engravings of the atrocity; invitation and unleashing of the malevolence itself, to seduce obliteration;
-affliction, existence thriving in the wound
(assumptions of) inevitability + anticipation + projection ==> mithridatic remedy (in ideological & literary apparatuses): “swallowing partial glances of the extinction of society, actuality, and being itself” (Mohaghegh) [a form of training? for continuation?]--> the poet asking us to fasten our reeling gazes to the objects of damage and derangement (@Ali ) ==> (extremist:) thought and expression have taken the shape of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]
fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]
cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = expl[...]
(243)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.5[...] of a *meteorological device*, forecasting seasons of pestilence and mutilation [<-- my whole work has been against that]
fanatical responses to the evolving storm [=/= the fool (the one whose cognitive defend-system is down), the joker (figure of the always problematic, with its speculative sense for potent tie between meaning and bodies), the cheerleader (porpoising socially deviant, corrupting forerunner), the sleep-walker (moving in anachronistic temporality, in non-explicit non-intentional acting), the eros (weaker than the problem it tries to solve), the queer (optically dense and less elegant kind of corporality in our encounters), the rabbit-chaser (detouring off the ontological anxiety of humanity's enigmatic destination)]
cyclopean protocols of extremity --> narrowest vision (immensified)
the cyclopean organ (of doing/thinking) ==> ‘oracle = explosive device’
|
--> wisdom + rage
--> boundless confined
>
--> precision + enormity
--> nature + technology
--> betrayal + devotion
|
....three brothers سه برادر
----[they were said to have primordial understanding, having monitored the building of creation itself--yet this brings no consolation تسلى, no spiritual composure ارامش, only chronic infuriation, such that they remain at once eternal and impatient]
----[they are gargantuan, immortal, and among the rarest exceptions to be released from the underworld after the great defeat of the chthonic orders, and yet brought back to the surface to dwell among/away from men and the new gods in hard labor on a faraway island, discharged from one hell only to find another imprisonment]
----[they alone can swing the hammers that form mountains, bedrock, ocean floors, tectonic plates, seisamic, yet there is such insane detail even within their most jagged strokes, a punishing symbiosis of the minuscule and the colossal]
----[they are y are the initial inventors of the earth's wild proportions, yet now are condemned to serve as apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects]
----[they are traitors to the new line of anthropomorphic gods, having fought against their false ascent, and thus still fiercely loyal to the old titanic codes, even in their captivity and forced collusion, forever scarred by the robbery perpetrated against the older deities, able to picture the drainage ditches into which the others are now outcast, such that each episode of mastication and uproar is hurled like a psychic bomb intended to free this discarded confederation]
isolationism + monumentality
(teratological formations in modernity)
inner contemplation / evacuation
attunement to the nothing
athleticism of stillness
[interiority (feels the need to?) stretch out into exteriorit[...]
(244)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.5[...]gical diffusion ==> obliteration of the sharpness of the senses in modernity’) =/= loss of the radioactive potential of the world of appearances --> *rabbit chaser* [a mask that i am invested in,] a middle eastern existential cost at stake : the myriad and triggers that alone make possible the descent into Alice's Wonderland--the child chases the the white rabbit(~a partial flashing image) without real thought to its enigmatic reasons or destinations (“why and where is he going?”) Alice (like Janina) is only consumed by his color, speed, movement, and nervous incantation افسون of lateness*** (--> metaphorology of “depth” in east)
code of urgency: “mean what you say and say what you mean”
a (monumental problem or) discord in the West between: saying (or showing in terms of images) and meaning () }--> problem for the propensity of acting, running, hungering, wanting, and living itself --this-is-why--> most groundbreaking ideational products in the West often fail to penetrate enough to excite or instigate (the avant-garde can not longer shock [--> bankruptcy of the contemporary artists in europe]) =/= in the East: 1400 year mythologies can still provoke hysteria and radical fever }<-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)
Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]
a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)
dysmorphic labor
emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور
[*]insurgent = revolutionary of the unreal (=/= [Nasser's kind of] the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard[...]
(245)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.5[...]ral individual into its unknowing accomplice همدست, a vital participant in the abuse and mutilation of his own locality
(a Dandilian policemen remarking:) “They [westerns] are not beggers like us. they all have private cars. their whores spend four or five hours a day just playing around in the beauty shops.” --> for Sa'edi that is the pathological fantasy endemic to the inner workings of a colonized mind. the third world subject perceiving itself as the negational instantiation of occidental greatness ==> swallowing down the civilizational hierarchies of its oppressor's self-projecting image
(preparing for the coming of rapist colonizer) the Dandilians rush to make the Madame's house clean and tidy: “[...]the curtains had been drawn aside. Pots of geranium had been placed on the wall and beside the steps[...]” ~-> Baudrillard's theory of simulation : the Dandilian presenting to the colonizer a Disneyland, *a play of illusions and phantasms* [~->? Dubai: self-affirmation via the domination of the constructed other]
(the american officer leaves the next morning with a mocking laughter and he refuses to play and the Dandilians can't do anything)--> the civilizational dichotomy remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule
on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators[...]
(246)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.8[...]remains intact in spite of the horrifying events that have transpired, with the trafficked deflowered child serving as a metaphor for the cultural-political mistreatment of the third world under colonial rule
on Akhavan's “Adamak” (“Stick-Figure”) [--> historical treachery committed within Akhavan's nostalgic Stick-Figure]
demonization of the television's arrival
-television as a “magical box” an artificial phenomenon that “entrances” its audience
again the idea of authenticity is largely emphasized here, as the television is perceived as a “foreign” entity and therefore an enemy to the millennial history of the province
new medium =/= indigenous modes of communication/expression (of which the roving storyteller is the ultimate instantiation)
(poignancy of the) poet's anthropomorphic profile of the new technologically oriented media
-Akhavan's representation symbolizes the storyteller himself, lamenting his own erasure from the moment of the now (or it is his prophecy for the imminent destruction of the new media in the coming islamic regime?)
--> aesthetic testament to the possibility for a third world revolutionary imagination to emerge from the ruins of the colonial era [, *from the ruins of the empire*]
--> representing the third world as in a state of complete existential-cultural atrophy (tahlil تحليل رفتن) @Hoda
**anticolonial literature reaffirms the all-encompassing grasp of modernity over peripheral subjectivity [--> marginal leader (Mamitua Saber's Marginal Leadership in a Culture Contact Situation)]
(Mohaghegh > Huyssen on Baudrillard:)
Baudrillard's notion of the *silent mass* of the spectators disables any analysis of *heterogeneous subject position in the act of reception* @Laura
any economic or institutional analysis of apparatuses of image production is rendered obsolete by Baudrillard's notion of an almost self-generating and monolithic machinary of image production [...] (<-- Laura should be very aware of this)
Baudrillard's society of simulation does not allow for such distinctions ... simulation, after all, may simply be the latest version of the ideology of the end of ideology
}--> part of the theoretical apparatus of *anticolonial ideology*
one immediate danger of this approach is that it recklessly dismisses anything associated with the other side of the binary (of West/East, self/other, first-world/third-world, modern/premodern, etc.) ==> overlook the subversive utility and democratic accessibility of certain technological innovation --> evident in Shariati's ultra-atavistic endorsement for an aesthetic tradition: “intrusion of the machine into the humna-half may go so far as to paralyze man; it destroys creativity. imagine a type-written page that can be imposed upon millions of people, while before the advent of the typewriter everyone was free to use his creativit[...]
(247)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]s? for Baraheni, the answer seems to rest within a literary turn toward the arsenal of vulgarity, where language is forced to howl and curse again, to match the shock treatment and flagellation (شلاق shalagh) ==>
1. to unveil the degradation and depravity of power, to show it as unbeautiful and disgusting in its most bude form
2. to wage some reciprocal hate against power, to maximize the rawness of what is happening
[-]Shamlu's (dead-end) sightings of public execution and secret police night-raids of 1979-81
(Mohaghegh describing islamic state of iran through Shamlu:) a new iteration of revolutionary terror, millenarian clerical establishment that foresees self-congrave a feverish certainty across every corridor of urban reality (=/= conservative disposition of an ordained Shah seeking to keep his domination,) the vengefull return of a long-suppressed counterabsolutism that has been waiting anxiously for its chance to unleash and envelop a national identity in its now-seething ideology
-bringing the celestial abstractions of a faith crashing down into tangible existence --> they must ***sew, lash, and brand their righteous-ecstatic modalities into awesome materiality***
the vocabulary of: the prophetic, the messianic, the inspired, the sacred
}--> *Shamlu's avant-gardism had always led him to experiment with rotating styles of folkloric ballads, rebel anthems, existential meditations, doomsday rants, elegiac oration, children's lullabies --into--> (a singular blast of an) account of a devastated urban space that moves somewhere between legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, and war cry [--> Shamlu responding to an islamic revolutionary ideology that had enlisted its own alchemy of proclamation, lethal consortiums of drives that fuse the most savage, the most medieval, the most modern, and the most postmodern]
•being coming completely seized beneath the density of revelatory vision
•the ultra-alertness and insomnia of pure anticipation : a calculus of assurance that ‘they are coming’ --> omen
Pasdaran: the unpredictable and insatiate arc of extremity of a paramilitart coalition
=/=
SAVAK: formulaic technocracy of a scientific approach to persecution, extraction, and confession
Pahlavi monarchy: the administrator of urban violence was part amateur, part pseudo-scholar, part civil servant, part serial killer
=/=
Ayatollah theodracy: the administrator of urban violence was part vigilante, part crusader, part cult member, part thug
--> poet must epitomize the last unequivocal administrator of urban violence
does writing have a redemptive (=/=? reparative) function?
the author would necessarily venture to rescue something profound (from the state of dejection)
poet's keyword: *conflagration* حريق, fire --> a middle eastern aesthetics
[...]
(248)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.3[...]rsoin of “philosophy = learning how to die”)
Hedayat straying beyond signification, mortality, and ontological or phenomenological framing =/= my work with ajayeb
([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***
consciousness: only a host of many someones
Nietzsche's transvaluation of historical limitations --> experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation
will to power --> a premediated calculable claim to mastery
Nietzsche: art as an active competitive exchange =/= Schopenhauer's mystical retreat: art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment--a little intoxication and madness (--> a view that many artists today hold)
Nietzsche + Hedayat + Aslani + Hoda's immediate acknowledgement of the world-as-unreal =/= obstacle of historicity =/= Sina: I am following a very different critique of historicity in ajayeb
بادیه نشین فلسفی Nietzsche + Hedayat (elicit repercussions for) subordination of history to a kind of literary-philosophical piracy or bedouinism =/= citadel (of geography, civilization, culture)--> many fabricatoins of art happens in citadels in Europe
Pierre has always been busy with the question of synthesis
entitlement: way of intrusion in homogenous axes of existence
xxxxx 164
...................................
xxxxx 213
most of Mohaghegh's attacks are rhetorical
the (sacred?) boundaries of mysticism
(the boundaries of cities became mystic/sacred)
mystical channels
presenting worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori (arising from an amorphous collection of sound and image. @Hoda)
Mohaghegh working to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically immagined space
initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest
...................................
sect's threat
breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness
hermeneutic arsenals
organic theoretical apparatuses
(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration
Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle
forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity
shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many ar[...]
(249)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.9[...]r />
organic theoretical apparatuses
(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration
Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle
forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity
shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many are susceptible to its whisperings
thus he develops a perpetual alertness to its approach
schemes are everywhere
it seeks
to slip into (the sectarian's own) camp under disguise
penetrating the inner circles in dissimulated form and thus unspotted
no mediation
revenge in closeness
and even more than this,
shadow will attempt to escape accusation if possible
the spectacle
enemy's overhanging presence
--> continual motion
--> time is restless
tower, bastion, citadel, stronghold
operational apparitional center
phantasmatic points of references
a spiritual geoscape of concentration
it must appear formidable, immutable, and impenetrable
as a tangible headquarters encased amid far-flung mountains.
it drifts mainly as a figment in the nomadic mind
of the one who lives most of the nights as a marauder in enemy camps
roaming through its courtyards
speaking with the tower's white and black keepers
before receiving the next command
with it the facticity of another harsh assignment.
from tower's security standpoint
the world looks ripe for the taking.
the fortress holds, and with it, the dream of the fortress.
the earth
closing on us
a deteriorating prism
tightness, entrapment
this cylinder
to a mutual obliteration
all inhabitants are squeezed together
to make another planet
another dream of the enemy:
1. extraplanetary construction
2. confinement of the unwanted
3. momentary infiltration of the lair
4. consumption of the planet
|
conceptual twists: (quadrangulation:)
[four desires - four attributes - four corresponding identify-formation]
1. the most accountable --> creation ~~> *labor* (to build it) --> carpenter خلق
2. the most disconnected --> banishment ~~> *renunciation* (to disown it) --> judge خلع
3. the most invested --> possession ~~> *stealth* (to invade it) --> trespasser خفيه
4. the most around/above/upon --> engulfing ~~> *hunger* (to eat it) --> glutton دله
the entire worlds are disponsable
to salivate and gorge on w[...]
(250)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58[...]•revolutionary
•criminal
•religious
•mystical
•magical
•military
•*avant-garde*
•
**(its conceptual coridors:) each fuses the minimal (elitism) and the excessive (universality):
•delirium
•murdur
•hallucination
•whispering
•doom
•
}<=~ ***the self-chosen against the world***
(“we” is the electric compartment of the sect. the sectarian channels the alarming vibration of the “we"--the one who becomes many)
*evil: a force of liberation, beauty, complexity
Ali's microhostilities (on me, the way he tells)
*guided by dislike*
(*terminal Intimacy*: definite concept of friendship:) “they will all die for one another" = "they will all kill one another”
“the sect occasionally allows the opening of the closed circle, reforming as a stright line that penetrates the world of others” --> (a phantom) *imperative to entirity*
sectarian language: the author cages the reader (in each verse)
sectarian animism ==> paranoiac dialogues:
•language of things (communication with the inanimate)
•concert with sacred beasts (oracle, snakes, animal spirits, etc. **the uncooperative figures of nature**)
•warnings of extraterrestriality (those of faraway sentience)
•murmurings of superstition (man, fate, chance, fifth column[= the group who undermine a larger group from within])
hiding as mission --> dissimulation & hollowing
sectarian lives by code, but cannot be deciphered or analyzed* --methodological--> leaves one undetected (--> assassins who are inflexible, precise, and systematic to the highest degree, and traceless for this very reason)
...they remind of the ungovered body, the accidental, and death
xxxxx 280
...................................
(Mohaghegh's work on the middle east in his book) it is ***a theory that does not speak for ‘the East’(= a construction) but rather *an East*(= a radical illusion)***
-it offers careful insight into singular, distinctive episodes of thought and writing in the Middle East (and to explore their relevance across the topology of world thought at large)
-the fractal nature of his four separate subject-positions point to the *exceptional diversity and heterogeneous makeup of Middle Eastern cultural imaginaries*
...the insurgent carries a hundred masks within one, the poet a hundred more, the mystic a hundred more, and the sectarian a thousand
(@Geert)
[*]modernity: a self-naming historical epoch that redefines/fuses the exercise of power and knowledge and for which the enlightenment, capitalism, colonialism, technology, humanism, ideology, simulation, and the domination of instrumental reason[...]
(251)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.2[...][<-- chaos reminds us] --> Ali, Shabnam, Hoda, --Sina--> let's enjoy the pleasure of watching the text die* (_to rid literature of its survival instinct)
literature as a space of unbearable vulnerability --> perpetual sabotage --> each idea, each interpretation draws the text closer to (the hour of a) collapse
*contact with nothingness*
inscription of fatality
conceptual matrix of fatality:
•extremity --> breaking points
•excess --> an effusion, an unforming
•exhaustion (=/= fatigue)
the avatar of ecstasy
veiled secrecy of affirmation
}--> *archetype of cruelty*
--> [to speak of] (chaotic text as) *alchemy*: corrupt the order of things, become reborn in a polluted sensibility
(is this what i do?)
chaotic text must fashion a generative prism, unnatural admixtures, *contaminated alliances*
[let's] *unload texts toward corrosive depths [...] where they run their acids across one another* --> my work
transition from theory --to--> theft
transition from (the profession of the) reader --to--> smuggler
(strands of thought ranging:)
from cruelty --to--> fatality
from alchemy --to--> piracy
chaos --> anarchic potential, disquieting worlds
(Mohaghegh asking:)
*is chaos an affirmative or nihilistic experience of the world?
*is chaos primarily creative or destructive?
*is the expressive act (aesthetic or philosophical) a chaotic state?
*(east's) horizon fastened to the exteriority of Western thought*
experiential elsewhere
the so-called [*]cultural difference: an old game of declaring the world's disjointment
==> many people (including myself) ***to perceive their intellectual and poetic exercises as in partial alignment with the creative possibilities of their culture***
*partial cultural alignment* --> german discourse on integration
[chaos] manifesting and fading within countless spheres of speculation:
•Benjamin's temporal arabesque
•schizoid desire-production of Deleuzian nomadology
•Artaud's hysterical demand (-demand is always hysteric)
•fable of “chaos outside the system” (Schlegel's concept)
•active presence of an inhuman turn in Camus
•Serres's ‘genesis’ a quasi-mystical force of an immemorial nature
•Mohaghegh's ‘chaotic’ marks (no resurrection of a primitive world but rather) an extravagant departure from the history of being, an expressive wire being shaped as we speak
[*topologies of imagination / mode of consciousness / their specific poetic-philosophical mind:]
Europe/West --> possessive (when it is colonialist)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
[...]
(252)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.4[...]st)
Europe/West --> schizophrenic
Sout East --> nomadic
Middle East --> chaotic
*chaotic writing*
(artistic research writing as it is practiced in apass [--> *closure of a whole system*] =/=) a *writing-toward-chaos* (--> Hoda =/= closure ~? catharsis تزکیه غیر روحانی)
the protocols of understanding are challenged and not left standing
no dynamics of meaning-formation solidified
no acculturation (~ integration) of the reader is embarked upon
no (de)codification successful
all techniques of truth-telling must fail
--> refusing the closure (of a whole [subject/person])
its own raw self-refracting (textual event) --> *forever refracting itself* (--> is refractive writing/thinking really useful for iranians today?)
-transparently nebulous vision of darkened vantages
[Reza, Setareh, Ehsan, Foad, Hoda's conceptual register and incorporating themes:]
annihilation, rage, ecstasy, madness, deception, apocalypse, desertion, contagion, eternity, the shadow
imperative to restlessness
writing-act as inherently antagonistic
borders of subjectivity:
•dominant ideologies of history
•conspiracies of identity
Foad's poem “farar”
textual experience as a prism of subversion, innovation, and becoming
•hardened instinct for ruin kharabat خرابات
•fusion of:
◦appearance & disappearance
◦tragedy & delirium
◦creation & destruction
•(unsteady condition of the writing-act [unpacks itself without origin] where) *nothingness & excess* tangle
bluring of possibility and impossibility
to compose an affective universe without recourse to the myth of origin (*?) ~= to express a singular voice without access to a name
his literary-poetic mosaics
tracking the chaotic imaginary
(subjectivity's) disassociation from the world --> Hedayat's The Blind Owl (<-- an overreactive consciousness?)
*one that owes nothing to what came before*
a consciousness once held hostage
*carving inward and then assuming a combatitive stance*
ever quickening its velocity, only then to exhaust its force and vanish as if exorcised into breathlessness (--> what is this body?) -->{ persistent injury --> chronic wearing-down ==> subjectivity is overcome : *acceptance of cruelty* (=/= death wish) : raising the stakes of existential experience by transmitting the authorial self beyond its own limits and toward its chaotic possibility (=/= death wish)
annihilation epitomized as instance of vicious travel*** --> ?!
thought-scarring affect
(radical modification of consciousness:)
•Kierkegaard: “I die death itself”
•Bataille: “he who does not ‘die’ fr[...]
(253)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.5[...] whatsoever”
•Benjamin's “destructive character” clearing away
an annihilative technique
writing-act and the *conceptual terrain of fatality*
an ecstatic mode
bringing consciousness to sleep
***rage = excess + shadow (~ blackout) }--to--> formlessness [example: Hedayat: author's misshapen hallucination, beggin for an end to subjectivity and existence to “surrender myself to the sleep of oblivion"]
*individous potentials* of the rage (<-- lure of the rage)
-(Sana's) angered disposition
(as a) performativity of ignition and collapse
**rage/anger is always (sees itself as) innocent**
rage proceeds as a state of innocence, a forward moving clearance, to become an agent of sheer delivery, to commit at will
innocence tries to remember ~ that which “remembers” has become foremost innocent. wants its members/phallus back
[rage components: innocence, forgetting, coldness]
--> impact without imprint (--we must always have an imprint of our impacts)
the text becomes existence itself (--> the monsterous consciousness of Hedayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]
...fastened itself to...
(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~
*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstruc[...]
(254)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]edayat's narrator in The Blind Owl)
every object, event, or image, is synthesized back into the empire of the narrator's own account***** [=/= my work, my storytelling]
...fastened itself to...
(...currents of)
chaos**~~
annihilation**~~
rage**~~
*shadow*
--> **to elicit the transfiguration toward an emergent literature of the inhuman**
•Hedayat's shadow
•Nietzsche use of the shadow as a guarantor of the overman: “how his shadow stands even now behind everyone” , “now light, now shadow of that which must come” , “i will complete it: for a shadow came to me--the most silent, the lightest of all things came to me! the beauty of the superman came to me as a shadow: what are the gods to me now”
tilted destiny
beyond the need for being
chaos experienced as a *deception*
Ali motioning to chaotic discord, his rhetoric of video editing: phantasmatic lawlessness --> surrender the text to a certain sorcery(!), schemes of a textual unreality
=/= restrictive epistemologies of truth
=/= technologies of regulation
convulsive discontinuity (=/= systematicity)
carries the will to execute fantasia
(yet transpiring morphologies that carve in) authoritarian injunctions of being-in-the-world [=/= experimentation]
--> (Ali's mirage:) suffocated prism of reality --> rebellion becomes instinctive
-narrating graphic instances of sociopolitical violence --view--> modernity as a state of permanent collapse
(for Ali :) literature/art = espionage عمل خرابکارانه در مواضع دشمن (=/= bribery)
(in order to say no to being) “passive witness to an overconstructed world” =/=
•Beckett: absurdism (with minimalist penteration)
•Nietzsche: intoxication (Dionysian assault against surface/depth binary)
•Adorno: fantasy (is the real act of knowledge)
[*]text:
•mimetic transposition of the ideal
•reflexive treatment of the world
the invention of transparent**
[who invented transparency?]
deception --?--> suggestion of the world as unreal [==>?! pragmatism]
lucid interchange of untruths
existential distortion
San'an + moridan (مریدان) --> authority of authenticity
annihilated consciousness of the disciple (morid)
(volatility of) lived dreamscapes <-- (always) staged imaginary
(illusions go on unarrested)
Hoda's visual techniques (in video) ~ her special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparit[...]
(255)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]nctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)
it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain
sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor
(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent
four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory توبیخی (--> under intensive evaluative scrutiny)
3. litigious دعوایی (--> conspiracy)
4. exalted متعالی (--> grandeur)
*attribution error: social perceivers has to overattribute lack of trustworthiness to others
*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions
from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousness
the direct link(?) between socioeconomic status and development of paranoia
(physically:) high blood pressure & hardening of the arterial walls (& drug abuse) ==> decline in brain circulation ==> paranoid reaction
still paranoia has a better prognosis (تشخيص قبلى) than schizophrenia
(paranoia is a limited schizophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)
state of deafness --> paranoia
•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose: break between the ego and its object, a bond of identity
•Otto Rank: myth of the birth of the hero --> world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later [...]
(256)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.1[...] question/problem of: incompatibility of past and present, there and here
object of event or journey (expedition, venture,)
story of the “archive of...” : collection of savored differences
the unreal is not always imaginative or speculative
it is sometimes:
a drive (suffering, passion,)
a password (encryption)
a device (machine, guide,)
accidental and chosen
the character’s wisdom, impulse, cunning, courage (endangerment), innocence (purity), violence (rage, atrocity)
intelligence: diabolical perception
...................................
(to achieve) the perfect secret: a secret that when revealed remains a secret (a riddle, a puzzle ~= monster: confrontation of the raw unnamable)
future liar --> to resurrect (in the form of fable or rumor):
•fake archive (=/= real witness)
•buried forged artifacts in some gamble
•
--> future out of sync (hyperbolic commons) ==> (an aesthetic of) temporal deviation [=/= messianic time of revolution, historical time of modernity, chronological time of capitalism,] --> (the task of) **thinking untimely**:
•forgetting
•erasure
•recreative
(Artaud's vampiric schizophrenic untimeliness...)
(Sina + Mohaghegh's) *existential radicalism*
night: underground of time
where other things can happen
a phenomena where people encounter mercilessly anonymous indifferent impersonal inhuman nature of the universe
(Mohaghegh's work on the renditions of nocturnality)
(carnaval's) multiple forms [prototype after prototype] --> formfullness =/= (deconstruction's) formlessness
...................................
ordering ==> violence, exclusion, injustice, sacrifice =/= ~=> residue (of ordering --Serres--> its excluded inessential, peripheral, parasitic) *thermal exciter*
•the anthologizing, selecting, and ordering act @Marialena
•with the discourse of parasite we are at including and inclusion
now our relationship to knowledge is to be more extravagant and parasitic =/= economic and fast
every time we write (sometimes referring the reader to the dictionary) we are also reviving language
...................................
criminal's relation to the dark (fugitive, dealer, prowler ولگرد) =/= wanderer's relation to the dark (nomad, sojourner, sleepwalker)
Mohaghegh --on--> sub-identities whose survival relies upon a certain exact mastery of night's formulas + learning its conceptual-experiential relations to: time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, enigma, solitude, sensation, vision, secrecy, monstrosity, the body
night
•[where one] fathoms otherwise
•the time-space of the visionary, the imaginary, the [...]
(258)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60[...] />
nightclub: a place of nocturnal survival
club manager
lighthouse-keeper
(catastrophic imagination --> fable of) slum = the true face of the city
persecuted, transient, unrescued
(wunderkammer) a cabinet of curiosities (~/?= pandora's box) of subjects, objects, atmospheres, associates, body parts
ontocidal: decimation of Being, both individual and universal
medieval islamic world renders us countless templates linking night to sacred and profane realms: stories of augury, mantic beings, and vatic utterances in circulation from all sides
Thousand and One Nights
god's turbulent relation to obscurity
crescent moon
...brilliant speculative accomplishment of the Golden Age of Islamic Thought now a dark age of its own
معراج miraj (Mohaghegh's Dante's ascension)
sky-voyage of the Prophet Mohammad from Mecca to Jerusalem and then upwards into heavenly spheres, filled with supernatural descriptive passages of guardian angels, paradisiac gardens, hell-bound valleys, meteorological orbits, fatal latitudes and meridians, and the gargantuan throne of God itself
night-journey: spiritual + corporeal --> prophetic night (of strange breathing apparatus <-- angelic wing)
angel's wing [that spans entire worlds] --reopens--> (the relational channel between) desire & fear
(descriptions of seeing an angel's body)
==> sarin, cyclosarin, tabun, soman
==> respiratory failure, diaphragm hyperactivity, fainting, pupil constriction, salivation, myoclonic jerks (muscle spasms), cardiac arrest
}--> synaptic breakdown ==> cholinergic crisis --> captive in a state of poisonous ventilation
buraq: a chimera of: animality + humanoid + gemological (multiplicies) + machinic + vegetal + spectral (virtues) =/= taxonomical purity of creation
•stretch the barometers of hybridity, androgeny, disproportionality
•zig-zagging, levitation, elliptical arcing
•like a horse, smaller than a mule and bigger than a donkey. Its face was like a human's face, and its ears were like the ears of an elephant...Its head was of ruby, its wings of pearl, its rump of coral, its ears of emerald, and its belly of red coral. Its eyes were like glittering stars, and its tail of pearl, and its reins of light
--> vehicle to traverse from geographical to cosmological space
journey-to-the-center or exile-to-the-edge
[title]
*the old-hag world*
being-in-the-world = old hag with an ugly face, practice of seduction, artifice, cosmetic embellishment, optical tricks, enhancements
the designer, the seamstress, the architect, the sculptor, the illusionist, the surgeon, the perfumer --> surat صورت =/=? facade
[infernal-geological finale]
I [...]
(259)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.2[...]orpion, ideal killing-machine, back-biter, poisoned tips
--> ***nonstop leaking of the inward outward***
2. body parts of hell
3. topographies of hell
Mohammad's night-journey's hellscape, vivid orchestration of space
[...]in one direction, a “river of bile, blood, worms, and fire[...] boiling together, putrid and revolting” alongside another “black and rippled with fire[...] growling at itself with clamour and terror”
experimental cuisine (demand a certain oblique consciousness from the participant)
angel physiognomy (multi body, collective chant) ~= underworld scorpions
atonal angelic larynx ==> non-harmonic, anarchic, cacophonous image of the heavens (--Mohaghegh--> divinity as noise)
•prophetic listener (body became organs of hearing, schizophrenic audition of شش جهت six directions)
wind of barrenness
rih al ‘aqim (from the species of criminal wind bad-e dabur, God sends it to destroy things)
•blows throughout the placeless realm
•particular condition of absence (in taxonomies of ruin and chasm)
•their moon-like faces
•innumerable
[*]veil: transcendent invisibility, receptacle of competing backstories (of shame, conspiracy, superiority, covert, elite)
galleries of self-covering demonic beings
Gabriel: angel of revelation (oversees:)
•khasf خسف sinking into the ground
•maskh مسخ disfiguration of features
astigmatism (a type of refractive error, retinal tearing)
cartographical layerings
(Mohaghegh reading a Babylonian nocturnal prayer)
(old) god [divinity cults of ancient worlds]: signposts of an extra-human imaginary ==> consciousness trespass beyond itself
in the face of the night's obscurity (when the all-seeing shuts its eyes)
pastoral life turns murderous (at dark)
signaling the absence of fairness...
blurring of omniscience...
delay of verdict...
aimlessness of quest
•blindness to fill the void of divination
•wandering, detour, or stillness to fill the void of odyssey
Sin
moon-god
•enigma (“he whose heart cannot be read”) --> epistemic
•futurity (remote: “could see farther than all the gods”) --> temporal
somnolence خواب و بيدارى
==> branches of nonsense pervade (disbanding of the herd)
(cypress سرو) tree
inspector of cosmological space
in theo-terrestrial plane:
1. alluvion: the wash or flow of water against a shore --> inundation
2. alluvium: a deposit of clay, silt, sand, and gravel left by flowing streams in a river valley or delta --> detritus [residuum alone is left to control the universe?]
Ishtar
guar[...]
(261)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.4[...]primordial gloom
evil lizard, *world encircler*
•defeating Apep: basematerial outputs (spit) --to--> elemental properties (fire) --to--> man-made weaponries (lance, knife) --to--> fetishistic physiologies (the left foot) --to--> sympathetic magic (tearing apart of effigies
(sectarian logic?)
desire for clear reactional materiality [=/= sadistic or paranoiac serial killings]
teratological and semi-demonological turn
interjecting thingness, fiendishness, and monstrosity into our midst
night: indefinite definite ~=> nihilistic force of closure
(from) orthodoxy --to--> dramaturgy
(Mohaghegh's theory of) fanatical sovereignty in pagan thought --> ultimate keeping & violation of the law ~= obsessive form & apocalyptic formlessness
(reconciling) *the toxic dialectics of presence & absence* behind every theo-political order : gods walk among us in immanent ambush, hiding in night's open view (of many faces, masks, tongues, robes, tastes, proportions, and gestures), adopt infinite visages, apparels, pseudonyms, and dialects [=/= monochrome trappings of daily identity]
Ahriman =/= fire-god
omnimalevolent side
first destructive spirit
twins of the primeval choice
==> crises of perception
dwelling in non-being
shape-stealer
self-cutting (cooking of his own paranormal tissue)
earthly creation = ruse, net, and temporary prison (a decorative window-dressing to lure the false god away)
a sunless place
mortal transactions (of civilizational, philosophical, religious, and moral trials)
night-raid
nocturnal fierceness
asceticism of the warrior
asceticism of the night-watchman
(Goda riding with the) exponential disinformation of legend
learn to talk with night <-- not indicative of a knowing subject
--> to become both hypnotized & hypnotic whisper
language of mood (subtle movements of):
•temperature drops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky
Bronze Age eschatologies
queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions
dark thoughts
evanescing moon
...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky
thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)
*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--t[...]
(262)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.6[...]ops
•intermittent gusts of air and wind
•snapping of tree branches
•shooting comets of sky
Bronze Age eschatologies
queen of riddles
cosmic idolater
her language never argues, only propositions
dark thoughts
evanescing moon
...guerilla leader who fled into the mountains and froze to death beneath the night sky
thoughts of
•obvious separation (from family, lovers)
•potential victory and loss (fatalistic struggle)
•futility of human experience amid insects and animals creeping in his midst (transfigured)
*night <--tied--> wondering*
*night <--tied--> uprising*
*night <--tied--> possession + dispossession*
*night <--tied--> countdown* شمارش معکوس
*night <--tied--> disappearance*
*night <--tied--> abdication*
*night <--tied--> dismay* جبن
*night <--tied--> obscenity* جبن
***night --to--> bring the mind elsewhere***
Mirza Kuchak Khan
Jangali
...once the leader of the jungle movement; now the jungle will confiscate him
(tactics of the willed unknown)
inspiration <--> madness
horoscope <--> puppetry
sensitivity to lower-grade intimation ==> gaining of subtle lunatic powers (in the arts as well #feedback):
•slight paranoiac ability
•slight manic ability
•slight delusional ability
•slight schizophrenic ability
•slight obsessive ability
•slight melancholic ability
when dreams replace sleep
when the dead pass into the deep of the night
when night's deep appears in those who have disappeared
Blanchot
...................................
