[...]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 from fatigue ‘exposes’ its intensity.” (Peran)
A “tired” artwork

(Marti Peran)
a minority that wishes to be a majority
the semiotic body disciplined to daily exercise and beautification
fatigue, un[...]

[...]ch “literature” is born.
...the “facticity” of biological discourse that is absent from literary discourse and its knowledge claims. ----> Are biological bodies “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems? (biological body ~= poem)
“material-semiotic actor”: the object of knowledge as an active, meaning-generating part of apparatus of bodily production

bodies as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes.
“objects” do not preexist as such --> Their boundaries materialize in social interaction. Boundaries are drawn by mapping practices.


world =/= mother/matter/mutter
world ~= coyote (a figure of the always problematic, always potent tie between meaning and bodies. world as coding trickster.)

(feminism) movement rooted in specification and articulation (of [different kinds of] ‘elsewhere’) =/= (assumption of the right or ability to) identities and representation (of identities)


#workshop reading SK (for apass)
Which version of “realism” are you talking about? Recollecting truth and objectivity are activated whenever a ‘point of view’ is produced among other metaphors that we use in our practice and thinking in techno-scientific societies. In this group reading session we are going to study one of the most stubborn and pervasive phantasms in art and sciences, the figure of objectivity, with the Donna Haraway's 1988 essay ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. This reading focuses on politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating in our power-sensitive conversations, and what does it mean to become accountable and responsible for one's own noninnocent translations. We begin with her essay on the 2nd of February and talk about each of our practices in particular continuing on the 9th.


she wants to re-figure, not disavow, objectivity

“story-tellers exploring what it means to be embodied in high-tech worlds” =/= technophobia

technophilia is narcissistic : the notion that man invented himself and that man is involved in some kind of narrative of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion [...]

[...]of technological escalation whereby the objectification of human intentionality in the world has finally surpassed itself, and man has achieved self-objectification in a machine that will finally name him obsolescence as he is and destroy him in a technological apocalypse figured by the computer. (Haraway) [we need better dog stories =/= (Iron Man:) man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end tragic]
“...man making himself (by realizing his intentions in his tools) yet again in the Greatest Story Ever Told.” (your artwork doesn't need to be this kind of story!)
or the Darwinist tale of “Mitochondrial Eve in a neocolonial Out of Africa”
we need stories of companion species, the “very mundane and ongoing sort of tale, one full of misunderstandings, achievements, crimes, and renewable hopes.” (Haraway, La Guin, Tessa Farmer,)

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

[Haraway on Ihde]

...technologies are not mediations--that is, something in between us and another bit of the world--rather, technologies are organs, full partners, in what Merleau-Ponty called “infoldings of the flesh.”

infolding =/= interface
•“What happens in the folds is what is important.”
•Interfaces are made out of interacting grappling devices.
•the infolding of others to each other is what makes up the knots we call beings or, perhaps better, following Bruno Latour, things.

“Technologies are always compound. They are composed of diverse agents of interpretation, agents of recording, and agents for directing and multiplying relational action. These agents can be human beings or parts of human beings, other organisms in part or whole, machines of many kinds, or other sorts of entrained things made to work in the technological compound of conjoined forces.”

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

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

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

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

refuse all loyalty to my homeland and its values

*heuristic: mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a problem solvable
-trading optimality, completeness, accuracy, or precision for speed
it may *approximate* the exact solution for the problem
-enabling discover or learn something for themselves. (a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic [...]

[...]l reason ~= reification (madiat, jesmiat) as reason
(Habermas:) systems rationality, economic and bureaucratic rationality (==> patterns of meaning rendered functional) =/= communicative processes that sustain the lifeworld

the same Platonic tradition produces: {theory =/= practice} ==> {mind =/= body} ==> {"conceptual” =/= “material"} (and privileging one over the other)
(for the Frankfurt School) truth = "a moment of correct praxis”

what is at stake is the way ‘The Magician’ heroes’ way of non-relating to an entire environment and with it to an implicit “world” that they inhabit.
...that science is an ‘account’ of reality not a ‘tool’ for coping with it
...when the world and the instrument interact
descriptions of the affordances of indissoluble instrument / world complexes are at stake

then how can we think magic/knowledge/science without instrumentalization (‘something in order to’)?


the notion of ‘world’ and ‘worlding’ in other Hollywood sci-fi franchises, and the way a world (for example survival in Mars in ‘The Martian,’ surviving “outer space” in ‘Gravity,’ “pure wonder” and “abyssal unknown” in many Icarusian space exploration moves and movies, the deprived Earth in ‘Interstellar,’ and so on) is rendered dead or dangerous or prosperous, ideologies of anthropocentric extensionalism.

(this directly concerns my ajayeb apass research about the past, because hollywood constantly making science fictions about the past.)

[as much as Matt Damon is schizo-constructing a social environment (on “dead” Mars trying to contact “home”), Cinderella's schizo-affective relation with the talking animals is doing the same: talking back to a world that talks to her, where Matt is only able to talk to home station. I think we have better chances with Cinderella's kind of split personality.]


Modernity --> “Project of Enlightenment” ment” : religion =/= metaphysics --> science + morality + art -->  objective science + universal morality + law  ----{each with its own “inner logic"}
(Luhmann; transition to modern:) stratified and hierarchical organization --to--> “functionally differentiated” organization
(project of modernity requires) a universally assumed but nowhere concretely localizable lifeworld*** (=/=? situated knowledges)
modern person : the self-fulfilling and self-justifying observing subject

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

(Freud's) ego: the record of abandoned object cathexes
(cathexes ~= electrical charge; the libidinal energy invested in some idea or person or object)

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

(15.02.2017) three objects from apass:
-complaint
-evidence
-monologue


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

on futurity; in SF capital (Mark Fisher) the information (somewhere between cyberneti[...]

[...]t this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?

in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.

auto-erotic solipsism

باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the 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 practic[...]

[...] productions: study as artwork, reading as artwork, bottom-top approach to writing,
•findings: every research practice: must include “body image”, must include “the image of creativity” especially if you are iranian, must employ ontological attention to differential productions, must rework decompose redefine its root-metaphors, must give extensive equipment list, must trace its social connections in a wider ecology of practices, must include a critique of technology,
•moments of composition: a scene animated by some quality, or... taking place as accidents (or not)

key literature, magic wands:
1st stage:
•Richard Sennett: Flesh and Stonne --> learning about body image
•Manuel Delanda: A 1000 Years of Nonlinear History --> learning about material histories
•Eduardo Kohn: How Forests Thinks --> learning about semiotics
•Timothy Morton: Sublime Objects --> learning about ontology
•Avital Ronnel: (lectures and articles) --> learning about poetics
•Donna Haraway: (lectures and articles) --> learning about rhetorics
2nd stage:
•Martha Kenney: Fables of Attention --> *rationality: mixture of the highly rational and the highly fantastic
•Karen Barad: Posthumanist Performativity, Invertebrate Visions --> learning about apparatus
•Eva Hayward: visualizing apparatuses --> her interest in optics, in the optics in which marine invertebrates and people come together through visualizing apparatuses
•Vinciane Despret: The Becomings of Subjectivity in Animal Worlds --> learning about anthropo-zoo-genetics
•Kathleen Stewart: nonrepresentational theory --> other ways of description
•Katie King: technologies of writing --> a better thinking of locals and globals
•

(curiosity ==>) having to figure out how to do something that i don't already know how to do:
•ongoingness of collective practices of knowledge and concern<br /> •talking about (what is going on with) ajayeb
•paying attention to differential ontologies
•the stuff that happens through face-to-face colleagueship
•to be in productive alliance
•


unalianated critical work = art



Seifee wants to say something
something wants to say Seifee?


i like us to be skilled at
•objective perception
•5 minute perception
•rigorously passionate perception
•rhetorical perception
•sacred perception
•devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



#Bambi's mother studies:
•other stories possibility, past and history, performative approach to film
•politics of memory, and affect
•patterns of remembrance =/= event recall
•

[...]

[...]ls 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

traumatic realism: a figuring that, like t[...]

[...] opens new kinds of possibilities for relating and understanding

cosmoecology: multiple beings (gods, jinns, animals, humans, living, dead, etc.) each bearing the consequences of the others’ ways (of living and dying)

‘the ecological question’ is about the needs that ought to be met in the ongoing creation of rapports and connections --> the questions are how does this being achieve the task of holding onto its existence =/= “does this being really exist, or is it not a representation”
==> (Despret:) *we may never know (safely and reliably, either ahead of time or a posteriori) which beings will bear/enjoy the consequences of the concrete attention we give to them*

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

on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)


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

basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers

my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading

each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading

literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]

i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysi[...]

[...]entity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
•
•


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

learning from academia: committed to excessive rigor + sriousness of purpose

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

(Erikson's) developmental stages characterized by a psychosocial crisis of two conflicting forces: (each stage that came before and that follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

> -(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the world of people and things?]
•beginning to grasp the concepts of space and time in mo in more logical, practical ways
•causality
•reading (is an industrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about iden[...]

