[...]architecture
from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?
modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).
(i don't do filmic voyage)
...................................
By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)
...................................
the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)
one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagation of...
moving material semiotic
part-time organisms
when visuality is looked at in a haptic modality (the tentacular face for example), vision can be figured as touch, not distance. negatively curving in loops and frills, not surveying(/surviving) from above.
...................................
when a depiction (poetic, visual, etc.) is dangerously ambiguous?
are we really immersed in data realities? and that really means we are losing the sight on experiences fetched by our bodies?
co-existing and contradictory incomplete models that ground us in our critically limited existence. what does beyond the (techno-cartographic-episto-cogno-histo-) map's horizon means for this situated “us”?
...................................
(Amanda Boezkes)
the ontological purification apparatus
we are now on an idea of the earth in so to calibrate our sensorial systems to adjust to human-born unpredictabilities that override and neutralize long-standing histories of local knowledge.
how an ecological per[...]
(1)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...]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 imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manifest themselves like the image ‘in suspension’ in a mirror. This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense 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 ‘insurr[...]
(2)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...]onal processes
*Esta: my body knows the answer of what i ask, other states of body, what is mark? --> culture/context specific
*Seba: finding the best questions in beauty is about learning pronunciation, the issue of pronunciation instead of questioning (or their merge?), (statement/question) --> doubt --> postponing an immediate answer (“but before you answer...”) --> death of question
*Esteban: not to do: impose an answer, not triggering in the other, expecting an idea of an answer
*Arianna: deep truth involved, process, point of passage (the axis of child traverses your axis) what you say to the other is a container
*Joke: question --to--> invitation, creating the invitation
*Pierre: posting a problem is not about general sentences, it is about finding new relations in the existing fabric of the world, problematizing our intuitions into problems, therefore it is important to have the “?”
*Sina: remembering beyond history
--------[how can we enter something and not enter it at the same time?]
*Thiago: nonpresence <--> thinking, without body?!
*Aela: is about the question of distance and inside/outside, by practicing openness, it is about when something enters ‘you’
*Sana: physical-presence =/= imagination (mental activity ~= dream) {She needs to see Miyazaki}
*Roger: we do it all the time, for him it is more about active engagement, role of feelings, moments that you are pushed out by the entity
*Maarten: no! enter =/= not-enter, research depends on definitions
*Juan: layers of realities are involved, it is about expanding the consciousness by charming it into 90% presences, theater gives a yes/no quality to the question of entering, actors, stage as Dystopie of presence
*Xiri: yes! this is often the case, we are between 2nd-chances and being-torn-apart
--------[who told the first joke?]
*Gerald: objects =/= actual life (absurdity and absoluteness of objects) (contemplating about object ==> inner smile)
*Nicolas: father (by not getting it right), not mother (she is not the teller type), the tickler is about lunching possibilities
*Vladimir: God, Vladimir thinks this is theological and therefore axiomatic (that means self-evident or unquestionable)
*Lise: Monty Python, specifically the philosopher soccer video, in the way that makes you laugh
*Elke: God, God said “this is reality” (but we didn't get his joke)
*Steven: some funny kid in the street when he was 5 or 6, and it wasn't really a joke more a story
...................................
i like to set up a synonym-finder machine
(looking at mutations of ...)
--> the same way that in Attar's birds, one birds trying to convince another birds, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions, and not really an argument--i am also not having any argument in that sense
the[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0[...] it is not that you want all the audience in the world to identify with a general question or present this as a universal expression, but what could go beyond localization is precisely this concept that you, like me, transitioning body in your environment (bed or whatever) are outstretches of homeliness and forces that distribute across space and discourse, territories and sensing zones, you are an exchange between self and environment. this is pragmatism. like the variety of bed sheets, we are proposed with answers that vary, before posing any question.
to reformulate the question that was posed to you: how your proposal is capable of traversing from the bed to the wild?
pre-historic personhood
my work is concerned with connections, mediation and passages.
what you take for granted, is in another words, what that you can't not know.
(my proposal:)
the past is not absolute!
the idea is that the mythical became the mythological --> Things could be treasured for their beauty as opposed to
their utility or their numinousness.
(Martha Kenney's) “wild facts”
facts that won't hold still
fables
fables of ajayeb, creatures of imaginations, (im)possible worlds
...................................
your institutional hacks
three things to consider in my work:
projection, immersion, and synthesis
seeking to be at once inside and outside the topic
the issue of topology -- what remains invariant as a result of transformation
suggestive power of the figure
...................................
synthesis =/=? genesis (to originate something, to design)
genesis =/=? apocalypse
...................................
in research, contrast between method and subject, is a tool
(in studying natural history)
in critique, contrast between effect and affect, is a tool
(assumed quality of the object and one's own named experience)
[these tools are perhaps cognitive objects]
...................................
Enlightenment as cultural European phenomenon versus a scientific British one
(the theatrical function of natural philosophy in the England Enlightenment)
the function of natural philosopher in 18th century was to use experimental science machines to turn inert matter into active power, light/fire/heat/etc. to lecture an wealthy and polite fee-paying audience, in order to save them from irrationality, that inside all matter there is life and power, and that life was divine.
(however all this was all swept away in the industrial revelation)
William Herschel, an amateur natural philosopher discovering Uranus 1781
(Enlightenment was all about people changing their disciplines)
project of constructing a new theory of [...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.9[...]ual nature
*culture/civilization --to--> collective (emphasizing operation of gathering or composing and heterogeneity of the assembled)
*muslim countries --to--> muslim majority countries
*understanding --to--> better understanding
*what does X mean --to--> what does X mean for you
*body --to--> lived body
*body --to--> lived image
*language --to--> specialized languages
*world --to--> built world / thought world / described world / descripted world
*producing knowledge --to--> participating in knowledge projects
*to explain --to--> to explain in terms of...
*place/location --to--> neighborhood (ask ‘why this neighborhood?’ instead of place)
ajayeb helps me to work on:
-history
-poetics
-animality --> inhabiting material and semiotic positions --> how to find a descriptive act that is not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses? / this is about the places things take and occupy in our phenomenal world. / it is difficult to discuss the night-sky without first breaking it up into constellations. (Matthew Carey)
i have been building my own islamology or islam-studies department, through a low-voice critical mildly blasphemic rant about imagination
(anthropology of non-experimental imagination in the islamicated worlds)
[there is a difference between **experimental imagination** and imagination]
we are at the edge of extinctions
many species and lives are migrating to “where” and nowheres, pushing to the oblivion.
my issue with the ‘timing of understanding’ --> i don't want to be understood by you, i want to be loved by you ==> messenger + message --> so how do i produce lovers? (=/= Don Juan's type of love) --> there is a genius in your everyday talks that transforms me and has nothing to do with understanding (with the information that i grasp)
(using Martha Kenney thinking:)
i am interested in crafting words, phrases, and languages that reworlds us. (reworlding is about reorienting us in the world differently. --> is that what i meant by changing the rhythm of somebody's story?) what is important for me is ***what words ‘do’ rather what words ‘point at.’*** --> if not evidence then ‘what’?! *****the magic of the right word*****
...................................
communicating knowledge is always also making it
(false: backstage making knowledge, finding truths, connections etc. and then all of this gonna be communicated by publication, teaching, exhibition, etc.)
all the useful ideas i ever had, have happened in the process of deliberating, communicating, exchanging, and so on.
**trying to communicate is the same as making knowledge
(i don't make, i communicate)
...................................
from paf:
-lunching a counter-exotic movement toward the Book of Wonders: (1) pos[...]
(5)[...notes/midday review.txt]%1.1[...]onstructively talk about the reappropriations of meaning we might allow animation to constitute itself.
-how to train yourself in spotting relevant questions and unilaterally [einseitig] imposed questions? (their differences) [~? mofti مفتی, fatva فتوا =/= khotbe خطبه]
(to put the ‘question’ at risk)
*milieu-thinking* (to think by the milieu) :
1. no reference to the ground
2. never separating from milieu
(Virgin Mary requires a milieu [of symbolic efficacy, categories of belief, etc.])
what is the milieu of ajayeb? (ghalamrov قلمرو, mohite ejtemayi محیط اجتمایی, its ecology)
“natural”: that which science will eventually explain ==> nature =/= “natural”
“nature”: that larger, older, and wiser configuration that gets credit for ingenuity (instead of the creature's bodily know-how) by the call of the scientist
عجایب ajayeb's relations to the world, rhizomatic connections to other practices that likewise explore a metamorphic (rather than representational) relation
Earth =/= cradle
Surrealists’ automatism to cultivate lucid trances is missing the techniques of imagination developed by Ibn Arabi, (or by Sohrevardi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)
=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)
‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*
(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)
the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsipe [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])
(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)
(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified
commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران
[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.3[...]***consequential practice*** among many, make possible in the collective task of building and sustaining livable worlds ----> taking texts as worlds, taking people as worlds
-(when talking about your project) you are teaching me what makes you move. --> that means i need to learn how to be affected differently (other than my own projects terms) in order to affect (others) differently [# my bow and arrow intervention] ---- to give intense attention to your gestures (expressing desires, expectations, affects) and to respond to them in remarkable way.
critical hedonism (Archer)
--> refusal of the “embodied anxiety”
affective economies (Ahmed)
--> which affective economies animate our own bodies as scholars/artist/... and as people
(asking) is this practice good for the subjects involved?
--> we create (involuntary) differences, the question is, is the world enriched by these differences? (by Sina, Xiri, Aela, etc.)
-(also be careful with) “differences as raw material” in a “delocalized cultural capitalism (geopolitics of knowledge)” --(Renan in conversation with Peran)--> “internal colonialism,” “local difference as an object of study and raw material,” and “cooptation of imagination in the networks of information-connection.”
-(looking for other metaphors of) alignments =/= operational references to co-production
(Marti Peran) “The surplus of images has reached the maximum degree of pollution. In turn, the planetary connection ensures the exchange of images regardless of the visual regimes from which they come from. Images no longer speak anywhere. In this situation, the political task is to return to the linguistic battlefield. It won't be possible to do things differently if we do not start talking differently. The most urgent imperative is a language inventiveness.”
(atomism)
-constant and precarious self-management of molecular projects in a horizon-less future
-artists in the operation of self-making ourselves
#the image i made for Sohrevardi; allegory of Sohrevardi; the image's discursive architecture and its diverse inventiveness; (being careful with being) seductive in staging diversity; --> “an ecology of monologues”? (Renan);
-“The monologue is a linguistic space freed from negotiation.” [...] “Now, it seems that everything could be solved by the universal application of mediation, participation, collaboration processes [etc.] without realizing that this entails the strengthening of the social cohesion model that becomes universally inclusive.” [...] “The monologue, in this perspective, is a form of silence, a way of disappearing. One way to cease-to-be when we are forced to be.” (Peran)
how can i stop and resist “self-exploitation”? --> instead of thinking about transindividualism and commons, etc.
“An artwork executed fr[...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3[...]
never use understanding stand alon in a sentence --> better understanding {'better’ opens situatedness, for who and how “better,” etc.}
Rhetoric <--(has to do with)--> Contingent
Aristotle (in his work on rhetoric) was against contingency. He believed that the “unavoidable and potentially unmanageable presence of multiple possibilities” or the complex nature of decisions creates and invites rhetoric. (=/= Plato saw rhetoric as pure deceit [gul] and positioned it in politics. [you can see he is terrified by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth
*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?
...................................
(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)
از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one 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 [...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4[...]br />
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 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)
fo[...]
(12)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]fective 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 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
ve
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
(‘[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.9[...]ons 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 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 self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)
[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)
*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)
diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)
*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?
(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)
...................................
narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism
[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Irania[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.3[...]r of the naked ethnic body
hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed
...................................
%note on Alice's workshop:
how the idea of mimesis came when we were not sure what she meant by “make note.” the signifier of “note” defined itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)
Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the workshop was based on her (finished) ‘notions,’ with her ‘indisputables,’ her ‘literal’ objects; (dance, active, body, imagination, practice, generative, creative, etc.)
•production of the “I” in her work; (a nasty side-effect: collateral individuation) (when were the moments in the workshop that an interesting “we” was created and for whom?)
•the problematic difference between ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ at the footing of her thinking (--> my whole apass research is about this)
•(artist's) imagination as a magic wand that can transform things
*what helped me was the idea of thinking with a ‘dormant metaphor’ (in my own work) and ‘activate’ it, in a way that the problems and pleasures of thinking with that metaphor is felt. by ‘dormant metaphor’ what i mean is an operative word that one is using often and is left uninterrogated. for example the problems of “landscape” as a particular ontological tool for me became apparent only after i committed myself to that metaphor in the course of the interview with Pierre and Alice. to stay with a story, to live its contradictions. (and the position of it in a sentence)
•“it was ‘landscape’ talking; not me!”
•why i was seeing Tehran as the ‘ghostly landscape’? (matter of a confrontation with Tehran? exteriority of my subjecthood is at stake? ~->!? the arbitrary position of “genius loci” : that from a genius position one can see for good. -how to make myself nonarbitrary--not subject to individual determination--in relation to Tehran? --> towards ‘situated knowledge’)
•what kind of material-discursive practices thinking with “landscape” committed me to? [to explore and feel this commitment (and its consequences) is ‘staying with the trouble’ for me]
it felt like Alice believes[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.4[...]s unasked-for patterns (@Luisa)
taking up each other patterns [which are sometimes obvious, sometimes cryptic]
(what is the other name of the practices of “string figures” in Iran? -->[stars, facts, fabulations, “far”s, patternings,]--> all cosmopolitical, composes the “we”)
•a “we” compositional
•an “ajayeb” compositional
•
anthropocene system thinking
•feedback loops
•thermodynamics & 18th century mathematics (=/= hyperbolic mathematics in ‘crochet’ --> excess of surface, --> story of interface)
•comparative interpretive thinking (a dominant western model of knowledge production--which i am using!)
•modern synthesis: restrictive system theories within evolutionary theories
•systems idea
•
*“The global scale takes precedence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing
[title]
Bilingual Stories for Ajayeb NatureCultures
(...stories ‘for’ =/= ...stories ‘of’)
does Brexit and Trumplandia changes the landscape of English use as a language?
the image of pedagogy : semiotic apparatus (& technological) (--> the ritual of Simpson strangling Bart)
(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to
(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)
the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.
(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
t
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***
the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking
‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same
#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•
[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary
belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)
...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”
(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous
#[nodes and notes]
the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ [...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.9[...]br />
(@Luisa 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 inve[...]
(20)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]ernal 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 affective economies for her: abstraction, constructivism, idealism, figurative empathy, symbolism, longing,
3-
4-
(psychoanalysis [@Luisa] allows us to see that) *emotionality involves movement*
associations whereby “feeling” take us across different levels of signification, not all of which can be admitted in the present. (+Ahmed)
-emotions move back and forth (past associations, repression traces on present) and sideways (sticky associations between figures and signs) --> something as the cause of a feeling in someone --> “involving relationships of *difference and displacement*{as the form or language of the unconscious} without positive value” --> affective economies -->{social, material, psychic}
{ psychoanalysis = "absent presence” of historicity-->(sideways movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and destination
**the movement between signs converts into affect
feeling <--> fetish commodity
[...]
(21)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.4[...]
egosyntonic personality disorders are most difficult to treat (such as: narcissistic personality disorder, anorexia, gambling problem)
*egosyntonic: in harmony with the needs and goals of the ego [--> defences ==> maladaptive coping skills ~=> anxiety, distress, depression]
*egodystonic: in conflict with the needs and goals of the ego, in conflict with a person's ideal self-image
obsessive-compulsive disorder --> egodystonic
obsessive-compulsive personality disorder --> egosyntonic
Freud: psychic conflict arising when the original lagging instincts come into conflict with the ego (or egosyntonic instincts) [such as: erection problem ==> egodystonic]
...................................
[*]personality disorder: (a type of psychological disorder generally defined by) the lack of insight into the disorder
borderline personality disorder =/= shades of gray
(a view that sees) significances as unfair and uncaring (devaluation) or flawless (idealization)
(a standardized criteria of diagnosis since 1980) a certain class of neurotics who, when in crisis, appeared to straddle the borderline into psychosis
fluctuation in identity --> chaotic identity (=/= chaotic imagination)
*the most treatment-resistant personality type*
-75 percent in female patients
-related to neglect in childhood
borderline personality disorder often comes with very smart people
borderline personality + high intelligence ==>
•parakandegi-e zehn پراکندگی ذهن sporadic and dispersed mind --✕--> hadaf jahat kushesh fa'aliat هدف جهت کوشش فعالیت having a target, direction, effort, activity
•going from one thing to another without consistency in life باری به هر جهت
borderline personality disorder + narcissistic personality disorder [seeing people from top to down] ==> winning arguments by mixing imagination and reality, saying everything they like to others
--> (donya-e zehni) a mental world in which imagination and reality are not distinguish (~-> lying)
(a nontherapeutic approach) to turn the borderline into storyteller:
•dissociation --into--> impossible association
•disconnection as a state of consciousness --into--> impossible connection
•lying as a feature --into--> fabulation
•manipulative behavior --into--> articulative
•demand --into--> performance
•chaotic identity --into--> chaotic imagination
•ذهن پراکنده (sporadic mind) --into--> ذهن انحرافی (deviant mind)
•sensitivity (of thin or no psychological skin) --into--> sensibility
•
a therapeutic approach to borderline personality:
•dialectical behavior therapy (<--?-- mindfulness)
•
...................................
%notes on #work[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.4[...]odystonic]
...................................
[*]personality disorder: (a type of psychological disorder generally defined by) the lack of insight into the disorder
borderline personality disorder =/= shades of gray
(a view that sees) significances as unfair and uncaring (devaluation) or flawless (idealization)
(a standardized criteria of diagnosis since 1980) a certain class of neurotics who, when in crisis, appeared to straddle the borderline into psychosis
fluctuation in identity --> chaotic identity (=/= chaotic imagination)
*the most treatment-resistant personality type*
-75 percent in female patients
-related to neglect in childhood
borderline personality disorder often comes with very smart people
borderline personality + high intelligence ==>
•parakandegi-e zehn پراکندگی ذهن sporadic and dispersed mind --✕--> hadaf jahat kushesh fa'aliat هدف جهت کوشش فعالیت having a target, direction, effort, activity
•going from one thing to another without consistency in life باری به هر جهت
borderline personality disorder + narcissistic personality disorder [seeing people from top to down] ==> winning arguments by mixing imagination and reality, saying everything they like to others
--> (donya-e zehni) a mental world in which imagination and reality are not distinguish (~-> lying)
(a nontherapeutic approach) to turn the borderline into storyteller:
•dissociation --into--> impossible association
•disconnection as a state of consciousness --into--> impossible connection
•lying as a feature --into--> fabulation
•manipulative behavior --into--> articulative
•demand --into--> performance
•chaotic identity --into--> chaotic imagination
•ذهن پراکنده (sporadic mind) --into--> ذهن انحرافی (deviant mind)
•sensitivity (of thin or no psychologiof thin or no psychological skin) --into--> sensibility
•
a therapeutic approach to borderline personality:
•dialectical behavior therapy (<--?-- mindfulness)
•
...................................
%notes on #workshop of question (HWD)
-how come in my drawing class participancts couldn't even hold the pen
-participants lenzes couldn't focus, the words were in blur and in disarray
-i had to stop free associations and staggerings, and return to the task at hand
-it was like teaching a new language
-i was trying to share my methorodlogy, specificly. not a jam session
-is it neccesory or interesting to learn eachother methodlogies in order to get involved and engagned in eachother practices? maybe not --> go back to representational tools --are representational tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not[...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.4[...]and
-it was like teaching a new language
-i was trying to share my methorodlogy, specificly. not a jam session
-is it neccesory or interesting to learn eachother methodlogies in order to get involved and engagned in eachother practices? maybe not --> go back to representational tools --are representational tools the best we have? or maybe, structurally we can't give workshop in apass HWDs or endweeks, because participants are not there by free will that is usually mobilising them to look for and join a workshop that they are interested in.
%(am I?) ‘coming back with advices’ in my work [[#Esta]]
is it interesting for me or my research to think about how we moved that plant around in the 4th floor?
*moving plants* is risky
as backdrop for human activity
passively vegetating
making local and global connections: which local or global connections was made (by Sina, Xiri and Esta moving the plant)? (how the plant was repositioned in our) making of public common spaces
-practices of concern
(attentive to the plant that was a) shared “thing” between us
what was mediated, navigated and articulated with that plant in apass 4th floor?
(with this i am trying to ask about the) kinds of imaginative world-making at work
gathering forces
-
the mice, and the pattern of rice, how did we become the reader of mice's text? --> reader is always always constructed.
the mice disconnected us from global digital networks and wrote something on the floor...
(which objects of our systems design supporting some and not others) leaving out what are locally perceived as “nonpeople” can mean nonworking system. (biologists not seeing their secretaries as doing real science, artists in apass not seeing the mice doing real work, etc.)
--> *(Leigh Star's) “ethnography of infrastructure”* -infrastructure is both relational and ecological, both transparent and opaque. it is part of the balance of action, tools, and the built environment. [*]infrastructure: a dense interwoven fabric of shared visions of possible and acceptable dreams (of the inovative, as techniques, knowledge, know-how, and the institutions).
...................................
my previous lectures have been communicating something I don't quite understand to an audience that doesn't want to know. but still somehow they became not indifferent to my madness and we managed to establish lines of interest and interference (=/= restoring the phalus to its proper place, or getting a membership)
i am building another wit =/= you know when you are on some kind of auto-respond, those smart fast answers. my wits take ages to come through. in a way i have been slowing down certain kinds of wit. that's also why it is so easy to silence me.
i have been also busy with the timing of understanding. how to keep understanding open and o[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.5[...]Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schemas of text and the trace, Malabou on plasticity [=/= elasticity] (change of the paradigm of writing as developed in Derrida's Grammatology with the new paradigm of plasticity, her interest in relation between form, materiality and meaning) / “Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing” (28 pages)
[week 4] 20th century sciences and philosophies, the notion of fabrication of concepts:
•Xin Wei --> Whitehead / “Whitehead's Poetical Mathematics” (19 pages)
[week 5] on articulation:
•Deleuze and Guattari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)
[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”
[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)
...................................
#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality (“on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•
the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing
(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.7[...]ts geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible
(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]
after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?
another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’
...................................
because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext
...................................
committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:[...]
(28)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.8[...]storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ the world,]
-to think creatures/beings that have evolved in intra-action with their environment
-to question and examine the ontological issues: the locus of knowledge is presumed never to be too far removed from the human. in the workshop we reimagine the locus of knowledge in other location that nonhuman might occupy
==> a better account for the *ontology of knowing* =/= merely ‘welcome’ dispossessed Others (women, slaves, children, animals, and other exiles from the land of knowers) into the fold of knowers [no! no!]
•to challange “I think therefore I am”: the idea that the “world” is an idea that exists in the human mind --> knowledge making is a not mediated activity =/= (Barad's) “direct material engagement”
•(the workshop begins with a position that believes:) knowing is a distributed practice that includes the larger material arrangement [then isn't the practice of writing insufficient?]
after the first round we can ask: what do you need (un)know to write/think that story? or, what do you need to forget/unlearn in order to be able to think/imagine that world?
another round of the workshop could be: #imagine and describe an alien world where there is no ‘mediation’ or activities that are not ‘mediated’
...................................
because of working on ajayeb, i am becoming a “definitionist,” or “definitionologist” (not in the classical sense of concept theory)
a definition i give is a local abstraction, even when it is making boundaries for a dispersed or global concept, it is still a situated knowledge. that means it might be categorical but not applicable outside this particulare niche of space and time, whether it is in a bar in a conversation with Eszter or when accessed in my hypertext
...................................
committed to the imperative of the Rig, things not to do in the pop-up book:
•use as ironic: incongruity in expectations of what is ment and what it will mean in advance
•use to symbolize: as a way of not dealing with sujet supposé savoir
•use of anamorphic gaze: a non-diffractive optical system
--> to be careful (or keep in check) with sequential palindromic notion of pop-up book, to deal with the parsable seesaw motif inherit in the pop-up book Blickmaschin
•use hylomorphic: assumes form is inscribed onto passive matter (by an agent with a design in mind)
•
(relevance should be worked) non-ironic non-symbolic non-anamorphic non-palindromic non-hylomorphic (?)
...................................
towards writing the end of apass dossier
•practices: workshops, (bow and arrow,) ajayeb.net, rigs --> pop-up book, notes, routines, excess,
•trajectory: bibli[...]
(29)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.9[...]each other up into vanguards پيشقراول --> (towards thinking) differential/oppositional consciousness (=/= father, single kind of creators)
“you can know if you are wrong in rather interesting, situated ways”
@Leo
@Maarten
[*]"was”: (so important for iranians [#past]) a geographical place, a place:
•of pain
•of fantasy
•of hope
•of possibility
•of defeat
•of breaking and building
(--> a borderland)
metaphors that are also real places
figurings that are also (always unequally) lived in the flesh
to think “contact zone” instead of “binary shape”
ways of living and technologies, ways of doing the world forcibly brought together in relations of serious inequality, but which do not take the simple shape of dominator and dominated
*“abstractions are precious and they take a huge amount of work to know how to build them well”*
(?how do i know when in working with ajayeb) sometimes you are required (at the same time!):
•to be dead literal
•to be precise
•to be analytically good
•to be unforgivingly technically right
•to be flaming imaginative
•
*breakdown*: where the normalizing fails ==> something else emerges
*every collective needs people who feel:
•(a grace given to you by the structure of your cells, you don't know where it comes from:) “root sense that the world is not dead” --> a sense that things are moving and alive and future-full
•its people who feel despair (...emphasize the futurelessness of it all)
*!!!--> we (also) need sensibilities that are angrey at each other
(aligned with Haraway) my position has been that: we don't choose our sensibilities, we wake up and figure out what they are
(Haraway take on the ways we) may enginner as a species now (tech, syntax, etc.)
to refuse the story of the apocalypse + (still) recognizing the depth of the trouble
--> Freud's thanatos غريزه مرگ, a death instinct, (it is a deep, instinctual lure:) *a perverse pleasure in believing in inevitable failure*
*transference is descriptively very apt for what goes on in artistic moves [<-- to be careful of]
**to risk a feeling of (despair, of...)
the ways some of us risk things intellectually and emotionally different than each other
prima donna: doing whatever one does without any particular effort to nuance anything
*multiple impossibilities
learning from religion, the ways of which the name of God has become an impossible category. both catholics and muslim shia (#islam) are wellprepared for feeling this way, some kind of recognition of imp[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.4[...]cises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.
there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)
up-to-the-minute technologies
complicated issues around security apparatuses and [...]
(32)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.6[...]tly literate constituent seekers
-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]
...................................
(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories
now-but-not-then quality of continuities
Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***
you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*
(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming
Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum pieces at best. vegans deadly imagination sometimes don't get what they kill: most kinds of animals that have long histories in close association with people.
there is no relationship to this world that does not involve extensive killig (Haraway)
up-to-the-minute technologies
complicated issues around security apparatuses and different national struggles
histories of dispossession and genocide
“do you believe?" = "do you believe in a list of dogma?”
totally wrong question: do you believe in God?
[should i go to Berlin after apass?] a parochial person دهاتی (in the pressure of the seriously elite places[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%8.7[...]interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself
تأثر ta'asor, نتیجهی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy
the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in
in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march
(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date
the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams
the labor of looking
“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”
(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact
“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometimes it passes right into the middle of your brain and gets stuck there.”
(cryptic and as) crystal clear as a scream
[a question or something else] lodged in a tactile sensate anxiety --> aesthetic scene (of the senses) --> scene --> shape
(anxiety has to do with the sensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path
trauma[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9[...]escription of that force
hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”
high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time
[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism
[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing
[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile
imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine
which hyperobject you are caught in?
image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow
figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex
my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark
situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner
*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)
the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of the world’?
(Morton asking for) a geophilosophy that doesn't think simply in terms of human events and human significance
Morton: global warming =/= climate change
if one takes the ‘climate change’ as a substitute for ‘global warming’ is like “cultural change” as a substitute for Renaissance, or “change in living conditions” as a substitute for Holocaust
[...]
(35)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.2[...]br />
takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)
تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking
the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بیعسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge
rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)
...................................
•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self-image; solution of basic conflict:
◾تسليم compliance --> goodness, love
◾سلطه aggressiveness --> strength, leadership
◾کناره گیر aloofness --> wisdom, independence
•*psychotic: makes a house, take it seriously, invites everyone to come (--> loss of touch with reality)
}=/= richer, more complex, more satisfying personality --> person responds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings
•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)
...................................
my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself
IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long
vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)
death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بیوفا, liabl)
put into words: have I been destroyed?
[...]
(36)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.2[...] drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized
Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)
...................................
pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries
bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی
(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)
motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws
what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?
“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”
to think about X = to change X
we change the subject
we get some info: there are 5 people in the room. but when we bring that information into thought (because of how we feel and of our believes ==>) we start to bend the 5 to 6 or to 50 --> a try to change the reality =/= thinking in calm condition using science, information, conversation
...................................
bipolar --> mood disorder --> relationship of the self with emotions
borderline --> personality disorder --> relationship of the self with the world (of subjects)
narcissist --> personality disorder --> relationship of the ego with the world
...................................
people who grew up in iran and former soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz [...]
(37)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.6[...]which exactly do let the notion of production sneak back in under an other name)
(Manning on p.16 5th paragraph is an example of an) unaccountable unsituated abstract claim of reality:
•unaccountable --> where do you stand saying this?
•unsituated --> for whom is this good?
•abstract --> how you are saying it?
the notion of “care for the event”
=/= perspectives
=/= subjects
=/= persons
“occasion itself creates its subjects” (<-- you are a subject inside the occasion, how can you stand out and say that?)
(Manning) creating a concept of care =/= care as actually practiced in different parts of the world by people
(what is the politics of not caring?)
Manning's rhetoric of reasoning: ‘virtuous’
telling soft wisdom tale with an emotional twist at the end and how she did the right thing and came out clean and cool --> rectitude
her text has become all about the achievements of senseLab with a cover of high philosophical abstract conceptualization (~= fortification)
=/= taking *risk* (=/= adventure) of talking about the real problems that you face in doing/thinking
=/= abstraction as the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction
“adventure” is not the name of the game for me, for two reasons:
1. Manning brought her concept of ‘adventure’ to Belgium: the land of Tintin, poster of the moderinst adventure agency sold by the image of the individual blond univerasal truth-seeker exporting company who always wins by definition, Tintin is the one who doesn't have a culture and always others have culture in his stories
2. i have been researching europeans who came for an “adventure” to iran in the last millennium (such as Olearius), and it doesn't look good. when europeans go out of their center to east it is adventure (or anthropology), that means othering and feeling the differences of the other in order to feel outside. but when, for example iranians go to Europe, they never feel they are there for “adventure,” they are there to learn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”
(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]
-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?
rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “eme[...]
(39)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11[...]rn. the mode of adventure plays this role in the colonial dynamic of “going out there”
(my fundamental difference with her is that) for Manning (and Alex): “philosophy is a priori to storytelling” [=/= Serres]
-why did i behave the way i did in the workshop?
-was it my politeness, routine, habit of respect? what are the consequences of my specific way of (non)relating to her figure as a master, knower, seer, in relation to that which she offers and represents?
-why the scandalous was responded to, assimilated, burried, swallowed in the way it did in the workshop?
rethinking emergence:
-with the idea of “let it emerge,” was it herself that emerged because of us? (apply emergence-thinking to her figure in the workshop)
-how a collective resentment “emerged” in the participants? (apply emergence-thinking to the participants)
-how hierarchies “emerged” in the workshop? and what are they?
to be ungraspable for the market ==> ? (marketing the self)
to be unintelligible for the university ==> ? (devitalizing the university)
questions:
•decontextualization, as an artistic ready-at-hand tool of concept-making, does it do good or bad to knowledge and imagination (as it is practiced by the people who use it) and how?
•facing the challenge of bringing specificity and imaginative traction to our objects of attention, how do we build nontranscendental abstractions?
•and, why self-promoting is such a turn-off? (projecting a self-image of being 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 t[...]
(40)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.1[...]re 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 a project concerns the formation of personal relationships
comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority
...................................
only working with (that seems to be) your idea
(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious
...................................
Hillman
like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness [...]
(42)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.4[...]rt 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 a project concerns the formation of personal relationships
comfortable outsider status: impotent but secure in one's own critical superiority
...................................
only working with (that seems to be) your idea
(the problem of) being always so deliberate and cautious
...................................
Hillman
like the conver of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)
“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*
(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**
(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/=[...]
(43)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...]of his book (myth of analysis), an internal drama externalized materialized in the media, sci-fi fabulations of violence and war (such as Game of Thrones) are perhaps projects that also craft and give form to what is inside: dragon, torture, journey, landscape, getting caught, etc.
what are art's investments in psychology today?
all (including artists) must envision suffering and illness as something “wrong” =/= the fantasies, feelings, and behavior arising from the imaginal part of ourselves are *archetypal* in their sickness and thus *natural* --> (those odd irrationalities) ***are required for life***
--> then what is there to analyze? (<-- relevant question for apass)
“unconscious” and “psychodynamics” are *fantasies that could be replaced with better ones*
(Hillman's archetypal psychology) **asks the psyche to move with its sickness into life**
(to discover) a sense of soul in the sufferings of Psychopathology : ***something lives in me that is not of my own doing*** (--> demon, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***
analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual
mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego
****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> diony[...]
(44)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...]n, psychic force,,,) to take soul with one wherever one goes and to react to life in terms of this soul
symbolic meanings, insights, eros, body, craziness, the *lower aspects of the gods* --> the freedom to imagine and to feel psychic reality
“inner reality” --> called up by ego ==> individuality = to be peculiar, to be peculiarly what one is, with one's own odd patterns of archetypal responses
♥***we are never only persons; we are always also Mothers and Giants and Victims and Heroes and Sleeping Beauties*** (<-- what i am learning from psychoanalysis)
the mythic appears within the language, observation, and theories even of science
recent attempts to move out of analysis: (@Aela)
•group therapy
•sensitivity training (--> apass)
•love-ins
•blowing-the-mind with drugs
•
[*]analysis (is too potent) is too much a part of this century's self conception --requirement--> of ego psychology
([apollonic aim of enlightening consciousness -->] enlightened *egoization* of the psyche =/= *a darker and softer kind of life* ~-> end of neurosis, end of analysis, end of consciousness...) analysis --in-20th-century--> rediscovering the soul and reawakening its imagination
(rethought -->) [*]analysis: essentially as imaginative activity (or an activity of the imaginal realm) as it plays through all of life --> [the idea of one's “fable” ~] ***what is the fantasy he has of what he does?***
analysis is an *enactment*
enactment necessitates *myth*: a tale about its ritual
mysogyny <-- manifestation of the western, protestant, scientific, apollonic ego
****Hillman (penetrating the analysis in accordance with mythical perspective):
*transference --> erotic*
*unconscious --> imaginal*
*neurosis --> dionysian*
-what are the manifestations of ego in ajayeb?
-please let's have a darker kind of light...
(Keats:) world = the vale of soul-making }==> you'll find out the use of the world
(Hillman:) psychoanalysis: something one learns through “analysis” --> processes of the mind, heart, and soul (that were not included in the field of psychology in the past century)
(Jung:) depth psychology: an ontology of the soul based on archetypes
(a -logy that allows the) soul's speculative function
Hillman proposing a deep uncertainty concerning the root metaphor, the true myth of the work (of analysis)
mystes
epoptes (an initiate in the Eleusinian mysteries; one who has attended the epopteia)
shaman
an initiator
guru of the body*
root metaphor of psychology (?)
(until 1700: pattern = patron) --Hillman--> to discover this pattern [the general myth of our field] = to search fo[...]
(45)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.5[...]eways --> shifter's only meaning is the object it happens to point to
•drawing figures, hooks, asterisks
•or, placing what's structural, technical, transferential, pulped, leaking, intense
{things: an integrated thin layer to epitomize and abstract in new ways how people are hooked up with their technologies; parsing and criss-crossing some of the built-in categories and new needs of the people who are using it;}
things that do the reading, editing, assembling
*every edit ==> (set off a cascade of:)
•word falls
•Rubik's Cubes
•tropes
•infrastructures
•genres
•rhymes
•off-rhymes
•tonal flips
•half-steps
[compositional listening]
one reads aloud + the others *listening compositionally*
#writing exercise:
following out the impact of things (words, thoughts, people, objects, ideas, worlds) in hundred-word units
theoretical reflections get folded into the analytic, observational, and transferential ways we move
(Stewart + Berlant)
aftershocks of a shock you can't point out
(we shouldn't always ask) “where does the misery come from?”
designers imagined a still life, not a lifeworld where we show up to build things out
evaluative critique =? (mental habit of) demagnetizing things (for the sake of clarity)
proliferation of little worlds...
story = relay, weiterleiten, رله
...................................
in fact i have never been working on the notion of nature, my topic of research, rather have been all along zoology
score: creating disorder out of order
@Lilia
wry --> wryly کج معوج شده
...................................
paleonymy (use of a preexisting word in a new context) --> we are stuck stuck with old skeletons neurotic words [that are not mutating] (for example man, woman, animal, black, etc.) [=/= hope for mutation, random emergence, sudden epistemic newness]
(Avital:) *language = the house of being*
(not to think emancipatory -->) we live in language, we are structured and destructed by language
we can struggle, move, shift meanings, but never can erase or repress meanings
(Freud showed) that if you think you can be oblivious with things and do away with things and have erasure without remanence, it will go in the state of latency (underground) just to blow up in your face later (the ‘return’ of the repressed has ballistic velocities) --Derrida--> you have to work through with meaning and language (otherwise the old meanings always come back, you are never responsible enough with old meanings)
a word, becomes a thorn in our collective thigh
(what i am learning *rigor* from Avital > Derrida) something looks wrong, ([...]
(49)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.9[...]thout doing anything” --> one needs to pass ~= translation
*interest: a mediator that arises between two entities that do not know, before it arises, that they could be attached to each other. -->{
-‘object’: set of quasi subjects that are attached to it
-‘subject’: set of quasi objects that are attached to it}--> what new 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*[...]
(50)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.5[...] 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 mibashand.” (موجودات مقید وهمی فاقد تقرر میباشند)
--> vahdate vojud وحدت وجود =/= vahdate mojud وحدت موجود
*danger: tarde amre mesali طرد امر مثالی ==> ma'ad dar amre khiali معاد در امر خیالی
death, life, past, and future are not properties of objects, rather of subjects (anha sefate nafs hastand آنها صفات نفس هستند) [Corbin]
and you bestow them to objects that you think they are “dead,” “alive,” “from past,” or “of future”
“khorre” or “khorne” according to zaratustra: a light originated from the essence of the divine being and because of that some apparitions have gained hierarchy, and each human capable of a certain techne.
the idea of a divine presence in *heikal* هیکل
according to Socrates: bodies are frames and tools of the selves (nofus نفوس)
according to Plato, what the self (nafs نفس) does not had essentially that it had to descend into the material world? what the senses told the self that itself could not say?
an islamic-iranian cosmology:
-jabaru[...]
(51)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%14[...]on the state, fictioning the state of the earth?)
-a global kind of system knowledge
-a giant database ----> do i need to formulate my project into a technological practice?
what is the smallest unit of interest in the ajayeb cosmology?
the practices of relocating germplasms, including people in form of slaves, all over the earth in order to produce surplus that is transported elsewhere for capital accumulation... (Haraway)
industrial agriculture and plantation
to be storied and studied
the holobiont: host plus of all its microbial symbionts that form ecological units
-recasting the individual as a holobiont; the collective genomes
(Lynn Margulis)
holobionts: “multicellular eukaryotes plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-t[...]
(54)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]ecular biological catalysts, accelerating chemical reaction
using hallucinogenic to cure autism (!?)
bacterial --> social
“individual" = an island to be colonized (by bacteria), [we are] a niche (upon niche (upon niche)) for bacteria
immunall agencise are not (has never been) defensive, they selectively inclusive, they facilitate symbiosis, allowing the possibility of microbes become part of the body
co-metabolism
host-diet
four major symbiosis (symbiotic things) that ruled the planet:
1. rhizobacteria/legumes for nitrogen fixation
2. mycorrhizal interaction with plant roots and seeds
3. endophytic fungal protection against dessication
4. coral reefs and tidal seagrass ecosystems sustain oceanic biodiversity
}--containing--> smaller symbiotic webs we call “organism” <==[product of]== (ancient symbiosis we call) “cells + (ancient symbiosis we call) “genomes”
ritual defense of a dissertation, matter of opponent
a medical theater of dissection, laid out on table with the working-class barber-surgeons laying bare structures for the disquisition (tafahos تفحص) of the professor --> (the ways we are in this) *multi-imaginative theater* (~ congnitive emotional apparatus) --> infectious joy, the situatedness of the joy is infectious
we (should always) work in the context of joy
lost for details (for the fleshiness of ‘this’), not as a general principal or an example for something else
*the tale of detail* --> a small detail that wrenches the self into something that was not before
(the tale of understanding)
Gilbert's bio-sym-poetic joy --> knowledge-making
(Gilbert's) genomic fragment in the picture of mutual-benefit life --?--> metropolitan life insurance company
[--> *apparatuses of thinking* have thick trading zones between ecology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]
(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]
(protestants that were never burnt enough)
we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]
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 me[...]
(55)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16[...]ology and economics up to and including today, that is the mutal adaptation in real world, producing problems for us]
(how we go?) from one life-table to another life-table
(for example from mathematics of life insurance to population biology ~=> co-developement of disciplines; 19th century laboratories + practices of political economy;)
[matters of historical, economical, manegerial, capital, ]
(protestants that were never burnt enough)
we (always) remain in contamination [never in innocence --> be attentive to the tropes and will to innocence in each other act text]
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*? toda[...]
(56)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16[...] ( 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 understanding the language of even of inert, petrified stones. But the righteous man, in Benjamin's imagination, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)
(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.
[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]
...................................
[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins
...................................
(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)
...................................
[Martha Kenney]
(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)
just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy, is an unverifiable and unfalsifiable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. (wikipedia)
etiological myths
etiology: the study of causation, or origination
the politics technology and the politics of storytelling.
[...] Narratives, along with literary devices, tropes, figures, images and the aesthetics of language, inhabit and inform even our most reliable knowledge-making practices.
storytelling as one of the consequential material practices
[storytelling is material practice]
[where there is a situate[...]
(57)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.1[...]f constraint and opportunity. Narratives of both gathering and hunting ways of life produced genders and citizens.)
•tool-weapon equation in masculinist scientific narratives
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 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. [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 [...]
(58)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.2[...]sh a response from a reaction.”
the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.
multispecies contingency
In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.
the capacity to respond and to recognize response
We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.
Engage them [the dogs] as mindful bodies, in relationships of response?
the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)
[we make ‘knowing’. knowing is always a practice of making, and always embodied. the idea that thinking involves disembodiment of the knowing organ is just insane.]
“articulating bodies to other bodies” ----> disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies
entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not
...................................
ajayeb is system imagination
...................................
[Naveeda Khan]
Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global present, imagining a local that lays claims upon all three?
is there a Muslim environmental imaginary?
‘Islamic ecology and environmental ethics’ --> the need to center a vibrant materiality or the liveliness of things in the anthropology of Islam (that has been to date largely preoccupied with Muslim polities and subjectivities.)
It should come as no surprise that my own efforts at centering materiality comes through studying how these predominantly Muslim farmers interact with and come to acknowledge nonhuman forms of life (including the figure of Khidr خضر, dogs, river waters, silt, and lightning, to name a few). Finally, I remain concerned to explore how the singularities of these lives, both human and nonhuman, come to be hitched to the global. This research will culminate in a book tentatively titled Ensouling the Anthropocene: Riverine Life and Climate Change in Bangladesh, in which “ensouling” treats the problem of scaling up singularity to the global, intensifying efforts that began with “Of Children and Jinn.” [source: https://culanth.org/curated_collections/19-everyday-islam/discussions/20-interview-with-naveeda-khan-about-of-children-and-jinn]
...................................
(what i am reading in ajayeb)_with Naveeda: “Muslim cosmology and eschatology hold promoise of ecological thought, providing an unexpectedly materialist perspective on our creaturely interconnecte[...]
(60)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.3[...]and concreteness) -->[a tradition of thought that produces (& works with): “Abstraktheit =/= Greifbarkeit"]
***how ajayeb naratives provided the filaments of (muslim) ecological thought as a perspective on our interconnectedness and mutual entanglements? [Naveeda, Anand, ]
(wanting a) most perfect creation (to leave the best part to the end*) ==> God created humans last of all ==> consigned humans to a state of *belatedness to the world*
(unapologetically) anthropocentric: *making the human drama the most important one to watch*
acts of worship (that bears witness to):
•regularity in nature
•one's own nature
(agian) Khidr, the prophet in green, who is associated with hermeticism and also has a presence [...] as a way to suggest a subterranean connection between [...] textual tradition and the everyday lives of riparian (رود کنارى) Muslims [...]
riparian context ساحل کنار ,رود کنار ,حریم رودخانه
[context =? کنار]
“BE!” بععععع بع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع ع
Ikhwan: every creature knows and speaks of creation
that knowledge is not privilege of humans
that it is the failure of humans to imagine that they live in the presence of mute nature
نکیر و منکر interrogations by Nakir and Munkar, faith-testers of deads in their graves
دجال Dajjal as a dead body returned to life, many will follow him, but as dogs!
-return of humans as dogs --> idea of rebirth --> not homogeneously muslim space
“[who is] compelled to return as if it were a cosmic debt they owed the world”
-pathos of the inability of humans to sustain cross-species companionship --> the visceral dislike of the dregs of the many existence of dogs
--> dogs’ quality of aliveness; being more or less useless other than the occasional and fitful دمدمى protection of households that made them serve as the singular sign of life, a trace of God's surplus creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)
one's future animal self
(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the other in the afterlife?
-polysemy of imagery and wordss
“earth breaks so much” --> ?>
suggesting a چاره (chareh)
inflection of chareh and fetrat
چاره ی فطرت
***ajayeb's heterogeneously muslim spaces
•traces of Hindu, Chinese, Greek interest and thought
•occasion for cross-species sentience (Naveeda's beautiful research in chars)
visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه
bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being we[...]
(63)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.4[...] creativity. (Naveeda's work in chauras)
one's future animal self
(هشتاد ساله) octogenarian mindful of life's finitude
-what do you say/do when your feet is one on the land breaking beneath and the other in the afterlife?
-polysemy of imagery and wordss
“earth breaks so much” --> ?>
suggesting a چاره (chareh)
inflection of chareh and fetrat
چاره ی فطرت
***ajayeb's heterogeneously muslim spaces
•traces of Hindu, Chinese, Greek interest and thought
•occasion for cross-species sentience (Naveeda's beautiful research in chars)
visiting of shobhe to the town
(shobhe gave the town a visit)
شبهه
شبح شبهه
bringing bits and pieces of songs from many places... over their cell phones... being well versed in the different types of music to be able to tell the songs apart...
(Sven, )
attention to the physical surround of the religious consciousness rather than to the inner workings of their body
.
آخرت
آخرش
smells, rotting bodies, eroding bodies, soil composition, etc.
(to imagine dogs and humans coexisting as) competting possibilities within unformed matter* [=/=? companion species]
dwindling quality of life (and diminished humanity)
(Anand, van Dooren, Naveeda wondering) how in certain geographies disappearance of species seems not to give the people a moment's pause
* what_ gives a pause ?
*species self-perpetuation is sometimes with:
•biological reproduction
•becoming
•transfiguration
•rebirth
•symbolic dispersal
•resynthesis
•
sunnat to kill (فى نفسه intrinsically evil) snakes (=/= jinn snake in Anand research/stories of saint animals)
straw, chaff, rice, wheat, lentils,
ماشوره، کاه، بوريا
سبوس
گندم
عدس
the gift of death for the animals:
•عید Eid, God in sacrifice, release from hardship and burden; blithe disposal of animal; euthanize
•چشمزخم evil eye or witchcraft as the cause of animal's death, if they are lost through illness, theft, or accident
bonanza
anthrax
euthanize
inoculate
cagey
•canny حيله گر کمرو
•showing self-interest and shrewdness in dealing with others
•characterized by great cautious and wariness
•reluctant to give information owing to caution or suspicion
بو
-treating smell as indicating an unsettled situation
-inadvertent stench of dead bodies disrupts the composed mental image of the ideal corpse within [...] funereal pra[...]
(64)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.5[...]laces, renames, replicates, and intensifies terms, adding yet more texture, increased vitalization
-it is a sensuous node
-making (my points) a composite of affects and percepts --> speciation is always a cultivated response ***
*trap: “means also mouth, or mode of utterance; it is the “O” curve of lips and throat that makes sounds phonic and names the apprehension of becoming bodily. A trap, in weaving, is also a break in the threads, an unraveling, loosening, unwinding that opens up space. When we think of spider webs, trap is a silk net, a sticky mesh that registers sensation. For the spider, its trap is its nearby-ness, its where-ness, its with-ness. [--> lure;] (Hayward & Weinstein)
-how, then, might we hear the phrase “trapped in the wrong body” as less about authenticity (fixity and normativity) than about *textures of spacetime* (prefixial movements)?
[harkate johari حرکت جوهری ~/=? harkate pishvandi حرکت پیشوندی]._/'--> Sadra
(Susan Stryker warns) that transsexuals, in their capacity to be monstrous, arise, like Frankenstein's creature, from the operating tables of their (re)birth as “something more, and something other” than their medical service providers may have intended or imagined
more & other =/= with & of
*gender: sociopoliical taxomomizing ontologically distinct form (entwined) with enfleshed mattering
*animality: sensuous materialities, composites of affects and percepts, specificities but remain thresholds of emergence, individuation that prompt sensuous intra- and interchange ==> provocations
(Weaver, Kelley, Weinstein, Hayward, Kier, Franklin:) animal difference announces a radically singular Other marked by sexual differences
“trans-infused apprehensions and engagements with the expansive world of possibility opened up by non-anthropocentric perspectives.”
trans* />
trans* + animal --> (alternative ways of envisioning) futures of:
•embodiment
•aesthetics
•biopolitics
•climates
•ethics
we have to negotiate the [contaminated concept of] human --(to deal with)--> the persistence of humanism in structures of thought
critical animal studies has(?) the transformative power to interrupt humanism and its sexually differentiated legacy by challenging the boundaries between, and existence of, differentiated, essential kinds.
robust, nondualistic theories of human/animal
Critical Life Studies
•*species panic* (<-- the concept of the homosexual panic defense) {androids: species + trans embodiment}--> **genuine animals** transitivity: “shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another” [Huebert]--{"it”: exclusive right of gendered pronouns--"it” ascribed to artificial animals and and[...]