Mohaghegh on Blasim's The Madman of Freedom Square
the story of two foreigners known as ‘the blondes’, identical twins of fair hair and complexion who come each morning (their place of origin and purpose unknown) to roam down the main street of a neighborhood called the ‘Darkness District’. This quarter of the capital city is thus named for being the only sector still lacking electricity, and our nar- rator describes the residents there as physically gaunt and existentially worn down. This is an unwell place, and so the sudden arrival of the blondes represents a contrast, a radical anomaly and an enchantment-in-waiting for a zone that otherwise wants nothing more than to lay down and give up forever. We are told that the ambiguity of their circadian walk has an immediate transformative effect on the district; though these figures never speak, they cast gentle glances upon the inhabitants on either side of the street, and this courtesy soon bears miraculous fruit as the wishes of each person, young and old, man and woman, find themselves granted.[...]
(263)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.6[...]ly bringing electrical power and the locals planting flow- ers and showing acts of kindness to one another…all in honour of their two strange visitors (with whom we read that everyone has grown enamoured). They even build a stone monument in veneration to these silent newcomers. But then one morning the blondes do not materialize, as a violent coup is underway that sets the district on fire with bombs and missiles; amid the fighting, our narrator is flung against a wall, his life then saved by one of the blondes (their statue since demolished), and awakens in a mental asylum railing about the speechless aliens who rescued him (and the others)—only to find that no one has any memory of such beings or any trust in his recol- lections of them; he later finds himself strapped with a detonative suicide vest (the final light-bracketed image).
...................................
Morton on Weber --> sociology is itself (the logistics of) disenchanted in exploring disenchantment
charisma-based society ~=> disenchanted bureaucratic society
charisma: (paranormal) force field that surrounds and penetrate us with *healing + destructive* consequences
(<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)
bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion
agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming
neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism
Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost
(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality
force-like animal magnetism
magic = causality + illusion
appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip
(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)
incomprehensible charisma of kitsch
(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])
...................................
(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile
...................................
body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one ca[...]
(264)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.7[...] individual and collective past
•
=/= children vacillate between innocence & awareness, morality & immorality, cruelty & kindness, foolishness & wisdom, , , **children act as sophisticated consumers**
--Elias--> ***children make emotional, political, consumerist choices***
how adults construct childhood --> ***aesthetic social imagination***
how adults imagine children (in idealized forms ==> evocation of emotions) ==> give meaning to (individual and) collective realities
childhood --> worry + obligation =/= adulthood --> ease + freedom
(my childhood is sometimes remembered by me so different than of my friends --> makes the universal media objects specifically precious: cartoons that were watched by us across border and time ---> go to Sina's Children's Media Watch List childrensmedia.net)
imagine children -->
•nature of emotions
•relationship to religion
•relationship to society
◦articulation of attitude towards society
•constructing concept of:
◦individual
◦community
◦nation
◦gender
◦age
Elias's notion of emotion --> a broad category to index concepts of morally, ethics, politics, aspirational acts,
(everything depends on the ways we remember our [emotional experience of] childhood)
(memory = salad of) fragments of memory + emotions from our experience + emotions experienced by others + what we have been told by others about our childhood
common theory --> age between two and eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising
*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)
*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions
*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)
*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)
create and identify emotions in visual images
fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking
(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]
Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society
turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement wit[...]
(265)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]d eleven children are most sensitive to external factors ==> most vulnerable to advertising
*age seven*
children are increasingly controlled by symbolic relationships and images (+ make judgment about things)
*under five*
{human characters ~?/= animated characters}--> belief in imaginary characters and monsters, management of emotions
*age two*
(end of) two --> children begin pretending (until age of five)
*over four*
idiosyncratic system of thinking about causality (extraordinary plays larger role than adults)
create and identify emotions in visual images
fantasizing =/= fantastical thinking
(for children) wishing = mental + magical + it exists in relatio to skill [---> go to Cinderella, waiting]
Elias's study of children images (visual material featuring children) in Persianate cultures (turkey, pakistan, iran) --> (role of) ***childhood/children = location of enacted emotion***
childhood + religion + visual culture <-- implementation of ideology in society
turkey, pakistan, iran:
•strongly ideological (like other states)
•multiethnic
•shaped by encounter with colonial empire
•strategic (=/= cultural) engagement with (west) global powers
•belief in the existence of charismatic religious authority
•belief in barkat برکت
Iran special relation to *religious visual art*
(Elias's) aesthetic: social imagination, creating reaction without words (= showing)
=/= telling
=/= nonutilitarian form of contemplation of art
=/= cognitive
Western mid 18th century philosophy ==> “aesthetics”
lower cognitive faculties
experience of sensate body
how the world strikes the body
emotional and affective response
modern aesthetics --> contemplation of beauty (superior to idleness and boredom <-- some sort of failure of moral vigilance)
“art = description of beauty”
==> Kant: aesthetics = sublime beauty (=/= quotidien)
}--> (fable of) the idea that **beauty engenders virtue** --> the beauty must be formal
(social system --> people) interacting with visual objects
making consumer choices [--(is not always)-->] interacting with visual objects in ways that further ideological formations
*religious reaction to sensory inputs are aesthetic* <-- they anticipate knowledge to be revealed in the future =/= rest contemplatively in the present
*religious gaze = apocalyptic glance*
=/= Kantian aesthetics (noninstrumental form of enjoyment)
Plato + Aristoteles ==> premodern islamic thinkers --> “beauty = virtue” (harmony of physical and moral)
(problem with) philosophical aesthetics of disinterested contem[...]
(266)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]br />
age-graded sequences of children's religious books --> progressively decreasing use of images
questions (> Elias:)
•are there culturally specific ways of seeing --answer--> yes
•does religion requires its own categories for understanding visuality and sensory systems? --> *religion is a problematic category* <== inherently unstable {religion referring simultaneously to systematic ideological systems, atomized and multivalent beliefs, range of individual and cultural practices}--> constant flux + relative to each other =/= religion: discrete phenomena
•scholars who argue for a transcendental quality to religion
•Durkheim + Weber --> religious = behavioral
•Otto --> location of religion: a fascinating incomprehensible force outside of the human person
•Eliade --> essential unity of the religious (~= commensurate human behavior)
•Elias --> manifestation of belief and ideology in visual written emotive forms --functionalist--> [*]religion = visual art
visual material --serve-->
•aesthetic
•generator of meaning
•generator of affirmation شعاری
•icon
•talisman
•objects imbued with religious function
•token of aspiration
•instrument of aspiration (or other emotions)
•explicit reminder (of good behavior)
•gesture towards a better future : wish images
•
seeing = embodied act (---> go to Gossip Girl)
•(individuals make complicated interpretive choices concerning) what to look at & what they have seen
•*we feel through, about, from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
<[...]
(267)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...], from the visual* ~= visuality is embodied ~= visuality is multisensory + emotional
•Merleau-Ponty --> prereflective bodily consciousness: ‘body = instrument of comprehension’ (all material and other objects are woven into the body's fabric) --example--> blind man's stick
•[Groz --> phantom limb]
(Asad > Elias) power of things is their ability to act within a network enabling conditions (physical + mental --> feeling, remembering, hoping) -->{capacity of objects ==> society and politics become vitally material}
(the idea of power:) objects have agency in the complex web of interactions that joins them to other [--> object having itinerary] =/= objects have abilities or sentience that they use autonomously [--> object having life]
}--Elias--> critique of the idea of scopic regime
Elias furnishing the minimum information necessary to create an informed context (to frame of discussion) =/= give comprehensive history (about iran, pakistan, or turkey)
objects --> *affecting presence* (objects elicit affects)
[*]object: location of emotion, happiness pointer (---> go to index finger)
visual object: signifier of individual and collective emotion and aspiration
index
we do not have access to reliable system of deductible reasoning that assures us of an accurate interpretation of one value to the index --> lack of precise causative relationship between *observed phenomena* and their *affective consequences* (manifested on individuals and human societies)
}<-- this plagues visial material cultural studies
(Gell's notion of) abduction: a form of reasoning to abduce a possible (=/= actual) agent or effect
abductive reasoning (=/= deduction, communication, translation)
--> ***to analyze and experiment in the lack of data or causal relationships*** (which happens most of the time)
(i have been using the term speculation as synonym for abduction)
abduction = informed abduction : you need as much contextually relevant information as possible
(learning from Elias)
•specificity of emotions and affects <-- much more interesting
•specificity of objects or people
[*]emotion: object of (unintentional) human manufacture ==> location of human meaning & motivation
...................................
childhood Elias chap2
philosophical notions of selfhood in late antiquity (= islam + europe) ==> study of emotions & feelings
Platonic + Aristotelian : “emotion = ambivalent urges need to be disciplined and harnessed through some process of education” ==> islamic ideas of body & mind
favorite emotion (~ religious expression + motivator) in islam [+ sufism]: love & virtue [--✕--> my interest in hate & monster]
it was only one and half a centur[...]
(269)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.6[...]eeminently cultural --> Lutz
anthropological approach l:
•metaphors/words for different emotions --Kovecses--> individuals choose to conceptualize their emotions differently within the constraints impressed on them by in universal physiology {*force: the primary emotional metaphor*}
•body-based constructivism
(William Reddy >) emotive: (for example saying “i am happy.”) performative (effects change) + constative (describes the world)
•emotive utterance --> getting through of something nonverbal into verbal --> failure of representation --> a person
}--Elias-->
•logocentric concept of emotive <-- comes from speech act theory (there is no evidence that thinking and saying out loud “i am happy” have the same effects, or forcing one self to smile)
•there is no reason to consider one action more or less descriptive than performative than the other [--Sina--> my whole work has been about arguing the performativity of descriptive acts, there are no descriptions that do not generate emotions]
•lack of methodological distinction between (anthropological) fieldwork [: subject is changed by the presence of researcher] =/= historical research
•problem of synchrony in “emotive” <-- ignoring memory, aspiration (on the list of the emotional actor)
emotional states can be evoked or avoided(?)
conditions can be manipulated with the goal of shaping emotions in the future
emotion and its affects
•emotion --> medicated and sustained
•affect (a very recent idea) --> ephemeral instantaneously rises and dissipates (leaving residual effects)
}<-- a heuristic device (difference) to highlight different kinds of experiences, their perception and impact
affect is under inquiry in understand:
•customer culture
•entertainment industry
•
•(individual located in larger communities)
[*]affect: embodied thought : culturally and corporealy informed cognition = thoughts + apprehension “i am involved”
[emotion = i am involved]
(Elias) arguments in favor of affect (affect-culture):
1. (help us to understand) relationship between *(human) bodies, nature, action*
2. explains cooperative living, sacrifice, generosity, attachment, affection (better than theories that focus on economics, politics, power)
3. critical apparatus for gaining knowledge from human interaction and social movements --understand--> future
(concept of) affect --> productive way of understanding human attitude and behavior
_____________
affect theory
•(Spinoza ==>) Deleuze's ethnology of bodily capacities ==> Massumi
•(Darwin --?-->) Tomkins's psychobiology and differential affect ==> Sedgwick
Tomkins
basic affect transcend culture
durable and socially meaningful
Deleuz[...]
(270)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.8[...] religion, country]
gheirat specifies one's appropriate reactions to the particular acts of the other --> in the form of emotions: anger, hatred, jealousy
(Elias’ problematic and useful definition of) [*]affect: perceivable measurable describable effect of emotional events and experiences, what is felt + what is emoted at an individual and collective level, (enacted + perceived) ‘happening’ of the human experience (=/= undefined protoevent)
affect: a way in which one knows an experience is occurring + a way in which one reacts to an experience ==shape==> future human experience
1. enactment (performativity) of emotion is inseparable from its experience
2. emotions, enjoying words, emotion events cannot be comprehended apart from the sociopolitical context in which they occur (emotion act ~/?= emotion evoked)
somatic activity (crying) ==make==> emotions (sadness)
(in islam) happiness <--> virtue
(robust genre of literature) marvels and bestiary --> wonder at natural & manufactured wonders of the world (pyramids ~= mortality) “==encourage==>” contemplation of God's creative powers
(in sufism) tension between good and bad feelings (ugly, outlaw emotions...) ==> progress (spiritual advancement)
--> (sufi) scandalous behavior: performative form of cultivating negative emotions in oneself and others
emotional regime
ecological phenomenology
emotional habitus
habitus = [*]mood: collective feeling --Bourdieu--> *making and using moods have to be integral part of (the goal of) any sociopolitical process* (@Foad, @Sina)
(**collective action if impossible if people are not in the mood**)
*educational material (~= ideological material) : integrated attitude toward the world*
regulatory forces of society construct (=/= control) behavior
[two feelings: you are *constructed* butd* but still might find yourself with agency =/= you are original (essential, special) and might find yourself *controlled* by forces of society <-- bad idea for political engagement]
**politics --> a sphere that is deeply imbricated in the visual regimes of societies** (--> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)
(Naveeda Khan)
Jinns and children
a place for a child to build conviviality / continuity with a creature made of smokeless fire
(the girl) she charts through a modality of “hearing”
..that which defines the normative, the duties, and responsibilities that accompany observance of a religious tradition.
[...]
(271)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62.2[...]/>
[two feelings: you are *constructed* but still might find yourself with agency =/= you are original (essential, special) and might find yourself *controlled* by forces of society <-- bad idea for political engagement]
**politics --> a sphere that is deeply imbricated in the visual regimes of societies** (--> for me that is why visual arts are so important: politics is always visual)
**politics --> affect can explain the processes that are inexplicable through other functional explanations + affect exists as an object of power (political formations are reactive to and formed by affect)
(Naveeda Khan)
Jinns and children
a place for a child to build conviviality / continuity with a creature made of smokeless fire
(the girl) she charts through a modality of “hearing”
..that which defines the normative, the duties, and responsibilities that accompany observance of a religious tradition.
different intensities by which the normative is reiterated
Jinns are also known to eavesdrop (esteragh-e sam’) on the angels in the lower reaches of heaven to acquire limited knowledge of the future
the little mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self
**wonders of children
children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray
8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food
her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity
“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)
“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)
...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)
...................................
ecstatic identifications with...
one could legitimately dream of the prophet, but one could never call him forth
both these paths escape jinn, having a dynamic if disruptive presence within human world, alongside the presence of angels and saints
[...]
(272)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.3[...]tle mischievous spirits (nafs) that make up a self
**wonders of children
children are born free of sin and have the ability to communicate without reason (aghl) and therefore carry the threat of being easily led astray
8 year-old Maryam, channeling communication between the jinn and her family
a time that she would look into the palms of her hand (to see what the jinn would have her see)
she instructed the jinn that he could enter her father's body, with his permission, jinn wanted to taste human food
her father and brothers would listen carefully to her descriptions
(authoritative figure of the father becomes the pupil of his little daughter hearing her words of advice)--alterity
“in the middle east, the child is seen as the crucial generational link in the family unit, the key to its continuation, the living person that ties the present to the past and to the future” (Ferena 1005)
“in the indian case ...the child is seen as already being full person in domains to which the mother does not have access” (Veena Das 1989)
...healer or magician may utilize a child to bring into presence or communicate with the spiritual being
(***the presence of child in Ma'rekeh-Giri معرکه گیری?***)
...................................
ecstatic identifications with...
one could legitimately dream of the prophet, but one could never call him forth
both these paths escape jinn, having a dynamic if disruptive presence within human world, alongside the presence of angels and saints
there can be no other experience of the prophet other than through the record of his words and deeds??!!!
the daily struggle to presence the prophet
علما olama =/= بچه bache
face-to-face =/= via-jinn
face-to-face learning from the olama (the authoritative transmitters) versus a faceless and voiceless jinn with his child serving as its ventriloquist (arusak gardan)
activating competing bodies of knowledge and sets of relations
(in the hope that one of them will pay off)
insistence on a modicum [minimum amount] of consistency
...................................
...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character
(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers
‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(for Zezru) the children are pure, th[...]
(273)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.3[...]odicum [minimum amount] of consistency
...................................
...enmeshed within a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity.
-malevolence is something that holds out the possibility of harm rather than actively intending it
-generosity is the willingness to concede to others rather than a nobility of character
(also the dilemma of introducing the jinn to your child)
“exposing” his children to their disruptive yet generative powers
‘exposure of children to evil’
the innate resource of children
(for Zezru) the children are pure, they represent non-evil. they belong to shades. their innocence does not imply a state of passivity.
what regions of experience and expression the child has access to?
innate resources of children
Reynolds
children’s own resources are bolstered by the protection afforded by living and dead kin
a parent (or guardian), cannot know in advance what regions of experience and expression the child has access to or what he or she is capable of
in Islam: children are considered to have a certain strength and prescience that makes them effective as conduits to the world of spirits =/= innocent creatures to be protected
•children are free of religious obligations up to the age when they are seen as maturing
•protected by countercharms and exorcism only to an extent
a certain unintentional malevolence existing alongside generosity
[*]malevolence: something that holds out the possibility of harm (=/= actively intending harm)
[*]generosity: the willingness to concede to others (=/= a nobility of character)
religious differences --materialized-->
•as a malevolent witch
•in a father’s potentially malevolent instrumentalization of his daughter (bringing the jinn home)
parsayi پارسایی
*pious self = composition of a series of *presubjective singularities* (standing alongside one another [within a milieu comprising other such series/seriousnesses])
=/= self-contradictory subject arching toward resolution
=/= norm-bearing subject that has achieved coherence
(*presubjective singularities*)
let's explore how a self moves alone this series of singularities, what brings about movement, and where may it be tending [wohin]
---Naveeda--> presubjective singularities: different versions of oneself that are not sharply distinguished from one another but are nonetheless distinct
[*]subjectivity: whatever you do set yourself apart from others
Maryam's father, has moved from a version of himself that he knew to other versions of himself of which he did not have prior knowledge
his movement was toward the jinn and then away from them. so not in the serie[...]
(274)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.4[...]ils to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***
Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's work if we do not see ‘against whom’ its principal concepts are directed”
[*]dialectics:
1- the idea of a power of the negative as a theoretical principle manifested in opposition and contradiction
2- the valorization of the “sad passions” as a practical principle --> “the unhappy consciousness is the subject of the whole dialectic” (Nietzsche)
3- the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself
•Hegelian: a determinate negation, followed by a “higher” synthesis
•Badiou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory
postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics
to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and nonnegotiable indebtedness
•expressed relations of power
•other modes of spiritual and material relatedness (that would be lost if i were to tell a story that was only a variant of a master-slave dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*
how do we piece together a world?
ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)
encroachment tajavoz تجاوز
super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
◾are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•
(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contra[...]
(275)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.7[...]/>
nondialectical thought =/= law of noncontradiction : you are either for or against (Islam, state, ...)
a kind of life-force that an older generation of social science would have called “agency”:
“she is fearless and has an amazing ability to bring people together”, i was drawn to the vitality that she embody --> Singh understands her life not simply as a unidirectional story of “empowerment” or “agency” [a story many iranians are caught in] but as a *fluctuation between forms of strength and vulnerability*
(condition of life itself:) our particular strengths and vulnerabilities variably express themselves
...pushing a family from a position of relative strength into near destitution
how do we conceptualize relations between potentially hostile neighboring groups? (Singh 2011)
[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***
agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future
jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness
[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghos[...]
(276)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.9[...]ing groups? (Singh 2011)
[agonistics & intimacies] --how--> they may traverse different intensities ~~~~> ***differences internal to a life***
agon (contest) --Singh--> agonistic intimacy: a way to understand the co-presence of modes of conflict and cohabitation, (*co-presence of violence and wellness*,) to leave open the possibility of a shared and contested future
jinn: a category of spirit shared by popular hinduism and islam
who, usually turns out, is a lifelong conpanion
*a relation that can be life-giving may also become life-denying
jinn and other minor spirits may also harbor the possibility of madness
[varying thresholds of life]
thinking of the dead, the unborn, spirits, and those participants among living --> what kind of conception of life this requires? --> (Deleuze > Singh's) ***varying thresholds of life*** (=/= Agamben's “bare life” [--✕--> Singh's starting point: how one thinks about life or vitality not just as bare life]) --> as a way of engaging ancestors (such as Ehsan's little girl ghost [#Ehsan's brilliant storytelling gives the “unbeliever” goosebumps from the intensities, the “incredible feeling of an unknown Nature-affect” that he embodies]), spirits, the undead, and the unborn who subsist alongside the living
*threshold:
•to denote points of passage accross phases of life
•refering to varying degrees of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گامهای ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: [...]
(279)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]es of intensity (that may continue after death)--> as a spirit/jinn is preserved or recedes, through possession or in visions or memories, enduring in potentially multiple dimensions
*a memory, a dream, even a hallucination is also a threshold of life*
agency of spirits [jinn, abstract spirit of modernity, secular education, Thakur Baba, , ,] = *a threshold of life* (with its own immanent forms of movement and flux)
[-]lets not call it “disenchantment” or mere nostalgia, but *a shift in the quality of life* --> ethnographic investigation can be a form of heightened attentiveness (to varying thresholds of life [to the intensities of Ehsan's ghost-girl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گامهای ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)
(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*
“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”
Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)
yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not t[...]
(283)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]irl, to the cannibal mice, Tehran's earthquake synthesis of affect, , ,]--(these [Tehran's range of moods and intensities] are)--> waxing and waning گامهای ماه *intensities immanent to a milieu; affecting our ideas of ethics and politics)
the social =? “our” version of the transcendent/immanent metaphysical
how many dimensions is “our” metaphysical composed of (in Tehran)?
(Durkheim starts:) religion = an engagement with a vital animating principle, “a kind of anonymous and impersonal force [...] none possesses it entirely and all share in it”
-spirits, demons, jinns, gods of every rank are the *concrete forms* that capture this energy, this *potentiality*
(later Durkheim reduces this remarkable promising formulation in his signiture from the metaphysical: “the moral authority of society”, ‘religion ==> solidarity انسجام’ }=/= innumerable anthropologists have shown how religion does not necessarily “reawaken solidarity”)
(instead of “the social” lets get interested in more than one dimension of life, lets think, with Singh and Deleuze, of) *vast continuum of human and nonhuman life*
“Baba, I have been troubled for years. What can I do to please my ancestral spirits?”
Beyzai analyzes deities and myths in Iran, negating any potential for spiriual movement between rival groups, even in what is clearly *a form of religious life moving across*
Beyzai preoccupation with defeat doesn't allow him to attend to ‘forms of religious life moving across’
•bottom-up thesis of oppositional negation and from its “top-down” opposite
=/= the idea of spiritual conversation
imitation of [upper caste,,,] values
[***]the fatality of these ideas of negation and of imitation is that they obscure the possibility of a spiritual inheritence that may be shared and contested in ways that create the possibility of a *cohabited future between neighbors and rivals* (Singh)
yes yes the history might be made through bloody contradictions, and yet, we cannot be as Magi, waiting for the big drama to unfold --(we can do better)--> a signature capacity of ethnographic attentiveness in an affirmative lineage of thought --(not to deny contradiction)--> to be able to sense **varying intensities of conflict and cohabitation**
(play and war may both be latent in the give and take of everyday life, and the difference may not always be clear-cut)
نیرومندی و کثرت اهالی و تعارضات کشمکش و جماع
(how?) (to be able to) sense varying intensities [کیفیتی با شدت و سختی و حجم ~= انقباض ,در هم کشیدگی + شتافتن ,گرفته شدن + فراهم آمدن ,گرفتگی ,ترنجیدگی] of conflict and cohabitation[: my sister thinks of this term as family in small scale]
--> differential [داراى ضر[...]
(284)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63[...]a form of hunting and gathering impressions
2- sifting الک کردن and cultivating expressions
(my work in apass:) our relation to concepts becomes more explicit, as we turn impressions into considered thoughts
...................................
thinking postcolonial urbanism with Anand Taneja
(this is the question of the limitations of imagination:)
how (for a generation of scholars [or artists]) rural (india) [or syria, Iran, or South Korea] has become simply a space of disasters, statistics, and deaths --✕--> Anand's work is a counter-example [i am learning from him to be attentive to my own imagination's stopping-points. to resist stories that render life in those milieus unthinkable] --> that those spaces are not only of abjection but also of imagination and curiosity --> to think about alternative (conceptual) vocabularies to think about those abjected places, religion, and ajayeb [that does not only negate those milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is
how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms
(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu
anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level
*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to lead to self-rule
[bare life =? life without a way of life --✕--> there is no life without a way of life]
(Singh:) someone's life cut off from their source of vitality
a local body of thought (jinn, etc.)
...................................
(Anand asking) what does it means to live in a city of jinns?
the jinn:
•serves as witnesses of times long gone
•figures of authority whose shrine blesses remembered forms of urban religious life
•forgotten by the amnesia of the postcolonial state
•rendered unislamic by the selective amnesia of revivalist tradition
jinn --> revive that old orientalist trope, constituted not only by bazzar, mosque, and hammam, but also of the antinomian potentials that have long been part of the Islamic tradition
...................................
v[...]
(288)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.3[...]some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->
(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***
exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions
-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands
>
(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]
(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*
question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]
sometimes recovery from violenciolence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-to be able to affirm certain kinds of silence (is key to a political anthropology)
different rhythms of conflict and cohabitation
questions
-life-giving and life-denying rhythms of ordinary life
-how (a revolutionary) event is grown from the everyday, and must return to it
Singh: progress of ethnographic knowledge --> a sort of movement that include the ***emergence of new answers to earlier questions*** ~= new routes of inquiry
[=/= progress in [...]
(289)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...]ligions
-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands
(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]
(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*
question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]
sometimes recovery from violence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain kind of silence, the refusal to let toxicity circulate, involves everyday spiritual exercises in *digesting the poison in the acts of attending to the ordinary* --> survivors affirming the possibility of life by removing it from the circulation of words gone wild... (--Hoda's lullabies songs of private injuries?)
-silence is never simply a silence
-to be able to affirm certain kinds of silence (is key to a political anthropology)
different rhythms of conflict and cohabitation
questions
-life-giving and life-denying rhythms of ordinary life
-how (a revolutionary) event is grown from the everyday, and must return to it
Singh: progress of ethnographic knowledge --> a sort of movement that include the ***emergence of new answers to earlier questions*** ~= new routes of inquiry
[=/= progress in the sense of a telos of increasing self-awareness]
intellectual vita (can't be all heroic and saintly, tales of adventures and achievements, as in the way Manning presented herself,) rather it can gather up it share of victories and wounds
...................................
everyday life: a life lived on the level of:
•surging affects
•impacts suffered or barely avoided
spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things
(Stewart:) “ideologies happen. power snaps into place. structures grow entrenched. identities take place. ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. but it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate”
*ordinary registers intensity* (regularly, intermittently, urgently, as a slight shudder)
(one [...]
(290)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...] of adventures and achievements, as in the way Manning presented herself,) rather it can gather up it share of victories and wounds
...................................
everyday life: a life lived on the level of:
•surging affects
•impacts suffered or barely avoided
spawns a series of little somethings dreamed up in the course of things
(Stewart:) “ideologies happen. power snaps into place. structures grow entrenched. identities take place. ways of knowing become habitual at the drop of a hat. but it's ordinary affects that give things the quality of a something to inhabit and animate”
*ordinary registers intensity* (regularly, intermittently, urgently, as a slight shudder)
(one can be) ***confused but attuned***
“we dream of getting by, getting on track, getting away from it all, getting real, having an edge, beating the system, being ourselves, checking out” -Stewart
(socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states, public feelings are not simply “good” pr “bad” but always) both powerful and mixed
the talk, once set in motion, expands into a بیشه thicket of stories and social maneuverings
(a scene in a restaurant becomes) maze of inspirations and experiments ♥
-“her brother's stories are shell-shocked and they have no endings. they leave you hanging”
singularity of the event ==> a “we” of all sorts opens in the room
chance event ==>
•a layer of conflict
•a daydream to things
...tuned in to some little something somewhere
“in a video that blankly records an arresting image, young embodiments of a mainstream in the making come face to face with an otherness that compels a closer look. the order of representation gives way to a more violently affective contact”
Stewart
force of things --> what counts as an event
a politics of being/feeling conected
a politics of ways of watching
a politics of waiting for something to happen
a politics of difference (of habit and dull routine)
childhood coming back [to you] as shocks of beauty
graphic stories prompted by the seemingly simple work of remembering:
•kinship ties
•married names
•stories of alcoholism
•stories of accidents
•stories of violence
•stories of cancers
[*]potential: fleeting and amorphous, it lives as a residue or resonance in an emergent assemblage of disparate forms and realms of life; a thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of presence --engenders--> attachments or system of investment...
(people are) collecting found objects snatched off the literal or metaphorical side of the road
...................................
Yazi[...]
(291)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64[...]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 Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}
many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer
Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions
intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)
[...]
(292)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.2[...]•enlightenment of education =/= ignorant
--Naveeda--> ‘maslak differences ~= grist for the art of war’
rumored
engineered
unfolding
sectarian geography of the city
mobilized in the form of bored policemen
prophet's era intermingled with Pakistan present
masjed zarar
gabze (mosque seizure قبضه مسجد) --explicit--> desire to stake a claim on a new nation-state (Pakistan) = expression of striving:
•tie religious/moral development to the nation-state development
•tie religious/moral development to the imagination of an earlier era of Islam
*expression of striving* in art: opening an art space, studio, school, or an institute (=/= create an institution as a conceptual gesture)
--> tie your development to the nation-state development and to an imagination (of change?)
•anything could be believed about a certain imam
•when someone (or group) attack you, they transform from human to animal
--> skeptical turn towards the world
neighborhood = ties + tensions
...................................
Naveeda chapter 2 Iqbal
Naveeda's ethnographic example of a scene of aspiration:
•librarians sit around a table (in a public library) engaged in a heated religious argument that threatens to spill into accusations of blasphemy
•Lahoris resolve to build mosques for their neighborhoods only to preside over the dissolution of their communities in their fights over the mosques
<-- sites of dissonance + aspiration
aspiration --> efforts at being Muslim (in the ways one knows or attached to) marked by a striving to an as-yet-unattained self without presuming that this next self is the final one
<-- tendency (=/= social program)
(=/= see these examples as the lack of consensus in Islam)
Iqbal --Naveeda--> theory of creative workings of time
Naveeda constructing a Pakistani Iqbal
Iqbal presence within:
•everyday acts of striving to be Muslim
•state exertion (official rhetoric)
•public culture of Lahore
**synthetic mode of thought**
--> how South Asian intellectuals created zones of thought by assimilating the work of thinkers from different times and parts of the world to their own ==> (develop and sustain a) *cosmopolitanism* [that exceed the limits places on imagination by colonialism, nationalism]
(--in--> both locatedness and translocal ambitions --understand-->) *the openness and connectivity that characterizes the socal*
Iqbal's mode of self-experimentation: he put himself in relation to dynamic individuals and emergent movements and institutions to see how they sat with him and he with them
--Naveeda--> *experimentation does not require the creation of the new[...]
(293)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65[...]"religion = revelation + reason” --Iqbal--> affirmative picture of existence after revelation had ceased
Muslim thinking in need of biological renewal ==Iqbal==> revolutionary Muslim thinking
}--> a theory of human perception + intelligence + their place within the larger picture of natural evolution
-in order ot make islam political they have to reject the supernatural (miracles, keramat, etc.) ---> go to Corbin's critique
*striving to overcome the (so-called) sickness of modernity* --> (now in Europe artists want to become -->) *physician of moral community* (hakim al umat)
habits of Allah
•miracle
•
Iqbal --> the question is not of evidence (whether miracles did not did not happen), rather: whether belief in miracles is usefully to a community : miracles ==> intensify sense of supernatural ==> hold together --> society with *ideal nationality* (not territorial nationality)
}--Naveeda--> (Iqbal is saying that) just as Muslims needed to understand the capaciousness of nature (to be able to engage and value human striving), so too did they need to accord existence to the supernatural <-- quality of striving
Maududi's picture of aspiration
modern Muslim citizenry <--Maududi-- should be created by the state (the idea that state must mould every aspect of human life on consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform ==> *true Islam =/= muslim Islam*
~= Islam is perfect, muslims not
•Asad --> muslim self-transformation (self-directed changed) ==> perfect form of islam
•Maududi --> (Muslims who know themselves to be weak by constitution -->) one erect a state to install change in oneself ==> perfect form of islam
•Iqbal --> striving: individuation without individuality ~= potentiel without concrete ~= experimentation on self
producing the concrete environment within something to make it available to X : enabling =/= entailing
...................................
Naveeda chapter 3 law
Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]
Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice
munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upo[...]
(296)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.2[...]ot territorial nationality)
}--Naveeda--> (Iqbal is saying that) just as Muslims needed to understand the capaciousness of nature (to be able to engage and value human striving), so too did they need to accord existence to the supernatural <-- quality of striving
Maududi's picture of aspiration
modern Muslim citizenry <--Maududi-- should be created by the state (the idea that state must mould every aspect of human life on consonance with its moral norms and program of social reform ==> *true Islam =/= muslim Islam*
~= Islam is perfect, muslims not
•Asad --> muslim self-transformation (self-directed changed) ==> perfect form of islam
•Maududi --> (Muslims who know themselves to be weak by constitution -->) one erect a state to install change in oneself ==> perfect form of islam
•Iqbal --> striving: individuation without individuality ~= potentiel without concrete ~= experimentation on self
producing the concrete environment within something to make it available to X : enabling =/= entailing
...................................