[...]hat follows has its own ‘crisis’)
[conflictual psychosocial crisis --> virtue ~-> (answers to) existential questions]

-(0-18 months) Trust / Mistrust --> Hope
[Can I trust the world?]
==> what constitutes dangerous situations (in life)
world is undependable, unpredictable, and possibly a dangerous place
[*]trust: syntonic quotient
[*]mistrust: diatonic quotient
--> oral stage

-(2-4 years) Autonomy / Shame-Doubt --> Will
[Is it okay to be me?]
venture out to assert their will ==> learning about environment
lack/excess/ridiculed restriction ==> shame --> doubt (in dealing with, handling problems)
--> anal stage

-(4-5 years) Initiative / Guilt --> Purpose
[Is it okay for me to do, move, and act?]
autonomy + mastery (--> artists who stay at their own autonomy and mastery are fixated at this age)
discourage the pursuit of independent activities ==> guilt about needs and desires
--> phallic stage

---till here we were in the realm of play---

to master trust, autonomy, and industrious skills
(i have mastered ‘trust,’ failed at ‘autonomy,’ and overdosing ‘industrious skills’)

-(5-12 years) Industry / Inferiority --> Competence
[Can I make it in the world of people and things?]
•beginning to grasp the concepts of space and time in more logical, practical ways
•causality
•reading (is an industrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about identity formation?) --> [according to Erikson] only when identity is established [~ experimentation stopped] the questions “What have I got?” and “What am I going to do with it?” can be asked
[*]identity: to identify the object of one's fidelity***
-identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently prolonged
-->? genital stage

-(20-39 years) Intimacy / Isolation --> Love
[Can I love?]
[*]distanciation: “the readiness to isolate and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence [...]

[...]ustrious skills?!)
•recognizing cultural differences (is an industrious skills?!)
•completing the task
--> latency stage

-(13-19 years) Identity / Role Confusion --> Fidelity
[Who am I? Who can I be?]
concerned with how to appear to others
fit into society
(used to be evidenced in career, now in sexual identity -->) superego identity is the accrued confidence that the outer sameness and continuity prepared in the future are matched by the sameness and continuity of one's meaning for oneself
==> sense of identity --> re-establish boundaries (in a potentially hostile world) <-- this is difficult because commitments are asked for before particular identity roles have formed
}--> experiment and explore (in a ‘psychosocial moratorium’ [allowed adolescent role confusion]) ==> firm sense of identity
(experimentation is about identity formation?) --> [according to Erikson] only when identity is established [~ experimentation stopped] the questions “What have I got?” and “What am I going to do with it?” can be asked
[*]identity: to identify the object of one's fidelity***
-identity crisis for persons of genius is frequently prolonged
-->? genital stage

-(20-39 years) Intimacy / Isolation --> Love
[Can I love?]
[*]distanciation: “the readiness to isolate and if necessary, to destroy those forces and people whose essence seems dangerous to our own, and whose territory seems to encroach on the extent of one's intimate relations”

-(40-64 years) Generativity / Stagnation --> Care
[Can I make my life count?]
guiding the next generation

-(65-death) Ego Integrity / Despair --> Wisdom
[Is it okay to have been me?]
(only now is able to) develop integrity

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

you have a ‘bad day’
(in Socrates:) because you are ignorant of geometry
(in Feminism:) because you are a man
(in communicative capitalism:) because you are ‘boring’


how to plot to take over the world?


(Rilke)
“I wish to help and expect to be helped. Everyone's eternal mistake is to take me for a healer when, in fact, I am only attracting others, for my own profit, in the trap of a simulated assistance.”


(your) interview and interruption


I would take a bullet for you
/////
you go for the knife and i prepar myself to die

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

duty ~= Dienst nach Vorschrift
(the problem is that it is not enough to have a duty, rather, you have to define what ‘duty’ is. that is the only duty)

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

MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy..[...]

[...]. that is the only duty)

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

MADMAN#1: i like to think, “i am rich they can't hurt me.”
MADMAN#2: that's a mistake.
MADMAN#1: i am being punished for making my job look easy... Although, that kid, guy, he has a spark. He is a pure account man.
MADMAN#2: and what is that job all about?
MADMAN#1: i don't know. it's about listening to people and never saying what's really on your mind.
MADMAN#2: no. it's about letting things go so you can get what you want.


“I could tell the minute she saw who I realy was, she never wanted to look at me again, which is why I never told her.”
--> i am not telling you anything, because the minute you see who i realy am, you never want to look at me again.

“...but nobody knows what is wrong with themselves, and everyone else can see it right away.”

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

is this an honour?


(a) better thug


so, one summer evening, I was wrong, ...

once when i was wrong...


thank you for that kind (of an) introduction



i like to make decorations for other people's work

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

Instructions of Shuruppak
“In those days, in those far remote times, in those nights, in those faraway nights, in those years, in those far remote years.”



daftare bimani دفتر بیمعنی
hezar nokte هزار نکته



i can only stutter and telegraph you mutilated message
also i offer the hermeneutic of frustration so that we don't feel we have mastered or understood necessarily



janebe hagh ra gereftan جانب حق را گرفتن ==> hagh-be-janebi حق‌به‌جانبی


safineye nadan سفینه نادن
safineye nadani سفینه نادانی

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

Bettina's self almost entirely to be construed within the order of the will


(Hillman:) Eros is always curiously weaker than the problem it must deal with. --> logos is biger than its problem



1. revolution: changing/disturbing the value system
2. reform: changing/disturbing the social norm (hanjar هنجار) --> eslahat اصلاحات
3. invention/noavari: changing/disturbing the system/institution/sazman
4. coup d'état: changing/disturbing the people/apparatus


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
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phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing)[...]

[...]erpolated or addressed by power
politics of self-realization --> anti-bureaucratic creativity of artist --> postmodern capitalism: ([pretends to be] no longer hierarchical bureaucratic but) creative interactive autopoetic

(@Leo:) ethics =/= morals
*ethics --> my consistency with myself, fidelity to my own desires (which is transvaluated as external and part of social system)
*moral --> the symmetry of my relation to other humans (which is transvaluated as individual and internal, “don't do to me what you don't want me do to you”)
being immoral out of principle, to act in a certain way as part of a fundamental existential choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)

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

[*]death drive (inerested in fucking, cannot being-with): *to lead organic life back into the inanimate state*, to return to an inorganic state (-we are talking symbolically not biologically) [=/= eros (interested in love, life, sex, and being-with, the world is very vivid to eros)]
-->{image of the eskimo piercing through the ice and snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every 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 -[...]

[...] he is necessarily excluded
•
}--help--> anecdotic implication (=/= therapeutic system's theory):
•anecdote becomes the frame of the conversation
•risk of becoming involved in the anecdote's ridiculous fleeting liveliness
•

the anecdote, which dramatized the dead end where the intervenor's capacities are reduced to non-existence --> can also revitalize the relaional process (if introduced in a new quasi-causal chair)
[anecdote's] circular causal hypothesis which reduce the anxiety create a more accessible reality --> constructing a myth = [*]story: lies which tell the truth**
•anecdote takes it place in a causality chain where it lives for a fleeting moment carrying a *parasitical* or a *paratherapeutic* significance
==> construction of a specific restricting environment in which the parties [family and intervenor, artist and feedbacker] are trapped
--Despret--> ***the reduction [of anecdote] becomes the starting point for a new release of the energy it liberates***(!?)

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

Zoological Vandalism: Chimeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties

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shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves

we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change

in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)

to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question

(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values


the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all

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

(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)

(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology



my whole work is about two things now:
[...]

[...]. The semiotically invested finger comes to manipulate the alphabetico-numerical ordering of ‘Geschick.’ (Avital)
-The spiritual forefinger presses towards schizophrenic partial systematizing.
-Also, it is the bewitching finger, which makes it rude to point or to press red buttons, for the power of pointing used to be associated with *magical arrests* (thus in Jewish Orthodox marriage ceremonies the wedding ring is said to be placed on this spiritual finger of the woman, to block her potency).
-making the marionette come alive
-history of index finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading Heidegger)
-Heidegger shows, “Speaking must have speakers” (not merely in the same way as an effect must have a cause)
(...what must remain unspoken in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking)
...decisive disconnectedness in all language tracings.
schizophrenogenic understanding of language (and of anything)
[this is related to the story of the fox and sound, accidental essencing of the index...]


“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often we do not see what is there. In the first place because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as if we cannot see a thing.” (Avital)
(focus the lense on being)



the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” تعجب
(using Avital's words) But if we were to remain in this mood, then, despite appearances, we would not be awestruck, or even struck, by the [text]: we would have missed the encounter with it. In fact, our astonishment would mean that we took the entity of the ajayeb for an object, one created by an author [...] admire a product [by God] and be pleased by a cultural achievement.----Gazwini is making this mistake with God.
-how can we resist the “ta'ajob” or wonderment in reading ajayeb?
-we would not have allowed ourselves to be greeted by the enlisted creatures of ajayeb, be met by its poetic Greeting.
-reading the promises of ajayeb----(and keep in mind that) everything in the Greeting is offered to the greeted as a sort of promise

Ungleiche is a figure

by getting on top of the material, we have not let it speak its word

(not to master or master over the material of ajayeb)
“If we allow ourselves to be greeted by the poem instead of overwhelming it with our knowledge and facility for reformatting poetry according to cultural or philological codes, then we are faced with the enigma from which the poem cannot be wrested by our acquired habits of mastery.” (Avital on Heidegger's Holderlin's Andenken)
***Mastery is not a [...]