(65)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19[...] meant by hospitality?
Leo's angry and productive underbelly
Leo's take on honesty: real and raw
(gardens are full of) grotesqueness and splendor, death and life, delicacy and treachery, softness and sting
transgenerational
regenerations
liminal: a threshold without a value, a doorway without assurance
that false divide between life and death (somebody animating it)
(Eszter's lace-like interiors)
loss ==shapes==> our relationship to the living (@Jassem)
(*ambivalence of loss and remembering* in the) melancholic calculus of the archive: “what is lost can become what is preserved as part of the self”
-as an environment sickens and dies we harbor the loss
(hope =/= salvation)
...learning a new grammar of animacy (with Hayward)
“[...]memories of excess and delight, freaks, fright, and exploitations. Too much sugar. Surprise. And disappointment. Larger than life. Grotesque. Alluring. Captivating. Calling. Their juxtaposition in this contradictory scape of sea, desert, and mountains--surreal”
(the mer-creature) a living condensation and displacement of what people imagined as real
...how little is needed to prompt the imagination: paint, wheels, and wood.
(US/Mexico or land/ocean borders...) a space about who and what cannot move, of who and what falls apart, or of who and what is lost
...................................
(the inter- and trans-action of) learning, playing and thought
in ajayeb what are the:
•animacy hierarchies (--Chen)
•exposed and transparent conditions of possibility (--Hayward) ==> becomings and assemblages
•ontological fixities
•enactment of large-scale fantasies (--Chen)
•
(Mehran Rad) on description of spring
kofr کفر <--> “nature” (tabi'at طبيعت) <---> bahar بهار <--> bot-khane بت خانه
Manuchehri: نوبهار آمد و آورد گل و یاسمنا باغ همچون تبت و راغ بسان عدنا http://ganjoor.net/manoochehri/divanm/ghaside-ghete/sh1/
Hafez: کنون که در چمن آمد گل از عدم به وجود بنفشه در قدم او نهاد سر به سجود http://ganjoor.net/hafez/ghazal/sh219/
=/= durdastha دوردستها, beyonds
donya دنیا <--> gozar گذر
-->? materialist
Nezami:
بهاری داری ازوی بر خور امروز که هر فصلی نخواهد بود نوروز
گلی کو را نبوید آدمی زاد چو هنگام خزان آید برد باد
(ruse, san'at صنعت -->) hile حیله =/= sho'bade شعبده (shab-bazi شب بازی, neyrang نیرنگ,)
[...]
(66)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.2[...]ly situated relational worldings) =/= societies of individuals in human-only histories (~ Euclidean figures and stories of Man)
(which network is?) a netbag for collecting up what is crucial for ongoing
ajayeb's technotheocratic geoengineering [, it “fixes” some common imaginations the “affairs of life,” and not specifically the “afterlife,” (within the {terminology ~} figural-conceptual powers of syms and material-semiotic time-space of the Indo-Greco-Arab-Turko-Persian terra taxa)]
•periods of time
•“known” life
•abode (budgah بودگاه, Wohnplatz)
•donya دنيا
-stories that focus on composition rather than intrusion
-stories that focus on ongoingness rather than game-over
(Haraway > Stengers > Latour > Margulis) Gaia, to name complex nonlinear couplings between processes that compose and sustain entwined but nonadditive subsystems as a partially cohering systemic whole
planet-transforming, historically situated, new-enough, worlding relations
(systematic stories are linked) metabolisms, articulations, coproductions
(they must also be) relational, sympoietic, consequential
myth-systems (are set-ups)
(a deadly one: “Man + Tool ==> history”)
names =/= faces (~ morphs of the same)
a thousand names of something else
(what Haraway is naming with) compound-eyed insectile and many-armed optics
winged domains
bird-bodies
(Haraway's spider and) my ajayeb's snake: tasks of thinking, figuring, and storytelling
--✕--> heady facial representation; [Luisa also dislikes this]
•figure of snake (circular serpent) is ajayeb Persian sf worlding, has ties with the Greek Chthonis (“of the earth,”) is at the same time the image of the continuity of life and the abyssal moral (eating your end, no gag reflex)-->{[...]
(68)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.3[...]ure: piled-upon assemblages within which there are many discontinuities but also connections, some deliberative, some inadvertent. (Katie King)
--> “flexible knowledges”
...................................
آب حیوان {how could I know that Vladimir (in his performance for Lilia's apass score) was not (in)sourcing the Holy Waters, abe heyvan or vozu? his sweat was the ooze of a modern and secular labor. he was using a profane water?}
حیوان خوران جهان heyvan khorane jahan
زیرکان کهن kohan zirak
حجابی که ظلمات شد نام او روان آب حیوان از آرام او (Zolmat & abe heyvan)
...................................
#my work in apass is about:
•bestiary: archaeological anthropology of human-animal practices
•rhetoric: scaling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•
I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-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, perfor[...]
(69)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]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 vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)
gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)
leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper
•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion<br />
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reifica[...]
(70)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.1[...]>
•orientation
--> practical action
•course of action
we come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. the bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]
[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body
(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”
[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”
things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)
what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)
in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?
[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)
history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful
(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy
cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)
(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*
***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***
‘question of power' = do you go along with it?
sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”
bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }
...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feeli[...]
(71)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.6[...]nt than the familiar notion of Shakespeare's “world is a stage...”?)
[Barad, poet of matter, time and space:] “Matter does not move in space and time. Matter materializes and dynamically enfolds different spatialities and temporalities.”*
*there is only exteriority within*
--?--> models that position representation as the lens that mediates between the object world and the mind of the knowing subject --> (an optics that reflects) a geometry of absolute exteriority between ontologically and epistemologically distinct kinds =/= ajayeb's diffractive differential materializations
perhaps that arm that got detached from you, could have a chance of not becoming a jettison phantom limb forever haunting the missing amputated ‘you,’ rather, a part of “companion species being helping out”? --> *connectivity does not require physical contiguity* (@Luisa's string “theory”)
[*phantom limb* (a concept every theorist/artist should take seriously), in Descartes: used as an illustration of the deception to which the inner senses are prone.
“fossil images,” persistence of pathological excitation to the peripheral nerves. (the condition of ‘amputees’ for the one who re-members and builds archives for his phantasmatically lost limb) *imaginary loss of a penis* --> a “tool” for a recovery of what was “always already” missing --> Freud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]
ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature
[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics
ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in [...]
(72)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.8[...]reud: libidinal memorial to the lost limb (@Elen's kind of mourning for preoedipal (~= precastrated) body, and her (erroneous) localization of it on the motorbike)
Grosz: “It is only through controlled use of the phantom that the artificial limb can (gradually) take the place of the lost limb”
#body image]
ecologies of reflection and diffraction --> resolution of nature
[*]diffraction: an effect that limits the ability of a lens (or a system of lenses) *to resolve an image*
•(to evolve a creative tension,) a trade-off, between the resolution of detail and diffraction effects, between geometrical and physical optics
ajayeb's ecologies mixed (less of) reflection and (much more of) diffraction, are taken from a yet not detachments of the experience of phenomena and the apparatuses of its description, of percepts and affects
#my findings of composites of ajayeb:
•animals varying number of legs --?--> animal + movement
•fantastic creatures --?--> animal + environment + affect
•fable poetics --?--> animal + apparatus of description
•tentative citationality [other name of “rumor”?] --?--> nonhuman + human relational histories
•remembering is an extremely creative (& imaginative) practice
•
--> ongoing, open-ended articulation of the world (<-- my work on ajayeb)
--> these are the diffraction patterns in ajayeb that are (artistically, politically, ethnically) significant for me (?)
--> these are instances of resistance against biomimesis in ajayeb (?) [biomimesis is involved with mirroring, imitation, or reflection, and other tropes of “sameness"] =/= trans-materialities of the creatures of the world, they transgress the sacrosanct divides between techne and episteme
(many creatures of our shared world have) evolved in intra-action with their environment, and old bestiaries, such as ajayeb, critically inhabit a mode of description and affect situated within the intra-activity of technologies of writing and perception
•the creatures of the mud know better not to get caught up in a “geometrical optics of knowing”
we are seeking a different genus of knowing =/= mediating machine, inscription devices, lenses, panopticons, and various other epistemological tools that many science studies and cultural studies scholars fancy. (is that also what Marialena fancies? her list of tools)
[*]intelligibility: an ontological performance of the world in its ongoing articulation
not a specifically human capacity, intelligibility does not require an (usually human) inttelective agent
the problem with design is that designers (as well as scientists and engineers) are busy with building ‘enhanced communication networks’ and principles of ‘usefulness’, in the way they relate to the “forms” of nature
*connections and commitments (come together)*
[...]
(73)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.8[...]/>
[*]attunement: a generative, compositional worlding
-particular attunements can become habitual
-(in the atmospheric of my ajayeb) what is recognized as worthy and knowable object
-what are the links [sensory & affective] between (my) ajayeb's worlding and other worlding
{ migraine ---> house }--> (an acute) sensory attunement (to the atmospherics of the house)
migraine: “black-furred creature beginning to stir”
Foad's atmospheric attunements, responses to the environment
(fully sensory, at once abstract and concrete)*
•a labor
•a sentience to a world's work
•ways of being in noise and light and space
intimacy with a world <----> world's imperative
*an imperative can:
•catch you up
•then deflate
•pop
•leave you standing, a fish out of water
“the sentience of a situation is filled with tracks of labor and attunement--a dwelling in the expressivity of something coming into existence” (Stewart)
we take the world for what it's up to
[*]atmospheric attunement: actual affects of modes of living being brought into being; labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries
-the lived spaces and temporalities of:
•home
•work
•school
•blame
•adventure
•illness
•rumination
•pleasure
•down time
•release
•phantasmatic or unthinkable situations
•
--> rhythms of the present /*/*/*/*\
ajayeb reports of world:
-dense entanglement of affect, attention, the senses, and matter
(everything depends on these entanglements)
a condition
a pacing
a scene of absorption
a dream
a being abandoned by the world
a serial immersion in some little world you never knew was there until you got cancer
a dog
a child
a hankering
the next thing
(?how much ajayeb tells the stories of) unraveling of states of attending to what might be happening
not being able to sit still
being exhausted
being left behind
being ahead of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything
a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad
atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•
an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential
[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of somethin[...]
(74)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.2[...]p as apparitional things (surat صورت) and then sharpened and repeated in compositions that labor to describe but also flourish on their own terms
my efforts have not been to finally “know” ajayeb, Sven, or Sana, [i have been reluctant to collect them into a good enough story of what's going on with them,] rather to fashion some sort of address that is adequate (and fabulous) to their form
-does the intensity and texture of my routines (talks, writings, etc.) make ajayeb habitable and animate?
-in the last year in apass i have been training myself to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer
#my apass ajayeb project:
(learning) building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities --> to create a contact zone for analysis ****
[~?-> ajayeb.net, pop-up book]
[that's why i have been against the popular idea of authorlessness in apass, i am invested in (our) singularities; identity is a zone of attunement]--> Stewart calls herself “she” to mark the difference between her writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence
-to touch details that establishes a direct contact
?in our group who
•gazes
•imagines
•senses
•takes on
•performs
•asserts (not a flat and finished truth)
•is in a hot persuit of something definitive @Lili
•a point of contract @Esta
•
watching and waiting for an event to unfold
the still life that gives a pause --> the story of many of us
______________
“every achieved poem inscribes a perceptual signature in the world” (Stewart > Doty)
poems have to be achieved (in the social-material world)
(achieved =/= archived)
[*]poem:
•etching *lines of action* and mood across the sensations
•compositions at work
my ajayeb's
•objects of analysis: “compositional elements of thrown together worlds”
•objects of critique: “associative account of the modification and reciprocity of bodies and actions, environs, senses, rhythms, tones, and proprioceptions"[: sense of the position of parts of the body, relative to other neighbouring parts of the body]
•objects of database: “are soicialy, poetically, materially compositional”
the social, the subject, matter and event are comprised of:
•affects
•potentialities
•energetics
•attunements
•orientations
•disorientations
•atmospheres
=/= finished actualities*
ajayeb is compositional, that means something reaches a point of expressivity, something throws itself together as matter already configured yet enigmatic and provocative
(Stewart helping me talk ajayeb)
(am i working to) brid[...]
(75)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.8[...]g down at the enterence to a freeway tunnel in Medellin in 2006 --> ajayeb is also about writing about what ‘might’ be or have been.
**a mediation on writing and drawing in a horrible world**
#my drawings in my notebook/papers in our apass meetings
-a hand that draws a scence also draws itself into its corporality, conjuring it in the manner of
-a line records as for what it leads the doodler to see
-“a autobiographical record of a discovery of an event” --> a trace and suspension of a wobbly emergence of alertness (to what my friend might have said) ---> these are lived abstractions
possible paradigms for the convergence of emergence:
•affinity --> Leo
•complexity --> Eszter
•(auto)poiesis --> Hoda
•perception as action --> Elen
•speculative realism --> Zoumana
•radical virtualization --> Aela
--> we are all somehow busy (in apass) with reorienting to the creativity of thought-action crossings
life is germinaly جرثومهای aesthetic, and the aesthetic anywhere is already political* --> Kenney
[title]
ajayeb's stories of natural and dreamed up things
the immaterial matterings of supra-personal imaginal real of ajayeb forms
(different names for the same thing:)
•forms of emergent in the conduct of life (Nietzsche, Foucault attending to the intimate relations between knowledge and power)
•worlding, the mirror play of materiality and its poetic composition (Heidegger)
•planes of expressivity reaching a point of recognition or force (Deleuze and Guattari)
•the shimmer (Barthes)
•rhythm in itself (Lefebvre)
•structures of feeling into political theory (Raymond Williams)
•forms emergent in the conduct of life are immaterial matterings --> *the contact aesthetics* of natural and dreamed up things throwing themselves together (Stewart)
ajayeb is a literally unblievable image, a sociality, a muscle, a world thrown together in a sensory refrain witnessed by a present subject; collective dreamed up nature and historical presents ripe with rhythms and speeds, with streams of matter and thought; ajayeb is a capacious assemblage
ajayeb stories are:
•material-sensory arc of history
•series of absent/present (moments) sensed through forms and events
lostness or reslessness of drifters
fantasies of potential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,
[...]
(76)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%21.9[...]tential “home”
(a plce of) abjection of state neglect ==> production of future
(Stewart's) the middle-class mobile citizenship and the proper traveling subject
Janina's “i don't know” s
a material semiosis of choices
what are ajayeb promises?
wtinessings, encounters, timeouts, fantasy, distraction,
a 19th century elite tradition of secular pilgrimage to the sacred
pursuit of see-it-yourselfness
a spectacular form of amnesia *
(the joints of my pop-up book) spin around fantastic axes
Stewart: “the state of public transportation in the U.S. is an event in the worlding of bodies in motion”
-a landscape abuzz with connectivity
shape-shifter jumping between composition and concrete
my apass project:
(sharing with you) the pleasure of recognizing a described world (in ajayeb)***
(i can sense the ajayeb's) pleasure in describing the animacy of forms
-describing a world is the pleasure of sensing the incipiency of *form in matter* and fantasy and the effort to draw the lines of form's traces. still palpable even it only imagined (Stewart ***)
(ajayeb's) heady business of making sense out of what happens
-to venture out in the manner of
-ajayeb sings an autopoetic refrain scoring and unfolding
-gesturing into form, a magnet burdened with impressions
textures give way to qualities of form
*before the blizzard: the sea monster
______________
Xh1IgPomwW8 Stewart's experiments coming at the phenomena of worlding through a series of angles organized prismatically:
•precision
•atmosphere
•attunement
•refrain ترجیعبند (poetic fixed form)
--> the tune on which people and things venture out
--> a kind of mapping infrastructure
--> lines and distributed biography
[pop-up book]
#description: (world is like a) pop-up map of possibilities [=/= map hylomorphically onto meaning]:
•(condensed) points of precision
•fundamentally divergent nature of things that happen --prompting-->
•the mode of social poiesis
•a path into continuous variation of matter and form, word and world
•(pop-up book made of) mobile and immobile flickering
•a thing that can be physical if the eye is quick enough
•a crystalline image of the deforming of a form
•bending itself (myself?) in refraction (=/= intimate register of knowledge and power)
•a conceptual machinery of cutting edges
•a compositional jumping off point; a ‘lifted out of’; a ‘being-moved in’
•...the ajayeb pop-up book two parallel spreading qualities and scenes across a cart[...]
(77)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22[...]y, personality and language out of people [--> ajayeb] ==created==> spaces of care, territoriality, order, horror
the stark mantras of representational critique: that the play of abstract categories (real/fabricated, nature/human habitat, wild/tame, red/white, high/low, etc.) bloodlessly determine worlds or adequately describe them ==> { everything is political = to always know what the political is }--> ‘political’ : something that exists in the big picture of broader significance, something strongly obvious (but not to most people!) that meanings can be automatically assigned to things and are the basis of those things’ value -->!@Ali
the effect of context
matters of composition, each with a “we”:
•feeble نحيف
•experimental
•eccentric --> Elen
•habitual --> my mother
•generous
•gestural -->
•half turned away
•reached the expressivity of a mood, a tone of voice
◾do they lighten things or load them down?
...a composition made explicit in the figure of *the active survivor* and *the knowing reader of impacts* --> a watchfulness-turned-impulse that ends not on meaning but in the haptic, multi-angled, sensorimotor qualities of a world's unimaginable detail
(@Varinia) qualities sensorimotor interactions with environments that are not reducible either to thoughts and imaginings:
•*richness: a scene spied provides infinite detail beyond what you can invent --> #excess
•*bodiliness: the motions of the body affect sensory input
•*insubordinateness: the world has a life of its own; things moved by themselves
•*grabbiness: sensory impacts matter apart from their cognition
--> having a phenomenal experience is having skills with these qualities** [@Hoda]
an ecology of potentialy marked by violence and care
...................................
>
[Alberti]
we might:
•provide a better understanding
•provoke novel realities/ontologoes (to emerge from material)
•provoke an understanding in the context of the everyday
*(Latour, Whitehead, Law:) archeological entity = ontological entity (by nature) }==> productive of reality
to focus on practices in which all possible elements of the process must be understood as active and creative (--> # equipment list)
*“to take seriously" = to accept at a fundamental level the truth of a claim and to doggedly follow its consequences
(form an ontological and conceptual perspective)
(--> dogs follow consequences)
(indigenous thought is treated as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [o[...]
(78)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...]mological affects
[*]scale
•operates through intensity and not size
•emergent and performative (Jones), (juxtapositions of) scales ==> “interesting psychological and phenomenological effects”
•a flat approach to scale does not separate the social and material, or the micro from the macro ==> [*]size: (emerges as a possibility, as) one means of enacting the potential of another scale; accidental effect of intensity: materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity***
•is about intensity and excess --> potential for visibility/invisibility and proximity to the original condition of undifferentiated, intensive difference (~=? hayula; perfect formless form)***; intensive different “h” of hayula هیولا...
◦ه
◦ه
◦ه
◦ه
Alberti argues for a form of ontological symmetry between the theory we bring to bear on our evidence and the way that material acts as evidence (@Seba)
*[mesopotamia] chronically unstable bodies
a corpus of zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts and traps
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه
all sorts of dualism are at work in the archaeological imaginary of the region from Amazon to the Andes
marking a body =/= representation of that act
Alberti's arguments”
•the fantastic forms, bulges, protuberances برامدگى, and other modifications of bodies and pots express a general concern with “shoring up” or “fixing” a world conceived of as inherently volatile فرار --> bodies (pots and people) were considered “chronically unstable”* {pots --> intentional activation of affective capacities in the clay; pots and bodies are “grown” in he same way}
•chaotically scale-changing, their scale is one of intensity and excessiveness (--> figure-ground relationship between visible/invisible, body/soul)
*perspectivism: all species potentially share a way of knowing with humans. their “essence” 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-ca[...]
(80)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.5[...]ame ways as their kin** }--> is this what mother does? (has to do with the ability or threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds
a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)
let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural
archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”
****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)
we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•
(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth
(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)
*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object
(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*
in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”
“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro
[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective relations =/= a capacity that can be awakened in a seemingly inert thing
=/=?! transference, (is transference an object-oriented account?)
the active nature of materials refers to their recognized capacity to escape form : their untrustworthiness
(a paradime for creative arts:) artifactual production --> animal creativity
(in Amazonia, and) in ajayeb, no distinction is made between thoughts, feelings, body and mind --> thoughts and actions happen in the same ontological space
(Alberti > Viveiros de Castro)
...................................
shift from an epistemological to an ontological register in theoretical archaeology
[...]
(81)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23[...]proach (in ontological equivalence of bodies and pots in anthropomorphic ceramics from northwest Argentina...):
social ontology --> reconstruct the ontologies of past societies [<~~ my work on ajayeb]
ontological archaeology's background in feminism, queer, and phenomenological
approaches ==> interest in the body
influence of the animal turn in archaeology
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
(nomenological explorations of animal representations in Attar and tasavof)
what kinds of beings existed within the social universe of pre-Columbian Andean peoples
(renovated concept of) animism: ethnographic meta-analogy for past ontologies --> models of relationality for archaeologists to interpret material patterning in the archaeological record
investigations of personhood
(building toward a) taxonomy of past ontologies --✕--> ontological critique
(Alberti >) Viveiros de Castro's project: to systemize amerindian thought into a metaphysics such that it can have a reciprocal effect on anthropological thought and “naturalist” or Western metaphysics
ontological realism ==>{
new language attempt to imagine the complex topology of relational realities:
•Latour --> network: things exists as a consequence of the strength of their articulation
•Ingold --> meshwork =/= Aristotelian hylomorphism
•Barad --> entanglement = Quantum physics + queer theory ==> properties belong to the phenomena in question =/= inherent to things
•DeLanda --> assemblage: how humans + nonhumans produced communities that changed in composition and through time in neolithic and bronze age
assemblage --replace--> context
assemblage = phenomena --> temporary, contingent, unbounded
Latourian critique of categories =/= beyond human correlationalism
pluralizing ontology ==> charges of relativism <-- ‘objective knowledge =/= contingent foundations’ }--> nonrepresentational approach =/= over interpretation, abstraction
archeology operates by seeking strong and effective articulations between theories, apparatuses, material remains
ontological realism (=/= naturalism, constructivist) --> objectivity and truth are contingent, but also demonstrable and robust
@Chloe
material record: an expression of **how past gathers in the present** (=/= fragmentary evidence of history <-- forensic approach)
past continuously unfolding and therefore changing
Alberi --> (social) ontology: a new interpretive tool
additive work (=/= reconstructive)
archeological accounts of other's ontologies
animal turn in archeology --> nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Willerselv
Viveiros d[...]
(82)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.2[...]n perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the past as anticipating something new
(my research and work on bestiary:)
•how can we produce new works that challenge us to think and experience archeological things (ajayeb) in new ways without resort to explanation or interpretation through a process of disarticulation, repurposing, and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind? (interpretive framework)
•how to allow ajayeb to continue to operate effectively on us?
both affective and historical force (of ajayeb)
art engenders material becomings (classical definition)
art engenders imaginative becomings
learning from archeology: to be pre-conceptual : the process of craft, to grasp how concepts make their way into things
undisciplinary space (instead of transdisciplinary)
disarticulation: repurposing and disruption of archeological artworks with a political intent in mind
--> cannot escape the anecdotal when it comes to interpretation --> artifacts (for example a neolithic Balkon clay figurine) become symbols for social position ~= allegorizing (=/= speculation)
historical energy (force) of things = something of the past that endures in them
(old and unhelpful definition of) art: impacting nervous system without conceptual mediation (directly impact living bodies) --engender--> material becomings ["art = giving birth"]
--Alberti--> art (and anthropology) need the pre-conceptual: the process of craft (to grasp how concepts make their way into things)
[*]concept: fragment of past world
maker + material ==emerge==> concept
-in artistic research @apass are we dealing with the simulacra of knowledge?
understanding the potters (and artists) who made the ceramics as crafters = understanding them as *intimately connected with a particular world* <-- knowledge of which came through skilled material practice
#feedback
-how does it apply to digital relations?
•practiced caressing of hand over clay forms (~ handling, nurturance) ==> zoomorphic, anthropomorphic bodies (Ingold call it anthropogenic)
•digital interface CG ==> ?
•
[...]
(83)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...]> these meanings and powers can be “glocalized”: altered, filled in, indigenized, and reunderstood *within local agencies*(: people, art forms, practices of everyday life)
(globalization processes) ==> academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible سزاوار سرزنش forms of hybrid histories
(Katie King's flexible knowledges:) layers of locals and globals
my aim in my research is creating *struggle for understanding* [= many communities involved in reading, writing, interpreting,] --> ***we are all members in these communities struggling for understanding***
Urton paying attention to decompiling intermediaty positions between so-calles reading and writing --> string records --> numerical accounts or maps or... ==> histories and narratives
my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*
the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimen[...]
(84)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24[...] histories and narratives
my research on ajayeb in apass as a practice is about *disassembling and reordering classifications we use to access pasts*
the excursion i did in Vladmir's block was somehow about examining sites of implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms
museum, TV documentry as a metaphor {a richly contaminated set of crafty metaphors and realities} and narrative frame, a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment --> economic globalization figuring in artistic/academic capitalism
(--> ajayeb is also of this kind,) *site of heritage* culture as promoting particular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion*** --> (the excursion made me) with ajayeb to be careful with ‘the commerce with global knowledge production’ --(what is at stake)--> structure of pasts, peoples, and sensation
*heritage culture ==(impress)==> public histories* --> appropriation of national and personal identities; today (specially in university) no one is “immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture” (Katie King > Morley & Robins) [i can imagine apass is struggling with this specially in Brussels]
(@Vera's position as a museum tour guide, exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a “feel good” atmosphere for tourism)
(Katie King > Slaughter & Leslie) *global market:
•fields “close to the market” --(reguire)--> proucts
•fields “peripheral to the market” --(are pushed to)--> pedagogy and public service
(sometimes virtually indistinguishable:) impulse to democratize ~=? commodify knowledge
-they model for museum goers as:
◦reenactors
◦shadows
◦witnesses
◦a play at being “there”:
◾on set
◾on site
◾in that past
◾in a past:
◽mentally enacting
◽reenacting
◽experimenting
◽speculating
◽trying to find evidence for various pastpresents
TV camera: like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands (Kopkins)
TV documentry's “distributed agencies”: neither [director and screenwriter] can claim priority without wraping a description of these productive processes, and neither can make the TV product without the essential interaction of many people's hands, minds, tools, skills, tasks, objects, and infrastructures --> these distributed agencies (with problems and possibilities) are also necessary in art research ([Katie King:] and in scholarly knowledge production), (building, creating, constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensative to[...]
(85)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24[...] the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”
to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)
[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental
...................................
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 [...]
(86)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.2[...] partial rendering of the world
[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”
(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥
“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”
Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once
*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood
...terms commensurate with the clamoring world
(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **
Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death
(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them
***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating i[...]
(87)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.5[...]e* (of the divine, or an excessive described world)]
(in my performances) through description, twining strands of meaning, braiding together elements of [my] thinking and perception to make an image both elusive and unforgettable, unparaphrasable نقل بيان نشدنی
*density* ==> melds perception with thinking and feeling ==> making a new generative reality
(the speed of my talking has to do with the quick and compressed that) operates on us before we have even had time to think about what is happening ~=> a world that is both immediate and immense, a moment out of context, a pouring stream of being (on the way so somewhere else) [a viscerality that Vanja reported after experiencing my performance; my #routines]
-when you look at my performances there is a feeling of it is not quite figured out how he is yet, there is no settled mastery on its way, rather, there is a restless experimentation, a trying on of different densities (of meanings, letters, spoken energies, etc.), various surfaces, degrees of busyness and calm --> how to look at this kind of work?
(we don't need anymore art like this: as if they have been made on secret, and *their radicalism lends them a sort of urgency* [<-- no no!], a perpetual quality of surprise)
-my imaginal portals: to invoke an inviting world of associations, a scented cool, ~ an indirect way of naming (=/= to program language : reducing language to a debasing perceptual shorthand)
-proposing ‘it is’ by placing another beside it, cultivating opposition and tension
“something understood” --> left open, undefined, ...
(Elen's “je suis” [Ich bin] in her images and...)
(with the help of Janina, we are) madly in love with the surface of the world
@Marialena; transmembering power of the sea, nautical daryayi دريايي، مربوط به دریانوردی، ملوانی
saying what ‘you’ see & saying why you ‘see’
the more accurate and sensory the apparent evocation of things, the more we have the sense of someone there doing the looking (<-- USA spectacle knows this)
X in Y's translation
“a fish never makes an aesthetic mistake” --> it sends us hurrying to every visual image of fish we can think of, to see if it could be true*
(a good) description: an evocation of the sensory world also suggests the limitations of such evoking, maintaining a sort of open space
in which meaning isn't closed or completed, but remains instead generative
a title sometimes does the useful work of placing us specifically, so that the body of the poem can turn its attention to the heart of the matter
(it is surprising how strongly the) naming of particulars ==(bring color into)==> poem's (or text's) perceptual web
distortion's power to[...]
(88)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%24.8[...]>
“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 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 breathing fire,,] powers of contagion
encyclopedia ==> quality of monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)
animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration
“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”
the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)
...................................
*questionable interpretations
#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies
which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history
(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces an[...]
(89)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.4[...]monstrosity does not affect any real body (=/= lurk)
animals in the non-place of language, meeting in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration
“Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the ‘in’ where the things enumerated would be divided up.”
the ‘operating table’
a table --> a tabula, “that enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences--the table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has intersected space.” (Foucault, The Order of Things)
...................................
*questionable interpretations
#attention
([art/]aesthetics of noticing)--> appreciation of multispecies landscape, making living ecologies
which sectors/fields of art require artist to go out and notice things?
(engage with which) details of the world --> breaking common sense
our mamalian bias:
•predetermined body shape and size
•run toward death (pre-programmed death =/= history) ==> makes us think in terms of set-life courses
}==> allow us to imagine a standard individual outside of history
(Tsing's) history: overlapping tracks and traces and many trajectories of world-making, human and not human
irreversible time ==> indeterminacy (of history) --> new alliances --> the ability of assemblages to produce historical changes in our common world
what needs to be stated
what needs to be produced
context-dependent --?--> the way things are
architecture of podium <--✕--> labor-process of the actual speaker
how talks are *actually* produced
in your material practices
hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking
noticing ants, spiders, little traps, species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, labor-studies, house-hold studies, ajayeb-studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world
(Gordon allowing) *algorithms to become stories*
(the technological enablement of some) *disciplines of attention*
“we are al lichen”: we are all ecosystem composite critters
ants, combining two kinds of noise, half-hazard patterns of interaction
half-hazard contact
half-hazard context
}==> it works (=/= perfection, precision/efficiency of clockwork)
#some Baradian models of intra-action in popular cinema:
•(intra-action received and wielded through discipleship and pre-programmed talent:) The Force in Starwars. [the story don't allow any other story of The Force and its contingencies other that good and evil tool-use of it]
•(intra-action resisted by i[...]
(90)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.5[...]f 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 categories it assesses are already set in place)
[*]curiosity: alighting on common excitement to learn about the world and its goings on
[*]imagination: staying with (our) observations until we find frames for thinking about pattern and trajectory
to create new genres of translation (==> play)
(the problem of) *unintentional design*
(what i am learning with ajayeb is the art of) paying **close descriptive attention** (to human interactions with other species)
-to re-learn the arts of description, that the art of 20th century is so deprived of
“population genetics and neoclassical economics each made description unnecessary through a calculus in which self-contained individuals could be posited without attention to social relations and histories” (Tsing)
sciences that are designed specifically not to tackle problems of living together
#project 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
using:
•anthropology --> its expertise in ethnographic methods
•history --> its turn to environmental narration
•biology --> (ecological evolutionary-developmental trends) that have shown how species come into being with each other
•science studies --> its lively juxtaposition of technological and philosophical methods
Tsing: there is no reason that anthropologists cannot study nonhumans using some of the very same methods we use to study humans--or close parallels to them
[...]
(91)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.3[...]rence between free “owner” and coerced “labor” --> racial divisions were produced and reproduced in each dowered marriage and inheritance
-poor families needed more labor, particularly where child labor kept many adults alive
-privileged families were charged with the advancements of the race, women must bear its heirs --> late 19th century discourse of scientific hygiene and eugenics اصلاح نژاد informed white women's species segregation
{ boundaries of home = boundaries of love }--> fetishization of the home as the space of purity and interdependence ==> extra-domestic intimacies (within/between species) =
•archaic fantasies (the community, small farmer, etc.)
•passing affairs (feminism, animal rights, etc. )
+
outside the home = domain of economic rationality and conflicting individual interests
--> mid 20th century allowed other species accepted: pets are models for family devotion. but the model of the loving and the beloved pet does not spread love; it holds tight inside the family (-Tsing)
[biosocial plan:] other people & other species are judged by their ability to live up to one standard of domestic intimacy (USA or iran):
they love their children and pets ==> imagine themselves as compassionate and moral --> makes them ‘good people’ ==> equip them to make decisions for the whole world ==> moral hierarchy (~ your goodness is qualification for global goodness) ==> other people & other species are judged --> project to improve the world ==> *collateral damage is unfortunate but not inhumane*
urban jungle
jumble of diversity + imperial planners
excessive teams
technique of unmapping, for separating paired projects and effects and places and things. (for example unmap state and capital from diversity places)
•spread obscurity
•to know something from disordered edges (=/= ptoductive edges)
◦what grows in the seam (to begin with)
•pleasure of variety beyond the domestic
•how places are differentiated and specific
...................................
Global Futures
(a game of) possibilities of contingent connections
a game that develops our ideas of the productivity--for better or worse--of contingency
a game to appreciate contingent connections [=/= stale and dangerous predictions (==> mithridatism)]
futures of all sorts are forged in the contingencies of strange connections
•foreclosed in the narrow channels of corporate expansion
•clashing state and popular terrorisms
•our best hopes (as well as our inchoate terrors)
*Tsing: “Contingency surrounds us, but we ignore its power to shape the future.”
**europe's secular prophecy's formulaic tropes for encapsulating time**
•most powerful future-making stories have told of the fulfillment of pri[...]
(92)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.5[...]s history: it becomes a part of the world of the game.
the goal is to develop a set of *coalescences* that fulfills a preassigned mission.
whoever tells the best story while completing the mission wins.
you (tell stories in which you) are free to:
•make the world a better place
•hatch a nefarious scheme
•narrate a true story
[*]coalescence: the historical force that arises from a transformative coming together of disparate groups, institutions, or things:
an unexpected connection ==> a “historical force"[= something that might change the world]
(parties might be: groups, institutions, ideas, identities, things, or beings. chili peppers and Thai cuisine; African rice producers and the Carolina coast; astrolabes, compasses, and plane tables)
[contemplative mode of togetherness: (in Europe) coalescence انعقاد =/= (in Middle East) confluence تلاقى }--> transnationalism =/= internationalism }~-> forms of alliance that are possible and needed that can be created differentially with “trans-” =/= “inter-“]--> *coalescence is not meaningful nor possible in Middle East?*
example:
•not coalescence story: to say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals. or to imagine a pet store that sells both
•coalescence story: a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become seriously endangered because of the program <-- *both cats and goldfinches are changed in the encounter*
coalescence can be unintentional, seriously damage collaborator and the world
missions could be:
•create a revolution
•corrupt a nation's government
•use a natural resource to create havoc
•revitalize an ancient philosophy
•
future-making cards:
icons of historical agency
they represent the world through stereotypes and symbols
used as an ideology about X (=/= as the real thing)
eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes prevent theories to require things to change =/= Global Futures conceptualization of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***
*world power =/= world time*
time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism
coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying
...................................
#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”
Nag[...]
(93)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.7[...]> forms of alliance that are possible and needed that can be created differentially with “trans-” =/= “inter-“]--> *coalescence is not meaningful nor possible in Middle East?*
example:
•not coalescence story: to say that a cat and a goldfinch are both animals. or to imagine a pet store that sells both
•coalescence story: a cat-feeding fad that requires that cats eat nothing but goldfinches to give the cats a sleeker coat, while goldfinches become seriously endangered because of the program <-- *both cats and goldfinches are changed in the encounter*
coalescence can be unintentional, seriously damage collaborator and the world
missions could be:
•create a revolution
•corrupt a nation's government
•use a natural resource to create havoc
•revitalize an ancient philosophy
•
future-making cards:
icons of historical agency
they represent the world through stereotypes and symbols
used as an ideology about X (=/= as the real thing)
eternal essences as natural objects or cultural codes prevent theories to require things to change =/= Global Futures conceptualization of time and change --> ***forms of human and nonhuman possibility imagined within current discussions of politics and culture***
*world power =/= world time*
time --> evolutionary ladder --> progressive --> supportive trellises of flowering liberalism + critical charts of intensifying capitalism
coercive international development
civilizational paternalism
free-market bullying
...................................
#my theory (=/= reductionist, or psychological identification) on specification of:
spider =/= linear temporality
whale =/= distinction of organism and environment
(?) =/= “single point of view ==> subjective phenomena”
Nagel: the fact that an organism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states
Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing
physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account
...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of[...]
(94)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.7[...]anism has conscious experience = there is something it is like to be that organism {--> subjective character of experience}--✕--> analyzable in terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states
Blade Runner's notion of “soul”: ascribed to robots or automata that behave like people though they experience nothing
physicalism: phenomenological features must themselves be given a physical account
...if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience at all
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited whale
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited snake
anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited jinn
--> knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life
/>
Nagel asking: we must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate استقراء to the inner life of the bat from our own case, and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion
“our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited” --> Nagel's view remains secular and in the bounds of his disciplinary field. (religious studies, theology, animal subjectivity studies, art of description, they can be helpful to describe things not in terms of the impressions they make on our senses)
-Nagel is trying with the wrong language at bats: “does it make sense to ask what my experiences are ‘really’ like as opposed to how they appear to me? [...] objective processes can have a subjective nature.”
what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves =/= what it is like for a bat to be a bat
schematic conceptions of Eszter
(old
(old model of understanding:)
* --> stimulus (things sparkling) --> perception (hiting the senses) --> apprehension (mind aware without judgement) --> comprehension (psychological judgement about the manner of situation) --> knowing ==> world of doing, in which “action” is: expected (mother attending the child, free liberating the prisoners), commanded (soldier's hierarchy, job's duty), solved (engineer puzzling out a problem)
the things apprehended from a particular point of view (particular visual phenomenology) are not connected to that point
Neobeobachtungen
moshahedat مشاهدت
نگاه جدید
*essence of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)
*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)
X is Y
“is”: conv[...]
(95)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.8[...]r />
•damaged bodies
•damaged subjectivities
•damaged communities
•damaged relations ==> Udyr monster
•damaged ecologies
•damaged histories ==> insomnia
•
(@Jassem and Mia) is there (only) death at the end of entropy?
sequence of events from the point of view of plague narrative
extermination + determination, laws of identity, repetition
the material despair of a colonial capital modern condition leading in high speed to the entropy of cultural-individual ethics, under the overwhelming weight of tangible misery --(Jassem and Mia)--> cognize the immediate material urgency of the endangered subjectivity
--faceless--
nonanimal --> nonhuman + nonanimal ==> destabilizing effects
with their flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance --> subjectivity's disassociation from the world
[in no (or which) calculus of assurance are they moving?]
ruined main body (of the performance)
ruin is (a fictional being) adding additional variety to technical being (frontier technologies) of Norway
-obsolescence (and why not adjustment? =/= extremist position ==> to emerge fanatically from the ruins)--(can we use our imagination not for world scale future speculation, and rather for small adjustment of this space?)
-give expression and meaning to the material culture
--landscape--
using it in the performance: a lens that refuses the abstraction of elements relation in a vacuum (as its optics, not a Blickmaschin)
show us: big stories take their form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy
(with “stranger within” [=? ‘desire within']) are we at the space of complain? <-- dispositions of Beschwerde
a form of protest --> (disenfranchized language of) *mutated rage* --> always innocent ==> agent of deliverelivery
(protest part of) the proud and brutal history of break-out syntax of civic responsibility (=/= adjustment)
rage & ecstasy
ruin --> doom --> rage --> innocence --> delivery: performance
--ruin--
we can and should ***navigate the ruin***
(navigate =/= asset-production)
-capitalist (owning the rhetoric of progress) telling us / teach us to ignore ruins (in the making)
-is there life in ruin? --Tsing--> place of unsettled identities, *in it each of us become ourselves with the help of a less-than ideal collaboration*
bring your curiosity
contaminated diversity [=/= doom: a form of missing that which is contaminated, (an affect typical of Tehran,) one has lost the pulse of the world]
(hard to clasify)
*cultures and species that don't adjust well to disturbance* (<-- we shouldn't lose hope on them)
--> **precarious survival** : in order t[...]
(96)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.1[...]/>
living in ruins
--Jassem--> maybe is a nightmare story
--Tsing--> maybe is a mushroom story
(capital/genocide/...)
(destroyed by...)
rats, rabbits, and algae seaweed
your abilites to nurture and tell stories --tales--> *life emerging from damaged human comunities* (and blasted landscapes) --> not exactly a story of hope (=/= towards a better sleep, the “less you know better you sleep” kind of story), stories of displacement and losses (due to war and concentration of wealth in our time)
=/= *big narrative of progress* : a single world trajectory and time [=/= *time of surprise*] of which “everybody takes part” (*moving forward together* --> #sci-fi series of transnational crew on a spaceship) ...powerful ways of knowing the world [<==?== renaissance] (--my ajayeb project is about those ways of knowing, stories of what sets the world on motion, such as universalism & cultural relativism)
--> *building communal agenda* ~ (dream of) transculturalism [~ blend communal identities] (<== Jassem and Mia's Norway: humans get richer, more efficient, and more make the natural world work for them), is given to us by “men” (that we don't have to follow)
[*]progress: anthropogentic landscapes haunted by imagined futures
--or--> (you might) leave your home and run into a vast new problem
stability is a privilege
[what is?] the future of your dreams
[what are?] the nunhumans worth noticing
species that signal “i am available”
[capitalist accumulations + insult upon insult upon insult ==>] diversity
diversity: (in Germany, considered archaic and chaotic) collateral damage of improvement, necessory victim of progress
fire, herding, farming,
--> creating niches for hunting and forging
--> messing with (nature)
-the question of how much (of human, neighbor, etc.) disturbance we can live with
-what is to consider other's (species, peasant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
[...]
(97)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.2[...]s waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense of place --> displacement
•the ways we experience livability through places
(has to do with my own broken/corrupt/fubar link with ancestry <-- only “your people” can show you how to imagine it, the center/home)
transportation --{traumatic & distruptive}--> transformation
time of surprise ==> nonanimal (udyr)
-nature-culture patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...
(for you there is also) ***many fantastically large set of contexts within which to say “yes”***
(Tsing's) *contaminated diversity* (complicated, ugly, humbling) [=/= ‘endangered species’ and cultures (innocent victims of human progress)]
-implicates survivors in histories of greed, damage, and destruction --> cacophony of troubled stories --might--> help to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake
-difficult to love and relate
joint organs {part plant, part fungus} interspecies phisiology ==> *mushroom*
*tumble: falll down as if collapsing (from upright position), thrown together (in mess, and very difficult to rewind)
=/= transcend
=/= entropy
•bodies tumble into bodies --> monsters
•histories tumble into histories --> ghosts
•stories tumble into stories --> lures
(material lifeworld tumble into) forests tumble into fables tumble into politics tumble into ...
***dispersal & entanglement*** {
•dispersal --> shattered, torn, broken, dispersed, ma[...]
(98)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...]
•subject surging to bear an affect, subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment
•traumatic realism
•(endangered ==>) survival: fighting for “your right against others”
•less-than ideal livable collaborations
•
•constructing interest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]
[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves
poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism
(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(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 o[...]
(99)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.7[...]a's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized
(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)
([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology
(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally
...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]
binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conflicts, and cultivates subjects who conceive of the political in these narrow oppositional terms --> to define the political as opposition between friends and enemies
***power always works by claiming that the future is already determined by a past narrated from its perspective*** (<-- that is why my work is about the past) --> [my work:] *learning to think otherwise about both the past and the future*
(the failure of political imagination in only speculating about the future)
*(the basis of) the political: transcendence of the accidental*
Morris shows how the potential force of the political depends on the recognition that it is not merely that which can be relegated to the past
...................................
(Bubandt > Morris > in Buli, North Maluku in Indonesia) witchcraft: ambivalent aporia, the interminable problem of life ~= empty seashell (shell in which there might or might not be an occupant, provides the de-sexualized figure for doubt that saturates the consciousness of those who inhabit the world of witchcraft, an internally split subject)
anthropology of witchcraft
--✕--> charges of residual exoticism by reading witchcraft phenomena as sites at which the transformations of modernity are mediated and made available for resignification
-to displace (witchcraft) into the domain of representation --> capacity to resignify the historical real
lethal violence at Marikana (South Africa, August 2012) --> muti magic was a not matter of resurgent tradition (for the black South African analysts), rather, magic was a visceral, strategically instrumentalizable, and absolutely lethal power. the kind that enables people to go to war, the kind that operates at the point where language fails (--?--> the use of poetic mystical enchantment in Iran-Iraq war for sending young soldiers to the battle fields)
witchcraft only becomes visible in the moment of accusation, as a retrospective effect of oracular diagnosis (Evans-Pritchard)
(...no one is sure that he has indeed heard a witch)--Bubandt--> witchcraft: [...]
(100)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.3[...]ed
•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 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 strugg[...]
(101)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.6[...]n?)
...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 identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority
slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks 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 speec[...]
(102)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.7[...]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 somatically attained
women's accounts of self-monitorin[...]
(103)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.9[...]tening-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 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 phenom[...]
(104)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.1[...]
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 *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation
body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image
-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)
are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]
...................................
(?we need) political metamorphosis
the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the incr[...]
(105)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.2[...]scourses in 19th century: (Jonathan Strauss -->) irrationality (nonsense) was a legitimizing force for medicine in that the very incomprehensibility of the mad created a mysterious and extra-social language that the rising medical profession could adapt to its own purposes
“nonsense” of “the native” [--> my start-up engine in Islam lecture series, a privileged site of mysterious incomprehensibility allowed me to to form the methodological basis for a fieldwork for unknown forces of irrational life in distant societies...]
*anthropology: (a distinct human science from the desire to credibly) master nonsense*
(Baxstrom + Meyers)
anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher
([Malinowski updated and secularized a much older epistemology 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 sat[...]
(106)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.4[...]yers)
anthropologists claiming to have assumed the “point of view” of another (~ fieldworker must achieve the cultivated sensed point of view of another) --> distillation of method & disposition (?) <-- when confronted with the question “who are you?” and “what do you do?”
(according to Malinowski: this) privileged relation to the unknown must emerge through the ability to test what is asserted to be real --> a series of subjective trials subsumed within the rubric of “fieldwork”
*presumptions:
•experiential disposition of the analyst ==> understanding of a phenomenon other wise held to be imaginary and fictional
•witnessing and testimony ==> evidence as to the reality beyond the direct experience of the researcher
([Malinowski updated and secularized a much older epistemology 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 ofric 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 [...]
(107)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.4[...]plices 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” --Avital--> Griaule aggressively frames the scene of ethnographic encounter itself 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 stu[...]
(108)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.5[...]ossession
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 this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) [...]
(109)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.6[...] 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 this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)
Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense
hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it
...................................
(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*
Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”
metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one
•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•e[...]
(110)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.6[...]not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?
[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real
--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies
}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what 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 dis[...]
(111)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]äxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what 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 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 f[...]
(112)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.9[...]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 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[...]
(113)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.7[...]led, 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]?
devil overhearing and interfering with even the most intimate communications
inquisitor <-- 16th century questions of theology (in a world where the trappings of belief are everywhere but there is no incontrovertibly visible evidence of god's...)
demonologists of the 15th and 16th century were not sure about:
god
man
witch: the abyss between god and man = a kind of proof, a reassurance that the evil of the world can be explained (through the various iterations of satan's power)
demonologist --> “God must exist because Satan is right in front ot me!”
***desire to believe =/= (simple) belief***
•['desire to believe’ and ‘belief'] were not the same during the time of the witch craze
•were not the same in the fast-evolving discourses of the human sciences of the 19th century and early 20th century
•are not the same today
@apass:
1. the general tendency to remain an artist ~ a myth, an effect, a warrior
2. to make anomaly the law عمومیت استثنا
hearing the name of the witch --> subject to stict verification
demonologists and inquisitors at this time desired proof <-- viral proliferation of the witch came to provide that proof
***interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*** [#styles of knowing]
confession -->{ *[...]
(115)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.8[...]ry, 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 (@Sana):
•researcher = detective, examining magistrate دادرس
•crime = fact
•guilty = interlocutor (in reality they guide you into [often organized] labyrinths)
•inquest = strategic operation
**the imaginative results 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 detai 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 ne[...]
(116)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]sed 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 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 mo[...]
(117)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31[...]nvestigation
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 *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 unknowabl[...]
(118)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...]tailed 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 *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[...]
(119)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.1[...]eing asked of the animals }--Despret--> how these changing animals *became real* by way of the very *test of transformation* that had been proposed to them (~ how they were involved in the “process of verification”) --> *to understand the system of truth that was ay the heart of these tests* (=/= to produce an umpteenth critical analysis of “representation” @Pierre)
==> you are under the same constraints as those in whom you had placed your confidence
@Sina: do not construct knowledge about your mother behind her back! --> getting to know what matters (to them, to her) ==> allows transformations to occur
-i usually did both (as mentor in apass), construct knowledge behind people's back [psychosis] & getting to know what matters to them [paranoia]
(Despret discovered) one (unignorable) thing that mattered to scientists was: how animals take an active part in the knowledge that is produced about them
(why working on ajayeb bestiary involves becoming interested in sciences:) you work on animals --immediately--> you are marking on scientists
i remember the way i anticipated where a pigeon, a cat, spider, or ants, would make a home, a niche, in my childhood house...
the difference between ‘what i imagined’ & ‘where the nest actually appeared’ ==> made the world far more interesting
--> looking at the perception of animals (when you are child)
inventive and remarkable birds
happiness of sheep
sadness of captive wolves in a park in the Lorraine --> *not because they were captive but because captivity had transformed them into stupid and cruel beings*
[it is good to be able to say that] certain scientists not only do “bad science” (which remains a way of keeping distance) but that they do “science badly”
creatures that happened to be animals
creatures that happened to be ghosts
creatures that happened to be ...