Naveeda chapter 3 law
Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]
Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice
munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)
(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered
Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer
something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition[...]
(297)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.2[...]lapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference
striving =/= progress
...................................
Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge to proper authority
lack of consensus on what X is (among its varient constituents) ==> (problem of) loss of tolerance
(for example Pakistan:)
contradictions between commitments to:
•existing hierarchies
•tribal ties
•universalistic religion (whose version of community transcends those ties)
(Naveeda) thinking of the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world
intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation
attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future
disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass
disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)
•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack
(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving
the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand for a state = demand for a society ~= demand for a self
how to read Pakistan's historical records shaped by the *aspiration to strive as Muslims*?
to effect experimentation <==
•disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
•
tradition and ethics of debate and disputation
Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by r[...]
(299)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.3[...] the potential lines of movement among entrenched differences, cited texts, and possible positions generated by selves encountering others in the world
intensities that burn within you + openness to conversation
attention to time --Naveeda--> draw a consistent picture of an Islam with open future
disputation = a form of experimentation: doing and undoing of known forms (in the spirit of striving) [=/= experimentation: innovation in self-making, or social arrangements]
@apass
disputation: a form of interaction (with risks and ill effects [risk of alienation, estrangement of others])
--> [*]becoming: coming to terms with the trajectories and crystalization of tendencies within the transcriptions of the state and in public culture --> **excavating the resources (that this way of being Muslim) give to itself to reflect upon and evaluate (--> renew its inheritance of Islam)
•approaching history from the perspective of plenitude
•approaching history from the perspective of lack
(upsurge of excitement accompanying the creation of Pakistan --Smith--> a tendency [=/= social movement for example reform or piety with identifiable advocacies and trajectories] called) [*]aspiration: sustaining the striving towards an ideal final form (a state, society, self, etc.) =/= achieving
the aspiration of making Pakistan --> to aspire an islamic state ~~Smith--> muslim way of saying that Pakistan should build for itself a good society
--Naveeda--> demand for a state = demand for a society ~= demand for a self
how to read Pakistan's historical records shaped by the *aspiration to strive as Muslims*?
to effect experimentation <==
•disputation (jadal)
•argument (bahs)
•disputation (monazereh)
•debate + polemic
•building mosques
•
tradition and ethics of debate and disputation
Carl Schmitt --> political theology
*politics discovers its modernity by repressing the theological foundations of its concept and practice*
theology was always about worldly politics <--> religious transcendence }==> run analysis both ways:
•transcendental coming into play (in some instances)
•worldly life coming into play (in some instances) [immanent quality]
--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting
}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving
**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]
perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual [...]
(300)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.4[...]uality]
--Singh--> self-making & self-perfecting
}--Naveeda--> religious argumentation : expressive of ongoing striving
**one works on oneself by revisiting and reinhabiting theological conundrums (through words and practice)** [same in artists as well?]
perceived eagerness for debate among lay muslims --> (anxiety over) disputation ==>
•indulgence in abstract thinking
•undermine the tenacity of individual faith
•reduce the hold of the daily obligations of ritual worship
•lead to a diminishing attachment to worldly life or stakes in the social
Veena, Cavell > skepticism:
•philosophical efforts at securing one's knowledge of the world unmediated by sense experience (<-- classical)
•human disappointment with our earthly condition of being distinct and separate from others (<-- social)
•efforts to secure unmediated knowledge of others (<-- social)
•
[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence
skepticism <--> aspiration
aspiration =/= clear vision of ends
Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)
(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)
in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]
discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)
Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health
Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”
Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:<[...]
(304)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.4[...]ed knowledge of others (<-- social)
•
[Veena (giving historicity and ethnigraphic precision)-->] skepticism ==>
•renders other vulnerable to suspicion
•unsettle social relations
•produce the conditions of possibility for suffering and violence
skepticism <--> aspiration
aspiration =/= clear vision of ends
Pakistan:
•idemtifies itself as an ideological state (Islam) [==Naveeda==> (the possibility of) some experimentation within its apparatus : ***articulation and dispersal of ideology is not linear or cumulative*** it flows in directions other than from the top down]
•inherits the colonial administrative structure + imperatives of government (postcolonial state)
(Sina -->) to be ideological about X : driven to ascertain and adjudicate the others relation to X
(certainly as an achievement)
in islamic ideological states (like Pakistan and Iran) you are allowed to experiment on what is it to be a Muslim
(+ skepticism with respect to those who strive)
•skepticism transforms into an *impersonal force* (that can emerge anywhere and strike anyone) [<-- disembodied aspect of skepticism]
discourse of spiritual diagnosis
(takes place through an evaluation of one's physiology)
Deleuze's symptomatology: a creative act bringing about a change in health + affirmation of a way of life
•striving --> good health
Iqbal --> attentiveness to thr physiological as a means to gauge whether one's spirituality is on the right track
•with Bergson --> concern for the futurity of Islam
•with Nietzsche --> concern for the spiritual health
◦Nietzsche: physician of culture, (understood as political act) “striving and self-diagnosis ==> implicates the individual in the world ==> produce charges in the world”
Naveeda's ethnography method of interviewing:
1. locate traces of X in (context:)
◦everyday life
◦public culture
◦
3. see how this tendency crystallizes
◦at particular points
◦within particular persons
◦within particular texts
◦
5. study this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦
jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim
*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass
...................................
(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*
becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant
[...]
(306)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.5[...] this crystallization
◦comes to be overlaid
◦expressed through lived experiences
◦be productive of
◾further movements of the tendency
◾countertendencies
◾its dissipation
◦
jinn <--> striving
Naveeda shiwsyin her research a single worshiper's choice of striving: relay upon a jinn for guidance on better ways to be a Muslim
*striving --> put collectivity (for example family) in jeopardy*
*@apass
...................................
(state pronouncements of) correct way to [?how to] *attach to the prophet*
becoming a knowledgeable religious disputant
Naveeda > Iqbal > the weary self that could not be roused to piety by religious zeal strikes a posture as much of resignation to sin by a nonpracticing Muslim as of a certain pride of withholding oneself from conformism.
--> of one goes to prayer in a mosque it is by one's own choice
...to dismiss differences = the political expression of the petit bourgeoisie
Iqbal's disapproval of guidance --variance--> (Sahib) seeking guidance from a jinn for pious pursuits
singularity of Sahib's efforts at improving himself as a Muslim --> (Iqbalian aspiration) posture of the nonconformist
state's fears that the milieu was pervaded by non-Muslim others posting as Muslims --jinn--> [made vivid] *skeptical experience of everyday life as a place of illusion and trance* (go to --> my work on Relaxing Horror Tales for Children and Adults)
bedat بدعت
accretion of customs in the form of innovation
jinn
-what nature of influences jinn introduce into human lives?
•library of religious commentary
•prophetic tales
•magicians’ manuals
•folklore
•ethnography
•
--> characterization of jinn
human ~= jinm --> endowed with passion, rational faculties, responsibility for their actions, etc. they eat, grow, procreate, die
constantly evolving relationship between humans and jinns
from pre-islamic --to--> Islamic
both good & bad ascribed to jinn's constitution --to--> to be much more unequivocally associated with evil
the little mischievous nafs نفس that make up a self --> Muslim interiority (projects?)
...in the belief of jinns:
•complex arrangement of cultural memory
•political strategy
•mental illness
•individual subjectivity
•
--✕--> *Naveeda taking the existence of jinn for granted ==> (her effort) to learn more about the family that adopted them and their efforts at striving*
*taking the existence of X for granted ==to==> learn about the people who adopted X*
“Muslim children - how bring them up?” vol 3
(in Islam) child: bring with[...]
(309)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.5[...]ies of knowledge*
Naveeda --read--> Sahib taking cues --on--> prophet's example --from--> faceless voiceless jinn --with--> little child surving as its medium
-parental disappointment with sons
-children possible abandonment by their fathers
-wife's estrangement from her dying husband
--> ambiguities that undergrid lived relations
“Maryam rushed to greet him at the door of the house but then she fell back screening. apparently a thirty-feet-tall churail (witch) had followed Sahib from India. Sahib immediately dropped his bags at the doorstep and without pause rushed to the mosque to say his prayers. when he returned home, Maryam assured him that the witch had left him.”
Sahib allowed the entry of jinn into his home without the armature of the average amil (who undergoes considerable pain and deprivation to be able to lay claim upon particular force, and undertake continental exercises of the body and mind to control it)
--risk--> potential disruption of the family
--abdicate--> his position of authority within his family --to--> attend to his daughter's words of guidance
*his turn towards Maryam = turn away from the present* (of his everyday life not having the spiritual richness & *authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])
from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter
pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself
in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound
--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self
in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control
(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?
...................................
Naveeda chapter 5 mulla
graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect
participation in change
(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality
Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should[...]
(310)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.7[...]*authoritative accounts* [he desired to make himself a better Muslim])
from a pedagogical figure --to--> pupil to his daughter
pursuits of the self ~=> incorporate the unexpected --extent--> abdicating full control of oneself
in bringing a jinn into his life --> it became a version of him joining other versions of himself with whom he was bound
--Iqbal--> striving to one's next self
in the famous tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp, a child found a genie and could be literally pulled out of a humdrum existence to soar the skies
•Maryam shared the jinn's joy in discovering human food
•she got to whisper her secrets into his ears
•make him complicit in her projects
•she got to temporally take leave of her body that was changing beyond her control
(Naveeda asks) was Sulayman (the jinn) about the inability to acknowledge friendship over time?
>
Naveeda chapter 5 mulla
graffiti --> awareness of X at the level of gesture and affect
participation in change
(Agamben -->) [*]gesture: inhabiting of potentiality
Naveeda four scenes of aspiration:
1. librarians engaged in argumentation over the nature of the prophet's body after his death --gesture--> argumentation
2. neighborhoods embroiled in fights over mosques in attempting to prescribe the rightful atmosphere for prayer --gesture--> seizure
3. the state drawn into theological disputation and legal experimentation over how over should attach oneself to the prophet --gesture--> legal experimentation
4. a pious man trying to seek guidance on how to be Muslim from an invisible being (jinn) --gesture--> search for guidance
}--affect--> accompanied by intensity of seriousness, sincerity, excitement, disappointment, sense of loss
}--commitment--> friendship, neighborliness, familial ties
large arsenal of off-color jokes about specialist fogures of all religious traditions in the popular culture of the subcontinent...
•horror stories
•psychological profile of mullas
•weekly skewing of mullas
•mulla jokes
•cartoons
•
political commentary <--> criticism
--> mulla was to blame for everything that was perceived to be wrong (in Pakistan) --> *pervasive skepticism* [also in Iran]
skepticism shadows striving (?)
the other of the striving muslim in Pakistan:
•shadowi Shia
•deceiving Ahmadi
•bad-tempered mulla بدمزاج
mulla:
•Iqbal --> ossification of the institution of ulama
•Pakistani state --> ossification of commentary upon Islamic texts
...everyday assertion that one's religiousity is superior to others
mul[...]
(311)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.7[...]
2. خطیب khatib (Frida sermon)
3. قاری ghari
4. موذن muezzin
mulla --derogatory--> one who is overzealous in upholding the letter of the shari'a
(+ additional connotation:)
•ignorant master [go to --> mulla nasruddin: religious master who gets by in life through hypocrisy and cunning + outsmarting those of noble birth and high cultivation]
•gabza agent (seizure of property)
•sodomizer (one who rapes men)
•a naive fool out of step with his time
•
colonial politics in south Asia --> British colonial administration in India see ulama as outdated, deliberately obscurantist, jahel ==> negative stereotype ----> post-colonial period
mullaism:
•Pakistani state --> fossilized state of knowledge on Islam
•Iqbal --> mullaism =/= freedom of ijtihad
(Talal Asad -->) Islamic diskursive tradition is grounded in *argument that anticipates resistance* in the form of doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding ==> it employs the force of reason to bring forth the *willing performance of a practice*
}==produce==> domain of orthodoxy (+ relations of power)
(for Naveeda) anxiety or skepticism ~= sign of aspiration for striving
labbaik: i am here (to follow your orders)
theatrical unteality
...animus lies in the world
[later he] identitues this animus with thr workings of iblis (satan)
...this is a city of whispers [waswasen], a city of mad possession [shar], a city of deviation [ilhad], a city of anxiety [tazadzud], a city of dispersion [intishar]
the ability to smell oneself --> to experience oneself as other
how public culture can ability skepticism as a pervasive condition
mulla jokes --> horror stories = fear + revulsion
(Freudian) eruptive quality of jokes --> joke erupts into everyday life as of from elsewhere
political cartoon: maximum effect through a minimum of details
(mulla) jokes, horror stories, political cartoons --Naveeda--> *exiling the foreignness within*
stories of:
1. mosque in an upscale shopping center
2. sexually predictory mulla
}--> (speaks of:)
1. the perception that there were places in Pakistan where vise was allowed to grow unchecked
2. the menace the ulama introduced into everyday life
}==> (the effect of:)
•keeping public attention upon possible sites and agents of corruption
•putting the everyday life into question (as to whether it was what it appeared to be)
political cartoons --imply-->
•Pakistanis are caught in someone else's game
•growing unfamiliarity of Pakistan
(charges of)
sinfulness
sexual voraciousness
[...]
(312)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.9[...] “social” and “arbitrary”
at the end it is the mental operation
(techniques of thought)
the image plays a central role in the construction of relations between (visual) themes and particularity of words, which in turn help organize narratives
...................................
these all were technical or formal questions so far
memory is a way consistency maintains itself
civil society is afraid of personal recollections and perverse databases, digital collections
is khm’s archive a state sponsored memorialization, monuments of a consistent history? (that assumes a sublime ending?)
the immemorial (in memorial)
have a strong philosophy of technology with this project
there is never merely a technological question, always already ontological
who wants to remember, solidify, and memorialize?
and for whom?
building a technological temple of memory, khm aesthetic narrative of its own history?
(first there is one big account of property that all these fragmented histories of numerous people who worked in khm are singed under one signature, of khm)
should we disavow any notion of “spirit” in khm?
we must agree that khm's render of its own history is pure aesthetic what so ever.
we must remain committed to the experimental, when dealing with archival domains in the school of media art where experimentation was in its original conception and foundational roots (as Zielinski expresses in one interview: “+25 KHM: Siegfried Zielinski” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JQ3aTwu2s)
arte
DAS KURZFILM-MAGAZIN
KURZSCHLUSS
Siegfried Zielinski im Interview
http://cinema.arte.tv/de/artikel/siegfried-zielinski-im-interview
hybrid objects?
is the logistic characteristic of digital data inconsistent with the hybrid objects of art?
Forms of thought, from what Lévi-Strauss called the “systematization [of] what is immediately presented to the senses,”
(Jakobson)
transmutation: cognition involved by the form of translation
data ontology
what is the point of view of rationality in this for us?
(what is the point of view in witchcraft? knowledge is a performative recipe)
what is the point in point of view?
...................................
(Jorge Luis Borges - ‘Funes the Memorious’ in ‘Labyrinths: selected stories & other writings’ 1964)
in Borges story, Funes, the character unable to forget is incapable of the concept of ‘general’
solitary and lucid spectator of [...] an intolerably precise world
not capable of thought
in order to sleep, he had to imagine a direction he would turn his face, made of homogeneo[...]
(313)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.1[...]
•“revolution” --> our current conception of ‘revolution’ is marked by the historiographical work of Karl Marx
•(historiographical traditions)
compare first lines of Halaj's biography in Attar and Wikipedia:
•آن فی الله فی سبیل الله آن شیر بیشه تحقیق آن شجاع صفدر صدیق آن غرقه دریای مواج حسین منصور حلاج رحمةالله علیه کار او کاری عجب بود و واقعات غرایب که خاص او را بود که هم در غایت سوز و اشتیاق بود و در شدت لهب و فراق مست و بیقرار و شوریده روزگار بود و عاشق صادق و پاک باز و جد وجهدی عظیم داشت و ریاضتی و کرامتی عجب و عالی همت و رفیع قدر بود او را تصانیف بسیار است [...]
•Mansur al-Hallaj (Arabic: Abū ‘l-Muġīṭ Al-Ḥusayn bin Manṣūr al-Ḥallāğ; Persian: Mansūr-e Ḥallāj) (c. 858 – 26 March 922) (Hijri c. 244 AH – 309 AH) was a Persian mystic, poet and teacher of Sufism [...]
(at the end it is the colonialism that) decides what a disease is [=/= other system/culture (fragile networks) for classifying diseases of the body and spirit, such as ajayeb. (for example see how schizophrenia is classified and understood)]
--> practical ontology
representation of the past
sequencing of the present
==> making it appear that science describes nature --> social power
(at the end you see only those actants who are strong enough, and shaped in the right way, to impact)
“[...] the loosest classification of work is accorded to those with the most power and discretion, who are able to set their own terms.” Bowker 1996
lingua franca of the medical insurance companies
actor network theory: looking in detail at the role of (relatively) black-boxeboxed hybrids [what scientists are actually manufacturing] in creating the discourse of pure science (as endpoint)
science's objective account of natural order:
•trials of strength
•enrolling of allies
•cascades of inscriptions
•operation of immutable mobiles
--> development of standards
‘Janus face’ of science
[Janus, in ancient Roman is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, and endings. a god of transitions. having two faces, he looks to the future and to the past. (Greeks had no equivalent to Janus.)]
when your work (artistic/scientific) can be seen as a direct translation of the quest for Iranian/French honor after defeat in the battlefield --> the actors don't see what is excluded: they construct a world in which that exclusion could occur
(Latour --> according to American pragmatist strongholds:) reality = 'that which resists’
[...]
(314)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.2[...]the Jamuns river...) what may be coming up or downstream or even overhead or below ground, that they are also involved in displacements in situ either because of floods or erosion --> continual throwing up of constitutive elements of social life into the air and their constant re-organization when they return to ground
the erosive tendencies of the river --> the slow movement in place or lateral shifts that lead people to just drop off the scene
(Naveeda: we are in a) landscape not just erosive of relations but also *productive of forgetting* --> adaptation in the present entails an ongoing corruption of memory [--> #Bowker, forms of erasure]***
(#stories of integration in Germany)
...................................
[pre-notes with Delanda's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History]
what are word-forming resources in farsi?
(not to increase their prestige, rather, to problematize) reservoirs of expressive resources in ajayeb and tehran --> to challenge which international standard?
what are the definitive historical process that create uniform set of linguistic norms in iran?
in my work on ajayeb, also, perhaps i am offering a grammar to the empire---learning system thinking
dictionary --> formal codification of language
regarding my ajayeb hypertext
--✕-->? certain spelling rules, grapheme نويسه [characters A, B, ...], morpheme واژک [smallest meaningful language unit]
--✕--> what are my articulatory shortcuts? (least effort needed)
-how internet press is aiding which minor languages in their struggle against majors?
-and which standards are rising there?
-and what are the hegemonizing effect of my ajayeb hypertext on language and energy? its conservative pressures (on literary imagination) --> my concern with farsi linguistic evolution and its contaminations with other languages
what are my ajayeb hypertext contact situations?
(in my ajayeb) “?q=” =/=? searching device abstract probe head
==>? sorted into homogeneous sets
-->? abstract automata -->{ ajayeb.net ~= a valid-enough mean of transferring the *combinatorial productivity* of automaton [by different (social) dynamics] }-->? #bottom-top approach to writing
my Rigs are about:
•processes responsible for the generation of phrases and sentences
•to produce new strings =/= checking them for validity
(you cannot be not connected to) *collective assemblage* (of enunciations)
(what is my -or-) do i need an abstract machine that connects my language to the semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to the collective assemblage?
my ajayeb: a throng (هجوم) of (neo-English-Farsi) dialects, patois, slangs, and specialized languages
[...]
(315)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.6[...]: a variable legible palimpsest
(office procedures & computer programs are both) designed as *abstract machines*
-for ajayeb i designed an abstract machine called ajayeb.net to realize a seamless interchangeability between my artist/research procedures and computer programs
bootstrap: a simple system activating a more complicated system
(i have become hypersensitive to:) progressivist telling of the history of the earth =/= strangely synchronic world where there is no effective arrow of time
[*]synchronization: the work that it takes to bring the various bits of the world into a single archival framework*** (with their metaphors and strategies) ==permit==> cohabitation of discipliness --> **synchronization of the social and natural worlds to the same temporality**
(synchronization is always at work and is technologically determined)
--> conjuring of the social and natural world into forms that render themselves amenable to recording ==> (imperial records) archiving changes the world & creates a record of it --Derrida--> sequential & jussive (imperative)
+ scientific work epitomized the developement and rigorous application of these procedures (---> go to Serres's origin of geometry and greek empire)
***synchronization brings material forms (commodity flow, train travel) together and when geological and historical time are mapped into the same time --> metaphorical & ideological & material interact (==> emerging powerful possibilities) [--> in art we also do a lot of syncing and synchronization (<-- this is perhaps what Pierre meant by saying that researchers are creating their own science)]
time management, a central issue in industrialization
Babbage: clock = regulator of time
industrial world-knowledge ==> importance of the division of the history of the earth into equal periods of time
information drive (a drive *to save as little information as possible about something*)
(Latour's) oligopticon: special places where the micro-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework [...]
(316)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.3[...]o-structures of macro-phenomena are crafted, local activities become a “bigger” issue (such as parliaments, courtrooms, offices), where different strands of “macro-social” phenomena are weaved
-they see much too little, but what they see, they see it well (=/= total surveillance of panopticon)
watch (from 1800 to 1820 at least 100000 clocks and watches were produced every year)
“clockwork ocean” with waves and cycles of salinity as “balance wheels”
(Bowker > Graham Burnett > Fontaine Maury)
}==> imposing a **temporally mediated qualitative difference between the creator and created** (instantiated on the factory floor and in nature) --> creators stood outside regular space and time (=/= situated knowledges)
(19th century) scientific work = imposition of a representative framework of regular space and time on social and natural time
(science was and still is) making society confirm to the same spatiotemporal representational framework it was/is “discovering” in nature (---> go to the #scientification of christian genesis in Nolan's Noah film)
*imposition of a regular spatiotemporal representational framework* = (Bowker's) [*]convergence (a key aspect of synchronization): a cosmology (inspired by factory production) of nature and humanity--to make science, art and politics converge more and more towards the same goal, to introduce to them the notion of change, progress, succession, continuity, life, submit them to the same law (of constancy and uniformity)
•in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)
*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”
fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”
•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator
chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity
working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)
machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs
Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...]
(317)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.4[...]◦in astronomy: (1836) “the return of the comet of Halley at its predicted time has been remarked with intense curiosity and satisfaction by astronomers, and by the public. this has now become a regular and well ordered member of our system” (=/= ajayeb)
*representational framework of temporal regularity* ==> one can read backward into the past and forward into the future (--> # sequential palindromic time)
--> tale of the real archive : tale of stasis [==> “violent care”: preservation of current species and the imposition of stasis] : single law : (the fable of:) “perturbations and oscillations providing noise that true understanding would filter out”
fable of industry:
•how humanity had gone from being initially weak to currently king of nature : “industry = second nature”
•art submits to science
•industry recognizes science for its regulator
chaotic spacelike, lacking direction and granularity
working of childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)
machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs
Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer
ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo
arguments about rates of change = about facts of change
eternal, unchanging present
train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian world of abstract qualities size, shape, quanity, motion
==> space out of the window of a moving train: a new kind of geographical representation, abstract and regular
(a problem in management:) “time had conspired with capital to annihilate space
@Sana
[a ‘second nature’ being created] railway (+ telegraph) ==> commodification + communication
in our trip to Rivage with Marialena we were in terested in signs in the built landscape, the “second nature” in the nature of Rivage, which were “concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made farming possible”
a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and histories
a heterogeneous collection of lives and spaces
why translation must be a monopoly (according to railway):
you need centralized bureaucracy and effective monopoly [...]
(318)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.5[...] childhood marked by staccato syncopation (=/= regular rhythms)
machine regularizes “man”: processes synchronizing him to industrial time
mechanical uniformity became the “natural” state of affairs
Facebook within the spirit of industry --> “under the [spirit of industry's] influence, people will begin by grouping themselves more naturally [...] people will come closer together, mass according to their real analogies and according to their real interests [...] the same ideas will circulate in all countries [...] uniformity of costumes [...] the same needs, a similar civilization, will develope everywhere [...] without confusion or violence, relations both as complex and as easy, as peaceful and as profitable as may be” -Charles Dunoyer
ufs (unidentified flying subject)
ufo
arguments about rates of change = about facts of change
eternal, unchanging present
train traveler looking out the window
a Newtonian world of abstract qualities size, shape, quanity, motion
==> space out of the window of a moving train: a new kind of geographical representation, abstract and regular
(a problem in management:) “time had conspired with capital to annihilate space
@Sana
[a ‘second nature’ being created] railway (+ telegraph) ==> commodification + communication
in our trip to Rivage with Marialena we were in terested in signs in the built landscape, the “second nature” in the nature of Rivage, which were “concrete embodiments of the environmental partitioning that made farming possible”
a heterogeneous collection of lived spaces and histories
a heterogeneous collection of lives and spaces
why translation must be a monopoly (according to railway):
you need centralized bureaucracy and effective monopoly in order to operate with efficiency [...] [...] you could not have every train running on its own (loca) time ==> (Bahn railway map =) a representation that permit efficient operation --> *an absolute time and annihilated space*
(industrialization -->) railway/railroads --> basic accounting techniques used by American business enterprise (into the 20th century)
==> infrastructural technology: organizational form (accounting techniques, reports, etc.) synchronized with its own impact on the world (regularizing it) providing both a ***material and metaphorical implusion*** (to order its forms of inquiry/activity)
@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities[...]
(320)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.5[...]r />
@apass monday reading
means of new infrastructural technobody ==> technoscientific representations ==> (dual process of) commodification (railway) + representation (abstract space-time)
--> “you need to be able to represent the world in a *coherent and standard* form [~ databases] in order to run railways [or program language operation] and deal in commodities
increasingly less well-defined boundaries --Serres--> we need analytic categories that allow us to account for the unified representational time and space applied to both bureaucratic and scientific work --(Sohn-Rethel)--> (relationship between) **commodity form and the process of intellectual abstraction** [-abstractness governs the whole orbit of commodity form]. when commodity is up for sale, it is by definition not to be used; it exists in a kind of “frozen time” outside the normal flow of time. it moves in an abstract spatiotemporal world (~= “second nature"[==> cognitive faculty of conceptual things] =/= concrete world of “first nature”)
*import* the ideal abstraction basic to greek philosophy and to modern science
systematizers
nested series of regions
synchronic extension --> “trace” back records in past: indian empire preceded edgyptian preceded persian preceded western. a second world, Europe, is contained within larger world (~= european union) --> (fable of the “step by step”:) man has step by step, broken with this natural asian world, and constructed, through industry and trial a world informated by liberty [--> my german orientation course, “that is why refugees are coming here"]
fable: history as the tale of struggle (~ liberty against fatality)
(glorious) race into the future
temps
•time
•weather
(i have been working against:) “the irrelevance of the past for a purified real present (which Bowker underlines in Lyell's work)
syllogism صغرى کبرى
soghra kobra
senility kohulat
**database
(replacing syllogism) principle of the *division of labor* --> simultaneity of groups (of people) --> “the succession of acts of which a single act is composed, is the same thing as the succession of diverse works necessary to arrive at a result which is nevertheless single.” (this) succession ==> division of labor
“there is not context only text” --> when you get to Paris, upbringing and race are irrelevant to a person's actions. contemporary humanity would move completely outside the flow of narrative time
1830s geology
history: a science of singularity and secular change
earth: records of catastrophic events that affected the body terrestrial (much as political events affected the body politic)
(Lyell + Buchez + Michelet ==>) (reconfigured the world from) [...]
(321)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.6[...]
[title]
Freud's penis
inscription of records onto skin
the changes humanity has brought are (not of physical but of a) moral nature
strange tale! --> it is the bestial part of humanity fitting into the economy of nature, whereas civilized humanity operates in a different dimension to nature ==> creating the temporary appearance of an anomaly in “nature's book”
[title]
*the time of the good record keeper*
time of God
sybarites (an urbanite addicted to luxury and pleasures of the senses)
sycophants (=/= a public informer)
incalculable, irrational past seems to Lyell full of noise and cacophony irregularity
memory ensconced in books (~ filtered memory, rational memory, part of the archive with its very clear point of origin in printing) freed us from instict and brutality [---> go to TED talk ‘big history’ by David Christian, fable of printed record and progress of humanity tale]
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor
Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature
information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied
information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past
“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)
heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]
...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]
indifinite space as filled with worlds...
colossi
earthquakes
floods
storms
tranquil variations
“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present
[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)
moral duty as h[...]
(322)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.9[...]he black-box of talking survival
Robocop: highly complex cyborg (who came equipped with memory traces, superego, id, and--ever displacing the ego--a crypt)
court's frame-by-frame analysis of video --> recording and human memory @Ali
...................................
which ‘well-defined terms,’ *qualities of persistence*, object repository, and identifier resolvers am i using in ajayeb.net?
the performance of digital objects (and identifiers) (not treated as a simple binary property)
*(to retrieve) human- and machine-readable information*
persistence of cited objects (in ajayeb.net)
[*]persistence: a prediction about an archive's commitment and capacity to provide some specific kind of long-term functionality
which objects in ajayeb.net are:
•strictly unchanging
•subject to correction
•subject to significant update
[Calvert naming strategy]--> an approach: to invent a term (a portmanteau word واژه مرکب از دو واژه) or choose an existing word that is unusual enough (rare, archaic) to make the reader hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **
“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?
(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)
(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux
*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier
finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite
content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
[...]
(323)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.1[...]70s and increasingly international, have tended to be dominated by female fans
[*]poaching: how fans and fandoms appropriate commercial products for their own informal uses
*commercial exuberance* <== media franchises (<-- take advantage of the structure of multinational corporations [film and tv production, book, music and video publishing and distribution, theme parks, theaters, book stores, and so on. tie-in novels and coffee table, graphic novels, toys and games, other paraphernalia such as telephones, t-shirts and porcelain plates, music, commercial internet sites and catalog buying, and even scholarly works] + xeroxed fanfic, fiction written and self-published by fans,)
Star Trek = commercial media art =/= “art for art's sake”
-commercial media art is pleasurable precisely because *one instance of it is always insufficient in a very palpable way*
‘not enough’ ==> interactive & an on-going --> multiply collaborative process (across media)
= processes: people engage in varying degrees and forms of intensity and with varying collaborative possibilities -->{fandom: an interactive engagement that is culturally ambiguous =/= ‘society that values property,’ or ‘unique creations by single artists'}
(such media is) inspirational exactly because *so much is left out*, so much invites elaboration
•gossipy pleasures
•extratextual information
•many layered joke
•alerting the refrain of male friendship
•
like other kinds of SF Star Trek also often does replicate the very aspects of culture and society we find at the root of a range of social injustices, racism, sexism, homophobia, and others
Star Trek, understood by cultural studies, is complexly contradictory, full of progressive possibilities + structures that shut down such possibility
--study--> cultural sites of struggles for power and for competing visions of justice
Kirk speaks Spock's funeral address and movingly says: “his soul was the most human.” --> “human” simultaneously creates unities across races and nationalities (as a universal term for courage or compassion), just as it also valorizes and makes superior the species “human” ==> new inequality between humans and nonhumans
...................................
wmst601fall10.blogspot.com Katie King
zoo spelled backwards
http://www.ediblegeography.com/cross-species-dining-an-interview-with-natalie-jeremijenko-and-mihir-desai/
Jeremijenko @Sarah
edible lures
bio-amplification that happens through the food web
the New York of...
the Brussels of...
(there is always) the Tehran of X [trees, dogs, rats, moms, thugs, etc.] (=/= the X of The Tehran)
approach: targeted drug delivery --> doing focused interventions =/= treating the whole system
links of how *shared interdependent t[...]
(324)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.1[...]media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new forms of distraction, new forms of habit, new forms of practice
*politics of intervention: a matter of entering in the middle in order to *modulate* ~= (Rai's) counter-actualization (~= criticism): moving down from the extended, back to the intensive or potentiality (not merely a deconstructive practice, but) an ontologically oriented practice, a performative intervention brining a change of speed, rhythm, vibration --> politics of vibration (Pia's method)
media technological developement ==deploy==> (which?) ontological and epistemological implications
to give criticism more specificity and width
measure and media technologies
...................................
(Rai) [hacking jugaad practices] they operate within and against the plasticity (both neural and spatial) of India's “smart cities”
-feedbacked assemblages of affect, matter, policy, culture, biology, perception, value, force, sensibilities, practices, and discourses
-sensorial, algorithmic, material, and territorial makeshift infrastructures enabling digital cultures in India today
cultures of pirated workarounds (jugaad) in digital technologies
emergent digital cultures
stratified data
*hacking empiricism: a self-reflective practice of linking a problem to both its ecology of sense and sensation and to its processes and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways
ecologies of workaround practices
...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation
...nodes of algorithmic capital
traverse and exceed
islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India
marketing and hacking of digital cultures
social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability
**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies
heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)
Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****
[...]