[...]ex finger points to the essential being of language, which is “Saying as Showing.” (Avital reading Heidegger)
-Heidegger shows, “Speaking must have speakers” (not merely in the same way as an effect must have a cause)
(...what must remain unspoken in the sense that it is beyond the reach of speaking)
...decisive disconnectedness in all language tracings.
schizophrenogenic understanding of language (and of anything)
[this is related to the story of the fox and sound, accidental essencing of the index...]


“We are hypnotized things suffering from positive and from negative hallucinations, that is, we see what is not there and often we do not see what is there. In the first place because what it is to be there has no clarity of being. It is as if we cannot see a thing.” (Avital)
(focus the lense on being)



the mode of awesomeness and dissolvement with awe is the prescriptive utterance in the case of ajayeb, the ‘wonders of...’ translated from “ajayeb-e...” triggering the verb “ta'ajob” تعجب
(using Avital's words) But if we were to remain in this mood, then, despite appearances, we would not be awestruck, or even struck, by the [text]: we would have missed the encounter with it. In fact, our astonishment would mean that we took the entity of the ajayeb for an object, one created by an author [...] admire a product [by God] and be pleased by a cultural achievement.----Gazwini is making this mistake with God.
-how can we resist the “ta'ajob” or wonderment in reading ajayeb?
-we would not have allowed ourselves to be greeted by the enlisted creatures of ajayeb, be met by its poetic Greeting.
-reading the promises of ajayeb----(and keep in mind that) everything in the Greeting is offered to the greeted as a sort of promise

Ungleiche is a figure

by getting on top of the material, we have not let it speak its word
r /> (not to master or master over the material of ajayeb)
“If we allow ourselves to be greeted by the poem instead of overwhelming it with our knowledge and facility for reformatting poetry according to cultural or philological codes, then we are faced with the enigma from which the poem cannot be wrested by our acquired habits of mastery.” (Avital on Heidegger's Holderlin's Andenken)
***Mastery is not a content but a habit.***
disposition from knowing is required if we are to let the word of ajayeb speak to us (in the form of greeting)
[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]----> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! (making it about grounding and historicity, instead:) let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)

memory/remember is sojourn
memory and its (peculiar) temporal climate
-how can we no[...]

[...]hetical remarks
•grammatically set to emphasize --> belonging to the secondary
•whispering ~ “this isn't much, but let me insert, inject”
•disavowal of the text
•denial
•confession
•pumping the text to its opposite meaning
•turns everything around --> a noble feeling
•

(Avital > Nietzsche:) destruction: commitment to futurity
affirms life, clears out the nonsense
=/= devastation: destruction without future
-if you are stuck with monumental history, and if you are burdened, carrying too much baggage (historically, aesthetically) ==> you are weighted down and cannot move forward




the image of hybrid being in ajayebnameh, half animal half human, is being both wild and tamed, vahshi-ram وحشی رام

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(the word) wonder, it worlds.

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

work in ajayeb is about the phenomenon of understanding that is to be found in modes of experience that lie outside the universal claims of modern scientific method (--the experiences of art, of philosophy, and of history itself.)

in the hermeneutic universe i am building, Iran is made of China is made of India is made of Afghanistan is made of Iraq is made of Greece is made of ...

(can I say that my work has been all about Iran-centrism?)

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

history of truth


*making an ecological landscape of ajayeb cosmology, that means making visible the connection between beings and contact zones among animate and inanimate and nonhuman:
diamond <--> snake
fire <--> speech
fire <--> animals
wind <--> future
cow <--> angel
water <--> light
darvishi درویشی <--> Div دیو
earth <--> Bahman بهمن
mars <--> wolf, pig
moon <--> effect of Gabriel's wings
earth <--> woman/enmity/illusio
mountain <--> ganj گنج
jinn جن <--> climate
Div <--> stone
climate <--> ghiamat قیامت
khidr خضر <--> life/death giving


(ajayeb-e chah) عجایب چاه
wonders of pits --> wonders of moon (Moghana مقنع, bringing a moon out of a pit, mah-e nakhshab ماه نخشب) [Moghana's work on mirror], [neiranjat نیرنجات and telesmat طلسمات (of Moghana’) ~=? ruse, tech],
[signifier of wonder:] mahi (ماهی‌ fish) [reflection of the moon in water] --> mah (ماه‌ moon) --> pointing at helal-e mah (هلال ماه half-moon) --> mouth of the beloved (یار yar) [registered in poetry of Sa'di سعدی] --> wonder finger on the open mouth
-also, Galileo's new telescope pointing at the moon (and sun-spots 900 years later than the chinese did,) and his pervasive a[...]

[...]e?
natural selection --> adaptation --> conditions of existence
embryonic homologies --> unity of type
==> “descent with modification” (or decent modifications)
[(embryology =/=) ‘fire’ could transform matters, “change” their class, their type and its unity --> “parvaneh sho!” (پروانه شو) Rumi مولوی wants embryology undermined?]

construct phylogenies
(phylogeny : branching out evolutionarily)


‘Haeckel claimed that Darwin's ideas included the progressive development of species. “Development and progress” was what characterized evolution. The explicit association of evolution with particular political, religious, and racial views became the hallmark of Haeckel's career. Haeckel proposed a causal parallelism between the embryological development and phylogeny. His “Biogenetic Law” that “Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny” was based on the idea that the successive (and to him, progressive) origin of new species was based on the same laws as the successive and progressive origin of new embryonic structures. Just as the earlier stages of human development developed into the later stages, so earlier species evolved into the later ones. Natural selection would eventually get rid of the earlier species. (In the Welträtsel, Haeckel [1899] would also proclaim that the more evolved humans [i.e., the Aryans] would out-compete and eliminate the more primitive races.) To Haeckel, the evolution of the animal kingdom was the same as individual development not only because the laws behind each were the same but also because the entire animal kingdom was an individual. Here, he was harking back to the views of the Naturphilosophen of the previous century. In other words, the development of advanced species was seen to pass through stages represented by adult organisms of more primitive species.’ (The morphogenesis of evolutionary developmental biology)

inter-cellular digestion
•the evolution of new features was based on changes in developmental stages, not in adult astages (--> that's why the developmental stage is so important, because mutations happen --> work with children)

Ontogeny or morphogenesis: organism's developmental lifespan
Phylogeny: evolutionary historical heritable traits

ontogeny ==> phylogeny
“ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny: it creates it” (Garstang, 1922; p. 724)


evolution was not so much a branched chain as a ladder

molecular systematics

evo-devo (evolutionary developmental biology)

each discipline has:
-its own rules of evidence
-its own professors
-its own journals
-its own vocabulary


small genetic changes was not sufficient to generate evolutionary novel structures such as teeth, feathers, cnidocysts or mollusk shells (Goldschmidt, 1940) (--> lizards had birdness in i[...]

[...], 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*? 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)

“undimi[...]

[...] [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
<br />
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--ou[...]

[...]in which we are not separated from and hierarchically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.

The interlinked sacrality of both ecology and cosmology, of ‘kudrat’ (~ power of nature?) is common to both Hindus and Muslims. ‘Kudrat’ is thus the cosmological aspect of north India's Invisible Religion.

There is a long Islamic tradition of seeing Nature as full of the signs (ayat آیات) of the work and presence of God. The Qur'anic verse “Withersoever you turn, there is the Face of God ( Qur'an 2: 115)” has traditionally been interpreted by the Sufis as meaning that the “order of nature is nothing but the Divine Reality manifesting itself on the plane of phenomenal existence (Nasr 1996, 62).”

description of the garden ---- [accounts of the heaven are filled with descriptions of springs and wells, tanks and streams, gardens and trees and flowers] --> recreating of heaven on earth was tight with natural and animal life forms


where a text or these texts (ajayeb's text and world) is *acclaimed*? today and before, by who? Indo-Pakistan sub-continent? South-Asia? Indo-Iranian regions?
***([who were the] agents through which ‘natural’ responses [to its impulses] are said to operate[?])

the hierarchy of created things [...]
apex in the righteous man, reaches down into the abyss of the inanimate by many gradations (Benjamin 1969b, 104)

“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of 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]

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[instead of the struggle against sin (~=? christianity) or the struggle against suffering (~=? Buddhism),] the struggle between (different) sins

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(the reading of ajayeb portraits) the global [and therefore *ethical] consciousness (at the end of 12th century middle-south asia, “the east”)

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[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,[...]

[...]tiological 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 situated perspectives there is storytelling]

it is “practicing generous reading”

and “technique of refiguration” --> create alternative forms of knowledge
[figuration ~ storytelling apparatuses]


(Haraway, Primate Vision)
•“Attention to narrative is not instead of attention to science, ...”
•[there is no way that we can] escape the particular pleasures and dangers embedded in the story-laden sciences.
•[what are the things that] could only be explained by cultural, not scientific, genealogies [?] --> ideological apparition[s]
•Something new was required to account for change; the logic informed a kind of paternal creation myth [........] unchanging “matrix” for the generative principle of change. (In Zihlman's story logic, both gathering and hunting emerged as repatternings, not opposites, in changed conditions of 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 narrat[...]