(the influence of) Anglo-Saxon animal studies [on me]
(in Despretian way) learning to think from love
(the bad) fable of coming out of the closet
there is no closet. there are transformations.
falling from a horse, on a path that no longer leads to Damascus
(the story of) Saul does not answer God; he politely asks him to wait two minutes while he comforts his horse. let God wait; other things matter <--Despret-- this is where true conversation takes place
(a philosophy, or thought) one of: obligation =/= distance
(Stengers:) obligation =/= requirements -->{*a distinction that is to be made*, to be created, to be invented, not acknowledged as already manifest in the state of things}
obligation (is much more demanding than) =/= right
(Sina:) obligation =/= commitment
[*]being obligatet = agreeing to expose oneself to failure, refusing[...]
(120)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%31.6[...]jectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar گربه نره و روباه مکار they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)
(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]
apparatuses of subject formation
...................................
THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?
(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?
why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?
bird people
,
fox people
,
arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)
‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse of friendship and enmity, the visible anticipating itself as target for violence, becomes meaningful when we approach it in a game-theoretic-semiotic linkage, relating and tying together issues of voyeurism, surveillance, violence, media and mediation, and predation in poetic itineraries.
[business] friendliness, تعارف Tarof and greetings [and its artificial inseminations] (sometimes) is it covering up or masking really predatory behaviors(?)
and in Kelile o Demne,
کلیله و دمنه Kelile o Demne (i am becoming more convinced that) is (all) about the phenomenology of *friendship and the *contract
Sa'di is the theoretician of friendshi[...]
(121)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.6[...]t lines of communication through play. the dog waits and watches, the cat looks and looks, which when is your turn to be looked at, can be therapeutic or unnerving.
meeting the cat half-way
...................................
[Avital]
the greeting ‘hello’, the initiatory and inaugural moment of our encounter
the gift sabotaging the freedom of the subject to receive greeting or offering greeting
a gift that becomes a curse for the person,
who has the civic stability to refuse a greeting?
the finantialy challenged and the greeting
explore friendship as a crucial modeling of justice?
configuration of encounter
It doesn't always have to be science fiction, risking the wrong blend and watching the uncontrollable spill of consequences --> hook up friends
friendship, as Avital practices it, should often involve triangulation and the drama of departure?
I found myself (also) tempted to reduce her/him/you to sameness,
“meant to be,” relying on a kind of metaphysical latency.
invasion with little violation(?)
(In rhetoric:) citation = apostrophe [address to an absent or imaginary person, calling to the other]
(i am late. i am transed late. translation and trans-relations has everything to do with latency. )
Avital: For Bataille, friendship is part of the sovereign operation and is linked to reading.
apostrophe (citation) for Derrida is the possibility of postmortem discourse --> memory, acts of bringing back, recalling
can we take out no insurance policies to safeguard thinking or writing or building?
(Lyotard's) différend: a dispute or difference that cannot be resolved by the cognitive or linguistic resources we have at hand --(indicating rather)--> a rupture in the presentation of testimony (~ litigate)
something you could turn your tattooed back on
(#my work on [post-feminist] harem)
(companionship and sexuality and installations of community) --> The Inoperative Community [Bataille, Blanchot, Nancy]
(how to) create community wherever I go?
(establish relationships: humor, kindness, attention, reworking, “re-”, festivity, moderate arousal, silliness, playfulness, support,)
learning making a “fictive kin group in training” (how to learn to notice each other? how to learn to be in the same game?)
to insisted on community without relying on transcendence =/= communion
(community without illusions about itself)
a community that is self-annulling but rigorous (rigorously perverse)
(--the duties of the survivor)
-this is about creating convivial spaces (=/= urban design ideology)
(to set up around) work =/= (bodies of) knowledge
(let's make this an [...]
(122)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%32.8[...]--"they contaminate!”)
in the case of mobile phone animal meme, the human-animal relation does not operates solely through the physical proximity of humans and animals, but rather a wider geography, and networks the interiority of Tehran domestic environments.
-as the house becomes cleaner, the public domain becomes more feral, and the animal more contagious, and the proximity more virtual, and the cross-species relationships and pictural,
-questions of the vital, the dangerous, and the wild (in tehran)
“[...]animals, especially dead ones, enter centrally into what humans can themselves be and do in the world.” (Cockburn)
i am trying to establish an anthropological, sociological and psychological investigations in this matter, calling for a ‘cultural animal geography’ that focuses on the complex entanglings of human-animal relations with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]
...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***
societies in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)
technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]
*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.
‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...
understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?
“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western scienc[...]
(123)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.1[...]ns with space, place, location, environment and landscape. ~-> topology(s) {it means that spaces and places involved make a difference to the very constitution of the relations in play}
[Tehran: wilderness ~ public ~ non-domesticity]
...differing peoples in differing periods and worldly contexts***
societies in a host of settlements, fields, farms, factories, imaginary, literary, psychological and virtual spaces (--> and how animalhuman is socially defined)
technologies of human orderings : telegram? [encountering all kinds of inventiveness that go on cross-species (human, animal, story, image, media), the kind of semiotic work]
*Space* (de Certeau) : A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place.) The law of the ‘proper’ rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own ‘proper’ and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
--> space as the ‘scheme of things’ --> species-identifying
=/= imaginal space, animal space, memory, dream, etc.
‘species-identifying’ (classification) in:
•pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...
understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?
“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”
when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?
who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)
...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?
In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’
[...]
(124)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.1[...]◦pre-Neolithic totemic societies (Shepard 1993)
•biblical classifications of the different beasts (Leviticus: Sibley 1995)
•ancient and medieval ‘great chain of being’ thinking (Lovejoy 1936)
•Linneaus's Systema naturae
•tabular representations of the natural world (Frangsmyr 1983; Spary 1996)
•...
understandings of what comprises an animal is different in each case.
what should be interested?
“(elaborating on Shepard,) Ingold (1994) suggests that hunter-gatherers generally view the distinction between humans and animals as permeable and easily crossed, unlike what is taken as read in much Western science and philosophy.”
when/how you are persuaded to portray yourself as the relevant ‘expert’ in whatever field?
who are the legitimate spokespersons for animals? once Attar, and now biology sci.
(‘the modern constitution’ is as guilty as mysticism's literacy)
...and that strong human sense of the proper place of animals (which they should occupy physically) --> material-conceptual (double) placement ...(‘scheme of things’ [ajayeb] --> animals supposed to be found in the non-discursive spaces and places of the world) (or on the television)
-Said: ‘imaginative geography’, geographical ‘othering’
-overlappings that we find in telegram social media tehran --> what kinds of ‘animal’ (which animalities) are at stake there in the mobile phone's interface?
In recent years zoos have reinvented themselves as ‘arks’
animals categorically embodied ‘meaty beings,’ and how they are usually “out of place” in the the immediate locality made in Tehran
animals are very good at forging their own beastly places, ‘other’ spaces of that of the human
(this is not about ‘territory’)
who “can” think and act in the world?
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]
cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals
*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency emerging as an effect generated
and performed in configurations of different materials. Latour's work to relocate qualities.)
(--> New Mate[...]
(125)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.2[...]
who has the “ability” to prompt change?
[my apass research project is in a sence *contemplating the agency* and speculating *relocating qualities* ~-> (re)configuration of the world]
cultural cross-codings has always been constructed between ‘some’ humans and ‘some’ animals
*the “source” of agency, coined in Europe(?) from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards: self-awareness, intention, thought and language --> properties of “consciousness”
(--> History of Consciousness department in the Humanities Division of the University of California, Santa Cruz. #entities that started to make decision deep in the ocean)
(--> ‘actor-network theory’ ANT; Callon, Law, Latour, Serres. #the key difference here lies in the historical uses and mediations of objects, for humans objects are employed to solidify social bond. ANT sees agency 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
[...]
(126)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.2[...] 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. (--> Hollywood)
...................................
[Avital]
the maternally contacting child is menaced
it is the mother who call(ed) first
mother and child, each the absolute hostage of the Other
to face the immense, faceless Someone
the nature of our encounter is on a timer
ask for subtitle if I go foreign for you. (i might go foreign for you)
in nerves sense, i am pushed and persecuted by the need to quickly tell you everything that I know ---> the pedagogical instant -----> i don't think one can proceed slowly enough and pull the break in the age of rapid and fast food and acceleration.
our verbal velocities could reach no one in a way that would truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality... ?
...who took no prisoners (...who can truly say that?)
(I also? take pleasure in) the injurious effects of language : words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in psyche or soma --> manifesto
...................................
(as a reader) friend is [...]
(127)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33.3[...] />
•(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*
-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 relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals
(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]
bureaucrats (victim or tr[...]
(128)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.7[...]rid of genealogical knowledge necessary to make them into benign ancestors*
-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 relation to the dead is commemorated primarily through national rituals
(in the Jeju uprising/massacre case that Veena studies) ‘victim’: the qualifying condition for genealogical connections to be maintained in imagining kinship as constitutive of the relations between the living and the dead [=/= victim: an appeal to the authority of subjective experience, or the knowledge produced by the State about the dead as victim or traitor]
bureaucrats (victim or traitor?) and shaman (ancestor or ghost?) --> entanglement of different ways of knowing and classifying
(for the survivorss of Jeju after 70 years) inordinate character of knowledge appears in this world as the unbearable burden of not being able to convert your dead kin into ancestors consigning them to a ghostly existence
--> so that the ancestors can rest peacefully in death and less in terms of the discourse of transnational justice or human rights
reputation of a woman --> the marriage prospects of girls --> ideas of purity and honor --Veena--> “poisonous knowledge” secreted by the large-scale abduction of women (in India-Pakistan Partition)
-cultural understanding of sex as especially polluting for a woman
disclosure or a coming to know that a close relative had a hidden history tied to large historical event --> announcing an “otherness” to a close relative with whom one had inhabited a life.
Partition ==> distortion of everyday language itself and its bodying forth
bodily nature of language
poetry suffused with exquisite portraits of grief
the sense that kinship relations themselves have become lethal
(journalism's) trap of knowledge/ignorance (ruth/falsity) binary [asking for formal solutions to problems of indeterminacy because of the finitude of knowing subjects or veiling of [...]
(129)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.8[...]heory’ --> *routinized antiessentialism*) ==> loss of conceptual access to an entire thought-realm***
immersed in a precritical understanding of the body
the idea of biological construction having been rendered either unintelligible or naive (in feminism --> an avowed interest in the body + a persistent distaste for biological detail)
interested in antiracism and politics of globalization --✕--> crucial dimension of research: body <== “the precarious, accidental, contingent, expedient, striving, dynamic status of life in a messy, complicated, resistant, brute world of materiality, a world regulated by the exigencies, the forces, of space and time” + the conditions under which bodies are encultured, psychologized, given identity, historical location, and agency
*(you can) speak (back) to postmodernism (or democracy etc.), rather than simply speak on (your relationship to) it*
...................................
>
Hayward on the role of embodiment in visual cultures + meaning of animals in representation
*to envision animal* = to visualize, to experience, to figure, to image, kinds of species, discourses, representations, institutions, histories, epistemologies + to “imagine possible” a set of material and ethical relationships between species
envisioning:
•a mode of seeing and embodying, of immersing and inhabiting, and of storytelling and theorizing in a techno-scientific world of “eye machine”
•a range of practices for situating the “self” (that tender thing in postmodernity) in places and spaces grown thick with entanglements and consequences; a form both of “to face” and “to perceive”
aesthetic conceptions of beauty and/or ambiguity coupled with biological epistemology and phenomenology of the organisms --in--> in Jean Painleve, Genevieve Hamon, Leni Riefenstahl, David Powell ==construct==> a host of hybridized and enmeshed “encounters”
biosemiotics
zoosemiotics
-humanist fascist aesthetic --> desires to memorialize “beautiful and unpolluted” coral communities
-promise of immediate and luminous experience of “jellyfish otherness”
-systems (of power?) that constitutively produce animal and human actors
human-animal + nonhuman-animal + apparatuses --> co-constitutive in the process of trying to know something about whale ecology
(Hayward > Whitehead:) concrescence: “we” (con prefix) ere- (create) scence (sense, or the “scene,” that which is seen), the present is given by a consense of subjective forms. We are multiple individuals, but there are also multiple individual agents of consciousness operant in the construction of the given.
-literal materialization of a dynamic produced
photograph (only one part, a kind of lively limb, of the relay):
(ajayeb style -->) a bumptious a[...]
(130)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.9[...]r />
transgenic technologies ==>
jellyfish + GFP (green fluorescent protein)
rhesus monkey
glowing kittens
transgenic pigs
(...animal examples of chimeric and impure)--Hayward--> articulation of carnal interdependence across species boundaries
bacteria, yeast, fungi, plant, fly, human cell
chimeric borderlands of GFP and transgenics
pushing against the perceptual and affective registers of laboratory walls embodied selves, eating practices, living conditions
bio-capitalism
animal industry
(Hayward on) carnality and radiance of naturecultures
(welcoming a) multidisciplinary table of where light is being eaten
visuality as corporality
light = meat
(Latin word) lumen: light, lantern, lamp, clairity, understanding, the central cavity of a hollow structure in an organism or cell
*somalumenal: how might luminosity, effulgence and illumination be about embodiment or corporality? light transubstantiated into flesh and matter (=/= body transcended by the thrills of enlightenment and radiance)*
(my work on telegram bestiary:) *post-animal studies*
[*]tranimal: a synecdochically imagined correspondence written as a portmanteau word --> changes in our understanding of bodily transformation, somatic and sensual synthesis that manifests synecdochically (a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part) =/= metaphorically
[Cinderella is synecdochic]
*trans-
ongoing labor of cross-species agents
energetic and material crossings that disrupt bifurcated categories
(Haraway + Hayward) metaplasm قلب حروف: a change in a word (by adding, comitting or transposing its letters, syllables or sounds) that can signify a mistake, stumbling, a troping that makes a difference [in joined natureculture --Haraway--> flesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds]
to inflect tranimals with its tropic kin of antimeria that turns nouns into verbs, that mobilizes, incites, activates persons, animals, places, things and ideas
*i am rubied by your attention* : the relay of energies and forces (not just encounter) ==constitute==> ontology
[*]ontology: what there is + what debts we owe to it --> we owe ‘sensation’ to life's ‘insistencies’ : (Hayward arguing) we must respond to *life's insistencies* through sensation (corporal prehensions)
--(?why to write:)--> **noun = transitional responses to relationships** (=/= direct products of environment)
==?==> percussive distribution of affect
boundary: refracted interfaces of passage, prepositional orientation
sensuous being: unmetabolizable more, the residue of passing
jellyfish sting story
“a jellyfish stings human skin, leaving an empurpled m[...]
(131)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%35.2[...]merely receptive,) implies a task, a pragmatic act = appropriation
**one's heritage is something constructed, and it is constantly transforming itself retroactively** بازگشتی --> it makes us capable of responding and that we in fact respond to our heritage =/= simply carrying on a tradition
***things are inherited, but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***
(Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]
how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals
*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*
ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals
when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]
Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviors appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end
moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help
asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*
(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relation[...]
(132)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...]a source of pleasure
•a practice in the construction of our identities
•a judgment about beauty (of something being well done that *relies upon the recognition of one's peers* --> this is something i realized in apass) ==> judgment about *bond* (that concerns) the means of the work's doing [and places where humans and animals share things, achieve things together, accomplish themselves] (=/= the work as accomplished): a **reciprocal judgment (of bond & beauty)** [bond: judgment about the conditions of a life lived together ***even in situations that are radically asymmetrical***] through which the breeder and his animal [also participants in apass] may recognize each other
(Haraway's) work: a process that crafts capabilites to answer for + answer to
Despret's notion of ‘judgment of the bond at the center of all relations’ =/= Wittgenestein (famous and meaningless observation: “if animals could speak we would get shouted at every day” : highly anthropocentric notion of animal as victim)
(Porcher's radical idea of) we work with animals in order to be able to live with them, not the other way round
[Tehran's need of] speculative fabulation: stories that whets our appetite for possibilites, that open imagination =/= idyllic story of a golden age
(Despret, Porcher, Haraway) work: locus of unexpected encounter, the possibility of our communication
...................................
eternal turtle
...................................
new zoonotic infectious diseases ==> new human-animal relationship
vast silent reservoir in aquatic birds
confinement, deprivation, stress
global biodiversity crisis --> there is no monopoly on animal cruelty
mass-production of animal suffering
unsanitary practices
(we make) mad cow disease: herbivores --into--> carnivores --into--> cannibals
...................................
*discussion across ideologies*
partisan mindset [--> social belonging]: ideology provides an ostensive set of tools (sometimes unconsciously) for analyzing a complex social world = orientation
•partisan operative mentality یک نوع ذهن عملی
•normal is ontologically privileged over abnormalities (or vice versa)
•left-wing identity politics: reductive us-versus-them mentality + moral panic
i am influenced by the demand of the other [= (Lacanian) socio-psychic projection of a Big Other that stands in for the presence of the ontologically non-existent group narrative] ==> moral grounds for living
(?) reverting back to your material status (as private individuals) =/= looking after ideological stability and economy
thins that don't work with when talking to partisan mentality:
•factual argumentation
•punching them
•Kantian argument for the intrinsic value of all human lives
(what generally don't wo[...]
(133)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.3[...]eans’ for another being, but also how something ‘matters’ for it (~ the most meaningful)
language of perspective --Daston--> what does it mean to understand other minds
*sympathetic projection* [--> **perspective: apotheosis of subjectivity as the essence of mind] <-- a cultural shift:
•habit of interior observation cultivated by certain forms of piety
•increasingly refined language of individual subjectivity (developed in the 18th and 19th century novel)
•equation drawn between ‘sensory experience = self’ by sensationalist psychology
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy
perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective ==imperil==> necessary distance (or ‘sanitary cordon’ between the observer and the observed)
}==>
•anthropomorphism =/= science
•anecdote =/= legitimate date
•nonhuman =/= beliefs (--> you can't attribute belief to animals)
(old dualism of) “Science =/= non-science” ~= “imaginative (autobiographical, emotional) =/= factual (neutral)” ~= “body =/= mind”
(reconstruction of)
what is most meaningful for animal
what is the perspective of animal
*most meaningful: affected perspective* (Despret) =/= (Uexküll) semiological perspective (of the tick)
(looking for or) focus on affected perspective ==Despret==> (reveals) scientists’ bodies in their practice --> what having a body means (for scientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made” by scientific practices [<-- that is why the question of science is important for whoever dealing or working with the body]
+
(Annemarie ==>) bobies (that are made) are enacted multiples (in medical practice)
+
(Despret -->) how bodies are undoing and redoing themselves through different scientific practices with animals? = *how are bodies growing multiples in diverse practices?* + (its corollary) *how do each of these practices (+ animals they are addressing) enact each of these bodies?*
Mowat's *modest embodiment* ==Despret==> partial affinities [=/= seeing like a wolf or mouse] ==> feeling or being like a wolf or mouse = ****to be taken in a radically non-psychological sense**** (--> Cinderella's non-psychological relation to her birds and mice =/= contemporary western psychological subjects)
---> go to wildboyz, Cinderella under a mouse regimen
-using his body as an experimental tool --> eating a wolf's diet (=/= empathy, romantic dream of being a wolf)
submit his own body to mouse diet
one uses one's own body to meet the needs of another
Mowat used his [...]
(134)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.7[...]
“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of the morning greeting ceremony
limits of endurance
i feld that i, because of my specific superiority as a member of Homo sapiens, together with my intensive technical training, was entitled to *pride of place* =/= being under observation
Mowat's humour =/= Derrida not laughing at his own worries (concerned with: what distinguish animals from man is their “being naked without knowing it”)
•naked body is a pretext, a pre-text for more philosophy
•Derrida is talking to his colleagues (the very people who are **seeking grandiose difference** <-- also artists) =/= a difference that happens to him
•(my problem with the old tiring trend in philosophy [after encounter with Manning]:) looking for locus of things [a generality] : talk about ‘the figure of the cat' = the allegory for all the cats on the earth (~ the felines that traverses our myths and religions, literature and fables)
***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)
wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries
what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?
(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*
****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)
[...]
(135)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.8[...]
***what the cat might actually be doing***
(this is my relation to description, what is the world, that cat, the demon, the mice up to? and use my best imaginative crafts and precise descriptive acts, the answers are many. that is not about definition or defining ‘what is’ the cat that visits me or the spider in my room. i only try to well define concepts and not subjects. my style of presenting my research on ajayeb bestiary: narrating the contingency of the differences that happened and mattered to me in particular =/= philosophy)
wolves (=/= nomadic roamer) have strong feelings of property rights and they ritually and regularly mark their boundaries
what am i allowed to do with my body when i am with animals?
(Despret + Strum + Mowat) using one's body to make the animal respond (--> does this make sense with humans? in apass for example --?--> use your body to make them respond =/= react)
--Haraway--> a “good” (actually bad) scientist = learning to be invisible, like a rock to be unavailable, as if data-collecting humankind were not present, seeing the scene of nature close up through a peep-hole, remove from the subject animals’ social environment
•(ignoring animal social cues) imagining the baboons as seeing somebody off-category, not something --> to be a *nonentity* (tolerated but unobtrusive!!)
--> [*]distance: a cognitive and relational perspective {what kind of distance, aesop fables, Kelile Demne, or ajayeb takes or keeps?}
--> learn to be [*]polite: (in the ethical, political, and epistemological senses of the word) to respond, to acknowledge, to look back, and *to greet*
****politeness ==> transforms you --> in the way of those you are being polite to**** (<--?-- Cinderella's politeness)
companion story --> wich who we share food {=/= with who we cook together <-- generated protocols ==> host, guest, house, power}
[(Annemarie's) praxiographic enquiry into the] (Despret's) embodied practices of knowing [of (Sina's) Cinderella]
**bodies enact =/= perform**
@Chloe, Mette --> (ironic) performing a protocol =/= embodied choreography
(contemporary choreography =/= embodiment)
(scientists and animals are fleshy creatures which are) enacted and enacting through their *embodied choreography* (<-- epistemological, political, ontological)
scientist work [observing, collecting events, meeting them, writing about, inscribing them into theories --> explain why they do what they do] ==> *makes their animals more real*
--Despret--> a praxiographic account [~= feedback] (paying attention to the way scientists embody their work) ==> *make scientists more real*
(for apass) we need praxiography =/= philosophy or theory [of artistic research]
Sina's note taking in apass --> how *practic[...]
(136)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.8[...] 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”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”
embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement
[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond
--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies
“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism
***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)
Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*
...................................
Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist
اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them
*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*
-why do we listen to prohpets?
quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being
(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not bec[...]
(137)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37[...]osition of your presence)
•Lorenz's “becoming with”
•Despret's “the miracle of the attunement”
embodied communication --> responsible relation --> constructing the possibility of engagement
[*]responsible: the one who constructs him/herself in order to be available to a respond
--Despret--> (to imagine that we can actually) correspond through the choreographic language of our bodies
“traying to get knowledge" = knowing for the sake of knowing }<-- 19th century adventure hunter archeologist imperialism
***(for James) [*]emotion: what makes us feel (=/= what is felt), an experience of making available ==> an occasion for others : ****emotions ==> dispose our bodies**** (+ our bodies dispose our emotions) @Chloe
-if we want to feel an emotion, we can dispose our body to produce it (<-- this was my method in my early performances in 2014)
Lorenz, Strum, Smuts, Despret
learn to become what it becames when it acts ‘as if’ --> *stakes of reliable knowledge : to thing with*
...................................
Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist
اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them
*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*
-why do we listen to prohpets?
quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being
(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*
what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language
*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in
very bottom of the ladder of choices...
for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی
ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)[...]
(138)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37[...]r of choices...
for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی
ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)
ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne
*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study
(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens
the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution
the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning
---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, you know everything is building towards this climax, you read it in a very different way than the person who has to retrace all that have been implanted in your way by the author to throw you off the scent of the real villain {==> you lose the past in the image of the present}
+ scientist (who wish to have a) story about *why we believe what we believe now and why it is right* [knowing that everything we know now will be overturned if not now later]--> pathos and progress of science {==> negates science's enormous creativity and capacity for renovation}
-*Foucault showed how many more objects [sexuality, etc.] have histories (that we thought they don't, that they are constant for all humanity for all time for all cultures)
ravens are capable of being silent when they don't care to be noticed
(the raven inviting the others to share in the party, when food is difficult to find + they are experts in hiding food items) eyes of an ethologist --> why do ravens do that which the logic of evolution should prohibit them from doing? --Despret--> this motive will be not only a matter of discovering but also of inscribing in the regime of proof
hierarchical ladder =/= great economy of conflicts
one-upmanship
(raven's) acts that appear to be useless, pertain at once to both the game and to the affirmation of skill
**reciprocity of exchanges of good conduct**
•you are interested in the difference[...]
(139)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.1[...]enticing ravens
*seeing without being seen*
obliging them : luring them to actualize the choices : ***creating situations as if they were natural*** (so as to let the birds do the talking)
(it is a matter of) rendering them more robust [giving them the occasion to resists, of giving them *the power to send the researcher/storyteller to work* =/= to disarticulate (what Ferdosi does in Shahnameh to the Div)]
to find an enticement that interests them ~= to let himself be recruited by them
[from Latin “cresc-” grow, rise ==> crescent, crew, decrease, crescendo, recruit]
to trust them = to act like them
@apass feedback (differential knowledge that is created because of not trusting)
the lure could be used to respond to this question: the ravens fall for the trick
...not only do the ravens not respond to questions but they pose new ones
-how could we ask them (the ravens, trees, etc.) to verify our hypothesis (about them)?
*he has no answers =/= he has nine hypothesis*
biological detective stories
curiosity (for the things you discover that you don't know) <== the more you know
more cunning
more imagination
more activities
--to--> obligate ravens to choose between hypothesis
{ Heinrish: “It is still dark, and I'm already being awakened by raven calls! Several birds are flying over Kaflunk making short, high-pitched calls that are unlike the usual quorks. These calls convey excitement. The birds are flying to a kill! I feel it. Even I can understand, and I too am recruited” }--Despret--> ***if this recruitment by nonhumans was able to acquire such an efficacy, it is because the human was transformed by those whose enigma he was trying to understand*** [=/= animal rights activist ==> evidence arrive in the form of a weakened raven that has to be saved]
<br />
***letting himself be drawn into their enigma = converting the environment into a little more of himself ==> he learned to become sensitive to what makes the ravens sensitive*** (Cinderella's mice learned that about her)
Heinrish --> I, as a mammal for whom they are not intended, can feel [...] I also feel I can detect a raven's surprise, happiness, bravado, and self-aggrandizement
(recognizing one another ==>) to go by way of what the ravens demand --Cinderella--> *progress often depends more on how well one follows the situation than on how well one controls* (especially when control is difficult)
•one must learn to ask them to give evidence differently and to try to understand *how a raven ponders a question*
and now, when everything is suddenly new, this bird acts as if nothing is out of the ordinary! [...] I can only guess that they see it not as an absolute but as departures from the accepted. when everyt[...]
(140)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.4[...]ing 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
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)
[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incoherent genders[...]
(141)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.8[...]ontemporary society as “regime"]
genre of animal
Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)
maroon: escaped cattle
typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic
glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*
xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)
Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized by a racial capitalism and its scientific jaws” [<-- Hayward's politically correct and simple fantasy about good and bad]
...................................
*body* --> sociohistorical construct & constrain
=/=
*embodiment* --> sense of being bodily (pain, ...) [<-- my focus has been on this one more than the other] --> **never embody ironically!** (<-- maybe irony is OK in visual or written medium?)
•embodiment goes beyond body (my body is still my body but also not)
•to pose
•to transpose
in my work, i transpose: walk through readings (=/= transform: performative “true” embodiment)
•transposition: a mapping of senses, to change something into another form (+ its foreclosures, refusals, limits) = expressive excitation, provocation of difference that cannot be resolved by penetration or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration
border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood
sensation: a composite of affects and percepts
personal =/= individual
Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina
story: act of violence and deception
medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account
accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations
described: formalistically detailed transpositional
post-[...]
(147)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.9[...]l
Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina
story: act of violence and deception
medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account
accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations
described: formalistically detailed transpositional
post-animal: the afterward of the animal is meat
bumptious coherence of bodies
(neighborhoods) designed to make some vulnerable while others safe
percussed by bullets or by traffic
*threat as invitation*
جراحی زیبایی who alter themselves through surgeries and hormonoes *to feel themselves differently*
(shia in iran is islam after a cosmetic surgery to feel their religion differently)
*changing sex is about changing senses and species* @Foad
/>
depending on my needs, i pretend not to understand
instrumentalization of animal life
surgically changing body
technique of eschew اجتناب
eschewing a nature or culture distinction
sex in pieces
spheres of imagination
[my work:] transhistorical diagnosis: reading in pieces neighborhoods of imagination (opposed to what is available)
#sleep-walking
web-building beasts (spiders) [webbing =/=? weaving: a feminine trope?] }--> expression of the body
my fleshy referent 🕷
over-reaching subjects
*spider's web ==propose==> home and territory are of and with the body*
spiders are scenes of arachnophobia and revultion
extending bodily substance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver ofver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes
[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sen[...]
(148)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38[...]f the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes
[*]trap: a mouth, a mode of utterance, the “O” curve of lips and throat that sounds out and names the apprehension of being embodied
--> ***positionality ~/= situatedness = to be trapped*** (to speak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*
[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat
•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects
(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**
(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts
irreverent intimacies
thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”
limits (of my body) = energized zones
sadomasochism stitches
*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)
pastpresent: an always present past in the present
*patterns longer than lived experience*
[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies
{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place
•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally
(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual m[...]
(150)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.1[...]ak and receive ranges of sensuous input from one's environment) --> *our bodies are not endlessly available to intentionality*
[*]articulation: speaking oneself into culture and history, but also creating a site, a gap, making room in cultural and political fabrications, and finding a tempo, a beat
•utopic inclusion (sexual, national, racial)
•*sexuality imagined as political promise* (radical force of nonnormative sexuality) [=/= (for Freud) sex is regressive]
•trans: energetic and fantastic space between objects
(racial, economic) **divisions = dependencies**
(Lyotard: we must) construct the anatomy of polymorphous perversion, unfold the immense membrane of libidinal body =/= system of parts
irreverent intimacies
thresholding: an intensity that must be exceeded for reaction to occur
“here is my home, i am freshly aware that my body is a threshold, an entry between rooms”
limits (of my body) = energized zones
sadomasochism stitches
*carnal improvisation* <-- paradigm of performance art in europe (---> go to karaoke in KHM, role of my body as medium in the circuit of transmissions, poetically imagine the shape of a new pattern)
pastpresent: an always present past in the present
*patterns longer than lived experience*
[*]history: libidinal tracings, erotogenic intensities, psychical cartographies
{ porosity = poiesis }--> collapse the boundary between the embodied self + its world + others ==> consitute a specific place
•puberty = the fantasy that this disfiguration will make me more myself
•teenager = you spend hours before the refracting reflection of your transmutating *body = your most intimate other* --> enact boundaries, sometimes lovingly, but also brutally
(senses are) reactive to the sensual abundance of the world but limited by affected perceptual milieus
[*]texture: residue of unmetabolized and metabolized sensations of animate forces --> emergence of bodiliness (<-- Hayward's rhetoric)
transitional body = textural body
architecture: the most binding part of the communal rhythm
appearance ~= metonymic
appearance allows her to emerge situationally as a woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject
(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment
identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference
(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)
[...]
(151)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.1[...]ey go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?
***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***
the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*
(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer
...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar path” nor that of the meaning of the wall
artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her
hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation
(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control
sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it
each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects
(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*
*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella
it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause involved
animals certainly respond to a question, but it is not the one we pose to them
*the researchers compartmentalize the research; the animals to not stop prompting them to decompartmentalize it* ♥
(always) the artifact --constitutes--> the object of critique
animals do not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them
(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)
why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the an[...]
(152)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.5[...]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 thought)
(dramatization of) agonistic intimacy : a relationship of proximity and violence between neighboring social groups (the body of neighboring species)
--Taussig--> ritual violence (the most stunning prop is the human: the all too profane body with its various appendages, fluids, undulating surfaces, folds, exists, entrances)
--Veena--> sacrificial violence : dramatization of one's own inevitable death (there is a certain anxiety around violence that is integral to *the imagination of an ethical life* in Hindu texts and practices)
--Sina--> gamer video of zoo
condition of viscerality
a condition of being ransomed to death
Venna --> a major theological transformation (a critique of violence) in a nonmessianic nonsoteriological sense رستگاری شناختی in South Asia took place with the Mahabharata
*cruelty =/= violence*
•the feeling of noncruilty expressed in the unpredictable attachments, at times across species (companionship) in the Mahabharata (Veena) [in Attar? in Kelile and Demne?]
•companionable thinking (Cavell)
•commission species (Haraway)
--✕--> Singh's agonistic intimacy:
1. companionship may also involve forms of mutual violence
2. violence inevitability (in affinity or animus) does not remove a consideration of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*
a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later
informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms
which r[...]
(154)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.7[...]
(==Georgescu==> counter-memory <-- does it assist coming to terms with the past, processing the paralyzing past and the humiliating present of globalization coupled with reactionary state control)
socialist advertising (--> promoted products and services that had not competition in the absence of a real market) ==now==> a sense of awkwardness (absurdity of an era) --> an oxymoron ==> (the ads’) appeal ==guarantee==> the authenticity of remembering + mutual recognition (among members of the nostalgic community) ----> *longing for a bond specific to an elusive era*
(for late socialism --Imre-->) [*]nostalgia: a popular and essential compensatory gesture to make up for the loss of a contradictory temporality
+
a mode of continuity with an era that was 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[...]
(155)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.2[...]utsourcing 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
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism[...]
(156)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]ojected 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
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)
one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)
(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}
zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark[...]
(157)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]akes a piece of wood and asks “where is fire?” I say the way of everything is in manifestation as when two woods strike together made of Margh and Afar,[1] fire will appear or hit stone to metal
[1] According to Jashn-e Sadeh recalls the importance of light, fire and energy; light which comes from God is found in the hearts of his creatures. --> Hushang and the origin of fire
...................................
we are too abstract, we are thinking yes there are things out there wild or whatever. then we must be surprise to see that the abstract far thing is made of flesh, quartz, or fire.
unlike camels and rats and sheep, other four legged or mammals, fire is not designed for something, the way organisms evolved to have meanings and representations to each other. fire embodies a vast place in our material and industrial and semiotic world but itself is not a creature of evolution. it knows nothing of symbiogensis nor of molecular compartmenship. fire is an elementary radical reaction to closeness. the third person. pure manifestation.
every mountain range have personalities. rock is arrange by evolution. it tells you about itself when you feel it firm in your hand pressing to your ear, asking thousands of questions, exploring with imagination. stone is not a social creature, maybe that's why we listen to them. fires are social beings, death sentences.
their society and ecology
reaching access to the literacy of fire-work
...................................
(...) --> the black-box --> ka'ba --> an intermediate mechanism to reach beyond the door-knob --> dark medium of worship --> the jinn --> ontology of the envelopment --> an interiority that is exterior --> talking-fire --> mediums of the beyond --> put your ‘thing’ in the fire --> going through the fire --> test some fossils --> ice age --> databases that survive --> promises of futurity --> tech --> black-box is always about the-envelope and the-beyond --> going back to the cave --> monotheism invented darkness (praying in the dark marked singulaity of worship as the begining of subjectivity) --> there is a sudden big shift from telling-stone to talking-fire (introducing the spectacularization of truth-event, where risky aesthetic of fire coded as masculine is traded for a mutuality of slower wilderness a more feminine trope. the telling-stone proposes a totally different ecological model than the survivorship narratives encoded in the trial of the talking-fire. truth became untouchable visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worsh[...]
(158)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40[...]e visual spectacle that can burn and annihilate charging off the haptic closeness of the stone to the ear. truth became the matter of untouchable, visual. the angry truth god came with the fire both as tool of worship and punish (human taking lessens and used fire to discipline the forces of nature) --> the darkness that enveloped the worship, made the absence of light crucial for constructing interiority [note: before going to light-fire the worshipers must wash themselves in Vozu, in Namaz the worshpers wash themselvs before going to the darkness of prayers---is this water that we make vozu the same as ‘abe heyvan’? before going into the hyper space, the ritual plays a key role and a key hole. like all hyper spaces that forwards you yo the beyond the box as well is about deliverence (to the lover?): (for the sake of) salvation ‘rastgari’ is about delivering ‘you’ (--> Ma'ad --> masaleye “enteghal” [be alame digar] [dar tarikh falsafeye eslami irani ---> go to footnote in Motakhabat 2nd volume page44]) --> for *Rumi people is firewood, hizom, inflammables; fire is the present tense, its light is about the future and its ashes about the past: we like ash to perform 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 fo[...]
(159)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40[...]rtain 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 to nurture, itself a product of successful ontogeny of an older generation.)
-many myths correspond to the ontogenesis. in Ontogeny, timing is everything---narrative.
-aspect of the ontogenetic self---(the modern world has lost the ways to guide the) new person emerging at each stage
[from kinfolk complexity and elderhood to medically sustained old age] -- i myself have turned to old folk to do storytelling, as necessity(!?)
one emerging in Pleistocene, is about perceiving one's place in the scheme of things (and not sending people down the pit into darknesses)
WE NOT ONLY LOOKED ‘AT’ ANIMALS, WE ALSO LOOKED ‘INSIDE’ THEM, realizing that they were more kin than indicated by our exteriors. (it wasn't Aristotle first who was performing such procedures)
attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)
inheritance (DNA, etc.) calls upon human society and imagination to invent its exact expressions.
human species’ “theme” is Paleolithic
(those who are “better” live in a natural environment and a cultural system that are closer to) meeting the “expectations” of the genes
Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic
trees structure space
**imagining the possibilities of something else being in there.
(how we were doing it? before fire)
“A meditative stillness that is good for the human soul, suggests poet Gary Snyder, was invented by motionless hunters. That moment of silent reverence comes also at the final death stroke when one succumbs to the cycle of life.” (Shepard)
[from predation to hunting (there is a huge epistemological shift) (matter of representation and interpretation)]
mammalian ecology
[(let's) risk everything (instead of risk-reducing) --- issues of representation and agency in thinking ‘with’ animals. textual, metaphor animal in Attar line of thinking]
a distant call in known terrain says it is the there, not the here, where attention should be paid. [far, origins of our tropes, metaphysics? abstraction? =/=? motionless hunters invented motionless meditative worship]
-(kinfolk in) swamps, brush, and forest (in terms of discerning the *relationships between clues*)
-(indirect) dealing with the escapable (=?=> tracking strategies + symbolic thought)
a central theme: (a banquet/feast at which) the participants--eater and eaten--risk the improvements of mind against the certainty of occasional poor decisions, (faulty memory, carelessness[...]
(160)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%40.3[...]e beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)
what kind of grid the fire produces?
beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***
testability? we want everyone and everything tested
after testing the fire...
monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,
[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness
the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire
what ciruits are installed by this?
how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?
what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?
/>
what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?
how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)
interpretation <--?--> experience
fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation
...................................
[Serres]
technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
fire, and transcendental subject
[my body lives still in that space that the society ofety of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]
siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous
when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)
transsubstantiation
...................................
the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.
...................................
against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs a[...]
(162)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41[...]r />
(ice and fire) is only relatively cold
fire, and transcendental subject
[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]
siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous
when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)
transsubstantiation
...................................
the “call” come[...]
(163)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.1[...]tional 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 given in simple observation* --> the numinous power in thunderstorm developed from the dark thundercloud into an enormous black eagle, but since the mighty roar of the thunder could not well be imagined as issuing from other than a lion's maw, this bird was given a lion's head
**form-giving imagination**
rings the changes on a basic meaningful form in a whole series of variations, each expressing the underlying numinous content in different ways
-series of suggestive variant images all expressive of its power to wax, to produce and yield
lord: a charismatic leader magically responsible for producing fertility and plenty for his subjects
...situationally determined nonhuman forms --✕--> victory of human form over nonhuman forms slowly and with difficulty (with the begining of third millennium from early Dynastic onward)
intransitive: fulfilled in the specific situation or phenomenon and did not reach out beyond it (~ characteristic boundness to some phenomena)
(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[...]
(164)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%41.9[...] One of many crucial and important ways that past comes to effect the present is made over form. Form, with its strange logic and efficiency, has the capacity to freeze time. Life as we know it lies in the results of the processes that future forms come to effect the present. Any being's very survival depends on its ability to access the zones of continuity and possibility in these processes. How we can articulate these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?
4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.
Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.
The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.
The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it p[...]
(167)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%42.9[...]he classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of how to keep out of that place, this project proposal suggests to explore the Hayula's experience of self and how it incorporates destabilizing its, which might permit or prohibit seeing beyond its conditions.
In another level of description we will look at the concept of Hayula as a device in cross-catalytic relations in matter-energy flows, looking at it as a semi metaphorical and physical nonlinear model for structure-generating processes that populate our world. How attractors and transistors consolidated different energy flows of certain intensities to gain access to self-organization? The energy trapped in winds and currents, atmosphere and hydrosphere, solar energy that plants capture through photosynthesis, has clocked societies for centuries and gave them rhythm. A small fraction of a plant life that has powered most of civilization's past intensifications. Enormous reservoir of oceanic and atmospheric energy fuels a great variety of self-organized structures: tornadoes, cyclones, pressure blocks, and, more importantly for human history, wind circuits. These forms of spontaneous structural generation suggest that inorganic matter is much more variable and creative than we ever imagined.
[...]
...................................
(Wietske Maas)
materiality that is specific to the eye
similar to a plant, the eye is not a simple aperture to absorb light, but a filter to mitigate external stimuli.
unveil vision as a process of chemical contamination and digestion stemming from plants. vision is rooted in the materiality of digestion.
the human eye is an organ complicit with plant photosynthesis.
in fact, seeing is a process of photosynthesis. as much as plant photosynthesis absorbs excessive light and turns it into the carbon structures of sugar molecules, the human eye has to mitigate light and turn it into the neural structure of vision, cognition, and memory. in this process the eye protects itself from the corruptive metabolism of light, tapping into some ancestral mechanism shared with plants.
if human eye protects itself like a plant, we can think of photosynthesis itself as a sort of primeval organ of vision spread out across the skin of the vegetable kingdom.
material commonality (worth exploring)
incarnate an external organ of vision
our tie with the general metabolism of light
correlations between human vision and the organic world
using a technique to record the surface of reality or using to reveal the internal chemical composition of matter
in the chromatogram, a light reaction reveals the inner chemistry and transforms matter composition into visual patterns
different regime of visibility
light is not[...]
(168)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%43[...]r />
ritual efficacy of images and objects
ritual relation to mnemonic technologies
relations between images and words
--Severi--> concept of chimera helps (an indigenous mode?) in understanding power and dealing with it
(Severi and Lagrou + Guerreiro)
[*]chimera: every image that, by designating a plural being by means of a single representation, mobilizes its invisible parts, by purely optical means or by a set of inferences
-chimerical image associates, in a single visual form, indexes from different beings (a bird and a human being, a serpent and a jaguar, a wolf and a sea lion etc.), provoking a projection by the eye, which gives rise to an image implying at the same time the presence of these different beings
-evokes something that is implicit or absent to the observer
-chimerical images present a specific link between iconic representation (by imitation and convention) and indexical indication (visual, tactile or other) of a presence whose mode of existence, especially mental, is not realized materially
--> game between:
•perception & projection
•iconic representation & indexical indication
==> intensification (of the efficacy of chimeric images) : “capture the eye = capture the imagination” + demand that by projection [the observer] mentally “complete” the image
indexical signs have a causal contiguity (spatiotemporal contiguity) with what they signify
ritual action and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic
(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societie[...]
(169)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]es present a specific link between iconic representation (by imitation and convention) and indexical indication (visual, tactile or other) of a presence whose mode of existence, especially mental, is not realized materially
--> game between:
•perception & projection
•iconic representation & indexical indication
==> intensification (of the efficacy of chimeric images) : “capture the eye = capture the imagination” + demand that by projection [the observer] mentally “complete” the image
indexical signs have a causal contiguity (spatiotemporal contiguity) with what they signify
ritual action and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic
(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***
chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity
(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion
@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)
[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
◾Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's speech is transformed into pure value (~= poet's speech for whom words are values before they are signs) --> (for Clastres) language =/= violence: a facet of coercive power
denotative قوه تفکيک ()
predicative (Dickensian aspect)
referential (the efficacy of its context and meaning depends on something else)
enunciation (pragmatic) ==> effects on the enunciator + audience ~~Silverstein--> [*]politics: the dynamic arrangement and rear[...]
(170)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.1[...]eory (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)
counterintuitive context of ritual communication --> successful propagation of a representation (memorable)
for example recitation of shamanistic chants --construct--> an acoustic mask =/= convey meaningful message
for religion (and marketing?) culturally successful representation : *a counterintuitive representation formulated within counterintuitive conditions of communication*
}--Severi--> we need a more expressive theory of cultural propagation (<-- my try in telegram bestiary text)
doctrinal (semantic memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes
(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatur[...]
(171)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.4[...]c memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes
(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)
messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time
pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet
(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition
Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-ma[...]
(172)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.4[...] of dance
the old man Arnold
chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-
(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]
bleeding pearl
parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together
[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)
Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)
shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)
acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker
reflexive application of parallelism
(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)
use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority
imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion
both paradoxical & parallelistic
new ways to be faithful...
...................................
exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*
professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange
@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices
education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development
research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventure of charismas**
...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)
...subjectivities without a heritage in criticality and art
constraint: a source of self-abundance --Renan--> suffering and risk = opportunities to hybridize with life
curating:
•nutrition and extension
•analysis and transplantation
•=/= content historicization
•=/= data
extraterritoriality
being collocated in all the whispers of the world
wild pollination
artificial breeding
Renan: Institutional work carried by a freelancer, a private individual or a civil servant can improve the publicness of art. It gives confidence to the work of art in public service.[...]
(173)[...notes/hayula notes.txt]%44.5[...]years.
intimacy: first talking than thinking (maybe even taking it back), feeling an idiot afterward. When the saying is taken over by rhetoric or maneuvering or calculation then the problem is persuading or proving, not intimacy. (intimate thoughts in Shakespear). running with strategy in conversing and conversation (winning a round or winning an argument) is traceable back to power and coercion and its discomforts and anxieties. the art that i am talking about should not win the conversation. (but why intimacy in the art project at all?) by intimacy i find a route to my true consciousness. in intimacy only there is the possibility for love. not making the other/audience to think in a certain way, but exactly the opposite, the performer has to loose the game of convincement or wit (in her work/form/performance).
shyness: not the clinical term. i am talking about a shyness that is deep in the character, a kind of trembling before the other.
the ethical relation to the other, as always important, stakes are higher in performance? the proximity of the art object, the relation of the face to face relationship between the speaker and the listener, is the later container of ethical stake?
not audience attention, but audience imagination. not their reaction, but their response. Usually a response is a reply to a query not the result of a stimulus. Stimulus is an urgent vital process that acts to arouse action in shortest time. that time that is the price for thinking.
shakespear, the Everest of acting. Why performance/theater is not related to thinking and is always setup for acting and action? need for drama.
the event has happened off stage, now we talk about it. Macbeth, unlike tarantino!
violence is symbolized in many good old art. karaoke, etc.
violence is art-performance is exhibited...
the power of voice in islam, taboo of body.
no one is beheaded in the history of islam. (read tarikhe sakhtkoshi) contrast to French revolution.
i am not going to critique islam, i don't know what it is, just let me perform it.
who performs? someone doing something?
what is the cure for shyness.
‘performing for the other’
silent coming and going of the feminine, (form of shyness?)
when we send the shyest as an ambassador to represent us.
It is a self-defining system of signs referring to signs.
a quiet listener. we have yet no idea what is speak. how taking transforms the mind that talks. conditions of thinking in relation to talking, before or after the mouth that talks. thinking in other languages. if intimacy is saying before thinking, how fits the acts of maulwurfe?
work on shyness, I have to start (slowly) with what i (kind of) know.
“...Nudged on the scene as a kind of shivering being, anxious and shy,..” (k[...]
(175)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.1[...] connections
(jane jacob,) (1) community is spontaneous, the tissues of community are not something that can be planed, that they happen spontaneously. (2) and this only happens when you are at the local scale. so in this sense, design is suspect, because design is set to be post spontaneity.
find a way to think locally, and thinking about the city as a product of spontaneous interaction between people who are different. but the design can also make something that has a social character.
we perform an experiment to prove or disprove a hypothesis, we are working within a framework of a closed system, the original proposition governs our procedures and observations, at arriving at yes or no. but when performing the experiment we come across something unforeseen, or prompted by evidence to jump tracks and think about a different issue. then we are working within the framework of an open system. we move beyond yes or no to exploring something emergent, something whose elements was there but whose form was unknown to us. a fancy and careful way of saying “something new”, because it is new to our understanding.
William Empson
art results from overcrowding(?)
when one is responsive rather than assertive one can't imagine where one will end Up: thinking. this responsiveness is different than the state of being active or passive. a passivity that motivates and mobilizes the subject into places that are yet unknown to her/him.
Thinking, as Heidegger says, may be much the same as wandering. my lectures are like wandering.
someone who studies paradoxes, poetry and philosophy
(keeping what you know away from society, history and away from art, not to acknowledge what you have learn)
incompatibility between a particular love and a particular social arrangement for love.
when you play with others, not try to shine and not try to shy. (shyness is dangerous to society)
it is like being lynched by kukluksklan.
curios about somebody else rather than identifying with them.
i really learned how to work with people by learning how to keep people from killing each other in street.
if we are very sympathetic, saying “i know how you feel” is privileging solidarity: “we are all in this together”. but well we can't all be in this together in the same way, so what is it that we do together, despite this fact.
instead of the declaring voice “i believe this or that”, we can say “i would have though” or “perhaps” introducing a zone of ambiguity in people's relationship with each other you might get something social. subjunctive mood (konjuktiv) not only is to zusammenbinden the elements of semantic also to zusammenbinden the the people who are speaking in these terms.
cooperation is a rehearsal not a performance.
public real made of people who don't argue in behalf of their own i[...]
(176)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.3[...] (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)
The shock of new media is as old as the hills
Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
the conceiving mind over the perceiving body (vision/touch)
touching was considered “a cruder scanning at close range,” and seeing “a more subtle touching at a distance.”
for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of depth, and Condillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement and touch. The notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain.
[...]