(325)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.6[...]ses and dimensions of change*
•empiricism --> pragmatic experimentations in becoming other
•[*]hacking: (informalized workaround practices) inchoate unvollständig movement of workaround, informal (disorganized), extralegal, democratic, subaltern, collective repurposing of found materials shifting ecologies from relative stasis to absolute flux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways
ecologies of workaround practices
...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation
...nodes of algorithmic capital
traverse and exceed
islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India
marketing and hacking of digital cultures
social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability
**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies
heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)
Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****
entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)
-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures
(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)
negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)
the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*
Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures
strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity
(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism
interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought
collective practices of habituation
([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages
[...]
(328)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.7[...]br />
...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation
...nodes of algorithmic capital
traverse and exceed
islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India
marketing and hacking of digital cultures
social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability
**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies
heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)
Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****
entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)
-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures
(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)
negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)
the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*
Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures
strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity
<br />
(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism
interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought
collective practices of habituation
([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages
transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia
(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously
...................................
*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*
(Katie making a) multimedia bibliographic essay *with an argument* --> working out a practice of *transdisciplinary inspection*
(@apass, a fe[...]
(329)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.7[...]uble-bind systems ==> numbing out
queerly valorized --Keeling-->
if Pam Grier is a locus of desire for both heterosexual males and for lesbians such as Lesbian Avengers’ lesbian prtygoers, then her presence on The L Word [TV series] is another way the series seeks to bring these populations together in a shared project of value production
phenomena: topological reconfigurings/entanglements/relationalities/(re)articulations
ongoing reconfis of world ==> = agency =/= attribute
national agendas for innovation and economic positioning
which surplus populations will be enrolled into which kinds of institutions for knowledge work becomes an element of global academic restructuring
restructuring: politicizing funding + ...
intellectual double bind of having:
1. to address many diverging audiences simultaneously under the threat of survival
2. to author knowledges as merely one of multiple agencies with very limited control
==> *posthumanities*
(partial and highly distributed) authorial and receptive agencies --require--> affective labors -->
•sifting among authoritative and alternative knowledges
•clarifying affiliations
•inspiring trust
(Ahmed's material feminism) @apass
whose material was this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail
[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”
objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value
critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)
wir
(Katie --> one must wonder) who is being evoked by this ‘we’
to what extent this ‘we’ functions to interpellate the reader into a community that shares a common horizon? (@Sven and Chloe bookshop)
which side, which knowledge world, in what spacetime are ‘we’ on, inside and outside of, bonding and othering?
*tacit forgetting* =/= resolution
**what sorts of boundary objects value irritation?** @Leo
(my irritation in apass with tacit knowledge, spiritualism, Vivero, Manning, process philosophy,,,)
Katie accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attribut[...]
(331)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.1[...]as this?
which generations of feminisms were implicated?
which details were necessary to name others carefully?
what contexts were backdrops for which founding gestures?
affective labor (in apass): frustration, forgetting, unfairness, intensity, ethics, hope, carring attention to detail
[let's not] be quite so willing to deposit our hope in the category of “the new”
objects become sticky
objects become full of affective value
critique
(in apass i have been experimenting with the) effects of reducing complexity
(i am aware of both) the hard work of elegance in explanation & of essentialism in critique
-strategic openings and closings of “black-boxes” (full of memory)
wir
(Katie --> one must wonder) who is being evoked by this ‘we’
to what extent this ‘we’ functions to interpellate the reader into a community that shares a common horizon? (@Sven and Chloe bookshop)
which side, which knowledge world, in what spacetime are ‘we’ on, inside and outside of, bonding and othering?
*tacit forgetting* =/= resolution
**what sorts of boundary objects value irritation?** @Leo
(my irritation in apass with tacit knowledge, spiritualism, Vivero, Manning, process philosophy,,,)
Katie accounts for Ahmed worries that Barad's mattering and some othe black-boxing speech acts are only caricatures of whole arguments, of whole (disciplinizing?) archives, and that they are not conducted at the proper grain of detail, “not attributed to somebody”
attention (in time) -->
•narrow the range of possibility of -ism(s)
•alter the grain of detail ==> *differential focus*
ajayeb.net: an intellectual infrastructure assemblaged and stacked (extensively scaled, intensely scoped) =/= disciplinized archives of references (a knowing that linkages exist and can be assumed and must be consciously made explicit as “new”)
•my “=/=” set the focus of lens unsed in examining --> alter the grain of detail (deliberately and dismissingly) --> a “we” is needed --to--> pull back --to--> include alternate knowledge worlds
ajayeb.net/bibli: bird's-eye view of the bibliographic growth
mobility and detachability of “nots” provoking frission
@ERG's new website: what if the worlding here needs to scope and scale along ranges of detail, indications of shifts from one knowledge world to another assemblaged through boundary objects?
-who gets to say in which knowledge world?
routinized rhetoric about feminism
apparatus: open-ended practices
****(ok yes) “we honestly believe that there are no positions that are epistemologically superior to any other” --but--> at the same time [Katie and i totally] argue with and try to overthrow those i don't agree with****
[...]
(332)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.2[...]ntlessly lead mankind, screaming and protesting, by the nose towards a progressive utopia)
modernity ~=> (witnessed, if not caused:)
•death and elimination of numerous cultures
•destruction of countless communities and histories
•disappearance of hundreds of valuable animal and plant species
•transformed arable land into wastelands and deserts
modernity: the official culture of the world
(Nietzsche, Heidegger -->) it is not possible to think our way out of modernity with the philosophical system of thought and language supplied by modernity
--> Vattimo's (bad) philosophy of crisis:
•history
what was traditionally referred to as “history” is now perceived as having broken down into an infinity of “histories” that can no longer be (re)combined into a single narrative governed by a central theme
(today:) history = a kind of writing
•progress: *something qualitatively different from what precedes it* (a forward movement in history) --✕--> [now:] welf established technique (of such masters as Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard and Baudrillard:) to deconstruct rational metaphysics in order to open it, to rewrite it and thus to lay the foundation, in terms of a Marxian-inspired historicism, of new truths for a postmodernist thought
•(Vattimo's use of) nihilism as weapon to attack notions of ‘truth’ and ‘reason’ (in western metaphysics) ==>
◦‘logic = (just another kind of) rhetoric’
◦‘truth = will to power (by those who claim to be seeking truth over those who are being addressed by them)’
◦‘science and technology = dominating metaphysical systems’
--✕--> (eliminated any) possibility of a dialogue with cultures that are truly other as the rational metaphysics of science and technology
(the idea of) plurality of cultures and discourses must become a basic premise of postmodernist thought ==> widespread and widely pluralistic religious revival [+ excessive indulgence in relativism]
(the meaning of) morality and principles of justice in a postmodern world: [democracy's western ethos:]
•recognition of human needs
•courage
•solidarity
•justice
•prudence
•(virtue of) participating in rational discourse
(Sardar's reading:)
•stating the obvious with a sense of grand discovery is an essential postmodern disease
•what modern science and technology, free market economy and multinational corporations are doing in the name of freedom, justice and fairness
--> despite wonderful sentiments, and all the arguments for justice and equify, we end up with more of the same
(problem of the East with) modernity: a European cultural construct based on specific historical legacy and condition, and its basic goal has always been to shape science, politics, arts, morality and [...]
(333)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.4[...]ramme in a renewed attempt to justify neomarxism or new brands of liberal humanism
-what is a a genuine, radical departure from postmodernism?
religiosity: that which transcends the world (can be expressed in Fascism, Communism, Nationalism, Scientism, Aestheticism, Nuclearism, or in several other secular religions)
[*]secularism: a dishonest kind of religiosity***
(mark of out time:) *necessity of recovering our sense of oneness with nature* <-- our total alienation
[?my artistic research is the very expression of] (Griffin's) postmodernism : a new relationship with the past (and the future) <-- postmodernism acknowledges, appreciates and wants to learn from the wisdom of traditional societies ~= neoconservative religious fundamentalism =/= constructive nihilism
[the strive for a new ‘enchanted science’ (=/= sacred science) that] overcomes the separation between truth and virtue, value and fact, ethics and practical necessity
(Falk's) Disneyland postmodernism:
•abstract affirmation of a holistic harmonious future
•homogenized uniformity (based on a colonizing logic and westernization of the globe)
•reinterpret science and natural reality as confirmatory of a spiritual grounding for human
•holistic possibilities of encompassing conflict
•***postmodernism as an expression of the privileged status of the West***
*greek gnosis is the Terminator in its guise of mystic* (which provided the Enlightenment with its springboard and modernity with its mission to subjugate non-western cultures)
arrogance and authoritarianism are intrinsic in both Greek rationalist and mystical thoughts:
•Socrates --> worshipped reason and was an arrogant and obnoxious man who enjoyed ridiculing ordinary folks
•Buddah --> worshipped nature and produced a totally authoritarian system of thought (as have most philosophers in western history who have appealed to nature for ethics)
new postmodernism's value:
•ecological wisdom
•grassroots democracy
•personal and social responsibility
•non-violence
•decentralization
•community-based economics
•postpatriarchal values
•respect for diversity
•global responsibility
•future focus
*modernity is based on a fundamental value-idea --> secularism (a value whose opposite cannot be chosen as value)*
...................................
importance of scale
archive --> scale of the infinite
...................................
*history of knowledge [in my work on ajayeb] = dream of knowledge (present in the mind) of the people who are not anglophone =/= history of science*
inside and outide the mental map of the historian (of science)
SDzVaBj492s
Daston on *disciplinary n[...]
(334)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.5[...]re
criminality: departure from (or failure) to recognize a law
new violence
•violence against the sovereignty of local subjects
•violence against an internationalized regime that increasingly claimed exclusive sovereignty for itself
...................................
ethnography of capitalist crisis (a project on:)
•the politics of [*]transparency: the ideological pointing stick by which the market has appropriated for itself the function of regulating the state (where it was the function of the state to regulate the market)
•how capitalism ([Morris] in Thailand) disguises itself as mere monetization
•how money's total and totalizing meditations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy and eternal present-being
•
([i am] learning with Morris) ethnography of crisis
-how capitalism in Thailand disguises itself as mere monetization
-how money's (total and totalizing) mediations have come to be experienced in the contrary idioms of immediacy (and eternal present-being)
-rhetorics of transparency and visibility (conceived in aesthetic domains)
(narcissistic act of) teletechnic encompassment
*spirit mediumship*
[auratic threshold of representation]
(the nationally renowned spirit medium) Chuchad, flamboyant media savvy
daguerreotypy: a demonic receiving device that had the capacity to retain and thereby diminish the photographed subject's substance
(in Thai) kaan thaay [taking, wasting] ruup [picture]
•Thai word for photography
•concomitant transformation and discharge
--✕--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]
(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity
communist occult practices
emasculating magic
phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch
mediums = state's other
[today]
•identification between the local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•
mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self
[a figure [...]
(335)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]-X--> spirit practices were brought into conversation with the mass media
•conceptualized largely in terms of atavism and/or residue (repressed orgiastic impulse buried)
•(located on the periphery of) the *nation's geo-body* [=/= state's formed public]
(from the perspective of rationalist Buddhist orthodoxy [and in the case of iranian superstitions, Holakouee خرافه khorafe] -->) mediumship: (imagined as) a temporal interruption of the nation's modernity
communist occult practices
emasculating magic
phantasmatic triad of nation, religion, monarch
mediums = state's other
[today]
•identification between the local and the global (facilitated by transnational communication systems) compete with those of the nationalism
•*market-based discourses of civic politics in the anticipation of being seen from afar by a multinational media audience*
•
mediumship reborn as...
•circulating along with its own images
•part of an endlessly proliferating series (=/= double of a lost original) in which it merely seeks to be legible as an image of its displaced self
[a figure many artists today want to be: spirit] *medium* (profession of epiphanic discovery) --transmitting--> paranoiac messages --prophesying--> boundary penetration (originated with the state)
(revolution reduced to) the status of mise-en-scene
bourgeois democracy
market-based discourses of civic politics
simulacral space of the new mediascape
(Chuchad's promise of authenticity -->) violent authenticity of an exposure in which mediumship's representations would be renounced --> *techniques of the performance themselves become the object of performative inscription*
history of religious legitimacies
populist conservative monk --> religious sermon in the format of emphatically dialogic, using vernacular forms and local dialects to disseminate [--> content remaines deeply orthodox in its valorization of the foundational texts + its ritualist inscription]
+
medium's anti-ontological discovery
~=>
either there is nothing to transmit or there is no means of transmission = silence or white noise
Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without specification)
-what drew these people to this performance?
(seeking the) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked
acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience
broadcasting device = recording device
authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)
modern mediumship ~= [...]
(338)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.9[...]se
Phra Phyom --> embodiment of fame itself, a bastardized auratic presence that is always arriving (~ imminent without specification)
-what drew these people to this performance?
(seeking the) ambivalent pleasure (not without violence) of having a secret unmasked
acolyte
to ensure a line of vision between the medium and his audience
broadcasting device = recording device
authorship --(displaced by)--> a logic of *tracking of traces without a subject* (<-- reduction of representation and inscription)
modern mediumship ~= [*]automatic writing: (most associated with surrealism, in Western contexts) the writer seeks to merely transmit his or her unconscious thoughts and, in the process, to disavow the notion of authorial agency... [it marks a more general transitional moment in the history of representation --Morris-->] ***the production of meaning ceases to be a function of writing --> actuality or facticity becomes the primary object of inscription***)
confessional performances
denunciation of possession performance
untranslatable utterances [**increasing performance of untranslatability, glossolalia غريبه گفتارى --> contemporary spirit possession performances ==> the truth of the spirits in the mass-mediatized world is not referential and certainly not universal --✕--> the truth of the spirits centers on questions about the difference between noise and information]
mediums embrace technology
mediumship proliferates
mediums and the media provide each other with metaphors
(mediums seek to escape the relationship altogether) in forms of ecstatic nonrepresentation or absolute renunciation
Chuchad cutting his tongue --> disavow disavowal
“[...]he rendered himself voiceless, and the only sounds he could make were those of exhalation and inhalation: sounds of the body as machine”
...the crowd gasped and then repeated --> confused awe & automatism
[a fable:] “Chuchad placed the tongue on a piece of white paper, and the blood quickly diffused into the fibers. For a moment it appeared as though the tongue was writing a blunt, indecipherable hieroglyph. Chuchad then held the paper to his mouth so it was covering his face and pressed the tongue back into its original place. This time, he seemed to be rewriting, or rather, writing in reverse, and the glyph was inscribed on the tongue as though the tongue had been transformed into paper and the paper into pen. Thus did writ- ing make speech possible. The medium pulled the paper away, folded it carefully, and then, with only a little blood reddening his lips, began speaking.” (Morris)
•tongue excision = performative repudiation of mediumship
•voice = the vehicle of a simple exteriorization
•[*]fable: staged risk in the form of a bad example ==> “object of transmi[...]
(339)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.9[...]es the form (in the pilgrims experience) of [*]hesitation: a sign that identifies that thought is occuring & this thought is taking care of something that matters [---> go to Attar Tazkirat al-Awliya]
forms of hesitation:
•openly contradictory alteration of positions
•a critical position (the apparition is not there)
•a position of belief
•using semantics or syntactic devices that introduce ambivalence
--> Claverie learns to hesitate with them
--Stengers--> ecological practice: a practice that takes into account the fact that the inquiry participates in the ‘milieu’ of those it addresses --> *the practicioner is herself taking care of what matters with thoughts and learns to create (what Despret would call) the relevant *milieu of thought*
Matrix world: “consumer victim =/= resistant hacker fighter” and nothing else
if you are a student of ghosts --> you are competent in sensing the taste of ghosts
{ancestors ate too much salt ==> descendants desire water}--> *intersubjective nature of remembering*
-[Despret > Kwon] true human desires are not those of an isolated individual. it is the individual who feels the desire, whereas the origin of the desirem, like the spirit's phantom salt, may be with someone else, for it is in the presence of this other that the water becomes salty --> ***the desire to remember can be a desire that rises somewhere between the past and the present***
-agencement: the act of commemoration responds to a desire, so one cannot choose whether it emanates from the one who is remembered or the one who takes charge of remembering --> the desire to be remembered & the desire to remember hold together [=/= giving ontological priority to the imagination of the living]
what can i learn from Tehran's bestiary, from my mother, from unusual old iranian fables, from telegram animals?
•let myself be instructed by the events that my inquiry creates
•let myself be called by the enigma that will guide me inmy understanding of events
*to be instructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits
****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”
riddle: key + guide
(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings
trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you
what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]
...................................
[...]
(342)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.5[...]ng the popular understanding of race =/=) to show the unsettled and ongoing nature of the debate. [asking readers] to track the rise and permutation of various features of the argument
[asking Captain America --anatomical-->] “in what larger political, economic, and social contexts might ears, noses, index fingers, or brains hemispheres attract attention as reliable signs of racial difference?”
some wrong ideas:
•adaptation to new environments signals evolution (~= degenerating groups would eventually cease to exist)
•high mortality rates could signal problems in work and living condition
•sexual dimorphism thought to be a component of degeneration
•“more often than not, the views of society have shaped science rather than the other way around. in this instance, it may be time for science to reshape the views of society.” [<-- scary!]
•
to start with political agenda (good or bad) and fit evidence to that
political correctness (~ a social interest)
dogged persue of truth
*science's power to beguile اغفال imagination* (for example genomics testing to discover and reveal “truths” about unknown ancestry)
}--> (a post World War II and post-holocaust aspiratoin:) *the allure here is to finally prove we are all the same under the skin, or at least that we have more in common than we had liked to admit* <-- another project for making race matter, but differently
(Quinsy urgently need to learn) how not to be conversation stopper
Bland + Doan's Sexology Uncensored
...................................
scope of information science --> [*]document: organized physical evidence
new digital technologies renews old questions and also old confusions between medium, message, and meaning
document
ordniary information storage and retrieval system?
bibliography:
•collecting
•preserving
•organizing (arranging)
•representing (describing)
•selecting (retrieving)
•reproducing (copying)
•disseminating
•
(of documents)
early 20th century --> documentation adopted (in europe) instead of bibliography
[*]documentation: a set of techniques developed to mange significant (or potentially significant) [*]document: any expression of human thought (beyond written texts)
~-> *novel form of signifying objects*
objects bearing traces of...
*if you are informed by observation of it, you are looking at a document*
document: any material basis for extending our knowledge which is available for study or comparison
*capable of being used for:
•*reference*
•*study*
•*authority*
1951
document: evidence in support of a fact
any physical[...]
(343)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.7[...]vidence in support of a fact
any physical or symbiotic sign, preserved or recorded, intended to represent, to reconstruct, or to demonstrate a physical or conceptual phenomenon
--> viewed with access to evidence
=/= (concerned with) text
document =/= ajayeb's text object [--> pop-up book]
(object) (document?)
star in the sky no
photo of star yes
stone in river no
stone in museum yes
animal in wild no
animal in zoo yes
Briet's rules for determining when an object has become a document:
1. there is materiality
2. there is intentionality
3. the objects have to be processed (they have to be made into documents)
4. there is a phenomenological position (the object is perceived to be a document)
indexicality: *the quality of having been placed in an organized, meaningful relationship with other evidence --> gives an object its documentary status* [<-- for who and why is this useful?]
modernist mentality:
•scientific management
•standardization
•bibliographic control
--as--> complementary and mutually reinforcing bases for achieving progress
spiritual movement of anthroposophy --> cognitive aspects of the medium of the message
==> document: repository of an expressed thought + spiritual character
1963
document: micro-thought on a flat surface (fit for physical handling, transport across space, and preservation through time)
cultural anthropology --> “material culture” --> onject as document
artifacts contribute important evidence in the documentation and interpretation of experience
artistic research = aesthetic object + signifying object
semiotics
information sciences
Barthes --> object-as-sign
there is always a meaning which overflows the object's use
text: patterns of social phenomena not made of words or numerals
[signs have to be treated a something invented]
*social construction of meaning* ==> viewer's perception of the significance and evidential مدرکى character of documents ==> “relevance” is now considered to be situational and ascribed by the viewer (in digital)
}<== the property of being a sign is not a natural property <== ***property is given to objects***
Wikipedia: all signifying objects (points to) ~~> forensic aesthetic: all evidence = signifying فوری (easy + immediate) =/= aesthetic object فرار (volatile)
object in evidence --> offer it as evidence by the way it is arranged, indexed, presented
its manner --> in arranging material so that someone may be able to make use of it as new evidence for some purpose (=/= finding material that already is in evidence)
what is a digital docu[...]
(344)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.8[...]
?how year 1000 was perceived
•preoccupation with the time of Christ second coming
•natural and political disasters and upheavals --sign--> denouncement of sacred history
medieval = fear + passion (+ expectation) ==> eschatological imagination
escapology: significance of immanent (catastrophic) future history
calculations of the end
demand for reform
monastic analysis
discourse against an identifiable moment of apocalypse
•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope
unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]
apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog
mystical response
spasmodic irrationality
the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)
deathbed demons
hell in art
religious anxiety
mechanism of social control
(from) collective --to--> individual
(from) temporal --to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self
(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self
purgatory: in-between time and space
afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
medical eschatology
eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) ea[...]
(346)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.3[...]dentifiable moment of apocalypse
•antichrist
•whore of Babylon
•angelic pope
unfolding end of history [humbling of the mighty] + justice for the inarticulate (oppressed) [exhalation of the meek]
apocalyptic speculation about the enclosed unclean people of Gog and Magog
mystical response
spasmodic irrationality
the fate of the individual at the moment of “personal death” --> guilt culture (fear of damnation ==> life = ritual preparations for dying)
deathbed demons
hell in art
religious anxiety
mechanism of social control
(from) collective --to--> individual
(from) temporal --to--> atemporal or beyond time
(from) stress on spirit --to--> sense of embodied or reembodied self
(shift from) tamed death: a death expected and prepared for, experienced in community --to--> personal death: the moment of death as decisive accounting for an individual self
purgatory: in-between time and space
afterlife --> the concept of the (embodied) human person
somatomorphic: separated soul imagined as bodily
ordinary piety -->
•significance of physical death
•spiritual value of somatic phenomena (namely suffering)
the sense of an ending hovers over all spiritual writing in the middle ages
eschatology of:
1. resurrection: a sense of last things that focuses significance in the moment at the end of time when the physical body is reconstituted and judged
[<-- arise from traditions with a much less immanent sense of “last things"]
--emphasis-->
◦time end
◦person embodied
◦humanity collective
2. immortality: the experience of personal death is the moment of judgement
3. apocalypse --> (coerces) **what matters is the here and now** <-- implying a political payoff<br />
==> inflect and deepen the literature (description of plague, visions of heaven and hell)
}--> three eschatology differ:
•what is the person fundamentally
•fate collective or individual
•how and whether time marches
•where the end is located
•
medical eschatology
eschatology (in the west) is perhaps the most paradoxical (and inconsistent) aspect of religiosity
(traditions in which) earthly experience is a moment in an eternal dreaming
Islam, Judaism, Christianity are brooded over by the sense [*]last things: a sense of the end [soon or distant, individual or collective] contradicts itself (explodes itself) <== *it looks for a moment that gives significance to the course of time by finally denying (erasing, ending) that to which it offers significance* }<--- western european middle ages utilizes and deepens this multifold and contradictory tradition (=/= deny, impove[...]
(347)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...]/>
Bernard's heaven
painted embodiedness of the blessed (<-- problematic + powerful)
out of time heaven in which the soul is already body-shaped --> somatomorphic selves before judgement
apocalyptic moment --> self-referentiality: when the author reflects on the limits of their knowledge and expression
(all) eschatological texts (poems) in some way reflect their status as fiction --assert--> their nature as mediating and contingent
xxxxxx
Trans-ing xeno- unsettles the oversimplified Others necessary for the production of stratification and disallowance, without in the process destroying difference and the ethics of encounter.
the ontological primacy of centers in general
the refracted image
myths of belonging as an anthropocentric narrative, one is worthy of personhood if she is placed in home.
[in the political and fantasy practices of the most inheritors of traditions of white (or not-white, the actual color is not the point) settler colonialism and its ecologies, the introducing species--including ourselves--are always bad --> the extraordinary practice of disavowal (of the ‘creatures of the empire’ #Haraway) --> inheriting the notion of ‘belonging’ and ‘not-belonging’ (in this tradition) disavowal is almost the only way you can “keep” belonging. and one of the ways you practice disavowal and belonging is to exterminate the other (feral pigs, etc.) who “really” don't belong.]
•(which) *practices of belonging* (are not part of (whose?) dreaming?) --> they always turn up in family stories {feral =/= pest}
•how various kinds of species can and cannot get on together?
•who should be killed and lived-with?
•(who exists only under the) categories that come from the cunning of recognition [categories of the traditional, of the subsistence food (ma'ash معاش), of the enacting of a culture in view of tourist public,]
•managed belongingness
In Jean Genet's portrayal of dusk (quoted by Minh-ha 1996:101-102), he captures the ambiguity of this transitional time in the expression ‘entre chien et loup,’ between dog and wolf, that is, a time of day when one cannot be distinguished from the other, and he also describes it as ‘the hour of metamorphoses when people ‘half hope, half fear’ that a dog will become a wolf’ (our emphasis). This quotation exemplifies the ambiguously ‘unheimlich,’ [...]
security is never secure enough
Jesus knocks at your heart's door
(history's or pig's) happy ending
absence of ambivalence (in animals)
conditions of admission ---> artistic, sexual, natural *selections*
tickets to power-holding cliques that control the resources
phantoms of non-destruct[...]
(349)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.5[...] in a scene, watching as spectator from out of a situated identity in the world), (not so new) urban sensibility and urban subject matter; criticized by Guy Debord; --->{a theater with performers and spectators, a very physical understanding of public space, ---[dramatic & material]}
3- inclusive =/= integrative
many of the differences (culture, class, religion, etc) that cities contain can't be reconciled ---> how can I talk to you and not pressing a point of integration, rather inclusion? (where people feel provoked to integrate, integrieren, an inherently passive condition)
-always more parallel activities that don't form a spectacle only but are also productive
---[inclusive & synchronous]
***(in the public realm:) integration <~-> spectacle
public spaces must be much smaller =/= gigantism of dramatized power of the politics in large scale public places
small ==> intensity (--> this i learned from Julia as well, create small spaces to show our art-works to each other, the intensity of that moment generative of desire)
(most public spaces have been designed by powers that want to use the very size of the public space as way to *dramatizing their own power*)
•public space inspired by power
•public space inspired by wealth
•
the “stop” as an architectural project itself (@Selma)
we argue, in our project st.open, that there should be many activities going on at once in public space, that public space should be synchronous, productive as well as spectacular
...................................
*the way we concentrate has a deeply historical character*
Crary
looking at opera or television or driving,
we are in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment
Crary: how western modernity since the 19th century has demanded that individuals define and shape themselves in terms of a capacity for “paying attention”*** --> disengagement from a broader field of attraction for the sake of isolating or focusing on a reduced number of stimuli
{ our lives = disconnected patchwork of stats }<== dense and powerful remaking of human subjectivity in the West over the last 150 years
the so-called crisis of subject disintegration is diagnosed as a deficiency of “attention”
attentive norms and practices ==> modern distraction
imperative of concentrated attentiveness within the disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass consumption
+
ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element of a creative and free subjectivity
a cultivated individual gazing (~ Jassem) on a great work of art or nature
+[...]
(350)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.8[...]rreducible plurality of experience ==> (think in terms of) fluidity and immobilization
my work is usually unformed and informal: a speaking properly in terms of irradiated strata, an aggregate
emergence of increasingly powerful technologies and institutions that would determine and enforce *externally* the objects of attention for mass population --> history of cinema
•disciplinary framework: it is the aim of the teacher to fix the attention of the pupils --> habit of attention becomes amenable to the will of the teacher
attention was an indispensable component of the “normal” and “rational” subject of the late 19th century industrial society, yet had a disturbing proximity to “pathological” and “irrational” effects.
-Crary
Simondon, mold & modulation
Deleuze, on fold
by the end of 19th century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence
(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness
hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses
focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object
sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness
Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana
hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces
Ali's[...]
(352)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.7[...] century attention became an inadequate simulation of (an Archimedean) point of stability from which consciousness could know the world [rather] it opened to flux and absence (=/= perceptual fixity, certainty of presence) ==> subject-object scattered provisional existence
(extreme model of a) *technology of attention* @Zoumana [spiritism, *action at a distance* --> curse, ,]
hypnosis --> unsettling outlines of of a subject whose makeup could evade both intellectual and institutional mastery + precariousness and malleability of (what had been thought of as) consciousness
hypnosis adjacent to attention?! intense refocusing and narrowing of attention + inhibition of motor responses
focalization: concentrating one's attention on some specific object
sustained looking at a single point (i used to do as a child) ==> dramatic reorganization of consciousness
Crary in his book, Suspension of Perception, shows how high science and peripheral pseudoscience never had clear-cut distinctions in the 19th century. that there were a complex and shifting relation of mutual exchange between the “luminous” physics with a huge range of other “darker” ideas about ‘action in a distance’ enacted in spiritism
@Zoumana
hypnosis & suggestion --> automatic processes (inferior, more instinctual, continuous with animality), “mental decapitation” =/= ration elicit patient with conscious participating will power [--> Star Wars will of the weaker and less independent, powerful natures exercise over weaker ones, jedi --> strance states (of the weaker ones): being instrument of undisguised power --Stengers--> deviant types of behavioural control]
(hypnosis still being researched on but) ideologically could not be acknowledged as a constitutive part of human sciences
==> (stigmata of critical position [@Ali; follow it in Marxism]:)
volitional human action modified by external forces
Ali's tacit appeal to state secret, military secret --> importance of low-level effects of suggestion and influence in contemporary global culture (Ali's interest)
the role ‘suggestion’ plays in a society of communication --> the effects of:
•fashion
•mimesis
•mass psychology
•media-related contagions
+ influences of all kind ==> “oblige” us
}--> the assumption that attention can be controlled for specific ends
(over a hundred years) underpinning institutional strategies has been the position that *human subjects have determinate psychological capacities and functions that might be susceptible to technological management*
attention has been both: strategy of control & locus of resistance and drift
(by the end of 20th century) the attentive subject is part of an ‘internalization’ of disciplinary imperative --> individuals are ma[...]
(353)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.7[...]no longer discloses interiority or self-reflection
(within 19th + 20th century modernity) face: (par excellence) the substance of expression of the signifier --(D+G)--> **capitalist faciality** (exists to serve a signifying formula): the means by which the signifier takes control, the ways it organizes a certain mode of individuated subjectification and collective madness of a *machine without any content* (Crary > Guattari)
-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ head)’ [~ multidimensional polyvocal corporeal code] overcoded by what we call the Face
(////we have to escape the face and facialization!)
indication of bodies in my peers projects in apass:
-kinds of subduing and constrain necessary for the construction of an *organized and inhibited corporeality* (--> Laura's project)
-instruments of domestication
fixed pictorial (--> a holding action) --> social organization
study object of empirical sciences around 1880: perceptual field newly decomposed into various abstract units of sensation + related possibilities of synthesis
+ newly invented nervous disorders (hysteria, etc.)
--> (busy with) failures of the integrity of perception --> disassociated fragments --> (impairment asymbolias:)
*agnosia*: inability to make any conceptual or symbolic identification of an object ~ visual information experienced with a primal strangeness:
“perceptual field --✕--> pragmatic plasticity”
flat perception, no determination of depth object
}--> labelled as pathological [=/= my amazon project--was a form agnosia:
•resistance to consuming the world inrld in a productive or social way
•rejection of habitual or conventional patterns of organized perceptual information]
-this is part of the phenomenology of knowledge***
desymbolization of perception --> Foad
{for Janet:} attention: power of mental synthesis (~ the power of subject to form new perception, to have memories)
{for Freud:} attention: dynamic activity of repression
“[a] society recognizes itself and its own positivity through the morbid and pathological forms it identifies and invents” (Crary + Foucault)
subjectivity: provisional assembly of mobile and mutable components --> attentiveness:
•conscious/voluntary {task-oriented, higher behaviour}
•automatic/passive {areas of habitual activity, daydreaming, reverie, somnambulant states}
(the state of) the seated woman
[19th century regime of facility]
Clark's “face of fashion” (=[...]
(354)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76[...]tioned to denote a plane of transcendence
figuration of utopia --> simultaneous mapping out of death, absence, and finitude of historical subjectivity
Peirce's (nonoptical operation of attentive consciousness =/= Descartes) --> impossibility of direct intuition, of interpretive process
**cognition and perception could only occur indirectly**
index: exercising a real physiological force over the attention -- mesmerized into its particular object of sense.