[...](makesh مکش), volatility (farar فرّار), toxicity, drift,

the power that comes with ‘other’ (time/place of) styles of composing

(*bestiary is agential world*, that's why it is so interesting when you are available to it as a child. i am drawn to it --> agency bestiary sets to betray the anthropocentric binary: “active human =/= passive nature”)
(how to tell?) faithful and fantastic stories ==> better companion species

*a shift in humanities scholarship
(feminist science studies, the post humanities, the ecological humanities, animal studies, queer theory,) humanities scholars have represented their matters of care with an aesthetic (and therefore political) commitment to narrating stories with an emphasis on the relationality among agencies, forces, phenomena, and entities usually kept separate, in the background, or out of the story altogether (lde a Bellacasa)
--> redistribution of agencies
political stake ==> aesthetic tactics

poet laureates of queer animacies
“malek-o-sho'ara-e atefiate mahsus-e edrakat-e zende” (ملک الشعرا عاطفیات محسوس ادراکات زنده)

(animacy: Usually, animacy has to do with how alive or how sentient a noun is. In general, personal pronouns have the highest animacy, the first-person being the highest among them. Other humans follow them, and animals, plants, natural forces such as winds, concrete things, and abstract things follow in this order; however, according to the spiritual beliefs of the people whose language possesses an animacy hierarchy, deities, spirits, or certain types of animal or plant may be ranked very highly in the hierarchy.)

**animacy stories --> multitude of agencies
(what are the contemporary ajayeb animacy stories?


(neo-Darwinian's) standard evolutionary accounts of encounter between species (in terms of “sexual deception”) ==> individuation, competition, efficiency --> capitalist and military values (, economic tropes)
==> disenchanted “ecologies, populated by blind, reactive automations”

evolutionary stories =/= involutionary stories --> organisms become *involved* with one another's lives

(involution, pich-dar پیچدار, act or an instance of enfolding or entangling, an inward curvature or penetration; a function, transformation, or operator that is equal to its inverse, i.e. which gives the identity when applied to itself.)

“mimetic relations among plants and animals take shape in the thickness of the space between bodies, where affect and sensations are *transduced* through *excitable* tissues” (Myers & Hustak)--> affective ecologies, intimate encounters, articulate orchids


(on ajayeb,) ***creating sticky new attachment sites for thinking (human/nonhuman relations)***
###learning multiple writing tactics:
•thick desc[...]

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

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

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




[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]

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

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

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

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

multispecies contingency

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

the capacity to respond and to recognize response

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

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

the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)

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

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

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

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

ajayeb is system imagination

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[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 t[...]

[...]
reducing type is among other things at the heart of racism
types: colonised, enslaved, non-citizen, animal, refugee, [etc.], typological female reduced to her reproductive function,

secular semiotics (never nourished us?)

queering: the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, [sorting operations]

...patterning, consequences, and the possibility of response.
queer, off-category, sf worlding
(what are the SF worldings of ajayeb?--SF as building alternative ontologies. finding absent but possible presents--whether presented as elsewheres or other times. “[...]an elsewhere from which different [...] articulations of naturecultures and alterity could be explored.”)

“The one who would be normal, in a category of his own” --> ends badly

(human scientist's) deadly one-way test: unable to recognize the presence of the trapped one --> (for him) no one is at home in the categorically Other


[Seed Bag]

...the problem of destruction and wounded flourishing--not simply survival--in exile, diaspora, abduction, and transportation--the earthly gift-burden of the descendents of slaves, refugees, immigrants, travelers, and of the indigenous too.

(In the feminist SF mode,) matter is never “mere” medium to the “informing” seed;

Homebody / traveler

...disruptive details of good stories that don't know how to finish

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

[Barad]

[...] remembering is not a replay of a string of moments, but an enlivening and reconfiguring of past and future that is larger than any individual. [...] The past is never finished. It cannot be wrapped up like a package, or a scrapbook, or an acknowledgment; we never leave it and it never leaves us behind.

Barad's mother's question: “what good is there in offering recognition that can't be recognized?”

[...] there is only the ongoing practice of being open and *alive to each(other)* meeting

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



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

the strangest idea: that we have access to cultural representations and their content (that we lack toward the things represented) (=/= “agential realist ontology” barad-posthumanist.pdf) [Foucault's “words and things” is the name of the game] [--> @Aela, perhaps we can begin with a different starting point, other than the old idea of “humanity's own captivity within language--the starting place of the metaphysics of representation,” perhaps it would be better to begin with a different metaphysics... -->{the term ‘metaphysics’ (far from being th[...]

[...]/> 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,)


lahn-haye jahan
لحنهای جهان

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

(feral?) table of contents
how we know that contents are tabled at all? --> inheritances of taxonomy, natural philosophies aesthetics: tamed facts
#Rigs, my ajayeb diagrams

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

ajayeb's histories (~ ajayeb's historically 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[...]

[...]sacred.” popular religion is at many times populated by earthly figures alongside many astralized destructive finitudes.)

Haraway's urgently needed Chthulucene story


[Miyazaki's] biodiverse terra [God flips out] into something very slimy, like any overstressed complex adaptive system at the end of its abilities to absorb insult after insult. (Haraway's wording)

(yes yes we are all ultimately connected to one another,) but the specificity and proximity of connections matters

(Haraway + Latour's) ‘things’ are:
1- collection of entities
2- hard to classify, unsortable, (and probably with bad smell)


Anthropos =/= rich generative home of a multispecies Earth

“looks up at what he sees.”

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

ʿAjā'ib al-makhlūqāt wa gharā'ib al-mawjūdāt
Ajayeb al-makhlughat wa gharayeb al-mojudat (عجائب المخلوقات ,عجایب المخلوقات) in short: Ajayeb, is a suggestive cognitive work, full of strange linguistic pollutants, interesting agencies and animations, and like most of the medieval sciences and knowledge systems that were busy with the transformation of agencies it collapses “lists” and “narratives.” In Ajayeb each animal is a consensual hallucination device (~ each animal is a way of knowing the world); some pre-organic, inter-corporal species, with trans-ontological intentionalities.

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

infrastructure: 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 heyv}
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 [...]

[...]toric: 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, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an a[...]

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


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


...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•

in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility

self-exclusion

to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”

(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference

fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”






how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their relational nature) is or may be (usefully) (con)figured as *specific connectivity*? [the question of specific connectivites of ajayeb]--> this requires from me poetics: diffractive descriptive acts
-what are the ajayeb's beings and mine intertwined practices of knowing and being?

the agential cut of the brittlestar is a survival kit: the arm is “cut” and becomes part of the other (predator)

Barad is reading the brittlestar to rework (challenge conventional conceptions of) her discipline's ontologies an[...]

[...]raghe تفرقه


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

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

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

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

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





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

my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not the ideological enterprise of “Islam”, which is usually badly politicized in the historical memory of the West. we could get interested in the economics of corruption and technologies of rule, the evolution of government bureaucracies and classificatory schemes, anti-colonial critique,)

ajayeb is on the side of counter-classical traditions of standard Muslem-ness, and its less elite histories and cultural forms,

(intellectual identity:)
cross-dresser of the order
autodidact odds
sufis, merchants, nomads, poets, pilgrims, smugglers, laborers,
religious identity, religious knowledge, religious violence,

medieval persian mysticism:
•oral, temporal nature of speech
•speaking I to the unknown and unknowable Other
•the discourse of love
•apophatic discourse -->? politically subversive
•linguistic fragmentation, edges of meaning
•
[...]

[...]erly, to maintain a perspective (Albeti)


[title]
(with Alberti) trap-thinking for ajayeb storytelling --> to make capable of knowing different things, invoking, quoting, reciting, citing, exicing, inciting different kinds of knowledge [cit- : to call, start] --> mobilizing #citational apparatuses --> they enter into a ‘type’ of relation particular to each


[*]traps(/pots): bodies fully engage in perspectival communication and battles of will, variously constructed and provided with affects and capacities, capable of knowing different things and of inciting different kinds of knowledge through the types of relations they entered into


______________


archaeological material ~= myrtle (=/= marble)


[*]ontology: a theory and experience of what exists


*hylomorphic model of production (underlined by the substance ontology) ~= marble
=/= myrtle
> =/= ajayeb's inscribings
a making which assumes that form is inscribed onto passive matter
that pots accrue (انباشتن منتج) meaning through their processes of manufacture and role in social relations
~ form is brought to matter by an agent with a design in mind (Ingold) --> a concept of material culture in which “brute matter” is shaped by cultural agency
traces of action --> skilled means of representing a mental image
~= ‘design’ (as conventionally conceived) : to ‘project’ future states


[*]perspectivist theory: the conception according to which the universe is inhabited by different sorts of persons, human and nonhuman, which apprehend reality from distinct points of view (Viveiros de Castro)
-it suggests that there is no interior space to the body, only superposition of body and soul: the human form is, as it were, the body within the body, the naked primordial body [hayula]--the soul of the body --> infinite inite superposition of states #tey-ol-arz
--> the body, not the mind (or ‘soul’), is the seat of knowledge, different parts of the body know in quite distinct ways: (loci/organ of knowledge:)
•hand knowledge (meken una)
•eye knowledge (bedu una) (particularly prominent sometimes...)
•ear knowledge (pabinki una)
•liver knowledge (taka una)
•skin knowledge (bitxi una) <-- knowledge of sun, rain and wind is acquired through the skin
(painting, ear piercing can also facilitate the absorption of knowledge into the body)

[*]bodies ~= artefacts : sites of subjectivity
•the body is fabricated, just like the pot [Alberti]
•as ‘lived experience’ performs, communicates and extends personhood through inscriptive and representational practices that fully incorporate material culture and the surrounding world. (Joyce)
•people are made: bodies are composite transformations of artefacts from the time of myth* [...]