(177)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.8[...]champ both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.
lemon grass plant, marigold
Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92
newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)
mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)
The shock of new media is as old as the hills
Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.
(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
the conceiving mind over the perceiving body (vision/touch)
touching was considered “a cruder scanning at close range,” and seeing “a more subtle touching at a distance.”
for Berkeley there is no such thing as visual perception of depth, and Condillac's statue effectively masters space with the help of movement and touch. The notion of vision as [Ouch is adequate to a field of knowledge whose contents are organized as stable positions within an extensive terrain.
•a technological gaze
•way of seeing (Derridean deconstructed)
•high-tech images
•artifact (cultural artifact, social)
•image of the or a body and its environment
•impossible subject-positioning, the codification of flesh, a visualization of scientific narratives and the aestheticization of information, all of which tell us about a longer line of cultural fantasies about information, code and technology. (Norah Campbell)
•Everything said is said by an observe (Maturana and Varela)
•framing the world
•virtual gaze (Baudrillard)
•achieve absolute vision, while seeing nothing.
•very much as real; human and technological, both
•i say this as someone who thinks that we are part of this digital world, but we are [...]
(178)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%45.8[...]unicate with the world outside of the cell--a complex membrane--to talk with the materials alien to itself. Interface is a critical point of intersection between different life worlds, fields, or levels of organization. They are the areas in which social friction can be experienced and where diffusion of new technology is leading to structural discontinuities (which can be either positive or negative), the interface is where they will occur. The argent issue of interfaces in social interaction and flow between human animal, nonhumans, and computers is today becoming a zone of transition of ephemeral technologies, physical contact, socio-political boundaries, and metaphor-representation.
Since antiquity, representation has been the foundational concept of aesthetics and semiotics. In the modern era, it has also become a crucial concept in political theory. In a discussion of law and ethnography, Clifford Geertz calls into question the Western distinction between matters of fact and matters of value. “Facts and law we have perhaps everywhere; their polarization we perhaps have not.” Geertz's hermeneutic approach leads him to focus on the relation between the grounding of norms and the representation of fact. Therefore, he concludes, representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
The performance-talk is divided into three tangled narratives, one the social mode of traveling that includes the child--the opposite of the lonely masculine traveler--based on the real experience and a personal story in a trip to Amazon in Colombia with Karin Demuth and her three years old boy--Hanno--, second a multi-headed reading of technologies of interfacing within computer culture and the worlds of other species, the meaning of inter-facing with the other, and third a visual representation of the highly technical images recorded by Kinect infrared 3D-scanner/motion-detector. The result of the visualization is a heavily glitchy image, which aims in the performance to link the spatial practice to the perceived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with the notion of companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in an experience of walking in a tropical jungle with a computer in one hand and in the other hand the hand of the human child. The work deals with questions of the other-space that is mentally filled with projections and projects. The recording of the walking in the rain forest --as spatial and sensual experience-- is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new understanding of the locality of the wa[...]
(179)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46[...]7.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience
Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949
...................................
Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)
the project investigates the way in which Seifee as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.)
...our ability to share the experience of the habits of the world that we discover. (Kohn)
...................................
Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriented ontology as social theory [insights of object-orientation mechanically applied to the social by Harman, “immaterialism"]
•innovative adaptation of phenomenology
•critique of how objects have been failed by philosophy
•insistence upon an aesthetic attitude of investigation
--but-->
•object-oriented social theory lacks the rigor and imaginative potential to envision the ontology of the social
•the way object-oriented ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negotiated, perceptual, political, agentic) value*** [social theory is fundamentally predicated on the socius --> social theory is about the association between things =/= homogenous things]
}=/= Campbell's *posthuman relationism*: another form that better understands the abyssal point between the non-human and the human
r />
(2007 conference) speculative realism {antipathy to “human-centred” intellectual traditions} ~=> object-oriented ontology
(objectivity =/= obliqtivity)
Harman's immaterialism: realism without materialism : objects can only ever be captured obliquely
object-oriented ontology's development:
•characterised by a consistent lament for how post-Kantian philosophy in general (Continental philosophy in particular) has abandoned hope of describing objects as objects
•the real: absolute autonomy of objects (withdraw from subjects)
◦objects: sleeping giants holding their forces in reserve
•prefer the excess of the aesthetic over the reduction by the scientific (materialism's tendency to reduce objects to a primary substratum ==> rendering them susceptible to mathematical capture) --Campbell--> *aesthetic foundationalism* [==engender==> an attitudinal response to objects] (@apass, this is also a problem in artistic researc[...]
(180)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.2[...]our billion years)
4. a template for unlikely intimacies
Harman's philosophical monologue on social theoretical practice (which might yet be remedied by actual dialogue with social theorists) ==> performative fallacy (<-- common in artist writing)
@apass****
(Campbell asking) why has object-oriented ontology become such a popular force in other disciplines?
<== complex interplay between sociological + logical factors
+ rise of *para-academia*
@artist (in proliferation of artist writing)
****speculation = the alibi for a doctrine that wishes to spare itself the trouble of justification****
--> we need closer attention to rationality as the basis of judgement when we talk about speculation
--> we need to be more informed by (sciences) when we stretch relations to our rational outposts, without ignoring their appeals
...................................
posthumanism --> any discursive or bodily configuration that displaces the human, humanism, humanities --> (21st century) technology is the center of critical thought about culture and about nature
[*]posthumanism: a structure of feeling (sense of an era starts to be experienced in the social imagination --> social forms become more recognisable when we had some time to classify them, articulate them, theorize them)
(Williams > Campbell) structure of feeling
we can point to times in the past and say that as an X sensibility (they were romantics, enlightenment, postmodernism) =/= sensing here and now --> practical consciousness, a period at an embryonic stage, at the very edge of *semantic availability*
what structure of feeling is forming in the contemporary western world? --> posthumanism
(postbiological, postcorporal, cyborg existence, etc.)
to be human <--attack-- genomics, global finance, nature of social in virtual communities (telegram) ==> yet-to-be formalized paradigms of human experience
==> fracture the concept of legal self [legal theory (arbiter of human rights) --> concerned with what is to be human]
(taxonomies of the human species at its time -->) humanitas: legal term used in public in ancient Rome to distinguish Romans and Greeks from Barbarians
humans in persistent vegetative states
international trade of human organs
human genome project
xenotransplantation
technological unconscious
(tree of life replaced by) a model that:
•classifies species according to DNA
•disregards morphological type (how elements of body appear)
•reveals human to be a tiny subspecies in a mass of absolute diversity
classical philosophy --> scientized for a momden audience (by Descartes 17th century) --> special status of human <-- seen as a totally transparent, secu[...]
(181)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%46.6[...] object of the gaze [---> go to zoo]
how “human” ways of experiencing the world are gradually being integrated with non-human, technological ways of perceiving and understanding reality:
•Baudrillard --> virtual gaze
•Virilio --> automation of perception (war weaponry --> the idea that in west we have technologies so advanced we achieve absolute vision)
•Balsamo --> cosmetic surgery (~= new visualization technologies) ==> new forms of dominance [---> go to Kardashians TV shows], *replacing the male gaze with a normative disembodied technical gaze
•Haraway --> technocratic gaze
•Strafford --> (starting in enlightenment) *automated spectralization* (in visual presentation of the world) --> the intention and purpose of the gaze became medicalized and technologized [---> go to cartography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)
(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.[...]
(182)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.1[...]artography]
•
}--> (from technoscience to feminism) theorists have noticed a *splicing* of direct and tactile human perception of reality with another reality, one that is mediated and technical ==produce==> a new reality that negotiates the individual's knowledge of the universe in diverse and complex ways (<-- not catastrophic =/= Hörl)
(time of) intellectual and artist upheaval ==> new and surprising modes of imagining the human
1950s concept of cybernetics constituted a fundamental change in thinking about control, communication, information, life itself (+ new language of feedback, autopoiesis, cellular automata, neural net)
1990s
computers + information --> cybernetic theory: (stressed that) information patterns are more important in understanding organisms than materiality
*cybernetic view of the world --> information coded in pattern & randomness =/= material absence & presence*
•(both) human and technological = informational entities
•human = cyborg: (human conceived as) cybernetic organism
[?how] discourses (narratives + metaphors + symbols) of science and technology --Campbell--> use in advertisement to create meaning
**technological imagination --seize--> social imagination**
always reinforcing the *awesome power of technology to capture reality* (objectively + without any agenda)
•movie Fantastic Voyage 1966 <--Dijck-- fascination with envisioning the body from a different perspective
•status of foetus (float in black and white) <--Haraway-- meanings whose legitimacy comes from technological systems of perception
•[computer-generated images =/=?] camera-generated images <--Cartwright-- (paradox of) camera's role in capturing the real + camera's capacity to evoke emotion and present a sense of the unattainable ~= (to appear to be at once) both *magical* & *truthful* ==introduce==> new subjectivities into marketplace
mediation of visual phenomena through the eye of technology ~=> new sets of truths (about the body, environment, etc.) --often--> a **disembodied technological gaze looks at the body**
advertisement becomes more highly finished, excessively produced, artificialized --> a technological gaze is found in the discourse of advertising --> scientized & technologized images celebrate a particular view of ***life as information***
...................................
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 [...]
(183)[...otes on kinect performance.txt]%47.1[...]ics of) closure
logic of culture (nature made flexible)
science coded body
black coded body
colonised coded body
coded as self sufficient (when?)
the project and me are not boundary object (i am not tarzan)
suppress the lost text of aristotle on the rhetoric of humor
how can something work and not work?!
mathematical competition
what is the other story (of forest, journey, etc.) that i want urgently tell?
or the rhythm of what story i want to change?
...................................
In 1905 the French neurologists G. Deny and P. Camus recounted the case of Madame I who had lost body awareness. She described her “general insensibility” as follows: “I'm no longer aware of myself as I used to be. I can no longer feel my arms, my legs, my head, and my hair. I have to touch myself constantly in order to know how I am. I have the feeling that my entire body is changed, even at times that it no longer exists. I touch an object, but it is not I who am touching it. I no longer feel as I used to. I cannot find myself. I cannot imagine myself. My insensibility is frightening, as if everything were empty.” Madame I was unable to recognize the position of her arms and legs and was completely insensitive to pain. According to Israel Rosenfeld's thesis, Madame I was unable to know her body as part of her memory. (her brain could not create a body image) She could not imagine, or create in her mind, images of parents or the houses where she had lived. Lacking a continuous image of herself, she could re-create momentary images only when she was verifying to herself that she had a body. (see Strange, Familiar and Forgotten pp 40-42)
“If all self-reference were destroyed, consciousness and understanding would not be possible.
“Meaning and understanding are parts of the structure of consciousness that emerge from self-reference; they cannot exist without a body image.” (p.55)
“Self-reference is not a hypothetical idea but a demonstrable part of the structure of consciousness; a partial breakdown in the physiological mechanisms that create it give us the phenomenon of phantom limbs.” (p.56)
Two English neurologists, Lord Russell Brain and Henry Head (!) coined the phrase “body image” for the internal image and memory of one's body in space and time. The body image is not only a picture of the body but also an anticipatory plan for the detailed movements of the body, and rather than a fixed structure, it is dynamic and plastic, capable of reorganizing itself radically with the contingencies of experience.
The body image can also incorporate external object, implements, and instruments. When they are being used, they can [...]
(185)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.6[...], is what allows us to apprehend the objects and the spaces of art, turning contact into the communicative interface of a public intimacy. (but not in the Amazonian skin contact) (it is different than Lucretius reflecting upon the nature of things)
(materiality of) cultural surfaces
As a form of dwelling that engages mediation between subjects and with objects, the surface also can be viewed as a site for screening and projection.
The surfaces of the screens that surround us today express a new materiality as they convey the virtual transformation of our material relations. And these screens, which have become membranes of contact, exist in our environments in close relation to the surfaces of canvas and walls—also undergoing a process of substantial transformation. And so it is here—in this meeting place that is surface—that art forms are becoming reconnected and creating new, hybrid forms of admixture.
who shares (deep) engagements with superficial matters?
layered space of interaction between subject and object
surface can be read as an architecture
from mediated encounters with material space to mobilization of cultural space (the exhibition)
memory, imagination, and affect are linked to movement -- embodied in jungle walk?
modernity's desire and fancy for tactile experience, driving and impulse to expand one's universe and eventually to project it, to exhibit personal passionate voyage of imagination -- effects of a spectatorial movement that is evolving further in Selfie. that is the emergence of such sequential virtues motion capturing that comes to inhibit the train of thought = interconnection in the sequence of ideas expressed during a connected discourse and how this sequence leads from one idea to another (modernity).
(i don't do filmic voyage)
...................................
By Consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse.
“When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.” (— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, The First Part: Of Man, Chapter III: Of the Consequence or Train of Imagination)
...................................
the current forms of biotic forests is due to the spreading of seed-dispersing plants millions years ago (what about abiotic? Kinect)
one of issues related with rate/speed is synchronicity
the effects of biotechnically / bioculturaly situated people
Amazon's nature in opposition to slave gardens (slave plantation systems with factory machine) (along with imperial botanical gardens)
for travel and propagat[...]
(187)[...notes/notes.txt]%47.7[...] exacerbated (worsened) by travel.
cognitive activity
giving form to experience, also transforming things into signs, welding image and discourse
the contemporary experience is also made of sharing/tweeting/liking images
the contemporary political economy: communicative capitalism derives surplus value from the volume and velocity of sings and data circulating in the infosphere.
proliferation of cognitive signs is another feature of communicative capitalism, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli
(for Berardi) seeing means accelerating perception in the fields of everyday experience, accelerated tautological vision derived from constant passive observation. this is another of communicative capitalism's form of governance, as this kind of vision generates techno-linguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning
is Kinect image-compilation a creature of infosphere? (boring question?)
normalization of groundless seeing (exemplified in google earth)
“picture does not make an image” (Serge Daney, before and after image)
image against vision
life persists irrationality, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth. (Fox, cold world)
...................................
(Ada Smailbegovic)
nature of things (2013, Sina + Elisa)
related to temporalities and velocities (plant politics of movement)
the video registers different rhythms and textures of change in the event of weather
methodological impulse to draw on descriptive practices of natural history
attuning to particulate differences that compose change
the temporal dimension of human “umwelt” is tuned into a limited set of rhythms and durations. therefore many of the temporalities that are relevant for developing a politics of time (such as longe duration of geological time) may not be directly available to human sensorium.
not just something that it is difficult to sense, but temporality as a compound entity of other variables. (temperature, etc.)
binding times together
an alternative perspective on (anthropocene) temporality involves developing a poetics of description as a mode of affective and aesthetic amplification
=> developing an experimental poetics of technology as a mode of aesthetic amplification towards a less perspectival visuality -- the writing tends to operate in a more tentacular mode of perception --> sweating on every negative space
+++ sweating again was crucial in our sensorial (and therefore cognitive) relation when we were in Amazon. Kinect and sweating both propose modes of perception other than perspectival shadow casting system of vision.
(organic or inorganic/technological?) processes that con[...]
(189)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.1[...]indigenous ontologies
(John Hartingan:) Anthropocene as “charismatic mega-category”
(of the white intellectual space of the Euro-Western academy)
(which sweeps many competing narratives under its roof?)
(indigenous artists, Rebecca Belmore & Jolene Rickard:) material might act as a bridge, instead of a mirror
(narcissistic obsession of Western civilization/art with material-as-mirror)
(Dwayne Donald:) place-based cultures and knowledge systems
colonialism is basicly “disconnection”, denial of relation
(in its heart is written “we are not related”)
(so few indigenous bodies are present in sites where academic discourse are being forged and practiced) when they are present, they are often dismissed as biased, overly emotional, or unable to maintain objectivity over the issues they present. (can i say the same treat is with iranians? and in which scene or context? -- iranians are “not” famous for exhaustive discursive unemotional and unopinionated maintenances)
(around me / around here) => importances and pleasures of going from “around me” to “around here”
(how can we stop in art to) recreate exploitative patterns from the past (?)
ecological imagination is a turn towards reciprocity and relationship
in Kinect the path of a journey is refracted, mirroring a critical site of refraction, as a practice. walking with Hanno in the Amazon forest is a joyful and critical engagement through a form of practice that resists universalizing tendencies.
...................................
tree is never tree-like (filial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”
how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.
...................................
close-range vision
how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)
...................................
forest's “space”
Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
Representation is a distinctive manner of imag[...]
(190)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.3[...]lial, Arborescent, versus rhizomatic)
vertical vs. lateral
Arborescent vs. reticulated (like the patterns on a giraffe or spots on the python)
stake at “relationships”
how can we problematize narcissism? what if it is the wrong word describing a certain property of life? Narcissus is recognizing himself in his environment and he dissolves himself in that image. the main thing about this story is that he is most alive via the story, Narcissus is basically undead.
...................................
close-range vision
how can we practice movement and touch in the physio-locality of the eyes?
tentacularity
touching was considered a cruder scanning at close range and seeing a more subtle touching at a distance
importance of far distance over close range => refer to project Standing on the Shoulders of Giants (2015, Sina)
...................................
forest's “space”
/>
Hernri Lefebvre distinguishes Representation of space and Representational spaces. ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.
Representation is a distinctive manner of imagining the real, and is a fundamental phenomenon upon which all culture rests.
or instead of how a forest looks like, what is the forest made of? and for whom? what is the forest made of is the matter of negotiation (between the different kinds of beings who think differently about the forest)
in order not to neutralise the forest to culture (cultural history as an explanatory priority to the historically contingent circumstances) we can propose two questions of older critique of perspectival perception:
1. that the body accounts for perspective (?)
2. representation is exclusively mental (?)
of course both questions are phenomenological positions, ions, but that does not mean that we no longer need representation to understand relationality. (Konh words)
needing or not needing representation to understand relationality
...................................
(Latour)
not a philosophical argument, but a cabinet of curiosities assembled by “friends of interpretable objects”
... not an encyclopedic undertaking ... we have chosen only those sites, objects, and situations where there is ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking. (going to sites or objects where there is ambiguity, hesitation)
(the exhibition is not about recollecting truth or objectivity)
christian religious paintings that do not try to show anything but, on the contrary, to obscure the vision.
redirecting the attention away from the image to the prototype (Platonism run mad?) -- redirecting of attention to [...]
(191)[...notes/notes.txt]%48.4[...] />
entangled networks of matter and meaning
“i don't mind being ‘close to nature.’ but i know what they mean when they say that, and it's not what i mean.”
--Linda Noel, Koyungkawi poet and acorn mush maker
oaks were travelers and mixers
...................................
(Tomaz Mastnak)
Botanical decolonization
planting and displanting of humans and plants are elements of the same multispecies colonial endeavor
native plants as a discursive field
complex and unmarked ways that plants have been sorted out as ‘native’ or ‘nonnative’
(as a measure of perfection and ‘civility’) gardening was also the key to the survival of colonies
(for Bacon) ‘plantation’ meant in the first place to ‘Plant in’ people
‘plantation in a pure soile’ (founding a colony)
once we see colonialism as the literal planting and displanting of peoples, animals, and plants--as inscribing a domination into blood and soil founded in the fantasy of molding ecosystems with godlike arrogance--it becomes clear how colonialism ushered in the anthropocene
native plants, by implication, were uncultivated. in the imperial imaginary this distinction between cultivated and native plants was isomorphic with people as well.
‘nature’, like the uncultivated native, was to be dominated by ‘culture’. such ‘government of nature’ found its metropolitan manifestation in botanic gardens. (species collected for scientific reasons, for aesthetic and ideological benefit)
government of nature
invasive animals
the real issue is that we still live in a colonial environment. we live with the legacy of botanical colonization without even knowing it. this legacy is not mere background to social and political life.
Nazis’ attempted eradication of Impatiens parviflora from their own native forests (Gröning and Wolschke-Bulmahn, 1992)
the idea of “borrowing freely from all the world's styles and floras” erases the violent colonial encounter of displacing by replacing it with the figure of the undocumented immigrant
..charging native plant enthusiasts and invasion biologists and managers with xenophobia...
(Davis et al, 2011 article published in journal Nature, title:) “Don't judge species on their origins”, is a misleading phrase; at issue is judging species not on their origins, but on their emplacement.
(Yanagisako and Delaney, 1995) “people think and act in the intersections of discourses”
but not every domain intersects in every instance, and the character of an ‘intersection’ is historically specific. it is a truism to claim that ‘like humans, plants and animal travel’ (Raffles, 2011, page 12). What Raffles fails to address is crucial: how, exactly,[...]
(192)[...notes/notes.txt]%49[...]o someone's own idiom. I am teaching how to reread texts of Attar and so forth.
We have civilization because (we have learned) ‘to translate out of time’
übertragen,
handing down thought narrative,
something that also depends on transfer of meaning in space.
Languages conceal and internalize more, perhaps, than they convey outwardly.
Speech-act is most expressive of status and power--when a peer is in earshot. (something that i have been trying to undermine in my lectures)
...calculated to guard some coherence of inner life (while wounding outward)
(motions of) menace and non-information (in top down dialogues)
monosyllables of the oppressed and polysemy of the upper class (the capacity of the same word to mean different things, such differences characterises the language of ideology.)
fracture of words and the maltreatment of grammatical norms, by children, they are a exploited and rebellious class, the child seeks to keep the world open to his own, by refusing to accept the rules of grown-up speech.
Lear note: surrounded by incomprehensible or hostile reality, the child breaks off verbal contact. He seems to choose silence to destroy his imagined enemy. Like murderous Cordelia, children know that silence can destroy another human being.
The multitudinous existence of child has left comparatively few archives.
...the uniquely vulnerable and creative condition of the childhood
privileged inferiority (of both child and woman)
intercourse and discourse
feminine use of subjunctive, in European languages, give a characteristic vibrato to material facts and relations. ... They multiply the facets of reality, they strengthen the adjective to allow it an alternative nominal status.
...obtuse resistant fabric of the world
in every known culture, men have accused women of being garrulous, of wasting words with lunatic prodigality.
The chattering, ranting, gossiping female, the tattle, the scold, the toothless crone her mouth wind-full of speech, is older than fairy-tales.
...men's delight in women's voice when their register is sweet and low.
the change in men's voice, the crowding of cadence, the heightened fluency triggered by sexual excitement. And how men's speech flattens, how it's intonations dull after orgasm.
The motif of the woman or maiden who says very little, in whom silence is a counterpart to chasteness and sacrificial grace, lends a unique pathos to Antigone or Oerepidus..
fabric of obligation, different for men and women within the same community
linguistically programmed conceptualizations vs. biologically determined apprehensions of sense data
...lady Macbeth negates the fierce reality of Macbeth vision[...]
(193)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.4[...]trangeness 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 transcription of the original
history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James
translator's ‘mysterious duty’
if needed, i am anyone
language mysticism studies
...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’
it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace the growths of consciousness
in apass, inventing a science of myth and history, towards a general theory of significant sign.
Corruption of language and decline of body politics?
Can we correlate the Persian syntax with the metaphysical ambience, internal divisions, and lyric bias of Persian people?
A pivot point must inform and relate
...the shaping agencies of intellect.
Speech is poiesis and human linguistic articulation is centrally creative.
The language-matrix
language, informed by energies proper to itself, more comprehensive and timeless than any who makes use of it...
There is a phenomenon of linguistic Entfremdung inseparable from the creative genius of the word. (Humboldt)
...conjectures with prophetic brilliance
discourse (Rede) would not be muffled by the ground---we walk erect
jede Sprache ist ein Versuch---trial
(Humboldt)
different languages penetrate to different depths
Literaturehaus, hause has always been a metaphor for consciousness
cryptotypr : categories of semantic organization
which translates the underlying metaphysics of a language into its overt or surface grammar.
...understanding of those deep-seated dynamics of meaning, of chosen and significant form, (that make up a culture[...]
(194)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%49.7[...]e noise in pleasure and information in pain (?!)
---hmmm we can't know this properly?
Find in ajayeb, operating functions:
transformations,
fixations,
energy displacements,
movements of observer,
ambiguity functions,
freudian slip,
exploits of signs,
exploits of energy,
(ajayeb is defined by its resistance to metaphors in a system of language)
یک کلاغ چهل کلاغ yek kalagh chel kalagh is precisely noise in a transmission system along a given circuit from one element to another. From a point of view outside the system ambiguity must be added to increase the system's complexity
theory of change (in sign)
what are the unconsciousnesses of integration?
(many) interlocking (black) boxes
obstacles do organise, noise becomes dialect
they come crashing at our feet
in the forms of eros and death
like surf at the edge of the beach
unconscious is the last black observer of chance
aging, is a process we understand as the drifting of information into background noise
عجایب المخلوقات ajayeb al makhlughat, anamnesis, memory, and everything imaginable
body creates language from information and noise
one who utters language, is the receiver at the end chain, the final observer. But the initial dispatcher is (always) unknown.
Ajayeb, make? a chance-program couple
to perform both:
•i am submerged in (its) signal exchanges
•i observe its global set of exchanges
introspection veers off into experience
as Freud, who started from energy models of thermodynamics, has intuited, everything occurs by a dynamic of language, the subsequent development of thermodynamics into information theory.
Knowledge is always linked to an observer
we are drifting towards noise and black depths of the universe...
knowledge is at most the reversal of drifting, that strange conversion of times, always paid for by additional drift; but this is complexity itself, which was once called being
...................................
Auguste Comte says: in light of previous experience we must acknowledge that impossibility determining, by direct measurement, most of the heights and distances we like to know.
Thales, geometry as ruse
construction of summary
operation of application
use of metrics
in applied sciences
(often) measurement is the essential element of application,
but primary in the touch (sensory)
practice <--> ruse <--> theory
we need a ‘ruse’ to go from practice to theory
(mathematics? Is this why young philosophers are lured into math?)
the length my body cannot [...]
(195)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.3[...]sonian, 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 the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”
that which disappears from definition, reappears metaphorically
the small amount of linkage between events
(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)
ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul[...]
(196)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51[...] />
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 unfolding of the different movements.”
the full and compact nature, version of ajayeb
my work in apass is on a theory of transformation among languages (not about the best point of view =/=> system integrated =/=> trajectories calculated):
•ajayeb's natural language
•system language of differential logic
•english grammar and syntax
•organic and intersubjective space of my peers
•old farsi
•animal
•
“speak of” science
“speak about” science
“speak” science
“speak” metaphysics
speaking the language of dynamics
what is still at stake in science: the description of a world of processes
...................................
Lezra
In the European imaginary, the public struggle over the “better” word makes the city (the polis) @apass
Derrida calls for patience, take care read on slowly. Kafka: all human errors are impatience. Radical patience, is the necessity to differ, but also to rush in precipitately, one has to make decisions: absolute urgency.
Literature for derrida, reading in my works, is indissociably bound up with questions of politics, democracy and responsibility, religion, nationality and nationalism, identity and law.
E m foster, how can i tell what i think, till i see what i say.
What one finds repeatedly in derrida's work is the uncanny effect by which one is invited to sense the unfolding of all his thinking starting out from anywhere, from any idea, any word, any thought that happen to be at issue. Deconstruction is the name for this?
Derrida proceeds with patience and pleasure, to describe what is going on in a particular text or situation.
Every reading is difficult, Shakespeare, maulwürfe, mathematics. The difficulty of reading is in transforming the ways we are obliged to think about those texts.
The transformation is crucially always already in the texts he reads. Describing what happens when reading a passage of anything. Everything is in Shakespeare, in Plato, in Kafka. The relation between description and transformation is uncanny.
To talk about the logics of supplement is another way of attending the deconstructive effects of the and. To put into effect new discourses, new acts. This description and transformation is deconstruction, is more[...]
(197)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.4[...]the and. To put into effect new discourses, new acts. This description and transformation is deconstruction, is more than a language and no more than a language.
There are always differences, tensions, paradoxes in the text, between what a text says and what a text does.
Derrida always begins (wherever he happens to find himself) in a specific context, which is to say in trying to engage with a specific text or scene of reading.
(Writing is) is winking at someone (you like) while listening to my favorite music.
A writing that is not structurally readable -- iterable -- beyond the death of the addressee, would not be writing.
The supplementarity of digression, a fictional supplementarity. Freud is compelled to tell a story but in the act of doing so, he betrays the annulment or effective impossibility of this story. Sons murder of primordial father. Origin of morality: earliest moral restrictions in primitive society have been explained by us as reactions to a dead which gave those who performed it the concept of crime.
The feeling that a text is especially written ‘for’ derrida... As if waiting for him to come along and point it out.
Freud's story is less the narration of an imaginary event than the simulacrum of narration. Freud's quasi event, is at once of fictional narrative and as narrative as fictive. It is the origin of literature at the same time as the origin of law, derrida suggests.
Kant, Freud, Kafka, what makes important all these thinkers for Derrida has to do with how each in their different way brings out a ghostly or virtual ‘narrativity and fiction’ at the very core of legal thought.
Law is always an idiom. An idiom is an expression with a meaning that cannot be guessed from the meanings of the individual words: its door concerns only you. One's relation to the law is singular.
The drama of naming (@Sonja naming the dance, dancing the name, is she dancing the name of the dance)
john Keats, prospective; Williams Wordsworth, retrospective. Prospective work consists of hopeful preparation, anticipation of future power rather than meditative reflections on past moments of insight and harmony. Oriented towards the future.
All i am doing today, like derrida, can be seen as a grafting (ghalameh zadan) or extension, supplement or prosthesis, an outgrowth from somewhere else, earlier on.
I will attach to the story of maulwürfe like the shit on his head.
Recalling and reinventing Shakespeare, the idea is not to bring it from past to present, something that is already disjointed in time towards the future. I push the characters of King Lear to a future. The deconstructive reading of the play has to do with the opening of the future itself. It is utterly important that you do something unpredictable for yourself. If you are in the busines[...]
(198)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.5[...]r />
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 is assembled) [=/= cart blanche for meaning]
--> (Jassem's style of) reading otherwise: passing the classical discipline (=/= abandon, jettison it) to explore what it omits, forgets, excludes, expels, marginalizes, dismisses, ignores, scorns, slights, takes too lightly, waves off, not serious enough
•anthropcentric truth: a truth that appears to human beings
•instrumental truth: a truth aimed at getting things done (making things work)
•teleological truth: a truth which closes debate and fastens meaning
[*]visual = a form of control (<--Campbell-- this aspect makes it central to organizational analyses) <==
1. *visual organizes reality by claiming status as the preeminent form of representation* (vision is the dominant tyrannical phenomenology of the contemporary world ==> all forms of knowledge can be presented visually)
2. *conflation of the ‘seen = known’* : “vision = ways of knowing = experiencing the world” (<-- imagined inseparable) ==> the idea that depiction/picturing/seeing are ubiquitous features of the process by which most human beings come to know the world as it really is for them
3. *visual organizes the worldview of the seer* --> visual is at its most powerful when it is most invisble (for example scientific diagrams, mapping @apass)
***instances of visual control:
•uniforms
•packaging
•computer software packages
•brand logos
•buildings
•websites @apass
•management reports
•staff
•servicescapes [an environment where the first/primary perceived aspect is service]
•
harmful, deficient, deformed, secondary =/= superman, supergirl
logocentrism: letting the logic lead the letter --Campbell--> images are logocentric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [--> for example forensic architecture images =/= Derrida's *there is nothing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning
[title]
ruined coherent heritage
there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within
bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing
death of man
•Barthe[...]
(199)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.7[...]entric in that they create meaning by appealing to a central apparently undeconstructible system of authoritative truth (appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image) [for example forensic architecture images =/= Derrida's *there is nothing outside of the text*]
•in investigating an image we often posses a logocentric vision, drawing it into convergence, making it coherent and giving it a non-contradictory and singularly authoritative meaning
[title]
ruined coherent heritage
there is no escaping the enclosure of (logocentrism of western tradition of) metaphysics <-- we can critically engage it from within
bricolage
bricoleur --> one is participating in the intellectual heritage one is critiqing
death of man
•Barthes --> death of author
•Strauss --> structuralist approach to human nature
•Foucault --> history of the historical arbitrariness (of the human sciences)
•
}--> antihumanism (of Barthes and Foucault) suggests it might be possible to stand outside the humanist legacy (and analyse from a position outside) ==Derrida==> (escaping from human constitutes) a very human tendency that has been at work in the cultural and social imaginary since antiquity for example Foucault's archaeology: (to understand) *how reason determined madness in different eras by looking at how reason evolved historically* ==> puts the analyst outside the humanist legacy of reason ==restore==> the metaphysical illusion of mastery and control
=/= Derrida
(my problem with making alternative *archives, gardens, and maps* in art:)
•metaphysical complicity (with archive and garden) + critique we direct against complicity (with archive and garden) --> we cannot give up the “+" = slip into the form, logic, implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest
logocentrism operates in images by appealing to sources of transcendence outside of the image --> for example
[*]map: visual organization of the world --> quickly erase or black box the circumstances and history of their own construction ==> marshal vision into logocentric coherence --> act as reflection (=/= representation) of the world
radical cartography is now an established sub-discipline of geography (*maps are deconstructed to identify their logos*) @Sina's mimesis of Olearius's cartography
deconstruction is most needed at precisely those images where our immediate reaction is to say “there's nothing to be deconstructed here” (“that's just the way it is”)
software design (website interfaces) --> images of technology
critical practice: producing a new knowledge of the text (==> explain the ideological necessity of its silence) =/= make a whisper audible, complete what the text leaves unsaid
other: other meanings of a te[...]
(200)[...notes/Derrida old notes.txt]%51.8[...] before the accidental
}--> logocentric thought: thought which does not adequately attend to the contradictions inherent in its own medium ==> [logocentrism:] (fable) faith in the status of language as a lucid carrier of meaning (=/= attentiveness to the materiality of communication and the implications of such a project)
pecific languages make communication material, and exploring the interplay of terms within a linguistic system (-->? baroque) =/= Enlightenment = Age of Reason (logos)
...................................
Beauty and the Beast
or, blast of the clean slate
(goddamn it)
The picture of a relatively 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
(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 int[...]
(201)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.1[...]what Deleuze refers to as “deterritorializing” and “reterritorializing” moments.
...................................
about my performances:
“There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject.”
(Deleuze - Rhizome)
...consists not in an argument, but in the ecstatic elaboration of a metaphor, a web of interconnected concepts, the development of a new vocabulary without a pause for explanation or so much as a simple definition.
“...a mapping rather than a tracing”
“What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious”
“It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages... “
(removing some blockages of meaning-lock in San'an)
my lecture, emphasizes the rhizomatic to foster imaginative work that challenges typical critical forms.
not to overlook the working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations.
(in a book, a lecture, etc.) there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification.
(what are Attar's Sheikh's actual authority as a teacher?)
(George Makdisi: “Madrasa and University in the Middle Ages”)
[...] “Perhaps the most fundamental difference between the two systems is embodied in their systems of certification; namely, in medieval Europe, the licentia docendi, or license to teach; in medieval Islam, the ijazah, or authorization. In Europe, the license to teach was a license to teach a certain field of knowledge. It was conferred by the licensed masters acting as a corporation, with the consent of a Church authority, in Paris, by the Chancellor of the Cathedral Chapter... Certification in the Muslim East remained a personal matter between the master and the student. The master conferred it on an individual for a particular work, or works.” [...]
feeling cool and correct
(in) a parasitical golden age
what is “education” in a mystical world (or actually a mystical world-view)
how can be undermined or rewired, (“teaching” without education)
magical idealism
from Delphi-magiscism to the San'an
(does San'an actually wants to go to Greece?! but went to Italy?)
اقصای روم
the space we are founding ourselves in is not neutral, not innocen[...]
(202)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.3[...]al mask...
semiotic of 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 century
(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)
•ratio[...]
(203)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.4[...]towards the immensification of narrow vision
gigantic singularity
itself the house of many paradoxes: that of wisdom and rage, that of boundlessness and confinement, that of precision and enormity, nature and technology (apprentices to a lesser artisan-metallurgist god interested only in functional architecture and instrumentalized objects), betrayal and devotion,
mysticism is one of postmodern ‘mask,’ there are many others (the chaos-mask / face?, etc.)
one of many existential prototypes, subjectivity constellations, etc.
sliding between hostile and relaxed patterns of ...
with a sixth sense for disappearance
gained attunement to nothing
what are the athleticism of this stillness?
the turn in the thought of the mystic to externalize that same meditative daze!
what if an enthusiasm took hold to transfer this personal, self-contained oblivion onto a universal plane?
a single mood-shift: interiority feels the need to stretch out into exteriority.
without the logic of judgment
(in the aftermath of the 2th century) many visionaries of western thought (--postmoderns--) have emphasized a (desperate) need to inject ambiguity and doubt into our collective imagination
where is absolutism in San'an?
own descent (Abstieg) into paranoia
when in master-disciple relationship one is asked/taught not only read the works of past visionaries: rather to entertain the same mania, drunkenness, cruelty, or absorb temperament that engendered the very materialization of that text.
[Attar asking us to entertain the same mania when reading Tazkirat al-Awliya?]
...lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas
to become an echo of a profound legacy
we ask again: which phantom-sphere is more interesting? more aesthetically and philosophically attractive in its contours, appearances, and orchestrations?
which archive remains in fire throughout?
-which (archival?) constructs promise to survive us?
-things that run on hollow spectacles of meanings and simulations of depth
-adapting old tales to new territories of experience
an apocalyptic significance in the master-disciple relationship
(topology of communication/education)
(mysticism) an excursion into the otherworldly (or the eternal)
lending cryptic terminologies and cosmic ideas a palpable and resurgent quality.
THE pursuit: to become the echo of a profound legacy
the question is not the legitimate/authentic knowledges versus superstitious/mythic doctrines, rather: which phantom-sphere is more arresting? which archive remains in fire throughout?
modern-individuality versus the magnetic power of the sectarian voice..[...]
(204)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.6[...] some remote place of calculation or in terms of immediate force?
(this talk might be) a critical rant
(eastern thirds:)
the voice of a strange immunity
sacred crimes
one is hard pressed to find a truth that does not have a dead body
never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence
irrational desire of a no-man's land of an eternal immaturity
(an existential evacuation)
committing oneself to erratic wanderings in the desert => translation of a familiar topology into an ontological modality?
the extravagant paradox of proximity and distance
(interiority and exteriority, presence and absence)
civilizational taxonomies (--> versus animist taxonomies, in Attar's animal-birds)
the (sacred boundaries of mysticism) and mystic boundaries of the civilized city
the peripheries of the city became mystic/sacred
mystical channels*
they present worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori
two irrational analytical strands:
(1) to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically imagined space (San'an's biography missing in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya--Attar's obsession with biographies, he is drugged by bios, totally high---he can't let go of them, he cannot detach from the absents, the paternals? his master-complex? has he forgotten to mention his teacher, San'an, in Tazkirat al-Awliya? --Attar is himself San'an? drugged and doped by tastes and spices of his shop, his establishment. OR San'an is Ibn-Sagha (ابن ساقا)? (Ibn-Sagha was a Islamist jurist who lived in Baghdad 11th century, lived Muslim and died christian.) Attar's engagement with remembrance and bios --> is the San'an's narrative also about forgetting? Tazkirat (تذکره) --> Tazakor (تذکر) --> remember! --we are now on how Attar's San'an influences Hafez--(حافظ) The Memorizer. Hafez loves the story of San'an the non-memorizer, San'an loses his ‘hafeze’ (حافظه). (according to Hafez and San'an, the best student is the one who doesn't remember. precisely because they are trying so hard to remind San'an of what they thing ‘he’ is) --> [Indian MATSYENDRANATH amnesia tale, tells the story of a yogi who falls in love with the woman kind--one of his students puts makeup and dances his memory back to him. he must become the woman. there is a queer moment in the origin story of the San'an, which Attar censures(?). he erased his name from the black-list of death-‘the forgottens’, then danced for him as a woman-story-teller. (muse is the mother of memory.) the class struggle has obviously a Bollywood touch to it]-->Attar's source and storage?)
regarding Hafez and San'an, the poet must leave the home, the poet must travel foreign zones, and stay in the foreign. (this is, b[...]
(205)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%52.7[...] 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 disbelief.)
Sheikh's faith and christian purchase!? God bless scandal! Loving that christian girl is going to be difficult.
When the disciples saw this meadow--including the works of Kafdast (کفدست) that [...]
(206)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%54.2[...]terial and performance studies
(eco)maps
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 arsenal[...]
(207)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...] 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 its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-[...]
(209)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...] 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 its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.
My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the[...]
(210)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]a 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 its locatable mimicries. to its repetitive scaffoldings, fugitive trajectories, its performances of fatal experience of the text. to unload its corrosive textualities and let them run their acids across one another. this project is interested in both the unleashing and the pleasure of watching the text die.
part of the disposition of this proposal is also the suggestion that the two collaborators of this project, Jassem and Foad, are invested in those notions in their practice. Foad Farahani's poem “farar” enacting contemporary artistic formations and past-compound-mask, and Jassem Hindi transnational poetic agency, are both artists with acute appetite for chaotic imagination. Their instinct for the fusion of nothingness and excess, appearance and disappearance, creation and destruction, is at once carved and unpacked in the literary-poetic mosaics of their work: Foad's use of middle-persian mystic sensibilities and Jassem's combination of intensive encounter with the poetics of apocalypse and acid textuality.
My work has been about: learning/training in the crafts of noticing little traps of semiotic and material trans-species cohabiting, mutual coproduction of economics, ecology, affect-studies, metaphysical household studies, and understanding of the orders of the natural and human world, in the particular history/story of the East. in my projects i take history as the overlapping tracks and traces and many tranjectories of world-making, human and nonhuman. the textual performance of this project is in the effects of my research and practice with the questions of globalism and inheritance: difficult translational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative met[...]
(212)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]ational spaces, communicative nonunderstanding, relational aesthetics, and the differential sites of reading. and i use performative lectures: a material practice, hybrid in digital manual tactile operations of speaking.
...................................
“Four Masks of an Eastern Postmodernism”
insurgent, poet, mystic, sectarian
| | | |
chaos, violence, illusion, silence
•(sectarianism) apocalyptic writing
•(poetic) will to chaos
•(mystic) exile space
•(insurgent's) otherless subjectivity
یاغی
شاعر
نوچه
زاهد
[performative methodology]
for the collaborative part of sharjah project, i like to propose four “masks” (or “rotational avatars”) of subjective anarchy, that are few among many existential prototypes and subjectivity constellations of eastern postmodernism, as collaborative sites of encounter with four (or less and not necessarily individual) artists/participants.
•collaborators’ masks: chaos, violence, illusion, silence / (yaghi یاغی, sha'er شاعر, noche نوچه, zahed زاهد)--each endeavoring to discern the ontological possibilities and aesthetic imaginations of four theoretically-worked dispositions that Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh puts forward: insurgent, poetic, mystical, sectarian modes of consciousness, operating within multiple terrains of human and inhuman experiences of the middle east.
--> masks (the above mentioned four masks are accompanied by four “performative epitomes”): the exile, the animal, the shadow, the machine, (the monster, the thing, the contagion, the mirror image)
...................................
installation:
speculative objects (~/= anthropological objects) --to--> quasi objects
between research, social critique, speculative theory, and artistic production --> politics of representation
...................................
[*]insurgent:
resistance to modernism, and revolutionary agency
<== exhaustive disintegration of belief-structures in modernity
otherless individuation
eternal war
killer's freedom
(affective) overreaction
[*]poet:
will to chaos (--a type of consciousness that perceive the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn)
<== cataclysmic time of modernism (<-- great social disorder: prison, exile, censorship, etc. [==> Hedayat, Shamlu, Forough, Nima's tone of aggression --> a proto-sectarian space: secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, *the compartmentalized and esoteric iranian avant-garde with aesthetic devices of: unity, isolation, subversion])
fugitive postmodern map of escape from the grasp of the experience of the modernist phenomenon
|
responses to historical events of atrocity and transition
mystical, criminal, m[...]
(213)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.3[...]iting)
breakaway modality
نوچه پروری noche-parvary's effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, narration
(annihilatic temptation to) convert the text into a closed circle
(sect's threats of) forbidden power, moral ambiguity, collective density(/destiny)
...................................
[this project works with:]
[]
contributions/responses of:
•radical leaders (Jala Al Ahmad, Ali Shariati, Khomeini) --> ideological suspicion towards models of machinism and cosmopolitanism in the modern age
•intellectual forerunners (--> sectarian)
•literary icons (textual innovations of Hedayat, Shamlu, Akhavan, Baraheni) --> *poetic violence* and its apocalyptic 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]
f[...]
(214)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.4[...]
tale of the “symptom of a plague” (--> tale of “where we stand”) ==> (a concealed need for) ***immunity*** (=/= toxication)
‘reality principle’ of Ali , apass
“the eastern postmodernism arrives at the doorstep of the western philosophical outlook as a foreigner” -Mohaghegh
==> a *privileged semantic heritage* --suggesting--> an occluded alternative --from--> a shrouded/shredded resource ریزریزشده [==?==> my reparative readings (of ajayeb). this is something i should be careful about: to give the iranian semantic heritage density and texture, and not privileging it, not to give it a “voice” or “awareness"]
(Mona's disposition:) the assassin = the spectator
(for Ali ) truth has a dead body, (deranged, tortured, raped)
(oriental)[*]exotic: commingling of ***excess & absence*** ~= the third world (middle eastern) becomes all that EU renounces: the indecent, unrefined savage whose raw delirium stood as an offense to your elegance but somehow still enchanting a disenchanted earth
[*]eurocentrism: *carving a mirror into your presumed beginnings* (so it is displaces in elsewheres, as the effect of the mirror ---> go to the discussion of mirror in my amazon project)
[an imaginary mechanism of cutting off what the superego perceives as bad or good aspects of oneself (weakness or power) and projecting them onto someone else “over there” where they can be condemned, punished, praised, or endorsed (--mirror--> relates to images? =/=? introjection: process of symbolic identification --> relates to signifiers)]
iran has become the global instantiation of madness
***dispossessed of sublimity and excised from the world-historical process ==> *ontological vacancy* ==> Taliban extremism, achieving the mutual exercise of the death drive and the pleasure principle***(?!) ~->{rage of the id + libidinal appetite}--> never-ending allegory of loss and primal innocence
margin sedimented its own center
making my own white noise
masochistic + melancholic = ?
infantilizing and self-contained forms of play masquerading itself as autonomy
(fashion makes such monsters:) “self-hating winners of the game”
[civilizational taxonomies]
of globalist division of labor
of democracy (+ its negational counterpart [~ third world] <-- to be very careful about it, i like to develop a bit of paranoia for it)
(in the alterity of ‘the textual’ someone else might be living)
[(who/why does that? -->) translation of] a familiar topography --into--> an ontological modality
state of non-temporality (<--?-- majaz @Hoda) ==> no more locked in the imperishable antagonism of: interiority & exteriority, presence & absence }--(Hoda's)--> extravagant paradox of *proximity & distance*
=[...]
(215)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.8[...]e textual’ someone else might be living)
[(who/why does that? -->) translation of] a familiar topography --into--> an ontological modality
state of non-temporality (<--?-- majaz @Hoda) ==> no more locked in the imperishable antagonism of: interiority & exteriority, presence & absence }--(Hoda's)--> extravagant paradox of *proximity & distance*
==✕==> derivative subjectivity
architects of the law (that Elen is against)
(fable of the) “despotism of the oriental way-of-life”
existential homogenization
traumatic obligation
disjointed + cyclical (mind) ==> ? ...
the (faint) whisper of “no more.”
disarray
artificial becomes set in stone as the natural
bankrupt master-discourse
explode text & life into...
horizon of textual expression
the idea of chaos for the experience of writing and thought
[*the world as a whole*, inexhaustible + urgent + unmastered (abundance of self-creation/destruction) --> totalitarian stimulus ==>] chaos: [~=?! hegemonic will to mastery]
•poetic imagination (--> an art that ventures and wins chaos)
•insurgent mind-set (--> that every man is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos --> Heidegger wants to live =/= insurgent's reflex in middle eastern anticontext, *eastern revolutionary ethos*, “thinking of struggle = dialectical”, no revolutionary intersubjectivity [~= otherless subjectivity])
Apollonian hyper-rational retreat from the void
Ascetic immensified retreat from the world
self-willed experience of the edge allowed to guide forward
(Nietzsche's Zarathustra's chaotic temperament:) “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
/>
“chaos" = what (western) modernity has left (in east)
(that is why terminologies of “nomadism” can hardly be appropriated in middle east--they are chaotic, not nomadic)
[idioms of resistance] ~~--> intoxicating sense of power
(anti-,) “being-against”:
•in modernity: a direct/dialectical opposition of forces
•in postmodernity: an oblique/diagonal stance
•today: “alternatives within" = an imperial device that works well ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself’ --> trans-systemic reality
...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination
(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare
communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of th[...]
(216)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.8[...]aos)
•insurgent mind-set (--> that every man is surrounded, oppressed, and penetrated by chaos --> Heidegger wants to live =/= insurgent's reflex in middle eastern anticontext, *eastern revolutionary ethos*, “thinking of struggle = dialectical”, no revolutionary intersubjectivity [~= otherless subjectivity])
Apollonian hyper-rational retreat from the void
Ascetic immensified retreat from the world
self-willed experience of the edge allowed to guide forward
(Nietzsche's Zarathustra's chaotic temperament:) “one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
“chaos" = what (western) modernity has left (in east)
(that is why terminologies of “nomadism” can hardly be appropriated in middle east--they are chaotic, not nomadic)
[idioms of resistance] ~~--> intoxicating sense of power
(anti-,) “being-against”:
•in modernity: a direct/dialectical opposition of forces
•in postmodernity: an oblique/diagonal stance
•today: “alternatives within" = an imperial device that works well ‘in itself’ but not ‘for itself’ --> trans-systemic reality
...to believe in an outsider subjectivity capable of ahistorical imagination
(inflated dispositions of) triumphalism and alarmist nightmare
communist (Marxist silhouette) and liberatory combatants of the 20th century, intellectuals persecuted and exiled in the course of anti-fascist struggles, freedom-fighters of the anti-colonial/anti-imperialist wars --> nostalgic portrait of the contemporary militant
(Nietzsche, Kafka, Bataille, Foucault, Artaud, Baudrillard, Serres, D+G, etc.) continental thinkers architects of masks:
•the overhuman (--> Nietzsche)
•the supplicant
•the deviant (or barbarian --> Foucault)
•the body-without-organs (--> D+G)
•the criminal
•the schizoid
•the headless monstrosity (--> Bataille)
[(an exilic) postcolonial intelligentsia]
---{Nietzsche and Artaud's familiar persuasive authority, similar exuberant phraseology, and motifs in extremis --> ‘cruelty,’ Artaud wanted to “reject form and incite chaos.” antipsychological violent physical determination (a cruel yet necessary act upon the spectator) to shatter the false reality (theatre/art as a place where the spectator/actor is *exposed* [=/= “protected"]) =/= (aesthetic) distance (---> go to ‘distance matters’); this is the paradigm in iran's theatre and performance scene, where the audience are to be engulfed and physically affected by the show, ‘to be trapped and powerless’ as a theatrical value is an Artaudian tradition.