= *everything that focuses the attention*, (everything that startles us into an index)
--> make something conceptually present which is perceptually absent
installed economy of attraction(/distraction) [in European cities, and its deviation in Tehran differences]
fashion works to bind attention onto its own pseudo-unity
against the living, fashion asserts the rights of corpse and the sex appeal of the inorganic
(Benjamin)
--> death drive
(supreme cult of the commodity:) fashion: a blossoming forth into a luminous apparition of the new
[==>? withdrawal from fashion = a strategy of freedom]
Adorno: in the age of growing powerlessness of subjective spirit vis a vis social objectivity, fashion registers the alien excess of objectivity in subjective spirit, which is painful yet all the same a corrective of the illusion that subjective spirit exist purely within itself. against its detractors, fashion's most powerful response is that it participates in the individual's impulse, which is saturated with history. (“Aesthetic Theory” p316)
(?what are my time's) rhythms of attentiveness
*mask: a means of mental survival
mask (of masculinity) --> the ability to keep a secret --> *all secrets are (at the end) sexual*
[]should our artistic practices comment or be continuous with the (emerging) world of consumer culture? #make a fashion magazine with Ali and Janina: excursion into the stultifying and emancipatory effects of the fashion commodity. discussion on: jewellery, decoration, women's bodies, show, travel, glitter, ----> kaleidoscopic decomposition and displacement of the glitter object
-Mallarme's La Derniere Mode
==> luminosity of a single object is lost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
•internal movement of its text
artisanal craft
(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity
[...]
(355)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.3[...]matic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”
process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)
(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”
(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)
(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange
[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality --> ****in Last Supper the miraculous becomes the direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural visual space****
effects of vanishing point
(in all my image assemblages there is a system of em of fluid relations in which subjectivity is imagined [not in terms of coincidence with a quantifiable point of view])--> in every image and diagram subjectivity (~ identity and reference) is imagined in a system of relations @Eszter's binding order
zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•
my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world =/= facade of appearance and semblance
(=/=? coalescence, knowledge and diversity work, etc.)
i can't insist enough (learning from Seurat) that the foreclosure of the noumenal world (the true world) is inseparable from the fragility and insubstantiality of the apparent world
(shabah az sanaat joda nist شبه و صنع)
[...]
(358)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.4[...]/>
Pythagoranism: number =/= infinite
•infinite = void of knowledge, limitless and undetermined
•number = rational limit and determination
Pythagorean =/= premodern mystic values
*some of the great disenchanters at the origin of modern western science are deeply Pythagorean:
***number is the essence of reality ==today==> “nature must be studied quantitatively” (=/= ajayeb's quality of descriptive nature of the world)
...and appeal to mathematics in artmaking still comes from the hope of establishing clear and distinct ideas, which as such are necessarily true
Pythagorean primal cosmogenic principle: breath --> repression's binary rhythm of inhaling and exhaling, the mutual interaction of contraries (like sex) : the original generative force
(the union of the limited and the unlimited) --> still operating today in the year 2018
theories of dynamogeny on iranian traditional music radif, that certain musical proportions poses cheerful or bitter qualities, influence the person's emotional state
to transcend from quantitative number of dastgah --to--> a mysterious qualitative dimension of pardeh
(Crary's) Seurat's anarchism: (painting of the) world of mere empirical relations, cut off from the infinite (loss of the vanishing point) and from the light of either sun or moon (gaslight illuminates the scene)
Leo's primitive communism
pictorial generation of meaning
the keystone of Foad's technique:
purity of the spectral element
(Burgin >) fantasy: an arrest that domesticates the unruly movements of desire --> it takes on hieratic and tableau-like forms : phantasmatic figuration
*reconciliation*
(a formal idea, of) abstract functionings of binary oppositions {typographical distribution of energy}
=/= elevation in terms of “opposites” or “contraries” (colors, lines, forces, sexes, numbers)
technocratic dream of a quantifiable harmony that a machinic world installs or restores --> *ataraxie*: emphatically reduction of tensions into zero --Seurat--> homeostasis --> preindividuated unity : theater of equilibrium ==> erasure of both individual and historical temporality
(Nattiez:) the illusion that humanity could reach a stable point [...] at which time can be arrested. it is for this reason that androgyny and death so often appear together: social utopias end in massacres and that the structuralist utopias of an allembracing explanation of mankind reducible to torrents of binary oppositions result in “nothingness”
Freud's nirvana principle: to remove interval tension due to stimuli (--> death instinct)
Sina:
(painted and visible philosophy)
in my image assemblages what are and how they work:
•mimes of meaning
•ful[...]
(360)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.6[...]eech: به صورت موضوع درآوردن
(making what one guesses into a subject of discussion to be rethought)
irreducible composite of properties belonging to the observer
perspective: transforming psychophysiological space into mathematical space ==> sum of all parts of space and its contents are absorbed into a single ‘quantum continuum’
-Panofsky perspective as symbolic
analysis of sensation
“one coherent mass of sensations”
(Mach's legitimate and functional) scientific impressionism
*modernization (and rationalization) of perceptual (and aesthetic) response* <-- preoccupation of Seurat, Eisenstein, Moholy-Nagy, Schoenberg
(Crary > Chastel > Seurat's method was) a research into archetypal forms (lines, colors, directions) which answered to a double and deliberately compound ambition, at once *****archaic regression and scientific reduction***** [<-- this describe my work!] the artist/painter's operations set up a meeting point between *an ancient hieratic art and the rationalized discipline of the future* [= my work on ajayeb] --> culturally reactionary component of my projects, progressive and regressive at once, (past and future)
=/= Meyer Schapiro's Seurat: an enlightened politically progressive artisan-artist embracing science and technological paradigms in the interests of *forging an image of a nonhierarchical social world* [<-- an uncritical stance towards “science” and “technology,” approaching “the rationality of method” (in Seurat) as a final locus of meaning =/= the site of powerful and unresolved contradictions]****
-can our modern practices be constituted without reinventing its relations to the ancient?
troublesome ambivalence of Pythagoreanism: part of an animistic premodern magical world view yet deeply embedded in the essential assumption of modernity that all of nature is understandable in terms of numbers (-Bloch, modernism: quantitative side with metaphysics proper strictly scientific =/= figural-qualitative symbolic side)
... --> Seurat's unresolvable problem: to think simultaneously the idea of universality in terms of aesthetic absolute and the inescapable universality of modern exchange and calculation
--> (Norman Brown:) the money complex, archaic or modern, is inseparable from symbolism, and *symbolism is (not the mark of rationality, as Simmel thought, but) the mark of sacred* @Luiza's diagrams [--> this is important for apass, “aesthetic experience occurs within, not above, the opposition of the symbolic and the economy, and within the lived conflict between self-activity and reification” -Brenkman]
==> undialectical disjunction of sacred and secular
silent reflective monk
mechanical assemblage of never quite integrated elements
Seurat's texture of work <== an intuition of the loss of a[...]
(361)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.8[...]ed in a particular product [political processes leading to social injustice]) and/against thinking with assemblages (= contextual relational uncertain concept of the social of things and people as system of objects, in which nothing merely rules itself or others, emphasizing heterogeneity and process)... finally saying that Tehran is a relational heterogeneous uncertain system [Sina] and not a destined coerced programmed doom-object [Foad]. question: can we oppose the ideas of suffering and injustice and their expressions as essential qualities in the context of Tehran? what conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is suffering)?
-my family dining table: space of arrangement of practices of objects of...
-this discussion for me was about the categories and classifications that we rely on to investigate the world.}
--> Bergson: “in the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measures spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis [...] an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”
1880s and 1890s is exactly the time where many different discourses considered the ways in which external forces and procedures could influence or control both individual and collective subject
-common in French sociological thinkers (Durkheim, Tarde, Le Bon): the primal fact of social life is some system of control or coercion that is imposed on the individual {for example Tarde: “stupefied and feverish beings [in] magical charm of their environment [...] it is always more fatiguing to think for oneself [...] man lives in an animated environment [...] he gradually refrains from all intellectual efforts [...] his mind becomes stultified and more and more excited [= somnambulistic] characteristic of many city dwellers [...]"}
the audience in many artworks still today has the sign of the distracted crowd (جمعیت خواب)
(“man without qualities” =) de-individualized = suggestible, hypnotizable
(Fried:)
anti-rococo French painting: a painting had to first attract (call to someone) and then to arrest (bring him to a halt in front of itself) and finally to enthral (hold him there as if spellbound) = the modernizing instrumentality that is fulfilled in cinema today
for Tarde:
“social existence = somnambulism"[= heightened receptivity to suggestion, individuals apt to imitate one another] ==> “social = (a form of) dream”
--[...]
(362)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.1[...]ty could see itself reflected in the mirror of tragedy) of theatrical existence --> *sense of vision serves to reinforce one's place within the social whole*
[--> when i look at Brussels from the 14th floor...]
Wagner's cultural program for social reintegration and his belief in the transformative effects of the collective experience of music drama preformed and produced as a ritual communal event
(typical 19th century --> debates about the effects of mass culture --articulated--> “distraction =/= self-conscious contemplative perception” -->) Wagner's deploying the pervasiveness of *distracted modes of cultural consumption* ==> “higher (deeply attentive --advocated--> purified and ethically superior perceptual engagement) =/= lower (distracted)” forms of listening
-his dissatisfaction with traditional theatre that had allowed or encouraged audiences to look at each other at the diverse social texture of the theatre
an attentive, absorbed public (unthinkable in the 18th century ---> go to Sennett)
(still we are suffering -->) [to have] *control over the attentiveness of an audience* to subordinate it to the will of the artist ==> generate a *collective state of reception* (worthy of an art with such social aspiration @Hoda, Ali , Sina, --to which extent my mysticism in art was about my ideas about spectators incapacity for attention in contemporary Tehran?)
19th century theatre --(transform into)--> ***construction of visibility*** (structure the spectators perceptual experience)
“collective act of seeing ==> semblance of a community”
(phantasmagoric character of his work) Wagner:
•eliminating lateral views ==> frontal engagement
•near-complete darkness ==> preventing peripheral distraction
•lowering the orchestra out of sight
--> systematic concealing and mystification of the process of production
--> (Wagner stands for) will to mastery over all aspects of the spectacle ==allow==> calculated production of states of regression, fascination, dream (synchronized sound --> cinema's attentiveness half a century later)
-control over emotional response
-remaking of spectator experience
-production of dreamlike clairvoyant
(-can theater stage be a place of distraction? again)
intelligible relation of distance between viewer and illusory scene
--> the way diorama commanded visual attention
in my stage design drawings from 2009:
•standardized perspectival expectations
•metric relations
•position of spectator
•luminous detached rectangle
-
Wagner's Ring cycle: the last expression of a 19th century fantasy of the recuperation of tragedy and myth ~ the dream that culture could make whole what capitalism has broken --Crary+Lacoue-Labarthe--> [disturbing conviction/dream:] in an age w[...]
(363)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.3[...]r />
attempt of description of objectivists in a certain atemporal fixedness =/={attention: heightened awareness of a narrowed or focused range of perception, operation of selection, question of existence of content in consciousness, empathic function which belongs in the sense of intuitional experience ~= psychophysical, associationist, sensationalist, atomistic accounts of perception and cognition ==> how reliable and consistent the knowledge about the world is possible + (classical model of vision:) privileged point of view of a perceiving subject from which the objectivity of the world could be apprehended}
issue of cognitive and perceptual synthesis
•to resecure an unconditional basis for logic and science
•to escape from refined habitual patterns of perception inherent in various aspects of rationalization and compassion of experience in 1890s and 1900s (--> dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subjective lifeworld [unable to go beyond ‘pre-cinematographic conditions’ (~ movement thought only from the anchorage of a static “pose”)]
--Varela--> Husserl's (+ MerleauPonty) turn towards experience (the “things themselves”) was entirely theatrical : lacked any pragmatic dimension [---> go to Despret, Stewart]
what Cezanne did seek to “suspend” (to forget)?
(sensitivity to) perceptual experiences that had been ignored, marginalized, or incompatible (==> unarticulated)--within--> organization of knowledge about vision
}==> (Cezanne's) “attention to anomalous* --> ***engage a discordant exterior*** (that takes a hold on your recognizable world) [<-- our heritage in art]
Cezanne: “perception = process of its formation” : confronting and inhabiting the instability of perception =/= recording the evanescent appearances of the world
(Cezanne + Manet's discovery:) looking at one thing
=X=> fuller and more inclusive grasp of its presence (~ rich immediacy)
==> perceptual disintegration and loss, breakdown as [...]
(364)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.8[...] />
war machine: a counter-State mechanism
realized completely in: the “barbaric” assemblages of nomadic warriors (=/= “savages” assemblages of primitive societies)
-problem: it cannot relay
Deleuze and Guattari ask: so, why did the State triumph?
the fable of Urstaat: the State clearly dates back to the most remote ages of humanity
law of the State --> interior and exterior, Sovereignty only reigns over what it is capable of internalizing, of appropriating locally
=/= the rights of segmentary societies
_~*neoprimitivism*~_
polymorphous war machine
commercial circuit...
religious creation...
(Deleuze and Guattari's) space:
*smooth:
•vectorial ↗️⤴️↘️↞
•projective 📹
•topological 🐍 (=/= geometrical)
•
--> *space is occupied without being counted*
=/=
*striated:
>
•metric -|-|-|-|-
-
--> *space of counted without being occupied*
“minor science” (in which, model are:)
1. hydraulic =/= hylomorphic
2. of becoming and heterogeneity
3. goes from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane (=/= from straight line to its parallels) --> vortical
4. *****problematic(==> event --to go from a problem to the accidents that both condition and resolve it ==> [all kinds of] deformations, transmutations, passages to the limit, each figure designates an “event”) =/= theorematic(==> essence --theorematic: to go by specific differences from a genus to its species, or by deduction from a stable essence to the properties deriving from it) [--> make your model problematic, not affirmed by theoretical bullshit! --> my performances are about trying to find a way of not being theorematic while doing theory]***** (and they say ‘problematic’ the problem it is it is not an “obstacle”)
=/= “royal science”: reducing the “problem-element” and subordinate it to the “theorem-element.” State needs to subordinate hydraulic force ==> prevent turbulence (--✕--> Middle East =? distributed turbulence across a smooth space [<-- fucked up], [in smooth space:] vortical movement that can rise up at any point)
•civil
•static
•ordinal
/matter --assigned-to--> content
/form --assigned-to--> expression
~= hylomorphic: implying both a form that organizes matter and a matter prepared for the form (=/= hydraulic) <== *a society divided into governors and governed*
--> State science (appropriates and transforms the elements of:)
=/= “nomadic science” (Homeland TV series suggesting US government is a nomadic science: viewpoint of affections + nomadic operation of rogue CIA operatives + presidential decentralized power dynamic)
•becoming
•heterogeneity
•infinitesimal
•[...]
(365)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80[...] />
content is (not?) always conformist (<-- Julia was never)
Alex: imperium of true thinking --> capture, seizure, binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (= myth) ==> [*]logos: sanction of a ground
modern state: *realized reason*, the rational and reasonable organization of a community
-what are the exchanges that take place between the State and reason
modern state reason --> “the more you obey, the more you will be master” (for you will be only obeying pure reason) --> philosophy assigned itself the role of ground
common sense: the unity of all faculties at center
(in the archaic model imperial State:) poet = image trainer =/= (toady's) artist: (Deleuzian) *private thinker* (making counterthought, destroy images) =/= public professor
-problem with private thinker is that it exaggerates interiority when it is a question of outside thought --> the question of how **to place the thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside** (to make thought a war machine?)
(Alex in search of) maxim =/= aphorism (always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that utilizes it) <-- my interest
(?which) image inspired by State apparatus
[*]method: the striated space of the cogitatio universalis ==> path (=/= bridge)
thought ~= vampire (has no image)
(in the smooth space of Zen) the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target (#my bow and arrow --> it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere)
-whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or aim (#my bow and arrow joke @apass)
pathetic texts: thought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)
(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controlled ==forms==> a war machine : a thought grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior form
--> operating by relay =/= forming an image @Rob--> a thought that appeals to government ministry
--> event-thought =/= subject-thought
--> problem-thought =/= essence-thought, theorem
striating of men[...]
(366)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.3[...]es, of the earth deterritorializing itself ==> providing the nomad with a territory
*vectors of deterritorialization and local operations* that:
•wolf adds to the forest
•godzilla adds to Tokio
•
#video concept
in tiktok comedy style, a group of iranians (talking Farsi, all acted by one person?) are personifying a govermental response to a godzilla who is roaming in the city.
localized =/= delimited
[the spot where the forest recedes] or the desert advances
گرگ در جنگل / آل در بیابان
.... .\ ____ _
... \_____
. .... \ __ __
.... . \ ____
. ...\ _ ___ _
assigned direction =/= direction of the crossing
(for Deleuze and Guattari) religion: a technique of converting the absolute, making the absolute appear in a particular place --> the sacred place of religion is fundamentally a center that repels the *obscure nomos*[= Bayazid بایزید]
vagabond monotheism
Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed
از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine
/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]
...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture
three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)
animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries
<br />
orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)
oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine
revolution --western--> transformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State
the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State
psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality
(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence
Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counter[...]
(368)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.4[...] />
vagabond monotheism
Sascha's relation to the absolute through the space of the machine
electrically tampered ~= electrically tamed
از چادر نشین به هجرت reterritorialization of the spiritual ==> همدستی مهاجر با چادر نشین ==> war machine
/*[khawarij خوارج during the first fitna فتنه اول --> arbitration =/= war machine in which anyone can be Imam]
...when religion becomes a war machine (==> absolute deterritorialization) --> Isis
...a society reduced to the military enterprise --> Avengers
...gravitational verticals --> forest
...generalized parallels --> agriculture
three little pigs can be nomads? --> creating the house and then leave it (as an empty stronghold)
animal raising for the most part outside the control of sedentaries
orient: absence of State-form (!)
various components plied by escape vectors ==> despotic formation (in orient)
oriental State (sheltered in striated space) =/= nomad war machine
revolution --western--> transformation of the State
revolution --eastern--> abolition of the State
the empires of the orient, africa, america run against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and maintain gaps between their component (*the nomos does not become countryside*, the countryside does not communicate with the town, large-scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads, etc.) =/= Black Panther's fantasy of the african State
psychoanalysis of the dream of the State ? and its relation to its reality
(to establish) a zone of rights over an entire exterior --> rage & innocence
Neon Genesis Evangelion anime series --> war machine striated final merged in a cyber-flux with its human counterpart --> nature dominated (battle to occupy the smooth space)
[what now people want in Iran: not the smooth space a deterritorializing State, rather:]
capture of flows
(need for) fixed paths
well-defined directions --> restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativized movement
--> polics = management of the public ways =/= fluidity of messages and masses
silk road...
Iran State = smooth + striated
State translates: “moving bodies” --to--> “moved bodies”
” ” --> ” “
Star Trek transportation system
sedentary kind of tey-ol-arz طی الارض
what homeless/drunk people do in cities --> reconstitution of a smooth space = a manner of being in space as though it were smooth
***rebellious space is always smooth space***
virtual space is neither striated nor smooth space
multiplication of relative movements ==> smooth space --> the sea becomes the place of the ‘fleet in [...]
(369)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.5[...] />
short war
live messages
[text that is] ornamental (a way of encoding) =/= scriptural (according to a sacred writing)
tools
weapons
signs
jewellery
jewellery/sign --> expression
model --> free action / work
direction --> projection / introception (#bow and arrow)
(for Deleuze and Guattari:) ***architecture and cooking have an affinity with the State =/= music and drugs have differential traits --> on the side of the nomadic war machine
schizophrenic taste for the tool that moves it away from work and towards free action --> a schizophrenic taste for the weapon that turns it into a means for peace (<-- i prefer not to do this)
everything is ambiguous
rebel: a transitional figure of worker-solder (drawing the worker, on the one hand, and the soldier, on the other), a shared line of flight: “i seek a weapon & i am looking for a tool”
‘line of flight’: communication with smooth space
my work on ajayeb: to figure a transhistorical assemblage (that is untimely =/= eternal =/= historical) ==> encounter the myth anew =/= demystification: re-conquer the myth
the empire
•communicates with
•conquer
•integrates with
communication (of secret) --?--> adaptation, propagation
saber =/= sword
the flow of matter-movement
conveying singularities and traints of expression
assemblage --differentiates--> phyla (major taxonomic class) ~= flow ==> division into many different phylas + introducing selective discontinuities
technological vitalism
*refract differentiates*, retains, selects, draws together, causes to converge, invents
region of vague and material essences --> essences that are vagabond yet rigorous ==> situate fuzzy aggregates =/= fixed distinct and formed essences
corporeality = formed and perceived thinghood
•inseparable from processes of transformation
•inseparable from expressive qualities
vague = intermediary --> autonomous, stretching itself between things and thoughts --establish--> new relations (--> this is what Manning has adopted from Deleuze and Guattari)
variable intense affects
topological =/= geometrical
hylomorphic model =/= active and affective... (matter-flow can only be followed)
hylomorphic: imposing a form upon matter =/= materiality possessing a nomos : material traits of expression constituting affects (for example surrendering to the wood, then following where it leads by connecting operations to a materiality...)
-the critique of the hylomorphic schema is based on the existence between form and matter, of a zone of medium and intermediary dimensi[...]
(370)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.8[...]/>
vital forms of nonorganic life
[title]
your strength and your nothingness
transpierce =/= scaling
excavate =/= striating
...vagabond sign of itinerancy سيارى
from hole to hole
a line of variation
***the hybrid metallurgist, a weapon- and toolmaker, communicates with the sedentaries and with the nomads at the same time***
phylum:
--connected-to--> nomad space
--conjugates-with--> sedentary space
(we have both:)
*war machine*:
•opening
•rhizome
•gaps
•detours
•holes
•stems
=/=
*state apparatus*:
•capture phylum
•play the lines of flight
•into code
•into form
war machine collides with States and cities (forces of striation) ==> war
Deleuze and Guattari ask:
-how will the State appropriate the war machine?
(appropriate: subordinates it to its political aims)
from encasement قفسه --to--> (forms of) appropriation تصاحب
Genghis Khan and his followers were able to hold out for a long time by partially integrating themselves into the conquered empires, while at the same time maintaining a smooth space on the steppes to which the imperial centers were subordinated
Timur who constructed a fantastic war machine turned back against the nomads, but who, by that very fact, was obliged to erect a State apparatus all the heavier and more unproductive since it existed only as the empty form of appropriation of that machine
the peace of terror or survival
-the postfascist figure that takes peace as its object directly
-we have seen war machine assign its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death
*the unspecified enemy* we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place
two poles of war machine:
1. it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe
2. when it, with infinitely lower qualities, has as its object not war but the drawing of a *creative line of flight* (the composition of a smooth space and of the movement of people in that space)
an ideological, scientific, or artistic movement can be a potential war machine, to the precise extent to which it draws, in relation to aphylum, a plane of consistency, a creative line of flight, a smooth space of displacement
...................................
0.99993
Daston history of reason
Daston asking: how reason became rationality?
rationality (~= universal calculus of) =/= reasoning
•(a more) ancient ideal --> reasoning [with recourse to the faculty of judgement]
•modern ideal --> (cold war) rationality: a [...]
(371)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.9[...]es)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing then thinking about what you have done (~= communication, intimacy)
...................................
metaphysics of natural law
Daston's rigor: trying to understand why is it so persistant (almost irresistible) that we **extract social and moral norms from nature** (rather than jumping up saying that it is a doomed idea)
[--> got to fable; ikhvano safa court of animals; panchatantra Kelile Demne]
•to merge natural and social orders together
•to make nature meaningful
•to invoke nature to buttress human values of: true, good, beautiful
•
devil = collective human imagination of chaos
formless and lawless
land of no promises
past is no guide to the future
at the mercy of chance
the axiom of modern thought: society =/= nature [of which trespassings are rife]
[#fable]
to extract some sort of politics from:
•beehive
•physics of liver
•evolutionary theory
•organic specialization [--Aristotle--> slavery]
•
1. how conceptions of natural order sustains specific norms & the model of any kind of norm <-- historical + empirical
2. appeal to nature capture something profound about values in general regardless of their specific context <-- philosophical
(the human) impulse to *make nature meaningful* --> psychological + epistemological + ethical necessity
(1)
(specific) [*]nature: the ontological identity card : that which makes a particular thing what it is (what makes skwerl a skwerl)
the idea of ***fixed natural kind ==inspire==> the ideal of justice***
--> the idea of organic specialization [organ: ‘tool’ in greek; for Aristotle: “injustice = violation of specialization” (of citizen's tools or honors) <-- an order of nature]
rose wanna be skwerl ---> go to bestiary
“good consist in each being striving to be the best of its kind not the best of all”
(2)
[*]nature: the will of God (~ edict of God) --Augustine--> “sodomy = crime against nature (~ against God: the author of nature)” [--> unnatural =/= sacrilege توهين به مقدسات]
•a Roman custom (and a Roman intuition): when you are in a place you try to adapt to the local ways of doing things <-- (with Augustine) we are preserved in a proverb [#integration] --grant--> nature with supreme authority as God's proxy
seeking norms in nature --Daston-->
•is this (examples) why we should stop it (at best nature authority is borrowed whether overtly from God or covertly from social conventions ==> it is redundent and we don't need it)
•it is a dangerous weapon in the arsenal of the most repressive and aggressive elements of society
content of norms =/= [*]normativity: a [...]
(372)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.2[...]ance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar
}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response
middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the general)
2. religious discourse about wonder <-- sermons, hagiography, devotional writing, enormously popular genre of *saint's lives* (tazkirat تذکره نویسی) {
◦admiratio =/= imitatio (imitation جعلى) [the readers were urged to wonder at and not immitate the power and extravagant asceticism of holy men and women (in Attar?)]
◾admiratio ~= paradox (coincidence of opposites) [one finds mira (wondrous) again and again in the texts alongside mixta (mixed, composite things, chimera)]
◦admiratio ~/= curiositas (curiosity کنجکاوی)
◦admiratio ~/= disputatio (disputatiousness ستيزه جويى)
3. literature of entertainment: travel accounts, history writing, collection of odd stories called by one author
◦admirari (to wonder at) =/= rimari (to pay into)
◦(collected stories ==> amuse, instruct, move their aristocratic listeners -->) wonder =/= inductio exemplorum (generalizing)
12th 14th centuries
(twin authorities for middle ages) Aristotle + Augustine ==> tradition of understanding wonder as perspectival & psychological ==> theological-philosophical discourse
•Augustine: marvel =/= what we know of nature (=/= nature) --> *lodge the wonderful-ness of things (not in our reaction to them but) [...]
(374)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9[...]/>
[title]
failed exorcism
[3]
(Bynum providing a) medieval theory of wonder in the *literature of enlightenment*:
history writing
travel accounts
story collection
عجایبالمخلوقات ajayebnameh: the encyclopedic tradition of the ancient world known as *paradoxology: collection of oddities (monsters, hybrids, distant races, marvelous lands, [telegram beasts, instagram animals]) + antique notions of portents or omen: unusual events that foreshadowed the (usually catastrophic) future + accompanied by a vague sense of dread [it gives you goosebumps]
+ (Ehsan master of) [*]fabulae: (story) told without claims to their ontological status =/= historia
}==> theory of wonder: [@apass]
1. *response to facticity*
2. *response to the singular*
3. *is deeply perspectival*
•William of Newburgh --> (some sort of) probatio (testing, evidence) --base--> rimari (probe, pry into فضولی، با اهرم بلند کردن) =/= admirari (to wonder at)
•Gervais of Tilbury --> facts ==induce==> marvel ~= res gestae (deeds or historical accounts) =/= stories (fabulae, lies) [~= *you cannot be amazed by what you don't believe* (stories of ghosts, vampires, migration of quail, flight of squirrels, etc.)]
•John of Salisbury --> *marvellous singularity* (collection of advice for courtiers and princes) ~ wonder: response to majesty (hidden wisdom, significance) =/= generalizing = moralizing (inductio exemplorum, citing of instructive general causes --> forensic)
•
credible deeply unusual singular event ==> admiratio
[*]perspectival: reaction of a particular “us” to an “other” that is “other” only relative to the particular “us” (<-- this is why ajayebnameh is interesting)
•James of Vitry --> ***cyclopses who all have one eye marvel as much at those who have two eyes as we marvel at them*** (1200)
•Gosswin of Metz & John Mandeville --> turning such perspectivalism into gently ironic comments on themselves
•William of Rubruck --> barefoot travel through harsh terrain and climate required by Franciscan asceticism seems as monstrous a practice in the East as certain Eastern customs appear when reported “back home”
•
**(how? can we simply?) study medieval emotion** =/= wonder stated by historians, travelers, theologians, philosophers, preachers, devotional writers
*traces of emotion* that survive are mediated through texts, pictures, artifacts --Bynum--> we are not entitled either to assume a sort of Darwinian universal emotion, or to think that emotion-behavior is culturally constructed (as to exist only where we find words for it)
***texts may give us access to reactions less through adjectives attached to nouns*** (by calling something “wonderful” or “dreadful” =/= indicating the responses[...]
(375)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.2[...]immersion & navigation [--> descriptions of technology]
labyrinth --> texture field (a form of emerging visuality)
Jassem + Sina's labyrinthine polychromic activities (==> underlying artistic creation) --> interpret form symbolically through the visual residues of the technical operations
fetish: unnatural participation with things
*field theory*
behaviour of a dynamic system that is extended in space
all fields in nature are quantum fields
•[*]matter: energy bound within fields
•[=/= classical magic --> action at a distance]
•system --> a relation-concept [=/= additive whole]
--> ability to exhibit gradients, or lines of force
self-organization: (the capacity of a field) to generate patterns spontaneously
topological reading is a christian tradition, theory, and practice of interpreting the figurative meaning of the Bible. It is part of Biblical exegesis.
According to ideas developed by the Church Fathers, the literal meaning, or God-intended meaning of the words of the Bible, may be either figurative or non-figurative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.
The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation
...................................
(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.
r />
(Corbin)
Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology
psalms and invocations to the beings of light
the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences
victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت
(arch)angelic vectors
to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.
ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being
appearance = unveiling
Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splendor of the morning, the first radiance of the star, in the intelligible Heaven of the soul it signifies the epiphanic moment of knowledge.
the Presence of the philosopher at the mutational appearance of the intelligibl[...]
(376)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%82.9[...]ative; for instance, in the Song of Songs (also called Canticles or Song of Solomon), the inspired meaning is always figurative. The typical meaning is the inspired meaning of words referring to persons, things, and actions of the Old Testament which are inspired types of persons, things, and actions of the New Testament.
The early uses of allegory and topology were very close. Later a clearer distinction was made between the allegorical mystical, and tropological moral, styles of interpretation
...................................
(Mitchell:) vision has played the role of the sovereign sense since God looked at his own creation and saw it was good, or perhaps even earlier when he began the act of creation with the division of light from the darkness.
...................................
(Corbin)
Platonic archetypes in terms of Zoroastrian angelology
psalms and invocations to the beings of light
the celestial physics, which limits the number of Intelligences
victoriality
Sovereignty of Light, heralded by Zarathustra زرتشت
(arch)angelic vectors
to grasp the notion of ishraq (eshragh اشراق), the structure of the world that it governs, and the form of spirituality that it determines.
ishragh is at the same time both the ‘illumination’ and the ‘reflection’ (zuhur ظهور) of being
appearance = unveiling
Thus, just as in the sensible world the term signifies the splendor of the morning, the first radiance of the star, in the intelligible Heaven of the soul it signifies the epiphanic moment of knowledge.
the Presence of the philosopher at the mutational appearance of the intelligible Lights
“estrangement from their bodies” was for them a philosophical question
(for hayula proj.:)
primordial Flame which is their source, and which Sohrevardi claims to have seen in a vision that revealed to him the authentic ‘Oriental source’. This is the ‘Light of Glory’ that the Avesta names as the Xvarnah (khurrah in Persian, or in the Parsi form fan, farrah فره). Its function is primordial in Mazdean (مزدایی) cosmology and anthropology. It is the effulgent majesty of the beings of light, and it is also the energy which conjoins the being of each being, its vital Fire, its ‘personal angel’ and its destiny...
... the ‘negative’ intelligible dimensions of the ‘longitudinal Order’ (dependence, passive illumination, love as indigence)
produce the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which accords with them. The innumerable stellar individuations of this Heaven {as in the Avicennan schema, each celestial orb is celestial in relation to the Intelligence from which it emanates) are so many emanations which materialize, in a still wholly subtle celestial matter, that part of non-being which conceals--if one thinks of i[...]
(379)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%82.9[...]ich conceals--if one thinks of it hypothetically as isolated from its Principle--their being that emanates from the Light of Lights.
... from this second order of Archangels there emanates a new Order of Lights, through the intermediary of which the Archangelarchetypes govern and rule over the Species, at least in the case of the higher Species. These are the Angel-Souls, the ‘Animae caelestes’ and ‘Animae humanae’ of Avicenna's angelology.
...................................
transcend the ‘two-dimensional’ space {of the necessary and the possible) of Avicenna's theory of the hierarchical Intelligences.
Intimated beyond the heaven of the Fixed Stars of Peripatetic or Ptolemaic astrology lie innumerable marvelous universes.
In opposition to what was to happen in the West, where the development of astronomy eliminated angelology, here it is angelology which takes astronomy beyond the classical schema within which it was confined.
...there proceeds eternally the universe of the Primordial Ruling Lights
... which marks the boundary between the celestial world and the material world of becoming. It is the Heaven of the Fixed Stars which now symbolizes the boundary between the angelic universe of Light and Spirit (Ruh-abad روح آباد) and the dark, material universe of the ‘barzakh’ (برزخ).
The characteristic term barzakh, when used in eschatology, means the intermediate, and when used in cosmology, it means the inter-world {the ‘mundus imaginalis’). In Sohrevardi's philosophy of the Ishraq it assumes a more general meaning: it designates in general everything that is body, everything that is a ‘screen’ and an ‘interval’, and which of itself is Night and Darkness.