[...]ons 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 allof 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

critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project

(in archaeology:) ontology = reality (what there is) / peoples’ claims about reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> [...]

[...]chaeology

critically ontological: turning insight back on the archaeological project

(in archaeology:) ontology = reality (what there is) / peoples’ claims about reality (a fundamental set of understandings about how the world is) }--Alberti--> one can conceptualize ontology: as a people's “beliefs about” reality / as people's actual ontological commitments (~ people's reality)

Latour's modes of existence: ontological tendencies that exist more or less precariously under the assault of modernization

conversion of ontological questions into epistemological questions ==> deontologizing other peoples’ *ontological commitments* [--> that Goda mistook for ideology]

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


anti-Cartesian, relational, and antiontological exceptionalism


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

posthuman ~ nonrepresentational ~ realist ~ new materialism

(realism: an ontological approach)

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

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

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

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

ruin memories

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

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

theories + apparatuses + material remains

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

archaeologist on[...]

[...]gies 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 de Castro

Amazona --> animism (more than any other anthropological material) has provided modes of relationality to archeologists to interpret [...]

[...]in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts


the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description

kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field

aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries


pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied

to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst

the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)

metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality


(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things

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

Alberti
Ingold

correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research process

(archeology: a science of correspondence)

Alberti suggesting to separate arts and crafts (for analytical purposes)

artwork: non-conceptual outcomes of practice

artwork & archeological things --share--> ontological problem of how to make something new [~ *sensations/past never before experienced/thought*] out of (circumscribed body of) materials

archeological things carry both sensation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> art~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)

archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**

anthropology: th[...]

[...]nsation & *residue of concepts* with them (~~> artistic research =/= artworks)
==> resurrect the conceptual potential immanent to the specific arrangement of materials (and their temporary forms)

(ontological dilemma [of both art and archeology]:) *how to anticipate the coming into being of something sensed but as yet not thought?*
(---> go to metaphor)

scientific interpretation and explanation of the past <-~ archeology
{my work: speculative interpretation and explanation of the past [--> prefigure new becomings + intensification and unleashing of ‘i am part of what i seek to understand’ (= my subjectivity)] =/= lock the past into predictability}
•my ‘things’ in ajayeb are to an extent ‘archeological things’

contemporary science --gives--> ontologically relational world (<-- to be acknowledged by art and archeology)

archeology --Alberti--> fostering **a particular sensibility to what is of the past in things**

anthropology: the art of inquiry
(something you can learn from)

[*]archeological sensibility: a pervasive set of attitudes towards traces and remains, towards memory, time and temporality, the fabric of history
-Shanks

craft --Ingold--> knowledge grow from the crucible of our practical and observational engagement with being and things
(Aristotlean poiesis ~~-->) [*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)


•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•


(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills


21st century historiographic trends in art

artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work


art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology

producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*

*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•


prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds


the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•conseq[...]

[...]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 ==> ?
•


-how to read or confront ajayeb bestiary artifacts and think of them as *taking on something of the pre-conceptual labour that went into them*? --> (?how can it) provoke an art-like response [<=~ sleepwalking: no ontological difference between then and now ==> you are confronted with a raw material of affect and concept =/= past artifacts as vehicle for complex belief systems] }==drive==>
•new sensorial experience
•new conceptual work
---> go to description, Stewart


coalescing of language & concept & ...


[*]drawing: (the effect of being) harassed by reality

to be harassed by ajayeb past people animals (struggling in their reality)
---> go to haunted, possession

[*]art: risk of something new

archeology --> intimate knowledge of materials (--> appealing to art, crafter attune to their material)

my lecture-performances = exploring how to make my knowledge present (to myself so it has a chance to be reconsidered) and how things (ajayeb past bestiary telegram animal) affect me and to *allow them to engender their own concepts and meanings*

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

(modern western) human: composed of cultural clothing that hides and controls an essentially animal nature =/= (amazonian) animals have a human sociocultural inner aspect that is “disguised” by an ostensibly bestial bodily form -->{ [subjective particularity of spirit and meaning ==>]*multinatural =/= multicultural*[<== objective univers[...]

[...]ined who did science and what science was considered good
(#sohrevardi)

Darwinian conception of natural political economy of population


(in Attar, Kelile Demne, Ajayeb, i am hunting for) *** early systems theory *** --> providing the technical base for (different claims such as:) the claim to scientific maturity of the social sciences based on concepts of culture and social group


“he removed the putative head from the collective animal body.” --> animal body politic
--> society was derived from complex interactions of pairs of individuals, understood and measured by psychological techniques, which constituted the social field space. one looked for axes of dominance as organizing principles on both the physiological and psychological levels
--> the theory of the function of male dominance nicely joins the political economy aspect of the study of animal behavior and evolution:
•competition
- division of labor
•resources allocation model
with the social integration aspect:
•cooperative coordination through leadership and social position
with the purely physiological understanding of reproductive and embryological phenomena


*Garden of Industry*

dominance as a natural property (with a physical-chemical base)

a cross ideological exercise (is not possible): science cannot be reclaimed for liberating purposes by simply reinterpreting observations or changing terminology --> (Princess Bubblegum) denying a dialectical interaction with the animals in the project of self-creation through scientific labor

(let's switch to a deeper look at primates, not as models of human beings, rather:) how they live and relate to their environment in ways that may have little to do with us [this is so helpful for everyone and is why i am interested in animal body politics] and that will surely reform our sense of relation to nature in our theories of the body politic [--> #body image]
-bodies and societies that do not depend on dominance hierarchies
--> [my work with ajayeb bestiary early animal science is about learning] ***how to build natural sciences to underpin new relations with the world*** [and that ‘history’ is not like something you hand it to someone like a cake you baked]

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

قورباغه زدن با شلنگ بیرون پریدن گلوله قرمز
مورچه روی برگ روی آب
آجر پرتاب کردن گربه بالای درخت
مورچه سوزاندن با ذره‌بین
سوسک سوزاندن با آب داغ
جوجه ته چاه



heyvan, heyvun, heyvunak, heyvunaki
حیوان، حیوون، حیوانک، حیوونکی

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

(delight in) our *sensous involvement* with the *materials[...]

[...] (?) 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: a condition of doubt (=/= a system of belief)
--✕--> Morris questions: doubt =/=? belief

Morris asks --> doubt:
•whether illness is caused by witchcraft?
•whether one's neighbor is a witch?
•*whether one is oneself a witch?*

in Buli (=/= The Magicians TV series, Harry Potter film version of magic):
[...]

[...]ted 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 satisfied the demands of evidence}--> *interrogation under torture = an experimental form of knowing in crisis*

truth value of a nonsensical confession made sensible --> human belief, action, and social practices

ethnographic style of early French ethnographers --> **learning truth from lie** was essential to representing the “primitive” reality in order to interpret it in its true picture
-Marcel Griaule's approach to fieldwork: “The crime is the fact, the guilty party the interlocutor, and accomplices are all the members of this society. [...]the abundance of pieces of evidence serving to convict appear to facilitate the inquest, but in reality they guide it into labyrinths--labyrinths that are often organized. [...]The inquest must be treated like a strategic operation.”
--> nonsense to be mastered had shifted from the demonic, incredible forces at play for the inquisitor to the misguided tall tales of the native interlocutor [--> same mistake that Federici does in her book Caliban and the Witch. Federici, in search of[...]

[...]äxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}

(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded 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 leg[...]

[...]tal disorder swirling around a placid, passive female protagonist) + empirical strain of the discourse of the witch
•Sabbat @Jassem
•
-->

pact of the witch
obsessed state of the hysteric
interplay of face and tableau

(Warburg's assertion that) donning a mask constitutes an active attempt “to wrest something magical from nature through the transformation of the person”
[putting on a mask --> transformation of the person --> obtaining omething magical from nature]

Christensen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)

(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology


(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to[...]

[...]sen formally constructing “the witch” through a cinematic iteration of metoposcopic naturalism
(metoposcopy: a form of divination in which the diviner predicts personality, character, and destiny, based on the pattern of lines on the subject's forehead.)