-delirium: he wanted to deliberately become/stay mad [--> Jassem, Sana's methodology, the state of horrible energy] in order to heal/strengthened
-ecstatic loss of the self, hermetic elements in his works, a[...]
(217)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.9[...]
2- (vertically) foreign colonial state + indigenous comprador elite (واسطهها و دلالان سرمایهداران خارجی در کشورهای آسیا و آفریقا و آمریکای لاتین)
2- (vertically) subsequent oppression and exploitation of anti-colonial regime
3- (horizontally) global division of labor
navigation of identity
the reward of the victim جایزه قربانی (--> to be beaten)
the reward of the survivor (--> the self-conscious affirmation of having endured and gone beyond)
slave moralities
the *self-with-no-other* (too far gone)
Hegel's master-slave dialectic (an insight into the skeleton of domination): the basic way in which it is always the master (self) who requires recognition from an external entity (the othered slave) [--> Westworld TV series base: master remains in a state of complete dependency for his own self-definition on the slave, whereas the slave can gradually ascend toward an independent consciousness by virtue of his subjection --> “its own being-for-self” (=/= multispecies companionship)]
or
Spikvak's dissolution of the master-slave dialectic: proposition for individuals to imagine themselves as both “receivers and givers” (distinction between ‘agency'[as rationally legislated and institutionally validated] and ‘subjectivity'[as unrepresentability])
--> this intervention is successful in greeting modernity as a global responsibility
***decolonization as a populist mode of resistance
otherless individuation:
•the hermit
•the mercenary
•the maniac
the lowest common denominator turned into a metaphysics
authentic malevolence
*objective cruelty* (of the modern epoch and its dialectic strap) can only be undone by (a non-matching iteration of) *subjective cruelty*
*!!!
local: a forced site of radical alterity
(be careful with the notion of premodern local [~= anti-modern] --> retrieved moment of premodernity. --> rhetoric of retrieve and retrieving / remembering / )
(detachment is a genre)
justice: a sacrosanct universal
to protect one concept above all others, (justice)
undeconstructible call to planetary justive**
original philosopher being called:
-Heidegger support Nazism
-Adorno turned his back on postwar German student movement
-Foucault endorsed Islomic front in the Iranian revolution and Zionism at different times
Spikvak's project:
to articulate an escape from the border position of otherness
to make indivuality the culprit متهم beneath the heels of packed generalities
==> a negational subjectivity: preluding any form of existential action that is not po[...]
(218)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56[...]stern corridors
insurgent becomes the writer of (Manning's) impersonal event
touchstone of a rare immunity and a weapon
to evoke the anxiety of the audience (-Hoda?)
“kill him” --> shortening of language to mirror the contradiction of being : most horrifying manifestation of formalized coldness. not just the license to kill, but the mechanistic invocation of the license
the ‘what has always been’
eternal war
همیشه اینجوری بوده --> proposition of the insurgent stoicism یاغی رواقى [~ a self-without-other: has experienced firsthand the detriment of othering, @Foad]
(the rant, the taunt متلک, the insult فحش, the battle cry)
axis of eternity, middle eastern recourse to an original circularity of things
a concept of time as pure circle (from medieval mysticism)
=/=
deconstruction's uncanny
>
psychoanalysis's trauma
[a technique i use in my lecture-performances, i work reverentially = reverie + reference] --> could be helpful for Eszter
*(colorfulness ==> entanglement)*
the ligature (خط پيوند)
the outliner
unimagined destiny
(little freedom called) curiosity =/= alertness (<-- freedom of nerves)
(my problem with the) discourse of the trace (=/= heritage, tradition studies)
“let's leave a trace” --> you create your own kind of starting from yourself. you have no ancestors and your roots are in your footsteps
(it is never my concern how to leave a trace. rather, reading the fubar that is left by others for me to read)
(contemporary colonialism is tentacular)
contemporary colonialism with its *clash of civilizations rhetoric* [~=>? multiculturalism] =/= ancient warlords and dynasties (--Foucault showing the diffe difference between a medieval monarch’s beheading of a subject and the self-regulating disciplinary apparatus of the modern state) }<-- they don't get it: Middle Eastern response of Adonis, Darwish, Shamlu, Hedayat, and others. that is, to perceive modernity as the manifold extension of an eternal atrocity
the problem is those who have no patience for either concepts of “the world” or “the historical”
(eastern insurgent has been:)
•technically innovative
•epistemologically and ideologically distinctive
•existentially grounded in the waters of ‘what has always been’
Mohaghegh making a link between Hassan Sabbah and Ahmad Shamlu:
•Sabbah: leader of the Ismaili assassins and keeper of their Nizari fortress at Alamut: that he was said to have never left his inner quarters [the library, courtyard, or bedchamber] for thirty-five years except twice to stand on the rooftop and look out beyond the mountain --> this [...]
(219)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.2[...]ean view) Al Ahmad's dismissal of media: he is unable to see it as anything but a promoter of infinite pacification --> media =/= local
(a civilizational dichotomy ==>) portray media as abusive of islamic tradition
**rhetoric of endangered cultural subjectivity**
disappearance or extinction of one's own rightful place within the world (<--~~ will to hegemonic mastery)
*(Al Ahmad deduces Chomsky on a global-imperial scale -->) the operation of the media can not be divorced from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation
Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}
*cultural extinction*
urgency is (always?) neurotic
(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation
(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace
عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion
•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which i[...]
(220)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.6[...]of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}
*cultural extinction*
urgency is (always?) neurotic
(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation
(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace
عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion
•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of political economy)
•Al Ahmad <-- Adorno (skeptical prophecy)
•
}==> principle of utopian potentiality
centers of corruption
pleasure-houses
makeup
games
alcoholic beverages
luxury goods
Marxist tradition:
the underground aest[...]
(221)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.7[...]efuses 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 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 peopl[...]
(222)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]tivity [--> 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 creativity to the utmost in calligraphy” --Mohaghegh--> it is not reflecting on the historical reality that the exercise of calligraphy was always linked to a feudalist class structure, and often exclusively to the confines of the palace court, whereas the printed word open to a more widespread audience independent of material status
--> anticolonial ideology ==>
•carries out the presupposed will of modernity by homogenizing its very own constituency, diminishing any possibility for individual initiative or insubordination
•precludes the advent of outsider radicalism independent of some religio-civilizational confrontation with modernity
--> “there can be only one diagnosis ==> only one elixir” ==> produce an antidote that is equally colossal in scope, shape, and execution
}==> ***the local is no longer accepted by anticolonial ideology as a worthwhile site of contestation***
}--> (Sa'edi + Akhavan + ...) ~=> *messianic defender* of the national history : the sole harbinger جلودار of a *return to the real* ☠ [=/= cheerleader]
_,-+-._
.-’ ‘’-._
/ \
‘ ~. \
/ ~`’ ) .=” , )
| I ( ~ (
\ ‘"” `=' +
`.,_ `”;:L0Ve’ *’
`~'~.’ )_Y_0_U!\
*disease becomes temporary cure* (--> practiced by Al Ahmad, Shariati, artists [as irony and with the always problematic[...]
(223)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.9[...]ed space
•hooked into the contemporaneity of the localized apocalyptic (infinitesimal becomings)
•present as close an interpretation of the unthinkable strangeness of reality as possible
•on an ongoing desertion of the real
Adorno: “works that make socially univocal discursive judgments thereby negate art as well as themselves” @Laura's judgment on the fascist body (--> can consumption be resistance? @Laura: becoming fascist body ==> ? )
the medium of film-making in present-day iran attempts solely to bring the crypto-vantage of the everyday into obscurity-ridden view (to leave less clear --> my pre-2012 videos ‘Vagabond,’ ‘Constant Prince,’ and ‘city of domes’), allowing for a critical distance on the part of the spectator to examine one's own being-in-the-world in raw, blurred form (the truth is haze itself --> Hoda)
exoticization of the local --> reduce it to a nativist enterprise
(Mohaghegh > Tomlinson:) the everyday culture has ingested foreign elements from exogenous sources, with the various elementss gradually brcoming “naturalized” within it =/= image of pure, internally homogenous, authentic, indigenous culture
Sharjah art foundation of the Emirate's *postcultural imagination*
literary front
Hedayat, Yushij, Shamlu, Forough
Hedayat's The Blind Owl variants of a “will to chaos”
middle eastern avant-garde's vision of the writing-act --sketching--> a fugitive postmodern map of escape from its grasp
[in] moments of great social disorder
==> secret societies, iconoclastic trajectories, a type of consciousness that perceives the catastrophic-apocalyptic hint at each turn
(how an eastern or third world vanguard characterize itself in the heart of major historical tremors:) [listen to their *tone of aggression*:]
Nima: “with my poetry i have driven people into a great conflict; good or bad, they have fallen in confusion; i myself am sitting in a corner, watching them: i have flooded the nest of ants”
Forough: “all those who are involved in creative work have as their motive ... a sort of need to confront and struggle with annihilation”
Shamlu: “the children of the depths,” “the children of the storm,” “the horsemen,” “the bold ones,”
--> definition of the poetic world as a protosectarian space
رابطه مریدی مرادی
دار و دسته
قبيله
(Ali, to a subculture of) persecuted and endangered
==> peripheral narative (marginal leadership) become a force of intrigue and seduction (among iranian youth)
-how did poetry respond to historical events of atrocity and transition
-did the poets understand themselves as resembling a mystical, criminal, mercenary, or revolutionary edifice?
amorphous, obscure, versatile (think[...]
(224)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.1[...]/ Such that the black fire of my agony / shames even Hell for its insignificant holdings.”
--> with the maladjusted eyes if the iranian poet... we are at a far distance from western thought, one that seeks a renovated cosmopolitanism as remedy to the injustices of the cityscape in modernity
Mohaghegh's style of writing [when he talks about Hedayat and iranian avant-garde chaotic atmosphere --> (at once) binds and separates the East-West axis] --he--> abandoning transcendent abstractions and restoring it to the language of annihilative venture
*chaos as mask*
chaos = (one of many) eastern poetic mask
chaotic experience (in the service of a lasting nonstate) =/= essence, Being, structure, historical definitions, temporal-spatial specificity
Mohaghegh puts Hedayat's inventiveness in traction with continental philosophy:
•Schopenhauer: existence = reckless collision of transience and nonsensibility <== *dramatic dissociation of the aesthetic from the historical* (<-- Sana's current stance, for Sana the world is will and representation):
history: will's vicious reign over existence
art: space of escape (from the profanity of history, a rare fleeting opportunity to reimagine existence as it potentially could have been but never will be (~=? fiction --> is that why science fiction for iranians does not have the same signification?) [=/= redemptive corrective to the barbarism of the will, =/= weapon by which one might attempt to overthrew the will]
•Hegel: (paradigm of a) complete collapse of subjectivity with history. reason is sovereign of the world
*Dasein: work within the preconceived framework (barriers) of historical consciousness in order to modify its stance within the world
•Marx: the intention of restoring humanity to its actual historicity, positivism + humanism, epochal advancement, *dialectical materialism*: placing subjectivity in a state of subservience to a larger “historical reality”
•Althusser --> *interpellation: power first manifactures a conception of the self that it can later subjugate through the surveillance techniques of the institution
*subjectivity exists solely within the revolutionary progression of the prevailing modes of production*
•Adorno: the discourse of individuality within modernity operates as an accomplice to techniques of reification and the overall obfuscation of the culture industry ~= *assimilation/execution of myth by instrumental reason* -->{ art can be understood only by its laws of movement, not according to any set of invariants ~ antinomy: art is defined by relation to what it is not (separating itself from what it has developed out of)
(Adorno + Frankfurt School:) **subjectivity thrives in the decisive act of interpretation, one through which the ideological saturation of society finds itself unmasked and history is restored to its contest[...]
(225)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.4[...]--> iranian chaoticism [and why Nietzsche is so widely read in Iran], for Nietzschean: “art [--> eruptive potentiality of the will to truth] =/= history [--> desolation of the will to power]” --> the disparity between art and historical reality becomes the very source of chaos-consciousness saliency
ferocious risk of greatness & the asphyxiating decadence of mediocrity
(Ali's) peotic-becoming aestheticized existence
irresolute =/= reactive =/= dismissive
continental philosophy's approach to the associations of three spheres: history[==>], art, subjectivity --✕--> chaotic nonstate: clash between a hypersubjectivized aesthetic & the barriers of historical Being (--> annihilation of both “I” and the historical)
Benjamin's subjectivity must defend itself against the profane rotations of the historical (--> apocalyptic battle)
Benjaminian “angel of history” ravaged of its innocence at the hands of progress and then restored by overriding strength of the historical materialist:
demonization of the monstrosity of the historical + celebratory poeticization of the subject
=/= Nietzsche and Hedayat's subjectivity [should] not to be held in a “derivative placement =/= the here and now” (one must imagine beyond طالع بینی <-- شخصیت فراسو نگر) --> (card reading) one must place under scrutiny the commensurate manner in which the historical is navigated, orchestrated, and then overcome [=/= alibi for some alternative discourse of literary-philosophical humanism or aesthetic transcendence]
[?what is Adrijana's card reading relation to] the desire to divorce history from any potential taxonomy of meaning or intelligibility --Hedayat--> “one is confined in a proud, deceptive consciousness... that rests upon the merciless, the insatiable, the murderous, in the indifference of his ignorance--hanging in dreams”
the poem i wrote in 2010 “our metaphor” https://archive.org/details/ourmetaphor is an example of (my Nietzschean and Hedayatian influence, to address) the indeterminacy and illogic necessarily associated with a chaotic world
(for Nietzsche:) positivism = historical subjectivity's fictive interiority --leads--> decadence of a will to truth, attributing to events a rational look by fixing them within universalizing patterns of signification
Nietzsche: “it is precisely facts that do not exist, only interpretations” =/= fraud of the historical ==>
•Platonic idealism
•messianic grandiosity of the Hegelian world-historical process
•
•*rational historicism: a discursive phenomenon indispensably linked to enlightenment epistemology and its overriding drive for world-mastery*
}=/= explosiveness of a chaotic universe + experiential immediacy of this creative-destructive effusion نشد
Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy (seemingly) a study of the pre-Socratic culture[...]
(226)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.6[...]a nameless eyeless character sitting on the outskirts of a wasteland in conversation with his own shadow --> (beyond time and space) as a gesture toward discarded worlds without clocks or maps --> *the will to aimlessness*
(Hedayat in The Blind Owl) “I had no idea in what direction I was going [...] I did not care whether or not I ever arrived at any palce”
Mikhail Bakhtin --> art for iranian artists = (carnivalesque) a site that grants the right to understand, the right to confuse, to tease, to hyperbolize life; the right to parody others while talking; *the right to not be taken literally*, not ‘to be oneself’ [...] the right to rip off masks, the right to rage at others with a primeval (almost cultic) rage--and finally, the right to betray to the public a personal life, down to its most private and prurient little secrets
Baudrillard: the real is no longer possible ==> illusion is no longer possible ==>{impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level = impossibility of staging illusion}--> hollows the inability of existence to escape its own fictive composition (=/= epistemologies of repair, reading, weaving, etc.)
(Hedayat's) techniques of stealing from the reader the most basic hermeneutic device of distinguishing between imaginary and the actual --> Hoda, Ali
***annihilation: ontological death ==> death of ontology***
زنده به گور buried alive, an unmediated experiential sensitivity to the randomness of existence
***chaotic imaginary =/= tyranny of historicity***
--> ahistorical figure, having traversed the borders of language, humanity, time, space, and reality --> Foad's poem (--> world as endless becoming or nightmaze) =/= historicized existential experience (folloing only two distinct path, of subject and object)
*philosophy = learnign how to kill* (=/= Socratic-Platonic versoin 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[...]
(227)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.8[...]/>
the torment of overlapping, of absolute possession and absolute dispossession
unreal
surrealism
anti-realism
hyper-realism
irrealism
inaccurate, misleading signs around each corner of the cityscape
deceptive and insidious facades
taken astray and stranded amid false omens
the misinformation of the world's existence
the minor syndicate versus the drone
stretching between the memorandum and the dispatch
always in a dual hermeneutics of suspicion and discovery
drinking from the fool's gold of confusion ill-advising codes
the sectarian's remedy:
vulgarization requires vulgarity
response to disgrace is to enter the disgrace
to inflict the profane occurence and encourage the contamination of language and sign
into the stint of atrocity
to go barefoot and dismembered
sectarian appears before the maker:
in blemished and tattered from
(to prove hardship)
xxxxx 254
...................................
one must fear those who say “we”
Mohaghegh's writing reminds of Avital
...following it into its lower webs of imagination
sect: an insider-outsider formation
*the sect redefines*
life, secrecy, ritual, fanaticism, martyrdom
(in a fragmented age -->) sectarianism = apocalyptic writing + insurgent practice ["+” : a lethal combination] ==> ***an abstract idea + its immediate execution (within the world)*** ["+” : collapsing the boundary between the emergence of the two]
**(its other names:)
•underground movements
•secret societies
•forbidden associations
•cult gathering
•*artistic circles*
•urgan gangs
•rebel cadres کادر
•terrorist units
•
**(its forms:) they banish themselves and plan their hostile-ecstatic return to the surface:
•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 cl[...]
(229)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.1[...] 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 become the main pillars of subjectivity
Mohaghegh offers a list of secondary literature that forms the relevant archive from which his manuscript borrows, and **marks its axis of engagement with preexisting interventions**
#bibliography
Nietzsche's conception of chaos
“nature and mask determine phenomenal being, the phenomenon in its being, as chaos”
(Deleuze interprets Nietzsche's chaos as:) a philosophical overture toward “the pure unformed”
--> the subject is this free, anonymous, and nomadic singularity which traverses men as well as plants and animals independently of the matter of their individuation and the forms of their personality [~~> #write a short story for hayula]
*Eastern insurgent's participation in the chaotic event* --> there is no natural or pure ==> (a more) apocalyptic response ==> to became available
[--> to deal with sense as a predicate مسند or a property دارايى =/=? to deal with sense as an event]
community
(on Eastern postmodern gathering)
(alternative categories that express the potential for “relationality”: assemblage, alignment, circle, swarm, etc. that are based on multiple vantages [...]
(230)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.2[...]ct's violence)
the community is desperate to exist ==degenerates==> into totalitarian declaration of its rights; obsessed with constructing mythologies of presence (and being represented)
=/= the exile (the animal, the child, the shadow, the monster, the machine, the thing, the contagion) carries none of the anxiety of ontological authenticity. they come and go, as impersonal, nameless, metamorphosing creatures, never too long in the same place, always with some *new game* or *secret to pursue*
communities --> distinctly humanist : importing a kind of micro-universality --> ladem with oppressive suggestions of an inborn ethical obligation (originally from the enlightenment) ==became==> source of judgment ==> taxonomies of power ==> disenchantment, alienation, genocidal playback
Mohaghegh suggests the always social logic of community formation is toxic, “the death sentence to its mutability and actual freedom” --> to avoid the “trappings of a social framework, with its false codifications of ethical responsibility, and seek more elusive pathways of dialogue and juncture” (--> i am not sure about it, this could be also problematic)
...................................
[title]
**chaotic topology of imagination**
Ali's constant antagonism (in his work and in his speech acts)
Mohaghegh's use of “third-world authors”
they write the unnamable --&--> execute a vast becoming (of devastating scale and proportion)
to place these authors in immediate exchange with “western” thought --> to allow for a toxic, فرسایشی abrasive confrontation that reveals the outstanding distance from such conventions of knowing [--> my work is about this, to visist (visit + resist) these sites of critical encounter and embed them in my performative acts ==> to provide/produce a condition in which a non-antagonistic critical encounter between the “Western” order of knowing and the chaotic textualities of “Middle East” is possible]
epistemic warfare (~/= my ajayeb)
masks of an impersonal nightwalker consciousness
madness
hallucination
amnesia
becoming a faceless engraver
their explicit conceptual elements:
•burial --> blindness
•annihilation --> contagion
•shadow --> inhuman
•desertion --> deception
}--> chaotic experience
(according to Mohaghegh) this chaotic middle eastern elsewhere is not yet openly acknowledged by literature
-borderline illegible narratives
-emergent textualities
(my allegiance is with Mohaghegh's allegiance with) badlands of postcolonial site and its rogue arsenals [...] ==allows==> a fugitive, errant trajectory
(i have been tracing the locatable mimicries of middle east)
***chaotic textuality[...]
(231)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.3[...]stic 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
*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
◦tra[...]
(232)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.5[...]n 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’ from being merely a man will never be other than a man” ~~--> Rumi's bemirid بمیرید بمیرید
•Nietzschean call for an experience of the end: “from love of life, one should desire a different death: free, conscious, without accident, without ambush”
•Cioran's futurity that would “let all form become formless, and chaos shwallow the structure of the world in a gigantic maelstrom, that would be tremendous commotion and noise, terror, and explosion, and then let be eternal silence and total forgetfulness”
•Deleuze and Guattari's meditation on life overrun by “desiring machines for whom the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning w[...]
(233)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.6[...]t 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 apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)
Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”
(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)
(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus compl[...]
(234)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.7[...]th 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 apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)
Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”
(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)
(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy[...]
(235)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.8[...] of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
[...]
(241)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.8[...]ften in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)
infantile sexuality
jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure
*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought
separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image
Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]
>
anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,
(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation
to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***
[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation
deserter
textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exha
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intentionally sets out to become lost
vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected
self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself
arc of necessity
the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...
{ false subjectivity = [...]
(242)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]. text conceive the setting of inhuman
deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination
...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of instinct, desire, and knowing*
*exhaustion
damaged allegory of man
*evacuation --> surrender to fugitive trajectory
takes place on amorphous dust
wrenched
shadow-scapes
enterence <--> ejection
•misadventurism of the wanderer
•rogue thought
influx
disintegration
fever
velocity
the deserter mind is made to synchronize the internalization of waste and unrest and to ravage itself
spatiality of the the nowhere
intentionally sets out to become lost
vagrant: drifter در به در
اوباش
self that personified the dejected
self-eclipsing vagrant that becomes the outside itself
arc of necessity
the super-power of holding objects suspending in the air --> an intruder topology where everything is held suspend...
{ false subjectivity = hiding place }<-- chaotic imagination overruns it
...................................
Glissant
constrictions of the ‘forced poetics’ of writing (in plastic arts)
grandiose concept of the writer (of writing as an ordering process)
world meant as raw material for a book
Glissant's thoroughgoing exploration of models of disorder/chaos --> (his subversive epitome of) *opacite/opacity* --> realm of the intuitive and indeterminate as a corrective response to the systematizing pressures of assimilation and deculturation
==> to create a more immediate, oral, corporeal language
-inadequate process of attempting to note down, chronicle or relate the experience of opacity
chaos + opacity + resistance (in Glissant)
primordial act of defiance lajbazi
negation = heroic (=/= pedestrian)
Glissant's anonymous and pedestrian form of resistance --> knowledge of camouflaged reality
“The one with whom the poet is enchanted, that he names with each breath. But for whom words are inadequate.”
...in the unexpected expanse of global relating
“a poetics not of the tree but of vegetation”
[poetics of the decentered subject]
epitomise (pure) revolt (--> tree grows to reveal human configurations, fierce and solitary revolt against the plantation system)
modest forms of resistance
fragmentation of fiction --to--> polyphonic quiltwork of stories
[system of imagery]
(Glissant's) insistence on marine symbolism
transforming, restorative power of [...]
(245)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%58.9[...]h our current condition?
according to Lacan: *Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac* --> psychoanalytic treatment = inducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, 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 Camer[...]
(246)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.1[...]ion
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 foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia
(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}
i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”
[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]
defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)
the neurotic an[...]
(248)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.2[...]m of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}
i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”
[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]
defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)
the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*
“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)
(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech
*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)
...................................
[Searles]
schizophrenic individual is struggling with the question, not so much of ‘how to relate,’ but ‘whether to relate’ to others
(Searles's interpersonal ideal:) connection = relatedness without merging
spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference (pygmalionesque love?)
psychological illness = a disturbance of natural tendency to heal others (patient's unconscious therapeutic initiative)
“all patients have the ability to ‘read the unconscious’ of the therapist” (Searles)
*acknowledging what the patient's transference materializes*
...................................
apass's aetiology: the philosophical study of causation of disease
(deriving from the Greek words aitia = cause and logos = word/speech) --> “tell me what causes your psychosis or art”
(thing that actually drives you crazy:)
other individuals [~ tormentingly insecure nature of the ever-ambivalent symbiotic relatednes[...]
(251)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.2[...]etations*) ==> drive the patient psychotic (weaken the patient's ego to gradually assimilate previously repressed material...)
•stimulate the other person sexually (in a setting where gratification is impossible--for example to behave in a seductive way toward the child) ==> conflict (between sexual needs on the one hand, and rigorous super-ego retaliations)
parental double bind
**simultaneous or rapidly alternating stimulation-and-frustration of other needs** ==Searles==> a disintegrating effect
**chronic pleas for sympathy** --> child's desire and felt-duty to be helpful
Jassem/Sina typically engaging the other in some politico-philosophical debate, in which he talks with machine-gun rapidity expressing himself with a virile kind of forceful, businesslike vigour (while the other feels quite strongly urged to argue some of these points with him, though not being given a chance to say much), while he strolls about on his mobile phone and posing himself physically irrelevant to the other --> when in-fronted with Jassem or Sina, one feels strange (losing your mind, feeling like an insecure child *engaged in such a broadly divided interrelatedness with a parent*) while that feeling appears as simply a ‘crazy’ product of one's own imagination
(is non-verbal interaction always sexual?)
nonsequitur (a typical schizophrenic technique)
(to get free from) the delusion that you had had not one mother but many different ones
a continual unexpected switching from one conversational topic to another without any marked shift in feeling-content is in itself a mode of interpersonal participation which can have a significantly disintegrating effect upon the other person's psychological functioning --> a remark for me in my lecture-performances, i can't cause disintegration on other people's thinking for the sake of art --> *to undermine the other person's confidence in the reliability of their own emotional reactions and of their own perception of outer reality* ==> de-maintain grasp on reality <-- (often) artist's failure to develop **adequate reality testing**
-the artist is not allowed to make the audience crazy!!?? @Jassem, Dominguez's “mental cruelty”
techniques of undermining of ego-functioning (in the form of: deliberate experiments in the service of totalitarian political ideologies, cultural undercurrents in present-day democratic societies, and in the lives of the schizophrenic)
-what are the effects of your work on other's ability of participation in life?
Searles: effort to drive the other person crazy can be motivated predominantly by a desire to externalize the threatening craziness in oneself
(-artists do that?)
*introjected crazy parent* (==> predominance of the one's own irrational and cripplingly powerful superego)
(parents, crazy or not crazy, are always intr[...]
(252)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.4[...]nd their relationships with others, figures which could provide the basis for rapid ego-growth and personality-integration. but sometimes it is too fast, the ego regresses, and it becomes an experience of developing psychosis
pathological defense:
•delusions
•hallucinations
•depersonalization
•
skilfully dosed and skilfully timed increments in psychotherapeutic participation [such as premature interpretations demanded usually in feedback sessions] ==> opposite effects (rather than an integrating effect upon the artist researcher)
the schizophrenic patient's individuality resides partly in his symptoms
(Searles > Szalita-Pemow)
?gratifications in the ‘crazy’ symbiotic mode of relatedness (despite the anxiety- and frustration-engendering aspects that it offers)
earlier struggle between child and parent to drive each other crazy --> evolving transference of the patient-therapist relationship --> to crack each other
the economy *feelings of confusion and unreality* for iranians, in public political realm of state and individual symbiosis, as well as intersubjective early childhood and parent symbiosis --> the ways it enters cultural imaginary and artistic expressiveness --> *how and why iranian artists often try to make their audience crazy* [-and myself included, check Sina lecture's chaotic verbalizations of delusional materials --> jouissance of disorganization]
-(in my lectures) am i externalizing my psychosis? [~ romantic]
(mother repeatedly commanding the child ‘Now, think!’ [~ to perceive the secret] ==>) threatened, mistrustful, isolated self ==> finding hidden meanings + sarcastic response [~=> unnerving the other]
small children exposed to unfamiliar and complex situations ==> often experience of ‘you are crazy!’
modern culture of obsessive-compulsive character traits as orderliness, competitiveness, intellectualization ==> obsessive-compulsive type of basic personality structure (is made very common among artists, people who are busy one way or another with analysis and psyche of the other) ==> **reaction formation** (which is one of the major defense mechanisms of the obsessive-compulsive) ~= long-repressed desires **to dismember the personality-structure of other persons**
[obsessive-compulsive personality type is very common in expertise societies: tavahosh-e takhasos, clean (+ “contaminated” things), one is deeply immersed in research, mental control, not wasting time, adherence to routines/rituals, washers, checkers, impairment in formulating an organizational strategy, etc. ==> cognitive inhibition, or violent disinhibition]
wishes to foster personality-disintegration in other persons + genuine and powerful interests in helping them <-- how is this possible?!
-Searles suggests that the desires to driv[...]
(253)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.6[...]ntial thinking*
*tangential thinking*
•disorganised thinking ==> disorganised speech
•mood disorders
•dementia
•mania
•clanging (situationally inappropriate association of words based upon sound rather than concepts)
•echolalia (unsolicited repetition of vocalizations made by another person)
•[*]tangentiality: deviation from relevancy; wandering train of thought, lack of focus, never returning to the initial topic --> *topic maintenance*
◦self-centered social responses
◦attention to one's own speech is overcome during the occurrence of cognition ==> evasive vocalized content
(language use”)
referential (for the sake of context)
poetic (for the sake of message)
emotive (for the sake of addresser)
conative (for the sake of addressee)
pathic (for the sake of interaction)
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview
◦a particular identity is opposing all people who belong to a particular identity
[...]
(254)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.7[...]
metalingual (for the sake of itself)
...................................
-the concept of “wearing” from Alberti (prehispanic South America)
-the concept of “mask” from Mohaghegh (postmodern Middle East)
-the concept of “style” from Archer (post-industrial Britain)
[these theories are very helpful for me and import-rich for reimagining subjectivity. Alberti committed to anthropology, Mohaghegh to the philosophical, Archer to sociology]
...................................
slave: a person attached by law and by custom to the identity of another individual --> ‘social death’ of slavery (as legal nonperson ==> alienation) [in academic literature comparative study of slavery], slavery as a substitute for death in war
--shift--> (the concept that) slaves might influence the tastes, the language, the actions, and even the ideas of their masters
acknowledgement of presence =/= significance in relation to history
(A. Lee on) the African dimension of the genesis of the Babi religion
((oral sources for) the recovery of) subaltern histories in Iran [erased from historical memory]
--> deep resentment of “the presence in Iran of an ‘Other’ that does not conform to the imagined Iranian Self”
unblemished national selfhood
purity fetishism of... <== *purity deeply rooted in religion* [?]
...................................
(issues) politics of liberation:
•that liberal democracy requires common basis for culture and society
•identity politics:
◦“the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (Eisenstein)
◦invites people to stay in, to look inward, to obsess over the body and the self, to surround themselves with a moral forcefield to protect their worldview
◦a particular identity is opposing all people who belong to a particular identity
◦naming and claiming lived experience, and the authority arising from that
◦[no more?] sexual orientation (that it is now only about disrupting the mainstream)
◦(in the context of cultural negotiations) *strategic essentialism*: (despise strong differences in members of) minorities to temporarily “essentialize” themselves (forward their group identity) in a simplified way to achieve certain goals, to use hegemonic discourses to reform the understanding of “universal” goals
◦class-based politics are identity politics
◦to bring people together based on a shared aspect of their identity --> fail to examine differences among themselves
*solidarity does not require identification, but a willful act of alliance*
...................................
سپردن کتاب به حرق و غسل
ضعیفه دانا
(for Attar:)
ح[...]
(255)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%59.8[...]er between the *world's balance and unbalance*
(migration or) migrant: (~= fugitive:) individuals who are reborn existentially precisely through the act of the escape, in order to trick their persecutors ==> survive
[=/= the juggler: Nicolas]
Mohaghegh's proposal: *to lie our way into the lie*
-how and where is my unreal located in my work on bestiaries?
past --> forsaken ancients
outside --> time of disappearance
seduction: immersion in style
our guardian: the thief
(learning from Mohaghegh and Cinderella to be/operate for each other) between:
orchestrator (influence, innovation, experimentation --> laboratory)
partner (equivalence, benefit, reciprocity --> alliance)
slave (captivity, labor, devotion, service, worship --> bondage)
--or--> l.a.b. stands for: laboratory, alliance, bondage {bondage should be part of every (artistic or knowledge-intensive) practice}
the 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 iness[...]
(256)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60[...]ple 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 unreal, the unknown, the elsewhere, the outside, the emergent
•[where one] letting fall those droplets of mad and dangerous consciousness
•[where] governing categories of human existence are suspended ==> alternative classifications (banned libraries, archives, catalogs, arrangements)
•
•
=/= light --promises--> a certain stability of Being
those with a pathological need to rule
those with a diabolical impulse to abandon (subvert, reinvent)
those with nothing to lose (desperation)
those with everything to gain (quest)
time of weeping
(mourn, “this should never have happened”) creation as error; being as error
solipsistic cruelty: no longer recognizes itself in anything else nor anything else within itself
[Mohaghegh, prototype harbour, night harbors:]
return of the full moon --> metamorphosis --> werewolf
return of the nightmare --> fright --> dreamer
return of the sacred --> resurrection --> redeemer
return of the curse --> vengeance --> enemy
return of the tides --> migration --> sailor
return of the banished --> hatred --> exile
return of the ancient --> power --> idol
return of the text --> evocation --> messenger
return of the threat --> intimidation --> extortionist
return of the dead --> disappearance --> ghost
return of desire --> obsession --> stalker
return of pain --> infection --> virus
return of the discarded --> waste --> vagrant
return of glory --> vindication --> fighter
return of the scene --> concealm[...]
(257)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.1[...]
return of dust --> mortality --> creation
return of instinct --> animality --> creature
point of no return --> irreversibility --> lost cause
masochistic skepticism
sadistic truth
(Mohaghegh's) *deception theory*
death of God + death of the Human + death of the Real ==> limitless epochal existential era of lying
existential forgery
ingenuity
deceit
treacherous play
fictive double-crossing
elaboration
(thief's, runaway's, insomniac's, hysteric's, sorcerer's, and other night-traveler's) sensorial orchestrations of the dark intervals
morphologies of the night-traveler:
•the old boat-passengers once placed under enforced isolation
•the exiles displaced from occupied homelands
•the marauding sectarian factions who patrolled city streets each night (darkness = ideology)
•the slaughtered minorities traversed into non-being
•night-revelers عیاش
•
militant storyteller
phantom ancestors
phantom offsprings
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
[...]
(258)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.2[...]e 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
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)
Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children
(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related t[...]
(259)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.4[...]not 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
guardian of prostitutes
surrounded in myth by death and disaster
goddess of contradictory connotations and forces (fair play & enmity, etc,)
Lillith (derived from the Akkadian lilitu: evening creature, specter, or monster)
kidnapping sleeping children
(according to the Babylonian cosmology) night requires (non-identitarian) gods capable of abomination (backstabing)
-recognized by their tangible outlines as actual constellations in the night sky
-related to the more expansive domains of animality, vehicles, and objects
-emanate from a perceptual faculty closer to the child's imagination of cloud-shapes (=/= archetypal meaning)
Tiamat
primordial goddess of the salt sea, darkness, chaos, and creation
from the time of permanent nightfall
a destroyer-deity and yet whose sliced body parts form the heavens and earth
represented as unconscious, reckless annihilation and yet also holding diabolical intelligence
bathed in eternal blackness and yet known as “the glistening one”
Girra
dystopian potentials of technological invention
figure of wicked logos (undoing words)
(leader of the terrible)
non-metaphysical and equally nonhumanist devotion to the artificer (apparatus)
cosmic ballistics: scientific field of mechanics concerned with the launching, propulsion, flight, and effect of projectiles (trajectory and impact)
nocturnality and contagion
snakes and dragons of constellations
paradox (the beast)
instrumentality (the builder)
unleashing (the despoiler)
death-spell
نابودی gesture of *extispicy: ancient Mesopotamian practice of reading animal organs (often a sheep's liver) spattered upon a wall's surface
-a discipline involved less with knowing than with watching
The Egyptian Book of the Dead
philosophy of night, dusk, shadow
egyptian night-deities
-with astounding narrative-theoretical flexibility
-some slither, hunch, fly, or remain seated
-not residing on Olympian heights but rather in the subterranean below
star-covered nude wo[...]
(260)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%60.4[...]br />
*we must listen for the african voice in iran even when it cannot be heard*
siah siyah سیاه: afro-iranian children (descendants of african woman slaves served as domestic servants and concubines) who remained in iran, married local people, and could live normal lives as iranians (although they might be identified as black)
==> *some percentage of the iranian population is of african descent (especially among the wealthy clases who could afford slaves) <-- this heritage has never hardened into a clear ratial category within the society*
we must regard them as actors *even when we cannot see their choices*
...................................
childhood Elias chap1
[*]childhood: idealized romantic construct, with denied legal rights, reflection of adults about themselves:
•nostalgia for an 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)[...]
(261)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.3[...]ifferent 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 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 ([...]
(264)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]ated 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 contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocati[...]
(265)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.4[...]sthetics = 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 contemplations --Elias-->
•ignores majority of human experience
•(favors) apophatic (transcendent + ineffable غیر قابل توصیف) =/= cataphatic (immanent + experiential)
unstable & somatic ways we respond to (and seek out) everyday images
evocative & powerful (<--Sina-- nonartisitic images)
(art or not art) ***aesthetic response***
[*]children's media: aesthetic social imagination
(moral components of:)
cruelty, hurt, disgust, disdain
kindness, happiness, admiration, love
physical, material, somatic relation to the ethereal, metaphysical, intellectual
(?how can we) confidently treat “images = sources of socioculturel information”
(from) Islamic culture --to--> cultures associated with isalm
strong opposition to representational religious art <-- modern Islamic societies --> unproblematic accepting of representational religious materials intended for children
didactic islamic visual media:
•(Kuwait) the 99 --> heroes for each name of the God<br />
•(Pakistan, India, Afghanistan) burqa avenger --> burqa clad superhero against a corrupt view of traditional religion, using veil as costume
•(Pakistan) Ferozsons publisher
•Uysal press
•Timas press (Cem Kiziltug)
•
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 = behavi[...]
(266)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%61.5[...]therness (I-am-involved-ness)
Flatley
affect --> (nonvirtual) they come out unpredictability in dreams and physical symptoms
(interaction of) affect + habit, belief, thought, ideas = emotion
neuropolitics: neurobiological universals can predictively manifest themselves
article =/= book (more rewarded in the humanities)
...technical, symbolic, formula-filled language of scientific research
antirationalism of turn to body in affect theory --Leys--> “the claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal affective intensifies and resonances that so decisively influence it condition our political and other beliefs that that we ignore those affective intensities or resonances at our peril--not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will otherwise miss the*potential for ethical creativity* and transformation that ‘technologies of the self’ designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.”
enterprise of theorizing affect --Elias-->
(1) ideologically driven by an attempt to reverse an imagined poststructuralist theoretical hegemony ==> conscious turn from rational methods --> *asignifying transcendence*
-Massumi's affect: asocial virtual potential (=/= actualizes) ==> affect: unformed & unstructured (potential: transmitable + socially powerful) ~= undefinable & unknowable ~= unanalyzable & unpredictable <-- not usable as a theoretical concept
Massumi (moving away from linguistic towards t) --> affect becomes ethereal abstraction (=/= historical materiality) removed from the grasp of critical assessment
feeling --> personal & biographical
emotions --> social
affect --> prepersonal (non-conscious experience of intensity)
(2) florid and convoluted use of language --> fail to eschew obfuscation (without it there is not so much to say)
Massumi: “thought strikes like lightning, with sheering ontogenic force. It is felt.” <--Elias-- meaningless metaphor
the notion of precognitive affective event
•do nothing to help one understand the nature of conscious, felt, enacted emotion + its social ramifications
•provides no rubric through which one can engage in comparative analysis (or informed discussion)
(Brennan) affect: physiological in effect, social in origin
(Grossberg) affect: to locate human beings in their environment (why ideology is only effective some of the time? quotidien = pleasure + ideology) *it is in the affect (affective life) that people struggle to care about something, find the energy to survive, enact their projects and possibilities*
ideology -->
•affective intensities
•affective investments<[...]
(267)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%62[...]ve dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*
how do we piece together a world?
ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)
encroachment tajavoz تجاوز
super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
•are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•
(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy
khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه
we have to engage paradoxes of state power: capacity and incapacity (--> my point: the state in Iran is ambiguous.)
#workshop: Studying State Power---in Tehran we must explore theoretical alternatives to the concept of force: consent, contract, Singh's bipolar theory of force and contract, varying ideas of the “magic” of the state, Foucault's governmentality --> contemporary anthropology of the state, we examine varying pictures of state incapacity
•requirements: willingness to engage challenging concepts and texts, weekly online comment, class presentations and participation
•aims: a final essay: to make a coherent argument drawing on anthropological and theoretical literatures on state power
•axis: i work with Singh: that “there is no one correct answer we hope that students will c[...]
(268)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.8[...]nd despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)
دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت
Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --> this is a dialectical habit of thought: the idea that the signature moment of thinking is a determinate negation (of State, Islam, Europe, etc.) Singh asks: how did this particular mode of reflexivity come to stand in for “true” anthropological thought?
would it have been better to leave things more “fluid” and “complex and contradictory”? @Eszter
ethnographic labor:
1- 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
<[...]
(269)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.3[...]ms 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
...................................
vita
lives of saints
تذکرة الاولیا Tazkirat al-Awliya
concerned with canonization, education, and collective recollection of contemplative life
(vita as a biological genre recounting the lives of holly men and women in several religious traditions: Bhaktamala, Theravada buddhism, Therigata, etc.)
Singh asking: how would we narrate a scholarly life? (and i add to that: who could be oulia اولیا Arahant [further ones] today? queer or nonhuman)
*participated in the world historical “isms” (--> ajayeb)
--Singh--> narrating a conceptual life, vita
*uncertainties of reception* (in Attar's Tazkirat al-Awliya)
singularity of trajectory of Attar's saints =/= my random sampling of themes
anthropology: to write about anything that exists or imagined
can we talk affirmatively of a postmodern ethnography of ajayeb? =/= “totalizing vision” of culture
recovery of a human voice as a moral imperative (--> Hoda)
(?your history as a) telos of increasingly self-awareness
-Derrida's philosophical style tending to negative transcendence (différance: an absence that transcends ‘a’ and ‘not a’)
-Deleuze's tradition of affirmative immanence
(Singh > Deleuze > Strauss:) structure is composed of “pre-individual singularities” ~ nomadic distribution of potential --immanent--> contradictions, accidents, mutations
pure/impure
suspicious/inauspicious
life/death
heretic --> reorder and obliterate the partitioning of categories that compose the structural order of religion [--> Veena on Sikhism and Hinduism: symbolism of Sikhism understood in relation to Hinduism structural order, annihilating the categorical prioritise (intellectual and social) of the medieval world. Sikhism rejecting the opposition between categories of: the rulers, the caste system, and the orders of renunciation --> investment of the virtues of all three *in a single body of faith* and conduct]
heterodox sects
rebellious thinkers
--> negation of the organizing conceptual order
(social and) ritual order generates its own forms of instability
...ambivalences of key concepts ==bring==> “play” to the structure, for good and ill ~ liminality
(Veena's) liminial situation: a form of instability where the individual experiences his social world as separated from the cosmic [...]
(273)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.4[...]y* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)
event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)
event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place
in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims
in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure
(**modernity is an event**)
pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order
Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering
the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)
Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***
toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)
poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)
...distance that arises out of forms of proximity
Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture
...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity
(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,
*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*
Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: th[...]
(274)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...]lacement (~ 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 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 t[...]
(275)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...]nd speaking to the self (not as an esoteric practice, or as institutionally bounded)
-it gives you a language to explore their interiority
-(traditions of self-scrutiny and self-reflection,) a poetry of self-knowledge + rebellion against social convention [+ frenzied violence (vahshat) --> Majnun: an intellectual articulation, literary elaboration, and social proliferation of the “mazhab of love” a dominant strand of sufi theology, ethics, and political thought in the Balkans to Bengal complex]
earlier mode of understanding X as irreligious
discourses that recognize X as islamic
Anand --> *indic nature of islam*
-islam is indexed within the lives of non-Muslim Indians through a form of stranger hospitality
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order
(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows
shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself
perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)
Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)
Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*
...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”
*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?
*for an[...]
(276)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]>
many, besides muslims, have ongoing relations to islamic sacred objects
•embrace of the divine
•efflorescence of relations with nonhumans (snakes and cats)
(Naveeda on) Anand's mournful tone --> forces of restoration = forces of destruction
importance of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order
(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows
shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself
perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)
Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)
Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*
...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”
*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospi 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[...]
(277)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]ties {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}
many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer
Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions
intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)
...................................
(Mufti > Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination
***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism
intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
conditions of neoliberal global capitalism
[we have to see] disenchantment, necessarily open-ended and incomplete =/= self-consciously formulated projects of re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)
(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***
islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west
jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms
[...]
(278)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.3[...] re-enchantment
[i have to be carefull with my] allusive evocation of the passing of secularity into obsolescence
my work with computre programming and database --> practices of calculability: a hallmark of the secularization thesis
subtraction stories: accounts of the emergence of modernity-secularity as merely the falling away of extraneous elements (leaving a core of foundational human experience and its self-understanding)
(Mufti > Asad --clarifying--> the ways in which) ***the very category of religious experience as a distinct and delimited domain of social and cultural life emerges out of transitions to modernity***
islamism: a return of islam, either uncontaminated by, or having shaken itself free of, the liberal thought and practice of the modern west
jargon of authenticity: (a form of thinking, to understand crisis in terms of) loss and attempted recuperation of past social and cultural forms
emergent postsecular common sense ==>{islamist practices = an expression of religious consciousness =/= the inroads of secularism ~= Western imperialism}
(?what is made to disappear from view altogether in) conceptualizing the interaction of secular and religious imaginations and spaces in modern Muslim societies
[*]enlightenment: an encompassing logic of bourgeois modernity, within and against which different social groups struggle in widely different ways (it is not something to be selected or rejected at the great salad bar of modern life)
*dialectical perception* --> revivalist claims (of whatever) are products of the very cultural logics they disavow and disown
==Mufti==> *islamist thought and practice cannot sustain their claim to be uncontaminated by the modern imperial process*
precolonial poetic traditions in the persianate sphere (influenced by persian)
r />
...................................
systematic observation of the moon and its light ==drive==> development of science
studying soft moonlight =/= short-lived and blinding sensation of a flash of lightning
moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next
moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*
moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by demon]
reddish
orange
gold
yellow
white
the moon changes its course frequently because it is not able to master the cold
w[...]
(279)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.3[...]
moon:
boundary of the terrestrial domain
bediator between this world and the next
moonlight ==>
•reflections about the interstellar order of space
•boundaries of terrestrial captivity زندان تن
•*semi-clear blurred shadows that suggest a strange and nonhuman world*
moon changes constantly --> mood changes to the moon [luna in Latin --> laune in german: launisch moody = to be ruled by changeable moods, lunatism = a form of sleep-walking by moonlight or possessed by demon]
reddish
orange
gold
yellow
white
the moon changes its course frequently because it is not able to master the cold
when moon light...
upon moon lands...
out of reach moon was an object of pure observation =/= Moghana’s moon
scorching missiles of Helios
allurement
cheerfulness
harmlessness
Lucretius on the nature of things
look upward yonder at the bright clear sky
and what it holds
the moon, the radiance of the splendour-sun
moon-dwellers
icaromenippus Lucian’s satire about the moon lamenting the lack of imagination of ancient astronomers
trans-lunar celestial spheres
great intellectual abstraction is necessary to explain the appearances in the sky
Plato creates an image if completely harmonious world structure which makes circular rotating movements by means of spindles
Aristotle’s design gave a mechanical explanation for celestial phenomena (both terrestrial & astral physics)
Copernicus (+ Kepler + Galilei) ==> anthropocentric view of the world (=/= catholics church)
ibn Heisam --> visible light originates only from the moon
moonlight to be studies
ketab al manazirr />
size of the angle of deflection is so small that moonlight cannot be explained as sunlight
in 1609 Galilei’s telescope had 20x magnification
(moon’s) traces and spots
rough and full cavities and prominences
“let us not thing it an offence to suppose that she is earth and that for this which appears to be her face, just as our earth has certain great guilds, so that earth yawns with great depths and clefs which contain water or murky air, the interior of these the light of the sun doe not plump or even touch but it fails and the reflection which it send back here is discontinuous”
moon and the face of the observer
“there are people who believe that they are seeing a mirror image of the oceans on earth, and others say they are the traces of the mountains and mountain ranges of our earth; there are also people who believe that what they see is a figure that has been cut out of the reflecti[...]
(280)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.4[...], deregulated, commercialized, marketized public services
•Crane using psychoanalytical tropes --> horror = everyday terror
[*]horror: excessive communication
•Creed using trope of monstrous-feminine --> horror = gestalten deeds in adjection and castration
•Lim --> *horror = temporal critique* {fantastic local horror =/= historical time, supernaturalism, occult modes of thinking encoded in fantastic narratives}
[Bergson > Lim > Tolentino:] horror --> heterogeneous temporality, heteroglossia: multiple tongues, to disengage in certain (nation) formations
horrific real
translation of historical terror in filmic horror
historical real + filmic mobilization --render--> real as porous & artificial
horror --Tolentino--> transhistorical (transgressional) continuity of the project of desire & pleasure
--> masochistic viewing experience + trajectory of critique
(during Marcos order in Philippines -->) horror genre talks about the popular dialectics of the known & unknown, moral & immoral, inclusion & exclusion, defeat & triumph, struggle & redemption, normal & abnormal, reality & alternative realities, religious & secular
•horror provides a cultural trope for the imagination of the nation
anxious state in horror films --represent--> anxious state in ... (nation-formation, citizenship, etc.) --> irony: (the anxious state) it is not what it is
----> [*]viewing: a sadomasochistic act [you know it is frightful (or garbage) yet enjoy viewing (in KHM we called it hate-watching)] --> pervers pleasure ==> individual and social categories to remain constantly in a flux
intensification of anxiety ~=> carnavalesque moment of drawing pleasure
(in the film) history of a chosen local
logic of absence --> prohibitive history of violence + excess
ritual of horrific foregrounding
scene + coherence of meaning
*horror is performative : it needs to be restaged in order to be evocative of meaning*
sexualization of women integral to the genre of horror [aimed at its male audience, similar to Charmed]:
•sexy female leading role (in love triangle)
•man --> representing evil and underworld
•man --> representing true love (engaged in a battle for love + choice of the young woman, sexualized in the male contest)
•female viacera sucker --> female creatures need to show hidden skin [popular sex-oriented star --to--> female monstrous figure --allow--> display of prohibited body parts + heteronormative desire]
(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)
in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes the female subject survive, endure, move on
•they are punishe[...]