That concept, therefore, that the word barzakh connotes is fundamental to Sohrevardi's system of physics. The barzakh is pure Darkness; it could exist as such even if the Light were to withdraw. Thus, it is not even a potential light, a virtuality in the Aristotlian sense; in relation to Light it is pure negativity, Ahrimanian (اهریمنی) negativity as Sohrevardi understood it. It would be a mistake, then, to attempt to base the causal explanation of a positive fact on this negativity. Every species is an ‘icon’ of its Angel, a theurgy effected by this Angel in the barzakh which in itself is death and absolute night.
the schema of Mazdean cosmology, in which the universe of being is divided into menuk {celestial, subtle) and getik {terrestrial, dense);
{سهروردی}--{*} In Sohrevardi, the perception of the world includes, in structural terms, a metaphysics of essences; existence is simply a way of regarding {e'tebar اعتبار) essence or quiddity--it does not add anything to it in concrete.
The schema of the universe, then, is arranged according to a fourfold plan:
... (4) There is the mundus imagina[...]
(380)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...]ense in a subtle state; it is a world of subsistent and autonomous Forms and Images, the threshold of the malakut {ملکوت}. In it are to be found the mystical cities of Jabalqa جابلقا, Jabarsa جابرسا and Hurqalya هورقلیا.
It appears that Sohrevardi was indeed the first to elaborate the ontology of the inter-world, and the theme once introduced was taken up and expanded by all the mystics and gnostics of Islam.
stories:
The action of these Recitals, in fact, takes place in the ‘alame mesal’ [عالم مثال]. In them, the mystic relates the drama of his personal history on the level of a supra-sensible world, the world of the events of the soul, because the writer, in configurating his own symbols, spontaneously discovers the meaning of the symbols of the divine revelations.
We are not concerned with a series of ‘allegories’ but with the secret hierohistory, invisible to the external senses, which unfolds in the world of the malakut, and with which external and fleeting events symbolize.
سهروردی Sohrevardi's noble venture is not an ‘insurrection’ to islam an external and literalist religion, rather view that sees the integral Islam is spiritual, then Sohrevardi lies at the summit of this spirituality and is nourished by it.
crypto-Shiism شیعه
prophetic philosophy
...................................
Between a scientific treatise, a fable and philosophical discourse, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis imagines a pitch-dark world of an animal living as deep as possible down in the abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.
...................................
analogy of the cave
man with the x-ray vision
...................................
nowhere prosperous
ruinous prosperous
accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)
light, self, presence, knowledge
One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.
After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.
I was holding a candle.
has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door
tailors of divine words
I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.
The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.
...................................
{Laura Marks}--[her [...]
(381)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.1[...]rain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)
(what is thought's powerlessness at the heart of digital new media?)
calligraphy --(interface)--> Qur'an --(interface)--> the divine
(Gregory Bateson:) information = "the difference that makes a difference”
(@Anouk)
“in Islamic art and new media art, we have two triadic models in which the infinite is mediated to perception by some kind of information.”
worship !~/=>? transcendence
(Who can say what people are really experiencing when, in the course of worship, they gaze at a dome, kneel on a carpet, or let an allegorical painting dazzle their senses? -Marks)
(Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that) “every body of thought has its own plane of immanence, an unthought against which it struggles to give rise to new concepts”, still, they dismiss Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic “philosophy” as prephilosophical(!)
intellectual struggle ~= jahd جهد, ejtehad اجتهاد (Averroes) ==> to bring new concepts into the world
yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}
mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter
-Avicenna: all existence is contingent; God = 'the uncaused’
(Avicenna's conception of) the nonentity (or antimatter) as the virtual double of every existent ~= (Deleuze and Guattari's) concepts of the virtual and the actual
(Avicenna:) God ==> existence/nonexistence
(Deleuze:) existence <==> nonexistence; (mirror each other?)
virtual (حق hagh ~ truth) <--> actual (حقیقت haghighat ~ reality)
hierarchy of nonexistent things
not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)
-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold
فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
[...]
(383)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.3[...] />
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)
how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?
my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know what is lost
**chaotic loss --> to process through a host of errors and phantasms
what is the carrier bag theory of infinite?
عجایب --> (ajayeb's) inexplicable historical objects that suddenly turn up and refuse to be accounted for “fossils” (--> rupture =/= fold: history is deeply enfolded)
[which histories objects of ajayeb enfold and unfold?]
the origin is always complex
(how to) invert the judgment of value that informs us
piecemeal fabrication from alien forms =/= essential secret in history
positivism (esbat-gara اثبات گرا) =/= speculation
transhistorical claims about Islamic art--its ahistorical approach to Islam can contribute to Orientalism, (Nasr's spirituality) =/= to situate Islamic art within the history of ideas of its period, portrayal of a cultural worldview when they succeed (Marks)
Interpreting a cultural artifact for what it might have meant for the people of a past time is always an imposition--(to give preference to certain meanings at the expense of others)
(Marks’) existential phenomenology : one's own experience, sensory and mental, is used as a basis for analysis (to investigate), but does not assume this experience can be generalized.
code: a writing that is executable : a writing whose very nature is to carry out an action
“We are at a point where the Islamic heritage latent in Western modernism can usefully inform efforts to make information culture meaningful and responsive” -Marks
(Marks notion of) “Islamic art” --> unity (tohid توحید) of sorts --> unity of the code ==> multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity
“networks are the haptic space of our age”
qualities of latency
(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality
[...]
(385)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.5[...]f latency
(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality
...................................
*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•
hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories
anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry
...................................
Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...
*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*
Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجمالدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی
[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism
suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism
history of imagination
world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination
ancient Gr[...]
(386)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.6[...]
suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism
history of imagination
world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination
ancient Greek idea of how the imagination can make contact with a supra-individual reality --{followed & developed}--> Neoplatonist (understading of the imagination as) receptive of divine images
=/= memory images
=/= fantasmatic images --> phantasia --{i am wotking against the idea of “fantastic beast” ~-> phantasmata: post-sensory images combined in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images
هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world
sensory-imaginal-intelligible
•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind
i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)
ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief
( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•
christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject
so persian subject wanted the so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image
sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words
attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)
Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property [...]
(387)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.7[...]d in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images
هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world
sensory-imaginal-intelligible
•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind
i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.
Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)
ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief
( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•
christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject
so persian subject wanted the so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image
sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words
attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)
Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)
majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreada[...]
(388)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.7[...]cline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)
imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> extra-individual, suprasensory world
Frankfurt school + Althusser saw collective unconscious as fascistic
*(my) material practices of unlearning:
•pretending i don't know --> enactment / acting
•(to try) forgetting --> clearance / erasure
•sleep-walking --> closing the eyes of certain perceptive stories, and become available to another
•the “let's not assume...” --> “in advance” of a the assumption
•
contemporary Western thought, tired of the sovereign subject, is trying to conceive of an extra-subjective reality that binds individuals ethically to others and to history --> this is totally apass :)
-contemporary Western thought (evident in Butler, Foucault, and many others) is seeking a politically efficacious concept of the collective imaginary*** (a positive conception of alterity, of an outside that inspires the imagination to create)
ajayeb for me is an alterity (of an quasi outside--not quite inside) that inspires the imagination to create (--> imagination is always creative)
ajayeb: alterity of a world that inspired (and inspires) storytelling and imagination (to create beings)
since Sohrevardi the islamic philosophy has abandoned substantialism for process
Sadra's approach:
•process ontology
•critique of abstraction
•celebration of singularity
God = neccessary being واجب الوجود
(tashkhis-e vojud تشخیص وجود) modulation of being <--> individuation (تشخص tashakhos)
ذات مخصوص, فرد مشخص معین, وجود جزئی اشیاء --> موجودی است که از نظر قانونی می تواند موضوع حق قرار بگیرد
=/= شخص ناپیدا =/= hayula
[tashkhis (everyday gesture of recognition of something gheir-shakhsi) ==>? tashakhos]
(Simondon:) individuation is prior to individuals, and individuals are simply symptoms or effects of individuation --> very processual
harkat-e johari حرکت جوهریtranssubstantiation, trans-substantial movement
*harkat-e johari respects the potential for intensification [= the capacity to know, act, and fully participate in the flow of being --and--> continual intensification;] in all things (including hayula)--> Miyazaki's faceless monster's ‘act of beiong’ (is efficaciously real in a Sadrian way)--> *Sadra's great refiguration is that he formulates the ‘act of being’ itself as the most real
-Miyazaki's monst[...]
(389)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.8[...]>
(to think of Kantian cosmopolitanism a) a genuine model for commitment =/= outdated illusion
...................................
research method (a heritage of surrealism:) exquisite corpse technique --> (unpredictable and) innocent inventiveness
...................................
for Sohrevardi and Avicenna: nature = chah چاه shahr gheyravan (material of nature/world: ghir قیر) --> zolmatkade ظلمت کده
#comparative reading of stranded
ghorbat gharbia --> Crusoe
•daryaye sabz دریای سبز (green sea) = donyaye mahsusat دنیای محسوسات (phenomenological world)
•دایه daye = nafse nabati (vegetal self)- khahar sister = alame made عالم ماده (hayula هیولا) --> (you should) wrap it in azab عذاب
•woman = shahvani شهوانی carnal, pas-mandani پسماندنی (the one who stays, Lot's wife leaving the catastrophic city ~= mashmul-e azab مشمول عذاب) =/= salek سالک wonderer==> ba shahvat nemitavan soluk kard =/= queer mysticism
•maghak مغاک ghaar chah قعر چاه (where abe hayat is آب حیات =/= abe heyvan آب حیوان) = riazat ریاضت
from the spiritual point of view we are always at the bottom of the pit
rigid bodies
http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?=contextId=BULLETNODES
A rigid body is a polygonal or NURBS surface converted to an unyielding shape. Unlike conventional surfaces, rigid bodies collide rather than pass through each other during animation. To animate rigid body motion, you use fields, keys, expressions, rigid body constraints, or collisions with particles.
Maya has two kinds of rigid bodies--active and passive. An active rigid body reacts to dynamics--fields, collisions, and springs--not to keys. A passive rigid body can have active rigid bodies collide with it. You can key its Translate and Rotate attributes, but dynamics have no effect on it.
notes on The Rigid Bodies / (metaphysics of 3D)
the simulacrum / ideal / image --> Plato
mystic geometry --> Pythagoras (--> mathematization of the real, real ‘is’ math)
}--> what does it mean to perform 3D for these two thinkers?
fire simulation in Maya <--> cotton touching fire in Islamic philosophy
(<)> -->{
() manifest image --> shader/topology/raytracing
<> underlying (scientific?) image --> C++ / physics engine / object oriented programming
the mode of production in current 3D-biz creates a sort of cultural collateral or collateral culture (term by Lazzarato). 3D practices are arising as series of activities, not recognized as “work,” rather involved in defining and fixing artistic/cultural standards, tastes, norms, and strat[...]
(393)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%85[...]> open-source is part of the tradition of anthropocene system thinking: network synthesis, system engineering, theory of the organism, evolutionary theory, thermodynamics, and world system perspective
...................................
what are the nodes of energy in interdigitalities intra-actions in human-machine relations?
***we are belonging to a set of cultures that regularly believes in the idiom of: organism =/= technology
--> this little ontological dichotomous device is doing serious worldings, making and destroying worlds
technologies of descriptive practices
technology is descriptive practice
technology: anything describable as a technology --> idiom اصطلاح
...................................
[title]
age of stone, and stories for computers
...................................
(#workshop in Stuttgart 11.04.2017 with Femke http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.rigging)
provisional sketch for a workshop on “Rigging,” notes and nodes
on the notion and practice of Rig in CG
(CG as in “computational gesture”)
[title]
on Rigging and skinning: stories for cultivating creation and creatures of the industrial empire.
a practice in: rhetoric of technical reasoning in inorganic skeletal animacies.
•I begin with the position that believes in the essential ambiguity of technology
•let's look at some terms and notions and the ways they are enacted, practiced, and embodied, and to practice some hermeneutic fluency in phenomenological conditions in what we call character animation
KEYWORDS: soft bodies, skin, skinnig, Rig, Rigging, unwrapping, fold, CG, animation, locomotion, kinectics, skeleton, mechanics, interface, technology,
...................................
Rigs are about:
-ways of arranging space, time and matter : like a sentence, that sticks words sequentially together in a certain way. Rig would be a way those elements are attached to one another in time and space.
[*] --> one-dimenisional skeletal Rigs are generally intereseting for my research, because of the specific sequential order that many forms of culture take. (for example, “tradition” is from that famility of Rigs, a string of things in a particular order and not another. [---> go to totem columns]. “language” is another one.)
◦what are the degrees of flexibilty, stretch and tention between the nodes in a Rig?
◦what a substitution in a string-Rig might change the ways that being is animated, and therefore change the meaning?
-that means: change the Rig, and you will change the ways space and time are arranged
-that means: thinking about Rigs is like thinking about the language, or better: ontological commitments embedded in language. and since we are interested in materiality [that means: material hu[...]
(394)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.7[...]r />
images of hyper-sexualized damsels laid amidst tall grasses (most controversial 19th or 20th century figurations of women) --> [that is not enough--it falls short in showing] the way that these suits clearly encourage their wearers to close their eyes and explore the kinky pleasure found specifically in the way PVC peels from your flesh in one long slurp
plastics don't have the same ‘memory’ as textiles
they don't hold onto the past
they won't stay obediently folded like a cotton calico
vinyl swimsuit
*these designs proliferated a multi-faceted understanding of one's own skin*
-exposed skin feels so starkly and qualitatively different than a torso left to sweat it out under a nearly non-porous plasticine cloth
xxxx
...................................
(we are in) style wars***
critical considerations of style --> think across subjectivities & cultural practices
*aesthetics of mending*
mend: replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken
(--> regarding ajayeb, reparative, refigurative reading of the past, mending of *those thing that seem beyond repair* --> important for Tehran's landscape of affect and aspiration)
Archer: how arrangement of masculinity (~= acts of violence and wounding) might be *styled otherwise*
literal fashion victim of war hero
“every man” will put himself on the line, and earn his masculinity via rituals, narratives, and professions that are predicted on brutality--and that he will do this without grievance or hesitation
to be a man under such conditions, is to enter into a deeply gendered dialectic forged through acts of wounding and care that demand “men” to hurt, and “women” to do the work of mending
...the ways modern gender binaries synthesize sexual difference
business of state violence: accepting the notion that our identities are forged through obligatory acts of barbarism
how each of us work to fix identities
to do the maintenance work that modernity requires each of us
relic enduring centuries --> cultural need to materially substantiate the distance that lies between proper and improper forms of masculinity (dandy and war hero)
*routine and spectacular acts of wounding that gender identities presuppose*
--also--> attest to the critical will to desire different forms of masculinity
(artifacts preserved in climate controlled bubbles survive time to tell many stories)
conspicuous ornaments of legend
masculinities (and femininities) secured through woundings
(the work of) the maintenance of a particular form of gossip
towel
complex figuration of gendered social relations
which relics in co[...]
(395)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.9[...] method, or mode, using the clusters of concepts they had identified as interesting and useful for speculation
•thinking about possibilities for how (ethnographic/research) material can be analyzed, argued, collected, or presented, and needed to be something other than a verbal description
•using pechakucha presentation style (20 slides, 20 seconds each, a constraint intended to keep the students on their toes and to prevent dwelling on any single point for too long)
•presentation could tell us as much about how the group worked as much as what they specifically worked on
developing various ways in which stakeholders (traditionally have little or no part in the production of ethnography/research: readers, informants, the public) can be brought into the process of crafting and meaningfully manipulating research/ethnographic materials
slider --> to “mix” and “remix” (ethnographic) data
to fit their contingencies
to leave open agendas that might be brought to the data
to create an infrastructure that allows to experience first-hand the theoretical constructs one uses in text
https://ethnocharrette.wordpress.com/
#research group workshop reading, charrette method
take Nicholas Shapiro's “Attuning to the Chemosphere”
•to redesign pedagogical practices for training researchers
•collaborative initiatives in which research designs could be analyzed, experimented with, and transformed.
...................................
“may all your problems be technical” (said by Jim Gray oft-quoted U.S. computer scientist)
=/= understanding what to build, for whom, for what purposes, and how their usage of the technologies will evolve over time
...................................
many artists today work within the regime of the stereotype, manipulating mass-cultural imagery ==> hidden ideological agendas are exposed [supposedly]
(artist's view:) “stereotype = something arbitrarily imposed upon the social field” therefore something relatively easy to depose [<-- they can't be more wronge]
(artist's self-grandious fantasy is that) “they pose a threat to those in power”
juxtapose
superimpose
interpose
==>
expose
oppose
depose
an artist like Kruger --> gesture (and not action) --Owens--> *stereotype's transformation of action into gesture*
positionality inscribed in language by the personal pronouns ‘I/we’ and ‘you’ --> manifesting the subject positions of partners in a conversation
(the third-person pronoun is a ‘non-person’ designating an objective existence, and not a subject position)
-linguistic class of deixis: here, now, this, that [--> carnal discourse]
-linguistic class of deictic: I, you [--> directly to the addressee: acquires body, weight, g[...]
(396)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.1[...]asure and pain”
(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)
[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production
using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire
“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)
...................................
phantom limb Grosz
(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*
body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]
==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification
Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology
•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*
(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb
[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synes[...]
(397)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.6[...], tactile, kinesthetic, and visual sensations ==> (so that these are experienced as) the *sensations of a subject coordinated into a single space*
***any willful action requires a plan of bodily action --> the function of the body image*** (--> this explains my fucked up body image!)
-we cannot talk about space whithout body image <== the body image determines both the localization of sensations in different concrete regions of the body and the position of the body as a whole within space
body image ==> “=/=” :
•figure =/= ground
•central action =/= peripheral action
•(subject's) body =/= (background of) forces
•movement of limbs =/= corporeal context (of the rest of the body)
•outside (skin) =/= inside (organs [=/= process])
•active relations =/= passive relationship
•position of subject =/= position of object
moving from a state of amorphousness to increasing differentiation and specialization
a single movement reorients the whole of the body, creating what might be called a gait or posture, an individual and cultural bodily style
appersonization: treatment of one's own body as an outside object:
+ psychical vampirism: identification with the symptoms, actions, and fantasies of othe people
--> identification, incorporation, introjection
example of aging
-body image seems resistant to the changes brought about by aging
-they seem to have aged, whereas the subject feels as if he or she has not
--> condition of continual transformation + time lag in the perception and registeration of real changes in the body image
body image: condition of the subject's access to spatiality (including built environments) = a postural schema of the body [=/= mapping a biological body onto a psychological domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity
...................................
Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania
female fetishism --> lesbianism
fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)
[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure
Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•[...]
(398)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.3[...]>
Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another
erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?
...................................
Chen on animacy
animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates cultural life in important ways
[*]animacy: a quality of agency, awareness, mobility, liveness
--linguistics--> grammatical effects of the sentience or liveness of nouns
change of animacy ==> violates a cross-linguistic preference among speakers
(for example “the hikers that rocks crush” --> rock: the source of causality)
animacy
filled with life, disposed, inclined, animare to breathe, to quicken
anima, air, breath, life, soul, mind (mental impulse)
--connected--> animals
animosity --> animating spirit or temper of a hostile character
animating principle [--> rigging]
...................................
Ihde: playing a musical instrument (= a technological mediation) =/= the process of genetic manipulation
=/= Heidegger's technology: a metaphysically totalizing context (<-- every technology ended up with exactly the same output or analysis)
Ihde =/= utopian & dystopian views of technology
...to understand yourself to be thinking and acting ‘in the midst of’ the pervasive technoscientific character of life (@CG hacker)
Ihde --> ***technologies and humans constitute themselves interactively***
*technological mediation: heterogeneous relationships between individual human beings and the world + artifacts used for mediations =/= ideals of efficiency and clear communication
“breakdown ==> new gestalt” : something that had usually taken for granted, which then under breakdown conditions, now gets revealed in a new way (revelatory function)
=/= Ihde's *variational practice* : variations ==forefront==> new gestalts
(our) world = powerful effective & failing technology
we =/= tragic hero (+ broken hammer) or Enlightenment scientist (+ laboratory)
matrix --> female
those that move in the matrix --> formative male principle
(Foucault's) episteme: social-moral-religious stability
Latour
modernity <== settlement: (a clear and sharp distinction) society =/= nature --obscure--> the proliferation of hybrids: entities th[...]
(399)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.5[...]br />
electromagnetic clock coordination : transforming small electrical currents into high-precision rotatory movements
}--> “time is money” --Galison--> no old-fashioned mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic system would do--electricity was the key to the future (a future that would only come about properly if humankind broke with its mechanical clock past riven by anarchy, incoherence, and routinization)
distant simultaneity --> political, profitable, pragmatic =/= anarcho-clockism
#title
international bureau of measurement
Einstein agonizing over the nature of moving bodies and electrodynamics
=/= ether: the centerpiece of nineteenth-century physical theories
kinematics: geometry of motion, behavior of matter in the absence of force
metaphysics of Einstein's relativity theory --Galison--> underlined through some of the most symbolized mechanisms of modernity ~ determining train arrival times using electromagnetically coordinated clocks (was precisely the technological issue that had been racking Europe 1902) : symbol of the interconnected sped-up world of modernity
*centralized time* distribution was the temporal-physical glory of the unified German empire
turn-of-the-century Euro-American world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==r[...]
(400)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]an world --> overlapping networks of coordination: webs of train tracks, telegraph lines, meteorological networks, longitude surveys under the watchful, increasingly universal, clock system
--> Einstein's special theory of relativity was (an imaginative) machine <-- Galison's technological reading of (Einstein's) most theoretical paper
Einstein had opened the zone of unification (but in the process:)
•he removed Berlin as the Zeitzentrum
•designed a machine that upended the very category of metaphysical centrality
post world war I
all the activities of man, whether conscious or unconscious (sleeping, eating, meditating, playing) take place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”
1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)
...................................
James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects
[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful
*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)
rigging
the code space of the software environment + embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that envir[...]
(401)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.9[...]ke place in time; without order, without specified plans, we risk falling into anarchy (physical, intellectual and moral misery)
--Favarger--> the remedy: the precise measurement and determination of time with the rigor of an astronomical observatory
(to) democratize time : time rigor must be distributed electrically
(=/= gears and magnets)
Galison's exploring the material culture of clock coordination is to set Einstein's place in a universe of meaning --avoid--> two problematic positions (*on the relation of things to thoughts*):
1. materialism or empiricism: inductive, observation-centered account of scientific development (~ that ideas emerge causally and univalently from the disposition of objects and the impressions they make upon us) ==> “theory = provisional addition”
2. antipositivist movement of the 1960s and 1970s (that programmes, paradigms, and conceptual schemes came first ==reshape==> experiments and instruments all the way down) “thoughts fully structured things”
1902 --> triumph of the *electrical over the mechanical* was already symbolically wired to dreams of modernity
*electrical chronocoordination --signified--> political, cultural, technical unity all at once [*Einheitszeit = imperial empire (~= democracy, world citizenship, and antianarchism)]
*patent office: grandstand seat for the great parade of modern technologies
==> Einstein (eliminating the master clock + raising the conventionally set time to a physical principle ==> modern 20th century physics of relativity)
...................................
James Ash
on videogame designer (<-- i am applying that to technical animators)
distribution and transmission of media affects
[animators] work to create the potential for *positively affective encounters to occur* (encounters which increase the body’s capacity to act & produce associated positive senses of intensity)
creating critically and commercially successful
*producing contingency* (that designers attempt to manage and control)
rigging
the code space of the software environment + embodied techniques hackers generate (in response to that environment)
*structural determination + emergent practice*
a key aspect of media today --Stiegler--> [*]selection: a decision is made to broadcast one story over another
testing --> calculative logics of anticipation and preemption --shape--> the contingency of the event
the actual practices of riggers (technical animator)
animation industry
the ways in which affect can be actively manipulated for commercial and economic ends in the design and production of consumer services and good
***technologies are affectively engineered*** <--Thrift--Ash-- microbiopolitics of the subliminal: doing without thin[...]
(402)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.9[...]/>
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid bodies, but also curved spaces, n-dimensional spaces, particle spaces, volumetric space, phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)
automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]
(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules
Galileo --> geometrical concept of space (=/= differentiated qualitatively)
principles
1. rigging --> a form of understanding =/= form of sensibil[...]
(403)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.2[...]phase space, etc.) (looking at the animal) ==> abstract, proliferation of types --> rig] {--Lefebvre--> social critique of abstract space --> rigged}
-the way i learned 3D animation, the space of the software was a n-dimensional spaces (X, Y, Z, time, texture, audio, constraining, etc.)
automaton
a bit of machinery exhibiting somewhat complex behavior --rigging--> programming movement ==produce==> a working simulacrum of a living organism
•(in the days of magic) “name of god” was the rig for golem [?]
•(in the time of Newton) automaton: clockwork music box
•(in 19th century) automaton: glorified heat engine
•(in 20th century) intelligent building [~= rig]
•(perhaps rigging is our age's) desire to produce and study automata [~= computational mechanization, kinematic model]
(abstractly) automaton: a set of physically unspecified states, input, output, and operational rules
Galileo --> geometrical concept of space (=/= differentiated qualitatively)
principles
1. rigging --> a form of understanding =/= form of sensibility
2. in animation (physics) the choice of geometry is pragmatic (=/= analytic, a priori) ---> go to visualization: empiricist conception of geometry
(rigging --> transformations are applied to) geometrical properties: characterized by an invariance with respect to certain transformations [for example a line] --> make it ready for action or animation
...................................
railway
primary symbolic artifacts of the 19th century
railroad + its carriages should be considered as one machine : “a railway, like a vast machine”
...................................
(affective arousal) images of beauty amid urgencies of death =/=> trigger the responses one hopes
...................................
(Deleuzian) [*]event: impact of chaos on the body
most problems don't have solutions --Grosz-->
concepts =/= solutions to problems
problems ==> ways of living =/= answers
concepts: align materiality with incorporeality
identify politics =/= the right to speak about the world, matter, nature
the reign of the i --> who am i, who recognizes me, what can i become --> the right to consumption
...................................
process ontology of transing : one of many reembodied sensory arts in transgender practices
--> viral vectoring
*flexible global cognition*
discrete threats of knowing
discrete threats of mattering
[*]trans: materialization of process
[*]transdisciplinary: materialization of labors (in & beyond academia) ==Katie==> possibility of care
animal studies --often--> encodes & decodes human
~
relatio[...]
(404)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.2[...]*
(can be defined in a narrow sense) Identity: the consciousness of belonging (or longing to belong) to a place and of being at a distance from it.
map:
•a guarantee for “taking place”
•a sign of prevarication (a map is inserted both to establish a fallacious authenticity of a place and to invent new or other spaces)
We find ourselves immediately undone by the weightless fact that we have no reason to be where we are.
rhetoric of invisibility
maps are of a spatial scale
the history of cartography is marked by the appropriation, control, and administration of power (as David Buisseret [1992], Michel Foucault [1975 and 1994 (1967)], J. Brian Harley [1988 and 2001], Denis Wood [1992], and others have shown)
symbolic and political effectiveness of cartographic diagrams
(to leave open) the art of living with space itself
>
what it means to be located and discerned in the world
they lead the viewer “all over the map”
regime of the “image-fact” --> implicit cartography
an abstract point of view on reality that is analyzed
Conley > Bazin is close in spirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.
(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us
Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age
{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)
construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space
early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self
(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal [...]
(405)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]pirit to the first sentence of Ptolemy's Geography in which cosmography is likened to the construction of a world map in the way a painter executes the portrait of the sitter, while topography is seen as a local view (of a city) in the way that the same painter depicts an isolated or detached piece, such as an eye or an ear.
(my deep interest:) spatial histories that procede us
Renaissance
*art: various and always mobile articulation of space
*writings: spatially conceived and materially determined --> they explore surfaces and volumes
*cartography: component of the literary imagination of the early modern age
{narratives of the Renaissance tell of the construction of the subject through a venture--a plotted itinerary--into the realm of death and back again} (# Adventure Time)
construction of space in disciplines that pertain to geometry*
treating writing as a function of extension [according to Conley, Self-Made Map]
writing holds, penetrates, delineates, and explores space; it maps itself in relation to an autonomous signature--born of the congress of space
early modern: a growth of a composite writing that moves between diagrammatical and discursive inspiration ~=> creation of self
(i have a relation with ajayeb, or any ‘old’ text, in that of “the pleasure these works afford is due the ways that they allow us to invent imaginary realms of space through our illusion of having ‘first-hand’ contact with them” -->? creation of my “self”)
in a world in which we discover our heritage as gratuitous beings --> a partial and universal history of ourselves
we are products of individual and collective histories
geographic literature
the sudden birth and growth of mapping (between 15th and 17th century):
•in Renaissance admiration for antiquity Ptolemy esteemed as the world's founding geographer
•in growth of scientific revolution quantification and measurement was stressed, the human body and the geographic landscape of the natural world became topics of interest
•plotting and perspective: in representation art a “saturated reality” began to animate paintings + the invention of artificial perspective ==> new ways of gridding and plotting the world
•political unification, or nation building, to use maps to construct systems of defense
•*emerging self and to the self's relation to the idea of national space
new modes of surveying and plotting the world influence representation of the private and public domains of the individual writer
theatricalization of the self --> a consciousness of its autonomy (through modes of positioning [in gridded and textual reality])
--> a new cartographic impulse:
•changing conditions of information
•new taxonomies
•new relations that indivi[...]
(406)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]nd with Sana, through Sa'di, we start with this position, rehearsing criticism studies in terms of the birth of the subject and of subjectivity in early modern Europe]
terrae incognitae: the unknown, graphically inscribed, and to be conquered
“nomination is a mode of symbolic appropriation that furnishes virgin territories with a memory, with a gridding that dispossesses space of its alterity and that makes of it an object of discovery subjected to the constraints of linguistic reference, that intends that at every identifiable site there correspond a name” (Conley > Christian Jacob > Mallarme)
lodged in the corporal space of an image of “man”
spectral presence of death
navel: construed to be a site where the relation of the unknown has its first noticeable, physical trace, [...] the site of a ruptured attachment
-as an embodiment of the relation to the unknown
-the subject desires to give birth to himself or herself
artificial self-birthing and self-monumentalization
--> creation of a universe of wise (hakimane حکیمانه)
it is so strange in Olearius: the process of detachment that constitutes every subject's psychogenesis inspires a geographic desire (to retrace one's tenuous “roots,” which are woven through the visible register of language, the audible areas of images...) -- with Conley
Olearius's being: at one with the local, national, global, and cosmic space in which he or she visualizes an origin associated with a site of birth --> womb: the reassuring rectitude of the map, which is both a material and paternal image of seemingly timeless symbolic order
tensions between the visible and the invisible
(what is taken to be evident or “visible” meets what remains invisible or outside of language; #amazon project)
to grid the relation of the visible and the invisible (in cartography and writing)
their certain mobility of flux and indeterminacy (in Descartes becomes a subliminal practice)
the ideological dimensions of known and unknown become crystallized
*the viewer is urged to look at things transversally [=/= tangency: having contact at a single point or along a line without crossing] --> reader invents the process of subjectivity when analyzing the differential patterns that are working in the cartographic document
--> *double bind: of cosmic and local space, of viewer included and excluded from the discourse, of weakened deixis [deictic, words or expressions that rely absolutely on context] (or dialogue) ---> mobilizes subjectivity
quasi-spatial conquest (through the extension of the delimited field of the known in the channel of a ‘polar relation with the unknown,’ according to mappings that envisage the progression of a deferred knowledge) [Conley > Rosolato --> technologies that construc[...]
(407)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.4[...]authority that underwrote their own discourse ==> they make themselves
[*]colonialization is based on a culture's perceived need to acquire a protective zone between itself and the world in order to gain authority
(also) “it becomes increasingly difficult to find a stable signified to which the whole thesaurus of exotic signifiers may be referred” [Greenblatt]
topophilia
(i have been trying to reverse the movement of) transition from cosmography to topography
cartographic truth --> silent agenda (--> power structures)
motivation and demotivation of proper names and their implied referents
...................................
Allegories of the Continent
Persianisch, Persiae,
...................................
[Mary Louis Pratt]
“Our” Dr. Livingstone was a grand nephew of the “real” Dr. Livingstone in Africa. English Canada was still colonial in the 1950s: reality and history were somewhere else, embodied in British men.
The syllables wound through our lives, threading together by force of repetition things that were distant, discontinuous and unreal. Living stone. This is how empire makes the world meaningful to its subjects, how it weaves itself into the everyday.
...empire made us part of a history that was somewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.
The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.
the rise of natural history
These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particul[...]
(408)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.7[...]ewhere else made by people who were not us. At the same time, when it came to Africa, we knew who we were. Sunday school missionary stories built the color line into our imaginations. That was part of their job, to create us as subjects of empire, give us our place in the order.
The book aims to be both a study in genre and a critique of ideology. Its predominant theme is how travel books written by Europeans about non-European parts of the world created the imperial order for Europeans “at home” and gave them their place in it. I ask how travel writing made imperial expansion meaningful and desirable to the citizenries of the imperial countries, even though the material benefits of empire accrued mainly to the few. Travel books, I argue, gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized. Travel books were very popular. They created a sense of curiosity, excitement, adventure, and even moral fervor about European expansionism. They were, I argue, one of the key instruments that made people “at home” in Europe feel part of a planetary project; a key instrument, in other words, in creating the “domestic subject” of empire.
the rise of natural history
These case studies are shaped by a number of shared questions. With what codes has travel and exploration writing produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process?
codifications of reality
the emanating glow of the civilizing mission
the cash flow of development
(it habitually blinds itself to) the reverse dynamic
obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries
It becomes dependent on its others to know itself
important historical transitions alter the way people write, because they alter people’s experiences and the way people imagine, feel and think about the world they live in.