(Avital) scientific imperative (the demand in the 19th century for an epistemological reliable inquiry in the nature of things) <-- fascination for the freak and the occult <-- on the way to technology


(Baxstrom + Meyers > Philippe Alain-Michaud on Warburg) “in Mnemosyne, photographic reproduction is not merely illustrative but a general plastic medium to which all figures are reduced before being arranged in the space of a panel. In this way, the viewer participates in two successive transformations of the original material: different types of objects (paintings, reliefs, drawings, architecture, living beings) *are unified through photography* before being arranged on the panel stretched with black cloth. The panel is in turn *rephotographed in order to create a unique image*, which will be inserted into a series intended to take the form of a book. The atlas, then, does not limit itself to describing the migrations of images through the history of representation: it reproduces them. In this sense, it is based on a cinematic mode of thought, one that, by using figures, aims at not articulating meaning but at producing effects.”


transgressive approach to the archive:
•Gerhard Richter's Atlas, 2006
•Jean-Luc Godard's Histoire(s) du cinema, 1988
•Christensen's Häxan
•Warburg’ Mnemosyne (presentation of a series of visual cliches and stereotypes, fragments which were most likely already familiar to the viewer ~ figurative givens ==> empirical evidence + media to conjure with)
•Bataille's journal ‘Documents’ 1929–30 --> seizes cliched objects and then systematically empties them out in the course of its own expressions. Bataille and his contributors sought to defamiliarize the cliches, disturbing the placidly deceptive surface of the mundane in their fragmentary, juxtaposing methods of critique and presentation =/= Warburg + Christensen collecting mythological, figurative givens seemingly quite distant from the “really” real
}--> unsettling distances between myth and the everyday
-weave together episodic fragments in order to draw parallels (across domains of sense that cut across time) and correspondences across situations and characters
-Häxan deploys the techniques associated with Warburg's Mnemosyne and Bataille's Documents for purposes of affectively emphasizing the dark, chaotic forces that lurk under the smooth surface of the everyday
(Häxan's episodic structure ==>)
•characters seemingly out of a dead past to live again
•draw the phenomenology of the hysteric
•draw the work's own contemporary time to the surface


[...]

[...] of Weberian rationalization)

to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently


unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations

the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice


a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched


following satan's idiom...

Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence

*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves




Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”


working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)

etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight


beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space

totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor

(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot

sense of corporeal alienation from herself --> inhabit a script not her own --> critical to the “success” of witchcraft confessions

witch stereotype:
•Wild Ride
•pact with the Devil solemnized through sexual intercourse-
•cannibalism
•دیگ cauldron as the locus of the rite
•*massed, coordinated, female nature of witchcraft*


judicial machinery of a witch trial required evidence of criminal acts that (by definition) could not b[...]

[...]ower, now it is the queer) in apass

figure of man foundational to the human sciences [did not exist in classical thought ~ ajayeb] --move-to--> empirically institute the experience, witnessing, and testimony of an individual human subject = *the central linking relay between evidence, judgement, and the real* --> the ability of a human being alone to serve as the sole source of evidence in an investigation of “the real” (#feedback) [=/= Gilgamesh]
(in Qazwini's ajayebnameh the testimony of an individual human subject is ambiguous)

(Baxstrom + Foucault) *insist on rooting our form of knowledge in the figure of the human being and the human being alone --yet--> our gaze is continually drawn to a host of beings and phenomena (the witch, the spirit, the shaman, etc.) that cannot properly be enfolded back within this figure*


fabled definition (@apass relationship with defining)

fable of anthropology (a disposition with regard of the interlocutor other as truly “other”) -->
“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behavior and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” -George Stocking


...the field-worker must, under the signature of science, achieve the cultivated, sensed point of view of the other
@apass #feedback (a privileged relation with the unknown [of the other artist to whom one gives feedback])


(Baxstrom:) witch hunt = experiential engagement with nonsense

Malinowski --> how can the invisible be forced into visibility or sensibility? ==>
•connect the study of diverse human social practices to the seemingly nonsensical worlds of gods, spirits, and witches that were offered as explanations
•countering hierarchical and polygenetic theories of diversity
•appropriate empirical tests in the face of the doubled, impossible object of knowledge

*method = cultivated ability to craft experience and testimony into a “sensible” explanation of what otherwise would simply be ruled out as “nonsense”

15th century Europe ecclesiastical crisis:
[...]

[...]ting their offspring, octopus eating their mate, or cats licking their genitals and dogs filth scavenging--polluters of domestic space, cockroaches “belonging” to an stratum below civilized life, the “out of place” and abject owl, species sexual dispositions and different coupling, suggest difficulty in an anthropocentric expectation of alterity. animals simultaneously despised and admired --- the idea of eating your (so-called) “loved-one” (not a suitable object for affection) refutes cross-species identification according to anthropocentric standards. [windows of opportunity for cross-species bonding, domestic-wanna-be-feral story, myth of mental intention and animal flesh, irreducible heterogeneous ontologies and involvement of human-animal in multiple agencies, normal stories of becoming human, ]
-which animals are regarded as transgressive and ambiguous in Tehran? and which aren't?
-resisting any openness to the idea of feral animal that was expressed in my family, a meaningful discomfort, actually entails the fear of finding that we are not so different from animals, within the violent landscape of contemporary tehran.
-dust. fixation on clearing the dust out

this is one pattern of exchange.

(another interference:)
*In Pinocchio we have the excellent cooperation between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natu[...]

[...] if dogs communicate through their trainability cats redirect 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 ar[...]

[...]p, 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 obligation:) to create an atmosphere in which interesting mistakes can get made
let's bring a huge amount of material what we get into trying to digest
--> [an effect of being in Europe ==>] is harem about having a space/time to claim as my own? [it can never be?] an actual space which i can dream of and re-create and hope toward? retrieving a mythic place of origin [that cannot be rebuilt]?
•*the harem girls my ancestors* --> Cinderella

=/= longstanding tradition of seeing the female experience as ‘inherently’ painful (as in the pathos of The Handmaids Tale TV series)

(#harem Manifesto)?

..telos of anything {in apass, my bow and arrow? (=/= a generalized claim) --> it was about knowing the energy of each other and trusting the honesty and coherence of directional postures and responsive movements. [#harem] (*) one's game might be geared to build s[...]

[...]pecies (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’


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 con[...]

[...]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 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[...]

[...])

*translation: an active relation between and within languages =/= to overcome language --> is exaclty where the name politics ought to be reserve (Ranciere) (--> that is why i am doing political work [my work on: discordant objects of reference, misunderstanding, active deconstruction, etc. my ‘personal responsibility’ to insist on space of difficult translation])


unilateralism of an imposition: universality of human rights
(Keenan:) human rights = standardization of the rhetorics of claims we make on each other --therefore--> an open and undefined field of operation (and not some essence about humanity, nor law. Keenan is helping me not to think of human rights as an old fashioned, transcendental, essentialist, ontological discourse, grounding definitional basis, categorically an enemy's discourse)



military urban research (employing critical theory) --> use of theory as the ultimate ‘smart weapon’
-Deleuzian theory influences military tactics and manoeuvres --> a form of discourse between enemies
contemporary military theorists (in US TV series, re-conceptualizing the urban domain)
...military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by Artificial Intelligence, swarm intelligence, Deleuze and Guattari, Gregory Bateson, Foucault, Guy Debord, Bataille,


conflicted peace and peaceful conflict
competitive military buildup

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

Keenan on working with images politically --> *politics of exposure (or revelation ~-> forensic)*
(increasingly important dimension of political) *image-making*:
--more--> the event takes place in order to be photographed and reproduced and rebroadcast, transmitted and distributed, copied and viewed --> dissolution of the obvious political spaces =/=
--less--> making visible something that is otherwise hard to see (~= converting observation or visualization into knowledge in hopes that some kind of action will come about, based on the rational, reasonable, deliberate interpretation of those images) (<-- a lot of social justice activists, human rights organizations, and civil society practitioners are still working within this realm of the traditional image)

a bad (revelatory) theory of the (rational democratic) public sphere : “visual representation of things ==> known to a wider public ==> knowledge properly considered ==> wise decisions ==> actions”
=/= (a more properly) political moment of: inscribe images --within--> a narrative or a persuasive project --within--> a campaign that actually narrates them (captions them, makes them more available for some kind of political action) and doesn't just take for granted that their meaning follows automatically

the way performative dimension involves a kind of action that doesn't pass through the same cognitive circuits or the[...]