(281)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.7[...] />
(female star rendered both strong and weak)
1. exposing and defying the horror figure (first)
2. embodying the horrific abject subject (second)
in the narrative of horror
•the moral forthrightness that makes the female subject survive, endure, move on
•they are punished but never totally obliterated into the horror scene
internalization of fear ==>? domestication =? maintaining the status quo in community fronts --Foucault--> docile ==> productive for state formation
(the survivor never fully survives and triumphs over the adversaries of the) horror scene --> open-endedness of the closure = of knowing + of being abjected
(libidinal drive in) citizenship claims in nation-formations ~= (libidinal drive in) continuing performative of the horror subject
}--> one is constitutes through but never thoroughly in power relations
white sexy female star + horror + social melodrama (= Charmed)
orally told tales of female violence
miscegenation
desire for liminal female sexuality
necrophilia
female haunting
heterosexual desire
nostalgia for truth
==provide==> template for cultural idiomatic imagination
historical experience --> futile & enunciated through the orality of retelling (+ being capable of retelling)
historical justice has not been served in actual social reality ==> the horror scene bears the constant threat and possibility of repeating itself on the future
...................................
#idea
namaz gestures as alchemical ruse to open portals, kill enemies, transmute objects, and other specs
...................................
Naveeda chapter 1 mosque
mosque =/= shell for prayers
•monumental structures built by the state
old mosque: part of complex devoted to
•learning
•dispensing justice
•channeling charity
oft repeated statement: Pakistan is a mosque [~= one has to learn to inhabit this place, aquire the right etiquette in sharing it] (--> what it means to be Muslim in Pakistan)
•a place of assembly?
•a sacred place?
qabza, ghabze قبضه, violent seizure, forcible possession
(depending on who you ask -->) Pakistan under ghabze by:
•the state
•venal religious figures
•unscrupulous lay muslims
•sectarian groups
•
“narratives of loss --> investment on self-betterment* (+ bettering of one's community) ~= striving
emergence of new independent mosques --> new property arrangements (+ admin + funding) --> growth of civil institutions
city bureaucracy of Islamabad ==Hull==> *uncivil politics* (سیاست غیرمدنی =/= civil society)
(like Tehran) Lahore [...]
(282)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.8[...]eaucratic forms = a mode of experimentation*** (in being good [Muslim, intrinsic to Pakistan])
--> to enable civil relation (learning from Naveeda and Femke)
Islam is only one element of a complex weave of politics (involving local leadership, emergent communities of dissent and activism against an indifferent state)
flagging a social problem =/= filling a complaint
jahalat جهالت (=/= common sense + education + good breading)
resentment of uneducated
not class-coded?
--> character (determined by)
•nobility of birth =/= lowly birth
•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 intellectual[...]
(283)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.9[...]
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* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change
-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma
Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals
*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action
Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time
Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration
(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution[...]
(285)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65[...]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* but rather new ways of inhabiting the fundamentals (of religion in Iqbal's case) --toward--> producing the readiness for change
-attitudes of toleration comes with belief in dogma
Mohammad
the prophet's return is creative : insert himself into the sweep of time with a view to control the forces of history ==> create a new world of ideals
*prophetic consciousness: a mode of economizing individual thought and choice by providing readymade judgment, choices, ways of action
Islam is strongly informed by *teleology: final causes and ends
•(a tradition of) biding worshippers to act in this world with the knowledge of brevity of earthly existence (and the certainty that they will meet their maker)
--> perception of time
Bergson --> enabling change in the human perception of time so that humans could see how their present was charged with open-ended potential
(1934:)
•duration: reality of time as a dynamic continuity
•intuition: imaginative means by which humans could perceive duration
(picture of) life = vital impulse through matter
--> (positive account of) evolution: continual discharge of creative ideas (and tendencies) moving through a world of matter
[*]metaphysics: a technique to avoid “false problems”
Bergson's understanding of intellect: denying humans the experience of time as duration ==> Iqbal
how Iqbal rendered (Bergson's) vitalist philosophy (which denied teleology) acceptable to Islam (which strongly is based on teleology):
the idea of a forward-looking aspect to the intelligence permeanting life --> for a Muslim an “ought to be” stands in the forefront inflecting the present well before any final end
human-God copartnership --imply--> advancement of the self as the object of striving {the self arcs towards God and partners with God in order to advance}==> change in the world
“the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite”
(Iqbal)
Iqbal's striving:
•the end of one's striving is one's *next self*
•nonprogressive: one's next self could lay ahead, alongside of one, or in one's past
•not to part with their finitude too quickly (no fana dar hagh)
Iqbal's pholosophy -->? aesthetics of the self (~ creation of personality)
--(preoccupied with)--> *muslims crafting and tethering their subjectivity to the commentary world*
Iqbal's self-seeking individuals : actualize qualities attribited to God [(impersonal qualities:) majesty, beauty, grace] (to the best of one's ability) --Nave[...]
(286)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.1[...]ling
...................................
Naveeda chapter 3 law
Naveeda:
•mosque = site of striving
•law = state's efforts at striving (and inflecting muslim aspiration) [=/= law: site of colonial codification and ossification]
Foucault --> (when the state asks you for) registration: disinterested bureaucratic procedure = state's securing its authority
~/= Derrida --> law = a horizon of aspiration through a register of justice
munir report
semitic theory of state (Jewish, Christian, or Islamic): the object of human life is to prepare ourselves for the next life --> strive for human conduct which ensure for a person better status in the next world
*state --> act upon Muslim bodies to secure their afterlife* (by means of prayers and good work)
}--> define a Muslim:
1. identify the material body upon which am Islamic state is compelled to act (to ensure its afterlife)
2. to protect non-Muslims from the state
3. to protect the state from non-Muslims (kofar)
(for me there is a big difference between:)
•islam: achievement of the Arabian nomads (that make the musulman of today live in the past)
•islam: a tradition of intellectual imagination of those who were conquered
Pakistan 1972 constitution --(for the purpose of the constitution of the law)--> non-muslim: a person who does not believe in the absolute and unqualified finality of prophethood of Muhammad, the last of the prophets or claims to be a prophet, in any sense of the word or of any description whatsoever, after Muhammad or recognizes such a claimant as a prophet or a religious reformer
something akin to copyright (trademark law) --> disable non-Muslims from encroaching upon Muslim rights over their tradition (undertaking muslim modes of worship: use of honorific titles and modes of address specific to the prophetic community, building mosques, calling azan, citing from Quran or hadis, etc.)
khatam anbia --> khatm: seal --> aspects of Islam as sealed off and exclusive to muslims
(Pakistan supprim court's affective legal feedback loop) copyrighting islam = affirmation of Muslim nature <--Naveeda-- *a horizon of striving*
}<-- an example of (Iqbalian) reason + revelation
institutionalizing blindness
Iqbal on ahmadies:
•Tipu sultan collapse by the British 1799 = mark of political and psychological subjugation of Muslims --Iqbal--> Ahmadiyya messianic movement = subjugated people explaining to themselves their state of decline (negative enlightenment)
•tolerance = indifference
striving =/= progress
...................................
Naveeda chapter 4 jinn
strident --> engaging speech with vivid imagery
differential --> differing knowledge[...]
(287)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%65.3[...]litical 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
cunning
gluttony
political ambition
worthlessness
corruption
self-destruction
--> continuous efforts to set the mulla outside of oneself (=/= everyday familiarity with the ulama)
***negative stories and cartoons --express--> various degrees of skeptical orientation to the world***
jokes --(descriptive density)--> full expression to skepticism
--{also in Iran}--> making (mulla) grotesquely other ==> inconcevable to imagine any points of relatedness (to mulla)
•scatological jokes
•reworking of official rhetoric for ludic effect
•exaggerated performance of power
}--Mbembe--> “relationship of conviviality with the realm of official power”
vulgarity ==long-term==> *zombification of official figures* (robbed of their humanity --> they cannot be apprehended except through their caricatures)
...................................
to loosen some terms carefully: memory, form, order,
[The arts of memory- Comparative perspectives on a mental artifact. Revised and updated by the author Carlo Severi. Translated by Matthew Carey - Severi - HAU- Journal of Ethnographic Theory]
memory as a domain of social life
archive
“order” constitutes a principle to engender other forms of knowledge
totem poles, simply records the different circumstances that marked a particular social group, were comprised of organized series
occupied with the transmission of ‘names’, but necessarily, paralleled by a form of logical power, implies sequential ordering of different forms of knowledge.
the “art of memory” applies different types of relationships or archival techniques that are not limited to mere numerical calculation: mnemonic, iconographic, and logical techniques.
provide a convincing account of the complex process of ordering
in a measured rigorous way...
what characterizes the system
development of taxonomic principle
[...]
(288)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%66[...] 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 homogeneous darkness
“To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions.”
Borges ‘homogeneous darkness’ is what we as forgetful immortals afraid of to turn to?
maybe the directions we sleep into, orientation to the cosmos?!
...................................
is archive naturally and necessarily generated (out of regular form of activity)?
a (technologically implemented) beyond
the drive to animate and mobilize; and the drive to conserve, to fix, and so forth, are mutually constitutive for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics
to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about your own activity as a constructive activity
depriving yourself of any tools to act
is archive a tool to act?
the agency of an archive..
“other ways” of composing?
marking its territory? how to make a map without giving way to the territory as an extension of the map?
["Angels Without Wings” A conversation between Bruno Latour and Anselm Franke]
the mechanical extension, Res extensa, the (descartian) extended thing, the visualizing technologies, technical drawings, has been so strong that the temptation so say “well, that's what the world is really like” is very great, especially when your foreground is all of the engineering talents and engineering skills that are necessary to assem[...]
(289)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.2[...]actually repeatedly represses and disturbs ‘giving’
any remembrance involves forgetting
an official call for design an archive from khm also invoked that the institution is ready to forget, announces institutional forgetting, and disavows remembrance
remember includes the lost-member, bringing my member, the phalus (in English ‘member’ also means the male organ of copulation)
[Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Das Gedächtnis.” ‘Enzyklopädie Der Philosophischen Wissenschaften Im Grundrisse’ 1817. Web.]
Hegel makes a distinction of two modalities of memory:
(1) ‘Erinnerung’ (internalized memory, which is situated in the heart), (it could also be hallucinatory, might dependent on an interiority that isn't there!);
(2 and this one concerns archive) ‘Gedechnis’ (technological memory, a supplement or prosthetic device that reminds you. ==> it's mechanical, it's on the side of death and forgetting, a kind of memory that needs to be prompted) (to choose the technology of writing/archive the subject of memory is so screwed.)
***everything depends on the ways we remember!
[footnote on German memory]
[blackwellreference.com, entry: “memory, recollection and imagination"]
Plato's doctrine that all learning is the recollection (anamnésis) of things previously known but later forgotten casts a shadow over the idealists’ uses of Erinnerung.
...................................
is any act of remembrance also a traumatic experience? (Freudian take on memory) -- archive is so “not” traumatic therefore a tool of amnesia. (archive in digital age: the oblivion of availability --> media theory)
can we think of a non-traumatic gesture of socialization of memory? or memorial activity “has” to be violent in order to be remembered? (--> sublime) (like what Ali does, tattooing me, every time he tells me one of his stories of trauma)
like i said before, “who” wants to remember?
(masculinity is written all over this anxiety-ridden remembrance --> re+member, bringing back the symbolically lost phallus: “member” means “the male organ of copulation” in English)
trauma makes available, brings back lost objects to the consciousness, in a psychoanalytical sense. is then the digital archive an absolute oblivion?
...................................
///////// newer notes, saved in 11 September 2016 /////////
...................................
[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]---> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)
memory/remember is sojourn
the importance of archive is today perhaps not in creating one but in reading them.
--how many ar[...]
(290)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.3[...]s to remember only a given set of facts --> each type of memory which has been distributed in space will also be sequenced in time (http://ajayeb.net/?q=imperative+of+knowing) [for example mathematics --> physics --> chemistry --> biology --> sociology] ==> formal memory system
the problem of the detective is that for him only those facts are relevant that hand him the solution of crime (~-> goal-oriented individual disposition) =/= chasing rabbits
-the detective (has to) classify away traces: the systematic and deliberate forgetting of some actions in order to better remember others
-what makes a difference?
-in sorting animals which past knowledges (--> ajayeb) are deliberatly forgotten in order to remember them as incorporated into an information infrastructure called ‘species’? -->! the classified are remembered (in the technoscience world)
(what is the) complex ecology of memory practices (particular within apass?)
•Hoda --> politics of remembrance
•Zoumana --> situated perspective
•Sina --> narratable past
•Marialena --> type of language
•S
today, 18.07.2017, the ajayeb's knowledge can be stored and expressed in a quite restricted range of genres called myth, ancient, imaginary,
______________
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gbowker/records.html
we have learned from Foucault that different (medical) records, different practices of reading and writing are intertwined with the production of different patient's bodies, body politic, and bodies of knowledge
@Olga
record is the story of the organizational infrastructure [@Marialena, Olga]
[Foucault on knowing in the practice of medicine:] cascade of inscriptions --> writing [--> totality of observers/observations ==> “true knowledge"] --> modern clinical gaze ==> pathological processes of individual bodies (=/= medicine of species: individual symptoms / medical knowledge, essential truth beneath the sensible individuality)
...a body which hides the essences of the disease --> production of the organizations which enact and treat it
How is the patient (or choreographic) body's specific geometry and its historicity created?
*body is produced through embodied, materially heterogeneous work
(Foucauldian) dispositif: a network within which the body acquires its specific ontology
(Latour < Bowker:) the record ‘mediates’ the relations that it organizes, the bodies that are configured through it
regarding record, we can be concerned with:
•practices of reading and writing which bring the record to life
•mapping the configurations the record helps bring into being
how the structuring of the record speaks to the structuring of the bodies (of the artists?) we investigate? (@Sofia, Olga)
record -->{<[...]
(291)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.8[...]tails 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
my Rigs... :
•local restrictions of wach word
•the tendency of words to occur next to each other their degree of crystallization
[for my hypertext] (Zellig Harris:) the constraints or demands that words place on one another are transmitted as socially obligatory information [as physical information, the kind measured in bits, not the semantic information used in dictionary definitions.]
socially obligatory ‘information’-[as ‘physical information’ (kind measured in bits) =/= semantic information (used in dictionary definitions)] ==(transmits)==> constraints or demands t[...]
(292)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.6[...] one quantity relative to another, a quality that differentiates between similar things (==> derivatives) =/= different
اخرت eschatology
study of end-times [--now--> climate change, global restructuring, ]
-humans are often precariously enduring on the planet
(Cuban Missile Crisis...)
-when urgencies (become too predictive) ==> less sensitivity to the unanticipated --> (Seba's “save the world” =) all too human desires for control or for moral prescriptions
with Katie King --> *systems justice* requires something much more complicated
•we have to work with our extended being
•find out new things about it
-how can we go beyond human intention and systems of control?
-we need, and there are, many ways to minimize damage and maximize flourishing
(*systems humans participate in and do not control*)
(? am i part of this) “we” and “us” gathers sympoietically these boundary objects storing details and affects
the fable of “if it's about everything it is about nothing” --> no!
sharpening focus =/= narrowing focus
workshop for thinking
•with objects
◦moved around
◾in visual play
to take your imaginations along other things
•so their worlds layer and enfold and map out and crochet together
◦so that can be sensed and worked on
(?what are) our helpers in apass:
•companion imaginations = our collective animalities
◦such imaginations have worlds that layer and enfold and map out and crochet together (--> systems humans participate in and do not control)
•our complex personhood
•our distributed being
•objects we take as cognitive companions
•our significant otherness honored in on-going attentions
•new learnings
•new materialities
•
(?what are our) methodology of companioning with things
...................................
what is happening to me: attention to knowledge making practices (in the context of a literary pleasure)
*sharing = making*
*communicating = making*
clues --for--> contexts --shapes--> how we will take what each other says
(Katie King > Anzaldua:) who and what facilitates such movement among worlds?
home = domination + domestication + love
Katie King:
•why science fiction matters?
•how cultural studies helps us make SF meaningful?
interactive possibilities of media art, commercial production, mass culture
SF = effect of defamiliarization
(problem with Star Trek is that it is over familiar)
Janet, from a lesbian utopian future (death by disease of all the men)
Jeannine, from an alternate present (US never entered WWII)
Jael, where “War Between the Sexes” has become deadly litera[...]
(293)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.9[...]
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns
perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake
each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•
an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station
(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy
all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets
photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject
a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies
like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy
my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore
(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)
[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it
...................................
Ticineto Clough
media technological developements ==> (often and perhaps necessarily) put the transformation of being and the transformation of knowing out of sync with one another
why Hollywood concerns me:
•reconceptualization of labor from the cinematic mode of production to the affective mode
•the colossal projection of cinema as a guarantor of a culturally uniform memory
relevant for artists too (they cannot ignore this) --> to rethink the ontological grounds of knowing [and representation] (in the wake of) deprivileging or decentering human perceptio[...]
(296)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.4[...]sensation, affect, matter, energy
*digital media technology is being redefined in terms of a subtraction of human perception as the presumed center of being and feeling* @apass
(media understood in terms of) *nonanthropocentric affect* --> affect = transition, gateway, passages between dimensions ==> ‘everything = media’ (~ entities can feel or whose vibrations can be felt by other entities)
affect --> [*]media: contractions of forces of the world into specific resonating milieus
**mediation = modulation = (vibration =) intensifying or deintensifying rhythmicities and forces, below and above human perception**
[*]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)
(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing
(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)
}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*
sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi
*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)
control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)
[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)
[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the rela[...]
(297)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.5[...]explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]
-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)
(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions
tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition
*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*
in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?
@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•
elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)
an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره
odor kit
a device organized in a careful pallete of small differences
learning to be affected --entails--> a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of
body parts are progressively acquired --> world counter-parts are being registered in a new way (= my ajayeb studies)
*acquiring a body: a progressive enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world [---> go to Captain Marvel 2019 film]
what sort of project of multiplicity is transdisciplinarity?
what sort of double consciousness might it array in which political economies?
[...]
(298)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72[...]uddah --> 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 neurosis* of the history of science
all timelines are maps (are chronologies, are provincial)
most drawings are maps (are charming)
[Sina:] ****can we have (imagine) science without modernity (not coming right after it)??**** <-- my research question (to separate the bond between science and modernity? to flow the curiosity in that direction)
{ the idea of “science created the modern world + western global dominance” (=/= everyone else) }==> “understanding of modernity = understanding history of science”
(one of rare moments that) european middle ages is conflated with the whole of middle east civilization, as pre-Newtonian (in the eyes of W. Rostow)
--> cold war (maneuvering for the alliances of the newly decolonized nations)
--> all the ways of knowing that were not included in the current Anglophone and Francophone definition of “science = the natural sciences in English only in mid 19th century” =/= elm علم, Wissenschaft
**there is no culture without (its own implicit systematics of) knowledge**
•epistemological hierarchy (even without the display or existence of *epistemic culture* [dedicated to the persue of knoweldge] --> yet put pressure on communities of learning ==> ideas & practices, for example alchemy was court science par excellence)
•social hierarchy
•rational who can practice them why
(Daston:) the stuck of hands-on knowledge shoots up and then metaphysics plump it --> persue of knowledge becomes collective (with different pressure points)
for many cultures [including Persian]:
•the philology (grammer) is the queen of the sciences
•the stricing prevalence of *dispute: intellectual discourse staged as agonistic duel --> (most of our) ***intellectual life is conducted as polemic***
[...]
(299)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.6[...]g 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 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 valor[...]
(300)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%72.8[...]f display
•[*]pyramid scheme: a structure in which retailers recruit more retailers --> (mainly serves the interests of) multinational entities parading as local entrepeneurialism
grotesquely functionalized room
abandoning the ontology of mediumship (for...)
putatively unmediated truth (of...)
magic's metamorphosis entailes a repetition
([Morris analysis of Chuchad:] a medium becoming) a middleman disavowing the mediations that he performed in order to produce the illusion of value, or meaning, or truth
•working only in the repression of its own operations --> truth-effect of marketing
--> *the market can substitute for magic*, the media can be itself, the very nature of money (its abstractions and its generality) can compensate for the differences it effaces
*rhetoric of asian family*
occult network: networks that are not publicly disclosed
(in environments that are believed not to operate as an open economy --> economies are dominated not only by particular families but by the logic of family [exclusive and unassailable ties between small communities])
=/= rationalization of local economies, market liberalization,,
•anachronistic imaginary of transnational capitalism and the racialized family (of asian nations) --> idealized
•metaphorical ruse of kinship's discourse
•*neocolonial fantasy concealed in the dream of immediacy* --> Amway: theologically informed market liberalism--pursuing a noiseless world where feedback is impossible
confessional disclosures of new capital
rhetoric of transparency
mediumship's (enthralling) dramaturgy of disclosure
(Morris asking) what else is transparency in the massified world? a mediation so total that it has become invisible (?)
...................................
•to challange themr />
•to break with their own gesture
•to inherit from them
*Socrates --> alleged epistemo-sociological enquiry ([the tradition of] asking people what they know and how they think) --Savransky--> (hallmark of social sciences today:) *ethics of estrangement*: ‘becoming estranged’ from the realm of appearances made available by direct experience in order to ‘gain access’ to a realm of facts and causes**** ==Whitehead==> *bifurcation of nature*: a mode of understanding whereby experience only discloses that which is apparent, whereas the ‘relevant’ factors in the process of knowing the world must always lie, and be sought, somewhere else
*=/= Alice in Wonderland
*=/= Cinderella [--> harem girl, hallucinating with animals, not becoming a psycho (angry), arrested]
*=/= William James: inquiry is about **the way some people cultivate an expertise**, **how they hesitate**, **how they think**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for examp[...]
(301)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.1[...], **how they think**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for example)
◦*religious experience: to address his questions to the ones who know, the ones whose expertise could help him learn something new and often unexpected --> passionate, even if problematic, experience of living in a world where God matters*
◦*emotional experience: with theater actors, who know about creating, discriminating, disclosing, and sharing emotional experiences*
***from whom should we inherit our practices, and how?***
learning from Despret's *anachronism* (her field philosophy)
اشتباه در ترتیب حقیقی وقایع
(heritage of Socrates) form of epistemic and ethical bifurcation ==> search for hidden causes (underlying the conduct of actors)
Socrates's “you think you know, but actually, you don't know and you don't think” ==created==> ***[1]a device that inhabits thinking and produced only mental paralysis***
--✕--> (Despret:) investigators rarely ask the question of how the people they interview might be interested in the questions addressed to them
*relevance = adventure*
there are many examples of how a piece of abstract knowledge that looked like devoid of any imaginable consequences came to matter (acquired an importance nobody would contest)
-relevance may be lost in translation
*ecology of dynamic and fragile patterns of relevance, of modes of mattering for oneself and for others (Savransky)
[*]relevance: a sense that there is value beyond ourselves (something that is not ourselves, matters) --Stengers--> (daring to connect the) speculative + ethical + practical
(risk of) to renounce *knowledge as a right* + embrace *knowledge's achievement as an event*
[title]
(ego engineering)
***[2]device of anonymity (“to protect people”) ==> distributes expertise, and builds induces performs an asymmetry of roles
•the imperative of deontology
•(can be) a regime of insult
“you, the refugees” --> an anonymous mass marked with **an identity that they had not chosen, and from which they cannot invent themselves**
risk of disclosing
risk of separating
risk of isolating
risk of making people talk while silencing
risk of stealing the words
risk of of drawing the words out from the speaker
risk of retying the secret to its etymology [secretus: to separate, to isolate]
(what we like to think about in apass) to reflect on what anonymity can produce in other research situations
[instead of asking “what the body does/produces?” =/= what Sina's body does for the spider in his room? what Ninja Turtles body does for Iron Man? what anonymous refugee body does for Xiri? what Jane Fonda body does for Laura? etc.]
***anonymity ==> identity***
[...]
(302)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.2[...]: how to think and act with the evil sisters?)
amateur: the one who develops an expertise, a love, a taste [--Stengers--> dare to taste =/= dare to know]
Leibniz addressed his inquiries to the ones who know, because they have cultivated a particular relationship (of the amateur) with the very issue he wanted to learn about (=/= to address inquiries to the ones who know by virtue of being a mere authority)
•Leibniz proposed that woman should be addressed about the most important problem, that of the love (appropriate to give God) [...] because they are competent in the matter
•Leibniz = the master of abstraction --made--> [*]abstraction = a politeness of thought**♥, [*]politeness = a constraint on creation**
•****(why ask women about love? because) [*]woman: the ones who refuse letting a duty to ‘speak truth’****
--> a real interest in thinking about and with love (=/= “school of love”)
when you do *field philosophy* --Despret--> [*]field: a field-to-be, a milieu, a collective, a situation =/= field as something that preexists our inquiry
(how in apass i did field philosophy and field inquiry --> i made many times) situation-becoming-a-field (where you can learn something) needed:
•imagination
•tact
•daring
•opportunism
•humour
•
Despret > Claverie on pilgrimage with the Virgin of Medjugorje
she offered to those whom she addressed the most unexpected mode of response
she became interested in the very sophisticated way they think
(=/= social scientist's need to determinate the causes of something [designates it as an anomaly ==> impoverishing the object of study] --> asking “why people believe?” or “how can we explain such an odd thing as people believing in a supernatural being?”)
(she explored and learned with people how they think -->) ****how they take care of what matters for them with thoughts**** --> takes 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 [...]
(303)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.4[...] 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]
...................................
to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness
[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with
plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of who[...]
(304)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.5[...] discoursive moves and modes of attention of the author (=/= Quinsy's ملانقطى pedantic exploration of racism)
(politically correcting 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:[...]
(305)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.7[...]
•tapestries
--assert--> subjectivity (+ tactility) =/= impregnable surface of the screen
reformatting
transcoding
modulation of preexisting files --> selection strategy ~~> meaningful recontextualization (of existing artifacts)
paranoid will to connect what cannot be connected
subjective rationales
arbitrary systems (=/= established taxonomies)
vernacular forms of aggregation --> everyone with a personal computer today has become a de facto archivist (storing and filing thousands of documents, images, and music files, + porn)
analog in appearance + digital in structure
...................................
eschatos: furthest, last (in Greek)
theological anthropology --> the theory of the person
?how eschatological attitudes changed over time + how they hovered over human experience
millenarian expectation
?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[...]
(306)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.3[...]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) 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 [...]
(307)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...] />
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) 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, impoverish)
(three types of awareness:)
1- significance of dying and afterlife --> space time of personal collective destiny
2- apocalyptic time -->
3- eschatological imagination -->
purgation
purgatory time
•do pottery while you are in purgatory
•learn ice-skating while you are waiting in zamharir
•
{personal drama of death <--> progressive unfolding of collective history}--> ultimate disposition for individual soul and body ~~> the notion of ***bliss after torment***
torment: individual glimpse of the end
Augustine --> the imperfect but not reprobate
suffering: means of salvation (of we join the agony of Chris on the cross)
pain in this life : inevitable accompaniment to the corrupt body whose weakness and rottenness are indication of the approach of death
an era of exile --promise--> a new exodus from human failure and corruption
[title]
beautitude
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 cent[...]
(308)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%74.4[...]em of perception and modernization
Crary's development of the issue of attention is to question the relevance of isolating an aesthetically determined contemplation or absorption
general problem of perceptual synthesis and disintegrative possibilities of attention
optical verisimilitude
attention --> tension --> possibly of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded
how can something originate in its opposite?
Nietzsche
sudden emergence of model of subjective vision (in the 19th century)
complex and contingent physiological makeup of the observer ==> vision is rendered faulty, even arbitrary
reality maintenance
aftershocks of apperception
failure of a capacity for synthesis of conscious thought (named dissociation) became linked in the 19th century with pathological psychosis
this label (of pathological disintegration) was evidence of a shift in the relation of the subject to a visual field
*synthesis
•for Bergson: bind with creative forces of memory
•for Dilthey: creative forms of fusion specific to human imagination
•for Nietzsche: endlessly creative and metamorphic and not constitutive of truth
the rise of psychological explanation within epistemology
Kant saw perception crowding in upon the soul
for Külpe attention was the very condition of thinking, consciousness not in the mercy of external impressions
the importance of attention to the conception of subjective time in Augustine and Husserl
(curiosity triggered by) wonder for Descartes
in 18th century:
-‘unified’ operation of mental life
-force of a sensation
-an effect of an event external to the subject
--✕-->
in 19th century, attention: an essential but fragile imposition of coherence and clarity onto the dispersed content of consciousness
running in the park, a motif of selfhood, of individual freedom, finality of the possibility of soul from the enduring experience of active, willed effort in relation to the body
==> moi: a repository of self-initiated (mental physical) activity and free will
-running in park/city: a priori believe in the self
-your experience is yours
•attention
•judgement
•memory
•perception
•mediation
apperception --> nature of intuition --> (a mobile and dynamic) conception of will --> motor activity
19th century:
attention = will
character = unity
attention ==> mind --{attention is plainly the essential condition of the formation and development of mind}, systematic acquirement of knowledge, for [...]
(309)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%74.9[...]ion, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master
(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’
co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissociation, trance,
@apass, work on attention is so interesting because it is part of the history of modality of contemplation about processes and activities of the body
the neo-Kantian legacy of a disinterested aesthetic perception --desire--> to escape bodily time (and its vagaries)
•(Hume's) artist: someone in whom “nature has forgotten to attach their faculty for perception to their faculty for action” (<-- sounds familiar? “free” artistic perception)
•(for Roger Fry:) “imaginative life” is about contemplation disconnected from the possibility of action (=/= instinctive reactions to sensible objects and their accompanying emotions ~= animal)}--> a bad fable
modernist art: *timeless perception* [formal conditions of the possibility of vision, pure form operates as a principle of structure, Krauss outlines how temporality is excluded] =/= mundane or quotidian forms of seeing or listening [the object bounded by its contours, spurred/hated by modernism]
whenever we try to look at or listen to one thing for too long the attention (containing within itself the conditions for its own disintegration) inevitably reaches a threshold at which it breaks down[<-- a game i used to play as a child, playing with attention and distraction, mutating myself into a state of trance or autohypnosis, absorbed, diverted, nebulous =/= socially adaptive subject] --> *perceptual identity* (of its object) begins to deteriorate (& paralysis of will?) [_that is why in spectacle visual regimes the duration of perception must be regulated in short intervals]
attention is thermodynamic : a given force could assume more than ine form
partial sleep <--> abnormal fixation
(i am cautious at every turn to capture my own) *experience of distraction* is part of ajayeb studies. because it has to do with modes of attention and its persian history
perception is a dream
(an account of) [*]modernity: a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably broken up or degraded through technological, urban, and economic [...]
(310)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.3[...]ptcy of bourgeois aesthetic (late 19th century):
•Benjamin: absorbed contemplation purified of the excess stimuli of modernity
•Adorno: distraction as regression: perception that is “arrested in the infantile stage” =/= “deep concentration”
•Rilke: authentic attention as precious and rare survival of the lost ideal of artistic absorption in work now exiled to the margins of mechanized and routinized world
•Rodin: gazing of the handworker
-
}--> “reception in a state of distraction”, (<== absorption is psychologically grounded perception) =/= Crary arguing that attention and distraction ceaselessly flowing into one another on the same continuum (of social field)
[tales of understanding]-*
•what are the cognites of ‘contemplation’ (in german or farsi)?
the theological resonances of this latinate word --> contemplation: viewing/considering with continued attention; going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into the deep roots of things, into their creative ground
(to oppose) contemporary modes of distraction
modern forms of interiority, absorption, psychic isolation
Riegl's dream of a world in which art would be inseparable from an imaginary democratic harmony of individual and community (=/= harem)
collective attention (central attentive mass audience, 1900) : cinema
rational attention: attention linked to thought, one's telescope on object
(for Nietzsche:) attention: possibility of an absorption ==> forgetting --> life-affirmative }--> “focusing on the present moment”
final virtue of modern man: *presence of mind* --Nietzsche--> necessary part of the (cosmopolitan) individual's functioning within a modern world of economic facts and qualities --> ready at response to the machine, affinity with the technical, athletic political (#integration tale)
--> the (serious) modern soul is directed towards the news, focusing on the present, to employ the moment (#presentism #past-studies)
•fable of “to be at the present moment”
•fable of “to adapt yourself”
perceptual acceleration of modernized social field (work + leisure) ==> new *cosmopolitan individual* (who receives signals from many fars and nears, equipped to ‘attend’ to messages and participate in their circulation ☆ #facebook? --> diffuse anxiety of the other-directed person : gyroscope --> radar)
Arendt:
modernity: fabricating rendered meaningless =/= contemplation: beholding the truth
‘life = being’ ==> ‘contemplation = truth’
Heidegger --> characterization of Greek's primordial self-disclosing look ==> makes presence possible + glaring predatory look --of--> modern subjects = objects of conquest
dystopian story: a promising outburst (always of human) activity [[...]
(311)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.4[...]tability
diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)
*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*
uncertain content of the interior
(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)
Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)
Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence
fastening together and grounding narrative content
[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis
achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” things, ***to ward of experiences of disintegration***
(the reality-effect is processed and achieved differently in Iran. how? how iranian artists differ from the perceptual logic of modernity?)
([Elmira and Foad's] engagement with the) ambiguities of visual attentiveness
perceptual logic of modernity (: two powerful tendencies at work):
•*binding together of vision* {an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain the viability of a functional real world}--> sealed
•*dynamic of (psychic/economic) exchange* {dynamic of flux/dispersal}--> barely contained
(Manet's) faciality (a site of pictorial effect): casual amorphousness, a surface that 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?[...]
(312)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76[...]
...we are in a specific historical phase in the reduction of the time and cost of movement <==> circulating capital
}--Marx--> “capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier” ==>
•creation of the physical condition of exchange
•creation of the means of communication and transport
•*eradication of space by time*
instantaneity of vision from which space is deleted
vision compatible with the smooth space of the global marketplace
uprooting of perception from any stable space-time coordination
the history of capitalism is the history of (effective operation of) overcoming obstacles of:
•anything with a permanent stable location (incapable of being inserted into circulation)
•anything that is part of a code (traditional or established pattern of behaviour, resisting deployment in networks of abstract relations)
(images productive of labor usually end up intermingling the representation of that land as a *tranquil earthly paradise*)
an image: self-evident presence of native workers on the coffee plantation; they remain invisible except as abstract components within flow of capital or as “naturalized” elements within an imaginary landscape
an image: workers gathering and packing beans under midday clouds; a fraudulently homogenous and static image of elements (bodies and land) which have become quantified and exchangeable, part of an unstable system *incapable of immobilization*. it discloses the antinomic coexistence of living labor power (with its irreducible existential temporalities) and the tendency of capital to “circulation without circulation time.” the violence and social devastation underlying this all over distribution of human being within the lush vegetation of an apparently premodern landscape...
(my period of abstract digital image glitch: play of machinic objectivity -->) Muybridge's 1870s photograph of The Horse Motion ==> “*to be outside of* a syntactical and semantic organization that supported historical narrative”
-the machinic objectivity in play does not stake out a subjective position from which a “this happened” or a sense of “having been there” could be authenticated’ [=/= my later lecture-performances]. they are instances of *combinatorial logic* in which the individual images, although ostensibly part of a linear sequence and syntax [--> the way Julia noted ‘adjacency’ in the way i was presenting my image series], have a (‘newly’ in 19th century) ***autonomous, floating identity.*** their immobilization and groundlessness and mutable temporality is also the condition of their detachment from any binding continuities or trajectories, in a *decoding of perceptual experience*[--> also relevant for Foad's ahistorical “intuition"]. {this is could be related to a deeper relation with my youth's reality and its perceptions =/=[...]
(313)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.6[...]ver begins in the early 19th century --> a new unstable attentive subject (with a *vision refigured as dynamic, temporal, composite*) ==> consumer/agent of/in synthesis of a proliferating diversity of reality-effects (~=> digital and cybernetic imperatives of our present time)
invention
dissolution
creative synthesis
...................................
antimony: contradiction between two equally reasonable statements
the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an object outside its logical control*
-charged with antagonistic forces, like Seurat, my lectures (since now 2018) negate a possibility of an attentive closure, even as it fervently attempts to generate its own internal formula for perceptual presence and unity. like Seurat's Parade de Cirque, it operates in a ceaseless play of disclosure and concealment. [is it time to change?])
Seurat preoccupation with nonspecific temporalities
(estrangement from) a dream of instinctual wholeness
harmonious sensory utopia
-my lecture-performances constitute a provisional realm of freedom for an individual observer [~ myself: a psychic, social, imaginary position called being an Iranian--] of a prismatic past, coinciding with a proliferation of discourse [~= shifting plurality of ‘centers']
--> dream of subjective freedom + effects of power
perhaps my work is inseparable from (the consequences of the emergence of) *models of subjective vision*
-use of optical mixture in my work.
how important is the retina (for any artist)? -->(the question of) the seeing body in all of its physiological density + ambiguous position of that body within conceptions of visuality
•chromatic or luminous effects on the body
physiological regime of visuality (beginning with Thomas Young and Goethe, developed by Johannes Müller, Helmholtz and others) =/= renaissance-based pictorial order
collapse of *camera obscura* model of vision --> emergence of *psychological optics*
1890s
construction of various nonreferential models of perception
+
pragmatic functions of an observing subject
--> status of vision and mind
--> nature and value of sensation
--> representation of social facts
central to many developments in the visual culture in the West in late 19th century: *questions of perceptual and cognitive synthesis*
Gestalt theory ==> essential primacy and ethical value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition[...]
(314)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.7[...]as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
/>
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination
Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
attention --> Nietzsche's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim
(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= s(=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body
(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!
a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectiv[...]
(315)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.9[...]separable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*
what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations
(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”
in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations
Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become apprehensible
my paintings
•(unstatistical) distribution of isolated and categorized units <== additive principle of formal adjacency <-- (my belief:) depleted atomic relations [should] predominate beneath the spurious appearance of social concord [in my world: Iran]
}-->? holistic mode of association (=/= my performances) -->? desire for (modern forms of) cohesion (in the absence of inflexible forms [~ disintegration of the mechanical solidarity of tradition, religion, myth, consanguinity]) -->? wanting an *original solidarity* (---> go to the image of the ‘harmonious vision of industrial society’ in my early paintings, self-regulating landscapes of feedback loops --> *state of equilibrium* that i wanted to achieve in the painting not symbolically)
(i prefer *pseudo solidarity*)
emergence of aggregates
manifestations of complexities
(this is happening in)
late 19th century is also the age of attempting to validate a relatively stable and domesticated image of the dynamism and destructiveness of capital
modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)
anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and f[...]
(316)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77[...]ts 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 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)
a residue of an earlier social world (in which the sacred, the occult, and artmaking were much more closely tied together)
...Egyptian priest, medieval magus, Babylonian snake charmer, headsman or executioner,
suggestion of magician --> emblematic of a modernized order of spectacle --> mass management of attentiveness + its commodification : *rationalized magic of a technology of attraction* (that conceals its synthetic construction)
opposition of charismatic and bureaucratic domination
Weber's “routinizatiom" = castration of charisma (==> permanent institutional structures)
prophetic/oracular individual (has seen the extinction of his society) [==implying==> an unstable dominat[...]
(317)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.4[...]]:
a Renaissance ideal, invoking a metaphysical dualism that found expression in rhetorical devices of contrast and antithesis --sumbsumed--> within the *larger ideal of opposition*
contrapposto could be decorative or structural, justified by its vividness, the clarity with which art could bring opposites into harmony
classical image (of the body) as an expression of a self-determining balance of internal forces
“authentic images” seem capable of action, seem to posses dynamis (supernatural power)
Universal Exposition of 1889 + international congresses of hypnosis:
•rationalizing ideological imperatives (concertized in the actual organization and layout of the Exposition --> rooted in the enlightenment's faith in man's limitless potential for mastery of his environment)
•hypnosis optimistically as the most effective entry into (previously inaccessible) territories and processes of human psychic life (and hopefully mastering this terrain)
•extensive presentation of colonial people and lifestyle as objects of spectacle in the 1889 Exposition (simulated villages inhabited by Congolese, Javanese, New Caledonians, Senegalese, and others) --> became contents of an imaginary immortal space, contents that were seemingly assimilable into the rationalizing taxonomy of the exposition's organizational schema [=/= Steven's schema in apass]
*both hypnosis (with its profoundly indecipherable trance states) & material life of colonial people (primitive cultures with their singular forms of exchange, of value and power relations) took on an exhibitionary existence at the threshold of their marginalization, assimilation, or disappearance --> (the unassimilable in both was) temporally refigured as the survival (or simulation) of an earlier stage of development (as a lower, regressive, or childlike state of mind or culture) [--> radically irreconcilable with dominant forms of western rationalism]
(for western rationality) hypnosis:
•influence without any logical foundation
•production of an illusory relation to the world
[--> similar to Foad's modality of freedom, wakefulness, and the notion of the intoxicated masses: loss of mastery, of ability to make decisions and reflect ==> the assertion that “hypnotic experience is formless” (---> go to Nancy)
*spectacle domination over passivity*
Foad: inner or subjective reality of a psychic state which could in fact involve residence and evasion of external authority]
=/= state of trance (as in other cultures) whether individual or collective conceived as an opening up or sharing
the 19th century exhibitions were part of a world in which people were beginning to live as tourists or anthropologists, addressing an object-world as the endless representation of some further meaning or reality
==Crary==> reality: that which pre[...]
(319)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78[...] of love and faith --> effects of obedience and imitation
•“attention”: transformation of sensation by effort and desire --> the desire for an increase in personal believe
•“plateau”: a flexible figure for natural, social, and statistical processes and events (including desire) [--?--> Deleuze and Guattari's plateau]
Le Bon:
“social = a particular modality of perception,” as a specific social arrangement that conditions the limits of perceptual experience
(modern) crowd: a viewing machine capable of generating “collective hallucinations,” a place for consumption of illusion, (with a “psychological unity” that occupies spatially remote locations,)
•“observation”: a cognitive model predicated on workable notion of objective reality (a classical epistemological model) that begins to corrode within a field saturated by illusion, hallucination, and whole industries of simulation
-individual subsumed in crowd is incapable of observation --> modern spectacular culture (to be articulated 7 decades later by Guy Debord
the crowd (in Le Bon) is a generalized site on which the accumulated dread and hope associated in the 19th century with social insurrection collapse into am abstract countless mass onto which dream imaginary of any sort can be projected
-Crary
19th century ‘crowd psychology’ assumption that attention has no necessary connection to objective optical observation of the world --> *crowd: drift toward a more primitive order of consciousness*
-withdrawal from surroundings and refocusing on some real or symbolic figure
--> theatrical configuration: means for controlling crowds --> (La Bon's) image of theater exceeding its older place within models of mimetic relation --to--> new effects of subjectification
Wagner's volkish homogeneity --> uniform modes of perception and response --> (problem of) community formation
Wagner's optical metaphor (community 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[...]
(320)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.2[...]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 where transcendence is undone, (the vacations of) art can recover an ancient destination and establish the type of mythological figure (in which humanity or a people could recognize itself)
-verisimilitude: the quality of seeming to be true, gloss, semblance
composite imaginary of the 19th century
______________
crowd
theater
phantasmagoria
Crary --> Seurat's Parade de Cirque = disclosure of *the absence at the heart of modern spectacle and perception*
vivid opening into a light-filled action-filled arena
@apass, a common way of criticism:
•*evoke, then withhold*
(fir example: evoke ‘entertainment commodity’ but withhold it. Laura, Ale ,)
•*invest, and dismantle* (we are invested in what we dismantle)
•*desolation of older scenes of representation* @Sina
Crary on Seurat Cirque --> investigation of the conditions under which a subject could be activated as an attentive perceiver
(forensic aesthetics --> conditions under which a subject could be arrested as a witness)
(Sina ajayeb bestiary --> conditions under which a subject could be contested as a knowing agent)
“frame: an isolating agent” (<== Wagner ~ to make an *autonomous and luminous field of attraction* with a deliberately ambiguous spatial identity)
--> explicit renunciation of the classical (and early modern) status of the image
=/= as a windowlike plane intersecting a cone of vision
=/= as a flat plane covered with colored patches
(Seurat's optics:) ***images apparitional value*** <== effect of image's detachment from a broader visual field (=/= diaroma and stereoscop)
--> 19th century optical experiences that severed the image from any continuous or intelligible relation to the position of the observing objects
(=/= Wagnerian aesthetics)
--> *collective vi[...]
(321)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.4[...]rrelates of psychological and kinetic response to perceived movement --> ideomotor experience (=/= truth of mechanical spatial movement)
(--> ajayeb description movement animal in motion)
***animal is arrested --> presence is not directly accessible to human vision, but can only be the product of technical procedures of simulation*** --> “nature = scenographic space” (--collapse--> precondition for the impossible unseeable apparition specter --Seurat--> spectacle)
phantasmal homeostasis
detemporalization of experience
management of attention <--> techniques of attraction
(Foad and) Seurat's efforts (in Cirque): abstract conceptualization of perceptual experience
(possibility of spectacle)
differed
displaced
denied
(image of spectacle)
derealized
drained of presence
*attentiveness of an observing subject* = site of increasingly specialized operations of power
...a twilight state of restricted consciousness ==> (Durkheimian solidarity --> what is at stake is that) the autonomy of the individual is reduced
--Crary--> importance of Seurat's work : to have intuited **how the collapse of scenic space allowed new imaginary figuration of immediacy** (of a regressive unity based on a corporeal engagement of the spectator) @Esther, apass, OSP, Femke
Seurat sensed something fundamental about the industrialization of contemplation (--> now fully matured in Hollywood cinema) + (he anticipated, like Wagner) the *effects of a phantasmatic luminous image on which essence had been displaced by appearance*
(you can still) escape into the psychological time (but don't erase the sense of the obdurate historical conditions out of which your dreams of equilibrium emerges)
Seurat's resisted the temptation of the phantasmagoric and of myth (=/= Wagner)
(--> are we the hairs of Seurat?)
•exposure of technical premises
•subversion of any stable “formation” (or Gestalt, on which the allure of the myth depends)
--Buchloh--> ***avant-garde: a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistence against the tendency of the ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and control all practices and spaces of representation*** (--> that is why i am interested in Walt Disney and Hollywood and Qur'an)
--> *to produce incompatibilities* (as an artistic strategy, visual or epistemic and otherwise; to make opacity, hostility to virtuosity and expressionism, )
your work could be adjacent to ____
but not identical to ____
your work might be built out if mechanisms for the production of subjective response --but--> it is never reducible to them
[...]
(322)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.6[...]tically from those of the body) ==> repositioning of the perceiver (+ motor readiness) }-->
•new patterns of production
•spectacular consumption
*machinic interface is the body* ==> related temporal shaping of everyday life
computer ==> psychic field of expectant attentiveness <--within-- one inevitably trains one self to maximize the speed of response to specific commands and functions (and derive at least one satisfaction from these habitual operations of mechanical facility)
}<--Crary-- epistemic shift in 20th century to theorise of subjective vision
instantaneity: unproblematic presentness of vision
Helmholtz (discovery of slow speed of nerve transmission) ==> “present state” of perception is deployed within a temporally extended physiological set of events
19th century --Foucault--> the essence of human life ceased to be something representable in the tabular space of classical representation =/= human life understood in terms of it's existence in time, of functions and energies that unfolded and developed outside the **immediacy of classical visibility**
*the conditioned reflex*
a chimerical notion of the western imagination in the 20th century
reflex (central cerebral process, onset of stimulus ==> preparation of motor response)
•one of the ways in which attention was positioned within knowledge of human behavior
==producing==> new forms of sensory experience outside of (various myth of) organic wholeness of subjectivity (--> distinction between “natural” & “artificial” sensation [---> go to my work in WIELS bestiary characters: what was individual experience in middle ages?])
•practical reconfiguration of behavior + possibility of external intervention and control
=/= Dewey's (galvanic image of) subject in a perpetual sensory interface with the world = uninterrupted mass motion --> unity of activity -->{*continuity* ==sustain==> an ideal of unity and wholeness =/= disintegration of individual experience, *disconnected nature of reality*}
(domain of experience in urban capitalist lifeworld:)
•industrial production
•spectacular condonation
•technological modernization
•rational, social, managerial control
(apperceptive experience of) anticipation, memory, and preparation for future actions
(halfway modernist Dewey didn't consider) breaks in perception might also have the capacity for *revivifying or expanding the limits of thought or cognitive awareness* [<-- and today 2020 many don't consider our contemporary media culture has this capacity]
--> what if our fragmented nature is one of the forms the discontinuous nature of reality can be apprehended?
celestial camera obscura
Dewey was deeply interested in practical ways of m[...]
(323)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.1[...]bject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon
Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’
Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]
vertigo: auto-movement of chaos
“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities
accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in your own provence)
**Cezanne's imaginative refiguration of himself as machine = translate automatically** ==> release from grounded condition of human perception : to become an apparatus = implacability apprehend a world outside of the terms (that the artist wants out) ==> novelty (~= to overcome the gravity of one's own interiority) --Cezanne--> primordial image (of irreducible formlessness, of ***world in process without horizon***, without position, of slowly vibrating colors...) [<-- *apparatus becoming* is now the cliche of contemporary artist]
glow of a geological dawn
archaic + inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) --> (its compatible) uprooted nonorientable subject
nature experienced as vibrations, animations, chromatic reverberation (+ seeking a “logic” to clarify its unfolding)
hideous sign of progress (for Cezanne: electric light, cinema, )
artistic modernism <==Adorno== (the fact that) the most advanced procedures of material production and organization are not limited to the sphere in which they originate (---> go to incarnation)
demotivated subjectivity
wants something that is neither optical nor mechanical nor intellectual ==> substitute a mode of consciousness that is predominantly intuitive : the awareness of touch
historical adjacency (<-- Crary's knowledge zoom)
*late work of Cezanne (in spite of apparent social isolation of its production) = a site where modernization of subject occurs (of late 19th century)* --> dynamization of perception (occurring in many different dom[...]