[...]how European travel writing interacted with enlightenment natural history to produce a Eurocentered form of global or “planetary” consciousness.
[Pratt considers] the classificatory schemes of natural history in relation to the vernacular peasant knowledges they sought to displace.
tourist propaganda
testimonio
oral history
If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.
the passport: contact zone, like the flirting gaze of an Iranian woman with German ambassadors in Olearius images
Transculturation is a phenomenon of the contact zone.
metropolitan modes of representation
creating (your own) autonomous decolonized culture[...]
(412)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.8[...]stering of life as an assemblage of elements thrown, in the course of events, into a contact aesthetic” [=/= the side effects of systems, codes, or imaginaries (located in an elsewhere)]
•return (anthropology) to sense and sensation (<== affect) (Olearius missed this, the “world” is proposed to him anchored in the consciousness of [his] humanist subject or its categories of thought. he misses Iran as a world charged with affect, which is a prolific, mixed-use contact zone in an ongoing state of transition that leaves [Iranian] people “improvising with already-felts” [~=? Golestan Sa'di]) -- affect added an affirmative critique that registers surprise at what and how things happen.
[*]affective subject: “a person who waits in the company of others for things to arrive, one who learns to sense out what's coming and what forms it might take, one who aims to notice what crystallizes and how things ricochet and rebound in a social-natural-aesthetic ecology of compositions and thresholds of expressivity.” --> “For the affective subject, there is always the weight of the world in what can be hoped for and what must be feared, in what flourishes and what matters.”
[*]Life: “an experiment of being in a world, of finding ways to be in circuits of force and form, an aspiration to get something out of the alchemical transmogrifications of things that twist off on trajectories far beyond humanist models of suffering or the usual hyperlegible registers of normativity and the state.” --> “[Life] takes place in the inhuman gestures of demons and angels, in the struggles of addicts and the rage of racists, in the endurance of the unbelievably injured or the oddly still curious.” (Stewart)
•a world deliteralized (with no endemic divide between a naturalized given order and the exceptionalism of event)
•things, to become recognizable as something to be in or near, or else to oppose and resist
•(affect --Deleuze-->) differential ontology: the prolific generativity of difference and connection taking place in a field of possibilities. affect studies now hitting:
◦anthropology
◦new materialism
◦object-oriented ontology
◦naturecultures
◦multispecies work
◦science studies
◦new ecologies
--> “the generativity and volatility of life as such, to its capacity to actively shift or harden into forms of peace or violence, pleasure and pain, collectivities and chaos.”
[...] it looks for ways to describe what precedes and exceeds the categorical in the labors of living through historical presents.
[...] affect-inflected [study] leans into its descriptive objects with an eye to their hardenings into something recognizable (=/= what is often called ‘critical thinking’: habits of snapping, to catch the world in a lie, dualist dead ends of modernist humanist social science, independent logic of data, the conviction that something is wrong --> paranoid appro[...]
(413)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.1[...]one: the Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. on this stage will appear figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate...”
[when we use “theater” in a cartographic sense it refers to the dynamic space where the “I” or the “self” sees itself engaged in a public space (of kin, of others, of economic and political forces)]
the theatrical arts: spoken work + visual spectacle --> rise of opera
[--> rise of natural history]
observers of the differences between their civilization and that of the Persians, their standards of measure were those of the West:
Xenophon
Herodotus
Quintus Curtius Rufus
Strabo
Pausanias
Ammianus Marcellinus
Barnabas Brissonius
Pietro Bizzarri
Johannes de Laet
Thomas Herbert
Hans Schiltberger
Hans Christoph von Teufel
Stefan Kakasch
Anthony Jenkinson
Anthony and Robert Sherley
Thomas Coryat
Pietro della Valle
Garcai de Silva y Figueroa
Jean Babtiste Tavernier
Raphael du Mans
Olearius (1636)
Engelbert Kaempfer
a Greek invented dichotomy:
(Greek) small democracies =/= (Persian) powerful empire
modestia (cult of the simple and good) =/= superbid (pride)
law =/= monarch
‘conflict’ is a theme
Europe/Persia reasons for contact according to Cambridge History of Iran:
1- religious incentive (moharek محرک)
2- both against the Ottoman Turks
3- commercial incentive
4- travelers passed through Persia
Duke Frederick's commercial venture that would put the tiny territory on the map, as it were, and eliminate all its debts [...] with Adam Olearius chosen to chronicle the mission as its official secretary
“Duke's stated aim in sending the embassy to Persia was to establish a trade route with Persia and obtain exclusive rights to export silk from the area, thus squeezing out the other European competition, especially the Dutch”
his methodology
(Olearius's citational mobilization) a typical Baroque writer, he cites classical and Renaissance sources copiously and compares them to each other, thus paying homage to the scholarly tradition
•list the main features of a subject under discussion
•quote classical and contemporary authorities --> elicit different opinions
•
*correction of faulty source material imperative*
Harvey's new theory of the circulation of blood
Olearius:
•seasickness could be caused by motion of the waves
•“monsters” living along the Siberian coast are wrong
•
Olearius's methodology is that of a comparatist
he juxtaposes (the customs and social structures of the people he meets with those of his native l[...]
(414)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.2[...]ows. Olearius brings all desciplines onto the stage of his's world: ethnography, history, natural science, geography, architecture, and literature --> this is very baroque _+]
Olearius's didactic program: to entertain while instructing
(tasavof's) world as *mundus symbolicus* <== cosmos of significance (~= art + history + nature)
[Das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt]
*theatrum mundi*
staging of nature (~ ajayeb) : nature in all its various manifestations (animal, vegetable, and mineral) must be displayed on a stage (of the title page, on the compartments of Kunstkammer)
•an arch of gateway resting on a platform or plinth (--> a basic model provided by classical architecture for the majority of Renaissance and Baroque stagings), a design that recalls the structures of allegorical tableaux used for triumphal entries into Italian and Dutch Renaissance cities, on order to honor the hero of the day
•(early modern title page *iconographic program*) incorporating the feature of the triumphal arch in order to signify the symbolic entry into the written work [<-- we don't need to do this!!] --> *formal monumental opening* (leading the “reader” to the ‘interior of’)--> Olearius's frontispiece (monumental, awe-inspiring works that aimed to spark the viewer's interest):
◦(to commemorate) official functions at the court
◦literary activities
[*]baroque: ***the art of not rejecting anything*** (el arte de no renunciar a nada -Montesinos)
(am i baroque?)
different types of frontispiece:
1. divided into geometrical compartments (german origin?)
2. depicting a particular scene (german invention) [images/elements chosen/included for doctrinal and controversial significance]
3. single cartouche (school of Fontainebleau), a predilection for Mannerist irrationality and illusionism; interlocking, complicated scroll-work and strapwork; imitating the three-dimensional scrolling, with edges curling forward around the inscription; fantastic architectural structures, and grotesque figures and monsters taken from classical mythology
4. architectural title page (with the most monumental and most three-dimensional character), arrangement of sculpture-like allegorical figures or personifications
shifts from the techniques of woodcut --to--> engraving (--to-->? digital) ==> greater pictorial detail & better illusionism
*Sa'di's advice and devices* [title]
(Sa'di's relationship to) ‘the accumulated knowledge’(==> device)
[*]device (symbolum): a combination of a picture and a personal motto. a private adage (امثال و حکم) or clever aphorism --> heraldic image --fusion~=> device: a personal message by means of which a knight would define himself--developed from the chivalric tradition** ==?==> Sa'di's moral devices
-theoretical advice and examples of de[...]
(415)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.4[...]cuss--> general qualities and characteristics such as courage, nobility, obligation ==> (genre of) [*]emblem: --(pictorial + verbal)-striving--> for *universal applicability*
*emblem <-- the desire to understand the mysteries of antiquity, especially ancient Edgyptian hieroglyphs (in obelisks, sphinxes, lions), which were thought to represent a secret language [original wisdom of early man] (<== concerns of Renaissance [for example Hieroglyphica written in Greek by Horapollo 14th century])
(what are my ‘hieroglyphics’ in ajayeb?) Renaissance humanists wanting to research and understand antiquity, also wiched to *make it come alive*, by using hieroglyphics + Pythogorean symbols (were added, since metaphors and allegories of the ancients supposedly derived from the wisdom of Edgyptian priests)
ancient mythologies and medieval allegories in Renaissance applied hieroglyphic science:
•ancient coins (interpreted as hieroglyphics)
•biblical imagery
•medieval animal
•plant books
•cabalistic number mysticism
•old testament motifs
}==> emblematics became a kind of a language, that scholars and then readers of the vulgar tongue deciphered in books and then applied to a number of fields in daily life
spiritual symbols of allegory and myth + factual/fractal world --common--> visual art
}--> ‘title page’ : interplay of symbol & reality <-- interaction of different spheres of imagery:
•historical characters
•living people
•stuff of geography
•stuff of astronomy
•architectural views
•(in the 14th century scholars began to collect) ancient coins (and medals) [one side: great events, historic individuals -and- the reverse: depicted allegorical subjects, gods or the *fates*, allegorical personifications inherited from the middle ages [arts and vices]] ~--> *moralizing nature of (someone's) ‘specifications’* [--> frontispiece: personifications as simulated sculptures in niches flanking the archway]
Sa'di =/= author's portrait updated ~ Olearius
Olearius had three printing presses installed in his house, and required that the engravers live and work there, under his direct supervision
“Concerning the Changeability of Worldy Things, and the Wonder and Praise of Virtue”
‘flaming hearts’ symbolizing “their” union
symbolism (of the frontispiece tries to) contain the subject matter (of the text that follows)
the triumph of death (but with a happy end for the deceased) # Adventure Time
“that which i wish for is not mortal” (Duke's motto)
“virtue lives on after the funeral rites”
his home, name, heraldry, figure, allows the viewer to grasp the entire span of the deceased's life (and death) *at a single glance*
horn of plenty
cupid is astride (with a leg on[...]
(416)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.5[...]s well (theatrical curtains pulled back to reveal the true subject: the paradisical scene of “natives”) [the scenic event of arrival in any civilized zone is embodied by the monument of the natives]
•flora and fauna of Paradise
to place the viewer in (an atrium-like building)
monumental inscription
(our anti-globe video in the exhibition =/=?) a scene showing a robed man standing on a globe ~-> “You lead me through your counsel”
the explorer writes his observation into his *magnum opus*, the traveler account (just as God writes in “das grosse Wunderbuch die Welt”)
=/= my amazon project
textual proclamation of the author's faith
Olearius's translation of the sufi lore collected by the celebrated Persian poet Sa'di, in a condensed visual form, (acknowledged later by Goethe) with the help of Hakwirdi
Brancaforte: Golestan speaks to an audience that has recently suffered from the ravages of war (or predicting it?!)
-Golestan (“valley of roses”) written soon after the bloodbath is therefore a document of its time composed by a man of reason who always stresses the practical [praised by Olearius as a “lustiger Kopff” (funloving spirit)]--appealing to a classical authority
-blending personal experience, humorous insights, and aphorisms (of an ethical/didactic nature)
-Muhammadian like the manner of Virgil-->{the past as legacy, disposing with the divine mechanism, purchase Virgil's tomb and worshipped it, poetry as a tool of divination, embodiment of experience, pastoral and erotic, attraction toward people of any gender, agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, way of a comparison with foreign marvels,}
religious relativism in Olearius's orientalism --> in deference to his christian audience and as a dependent of the Gottorf court--he disparages islam (verführischer Glauben, seductive belief)
-he is also a forerunner to the comparative religious studies (when he uses the word “Gott/God” rather than the name “Allah”)
-manipulating Hakwirdi's voice in the propagandistic confrontation between the great religions --> Olearius speaking for his persian friend: who feels the customs of his homeland do not measure up to those of his adopted country [like Norbert!]
‘other's blindness’: (a *textual disclaimer* of) the other who exists in spiritual and religious darkness =/= pictorial depiction
(in Persianischer Rosenthal the entire) ***enterprise of translation*** (from Farsi to German) is cloaked in highly metaphoric language, charged with fostering the development of the german language + nationalized sentiment, “our German language that used to lie beneath the dust of contempt now shines forth once again” (<-- i meet this all the time when i was living and working in Germany)
“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an amb[...]
(417)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.7[...]a man of reason who always stresses the practical [praised by Olearius as a “lustiger Kopff” (funloving spirit)]--appealing to a classical authority
-blending personal experience, humorous insights, and aphorisms (of an ethical/didactic nature)
-Muhammadian like the manner of Virgil-->{the past as legacy, disposing with the divine mechanism, purchase Virgil's tomb and worshipped it, poetry as a tool of divination, embodiment of experience, pastoral and erotic, attraction toward people of any gender, agriculture as man's struggle against a hostile natural world, way of a comparison with foreign marvels,}
religious relativism in Olearius's orientalism --> in deference to his christian audience and as a dependent of the Gottorf court--he disparages islam (verführischer Glauben, seductive belief)
-he is also a forerunner to the comparative religious studies (when he uses the word “Gott/God” rather than the name “Allah”)
-manipulating Hakwirdi's voice in the propagandistic confrontation between the great religions --> Olearius speaking for his persian friend: who feels the customs of his homeland do not measure up to those of his adopted country [like Norbert!]
‘other's blindness’: (a *textual disclaimer* of) the other who exists in spiritual and religious darkness =/= pictorial depiction
(in Persianischer Rosenthal the entire) ***enterprise of translation*** (from Farsi to German) is cloaked in highly metaphoric language, charged with fostering the development of the german language + nationalized sentiment, “our German language that used to lie beneath the dust of contempt now shines forth once again” (<-- i meet this all the time when i was living and working in Germany)
“Die Persianer” in Olearius is an ambiguous term, it could stand for either Sa'di or the text of the Golestan, or Hakwirdi, but this “Persians” is to be “let inside, wearing a German coat,” Olearius's body is charged with teaching “the Persian to speak German” (--> integration)
other translations of Golestan:
•Andre du Ryer
•Johan Ochsenbach
•Georg Gentius
*Golestan
taut and well-translated epigrams
end-rhyme poems
a ‘treasury’ of rhetorical and poetical motifs
a voluminous index of sayings
-*short and astute speeches* (ایجاز ijaz ناقلا naghola)
*the genre of aphorism* = "apophthegma” (concise saying --> fit for advice, --> emblem)
(clever and) *sharp* ==> memorable
practical advice for individuals (members of the bourgeois, merchants) who wanted to climb the social ladder and learn *how to behave at court*
Golestan was considered a rich sourch of (such) “oriental wisdom”
(why Olearius is so into Sa'di's Golestan:) the aphorisms try to convey mental images or pictures [...] the apophthegma are the verbal equivalent of the images of the frontispiece --Brancaforte--> both gen[...]
(418)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91.7[...]al objectivity, the map also points the way toward the more exacting “scientific” standards of the Enlightenment.
maps are cultural artifacts
Persia: exotic + faraway
map ==> analysis
a map--like a frontispiece--is comprised of both visual and textual elements, combining word and image; it represents a type of text, or discourse, that needs to be analyzed in detail in order to be “read” correctly
maps are never completely translatable (nor readable)
language translates into historical practice
carto-literacy
rhetorical device, ekphrasis: description
graph-o suggests both picture and writing *
the cartographic enterprises under Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf
mathematical principles + projection methods
14th century, seeks to include “ancient and modern discoveries in one verbal and visual description”
early modern age military and strategic situation of europe
establish fortifications
(Harley:) behind most cartographers there is a patron
mapping so became the business of the state and cartography is early nationalized
-global empire building
-preservation of the nation-state
-local assertion of individual property rights
}--> in each of these contexts the dimensions of polity and territory were fused in images which were part of the intellectual apparatus of power **
individual niches [on] architectural plinth
in Newe Landesbeschreibung: “in the beginning of the world, God created everything at once, with his clever/intelligent finger, using measure, weight and number ... because God is not a God of disorder, but wants everything to proceed in a proper manner and with the proper differentiation.” (translated in Vision of Persia, p.123)
illustrious predecessors
through their patronage and linked to the noble art of geography
the map is framed by scale bars (the cartouche [of title] rests on a kind of architectural base in which a scale bar is contained)***
(graticules, more details,)
typography plays a role in emphasizing (novelty?)
geographical purview (meydan-e did, چشم رس، ميدان ديد) of the rulers
map and approval
different layers of information in the map: by looking at it all at once, it is difficult to comprehend the entire story that the author/artist are trying to tell. by examining individual visual elements in the map, and then linking them to the text, one can trace the different narratives extant--manifest and latent--in the work (Brancaforte on Olearius cartographic work)
(this visual rhetoric is also what i am using in my storytellings) (i also need to be careful with my collages: (not?) to map out creations that[...]
(419)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92[...] />
-growth of cartography parallels that of the coming of autobiography --> mapping is responsible for the consciousness that leads to the production of the fashioned self
rise of:
•autobiography
•opera
•natural history
Olearius multiplicity of roles
artist, geographer, historian, tourist, merchant, diplomat,
Olearius's production of self
mantle of artist is passed on to the author, who asserts himself and his new status in pictorial form
[in the corner of the map of Flensborg from Newe Landsbeschreibung] a hat obscures the specific character traits of the individual [artist/cartographer], and the image opts instead to emphasize the professional activity of the geographer [==> *expert: a new subject ruled by laws of classification or ideology, an expert cosmographer or topographer]
+ beautiful theories of a fire that burned in the human heart
he stick to his calculations despite the criticism he receives from colleagues and friends
Olearius's scientific reticence (kam-guyi کم گويى)
he quotes (without attribution) Athanasius Kircher: “some think that the earth, as well as the heavens have their intelligent angels or spirits which move inside them and thus bring the waters out of their depth” (Vision of Persia p.153)
therefore the waters were driven by a natural power through the hidden veins of the earth and rose up into the mountains, just as in a human being the blood rises from the liver to the heart and moves upward to the head through the vena cava. --?--> Harvey's discovery of the circulation of blood
...cartographic literature both reflected and brought about changing perceptions of the world
about Marco Polo
Gabriel: Marco Polo did not have the influence on geography that one might have expected [...] he had no corresponding education, had been unable to make astronomical observation, and the results of these thrown-together maps was complete chaos [!]
the shape-shifting Caspian sea
*** Tabula Asiae ***
Olearius's travel account also seeks to be encyclopedic
...describe and judges the deviations from the European norm
common
barbarous
destruction of the body itself
Munster's final judgment:
“[Perisans] do not speak much and are more apt to act than to speak. they like the uncleanness or lust of the body; they are measured in their eating habits; they seldom keep to what they promise unless it is to their advantage” --> a laconic (mojez موجز) group of people who are frugal (sarfeju صرفه جو) in their habits, rarely keep their word unless it is to their advantage and are also oversexed ==> they are indeed different from the Europeans
discourse of analogy
cartographic evidence[...]
(420)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.1[...]e margins of the representational space**
--?--> Timuri jiz
patronage
naming
“es gab eine lustige perspective”
of note in this scene [shah Safi's banquet for the Hostein embassy] is the woman alongside the right wall, who seems to be flirting coquettishly with a German looking in her direction, thus establishing a kind of contact between the two cultures
the monarch's true nature is laid bare
“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”
the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or even 21st century) Westerner's conception of an Oriental court
oriental stage
...................................
صورت الأرض surate al-arz (face of earth)
اصطخری Istakhri, 10th century, translated into German by Mordtmann
>
he met another celebrated traveler, Ibn Haukul ابن حوقل
...................................
Verran: *innovating to effect the discipline of deductive proof in ancient Greek*
(i found out--Pierre also noted--that in my work i tend to) inspire a baroque style of empirical analysis
[*]baroque
--> now you see it, now you don't
--> (a thread of innovation in) mixing words and visuals
--> wonder-filled difference
--> sensibility concerned with collective way finding through complexity
*baroque sensibility* loves unlikely juxtaposition
*baroque form lives with passionate intensity*
****forms of non-explanation [=/= to reflect of ‘what is’ from a meta position****]:
•juxtaposition
•stories
•framing
•reframing
•folds --> working within the ‘folds’
•working on the edge
-
--> *pushing and pulling at the interfacterfaces we feel ourselves enmeshed in* [<-- that is exactly the description of what i do. #amazon project]
to recognize stories of entrepreneurship as stories of working relations between people, technology, and nature
@Setareh
acknowledge our “understanding of”(s)
(taking diagrams as involved only in) epistemic practices linking the mess of the actual and the ideal of the future =/= (account of diagrams that focuses on their unique) contribution in rhetoric --> *collective way-finding* (that #Olearius works agains for iranians and german, and Sa'di's version)
[diagrams:]
•(graphs, images, visuals that fill the) two-dimensional physical spaces
•screened images that cover the surfaces of a *tapestry*
•visuals performing in a graphic register in *tension* with linguistic registers (Verran) --> figurations designed to work with text --> open up a space for imagining their capacities[...]
(421)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.3[...]by eschewing اجتناب contradiction and equivocation =/= the baldachin (my graphs, atlases) elaborately figures both equivocation and contradiction --> *it equivocates about contradiction*
[equivocate: in Medieval Latin perfect passive participle of aequivocō “I am called by the same name”, doubtful signification]
Verran (in baroque form juxtaposing an engineering object with an art object) identifies diagrams as capable of effecting *dual rhetorical shifts*, effect possibilities of moving between speaking from and speaking to --> open up possibilities for equivocatign our contradictions + (representing =) *equivocating over what exactly is represented*[<-- in apass this is what i always do, in a way my project]
(@apass, attending to iconography opens up a space for asking:)
****what are doing here together?
****what kind of pilotage does this diagram offer and to whom?
(a way of abandoning the idea that these objects are essentially different) --> attending an object as:
•story
•diagram
•
...................................
intermingling the sexuality and materiality of bodies with the transcendental concepts and questions of spirituality and religion
to re-insert the body back into religious imagery
queer religious imagery
culture-jam
weaving their desire and bodies back into an exclusionary narrative
(un)critical faith
sexuality, gender, and bodily regulation in ...
deep inextricability of religious and secular discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and sexual bodies and practices (Wetzel)
...................................
Saadia Toor
() within the neo-Orientalist discourse [~= liberal modernity as embodied by ‘the West’ and Barbarism as connoted by Islam] ‘the Muslim’ enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic (with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]
organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of th[...]
(423)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.7[...]ty, gender, and bodily regulation in ...
deep inextricability of religious and secular discourses in constructing the body, as well as the ways in which such discourses alone can never tell the complete story of gendered and sexual bodies and practices (Wetzel)
...................................
Saadia Toor
() within the neo-Orientalist discourse [~= liberal modernity as embodied by ‘the West’ and Barbarism as connoted by Islam] ‘the Muslim’ enemy is today configured as both misogynyst and homophobic (with an essentialized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]
organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, in popular support for the Global War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam
a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews
liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women
when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality
‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter
(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic
part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]
return them to the ‘chardivari’
(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patri[...]
(424)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.7[...]alized Islam comfortably posited as the roots of illiberalism[= presented as the mark and the evidence of Islam's radical alterity from Western civilization])==> “civilizing missions” [such as my orientation course (as an ideological cover) in Germany] + [Hoda's bottom-lined subjugated self puts her on such “mission” (‘to rescue women’ and) ends any discussion with her (about women, or Islam)] }==> essentialized and monolithic (and flattened) ‘Islam’ emptied of history, diversity, complexity, and dissent نفاق -- devoid of any internal complexity and in fact incapable of effecting change from within
[--> critical use of #islamicated instead of “islamic"]
organic intellectuals (of the empire)
(authentic) native informants
brave and courageous ‘victims’ of Islam
•Rushdie one of the strongest voices within the clash of civilizations framework, in popular support for the Global War on Terror
•Manji's narrow polemic and cultivating a persona (of young smart queer woman) ==> new Orientalism
•Hirsi Ali an authentic ‘victim’ (“I used to be a Muslim; I know what I am talking about” -saying things that liberal ‘politically correct’ discourse will not allow Whites/non-Muslims/Westerners to say)
}--> ideology of Empire --> [a neo-colonial project:] discursive construction of an essentialized Islam
a range of “misogynist cultural” practices:
•FGM (female genital mutilation)
•honor killings
•the ‘cult of virginity’
--> they all predate islam and are common to Animists and Christians of the sub-Saharan region as well as Ethiopian Jews
liberal rhetoric of saving Muslim women
when some illustratives are pitched as a sensitive response to racist Islamophobia, but taking part in the mainstream discourse on Islam and homosexuality
‘Islamic-ness’ of the subject-matter
(the strange idea) that all Muslim countries are Islamic
part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called islam (or “west”)
-How really useful is “Islam” as a concept for understanding Morocco and Saudi Arabia and Syria and Indonesia (or Iran)? [Said asks]
return them to the ‘chardivari’
(Toor's notion of) ‘patriarchal opportunism’ : “whereby patriarchal structures from families to nation-states strategically select elements from an ideological ‘toolbox’ in their attempt to gain support for the sexual regulation of women.”
Toor showing how impossible it is to think of ‘Islam’ as being the source of Muslim women's problems:
•(an ordinary story) runaway marriage --to--> a battle for the consolidation of class and patriarchal power played on a national stage; a case (of Saima) abounding in the established and familiar postcolonial binaries of East/West, tradition/modernity, public/private,[...]
(425)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.7[...]ts of the world at economic, political, and cultural levels (= globalization) ==> intensification in the dynamics of social change ==> anxiety ==> (greater) regulation of women (in kin-networks as a response to political, social and cultural anxieties under globalization)
[This was just as true of Europe during the period of capitalist modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries, and of colonized and decolonizing societies in the mid-20th century =/= Islamic exceptionalism = a form of Orientalism operative today : an exclusive focus on ‘Islam']
haq bakhshwana (in rural Punjab): the daughter of a propertied family is ‘married’ to the Qur'an, or, in some cases, to a tree—so as to prevent her share of the family property transferring to her husband's family --> women are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves
Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘Muslim world’ --and asking how (in a Foucauldian sense) is ‘Islam'[~ the idea that something stable and immutable called ‘Islam’ exists anywhere] being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? “Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)
(unpack we must)
***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’
Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)
(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)
...................................
a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*
[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)
forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent
a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements
obvious: totalizing dramati[...]
(426)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93[...]rring to her husband's family --> women are both the property of their kin (symbolically and sometimes literally) while having rights to property themselves
Toor suggesting in her analysis a healthy dose of skepticism towards projects that present the ‘Muslim world’ --and asking how (in a Foucauldian sense) is ‘Islam'[~ the idea that something stable and immutable called ‘Islam’ exists anywhere] being deployed, by whom, and for what purpose? “Is it being used as an ideological tool, does it serve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)
(unpack we must)
***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’
Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)
(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)
...................................
a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*
[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)
forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent
a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements
obvious: totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself
precarity can take the form of:
•fraility (living in it and through it)
•a sea change
•a darkening atmosphere
•a hard fall
•the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve
•
ordinary things (=/= melodrama) they matter because they shimmer precariously
...seasons magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light
place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[.[...]
(427)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93[...]art) *as a nearing* [=/= raw material for exploitation]
(Heidegger) as the ringing between composing subjects and objects
(McCormack) felt as ways of going on in the world
(Deleuze) as increases and decreases, brightening and darkening
() in a cartography distributed across a field of intensities and durations
[=/= rush to incorporate them into a representational order of political or moral significance]
...................................
[*]epistemology = stories of knowledge from before that somehow we are still living with now (#fable)
Geroulanos -->{ Ardrey --to--> Kubrick's african genesis : “weapon fathered man”
technology + prehistory (in postwar period)
“tool ==> man"}
...................................
knowing images
epistemic image : knowledge-based pictorial gestures (in my work without) --> organization + collecting + demonstrating theories + scientific tools + direct references to natural objects
--> searchable interfaces (+ desire for condensed information)
(**list ==> searchable**)
(Apianus's early modern cognitive horizon -->) eye: another organ used to calibrate settings
activated eye --> new empirical pursuits
my epistemic images : work of an image fetishist
bestiary: animal character diagnosis
[horses]
(from) genre of taking care of the animal: veterinary --to--> chiromancy: profiling of the animal conditioned through the serial nature of list (==> control)
...................................
Brancaforte
readings of the apparatuses framing Olearius's books
tradition of representing Persia in the West (Xenophon and Herodotus)
narrative elements of Olearius’ works remain largely unexamined
Brentjes
elm naghli (artistic research knowledge) =/= elm aghli (rationality)
(science) elm in Iran <== (10th century written in Persian:) limits of the world [hodud al-alam] + pharmacological medicine + (translated ~= adaptations of) astrology
10th century --> gradual decline in literacy in Arabic ==> Persian treaties on sciences
rag-shenasi (knowledge of the pulse) --> Avicenna
روضة المنجمین
rowzat (روضة to look) [~/=? nozhat نزهت] ~= garden ~= astrological site
-(iran) university garden =/= (greek) university gymnasium
book: expository discourse (رساله توضیحی، تفسیری، نمایشی)
•poems on the subject
•تحسین و تمجید lengthy laudatory adjectives to describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
[...]
(428)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.1[...]ory: slight change in a single variable of a system can give rise to sharp discontinuous change
==> existence of multiple equilibria
Slobodkin
game theory
management of natural systems
Prigogine + Stengers
brusselator device (--> strange attractor) --> behavior and evolution of complex systems --illustrate-->
•discontinuous development
•bifurcation (points at which the system may go in either of two directions --> the system behaves as a whole)
local random fluctuations (around a mean) --> bifurcation point --> the system as a whole evolves to a new order
=/= cybernetic system (control center)
=/= steam engine (governor)
Robert May
the more complex a system is, the more likely it is that small fluctuations (will be just large enough) to be critical
complexity ==> unstability
~~~~> chaos theory
(for Prigogine) fluctuation: essential condition for order of physical universe, life, civilization
[the most humble aspect of the behavior of matter:] white noise --(chaotic phenomena)--> order [on macro level]
turbulence <-- cannot be predicted (deterministic approach), but we have empirical certainty that they will appear
55BC --turbulence--> Lucretius’ De Rerum natura (philosophical poem on the nature of things)
(his basic metaphor of) nature: hydrodynamic flow of particles in free fall, in swirls, in vortexes
‘small cause ==> disproportional nonlinearity’ : ‘random collision of some falling atoms ==> constitution of world’
--Serres--> (Lucretius) heterodox tradition (=/= orthodoxe)
romantic & baroque are ***discourse =/= paradigm***
•discourse (available to draw from)
•paradigm (to succeed another paradigm) [<-- to be careful as an artist, the fantasy of genesis]
•since the 19th century romantic complexity had been the more orthodox discourse
•since 1975 baroque complexity became the focus of interest
}=/= new conception of reality
•romantic complexity --favor--> stable structural metaphors (self-correcting cybernetic machine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)
body = turbulent phenomena par excellence
*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*[...]
(429)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.7[...]hine, Gaya, etc.)
◦criteria can be established (more easily) --> delineate emergent wholes (*abstract criteria*)
•baroque complexity --favor--> swarming individuals metaphor (population of individuals in turbulent motion) --> delineate emergent wholes (*situational criteria*)
◦conceptual problem of baroque: there may be higher level order, but what is it?
◾(it is not) stable patterns of communication (<== if patterns exists they are short-lived, individuals take part in several wholes rather than in one)
body = turbulent phenomena par excellence
*****
--Deleuze--> the very idea of “concept” is different in baroque thinking : [*]concept = an allegory, a narrative =/= a symbol of the cosmos <-- romantic idea of concept: a cosmological order that is grasped by the thinking subject
the uncertainty (of the world) in the baroque case is ontological [=/= epistemological --> uncertainty is an effect of not knowing enough]
...................................
(i say in iran, instead of public jurnalism we need more) *public anthropology*
...................................
(Stenger > Stewart > vivid pragmatics ~=)
(McCormack > Stewart > radical) [*]empiricism: if you walk in the woods --encounter--> the unthinkable profusion of forms --> material-aesthetic registers of (mobile & immobile flickering of) is and was (=/= sensory details described)
•[*]description: accidental glimpse of what matters + what shifts its matter in a moment of recognizable though unnamed and partial significance
tonal differences
a spark of color
a modulation in tempo
half-patterned expressivity
--of--> a scene teemingly differentiated and marked by thresholds of matter
when a tree is “charged and transfigured” by a violent sunset
Stewart + Dillard
a thing becomes a call to word<br />
(Harman:) objects themselves, like voices or forms of writing, have style
Stewart > Dillard's causal logic of bizarre but categorical predation:
a small frog perched precariously on a lily pad in a pond, its back end already strangely slumped in the water. Then it suddenly deflates
its skin “ruck, and rumple, and fall’ and then “formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like blight scum on top of the water”
--suggest--> its style
=/= exempla of a generality
=/= embodiments of something
*points of precision* in moments, scenes, forms, and states of matter
an image synesthetically remembered --> engineered bridges of the purely social or thee purely natural imagine a flatly describable world composed of fully present states of being
...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page
description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizin[...]