[...]ch of the witness

[?we are in the] era of the witness --> legitimized and validated victims

dramatic and emotional
trial: form of historical and political pedagogy
not merely to convict the accused but to “reach the hearts of men”

political agency of witnesses (survivors)

narrative in war crime investigations --> document ~= witness --> forensic approach

human remains are the kind of objects from which the trace of the subject cannot be fully removed

exhumation
examination

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

Mona is actually concerned with the separation of the spheres of ethics and knowledge
strength <--> “Gewalt” <--> valere <--> Vale <--> value*

vergüenza, a collective sentiment, of one's own dignity and self-esteem, shame
vergüenza ajena --> fremdschämen --> (one of the essential features of aidos/aidôs [αἰδώς]) the Greek personification of modesty
“bashfulness,” “diffidence,”
“respectful,” “reserved,” “revered,” --> vereor (or vereri): in religion, “to fear,” “to revere,” حرمت “to have respect or scruple for.” Vereor belongs to a family of words that derive from the Indo-European root ᵒswer-, meaning “pay attention,” like the Greek horan [ὁϱᾶν] (to look, pay attention, see)

one must take the path in exactly the opposite direction

(let's not be) persons con vergüenza : persons of honor, persons of their word. It is not so much that they keep their promises, but that they are bound by the word that they have given --> they commit to cumplire: “to carry out,” “to accomplish a mission,” [=/= “leaving your post,” Kafka]

vergüenza =/= to attack the community }-->? khashm خشم indignation: rupture of an implicit contract based on norms and conventions

the sentiment (and performance of Tarof in a weird way, and) of verguenza construct relations of social solidarity, the tie --> to give structure to the relationship to the gods (as well as that between persons) --> *aidos* becomes constitutive of shame civilization (that continues to mutate)

shame, sham, to “cover up” shameful parts
aischune[=/= *aidos* (==> *kleos* “fame”) defines the Homeric hero, aidos precisely identifies the definitive requirement of the hero, his “regard” for his philoi (φίλοι  royal friend/advisor of the king) and his genos (γένος, social group claiming common descent)]: to dishonor [=/= beauty, in Plato] }--> to disfigure; tied to the body, and in the case of the female body --> blush, as in the sensitive plant

aidos (~= moderation [provoked by the regard and expectations of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i usually don't respect/regard the expectations of the other]-->? that which separates me from the Homeric hero

(these a[...]

[...]odes of knowing as means of navigating the catastrophic (=/= simply knowledge about an object)

*reality does not have that frontal character*, (it is rather) like atmosphere, deeply embedded within context
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves

Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define everyday life itself or are grown within the everyday
*event of traumatic loss functions as:
•an event
•a figure of thought

20th century as the century of genocides : the story of collective violence from the point of view of victims and survivors <-- we must contest this story

•(Kleinman & Kleinman, Mookherjee:) victim stories ==> voyeurism
•(Fassin & Rechtman:) ubiquity of a trauma narrative substitutes critical engagement with the structural forces of inequality (or discrimination by a psychologizing of experience and of subjectivity)
> •
•

category of the victim is not transparent =/= bureaucratic legal forms through which the victim status is produced aligns with very different kinds of knowledge (shamanic, ritual, genealogical) to generate different kinds of affects

1947 Partition of India (marked by massive intercommunal killing, rape, and abduction of women) ==/==> victim
==> refugees, evacuee property, abducted persons

his fictionalized account of my responses to his questions inspired me to think
(your fictionalized account of my response to your question inspires me to think)

[to] rake the fallen leaves of language and literature to recreate experiences...

(usually) “treason” ==> massacres and violation of human rights by governmental forces

(one is forced to see events in other countiries in the light of issues pertaining to)  transitional justice and the global form of truth

unknown dnown 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[...]

[...]w 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 objects] =/= (Veena trying to) attend to regions of knowledge that can turn us to change the questions we ask

(inordinate) knowledge is contended with locally, diurnally, repeatedly

Veena asking how is this knowledge [catastrophic event secrete knowledge in the everyday] endured or contested; concealed or revealed; and what are *rhythms* of these movements?

*inordinate knowledge*
-as citizens, how do we deal with the knowledge that torture is regularly practiced as part of the security apparatus of many democracies?
-what responsibility do we bear for these practices that are before our eyes--that we cannot but help know?
-As relational beings how do we reveal the extent of sexual violence or violent histories of our families to our children and to our grandchildren?

(?to make) responses in terms of the cultural repertoire of one's own society relat[...]

[...]ics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)

normative moral claims

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


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

(mourning =/= indifference)

concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India

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


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

modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)

--> ***how does (and does not) killability shade into vitality?***

what does it mean for animals to be alive in a severely depleted habitat?

(what it means to be alive in contemporary Tehran?)

profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value

-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?
-what is the mood sounding the sacrificial death? (veneration?)

animal sacrifice has a long history in textual and oral forms of Hinduism (as do arguments against it)

آرامش قصاب
butcher's easy hospitality
slow time of sadism

#story
tribe of bonded laborer decide not to sacrifice animals. “what is the use of someone's untimely death causing another?” (and because goats are expensive nowadays). one summer all the brothers get together and call the deity. he possessed my father's brother's son. we said: “baba, we won't give you a goat. eat us if you must.” the spirit began to get angry. he said if i accept this for you, then others will do the same. (after negotiation) he ac[...]

[...]==> prompts action
[the strange connection of: action <--> ugliness]

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

postsocialist nostalgia: relational expression of a heterogeneous set of desires that operate in an intercultural network

Imre

western European longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> Europe’s repressed imperial history


two different modes of remembering:
•history --> official, public and professional modes (associated with commemoration and musealization)
•memory --> unofficial, popular and private modes (frequently associated with nostalgia and consumerism)

literary and cinematic texts that foreground some form of preoccupation with the past


-television (amnesiac qualities) has been accused of undermining memory and perpetuating a sense of ephemerality and transience --✕--> *television is also a powerful mnemonic tool*

***television is both amnesiac & mnemonic*** --> tv's propensity to resonate in different temporalities at once

television: a vehicle for the transformation of and a source of information about the quotidian ~ primary generator of collective memory [<-- this is now social media, Instagram TikTok]

historical drama
pseudo documentary
period drama series
--> providing the viewers with a “useable past” that is always related to and relevant to the concerns of the present


in the postsocialist region, the past has especially sensitive nerve endings in the present

national regimes & individual citizens alike have tried to revive usable paradigms of identity from past periods (to clear away or at least cover up the historical debris left behind)

television as a massive archaeological site

polymorphic, undefinable identity with tentacles in several fields that makes television (anon (and popular internet media) so confusing

(to understand who has stakes) in keeping history and memory practices separate and in minimizing the role of television and other popular media


(internet popular media) television's messy status as a medium

communist parties --> mould television to standardize citizens's everyday domestic life rhythms
•cheerleading docufictions
•educational quiz shows
•uplifting entertainment such as theatrical broadcasts of Russian and European classics
•doctored news
•limited advertising
•domestically produced dramatic series focused firmly on the romanticized historical past

{projective ideals =/= actual experiential realities of socialism}==> layer of ironic distance between [media (television) and its viewers]

(1990s following the Soviet empire's disintegration -->) ironic overidentification ==> nostalgia
--Imre--> e[...]

[...]iately. This question emerges in all sorts of domains of social life. As a bullshiter [*a technical term for performance-lecture: an art of interweaving logos] and program-coordinator and educator in the art sector (ZUYD Toneelacademie Maastricht), I am permanently positioned to ask this question. For this I have found the notion of trap particularly useful to think with, especially in environments where participants entice each other in their subjects of knowledge by means of an adaptable cunning intelligence.


Somewhere between fairytale findings, animal associations, and dictations from Benjamin Alberti, Eva Hayward, Marcel Detienne, and Vinciane Despret, I am thinking about traps as zoo-anthropo-biomorphic artifacts, made-up things that entice meaning across species. Trap-making is the forms of knowledge of the back-tracking of a fox, of building a fishing net, skills of a weaver, a carpenter, polymorphism of an octopus, and the rhetorical tricks of a crafty charlatan. The trap-maker imagines what is the perspective of a radically different being. If you make a trap for other animals you are fully engaged in multi-species perspectival game. You think about their bodies engaged in a perspectival communication. I argue, lures are needed to convey meaning. In this sense, lures and traps are mimetic devices, they are enticements of meaning, and we have mimetic participation with them. Mimetic is the opposite of semiotic. In mimetic participation, one does not ponder about the symbolic relations hidden in the game, but rather one is caught in its form. But this form can still be meta and not literal. In my understanding and use of lure one is not necessarily fossilized by this seizure. It is a form of figuration by trying to enact. It demands enacting something outside of you. A mimetic preoccupation is something that you cannot stop following. [*The fashion industry, marketing, conspiracy theories, art, psychology, and hunting, are all about mimesis.]


One mimetic form that I have been caught in is an old figure of children's fairy tale, Cinderella--during her confinement with the evil step-mother and two step-sisters. Cinderella is my ancestor and heritage. I was exposed as a child to Disney’s version of Grimm’s recollection of the story, which was the very last Disney movie that was officially dubbed in Farsi before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voiceover in Farsi was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in the Tehrani cabaret voice-performances. Her voice has a radically different feeling than its English original. In contrast to how “childish” the mice sounds in the movie, Cinderella's articulations are perceived much more “adult,” sexually textured, of how a young female sounded like in the Iranian consumer culture of the 1950s. Recollecting that Cinderella now reveals something else that corresponds with my research, an attic bestiary, a mini universe of meanings a[...]

[...]mimetic devices, they are enticements of meaning, and we have mimetic participation with them. Mimetic is the opposite of semiotic. In mimetic participation, one does not ponder about the symbolic relations hidden in the game, but rather one is caught in its form. But this form can still be meta and not literal. In my understanding and use of lure one is not necessarily fossilized by this seizure. It is a form of figuration by trying to enact. It demands enacting something outside of you. A mimetic preoccupation is something that you cannot stop following. [*The fashion industry, marketing, conspiracy theories, art, psychology, and hunting, are all about mimesis.]