(324)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.5[...]ass, Foad
scopophilia: a forced ecstatic abjection before the image
=/= mastery
[*]spectacle: (spectacular culture) attention would be made attentive to everything but itself
...................................
“my experience is what i aggree to attend to” (James) ~= affirmation of an autonomous self-choosing world-creating subject liberated from the receptive status of a subject for whom experience was “the mere presence to the senses of an outward 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[...]
(325)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.8[...]ence (--✕--> 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
•passage
--> in tune with the connection between content and expression, ***essentially laden with singularities*** (--> my lectures? an art, a technique, a science : following the connections between singularities of matter and traits of expression, they seize or determine singularities in the matter =/= constituting a general form)
=/= *chaotic science* (--> what kind of figure of engineer? @Sina)
*the problemata* --> vortices & projections [~~?--> chaotic imagination]
(projected into an abstract knowledge --?--> mapping knowledges)
State science --> Star Trek
imposes its form of Sovereignty on the inventinos of nomad sciencet
to administrate projections --> submit (war machine) to civil and metric rules that strictly limit, control, localize (nomad science)
“rhythm =/= turbulence”
cursing of a river*
Gothic conquered a smooth space --> the cutting of the stone (=/=? digital) + ‘plane of projection’: a plane limit, a series of successive approximations or placings-in-variations
=/= Romanesque remained striated space --> vault depends on the juxtaposition of parallel pillars
--D+G--> ***one does not represent, one engenders and traverses***
[*to engender: give you a baby from behind. *to traverse: zigzagging]
--democracy--> one represents visually
--Sina--> one suggests chaotically
roadways (well-centralized administration) =/= bridges (active, dynamic, collective experimentation)
lobby: a group with fluid contours, whose position is very ambiguous in relation to the State it wishes to influence
(for Ibn Khaldun:) war machine: families or lineages + esprit de corps
pouvoir (monopoly of an organic power) =/= puissance (a vortical body in a nomad space)
(to address the) vague = vagabond, nomadic, morphological essences (=/= ideal, royal, imperial essences) = haecceities
{for example the circle is an organic, ideal, fixed essence, but roundness is a vague and fluent essence, distinct both [...]
(326)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.1[...]thmetic [3 + 4 = 7] at its core --teach-> “exactitude of the mind” --> children are going to learn:
•the meaning of self evidence [of arithmetic propositions]
•the meaning of justified belief
•formation of ideas
•judgement
•reasoning
}--foundation--> quanitative science of a human realm
first reliable calculator --> 1850
rationality عقلانيت
•history of ever more sophisticated mechanical computers
•how rules themselves became increasingly identified with algorithms
•how algorithms became increasingly identified with mindlessness
Kant --> science as mechanical skill that can be mastered by diligence and determinate rules
tacit knowledge: a manul labor [styles of knowing] that cannot be captured by algorithms
---> go to Encyclopedie (Diderot)...
deskilling calculation ==> economic rationality (economic rationalization): you take the task, decompose it into simplest possible steps, you divide the labor, you hire the least skilled and cheapest labor possible ==Babbage==> increase the efficiency and the costs
•game theory
•rational choice theory
(memory + understanding + judgement + imagination)
*judgement (Daston) and imagination (Sina) are integral to the exercise of reason*
reason in rationality: algorithmic rule governed =/=
•passions اشتياق تعصب
•fantasy وسواس
•sloppy thinking درهم وبرهم
•ignorance بى خبرى
•superstition خرافه
•self-deception خود فريبى
the human factor
there is something about human that has always been in odds with reason
Nozick (~ Terminator) --> the rules of procedures that constitute rationality would be valid, would be efficacious, but algorithmic. executed by machine, but opaque to human understanding
~ Wittgenstein --> to follow a rule: a practice taught by example =/= precept
}--> *to understand rules in an algorithmic sense* =/= model, maxim, tacit knowledge
Daston --> there is no simple way, in which historical context determines the form and content of the thinkable. but (as in the case of algorithmic rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others
our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic
...................................
[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
deliberation: thinking then doing it =/= doing th[...]
(327)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.1[...]c rules and cold war rationality) historical circumstances do light up some parts of the intellectual landscape and darken others
our current understanding of what it means to be rational owes a great deal to the power of place and time
•for Kant: judgement = highest faculties =/= for modern (us) judgement is problematic
...................................
[the horror of the contemporary German art:] to deliberate: کنکاش سنجیده و عمدی =/= Janina
(art of [ironic] deliberation =/= chaotic venture, Sina's lecture-performances)
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[...]
(329)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.1[...]onder + fear + respect)
(ancient greek cosmopolitan traverler ethnographer) Herodotus's fable of ‘custom is king of all’ <-- داریوش perian king Darius's anthropological experiment: Greeks won't eat their father's dead body, they burn it =/= Indians won't burn their father's dead body, they eat it
•chaos: nature without order
•anarchy: society without order
}--> past is no guide to present and future : *there are no regularities (of human promises or natural cycles) to support either justice or knowledge*
why duplicate the moral order with an analogical natural order?
why turn to nature for your raw materials (to construct moral order for themselves)?
--> ...
are we now in the position to reclaim norms from nature?
--> yes <== nature exemplifies so many different kinds of order:
•order of the stars and plant =/= order of weather
•order of specific natures =/= order of universal natural laws
•order of local ecologies =/= order of cosmological unities of gravitation
•
which nature? --> any order of nature can be countered with examples of another order equally natural }--Daston--> [*]nature: repository (or wunderkammer) of all imaginable orders****
terror + randomness --> most effective weapon of dictators (you never know when it strikes again)
-horror of Kafka's bureaucracy: negation of regularity, destruction of order, institutionalized anarchy
-one of the most dehumanizing experiences: being completely subject to the will of another (~ slavery) [--> this is the most pleasurable experience in sex and sado masochism]
•nature never insults (its inhumanity)
•nature provides the raw material for meaning <-- *because we are embodied organisms we must incarnate our orders* (~ we must find a way to display them to ourselves)
•animals can feel terror, but only humans canns can feel horror: the emotion that registers a deep disruption of an order (no matter what kind, a two-headed baby [natural monster] or a mother who kills her two babies [moral monster])
...................................
[title]
itchy eyes
...................................
16th and 17th centuries
times of extraordinary religious, economic, and intellectual upheaval (Europe was deluged by novelties of all kinds: birds of paradise, armadillos, anomalies: solar eclipse, comet, narwhal tusk, etc.)
(Daston >) Bacon [standing on an extremely unstable scientific ground] used monsters and marvels (as a sort of intellectual hygiene) to jolt people out of their assumptions about the natural world
=/= Aristotelian natural philosophy
--> anomaly took center stage of scientific explanations ~= art's investment in the exceptional
==> curiosity becomes a virtue =/= vice
•nature is allowed to joke
•nature ha[...]
(330)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.3[...]ditions of his collected work
A Helpe to Memorie and Discourse (of Wonders, Foreign and Domestic)
*the passages and occurrences of the world* #ajayeb
•the creatures thereof
•the casualties therein
little-known properties of... (wine and water, fish, dogs, cuckolds, hunchbacks and monsters)
popular ignorance
solitary efforts of the professional scholar
culture of the educated layman (lawyer, businessman, government official, and their wives and daughters)
[change in sensibility (&-=>? change in interpretation)]
beginning of the withdrawal of the educated classes from more popular culture
@Goda
monsters (familiar canon of prodigies) became a subject of great fashion and not vulgar
(Daston tracing how) “in the wonder literature, then, monsters--along with the rest of the canon of prodigies--began to cast off their religious associations. this trend was accompanied by a movement to emphasize natural causes over supernatural ones.”
Pare represented [the causes of monstrous births] an elaboration on the natural explanations offered by Aristotle and writers in the Aristotelian tradition (too much or too little seed, maternal imagination, a narrow womb, a traumatic pregnancy, hereditary disease, bestiality and so on) + a new causal category: artifice (to include fakes and children mutilated by their parents to enhance their take as beggars)
shift in *causal thinking* --> (expanded the power of) maternal imagination covering eventuality ==> a new way of talking about nature
{(from) in the prodigy literature nature was effectively transparent (a veil through which God's purposes could be discerned)}--to--> nature gained a new autonomy ( fertility of invention =/= wrath) --> *nature personified* (the artisan) [Pare: “chambermaid to our great God"], monsters were treated as jokes or “sports” (lusus) of a personified nature
transcorporeal fields of sensoriality =/= boundedness of isolated bodies and things
nonanthropocentric zoological studies
Bacon's (tripartite division of) natural history:
1. *natural: the study of nature “in course”, or natural history
2. *preternatural: the study of nature “erring”, or the “history of marvels” --> a coherent category (=/= miscellaneous collection of phenomen)
3. *artificial: the study of nature “wrought, or the history of arts
nature's aberrations for the finest examples of her workmanship
nature imagery of the wonder book
renaissance thought -->{ (antithesis of) art =/= nature }--> art may aid, imitate, modify or surpass nature
--✕--> Bacon: art (formal and final causes) should become more natural & nature (material and efficient causes) should be made more artificial --> monster: nature's artificial work
[...]
(331)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.6[...]sings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance 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 & [...]
(333)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%81.9[...]eralizing)
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) in their ontological status*
•Anselm of Canterbury: marvelous =/= natural =/= artificial (voluntary, made by humans)
}--> miracles are objectively wonderful (because produced by God's power alone)
[1]
early middle ages latin texts --> mirabilia (wonder) ~= miracula (miracle)
13th century --> mirabilia (wonder) =/= miracula (miracle) ==ontological==> flatten the impulse to wonder:
1- (tends to) separate out (with hair-splitting distinction) a small number of phenomena as objectively wonder-inducing (*whereas all others no matter how odd are wonderful only to the ignorant*)
2- (suggests that) most events have natural causes: *if philosophers are diligent enough ==> wonder will cease* [= Sherlock Holmes]
◦(1235) William of Augergne --> people do not know how to go about investigating the cause [--> detective]
◦(1325) Oresme --> *vigorous imagining of a retained species + small external appearance + imbalance of some internal disposition ==> marvelous appearance* [--✕--> himself was fascinated and enchanted by the “marvelous properties” of animals and the *diversitas of human experience* especially of tastes in *food and in sexual positions and partners*]
◦a 13th century treatise “on the marvels of the world” (Qazwini?) --> a great part of philosophers and physicians believe that: natural things ==> marvellousness of experiences and marvels
◦Roger Bacon --> naturalistic explanation of saints who lived without eating... charms and amulets... *waxed lyrical over the infinite complexity of the common fly* (<-- is this what i did in telegram bestiary?)
◦Albert the Great --> physical manifestations of admiratio = "constriction and suspension of the heart” confronted with something “great and unusual”
◦Aquinas --> connect wonder with pleasure = a desire that culminates not so much in knowledge as in encounter with majesty, *wonder: the best way to grab the attention of the soul
◦
}--Bynum--> distinguishing ‘miracle =/= marvel’ ontologically =/= psychologically, perspectivally (or attributing marvels to natural causes) --✕--> eclipse of wonder
wonder as a response was not devalued or dismissed (even in a philosophical and theological tradition that de-wondered anomalies by insisting on an increasingly ordered world, whose laws were decipherable by the wise)
[2]
in the discourse of the homiletic موعظه and hagiographical تاريخ انبياء (tazkirat) --> wonder =/= imitable قابل تقلید (--✕--> the k[...]
(335)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82[...]f memory* (protagonist = German nation)
(serial poetic of) cliff-hanger structure
maintaining an (absolute) aesthetic continuity
{time: liquid realm =/= history: fixed realm}<--Dark-- protagonists must face when looking for their own identity
new German Cinema (Berlin School) --> ghostliness, constant travel, national division, alienation, rootlessness, inbetween-identity of the protagonists, stuckness in time =/= Heimat: the idea of stable secured community
...................................
labyrinth is architecture at it's best?
space as a limit and space as an environment
the relation of ornament to void space (background)
entering the space (pointing, direction) versus filling the space
in purely perceptual terms, all that is seen is the surface, but as an idea the building involves the whole of its inner, hidden structure; hence not only what is seen, but what alse is known appears.
concept of transparency: is a charachteristic feature of intellectual realism. in a drawing, transparency means the demonstration of knowledge about -or disclosure of- that which is inside, behind and under visible surfaces. (stimulant to the imagination of grave robbers)
is labyrinth or architecture a visual system (window etc.) or a spatial construction (direction, distinction etc.)? when we look at it in this text with the object of cloud...
labyrinth ~=? architecture's ornamental activity
[*]ornament: epression of an excessive force of form, the blossoming of a force that has nothing more to achieve --> fecundity
-ornament shifts among different planes at different speeds ==illusion==> movement and depth
labyrinth --(Deleuze and Guattari)--> “smooth space” [can be explored only by legwork]
labyrinth --> 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[...]
(336)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%82.8[...]rchangelarchetypes 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 imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ide[...]
(337)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...], 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 imaginalis (alame mesal عالم مثال). This is the world which is intermediary between the intelligible world of the beings of pure Light and the sensible world; and the perceiving organ proper to it is the active Imagination. It is the world not of Platonic ideas (muthuli flatunlyah مثل افلاطونی?), but of Forms and Images ‘in suspension’ (muthul mu'allaqah مثل معلق). This term means that such forms are not imminent in a material sub-stratum, as the colour red, for example, is imminent in a red body; they possess ‘epiphanic places’ (mazahir مظاهر) where they manifest themselves like the image ‘in suspension’ in a mirror. This world contains all the richness and variety of the world of sense 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, inv[...]
(338)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83[...]st 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 method of description, “affective analysis”: act of describing, what is going on in your body, prior to the body, and prior to perception--i have to describe well and simply. (sometimes even doesn't go back to the object we are describing) --> to tribute imagination to people]
muslim majority countr[...]
(339)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.1[...]uinous 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 method of description, “affective analysis”: act of describing, what is going on in your body, prior to the body, and prior to perception--i have to describe well and simply. (sometimes even doesn't go back to the object we are describing) --> to tribute imagination to people]
muslim majority countries (! instead of ‘muslim countries’)
occasional and atomist fabulation --> agency of God
(Occasionalism: God as the cause of things)
Islam's atomism it is not coming from Greek atomism
Mullah Sadra --> Process philosophy: Whitehead, Deleuze, etc.
تشخص tashakhos --> Gilbert Simondon theory of individuation
...so perception does not give complete access to the world (this is Foucauldian)
=> perception seems to have a more protective role (from unnecessary stimuli--in order to safe guard our survival) --Bergson: “it is grass in general that interests the herbivore” --> ‘sensory-motor schema’ is an agent of abstraction (Deleuze)
[@Varinia's “could/should/would”; ‘line of flight’ --> becoming; disturbing the virtual, in her work how is actual/virtual (made impossible to?) distinguished?]
sensory-motor schema:
Within constructivist theories, the sensorimotor schema is held to be the principal unit of knowledge in use during infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which the behavior was performed as well as expectations about the effects. Sensorimotor schemas are central to Jean Piaget's explanation of infant development.
[http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_463]
(mot[...]
(340)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.2[...]?]
sensory-motor schema:
Within constructivist theories, the sensorimotor schema is held to be the principal unit of knowledge in use during infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which the behavior was performed as well as expectations about the effects. Sensorimotor schemas are central to Jean Piaget's explanation of infant development.
[http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_463]
(motions, gestures:)
purposeful =/=? communicative
(Marks on) Invisibility, Legibility (khanayi خوانایی), and Aniconism (that the artist should or must avoid depictions of human beings or icons; an art that refuses to unfold its code, asserting that relationships need not be interpreted--a view developed in the conservative Sunni thought of the later Abbasid caliphate)
(عقل سرخ aghl-e sorkh --> Ulf Langheinrich's works)
the ways ambiguity stimulates imagination
“rubied mind-body”
(...ruined main body)
sense-perceptibles: images, etc. --> matter that is processed by information --> in new media (as Gilbert Simondon put it,) ‘form’ arises almost symptomatically from a ground modulated by information processes
a new level of invisibility--though not immateriality: information
cognitive attention as information to be processed =/=? sensuous material to be experienced --> is this a shift (predicted by Deleuze) from visual to information culture? (--> Trevor Paglen's works characterizes arts of the information age in general---image is the trace, effect, or document.)
the perceptible =/= the legible
aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”
enfold & unfold
(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes
you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...
(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*
wood grain (longitudinal [...]
(341)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.2[...]omadic,” 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
...................................
*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
[...]
(342)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.6[...](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 morphimorphing into the unreadablity of its own answer
Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about 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 [...]
(364)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.7[...](intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)
Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images
فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations
the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)
majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer
Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about 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
(tashkhi[...]
(366)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.8[...] things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about 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 refigurati[...]
(368)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.8[...]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 monster (and Attar's San'an) is moved by love, it is the energy that traverses and transforms them; it is the best thing to be moved by. before, they are, in themselves, illusory and perishing
-Miyazaki's monster episode animation expresses how substance yields to process --> خونابه اى plasmaticness of the animated line: freedom from ossification استخوانى شدن (#Rigs), the ability to dynamically assume any form (Gunning) --> change occurring واقع from within + propelled سوق from without
Sadra's matter: place of nonexistence and absence (=? hayula)
hayula: form of the natural, elemental body
in Sadra:
•the plant(‘s form) (= vegetal soul) is animal
•the animal(‘s form =? surat صورت) (= sensate substance) is human
•the human...
physical acts of perception
(a typical account:) the stronger the imaginal soul, the less distracted it is by the body, the more manifestly imaginal images will appear
fotuhat فتوحات or tazkirat تذکره is the stories of the intensity of their being, actualization, and certainty of effect
(Attar's stuff, articulate Sadra)
saryan-e vojud سریان وجود, *flow of being* (across the perceptible entities we encounter:) [the imaginal power working through them:]
•hear a person's say
•notice a weed growing
•smelling a...
•cognizing an image...
•touching a pig's nose [San'anian]
•
bodily senses can contact the divine presence, make contact, make a call (in Hafez, San'an's miscall)
•the imaginal realm is populated by singularities, every changing and infinite
•the imaginal faculty is of extreme presence, of intensification
(in this case ‘realm’ and ‘faculty’ bleed into each other's categories)
(let's get) creatively imaginal
accurate and attractive
***imagination is (definitely) not closing your eyes and dreaming, but being completely present to the world, committed to it and affected by it*** (to perceive something in its intense singularity)
مشاهده moshahede = contemplation
the infinate flux of visible phenomena (Kracauer)
قلمکار calico-world
چلوار
kaleidoscopic mountains
what was Sadra looking (moshahede) at?
•linear modeling of time --> clock time
•intensive model of time ==> movement across the “real” axis
[...]
(373)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%83.9[...]nse singularity)
مشاهده moshahede = contemplation
the infinate flux of visible phenomena (Kracauer)
قلمکار calico-world
چلوار
kaleidoscopic mountains
what was Sadra looking (moshahede) at?
•linear modeling of time --> clock time
•intensive model of time ==> movement across the “real” axis
effectively panpsychist: every entity is conscious, has a soul, and potential to intensify; minds in a world of minds
Whitehead's concept of transformative togetherness
ontological vitalism: exist ==> consciousness
reality precedes abstraction -->
for Sadra “point of view” is a distraction (for vojud وجود)
•perspectives
•names
•quiddity
--> because the positing of names and description is in correspondence to concepts and universal meanings, not in correspondence to existential identities and external/concrete forms (Sadra)
=/= Avital and Kohn --> but they do in amazonian forest semiotics
--> my point of departure with Sadra. i am tracing transfigurative signs of the flesh in practices of storytelling --(or not)--> Sadra emphasizes that imagination is better able to grasp Being: concepts are too static to capture/grasp the act of being (--> are they?! we have to deal with them anyway: wild facts, fables of practice, images are concepts, etc.)
ماهيت quiddity --> that which is understood (=/= being --> that which is experienced)
quiddity in Sadra is like the habits that Peirce and Bergson grudgingly accept as necessary for thought, though they need to be swept away for creativity to emerge. hence the importance of intuition for Bergson and Sadra, and of induction for Peirce. (Marks)
}--> (my departure:) a point of research branch for me: “to swept away quiddity”, is another story possible?
images have the power to multiply --> and other “sticky” things?
(like Sadra and Marks) i also prefer images that do not simply confirm general categories of what can be thought but undermine them with singularities that stimulate the imagination (=/= The Black Mirror tv series)
(destructive delusions, ideological images,) true visions and hallucinations --> the disappointment in hearing the deja vu
-deja vu is the dream of remembering
the divine outside
an immanentized imaginal real to be the source of truthful visions
to read Qur'an (or any text) as if it has been revealed to you
the visions of the imaginal are nonstatice images of things in their act of becoming
-is my ajayeb a modern interpreter of the islamic imaginal realm?
the ajayeb is about the lesser elite stances of the islamicated imagination --> the imaginal [...]
(380)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84[...]sal meanings, not in correspondence to existential identities and external/concrete forms (Sadra)
=/= Avital and Kohn --> but they do in amazonian forest semiotics
--> my point of departure with Sadra. i am tracing transfigurative signs of the flesh in practices of storytelling --(or not)--> Sadra emphasizes that imagination is better able to grasp Being: concepts are too static to capture/grasp the act of being (--> are they?! we have to deal with them anyway: wild facts, fables of practice, images are concepts, etc.)
ماهيت quiddity --> that which is understood (=/= being --> that which is experienced)
quiddity in Sadra is like the habits that Peirce and Bergson grudgingly accept as necessary for thought, though they need to be swept away for creativity to emerge. hence the importance of intuition for Bergson and Sadra, and of induction for Peirce. (Marks)
}--> (my departure:) a point of research branch for me: “to swept away quiddity”, is another story possible?
images have the power to multiply --> and other “sticky” things?
(like Sadra and Marks) i also prefer images that do not simply confirm general categories of what can be thought but undermine them with singularities that stimulate the imagination (=/= The Black Mirror tv series)
(destructive delusions, ideological images,) true visions and hallucinations --> the disappointment in hearing the deja vu
-deja vu is the dream of remembering
the divine outside
an immanentized imaginal real to be the source of truthful visions
to read Qur'an (or any text) as if it has been revealed to you
the visions of the imaginal are nonstatice images of things in their act of becoming
-is my ajayeb a modern interpreter of the islamic imaginal realm?
the ajayeb is about the lesser elite stances of the islamicated imagination --> the imaginal ecological consciousness
[title]
*imagination in rational thought [logocentrism]:
myth, symbol, and metaphors used as part of rational dialogue
--✕--> other ways of bringing the unthought [beyond] into the thinkable }--> tasavof
--✕--> other ways of bringing the far into the wondrous (~ the active imaginal) ==> as a basis for practical concepts }--> ajayeb
}--> beyond the official discourse
a time-specific (contingent) truth that intensifies as more people engage with it
[like all the concepts and metaphors we are working and patterning in apass]
...................................
Malabou's plasticity (<--✕-- différance)
the subject is plastic (~= malleable, =/= elastic), it never springs back into its original form, it can explode
[we are now dealing with a (highly adaptable, flexible, and disciplined) rational autonomous subject in a [...]
(381)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84[...] of man ==> [*]man: irreducible, perfectible bearer and guarantor of dignity, equality, and freedom
Levinas's ‘an atheism that is not humanist’: the exaltation of an obedience and a faithfulness that are not obedience or faithfulness to anyone
opening up an apocalyptic imagination
destroying the cultural optimism that had marked the turn of the twentieth century
ground for ethics, knowledge, and hope
(Kojeve, Bataille, reconceiving) atheism: a way out of any and all ideological systems
theological questions + mistrust of political hopes
to replace god with a political messianism, nation or state,
“disenchantment of the world = death knell for man” (?)
nonhumanist atheism: determined opposition to foundational concepts of man, knowledge, and truth (=/= critically rethinking problems of anthropotheism, of transcendence, of finitude)
critique of idealism = critique of transcendence
1920s: atheist humanism = idealist arguments about the capacity of the human mind (to transcend and objectively pattern the things that compose the world around it)
might and violence of ideologies relied on definitions of humanity (that made this violence not only plausible and rational, but almost necessary --> communism and colonialism)
Sartre's postwar minimal humanist commitment --> “existentialism = humanism”
-call or claim to failure of foundations and of man's status in the universe ultimately called up a new ethical command --> call for man to decide and to commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)
atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheolo[...]
(389)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.6[...]ine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)
the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation
the impersonal and atomizing (commonplace) associations with the notion of disembodiment --> the idea that in online involvement relations are abridged and trivialized, that there is a lack of commitment and risk, and moral engagement is impossible, and so on.
*what would be a situated account of the (lived-)body in CG?
“the ringing of the cell phone that embarrasses us in the middle of a lecture” --> extended body
plasticity and polymorphism of our bodies (online) [Ihde]
programmers working in other programmers’ works (--not imaginative engagement with the other, rather) --through--> interfaces and folds in interpretation {tutorial voices, screen videos, scripts, help files, layers of codes and tools on each other, nested folders on one's own computer, named categories by oneself, horde of text files and renders, etc}--> these are (en-/de-)crypting extended bodies constructed of language
subjectively constructed phenomenon of the communed fold interpreted : the 3D computer programm
(=/= romantic refusal of all mediation)
-what is the nature of the technology involved in CG?
•what is the source of the somatic sense of place, if not the body (since Greeks) and animality (since Deleuze + Guattari), in the case of CG? --?-->{the way a good farmer will pick up soil and feel the dirt in his hands}
(Greek word) ‘soma’ refers to a corpse (in Homer,) not a living body (--> #lived-body)
Neither the living body as an entity nor the Mind as an entity had a name.
for Aristotle, ‘thinking’ part of the soul, had an existence from any connection to the body.
“to experience the world is the very nature of body inside out.” (Christian Hubert > John Schumacher)
a community whose members are aware of each others’ passive presence is different forms
(active =/= present)
these are issues of social subject in a technically mediated world
to look at CG embodiment relations:
•fold (Ihde)
•skill (Merleau-Ponty)
•theory of affordance (Gibson)
•intra-action (Barad)
•detour (Latour)
(Merleau-Ponty's) ‘body schema’ : space of the body = 'spa[...]
(390)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.3[...]memory
...................................
(Christian Hubert > ) Rudofsky “unfashionable human body” (#veil)
Thomas Friedman “The Golden Straitjacket”
•political-economic garment of globalization era --> Straitjacket
(Cold War era:)
•Mao --> suit
•Nehru --> jacket
•Russian --> fur
•
•Islam --> hejab
(Tasavof-->{for which the body does not remain concrete and material, and soul is ambiguous and polymorphic}, Pythagorean:) veli: soul can clothe itself in different bodies =/= (Aristotle:) soul is the form of a particular living body { soul = organization of the body }--> “..there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted on without involving the body” =/= (Descartes:) soul = enlightened machine (~=? proper organization of the brain)
***The body is a special image --> body image
body, the priveleged image, the world of consiousness (through self-reference), the brain's primary frame of reference [-constructed with libidinal intensity? --> a map of narcissistic investment] (=/= body without organs)
•condition of the subject's access to spatiality (of the [numero-computationally?] built environment)
•anatomy is always “imaginary anatomy”
•the (body-)ego is a formation of body image through primary narcissim (in terms of Oedipus complex)
•body image also incorporate external objects (implements and instruments --> intimate, vital, even libidinally cathected parts of the body) ~--> the “detachable” parts of the body: urine, faeces, saliva, sperm, blood, vomit, hair, nails, skin--all retain something of the cathexis and value of a body
-for Bergson: an image that one know from within by affections, rather than from without by perceptions: body }==> “my body” is the center of actions ==births==> representation
-for Whitehead: “self-knowledge of our bodily event” ==> (organic) conception of nature
-masculinity: body subordinate to the mind ~=>{ body: site for feminist critique
-for contemporary feminism (Grosz): body is neither a biological nor a sociological category, but rather a point of overlap between physical, symbolic, and material conditions
the ideological representations of a “real” precultural body
[--> idealized in terms of abstract geometry, rendered primal in primates,,,]
“The theory of the body is already a theory of perception.” Merleau-Ponty
(in his studies on body, Christian Hubert quotes John Schumacher quoting) James Gibson: “The optical information to specify the self, including the head, body, arms, and hands, accompanies the optical information to specify the environment. The two sources of information coexist. The one could not exist without the other. When a man sees the world, he sees his nose at the same time; or rather, the world and his nose are both specified and h[...]
(391)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.4[...]es
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and techniques, interfaces and folds upon folds, constructions that do things for another constructions, Rigs that translate
kinematic equations, inverse kinematics, the math of it is called the Jacobian inverse technique
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Arc-welding.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Modele_cinematique_corps_humain.svg
“In robotics, inverse kinematics makes use of the kinematics equations to determine the joint parameters that provide a desired position for each of the robot's end-effectors. Specification of the movement of a robot so that its end-effectors achieve the desired tasks is known as motion planning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics
{\frac {\partial p_{i}}{\partial x_{k}}}\approx {\frac {p_{i}(x_{{0,k}}+h)-p_{i}(x_{0})}{h}}
Maya's interfacial iconograhies
...................................
how do we animate quadrupeds, invertebrates, phyla, rotifera (wheel-animals), and so on; for each a mathematics must be invented in order and terms of digital computationality.
“anatomy” is always “imaginary anatomy” (in CG, comtemporary dance, medicine, love, etc.)
a skin has to deal with:
“Global Stiffness Structural Optimization”
Rig talks to mesh, telling it how to move, how to be.
how we evolved from jelly to skelletal? something tense, intensified in space, some flesh attached to it. how the concrete mineral came back to assert itself in the terms of bones of the organism?
(a mesh is a matrix of points in which the neighboring points only matter to eachother. mesh is the result of the study of topology in mathematical notions of space and structure, with demands of an industry interested in the representation of surface. mesh is interested by creatures that have a skin, and have stakes in tactility?)
Rig is that constructed logic or grammar that allows mesh deformation in one way and not another. made of enfolded layers of code and constraint
story of the bone
the flow of matter and energy, flow of intensification between sortal processes, organisms, and minerals.
this is about how matter is defined, in everyday CG work
how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic
...................................
notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop
some post-workshop notes:
questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
[...]
(392)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.8[...] pop-up book are descriptive concepts, that means: they obtain their meaning by reference to a particular physical apparatus ==>? a constructed cut between the object and the agencies of observation
•pop-up book: an instrument with fixed parts ==> concept of “position”
•Rigs on the other hand tries not to exclude other concepts such as “momentum” from having meaning
--> ajayeb's variables require an instrument with moveable parts for their definition (?)
*exclusions (= physical & conceptual constraints) are co-constitutive*
*objectivity (= possibility of unambiguous communication, boundry articulations) --> reference must be made to bodies in order for concepts to have meaning (?)*
•my Rigs and books are about how discursive practices are related to material phenomena
(*)reading: “text” is the interface between the matrialization of “reality” and subjectivation of “reader” --> inseparability of language and reality in ajayeb
>
(“We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization
عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people
in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena
we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”
•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enare enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?
(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation
enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)
(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)
(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)
(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.
...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
[...]
(393)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.2[...], The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization
عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people
in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena
we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”
•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?
(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation
enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)
(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)
(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)
(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.
...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality
...................................
kinetic, energies expressed in variables
integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero
...................................
metallurgy concerns matter in movement
matter-flow
what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?
form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default
[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter
*skill and ontoloical risk [-->[...]
(394)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.2[...] Cartesian space, and its attending epistemo-ontologies and political economies (-Archer: the proportions of Dior's famous silhouette absolutely required that one always take a well-heeled “step-back” in order to comprehend themselves in a mirror, a camera lens, or even a street window) --> (offering consumers new manners in which) to dress, but also **to see and to understand themselves and their potentiality**
[myself, like many critical artists of my generation, we glean (harvest خوشه چينى) the occurrence of ideological violence]
relaxed clothing shapes
affordable
easy-to-care-for
mix-and-match fabrics
hyper-modern color combinations and patterns
couture خياط زنانه
animosity, bad blood, animus's system, the system is made
perennial enfant terrible
(the naked constant prince)
social change <== **fashion must (and will) go out of fashion**
Gernreich's economic critique of the fashion system --?-->{ disregard of the wearer's comfort which is an obvious feature of all civilized woman's apparel ==> conspicuously figured the middle-class woman caught-up in the middle of the fashion system as being utterly passive and woefully unimaginative -->
•seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**
***oppression =/= passivity***
Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*
{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”
Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify
“if desire [...]
(395)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.7[...]ignification*
{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)
Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”
Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify
“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”
(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali
(Zizek:) through fashion we learn how to desire --> how to desire our own subjugation, as well as the possibilities of our own freedom
*political potency of desire* (--> do we need to recognize and manipulate it to our advantage? @Foad)
توان سیاسی میل
[looking for?] proper names --> quickly recognized for offering some sense of sonic semblance in a sea of deconstructed phonemes in Anglo-shaped mouths
#wear my lecture
*fantastic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)
[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]
people who don't care about *dressing up* are situating dress reform (fashion) in a type of neutered and disembodied utilitarianism (--Janina--> ignorant to fashion's textures and to the ways that fashion's formal dimensions could motivate the body to move beyond the pleasure principle)
politics and feelings of pleasure and displeasure --Gernreich--> absolutely central to any critical understanding or experience of the world
@Jassem: desires (always, even in the most strict desire regimes) could lead us astray
(the radical moment) when my body pursues its own ideas (~/= the ideas that i do)
post-structuralist textiles (a different form of political activity) =/= radical politics (such as [...]
(396)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.8[...]ing
...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 contemporary Iran are emblematic of how and why the gender binary is imperative?
...relentless and futile acts of tearing and repairing
*we need to imagine how to restyle the relation between wounding and care so we can start to transform the fabric of our society*
(Archer)
@Sina: deconstructing the work of mending ajayeb
[stitches] pierces the substrate it is repairing, performing a modest violence upon what is to be mended, and reminding each of us of our sensitivity, vulnerability, and mortality
(Mark Newport)
linger in the cut produced by the suture (=/= patch over the proper wound)
(what kind of mending dares us?) to consider different, less clear-cut paths of relation and being (--✕--> masculinity's wounded duty)
Freud's fold of castration anxiety, fetishism, and Oedipus complex unfold in feminized form of labor to stitch and sew, to mark the wounds that “men must suffer” --> fashion material ritual, transforming and ideologically reinforcing femininity
...................................
(Janina's distinctive sartorial sensibilities)
(The Flash TV series charachers, each a free-agent entrepreneur, the personification of neoliberal agency)
-performing the affective venture and glamour labor, characteristic of the cultural industries today, (embodying the) hypermediated brand intrusion and suffusion
-using your own self-consciously branded personae to stand out in a cluttered field of visual noise
“famous for being famous” --> the fable of “that which captures our gaze, does not capture our respect”
-fame is built out of material human bodies moving through physical space, engaging and interacting with other material human bodies. it is [...]
(397)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87[...]f action: worker, rebel --emphasising--> body's institutionalization: factory, family
for Laura, in fascist media regime: ‘the body is dismantled as a locus of practice and reassembled as a discontinuous series of gestures and poses --> “body = semiotic field” ==> *body inscribed into the register of discourse*
[artistic common views:]
(stereotype uses) deterrence, [according to Baudrillard:] dissuasion, promoting passivity, receptivity, inactivity, docile bodies [<-- i challenged this in my master thesis on shyness and passivity in performance art]
stereotype replaces *physical violence* with *semiotic coercion* (--> that is why it is often seen in art the use of direct physical contact to counter that idea)
stereotype --> rhetoric of intimidation --> it poses a threat to the artist --> the artist bears witness to the state of affairs --> signify threat to the audience --> gesture (regarded as threat) ~ *apotrope* (a gesture performed with the express purpose of intimidating the enemy into submission, #omen, apotropaic, averting the evil eye, to turn away harm, --> mithridatic) --> artwork is thus engineered to produce an immediate subjection, (by reiterating a stereotype) imprint the stereotype directly on the viewer's imagination + (through juxtaposition) force us to decode them
(Foucault's notion of) power = effective immobilization of the social body
(the idea of) woman immobilized (turned to stone) by the power of the gaze
*medusa* had the power to turn to stone all who came within her purview (...is she the one who can turn stone back to person?)
to petrify, a producer of figures
Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)
medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:
Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth
[...]
(398)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.3[...]gures
Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)
medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:
Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth
Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)
ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive
(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life
(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)
Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)
[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope
artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator
...................................
Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on Owens's [...]
(399)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.3[...]re located when the swipe of Perseus's sword just reaches the Gorgon's perfectly posed neck ==possibility==> infinite outcomes
-a transitory but potent act of resistance (lies between identify and difference)
Kruger's feminist-inflected pronoun --> refigure the personal pronoun's normal operative function ==> viewers dislodge themselves from the law of the letter ==expose==> language of gendered oppression's limits
find a way of articulating oneself beyond pronoun's strict logics (--> alternative subject position) =/= Calderwood --> *contingency of seeing* : “manipulating the intensity of certain optical patterns in order to scramble--or dazzle--those fields of vision that the ‘apparatus of the pattern’ is traditionally tasked with managing”
[*]gender: semiotic apparatus; representation of a relation (that of belonging to a class, a group, a category -de Lauretis), gender assigns to one entity (an individual) a position within a class ==> a position vis-a-vis other preconstituted classes
flooding the visual field ==> refuse to lend themselves to the task of figuring things out ‘what is this?’
(let's suspend) act of perceiving oneselffrom a particular, fixed place in order to open up onto a sense of imagination [<-- identity, identification, positionality]
*discourse of desir* --Lyotard--> desire does not speak; it does violence to the order of the utterance
(?am i using the queer strategy of) **pattern-jamming** ==> nonbinary variance =/= proliferation of tick-boxes (identity politics)
•modes of ornamentation
•systems of organization
patterns --> repetitions ==> naturalize the appearances of certain recurrences in life ==> stabilize (our notions)
[*]pattern: an essential forecasting tool, (through pattern's) rhythms we come to place bets on our future [like the sun's cycle], maps of those terrains where belief most directly meets desire, where aesthetics meets significance
stripes --> capacity to serve as “a tool for setting things in order” (--Pastoureau--> between the lines a tangle of uncanny specters lurk)
-stripe's ability (not simply to signify but) to formalize or figure the abnormal within medieval visual and material culture [a culture accustomed to transmitting visual messages along very different frequencies: an image was created by superimposing successive levels, and, to read it well, it was necessary to begin with the bottom level and, passing through all the intermediary layers, end with the top on] (-what is noise for medieval visual culture?)
-with the stripe: the structure is the figure ==> force certain bodies into genuine non-place --> fields of actual nonsense
-(modern stripe's clarity is a case of) how ideologically saturated, or unnatural, the act of looking is
-(genealogy of stripe --> historical processes:) *yesterday's noise --i[...]
(402)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.5[...]rd 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, synesthetically (visual or tactile) organized and represented
postural schema وضعى
postural model (of the body): a three-dimensional image that both registers and organizes the information provided by the senses regarding:
•the subject's body
•the subject's location in space (~ its posture[...]
(403)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.6[...]ation in the body image
***in the refusal of sexual roles ordinated by heterosexuality,(for example gay men and lesbians) -->
•may perversely cling to preadolescent body images (--> to remain ambiguous regarding the differences between the sexes)
•invest greater intensity in erotogenic sites, making them the center of libidinal attention and narcissistic investment (Janina's room) (--> in effect reinscribing them in *a mode of resistance*)
}--> oral, anal, sadistic impulses, tactility, scopophilia, “sexual perversions” =? (to emphasize and cultivate) a mode of defiance to heterosexist requirements
[@Sina, the images that i have been clinging to are in the body image that i think i am refusing or inscribing: pony, unicorn, rainbow, skull, the childish bracelet i found in the park, etc.]
ماليخوليا
hypochondria خودبيمارانگارى
a Freudian problem: to describe the transference of libido from the external world and love objects to the subject's own body in illness
-treating nongenital zones as if they had taken on genital meaning = (in the case of hysteria) hysterogenic zone takes on a sexual, usually phallic, function
*hypochondria: chronic and abnormal anxiety abour imaginary symptoms = a flight against narcissim* (the individual defends himself against the libidinous overtension of the hypochondriac organ --> to treat it like a foreign bosdy in the body image)
[hypochondria =/= narcissim]
hypochondriac tries to expel from the body image but cannot because the zone is overinvested with libido =/= خوددگربینی depersonalization = psychical transformation of the body image*, subject lose interest in the whole body, they refuse or are afraid to invest any narcissistic libido in the body image
-depersonalization might account for the phenomenon of out-of-body experience (the outside world is also experienced as flat and disinvested از خود بی خود / فنا؟)
depersonalization: a kind of psychical mimicry of the organic structure of dizziness --> narcissistic decathexis [withdrawal of psychic energy] of the subject's own inclination to voyeurism (<-- disinvestment in the processes of self-observation) ==> seeing has no longer any value : the subject now seen or sees itself with no libidinal investment in looking (or being looked at) @Sina, Foad
_*hysteria --> transformation of body image (of the meaning of the sexual zones to other organs which are not usually associated with genitality)
_*hypochondria --> transposition of libido (displacement, from one organ to another, from the genital to other parts of the body)
_*depersonalization --> withdrawal of libido from privileged zones (often from the whole body)
}==> ****تغيير پذيرى lability of meaning for bodily organs**** : any zone of the bady can (under certain circumstance[...]
(404)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.9[...]eriences in Einstein's Gedanken-experimenten --> notions of the equivalence of gravity and acceleration
perceptual experience in relative train movement
clock watching in different space-time particularities
“On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
Einstein's special relativity --> begins with basic assumptions about the behavior of clocks, rulers, and bodies in force-free motion
Einstein's rethinking of *distant simultaneity* (part philosophy & part physics)
-judgment of simultaneous event: “that train arrives here at 7 o'clock" = "the pointing of the small hand of my watch to 7 and the arrival of the train are simultaneous events”
electrodynamics always depended on a view about kinematics : how clocks and rulers behaved in the absence of force
1891 Germany Leipzig was the site of one of the first electrically distributed time systems (to bind distant clocks to a single central clock) --> railroad lines
piecemeal ruin of time
•an inconvenience for the traveler
•actual difficulty of vital importance for the railway business and military
means of consistent calibration
🕓 coordinated time --> material-economic necessity + cultural imaginary
==> 1900 blossoming of chronometric patents: on remote alarms, remote regulation of pendula, telephonic, even wireless-transmission of time
}--> pass through the Swiss patent office in Bern & Einstein's desk --> Einstein's expertise on electromechanical devices (1902)
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 tr[...]
(405)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...]t 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 ==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 u[...]
(406)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.8[...] you need *open skill: contingent tactically oriented understanding* (contextually-appropriate responsiveness, context-dependent ways, regulated improvisation) <-- hacker's talent
(Deleuzian) [*]affect: the outcome of an encounter between two or more bodies (which can be human or inhuman, organic or inorganic), which either increases or decreases a body's capacity for action
captivation --> the specificity of the ecological relationship between user and (image) environment
(game) design
cultivation of the right kinds of affects through quantitative variables in the game's database ~= (Latour's) laboratories: theatres of proof (through a process of decontextualization, the scientific experiment which isolates the factors it wants to study, an entity becomes nameable & calculable ==> predictable & knowable)
•Latour's laboratory --render--> a particular object/process =/=
•game develop --render--> contingency (contingent events [within an already existing horizon of expectation / coded structure])
emergence of intelligences (of the users) --> (Massumi's) analogue: something that cannot be purely reduced to measurement through quantitative states or mathematical modelling (for example vision --into--> imagination, noise in the ear --into--> music in the heart [body operating as transducer] --> *transduce energy*) =/= digital: exhaustively possibilistic (control represented and manipulated through discrete quantitative states)
game design as an essentially the *anticipatory practice* (practices that attempt to plan, preempt, and rationalise the potentiality of future events in order to bring this potentiality within a logic of calculation -Anderson)
•shape the potential actions of potential users --> rendering contingency visible
somatic bodily techniques + analytical ways of conceptualizing and responding to situations (within the game, or animation task in a software) --> reduce them to abstract and codified tendencies ~= rig
(design:) rendering contingency visible through the practices of testing --> build affect into anticipatory practices
airport: rigged architecture (passenger is faced with a situation in which forwards or backwards are the only directions they may go)
3D animation --> [using] digital (a form of calculative abstraction) + [to create positive encounter with] analogue body subject (irreducible to purely digital or discrete mathematical states)
rigging ~~--> envelopment: complex forms of difference (between the analogue and the digital) are transduced and rendered visible
event as a process of ecological emergence (outcome of a material assemblage of various entities, forces, and rules working together to encourage and prohibit specific forms of movement and action) --help--> *how the potential for events to happen are being designed into envir[...]
(407)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89[...]ut in terms of a plurality that is located within spatiotemporal coordinations
(Kelley, Hayward > Katie)
‘here’ and ‘there’ ~ material partials
...
sensuous trafficking
from inorganic to organic
transcode sensoria
as refrain
by which life gets lived
play enjoyed
augmented states of being emerge
*distributed cognitions* (populated digitalities) ==Hayles==> abandonment of mastery (anthropomorphic fantasies of control)
my text rigging demons = (an unmetabolized knowledge,) play between technical animator programming + CG interface + soap opera + my affective involvement --> speciation bestiary style
not only tranimals, but national restructuring, political economies of sciences, images, culture industries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*
Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)
part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb
--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities
demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text
the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
•territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•
play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)
commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)
Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding
3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies
exosome explosive demons, as significant other?
we love to create worlds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)
careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)
[...]
(408)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.4[...] />
exploration
investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies
trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity
which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?
pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)
intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), noise, voice-over, subtle changes, micro-macro, micro-politic, rhythm, turbulence, fragmentation, metaphor, persistence, repetition, disturbance,
(unexpected)
--> separation ??? =/=? compose
media/mediums: new narratives (script, score, etc.), image archive, garden (material and semiotic site), performance poetry, land-art, video
why video: using performative materials, enactments and st[...]
(409)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...]
Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)
dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere
the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line
the hand that sees
a hand that perceives
the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)
study of the Persian object
gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surface inflicting things far and near
(an) art of viewing
how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other
optical visuality
erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed
*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open
a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)
celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye
...................................
[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, to rove about the frame and to engage, however we wish, the space[...]
(طرز بیان tarz-e bayan) idiolect of the geographer and cartographer
is composed of signs that do not transcribe speech. Riddled with speech and writing
a “map” that plots and colonizes the imagination of the public it is said to “invent” and, as a result, to seek to control.
an image that locates and patterns the imagination of its spectators
When it takes hold, [a map] encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articulation of space.
(the advent of bird-eye-view culture)
A map underlines what a film [or text] is and what it does, but it also opens a rift or brings into view a site where a critical and productively interpretive relation with the film [or text] can begin.
*locational imaging*
As the person who gazes upon a map works through a welter of impressions about the geographical information it puts forward—along with his or her own fantasies and pieces of past or anticipated memory in dialogue with the names, places, and forms on the map[...]
([...]
(410)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90[...]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 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[...]
(415)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]ography 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 individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity
the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the remin[...]
(416)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.2[...]ial 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 individuals hold with space
•emerging sense of national identity
the self would acquire its identity through the creation of a space that bears the presence (or the reminder) of the mapping of its signature
its “foundational fantasy” depends on (an alliance with) a strongly marked geographic consciousness
mimes the construction (of a world)
contemporary politics of statecraft
...to locate a mobile site of anguish to project the portrait (of epic and lyrical scope) of a national subject?
...between experience and fantasy for the sake of producing imaginary conquests in the shape of self-aggrandizement?
ingenieur du moi
medium engineers
imaginary space, nation, selfhood
*** the self-possessed individual ***
(Conley calls) writing “cartographic” insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse
(although his understanding of writing as ‘effects of recorded speech’ is not interesting)
(and he ties to fast cartography to expansion and conquest, allegorical propaganda of cartographer's presence)
living conditions of vocal exchange
visible coordinates that enclose, frame, quantify
a process of discovery --that--> maps its movement as it goes
-making a fetish of progress and accuracy
-vital, narcissistic illusion that the world begins with our birth and expands through our perception of it
isolario: illustrating the islands of the world, a genre
“national” subjects attached to the geographies that they are both mapping and describing
graphic construction of the self
Olearius's globe of Gottorf (=/= Morton's hyperobject): the effect of totality, of having engineered a world through its own labors. [Ptolemaic-Aristotlian machinery of the spheres, which hold the fixed stars in place, stars in a trace on the relatively stable horizon of earth and sky (in which meteor deviation from this harmonious arrangement or celestial machinery was considered disastrous)]
**self become autonomous <== fixed to an illusion of a geographic truth, it can be detached from the coordinate[...]
(417)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.3[...]f Rhizome (from Deleuze and Guattari), the unifying lines and connections that produce an image of...
[in a fairly common obsession, amateurs of maps ofen seek to find the names of the places where they were born or raised. but when Sana's father wanted to erase his name from the map Sana made with his itineraries we betrayed this originary site]
-schizoanalytic cartographies, Guattari on: conditions of enunciation, structures of individual and collective subjectivity)
-we say (in our work with Olearius): reading can be an actively vagrant, nomadic examination of ideological materials
...an attempt to create in an ever recurring, mobile, and modular structures that endow themselves with renewed form
*the cartographic project invents a relation with the past
[*]projective identification: an illusion that tells who, where, and what these maps are about, and specifies the power that they wish to appropriate in diplomatic (and military) areas
[*]perspectival object: is the concept that shifts the spectator from a passive role to that of an engaged traveler who moves through the time and space of a given body of words, images, and sensation --passage-into--> vital and marginal areas where imagination, fact, history, and self are combined
plastic and lexical attributes
confused pictorial and lexical properties
[*]pictogram: alphabetical shapes + bodily form + memory of a seemingly archaic past of confusion and violence + +
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus [word puzzle representing form of pictures or symbols; (Latin: “by things”) a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, for example H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥
*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are bei[...]
(419)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.6[...]jective identification: an illusion that tells who, where, and what these maps are about, and specifies the power that they wish to appropriate in diplomatic (and military) areas
[*]perspectival object: is the concept that shifts the spectator from a passive role to that of an engaged traveler who moves through the time and space of a given body of words, images, and sensation --passage-into--> vital and marginal areas where imagination, fact, history, and self are combined
plastic and lexical attributes
confused pictorial and lexical properties
[*]pictogram: alphabetical shapes + bodily form + memory of a seemingly archaic past of confusion and violence + +
pictogram is mobile, it moves between one register of cognition and another, it resembles the rebus [word puzzle representing form of pictures or symbols; (Latin: “by things”) a kind of word puzzle which uses pictures to represent words or parts of words, for example: H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥
*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized
a childhood experience
the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place
signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary
authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature
Conley argues that: the individual who comes to be named as such can only do so when he or she gains the required illusion of having a real place in the world or, failing that, of experiencing movement in space and language that redeems the labor of living
cartography
•compass for verbal plotting
[...]