(430)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.8[...]world composed of fully present states of being
...the wind forms blades in the sea like lines on a page
description: an approach to an ungraspable thing --> deliteralizing
remainders
(distributed gap between residents’ reports and police determinations:) [examples of semi-events (half-witnessed):]
•a dangerous-looking animal moving about on a man's property turned out to be a black plastic trash bag blowing in the wind
•threatening graffiti on a lawn were markings made by phone company employees
•a strange noise was wind in the trees
•a report of a man licking the locks on doorways of apartments on North Pleasant Street (--> suggestion of this licking everywhere remained)
•a blood-soaked glove on the ground outside the DB Mart was a pink glove (-- establish--> pattern of possible hands in roads)
-
--Stewart--> **an staging ground for people's perceptive** --> **attention to the weird possibilities emergent in the ordinary**
==> *mysterious patterns with precise details* [= ajayeb] --> (bring into relief) a background, a zone, a worlding in which things become perceptible (in a weirdly realist way)
[explanation =/=] stranger faithfulness to the spirit of the unnamed thing they witnessed ==> moved to make a report (something is a little off)
(if there is grounding it is grounding in) world's variegated poesis --> ([*]description:) to make room ([for its] emergence --into--> theory)
A walker with a routine gets used to the little apparitions of something throwing together in his or her vicinity
(questions of points of contact:) what to do with your eyes?
([against?] positionality of) writing from the ground
(memory of a city:) a contact aesthetic of histories and rogue trajectories set in motion by every object encountered
harshly half-formed world<br />
germinal aesthetics
channels of autonomous objects lay down stakes and swerve at points of contact with the itineraries of other things ==create==> a distributed zone of *robust realism*
the real (of X): transversal arrays of qualities or activities (like musical refrains) give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and hone senses
(to sharpen) realist attention to things
[*]life: ontological entertainment
unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere
gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
[...]
(431)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.9[...]ngs
[*]life: ontological entertainment
unfulfilled systems littered the kitchen
tangent to an elsewhere
gleamingly restored eighteenth-century perfections <-- Cinderella's mansion
...of autonomous objects lying around...
a zone of randomly abandoned X
against the background of nothing
visceral avoidance
pretty and fresh as blueberry pie
townies (how i am not a townie where i live)
•townie: loyalty to the expressivity of things
sociality of a wedding party (filled with roles and dressings)
crazy ricochet..
perfectly ordinary...
...long-ago layered over the wood (necrotic غانقرايايا)
“expressivity sliced through matter, word, and action, locking them together in a harshly half-formed world”
writing Cinderella diaries --> questions of realism
•what kind of real we enter?
•her realism (bring her) --into--> a rough contact with objects human and non-human
•Cinderella does things to and with them (her animals) [and reverse]
*social pressure ==> (people) make descriptive mistake*
a problematic (for example afterlife of a tragedy) --that--> inspires X --to--> speculative interest in forms
•Cinderella stating to noticing things (rumors, gossip, realism)
•gossip: realist attention to things
the world were his secret
loved the smell of the cold
in the night's dark hours
demanded our co-emotional sharpness
the world literally burst into color on the home side --and--> went gray in the instant of passing over the edge
no one knew their names...
...the energy of small things...
as if the point of living was to...
mosquitoes drew blood...
a helmet of white roots
...painted hyperbright colors in paint so flat it makes my fingertips dry just to look at it
dull dark oversized furniture
collapsed piles...
(nothing ever happens without first) registering a commitment to exhausting webs of complication
learning from mice --> dark little tunnels of limited choice
(Stewart's) points of precision: (of any act or story) what matters is the singularity of an angle of approach (a surprise contact, an opening onto some world's cocomposition, momentary flourishing of some capacity) [=/= a meaning]
shaken profusion in things =/= rush evaluative critique
so ordinary and problematic
so the idea of writing about “clean” started being interested in this website: https://www.politicalconcepts.org, and the desire to write a political entry point for them on the idea of clean in the 20th century
also after i moved to Brussels May 2016, the affect of dirty
to hav[...]
(432)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.9[...] back and) ask that (@NRW cultural fund, governmentality Regierungsfähigkeit, the city of Cologne)
[this question is asked by people in certain socio-material practices with stakes in producing citizens, such as professional of cleanness municipal responsibility ==often==> citizens disappear]
-maybe we like the lively dandelions (repertoire of green) and messy weeds (repertoire of clean) that grow in the cracks
being happy with cleanliness
being happy with seeing people cleaning --> seeing municipal care
leanring ‘where question’ from Annemarie: if you are local that doesn't mean you are local --> ***the local is not obvious*** : the local does not explain itself in its own terms, it is rather explained in terms that have traveled from elsewhere --> this is not to isolate the local, this is not against *traveling of terms*, rather, an argument for specificity: to ask ****which terms from elsewhere are relevant here?**** @Tehran:
what at stake there
what effected here
(what it means in my village?)
traveling of knowledge =/= traveling of repertoires of speeking
functions of import and embedding (something from another time or place in your present argument)
*there is no empirical without language*
there is no local without travel
(@Xiri, Hoda, to urgently shift from who to what)
(from) ‘who question’ of politics: who gets to talk? (like “do women get a say?”) --to--> ‘what question’: “what is made of women?”
[metaphors of doing]
(neoliberal legacy of) isolated acting objects =/= complex global-local inequalities
historical traces of the acting in the image of the fighting muscular man throwing a spear [~-> Arash kamangir آرش کمانگیر ~/=? my play with the bow and arrow in apass;] =/= digestion, eating (as “doing something” that you cannot control), plants growing, smelling (is not acting?)
...................................
*assemblages*
-continuities require ‘work’ to constitute them as ‘well-formed assemblages’
-the emergence of a stable assemblage requires ‘translations’
-(we should) search out the catalysts, enablers or inhibitors of processes that interest us
-how varied and multiple qualities of agency unfold as effects in assemblages that encompass both human and nonhuman forms, and how these effects subsequently achieve particular outcomes for different parties
(organic food) market <==emerging== ideological desires of embedded entrepreneurs who innovate within dynamic material-semiotic systems
(Foad stressed that assemblages are characterized by the condition of) ‘territory’: contexts that engender more or less conservative orientations of assemblages toward fixity
(Sina emphasized that assemblages are also characterized by the condition of) ‘abstraction’: the unique character[...]
(433)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.2[...]
•laboratorization of life (simple categories of liveness and deadness over the last 30 years)
•miniturization of life
•complexification of life
•automation of life
relation: smallest possible unit of analysis, extremely prosaic and mundane ==> world
theorizing in the way of relation (as in feminist science, actor-network theory, or nonrepresentational theory) ==Haraway==> engendering a more humble, more modest attitude in the human observer --✕--> Meillassoux's non-relational theory
(since Kand) western philosophy has been epistemological [~ investigating human relationship to things =/= ontological]
--> correlations (between thinking and being), we turn things into affordances when we think about them --> correlationism: we only have access to the correlation between thinking (thing-for-us) and being (thing-in-itself) ==> ‘all knowledge is relative’ [=/= realism]
Meillassoux's absolutes:
•there might be something outside thought
lack of a necessary ultimate cause or meaning (facticity) --Meillassoux--> fundarnental source of being (ontological contingency ~ “facticity itself is necessary”) : no ‘higher’ or ‘supreme’ force or reason (metaphysical, physical, spiritual) is guiding it [~ total ontological absence of a necessity] ==> *contingency* is absolutely necessary in the universe
“Everything in the universe is without reason and is therefore capable of becorning otherwise without reason.” --> this has happened already at least 3 times (where new sets of laws enlerge from nowhere):
•Big Bang
•life from non-life (==> new laws of biological life)
•thought
absolute is wider
“two billiard balls strike into each other, resulting in both balls flying off into the air, or fusing together, or turning into two immaculate but rather grumpy mares, or into two maroon but rather affable lilies”
(@apass)
every research agonizes about:
•the ontological status of their ‘objects’ (of enquiry)
•the epistemological status of their knowledge claims
--Campbell--> we need to “go ontological” about consumption, global warming, (hyperobjects)
hyperobjects:
•viscous (literally real, and you cannot throw it away)
•non-local
•larger on the inside than they are on the outside
•they call for forms ofjustice, ethics, politics and reason that are beyond humanist economies of identification and representation
social constructivism ==> everyone's interpretation of the real is legitimate [equal status of interpretation] =/= (Meillassoux's) speculative realism
understand the world at the level of the hyperobject <== we are creating (consumer) objects that are massive in scale and temporality
inter-generational justice (imagining till y[...]
(434)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.6[...]for which we do not have categories)
Meillassoux's concepts { nonhuman + rational --Campbell--> ontologically think about climate change =/= (despondency & passivity) equivocal status of climate change }==> bleak optimism: climate change has already happened + human civilization must learn how to die in a way that is a *creative and just foreclosure of the earth's organizational forms*
organization: an environment-making process
--> drawing of ‘general lines’ in the fabric of the whole ==constitute==> most basic mode of existence
--> making of some sort of cut in the universe to simultaneously create & order an inside from an outside [~ *bracket ‘a’ reality out from an undifferentiated plasmic whole* ~= framing]
==produce==> elements of a reality that can be controlled by human intervention
*how we frame climate change will determine the future of life on earth*
[--Sina--> that is why we need more curatorial skills: variational + organizational]
frame: strategic device, a mode of coping with the hugeness of reality (framing moves:)
1- bounding --> defining, separating, assimilating
2- stabilizing --> fixing, delimiting, controlling
3- bring into view --> empirical, technologies of representation, controlling
frame:
•useful models for viewing reality
•recursive lenses through which that phenomenon is measured and acted upon
climate change and new frames emerge side-by-side:
climate change as:
•externality
•superwicked problem
•anthropocene
**what if climate change is unframeable?** [<-- art is good at dealing with this]
climate change qualities:
•unboundedness: hard to separate what is climate change and what is not
•incalculability: intotalizable effects ==> emergencies and materialities that are beyond known forms of planning and organizing
•unthinkability: it escapes each time we try to capture it empirically, organizationally, psychologically
}--> *questions that have no logical or empirical answer ==> ontological* (they concern its ontology) ~ we do not see its fundamental being
end of empirical/logical = beginning of ontological (secular)
=/=
end of empirical/logical =? beginning of eschatological (nonsecular)
}--Campbell--> **ontologization of climate change**
*climate change = the world we live in =/= a problem within the world*
[*]climate change: the absolute context that determines what is possible + what has replaced a previous world
(i find Meillassoux + Campbell argumentation more convincing than Morton's hyperobject)
climate change as “problem” (that can be framed), “thing”, “within the world” [=/= the world: generative contex[...]
(435)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.9[...]e==> elements of a reality that can be controlled by human intervention
*how we frame climate change will determine the future of life on earth*
[--Sina--> that is why we need more curatorial skills: variational + organizational]
frame: strategic device, a mode of coping with the hugeness of reality (framing moves:)
1- bounding --> defining, separating, assimilating
2- stabilizing --> fixing, delimiting, controlling
3- bring into view --> empirical, technologies of representation, controlling
frame:
•useful models for viewing reality
•recursive lenses through which that phenomenon is measured and acted upon
climate change and new frames emerge side-by-side:
climate change as:
•externality
•superwicked problem
•anthropocene
**what if climate change is unframeable?** [<-- art is good at dealing with this]
climate change qualities:
•unboundedness: hard to separate what is climate change and what is not
•incalculability: intotalizable effects ==> emergencies and materialities that are beyond known forms of planning and organizing
•unthinkability: it escapes each time we try to capture it empirically, organizationally, psychologically
}--> *questions that have no logical or empirical answer ==> ontological* (they concern its ontology) ~ we do not see its fundamental being
end of empirical/logical = beginning of ontological (secular)
=/=
end of empirical/logical =? beginning of eschatological (nonsecular)
}--Campbell--> **ontologization of climate change**
*climate change = the world we live in =/= a problem within the world*
[*]climate change: the absolute context that determines what is possible + what has replaced a previous world
(i find Meillassoux + Campbell argumentation more convincing than Morton's hyperobject)
climate change as “problem” (that can be framed), “thing”, “within the world” [=/= the world: generative context from where problems emerge ==> forms of organization without precedent] ==problem==>
1. epistemological assumptions (+ expectations + responses)
2. unable to encompass (the qualities of climate change)
3. misrecognition of climate change
speculative realist idea of world
[*]speculative realism: a strategy for thinking, organizing, solving at the *widest rational angle: a form of thinking and acting that is concerned with the fundamental structure of reality in its absolute and unconditioned form (=/= manifestations of phenomena) ==> to deliver metaphysical truths unto the world without deforming them with the forceps انبر جراحى of one's own epistemic apparatus
(as) ontological threat ==Campbell==> escal[...]
(436)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95[...]a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to
Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*
(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***
to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy theory, paranoia, ,,)
correlationism ==> despite repeatedly showing that it creates massive sudden fluctuating geologic singularities, climate change is still folded back into known organizational coordinates
}--> *interactional openness* (+ temporal boundedness) (@apass) ==> negotiation complexity, high technical policy instrument, multiplication of actors, multiplication of negotiation tracks
}==> *solutions shift from a field-endogenous catalyst of institutional change --to--> a mechanism of field maintenance*
}--Campbell--> framing of climate change ==dictate==> the organizational structure to address it ==> misrecognize what it is
=/= ***a world [=/= a problem] ==generates==> problems (that no current organizational form can address)***
correlationism (--> prevailing belief that human reason cannot attain certainty in metaphysical, religious, moral matters) ==Meillassoux==> fear of dogma/absolute (deep-seated desire to be non-dogmatic) ==> *knowledge becomes a matter of belief* ==>{ reason undergoes a process of religionizing : ‘reason = a means to buttress claims based on faith’ =/= aiming to capture absolute knowledge itself, condemning irrational claims upon it }==> ***discourage hierarchies of reason (always to slightly disblieve waht we believe) [<-- happens in apass!]
speculative realism ==>
1. *organizational research* (@Chloe2) in the future must be deidicated to finding the right categories to account for a new worl (and not for a superwicked problem)
2. enables us to approach climate change from the *widest rational angle*
3. (‘climate change =[...]
(440)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.4[...]to take the side of the oppressed's language and *emancipation*[= demythologising (dominant ideology)] <== Marx's ‘false consciousness’ (for example capitalist ideology conceals and naturalizes managerial power and implicit subordination of workers) --> either side of a power duality can become valorised
•Hegel: “mythology = ideology aesthetically expressed for easy adoption by society” --> “ideology = an imaginary map”; political breakdowns ==> ideologies become apparent (independent of mythology)
-(Murray and Ozanne:) meanings people attribute to social structures change more slowly than the structures themselves --> reality[= the meanings given to social structure and the objective structures] is contradictory <== *inconsistency between subject and object* (~ societies both create reality and are shaped by it)
}--> consumers as the oppressed class in postindustrial society
Thompson: natural health myth (based on ‘cultural creatives’: dominant consumer segment of natural medicine):
•*romantic ideology derived from technologies’ ill effects on humanity and nature --> nature is mythologized as a state of harmony, science and technology as forbidden knowledge
•*gnostic myth emerged from a desire of consumers to bridge technology and spirituality --> “the immune system is metaphorically rendered as a mysterious immaterial force, constituted by intricate mind-body connections and ephemeral energistic forces, which can be brought to practical ends through quasi-magical practices of holistic healing” [Thompson 2004]
}--> advertisers exploit these tensions as conflicting ideologies converge with reality
brand ==> a point of difference + oppositional meanings --> [for example the attraction of the coffee shops that don't personify the Starbucks hegemony ~] anti-hegemonic consumers hold strong preferences for decor that symbolises the counter-culture
(Thompson + Barthes ==> Kristensen, Boye, Askegaard:) how communities develop conceptualizations of right and wrong
*moral systems are inherently ideological* in order to emancipate consumers from these forces critical reflection must occur***
@constant and apass: ***consumers don't escape the market per se but instead reshape collective identity through counter-mythology***
(for example) hipster consumer's attempt to demythologize a consumption ideology in order to protect themselves from mainstream consumers or ‘followers’ (when followers encroach on inside values:) consumers demythologize their consumption practices ==allowing==> new avenues of consumption to occur in an emancipated state
(critical theorists:) **market = arena of domination and power struggle**
==> consumerism can be enslaving and manipulative mythology crafted by the ruling class, can be overcome through resistance and demythologizing ==> ***emancipation = (a form of) new consumption arenas (that hold a favourable power dy[...]
(441)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...]ms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life***
Campbell --> a posthuman biology (an ethical imperative that in a technological age, that life is not just life)
Golem --> perennial horror in western imagination
Jewish psalms of the 6th century
formation of life (golmi: unformed limb) <==emanate== mother's womb & nonhuman earth itself
--exemplifies--> how *western humanist versions of technology tend to create a master-servant dialectic* (master-slave) and anything that threatens this divide invokes horror
(roots embedded in the Romantic tradition:)
•“frankenfood” (mash up original and unexpected food combinations, genetically modified crops)
•genetic engineering technologies
•“revenge of nature”
•“nature out of control” leitmotif
•
*since antiquity (in the west) technology has been simultaneously imbued with magic and rationality, evil and redemption, trickery and transparency [---> go to Baxstrom + Meyers Realizing The Witch]
Descartes: the philosopher who provided the western imagination with the most enduring model of the human --> preoccupation with mechanism as something that pervaded machines, bodies and animals but never the non-material, spiritual realm of the mind
*eschatological significance attached to technology*
schizoid stance, alternating between the technophobic and the technophilic (--> expressed in avant-garde): Dadaism, Futurism, Cubism, constructivism)
•technocs aestheticized and fetishized: world expos such as the Crystal Palace, garden cities, the cite industrielle, Citta Nuova, the Werknund, etc.
•military machinery of first world war which alienated human life while at the same time making the human inhuman
*technology as revold*
imagined as rebellious and repellent
(human civilization) haunted by the temptation of a reverse evolution which coexists in it with the potential for progress
--> *techno-anxiety: potential infallibility of the technological
(teratology, wider context of studies on monsters)
logic of contemporary technoculture --trope-->
•primitive
•technology
•horror
(Campbell drawing from a larger) intertextual repertoire consisting of advertising, film, and other images in visual culture
--> aesthetic conflation of the primitive, technology, and horror points to three new concepts:
•metamorphing: {<<--** exactly my problem with Manning's process philosophy}
◦(a logic of) ***identity as constant becoming***
◦***emphasis on flow*** (as a necessary way to understand process)
•primal technology =/= (humanist and pervasive) concept of technology as modern, progressive, clean, nonalive
•proto-atavism: evolutionary traits from the future can exist in the present (=/= atavism: evolutionary traits fro[...]
(442)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]ves behind traces of pain; ‘foot of the future’ contains within it the supplement of its embodied visceral human existence, a potent reminder of the human within the posthuman. Nike mutant foot *suffers from origin horror* (= no secure telos of origin which can link back to a primary source of either technology or organicism) we cannot trace it back to an originary ideal category of existence ==> it horrifies
•Nissan pathfinder; shape-shifting technology, moves between the animal and technical --> *automobile metamorphoses without any trace of its metamorphosis* (it bears no marks, scatches, dents, damage); mighty industrialized rendering (transformers film series) --> (an X-Men fantasy:) a future world of *ontological mobility* : entities are not fixed, their morphing into other entities is not painful, but a natural instantaneous reaction to their environment [=/= ajayeb]
•BBC digital faces; a giant disembodied head that roams across hilly countryside ~ *an affront to a humanist sensibility of integral bounded being*; filled with tiny selves --> genealogy of monstrous and mythical forms (Matrix 3rd episode the machine face) --> *visualization of the idea that the self possesses no central consciousness* [<-- posthuman: all mental thought, all consciousness and spirit, can be attributed to the operation of micro-material processes distributed in autopoitic (~ self-creating) body] /ERG website
metamorphing
critique of becoming (of consumer)
Cartesian (human logic of a world of fixed entities) =/= posthumanism (polymorphic unfixity, articulating a logic of identity as decentered and in the state of transition)
mutating =/= morphing (universally regarded as positive, apolitical <-- in poststructural theory)--> imagined technological posthumanism which cruises effortlessly and seamlessly through ontologies [like T1000 in Terminator]
digital morphing is a common production device in contemporary visual culture (transformers, X-Men <-- to resist that in our web designs)
morphing =/= ontological fixity
•how technology does not oppose nature, but stimulate it (Nissan pathfinder)
•how the morph causes a radical splintering of consciousness (BBC digital faces)
•how morph is the a visualization not of being, but of becoming
--> *flow, universally coded as positive* (sensibility of process and flux considered liberatory)
--> a logic of quick-change (embedded in entertainment and computer industries)
high-technology embodiments:
•cyborg
•foetus
•ecosystem
•database
•genome
•cellular automata
•insects
•
morphing =/= mutating: the visceral, painful, embodied experience that results from ontological boundary clashes
mutating into otherness =/= morphing into otherness
(pain of the flow -->) ***mutation is a concept t[...]
(443)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...]ism, subsequently confirmed by the participation of civil society*
...a practice of dialogue between art and development, across geographies: banking on the coalition of ethno-nationalism and globalization, and promoting “indigenous” forms of capitalism, while avoiding the optics of exoticization }==>
•divides and controls localities
•contextual differences are distributed as needs and urgencies
•juridico-engineering structures (symbolized progress)
•cultural globalism with consumption at its core
•regions soused on the liberal democratic fantasy of salvation via harmonious, multilateral exchange
(we don't want dialogues, we need meaningful dialogues)
--Renan--> [to relocate the “struggle for exchange” in] monological circuits across the topographies of power and restitution =/= geographies of guilt and embarrassment
antagonistic knowledges (organise and rally actions and thoughts for resistance) --> changes how you are socialized
Robinson Crusoe
a miniature history of human development according to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)
Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)
(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
[...]
(444)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]entary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)
Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)
(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe starts making Bible fals (فال انجیل opening the Bible to a random page and read a verse that he believed was addressed at him)
◦he makes list (pro & cons --> debit & credit [--> mentality of business studies] --Weber--> book-keeping: distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism)
◦
•Crusoe: true protagonist of the empire (--Joyce--> prototype of British colonialism, *mythology of colonialism* --Sina--> #fable of imperialism)
•(romantic notion of) nature: idyllic =/= (Crusoe) nature: unforgiving + sparse }<-- utopian =/= dystopian nature --> Lord of the Flies
...................................
(with Annemarie's help @apass)
*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions
judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards
difference
which differences exactly?
what are their interferences and their diffractions?
--> the surprises that come with finding “variations”
(stories about[...]
(446)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]usoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe starts making Bible fals (فال انجیل opening the Bible to a random page and read a verse that he believed was addressed at him)
◦he makes list (pro & cons --> debit & credit [--> mentality of business studies] --Weber--> book-keeping: distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism)
◦
•Crusoe: true protagonist of the empire (--Joyce--> prototype of British colonialism, *mythology of colonialism* --Sina--> #fable of imperialism)
•(romantic notion of) nature: idyllic =/= (Crusoe) nature: unforgiving + sparse }<-- utopian =/= dystopian nature --> Lord of the Flies
...................................
(with Annemarie's help @apass)
*sources of knowledge =/= styles of knowing* ==> tensions
judgment: an occasion to apply one's own standards =/= observation: a mean to get to know somebody else's standards
difference
which differences exactly?
what are their interferences and their diffractions?
--> the surprises that come with finding “variations”
(stories about)
vessels & fluids
pain & technicians
patients & doctors
techniques & technologies
(bracketing the practices =/=) foregrounding the practices --> objects come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are manipulated ==> reality multiplies
=/= single passive object in the middle waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives (SK the elephant parable)
philosophy used to approach knowledge in an epistemological way (~ preconditions for acquiring true knowledge = Alex's question “what is artistic research”) =/= (Annemarie's) *knowledge = a matter of manipulation (=/= reference)* ==> ethnographic interest in knowledge practices (--to--> “what are artist researchers doing?”)
xxxxxxxx
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#project: to create a multidisciplinary know[...]
(447)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.1[...]with finding “variations”
(stories about)
vessels & fluids
pain & technicians
patients & doctors
techniques & technologies
(bracketing the practices =/=) foregrounding the practices --> objects come into being and disappear with the practices in which they are manipulated ==> reality multiplies
=/= single passive object in the middle waiting to be seen from the point of view of seemingly endless series of perspectives (SK the elephant parable)
philosophy used to approach knowledge in an epistemological way (~ preconditions for acquiring true knowledge = Alex's question “what is artistic research”) =/= (Annemarie's) *knowledge = a matter of manipulation (=/= reference)* ==> ethnographic interest in knowledge practices (--to--> “what are artist researchers doing?”)
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#project: to create a multidisciplinary knowledge program around the relationship between art, marketing and [?], highlighting the imbricated فلس فلس nature of [?] as tangible resources and knowledge
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#project index Tehran theory: to think ethnographically about non-unilateral and non-static picture of aspiration in the context of contemporary Tehran eco-techno-culture
•archive question
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
•monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokenization and verification of natural assets --> augment & utilize --?--> provoking our relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and [...]
(448)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.1[...]raplanetary consumption: what the ***consumption of place*** means; embryonic consumption sites: store your child's cord blood stem cells)
3. interrogation of the roots of humanism (social sciences)
today:
robotic revolution
biotechnology revolution
*posthuman: ideological account of the future of the human species in annexation with info-bio-technologies =/= *posthumanism: (speculative philosophy + material reality) critique of the discourse and epistemologies of *humanism:
•belief in progress
•technological mastery over nature,
•separation of human and animal kingdom
•therapeutic approach to human behavior
•secular approach to scientific inquiry
*humanism = epistemology: a way of investigating the world that is consonant with our human intuition--understand--> life as comprising essentially animate or inanimate, self or other, human or nonhuman** [=/= set of diverse beliefs]
horror of surgically implanted biomedical enhancement --> (persistence of the) inviolability of the body as the seat of identity <-- a classic humanist assumption
posthumanism
•speculative philosophy + material reality
•abstract philosophy + empirical science
•ancient + futuristic
•exotic + specialized (telesurgery, amorphous computing) + banal + ubiquitous (automobility, eyeglasses)
•
--> apocalyptic era (intelligent machine takeover)
--> ecological ethics (human not the most important form of life on earth)
***attempt to overcome humanness is an age-old human tendency***
what constitutes life
•women --> Schiebinger
•slaves --> Douzinas
•computer viruses --> Parikka
•cellular automata --> Delanda
•bacteria --> Haraway
•swarms -->Thacker
•
*brand = living system* (--> distinguish themselves from environment, exclude from it what is not, feedback communication with environment, self replicate, evolve, ) =/= cultural product
@Femke
(Campbell arguing that) the human and the posthuman are (ways to describe the forces that are) already present in the human condition:
1.
computation of life
mid 19th century weaving technologies ==> logic of computation ==ontology==> “universe = giant computer” : attempting to uncover what life itself is through a better understanding and appreciation of the power and seeming omnipresence of computational logic
•a discourse [~ a way of talking about the world] (and not only a claim that people make)
--> an example of how dominant technologies are not just instruments but models (through which the world is understood)
‘clockwork universe’ was the model for the last four millennia: clockwork-like essence of cosmos + state + body (=/= romanticism, galvanism, m[...]
(450)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.6[...] the monotony of consumption with its transient satisfactions and reinvigorate it anew with fresh promise-claims
for example advertisement for mobile phone = *suggestion* (about a certain design aesthetic + a certain tole in professional life + a certain sexual appeal + a certain social network) =/= *announcement* (about a technical device)
(announcement =/= suggestion: the act of advertising)
}--1--> the idea that advertising's signs = carefully constructed highly selective and distortive ways of seeing [=/= simple reflections of the state of the world] ==(Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, Klein, Curtis, Jhally, @apass, Pierre)==>
•false consciousness
•commodity fetishism
•docility
•passivity
•manipulation of unconscious desire
•environmental degradation
}--2--> the idea that signs actually achieve their aims (through mortise and framing work, cropping, reification, interpellation, cooption, the gaze, face-ism, individuation) --> [Althusser's] interpellation: process by which we are called or hailed into subjecthood through practices imposed onto us from outside interests, subjects are created through material practices (going to church and kneeling down to pray precedes my subjecthood as a spiritual person)
•recruitment advertisement: interpellative genre par excellence ~ through the practice of response we enter into the predefined parameters of relation with the organization {Microsoft's “we want you!” --> 1: act of defining the subject: one who is special, unique, an individual among the masses. 2: collective pronoun: “we” serves to close the subject and the organization within a circuit of common purpose. 3: what is missing: a concrete visualization of working life in the organization, an absence which allows the reader to project his/her own fantasy onto space : ‘infantilize the organization ==> empower the subject’ --represent--> an imaginary relationship =/= real conditions of our existence}
}--✕--> (Campbell) ****images are ontologically cryptic**** : we conceive images to be both agentic & passive, residing in and affecting many spheres simultaneously
•image: visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, figurality, exist within a distinctive socio-legal environment --> **multiple ontologies [Ihde's multistable] move images beyond simple categories of analysis (<-- that is why i am still a visual artist, @Pierre)
***images are extra-organizational entities*** (they are designed by organization but become) *quixotic* and *uncontrollable*
*fable of complex: there is something about the image that is beyond analytic investigation (--Mitchell--> every image theorist seems to find some residue (surplus value) that goes beyond communication, signification, persuassion (there is an extra in images) --> images are complex {
1. they are constantly mutating in meaning and significance
2. they cr[...]
(451)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.2[...]e sense of global and interspecies (<-- Mortonian) [--> Sina]
4. conceiving of the ‘other’ as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mind-body, etc. (maybe) ==lead==> new conceptions of camaraderie, community, society, friendship [--> artistic research, apass, Viveiros de Castro]
bacteria [also: mushroom, swamp] --> poster-creatures of the flat ontology movement --> challenging classification
replacing Tree of Life with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, archaea, eukaryotes)
*bacteria: the ground zero life forms* -->! ***nearest we can get imagining the Lacanian Real***
we are more bacteria than human
(global) bacterial biome: para-collective (=/= “merely” biological)
*our ways of reacting to bacteria are as political as they are scientific*
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purity & pollution + their deep-seated link with social order and its transgression --Douglas--> {from the idea of poisonous vapours (miasma [unrelated to cleanliness]) --to-->} discovery of pathogenic organisms بيمارى زا ==> modern concept of bacteria
cleansing rituals before the bacteriological age functioned to ward off spirits and restore social order and control (@Elke, @Isabel, the artist as medium)
discovery of germs ==> radical re-conceptualization of dirt (--> it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity)
if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt --Douglas--> we are left with the very old definition of [*]dirt: matter out of place
**when we see dirt --> we see a system**
--Campbell--> when we see bacterial images we are seeing something else
***contamination = a violation of some mythical, symbolic, or political system =/= just a physical problem***
bacteria --> symptom of a disturbed system
symptomatic analysis (=/= feedback)
pioneered by Marxist critics, Althusser
symptomatic analysis of X = to open the possibility of there being unspoken, unacknowledged or disavowed content in X
symptomatic analysis --of--> (content of) antibacterial advertisement --laden--> with libidinal intensity or *visual pleasure* (= an image that is visually intense)
**consumption can be read like dreams** (a text that says more than it consciously expresses) --reveal--> repressed material (disavowed fantasies about: purity, gender, race, family, class, disease, displacement, sublimation, etc.)
◦what fantasy is upheld by presenting repressed material as bacteria (or artwork)?
--> reading against the grain of the text (Jamesonian)
--> advertising images can be read like symptoms of repressed libidinal desire
-i did symptomatic reading of Olearius (but not of ajayeb [...]
(452)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.2[...] instrumental --> change someone's behavior
2. expressive --> (a general view of) social order
pollution --> claim & counter-claim to status
sex pollution <--> body pollution
sexual danger --> symbole of relation between parts of society (hierarchy, collaboration, distinctiveness of social units)
expressive oversystematizing --> (sometimes) necessary to interpret beliefs
cosmologies with pollution symbol
reflection on dirt = reflection on relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death
rules of purity ~= comparative religion
(primitive:) sacredness ~= uncleanness
[an idea of] sanctity = (a little more than) prohibition }--> to protect profanity from divinity
hindu --> relative notion of pollution
cow dung is relatively pure to a Brahman priest, impure to a god
>
*respect <--> pollution*
•khak-e pa خاک پا (feet's dirt)
•dirt/dust as cleansing agent
•
Frazer > Robertson Smith (old testament scholar)
taboo: restriction of man's arbitrary use of natural things + supernatural penalty (--inspire--> fear + precaution) ==> rules of uncleanliness
uncleanliness -->
•supernatural danger
•spiritual state of unworthiness (christianity)
•
i have a savage explanation...
*separation*
clean = set apart = holy
“primitive =/= advanced” :
**hyper attention to the material circumstances of an act** =/= christian (rules of holiness --> motive & disposition of agent is important)
contact with corpse
contact with blood
theology: god man relationship ==> assert (a definition of) nature of human
*most thinking men in the second part opart of 19th century were amateur anthropologists*
--> confused dialogue between anthropology & theology
(Tylor:) the theory of progression: “civilization = gradual progress from an original state similar to that of savagery” --> the idea of general continuity of human culture [---> go to integration]
“man = long process of (cultural) evolution”
what we do & believe is fossil (petrified appendages)
•Tylor --interest--> what quaint relics can tell us about the past ==found==> folklore
•Smith --interest--> common elements in modern and primitive experience ==found==> social anthropology
Green
theory of moral progress
existence and recognition of specific duties
self-sacrifice
reverence
man = unrealized ideal of a best (God)
*religion <--> ethical values of community life* (=/= speculative thought, exotic mythology, arbitrary relationship of an individual person to [...]
(453)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.8