(420)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.6[...]r example: H + picture of ear = Hear] and calligram [a poem with (a phrase or single word) in which the typeface or handwriting is important], it conflates language and image and is thus liable to move in many unpredictable directions**** (@Luiza, Sina)
pictogram mobilizes wit[--animates--> imaginary & real movement] and laughter <== “short circuiting of rational thinking” (Bastide) }--> for the construction of a psychogeography
-a pictogram attached to the place that it both represents and remotivates --> *old maps are preoccupied with information at the specific point where it can be written, only at the very site of its pertinence* (Jacob)
fragments of remembered writing
the labor of interpretation consists exactly in opening onto surprise [...] immediate rediscovery of the known (... Mijolla-Mellor) ♥
*
ideograms, mimetic figures, miming the objects
that disrupts and affirms the sate of things
a stenographic form that telescopes language and extends into space as it signals a point where memory and national identity are being schematized
a childhood experience
the subject uses the illusion of a given spatial and historical order to create an imaginary world of impressions that tie his or her body to a mobility of space and place
signature, affixed to the edges in the spandrels between a map and its borders, is both ungrounded and necessary
authenticating effect
a sense of self-distance and power are obtained in the enactment of a signature
Conley argues that: the individual who comes to be named as such can only do so when he or she gains the required illusion of having a real place in the world or, failing that, of experiencing movement in space and language that redeems the labor of living
cartography
•compass for verbal plotting
•turning the reader's gaze toward a productive consideration of its visible form
--*-- the dialogue and its dialogic echoes --*--
statecraft: fortification, centralization, extensive rebuilding (of national borders)
(Iran, Germany, Princess Bubblegum from Adventure Times)
--> (perspectival signature) existential relation with space
-Princess Bubblegum naturalized story: total control of now alienated bodies in a machine-determined future; (her jokingly horrible) mission to promote scientific management of every phase of society;
Princess Bubblegum = rational management in advanced monopoly capitalism
the cartographers create a “cultural entity” that, it is claimed, is only represented in the maps [...] also brought into being ... the authority that underwrote their own discourse ==> they make themselves
[*]colonialization is based on a culture's perceived need to acq[...]
(421)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.6[...]e 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 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
[...]
(422)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.7[...]uropean 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 cultures
dynamics of creole self-fashioning
Pratt's “contact zone”: the space of imperial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict.
“contact language”: an improvised language that develops among speakers of different tongues who need to communicate with each other consistently, usually in the context of trade.
“colonial frontier” --> “contact zone” shifts the center of gravity and the point of view
...the space and time where subjects previously separated by geography and history are co-present, the point at which their traje[...]
(423)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.8[...]cursive
the reality that he [Olearius] has experienced
Conley: “the mass of textual material that accompanies single-sheet or atlas maps tends to reveal its ideological perspective in the gaps between a silent, spatial, schematic rendering of an area (in visual form) and a voluble [por harf پرحرف], copious, emphatic, printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words”
questions of
•authorship
•political power
•intellectual influence
Meerwunder, exotic curiosities from the sea
“we were about a gun-shot's distance”
in the age of incipient European colonialist expansion
a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time
...................................
proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent conce[...]
(424)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.9[...] colonialist expansion
a truly Baroque (bestseller) work, Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen and Persischen Reyse
(in terms of Oriental drama)
erudition (fazl فضل) + adventure }-> in narrative
•it is Adventure Time
proto-ethnography
acquire eyewitness information about a relatively unknown part of the world
-(with Olearius's style we can hear) ethnography's mantra: “writing from the ground” --> attention to the shakenness of difference (encountered or imagined) [Stewart bringing my attention to the writing affect:] “ground” sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations. “Writing matters if objects of analysis are to be understood as emergent forms with qualities, intensities, and trajectories that can be described or evoked. Writing is not epiphenomenal to thought but its medium. As it sidles up to worlds, disparate and incommensurate things throw themselves together.” (Stewart 2012)
(the ground of Iran on which Olearius stands cannot be summarized in a literalized description, under the spell of a kind of cartographic shorthand [tond-nevisi تند نويسى، مختصر نويسى], into a strangely idealist paradigm that imagines the things of the world)
*writing can be:
•the practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as emergent and disparate ensembles --> speculative concept of ‘worlding.’ [to consider our] writing as an inscription that configures the spaces of form and event in daily living
•Stewart slowed ethnographic practice: Why does writing matter in ethnography? How do forms of writing change cultural theory? What questions do forms of writing raise about subjects and objects, forms of attention, the possibility of thinking through description? How do you describe a scene, a character, an event, a situation, a collective sensibility, a difference, a world? What does it mean to add density and texture to ethnographic description? What can ethnography do?
•attuned to the *forms and forces* unfolding in scenes and encounters --> *apparatus of conceptualization* [pulled into (a tricky) alignment with (your field's) immanent concerns and with the concerns of the worlds.] your (anthropological) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
}--> to compose [...]
(425)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%90.9[...]al) objects have to “be walked around,” “approached from precise angles,” and seen as “states of being,” emergent, or suspended in potentiality, or collapsing, or residual, roosting on live matter. *culture ~= [*]the cultural: “a resonant and magnetizing field that registered in people and things living through events and conditions.” we try to describe sensibilities hitting people and traversing [...] things:
◦bodies of thought
◦assemblages of infrastructures and institutions
◦new ecologies
◦the rhythms of a daily living
◦the strangely connective tissue (produced by handheld devices and social media)
}--> to compose a register of the lived affects of the things that took place in a social-aesthetic-material-political worlding [=/= “to track the predetermined effects of abstractable logics and structures."] ***singularities*** take place as a series of precisions (across sociality, materiality, infrastructure, etc.) they are “events of,” emerged in the lived problematics of a present ==> they could be brought to bear, deployed, maneuvered, suffered, or played with. [*]affects: “registering 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)
-[...]
(426)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%91[...]emphatic (mo'akad تاکيد شده), printed discourse that strives to tell of the invisible history that the image cannot put into words.” (Conley)
grid, superimposed on the map
a common topos in Persian painting: a male protagonist expecting the female to pour wine or some other liquid into the shallow bowl he is holding
this ‘anticipation of drink’ is construed (in the title of Olearius map of persia) as a gesture of welcome and hospitality; providing the viewer with an iconic image of two “typical” inhabitants and their form of dress --> “promise and peril” [riches to be found + dangers encountered; treasures + giant snakes]
this continues today: the image of an iranian woman in native dress
on the Persians’ inner nature and customs
the dedicatory cartouche's [special effects]: ruler's name, capitalized, special style of italics
establishing the Duke's geographical purview --> linked to foreign territories
through ‘knowledge’ and ‘discovery’ --> learn about Safavid Persia
(Conley)
(cartography during early modern age afforded to) the emerging self and the self's relation to the idea of national space
between raw perception and creative imagination
surveying and plotting the world
the drama of european literature: an unforeseen theatricalization of the self in the 15th-17th century
-the self seems to be produced in the form of a subject, as a paradoxical being divided between a representation of the conditional relations it is producing and the composite nature of the simultaneously aural and visual medium of print
-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 [...]
(427)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.1[...]th 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 interfaces 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 as *agential devices* --> (how) diagrams intervene in the organization and governance of institutions --> *diagrams as objects of governance and organization* embeding working imaginaries (such as in the imperial enterprise of the Duke Frederick that Olearius worked for) --and--> diagramatic devices of technoscience ==> enforcing *non-equivocation* and *non-contradiction* : the standard rhetoric of Western scientific thought and argument - - --> ***devices enacting norm***
[*]diagrams: a juncture: text-graphic / graphic-text as an ephemeral clot لخته of material semiotic resources where words are embedded in graphics as much as graphics are buried in words
...not collaborate enough to benefit from each other's insights
[representing passage of a domain of innovation from past to future]
is there a way representing the many differences at play? are there other ways apart from one arrow pointing towards one futre? the answer was swift: “no, that would not be wise. we need to demonstrate that we stand united [as an industry, nation, family,,,]” --> it was mutually and tacitly agreed that this is how innovation happens : man-made devices ride into the future on arrows of progressive tinkering with heterogeneous things
(Verran reading/naming of) normative iconography of technological innovation
assumptions of technological innovation:
•physics as fundamental knowledge (--> the translation of kinetic energy to electrical energy and the variables that influence the efficiency of that translation) [--(this is)--> knowledge relating to environ[...]
(428)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.4[...]nts
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[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)
(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, they suck the) *gestural sensory attachments of seeing and being seen* (into a world in which things are dark)
precarity ==?==> intimacy (of people in place)
(in winter with T-shirt and sandals) the townie body unfazed by the cold, endearing, a little heroic
an imaginary --> a logic of some sort --> abstracted ==> become a thing in itself
or, a thing simultaneously virtual and concrete
like the road, made not of dreams per se, but of laws, of ordinary practices, military surges, and construction technologies
...intensities pass from body to body:
•human bodies
•animal bodies
•machine bodies
•bodies of thought
•ecosystems
•visceralities and noumena
•histories
•the seamless habitus of supermarkets and credit cards
•
(Stewart's) precarity's form: compositional + decompositional
attachments, temps, materialities, states of being
[*]description: a writing culture lodged in emergence, generativity, potentiality
things that come into form through an assemblage of affects, routes, conditions, sensibilities, habits
what it means to meet the world:
(Stewart) *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"
[...]
(430)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.1[...]tiel [of stories; for example of the skull in Holbein's ambassadeur, magic database in Verran's ethnographic story]?
-enabling double vision
•the worker has to be equally magical about her own monitoring repertoires (apass cloud attitudes)
•to intervene the ideas of smooth and wellfunctioning development bureaucracy
•reflexivity: what the ethnographer sees as she is shifting her position and beginning to focus on a different (whole-parts) generalization [=/= simply a matter of being transparent about one's analytical choices]
(Sina:)
storytelling ~= bullshiting
storytelling ~= analytical social science
deflating claims (for example we have never been modern, etc.) do not afford possibilities for intervening
(why i use comparing stories in my lecture performances -->) the act of [*]comparing : a central aspect of seeking to contain the dual logic in one story --> (Strathern > Holbraad & Pedersen > Verran > ) peculiar intensification of the act of fieldwork
good faith analysis : stories that are explicit about the double vision through foregrounding within the story a figure that enables *switching*
•stories that never intervene in a way that was imagined (before the study was carried out)
(Strathern's) [*]partiality = incomplete + committed : a description is always part of a whole, which can never be known as a totality, and it is political (biased)
lecture performance ~= brining the effect of a story to life as generalization --> infra-ontological + epistemological work
...................................
Kwa
[*]holism: the ideal of integrating all the workings of nature into one whole
1950s --> a special relationship between the holism and the computer (the idea that if the assumption of holism is fed into a computer model, the computer faithfully reproduces it)
early 20th century --> notions of the complex unity of (living) systems ==> romantic conceptions of nature
*complexity = romantic holism =/= reductionist*
romantic tradition of complexity : to see an underlying unity in a world of heterogeneous objects and phenomena (Rousseau, Cuvier, last two thousands years, [is religion romantic?])
romantic scientist's moderate version of Kant's Copernican Revolution:
•Rousseau
•Humboldt --> ***to arrange the facts, not successively on the order in which they have presented themselves, but according to the relations which they have between themselves*** [~~> a sort of paranoia]
◦the idea that to see that Humboldt was able to see takes a “sensitive observer”
•Whitehead --> physical systems with endurance as the measure of their stability
•Tansley --> ecosystem ~= superorganism
•
=/= baroque (--Kwa--> neobaroque):
•Leibniz -->[...]
(431)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.4[...]nsory 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
(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 --> 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 [...]
(432)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.8[...]t 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 of how an assemblage mobilizes new compositions of material and expressive thing
}--> relational territories of heterogeneous stuff territorialized [by value] and abstracted [by price]
can we trace consumption as it unfolds?
-family assemblages are characterized as collections of distinct but related units, things that are never the same twice, but somehow hold together and maintain coherent pathways through time
(Price and Epp)
-(for people who move often) ‘home’: something that needs to be continually recreated by combining all sorts of elements in imaginative ways--home is a hybrid (=/= simply there waiting for them)
an “I love you” --enter--> assemblages in manners that catalyse (or inhibit) ongoing hybrid relations
levels of analysis is always unexpected [=/= purification]
modern separation between ‘believing in unicorns’ and ‘managing environmental disasters’ [~/=? ajayeb] ~ modern separations/boundaries: science/mythology/politics/religion/leisure (<--Latour/Haraway-- this is a problem) ==> ***purify components of our cultures***
‘program of intervention’: a purposeful attempt to construct realities by enlisting various allies : intermediaries establishing alliances between products, institutions, celebrities and consumers in ways that improve sales and mobilize stable relationships --> institutions attempt to strategically shape assemblages
(Law, Moor, Araujo, Ruiz)
marketers may try to establish stable brand images by mobilising networks of celebrities, scientists, consumption communities and various media outlets --but--> are contested, there is no ‘lead actor’ in assemblages
[*]marketing: iterative attempts to weave together networks of products, services or brands with heterogeneous allies in order to extend the usefulness of a particular market offering across wider consumption assemblages in time and space
-marketers think in terms of catalyzing interactions and consistencies amongst stubborn, messy and dynamic assemblages of spaces, representations, things and consumers
knowing: an intervention in the world
(Bettany)
[*]ethnography: stories that have in them a c[...]
(433)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.3[...]rtes): omnipresent homogenized capitalist exchange value
•Nancy's ecotechnics: critique of globalization and sovereignty
•Avital's narcotics: on Heidegger: the notion of ‘addicted to technology’ --asking--> under what conditions we could arrive at a *free relation to technology*? being ‘fast’ --> on the run ==> dumps understanding along the way. (for Heidegger) freedom depends upon Dasein's openness to anxiety ==diverts==> addiction [a certain type of being-on-drugs] }--> drugs have something to do with technology? @constantvzw
drugs in warfare: taking pills (or tranced by nohe مداحی جنگ) into superior performance, technologizing himself into the war machine (hero on heroin) --> technically calibrated culture
‘chemical prosthesis’ (a technology of the human) has been part of man-machinic hybridizations
-hallucinated exteriority
-stimulant, opening another hallucinogenre in life, at the edge of being
-our culture is bascially the history of ‘high culture’
(Avital suggests) drugs [master object of considerable libidinal investment] have been about exploring ‘fractal interiorities’ (and not exterior dimensions)
ecstasy of intoxication, forgetfulness, mimetic poisoning (of literature [= singular staging of the imaginary]): as sedative, as cure, as escape [= forced decision upon the subject]
-for Baudelaire opium became the transparency upon which one could review the internal conflict of freedom, the cleave of subjectivity where it encounters the abyss of destructive jouissance.
-(Emma Bovary had busted) a logic of reappropriation, collapsing the dreams of restoring a self
@constantvzw's investment in the critique of hallucinated plenitude and pure communication (enabled by digital media) --> transcendental telepathy (being online/connected over distances in a Facebook sense)
-pleasure and liberty values freely exercised upon a coded body
*hallucinator: a creature of simulacrum*
-what is wrong with the social media stream addict? a transport going nowhere; addictive, artificial, and beside oneself; [genuinely clean or drug free ~=? being exposed to existence, placing one's body in the grips of a temporality that pains]; phantasm of lack in abstinence; (like drugs they are) linked to *a mode of departing*, to desocialization, (like the activity of writing) nonproductive and somehow irresponsible, being-in-drugs (being-in-Facebook) supposedly resists the production of real value (incapable of stabilizing the truth of a real world); figure of drifter/dissident: obsessed and entranced, narcissistic, private, unable to achieve transference; movement of the simulacrum without address;
speed: going nowhere fast
...................................
[Campbell] on marketing theory
bacteria: entities that threaten our secluded sovereign cleanliness
our ideas of bacteria are shaped through the filter of advertiseme[...]
(434)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.4[...]-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 your grandchildren)
service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people
Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans
objects withdraw infinitely from humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?
Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology
[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”
Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle
[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, an[...]
(435)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.7[...]ve in scale and temporality
inter-generational justice (imagining till your grandchildren)
service-dominant logic (of consumer research) =/= object oriented (more than humanist/naturalist trophies)
service: that intangible value extracted from stuff by humans --to--> the increasing ability to separate, transport, and exchange information, apart from embodiment in goods and people
Meillassoux's arche fossil ~=? jinn
witnesses of the universe before humans
objects withdraw infinitely from humans
universal quality of all objects: *reserve*
==> (narcissistic) philosophy of a uniquely lonely human fate [--> popular contemporary depiction of human with one foot in animality and the other in consciousness]
----> then how *withdrawal* (should) play out in social theory?
Lingis's ‘imperative’: worlds are filled up with imperatives (human and nonhuman) that summon us --> enmeshed pre-cognitive, atavistic, technological, embodied modes in which we respond to the world --> how this does not get recuperated into the existing models of sociology
[flipside of withdrawal:] to think of capital: an extraordinarily force overthrowing any imagination of an alternative --> there is no possibility of ‘intervention' in Capital ==> ‘accelerationism’: an inside-out radicalism, believing in unleashing productive forces of human wrought to continue its dynamism : “the only way out is to plunge further in”
Campbell: ‘withdrawal from capital' = passing through the eye of the needle
[that which is expressed in philosophy, political economy, science and science fiction, and in transhumanist, lifehacker, accelerationist movements:] *flight from consumption*
}--✕--> Campbell's *speculative consumption*
what if consumption has something relational about it?
(we must become interested in consumption @apass, Pierre, Foad, constantvzw)
*non-correlationist marketing theory* [=/= correlationism: humans doing things in the world to inanimate objects to make immaterial effects happen ~-> access]
interobjective consumption
...................................
ask anyone to give a definition of ‘food’ --> ‘a source of fuel or energy for the body’ --> most people will give you the engineer's perspective of the world when they are asked =/= the marketers know that everything we buy has a deeper, emotional motivation behind it
innocuous purchase:
•pleasure-seeking
•status seeking
•identity-building benefit
•
ask anyone to give a definition of ‘clothes’ --> ‘textile materials that we use on our skin to provide protection from heat and cold’ =/= marketer will tell you that clothes are portals to different realities
*we don't buy bread --> we buy sustenance for the soul
*we [...]
(436)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%94.7[...]> backfires, moomerang effects, causing audiences to disbelieve the entire message
•*frame-bridging* --> when two issues ostensibly different are linked in complementariness in the same sphere as the concept in question (for example emphasizing the religious and moral dimensions of climate change ==> environment central to faith
•*emotional framing* --> we are suffering from a deficiency of *emotional knowledge* about climate change (=/= deficit of information) ==> locus of problem moves to the psychological affective realm ==> elevation of the problem to an existential threat or trauma --> (climate change becomes a factor in *identity formation*) we become more ecological in our cognition behaviour, affect
◦managers in organizations perform complex ‘affect-based’ work to translate the broader social emotions of climate change into the *local emotional landscape* ==establish==> new norms ==> alter the emotional salience of climate change (in the workplace) [<-•26/06/2021 this has become the dominant framing in artistic research environments @apass, Pierre, Chloe2]
*(successful) frames: work through the integration of the phenomenon into a reality that is manageable* (=/= Campbell)
focus on the sustainability of discourses that are imaginable and thinkable and connectable with people's existing world =/= focus on the reality of the moving target
‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles
discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective action dilemma, common property dilemma, non-commitment =/= responsibility, transnational commons dilemma, historical versus new emitters, fossil fuel lobby and corporate power }--response-->{ develop techniques for more thorough understanding of ecological interdependencies, manage multi-stakeholder interests, unite common goals in public bad game, transnational issue-spanning, pragmatic incremental gains, address value-action gaps in individual consumption regimes
•1990 --> risk --> mathematics
•1990 --> war --> political economy
•1990 --> crisis --> science
•1990 --> catastrophe --> mathematics (used differently in public imaginary)
◦“dnd of days”, worst-case scenario, complete system collapse, extreme events, irreversible, non-calculative, non-gradual }--response-->{ use catastrophe framing to induce immediate action, fix temporal focus on visualization of the possible aftermath to prevent it Disrupt business-as-usual regimes, use urgency and fear to engage immediate action, emotional r[...]
(437)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.2[...] and connectable with people's existing world =/= focus on the reality of the moving target
‘climate change’ politically more palatable مطبوع به ذائقه than ‘global warming’ in conservative circles
discursive evolution of climate change:
•1932 --> externality --> economics
•1960 --> wicked problem --> policy studies, public management
•1980 --> threat --> public media
•1988 --> global warming --> physical chemistry
•2000 --> contested debate --> science
•1968 --> tragedy of the commons --> ecological philosophy
◦collective action dilemma, common property dilemma, non-commitment =/= responsibility, transnational commons dilemma, historical versus new emitters, fossil fuel lobby and corporate power }--response-->{ develop techniques for more thorough understanding of ecological interdependencies, manage multi-stakeholder interests, unite common goals in public bad game, transnational issue-spanning, pragmatic incremental gains, address value-action gaps in individual consumption regimes
•1990 --> risk --> mathematics
•1990 --> war --> political economy
•1990 --> crisis --> science
•1990 --> catastrophe --> mathematics (used differently in public imaginary)
◦“dnd of days”, worst-case scenario, complete system collapse, extreme events, irreversible, non-calculative, non-gradual }--response-->{ use catastrophe framing to induce immediate action, fix temporal focus on visualization of the possible aftermath to prevent it Disrupt business-as-usual regimes, use urgency and fear to engage immediate action, emotional re-education, emergency planning
•2007 --> super wicked problem --> policy studies
◦time is running out, those who cause the problem are also seeking to provide a solution, the central authority needed to address it is weak or non-existent, current responses discount the future irrationally, psychological short-termism =/= long-termis }--response-->{ incentivize organizations, create path-dependent organizational interventions, progressive incremental trajectory, consensus-building, small coalitions
•2002 --> anthropocene --> geology
◦human-geological epoch (following holocene), new temporalities and spatialities, re-purposed as capitalocene, necrocene,, chthulucene etc. to incorporate political economy dimension of planetary terraforming, plantation, hyperobject }--response-->{ re-settlement of populations, adaption, repurposing the frame: capitalism to blame, not humans; capitalism surviving through exploitation
•negative externality --> should be internalized
•wicked problem --> climate change as threat
•emotional frame --> focus on values and morality
•debate frame --> balance-as-bias: dedicating half of the frame to counter-evidence of climate change --> fundamental paradox of collective action @Chloe2 --> tragedy of t[...]
(438)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.2[...]
•Derrida's random movement of signifiers (=/= origin as a transcendental anchor to build signification, Strauss's concept of the exemplar model)
Saussure ==>
•Barthes: “myth = manifestation of ideological tendencies of cultures” --> distorts history, depoliticizes speech ==> “language of the bourgeoisie becomes the myth of universal truths, obscuring the power relations and blocking the perspective of power between class, race, gender and other marginalized people” --> perpetuate existing social conditions
=/= Peirce: systems of signification create discourses (~ practices create the meaning behind an individual's interaction with a sign)
}--> ‘advertisers and marketers use signs and symbols to create meaning surrounding their brands. consumers interpret these signs and symbols in different ways’
‘perspective theory’
naturalization of ideological assumptions and how consumers problematize those assumptions in creating individual identity (shared identity and symbolic significance through consumer narratives)
[Thompson and Haytko]
problematization --highlight--> ideological subtexts --formulate--> binary opposition --naturalization--> constructed consumption meaning
four major imaginaries within stock shows:
1. ‘symbolic freedom and independence of rancher life =/= commercial ranching’ ==> mythically relieve anxiety
2. ‘ove and respect for nature =/= need for food and control over nature’
3. ‘community =/= competitive realities of ranching life’
4. mythologising ‘family unification =/= male domination and female subordination’
[symbolic perspective of mythology ==>] “narrative performance = ideology --> allowing people to act without logic, facts or values through illusion or myth” --> mythology: a storyline crafted by the process of individuals’ incorporation of symbolic resources provided through the marketplace, which then must be negotiated between the cultural contradictions and sphere of the dominant and public viewpoints
functionalism: each part of society is dependent on other parts of society ==> social cohesion
~ “whatever is happening in society is what is supposed to happen” --> “myth: a collective representation that empowers and supports social solidarity”
•Durkheim: “knowledge is socially constructed and the world exists through collected representations”
“personal desire =/= community obligation ==> mythology”
•Eliade: “myth = an account of a creation,” of that which ‘really’ happened --> religion
}--(Belk, Wallendorf, Sherry)--> sacred and profane consumption
•sacred consumption inherent in material objects that embody myth helps to develop social cohesion.
sonsumers resist commodification of cultural resources that in Eliade's view are the embodiment of myth
*consumers’ sacred creation*
[...]
(439)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%95.9[...]iment of myth
*consumers’ sacred creation*
[example: temporary consumption community Burning Man: synthesis of community and markets through the exchange of goods and creative acts of art and performance --> community narratives embodying mythological creativity as art and performance ‘construct a temporary cohesiveness']
functionalist perspective of social cohesion: “consumption = means of consumer conformity to culture” --> (cohesion perspective:) ***a positive feeling through the appropriation of creative agency and resistance to challenge the unreflexive consumption at the heart of the marketplace myth***
Barthes ==>
•critical theory: “myth = naturalising socially constructed and historical discourse” ~ dominant societal actors oppress subordinates by normalising markers of segregation and subordination --> the concern is 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 ord[...]
(440)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96[...]tions for consumption --western-->
•how meal consumption helps to maintain family bonds
•how home-made meals are useful in constructing and communicating family identity (@apass, Leo, Sarah, food-ing, ‘formulations of family identity ~=!? collective’)
•how families preserve identity through the transfer of inalienable possessions
•how families navigate complex consumption choices such as involving parenthood
•
...................................
(Campbell + Saren -->) [*]posthumanism: an aesthetic (not just an epistemology) that blends:
1. the primitive
2. technology
3. horror
[*]metamorphosis: (an engine that encourages the viewer) to recognize life not as being, but as perpetual becoming =/= (liberatory promises of) ‘flow’
(each articulating opposing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating
primal technology
proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms 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 [...]
(441)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]osing fantasies of posthumanism:)
morphing =/= mutating
primal technology
proto-atavism نياکان گرايى --> ***multiple paradigms 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 inhumanr />
*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 tec[...]
(442)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]
(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 from the past can exist in the present) []
==> type of posthuman biology conception of life
(let's have atavism instead of activism)
Campbell --> *critique the almost universal celebration of flow in contemporary philosophical thought* {<-- yes yes! thank you! ♥}
primitive: a site of primordial simplicity ~= originary unity }<== history of technology <--(told from a western lens)-- gradual progression and sophistication of the technical (for example Black Panther film)
-the presence or absence of specific te[...]
(443)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.2[...]achines induce horror : depiction of *technology out of control* inducing horror in the humanist consciousness (for example Black Mirror TV series)
(both primitive & technical) borderline figures of contemporary culture: replicants, androgynes, zombies, androids, posthumans, avatars, clones, undead
}--> *almost-not-quite ontologies* <-- displacing the unitary subject of classical humanism <== {new processes and quasi objects} <==create== ***{globalization, questions of history, social change, political movements, collapse of communism, fundamentalism, feminism, post-communist nationalism, global immigration flows, transnational projects such as human genome, digital human}***
•mothers
•machine: the scientific, political and discursive field of technology
•monster: emblematizes the history and philosophy of the biological sciences + their relation to difference and different bodies
enlightenment ==> a comprehensive philosophical and scientific discourse of positioning “people of color, native australians, females, slaves (+ scaipods, cynocephali, tailed men, giants) = nearly-human =/=liberal human subject (white male)
-in the interstices between humans and apes, there was plenty of space to locate speculative or imaginary creatures: *similititudines huminis* (beast-men, monsters with human resemblances, degeneracy)
posthuman
•celebratory declaration of the end of humanity as we know it
•heralding an era of:
◦human being will be superseded by technical being (+ ironically promissing to vouchsafe human being for eternity)
◦(liberatory seeks to) displace the arrogance of the human (as the ultimate and sole authorities of meaning)
•replete with ideological positions (ranging from horrific to hopeful)
•concerned with deconstruting the human as an ancient concept [~?~> dissatisfied and alienated by nature]
ectogenetic foetus (growth of an organism in an artificial environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation
(crossing:)
animal
human
inanimate
technologies
}==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)
[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb
monstrous =/= neat categories
teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories
[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams
(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means o[...]
(444)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.4[...]l environment)
surrogate mother جایگزین
pregnant man {in the fear-fantasy of miscegenation
(crossing:)
animal
human
inanimate
technologies
}==> horror (accompanying the posthuman)
[title]
monstrous logic of ajayeb
monstrous =/= neat categories
teratology
in a wider context of studies of monsters
written texts (not only physical manifestations) ~ defy canonical categories
[*]gothic: (not only a genre,) any type of text that makes coherent interpretation fail*** <== text suffers from an overload of contradictory meanings which make it literally fall apart at the seams
(Derrida:) monster: *species of the nonspecies* = as-yet unnameable which is proclaiming itself --> make people turn their eyes away
-the figure of the monster embodies a means of thinking otherwise
-event of the Derridean text signalling a rupture with the discourses in which it is gestated
--Campbell--> both Derrida and Darwin were engaged in the *practice of revealing monstrosity to the world*
***contemporary Iran = postmodern gothic***
آخوند akhoond: social imaginary of post-industrial society producing teratological monstrous formations <== their technological character transgresses conventions of taxonomical description --Braidotti--> cyber-teratological (fascinatino with grotesque + technological)
-what are the non-unitary subjectivities in Tehran today? (monster = horror + marvel)
monster =/= demonstrate, de-monstrate <-- vision + monstrosity
*monster: sites of otherworldliness* --used--> teratoscopy
1- Greek and Roman --> race of monsters: ethnic entity horrific & fantastic
2- baroque and enlightenment --> began to produce a scientific, wondrous, fantastic, rare, entertaining --(such as: madmen and dwarfs and other marvels participated in the life of his or her town and enjoys certain privileges [...] jesters and fools can transgress social conventions and do things that “normal” human beings cannot afford -Braidotti)
3- genetic turning point in the post-nuclear era --> cybernetic teratology: effects of toxicity and environmental pollution ==> new monsters [--> Tsing]
experience of the world of high-technology
artifacts of visual culture, (TV advertisements) dealing with the tropes of the primitive, technology, horror:
(these artifacts connote دلالت ضمنى long histories of techno-mytho-political dramas)
•Audi spider; where Audi is likened to a preditor, ensnaring, devouring its rivals; Vorsprung durch Technik written in gothic-style jagged, suspended cobwebs {<-- Ridley Scott's alien's technology as dirty; a lair swathed in a thick cobweb-like substance --> *technology as life* <== the dirt and dampness of *[...]
(445)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.4[...] --> *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 (embeddembedded 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 that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civi[...]
(446)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.6[...]litical <-- 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 that stops the flow***
(utopian:) technological imaginary portraying a simple and painless ascent into a silicon existence
chimera: (a term biotechnological discourse uses to refer to) the evolution of elements that do not belong together
[in greek mythology, a savage beast part lion part goat part snake =/= natural order]
•(Iron Man's definition of) technology: an instrument which accords the human with a gradual ascend towards increasing civilization, linear progress and power over her or his environment
•(Black Mirror's definition of) technology: paradoxical scene, a primal instinctual force
(my ajayeb =/=) technological primitivism: (aesthetic that is produced by) the ways “primitive” icons are used in discourses of high technology
technological merges into the mythological
ancient merges with the modern
•eXistenZ film 1999, a high-tech-primitive blend of amphibian eggs and synthetic DNA
portrayal of a symbolically resonant ancient life-source + form of a technical life-source
(Campbell suggesting) atavism: how supposedly primitive evolutionary traits which had disappeared generations ago reappear in contemporary human or animal life
-traits of a former time but still exist in the present
*proto-atavism: (exhibiting of) future evolutionary traits in the present ==> collapsing the quality of linear time [~=? my sleep-walking] (=/= human approaching a state of technological perfection through an orderly ascent of increasing complexity and sophistication)
--> technological progress = nonlinear, punctuated, multiple [<-- used in marketing today]
proto-atavism --argument[...]
(447)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.7[...]in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description
(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era
(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology
background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics of flow }
•primal technology --> technology is not always s progressive civilizing inanimate force, rather it is a destructive-constructive rich-poor lively-inanimate force in the world
•proto-atavism --> modes of living at the edges of humanist life
•posthuman biology ==> *monolith of humanist life is myopic*
in a way, in my research i have been seeking ways to acknowledge the place of posthuman ways of being in the world --through-->
•observing the high-tech (cellular automata, database, bibliographic technologies)
•observing the ancient (me[...]
(448)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%96.8[...]hey 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
...................................
#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 value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate
...................................
(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 2[...]
(449)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.1[...]cribe 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, mesmerism, quantum mechanics)
}==>
•consumer as computer/computational (consumer as information processor, consumer as automatic subject =/= psychological agent) <== science of cybernetics, automaticity, feedback
•information (a new powerful substance in mid 20th century), “raw data ==> decisions, models, theories”, a specialized value-free term (=/= fact, learning, wisdom, understanding, enlightenment) --> second half of 20th century: information began to assume a deep and proved privileges place (in politics, cultural imaginary), to informationalize consumer objects:
◦jeans as “intelligent denim” --> “vector graphics and pixelation as there expression of your individuality” (Jack & Jones)
◦cream as “pro-retinal A nanosomes and Par-Elasty” (L'Oreal)
•
2.
laborization of life
growing sophistication of the previously simple and straightforward categories of aliveness and deadness (<== technologies since the 1970s: stem cell engineering, in vitro fertilization, genomics, virtual surgery, biomaterial engineering)
}==>
•make the range of what constitutes ‘alive’ larger and more complex
•stage the interpenetration of the machinic and the organic
(in the future it will be the) marketers as the most influential groups in re-drawing categories of existence and deciding what is animate or inanimate, natural or technical (not scientists or philosophers)
[***classical marketing strategies: positioning, communication]
==> paradoxes in consumption (for example stem cell engineered meat appears as both identical and radically different from its predecessors) --> postethical consumption models (categorized as vegetarian? how marketing re-enchant food without appeal to a myth of pastoral origin?)
--> commentary consumption acts: organic food market, natural healthcare market
3.
miniaturization of life
“fast, cheap, and out of control”
autonomous (=/= central, god-like)
}==>
•technology is no more locatable within a machine (a consciousness that envelopes the world) --> dispersed: (a logic of) technology as environment [diffused] =/= tool [discrete]
[...]
(450)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.7[...]s --> processing (of information, microprocessor)
1990s --> networking (world wide web)
2000s --> sensing and controlling
“my consumption patterns worth so much that they underwrite my acts of consumption” -Hayles
•*cognition = a product* that emerges between the self and its environment (and does not take place exclusively on the brain) --stages--> cognition as a process
4.
complexification of life
complex (feedback loops, emergence, bifurcation) =/= complicated: accurately analysable system having a large number of component and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
>
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep ideep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [[...]
(451)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.8[...]t and perform sophisticated tasks
•most of the most valuable products today have virtual components (software, money, etc.) that would be unrecognizable 25 years ago
5.
automation of life
(fundamental legal principle of) ius gentium: all humans are the same in so far as they are rational human beings in possession of free will =/= 21st century neuroscientific research
}--Libet--> “free won't” : the mind exists in a climate which says yes, but it can say no
agency is outsourced to systems that increasingly invisiblize from everyday life (software deciding mortgage, Facebook suggest friend, turning car into a moving computer)
dystopian imaginary of Black Mirror TV series --> these developments are a tyrannical force that undermine an a priori and fundamental humanness
--Campbell--> consumer researcher's results will be powerful counter-balances to the often too blindly utopian and dystopian accounts of the future
...................................
[*]advertising: (ubiquitous and contentious) symptom of organization[= corporate entity and/or common practice]
aesthetic ambassador of the organization
--(a way through which)--> **anyone outside the organization mythologizes an imaginary inside**
(its) media:
•***indirect messages of public relations that are embedded deep in the heart of non-advertising genres***
•bombastic and direct appeal of made-for-cinema advertisement and corporate communication
•
how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects thereof
scientific advertising ---> go to Haraway
advertising:
1. fascinates us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment
(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته[...]
(452)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.8[...]how advertising used to be scorned as a practice and profession --> gained responsibility in American culture:
-1 advertising became instrumental in enlisting soldiers during world war I ==> lending it a moral force which served more noble purposes besides commerce
-2 it was elevated through its incorporation into education (first in Harvard University 1924)
-3 it becames adept at referencing styles and commissioning work from the realm of high culture
}--now--> advertising does not just produce culture, but ***culture produces advertising***
(one of the central questions of advertising in contemporary times has been the extent to which) *advertising enframes everything within its discourse and logic*
--Campbell--> ****if advertising is everything, what is it not?**** [@apass] <-- this is a crucial question about advertising and it is part of a larger global crucial devate about the commodification of life and previously inalienable aspects thereof
scientific advertising ---> go to Haraway
advertising:
1. fascinates us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment
(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته کارى, *implicit standards* of cleanliness, sociality, family life, health, happiness, and a great many other values ==> affect me
****modern advertising works by appearing not to care if it works**** --> when someone utters the immortal phrase “advertising doesn't affect me" = advertising has achieved its ultimate goal --> *****advertising empowers us to feel distant to it*****
Campbell --> advertising: organizs meaning in the most powerful and generic of senses + a symptom of the organization
1920 - 1930
modern advertising's coming of age (creating compelling signs)
(its signs underwent a qualitative shift in) sophistication
personalized testimonials
*participatory tone of voice* [=/= direct imperative command]
consumer goods embodied values (that had normally been attributed to humans and the natural world) [=/= mere economic entities]
(through the system of advertising: *imagining the product as a benefit sought by the consumer* ~ illumination instead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]
1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men*[...]
(453)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.8[...]es us
2. it works
an average person in the western world is exposed to 3000 advertisements per day
everyday, it transforms me from this world to an imaginary one for a moment
(advertising) offers through a *constant stream of visual cameos* برجسته کارى, *implicit standards* of cleanliness, sociality, family life, health, happiness, and a great many other values ==> affect me
****modern advertising works by appearing not to care if it works**** --> when someone utters the immortal phrase “advertising doesn't affect me" = advertising has achieved its ultimate goal --> *****advertising empowers us to feel distant to it*****
Campbell --> advertising: organizs meaning in the most powerful and generic of senses + a symptom of the organization
1920 - 1930
modern advertising's coming of age (creating compelling signs)
(its signs underwent a qualitative shift in) sophistication
personalized testimonials
*participatory tone of voice* [=/= direct imperative command]
consumer goods embodied values (that had normally been attributed to humans and the natural world) [=/= mere economic entities]
(through the system of advertising: *imagining the product as a benefit sought by the consumer* ~ illumination instead of lighting fixtures, prestige instead of automobiles, sex appeal instead of mere soap,,) *products --offer--> mini-solutions to the dilemmas of modernity[= the pace and scale of rationalization, depersonalization and urbanization brought by modern industrial capitalism ==exerted==> هزینه خسارت a toll on the human psyche]
1950 - 1960
(from) public role of sign identification --to--> private and psychological space of one's mind and interior life
rise of *depth men* (--> Mad Men TV series, people in advertising agencies that reportedly used psychological techniques to uncovers the subconscious needs, desires, insecurities, fears of consumers)
*product = unconscious fulfilments, solutions, comforts and fantasies to them*
[Packard's Betty Crocker cake mix and Esso's Tiger in your Tank campaign --> alleged power of small groups of people to organize meaning on a massive and uncontrolled level]
•freezer = a nostalgic site of security in a threatening environment =/= a device for cooling foodstuffs (*giving of food <--~~> love* + insecurity ==> more food than you can eat)
-more sophisticated motivational research and appeals
****advertising: a form of literacy**** (a new and bewildering code)
sign system of advertising is not static
the generations to come will regard contemporary sign systems as rudimentary and easy to decode
ultra-sophisticated images will appear antiquited and perhaps even humorous (@Goda hating contemporary sign system)
-the way in which advertising today visualize[...]
(454)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.9[...]>
•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 cross aesthetic borders and are not confinable to a particular domain (image = aesthetic + political + social)
3. they act on all domains recursively --impossible--> how the aesthetic life of images affects the political life of images }--Mitchell--> *image as species* (co-evolutionary entities, quasi life-form depend on a host organism) ==>
◦something not fully under human control
◦spread through the host organicism
◦some die some become pandemic
aesthetic --affect--> politic --affect--> aesthetic --affect--> politic
#workshop make an ad for apass
advertising tre[...]
(455)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.2[...]/>
brand --> creativity of consumers to create artistic output in the form of art (Star Wars world, Marina Abramovic) --advertising--> rhetorical purpose: *entertain* =/= inform (announcement), persuade, *warn*[old original function of advertising]
*to warn = to inform* [<-- 15th century advertising ==> journalism]
ever growing impetus of advertising to reproduce itself in new forms ==> different account of the evolution of new media : advertising creates new media to propagate itself (*two globally pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site
(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consume[...]
(456)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.3[...]lly pervasive and path-changing forms of media that would not exist without advertising revenue:)
•search engine
•social networking site
(McLuhan's “medium = message” --> that we should look at the structural nature of media rather than what it contains =/=) *message = medium* (in 20th century)--> [*]advertising: species that create media in order to allow it to replicate =/= a thing that we humans create and put in media as an incidental extra to an originary agent of meaning [<-- hylomorphic understanding of advertising]
[in 20th century (task of)] advertising: to render the invisible [qualities, such as: complexity, network, information,,,] into compelling visualities (--into--> public imagination)
•(in organizational discourse) complexity: (--articulate-->) unpredictable, multi-layered, decentered, emergent, globalized (world of Homeland TV series, of apass, of ERG's website: technological + adaptable + multi-layered)
*success <== visualize the complexity of their products* [in the case of ERG: student's knowledge and the institution of university]
(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)
amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•
[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)
>
...................................
***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***
marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture
postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity[...]
(457)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]dulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life
postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity
examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism
}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*
postmodern condition:
1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)
marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)
tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”
postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity
postmodern critique tends to rely on experiential or sensible judgement (--valued--> trusting intuition and sensing of what is practical/pragmatic based on cultural experience) =/= analysis of material evidence
****post world war II politics --> youth movement culminated in the 1960s --> institutionalization of the generational rebellion --> postmodernism*** ==>
•postmodern cultural critique rely on intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)
hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultural pastiche of the contemporary world*
--> #integration of the hollywood films (nested: music brand names become sub-spectacle within the spectacle of the film) --> (we are immersed in) an era of *metamarketing: marketing itself is marketed (becomes a prominent spectacle ---> go to Devil wears prada movie)
blurring of genres in news programs (Vox news), soap operas (), games ()
decontextualization + spectacle<[...]
(458)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.4[...]intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)
hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultural pastiche of the contemporary world*
--> #integration of the hollywood films (nested: music brand names become sub-spectacle within the spectacle of the film) --> (we are immersed in) an era of *metamarketing: marketing itself is marketed (becomes a prominent spectacle ---> go to Devil wears prada movie)
blurring of genres in news programs (Vox news), soap operas (), games ()
decontextualization + spectacle
the duality of ‘appearance =/= essence’ is dead in postmodernity --> cereal strategic decision-making in marketing : ****image = positioning****
-consumer always seeks an essence (in adopting a product)
-consumer of postmodern culture play the game of “surface” (they increasingly acquire the skills of recognizing the images and the positions these images offer)
[*]marketing: institution of simulation, imaginary, hype
(forms of) persuasive communication : transformational propositions ==> simulating potential experiences (=/= true or false discourse)
2- [*]fragmentation: the consumer engages in a series of independent, separate, unconnected acts --each--> require a different product
+ fleeting moments of exciting scenes and images
(postmodern) transcendence of the (modernist) necessity to *understand connections*
***artists of all kinds are increasingly assuming the role of marketing institutions***
the consumers (of postmodernity) are encouraged to play the game of *image-switching* (caring mother, efficient manager, elegant partner, gourmet homemaker --each--> require a different style {labeled as consumer liberation}) =/= central character
[---> go to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia of late capitalism]
disconnected from authentic self ==> (enormous potential for) creativity in manufactured representations
~~--> market becomes a pastiche
postsuburban transformation
complex interaction of high-technology production + socio-spatial configuration + spectacular shopping environment = ubiquitous shopping malls (--acquired--> postmodern theatrical character, fragmented experience of all cultures)
unrestricted ability to use signifiers [?pushed back by some emerging sensibilities of cultural appropriation, political correctness, gender policing, religious, etc.]
--> marketing competition rests on the creation of images (meanings) removed from any history, context, origin =/= excellence and sophistication in form and[...]
(461)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.5[...] true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]
***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the subject is culturally signified and constructed for fonctions determined outside its own power --> a property of the other)
*decoupling of culturally signified categories (of gender, etc.)* --marketing--> (postmodern stance and trend:) male model/actors who represent emotional, nurturing, and sensitive + female model/actors who represent aggressive, powerful, rational (in American advertisement and TV series)
/>
==> “i shop, therefore i am” becomes applicable to men
==> both men and women become ideal consumers --> flourish of market exchange
* * (both male and female) seek authentic self --> (get caught up in) objectification + fragmentation * *
pattern quest: imaging (representing) =/= being, knowing
[image marketing]
*the image does not represent the product, but the product represents the image* -->
•consumers are essentially consumers of symbols
•consumption culture = construction of symbolic environment
}==> tourism as the largest industry in the world (translate your culture images into marketable products ~= consumer fetishes) --> *global culturalism*
[manipulation of symbols]
(from) ethical issue (modern) --to--> stylistic issue (phenomenological, postmodern)
[*]globalization: (create fragmented heterogenized market -->) serve the locals with global universal signsigns
--> transnational: a highly symbolic communication system that is timeless, contextless, diffused in space, located anonymously, with no known history
marketing is the first institution that adapt to postmodernism
...................................
consumer (--impulse--> “i want”) =/= citizen (“we need”)
Sunstein
consumer sovereignty (matters of personal taste, “are they getting what they want?”, ‘freedom: satisfaction of private preferences’, ) =/= political sovereignty (*government by discussion* + reason-giving in the public domain <-- many/most citizens should have a range of common experiences =/= filtering of information, customizing information to fit)
**unplanned unanticipated encounters <-- central to democracy**
(pseudo-democratic) participation interactivity : invitation to participate in one's own manipulation by providing increasingly detailed inform[...]
(462)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%98.9[...]he relational*]
•so
}<==motivation==
1. considering the strangeness of life forms act as a template ==to==> think differently about life by mobilizing new ***prepositions of connection*** (with, alongside, between, sym-, etc.) ==provoke==> different theoretical insights into how society might work
2. ethical political drive to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (<-- Harawayian) [--> Isabel, Sara]
3. work of decentering the human as the premier valance of the universe (may in turn) ==cultivate==> an ethics that is ecological, in the 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*
...................................
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 [...]
(463)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.2[...]
◦resentment at being emotionally manipulated
◦contempt for the weakness of cute --accompany--> desire to:
◾touch
◾clasp
◾dominate
◾destroy
◾
}--> *cute: a site of visual intensity that is both pleasurable & disgusting*
****three objects that are most often rendered cute in consumer aesthetics:
1- women
2- technology
3- children
}<-- (in psychoanalytic terms) inherently dangerous ==> in need of control****
Campbell > why is it useful to see bacteria as cute?
***cuteness as a deep link to violence***
[*]cuteness: aestheticization of powerlessness --> a necessary step in permitting its extinction [to make everybody like unto little children is not such a bad way of disposing of them]
•representing the Other (the enemy) as despicable --> powerful effect
•representing the Other as domesticated + infantalized:
◦demonstrates the sublime Otherness of bacteria
◦we are relieved of guilt <== the bacteria is rendered beneath the threshold of ethical consideration
2. overpopulation
cramming of many life forms into tiny spaces ~= (literally) an uncanny microcosm of the imagined and feared socio-economic order
***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]
microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world
bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria
bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*
the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce
removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers
(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit
anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness
keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar (f[...]
(464)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.4[...]-Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world
bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria
bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*
the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce
removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers
(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit
anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness
keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar (for the environment) ~= what patriarchy does for the figure of the woman
bacteria adhere to each other and to their environment --> *they make any environment cohere as itself* : without bacteria there is no environment
3. lower classes
overweigth
bad skin
bad teech
criminally deviant
griminess سياهى
slick sheen ليز
dinginess چرکى
slouch اويخته
decay
in advertisement:
bacterium suicide bomber
ear-picking homeless man: the incarnation of bacterial cross-infection
**community <--> infection**
(health of the community is theatened by undesirable members)
*bacteria ==> community can come into full self-expression*
bacteria = disruption of social order ~-=> bacteria stabilizes the social order
***bacterial threat = biological model for a political necessity***
(familiar terrain of) hand: a vast and foreign bacterial colony
in a world of microbial resistance [in which common infections and minor injuries can kill <-- real possibility for 21st century and not a apocalyptic fantasy] --> *antibacterials carve out spaces of near-perfect security*
bacteria:
•overwhelm us
•outnumber us
•outclassify us
•exceed us
•pre-date us
}--> concealed by antibacterial discourse
good bacteria exists in the gut: their mar[...]
(466)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%99.4- 🔎

Hanno, imagination, motor skills, creative techne, mind, return of the hand, mad movement of creation, ungoverned hand that draws beyond consciousness, family, ethical unit, isolated and heroic being, lonely masculine traveler, athorize child's commitment, triumph of biological self-preservation, Levinas, infinity of paternity, Karin, accidental child, unplanned parenting, biologically directed offspring, i have to be invited to enter Hanno's table and i am accidentally claimed to be there in affinity
- 🔎

name of the child; animal and people become available; megaphone, KHM mothers; pianist talk; self recognition, intelligence, elephant, mirror-stage, whale story, awareness of self-whale; snake toy, blutige Hund, semantics, playmatics, puppet show; leash/unleash the dog; loss of perfect proportions in the imagination of technoculture; fibonacci nature; what happened to my dreams of cleanness and pureness in the jungle and with Hanno? being with Karin; I went to amazona to be curious and to be commited, to be able to spot what arrest curiosity. playing with Hanno is philosophy. kinect, cognitive technology of the real. you want to get destroyed into pieces. Karin invited me ti Colombia, and gave me the snake toy to think with. the body under attack in Leticia. insect visits you. it comes and does what it wants with your body. prehistoric incorrect hacking. wild child. feral computer. walking. what does it mean to be child before the animal? a cyborg urge.