One mimetic form that I have been caught in is an old figure of children's fairy tale, Cinderella--during her confinement with the evil step-mother and two step-sisters. Cinderella is my ancestor and heritage. I was exposed as a child to Disney’s version of Grimm’s recollection of the story, which was the very last Disney movie that was officially dubbed in Farsi before the Iranian revolution. Cinderella’s voiceover in Farsi was the continuum of an actor-training that originated in the Tehrani cabaret voice-performances. Her voice has a radically different feeling than its English original. In contrast to how “childish” the mice sounds in the movie, Cinderella's articulations are perceived much more “adult,” sexually textured, of how a young female sounded like in the Iranian consumer culture of the 1950s. Recollecting that Cinderella now reveals something else that corresponds with my research, an attic bestiary, a mini universe of meanings and beings with whom she is in conversation with and in a permanent collaboration of worlding.


Cinderella lives with the precarity of a family who torment and insult her on a daily basis. I kept asking myself, why doesn't she become estranged? Cinderella is circumscribed in all sorts of ways, yet she is capable of knowing new things about the animals she lives. She incorporates a form of transhumanity that lies in (1) the way she is inhabiting and composing with a place that she is not a master of nor can she escape from, and (2) in the way animals give her power and meaning. Can we think of Cinderella as an amateur ethologist? A skilled practitioner of attention to animals, for whom the ways that attention is addressed matters. A Cinderella who does her job is bizarre. It engages us in a totally different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of evil circumstances. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present, inviting more interesting questions about her labor of knowledge production. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of imagining what animals are capable of, [...]

[...]different manner than a Cinderella who is the victim of evil circumstances. Not considered as a victim, she becomes much more present, inviting more interesting questions about her labor of knowledge production. This opened for me a space to think about her inhuman gesture of endurance, her know-how of being in a world that proliferates with chaotic zones of improvisation with animals. From Cinderella one can learn cross-species politeness and exploring ways of imagining what animals are capable of, with and because of her labor. This is her mice-trap. Steeped in routines of schizo-affective hallucinating with talking animals, her technique of trap-making is not a category of human behavior, but a model for a form of intelligence. I argue that as a lover and interlocutor of mice, her traps are in the form of a net in which her subject becomes entangled. Lures are frequently needed to prompt meaning to an animal. Cinderella to the mice, is an alluring producer of sociality. Her mice-trap produces the meaning of the social. The mouse is captured not as prey but as material comrade and ally.


[....]


Sometimes there is no maker behind the trap. They are created by the world, by random, emergent, coalescence of elements in the environment. In a witness-fable by Kelileh o Demneh we have a moment of problematization of cunning intelligence. The story goes, once a fox was walking down his forest when he noticed animals were escaping from something. Upon further investigation he found out they were running from a special sound that scared them, a loud drum. At this stage, he is curious but vigilance and not afraid, because he knows the forest is all deceit and trickery. His inner thought is opportunistic or playful, he thinks there must be something juicy there that I can get my hands on. Lured in the other direction than other animals, he goes to the source of the sound, and puts his paws in it. He realizes that the sound was created by the force of wind moving a tree branch to hit the remains of an animal fat and skin caught in the branches. Disappointed and victorious, he calls the illusion and moves on. Here we have the fox revealing the techne of the lie: an assemblage of skin, fat, tree, and wind, that others are trapped in. What is the problem with the fox? What kind of wit or intelligence does he possess? Is the fox detached from the mimesis of the forest? How do we not get caught in certain traps? My question here is, in which context do you say yes to the trap?


The fox of Kelileh o Demneh is smart, someone who embodies “metis.” Metis is ancient Greek for wiley intelligence. Metis [pointed out by Detienne] refers to patterns of thought relating to an effective adaptable cunning, the exact opposite of contemplating about unchanging essences. The art of metis encompasses a coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviors that cultivates shohood (intuition شهود), m[...]

[...]nimals, he goes to the source of the sound, and puts his paws in it. He realizes that the sound was created by the force of wind moving a tree branch to hit the remains of an animal fat and skin caught in the branches. Disappointed and victorious, he calls the illusion and moves on. Here we have the fox revealing the techne of the lie: an assemblage of skin, fat, tree, and wind, that others are trapped in. What is the problem with the fox? What kind of wit or intelligence does he possess? Is the fox detached from the mimesis of the forest? How do we not get caught in certain traps? My question here is, in which context do you say yes to the trap?


The fox of Kelileh o Demneh is smart, someone who embodies “metis.” Metis is ancient Greek for wiley intelligence. Metis [pointed out by Detienne] refers to patterns of thought relating to an effective adaptable cunning, the exact opposite of contemplating about unchanging essences. The art of metis encompasses a coherent body of mental attitudes and intellectual behaviors that cultivates shohood (intuition شهود), makr (cunning مکر), ferasat (perspicacity فراست), farib (dissimulation فریب), badiheh (improvisation بدیهه), hushiar (vigilant attention هوشيار), be-ja (timeliness بجا). In the world of Kelileh o Demneh you are a hunter and the world is made of traps and animals are full of cunning. This is precisely the metis’ field of operation, a world of movement and ambiguity in the battle of perspectival will. For the Greeks and Kelileh o Demneh, continuous metamorphoses is the name of the game. A disconcerting divided shifting world of multiplicity that creates (1) polymorphous monsters (mistrustful mobile elusive beings) and (2) metamorphing minds (mistrustful mobile elusive minds).


The notion of metis that we have is articulated in Greek deities powers. It is the form of knowledge of Athena, Hephaestus, Hermes, Aphrodite, Zeus, and Prometheus. The Greek gods often found themselves in either position of victory or as vanquished. Metis is the power of binding in situations of confrontation.


The fox and octopus master of bonds


Trap is polymorphism, the opposite of what it seems to be, in Greek, dolos mechanos. Dolos readers to cunning, that which is woven, braided or interlacing. It is about the ancient techniques of fitting together different pieces that articulates a whole. A skill of making knots, meshes and nets that surprise, trap and bind. A net is the invisible (mesh of) bonds, the favorite technique of metis. Bond is the combination of two things, weave and twist.

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

[*]bond = weave + twist
[*]net: invisible (mesh of) bonds <-- favorite technique of metis


arm = bond
every part of its body is a *bond* which can secure anything (but nothing can seize)


*fox = a living bond* (can bend[...]

[...]st can make the weaker argument triumph over the strong ---> go to Kelile Demne cunning intelligence


(dolos -->) [*]cunning: woven, braiding or interlacing, *fitted together* <-- ***ancient techniques that use the pliability and torsion of plant fibers to make knots, ropes, meshes and nets to surprise, trap and bind*** <-- the idea that ***many pieces can be fitted together to produce a well-articulated whole*** (~=? art)


pliability انعطاف
polymorphism
duplicity + equivocality
inversion + reversal
}--> *attributes of curve*


ultimate expression of curve --> the “O”, circle: the bond that is perfect because it completely turns back on itself, is closed in on itself, with neither beginning nor end, front nor rear, and which in rotation becomes both mobile and immobile, moving in both directions at once
--> giving birth to its opposite
“machines” --> properties of the circle
/>

-gu --> used to indicate curving
-kamp --> used to refer to whatever is curved, pliable or articulated
the fossil of fire goes back before the wild-life

the history of fire related to the history of forest

In the 1950s, government officials in Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca--in southern Mexico--blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of theof the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history of their forests. Clearly, the communities internalized parts of the state-sponsored degradation discourse. (However, discourse analysis is not enough; it is all too easy to treat discourse as a monolithic structure of ideas[...] ) [...] These discourses require a threat, a source of chaos and disorder to which the moral regeneration of the progressive discourse can provide a solution. In the case of the Sierra juarez, forest fires provide this opposition. [...] It is exactly this resistance of the natural world to discursive domination that is one of the themes of this article. [1]

[1]ANDREWSA LVADORMA THEWS - suppressing FIRE AND MEMORY: ENVIRONMENTALDE GRADATIONAN D POLITICALRE STORATION INT HES IERRAJ UAREZO F OAXACA, 1887-2001

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

Jinn older and Man

ecology of the Jinn


(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire[...]

[...]rkr>
the fossil of fire goes back before the wild-life

the history of fire related to the history of forest

In the 1950s, government officials in Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca--in southern Mexico--blamed forest destruction upon the local indigenous communities. Fire, as a symbol of disorder, became the target of state control and the subject of a state-sponsored discourse of environmental degradation. [...] Fire suppression frequently has been part of state policies of social control. [...] The vision of fire as destructive, part of the state narrative [...] How has the memory of the traditional use of fire by indigenous communities been suppressed? [...]State political myth has obscured community memories of fire as a force in the forest, and as a tool for human use. [...] Why the indigenous communities of the Sierra Juarez no longer talk about the long-term history of their forests. Clearly, the communities internalized parts of the state-sponsored degradation discourse. (However, discourse analysis is not enough; it is all too easy to treat discourse as a monolithic structure of ideas[...] ) [...] These discourses require a threat, a source of chaos and disorder to which the moral regeneration of the progressive discourse can provide a solution. In the case of the Sierra juarez, forest fires provide this opposition. [...] It is exactly this resistance of the natural world to discursive domination that is one of the themes of this article. [1]

[1]ANDREWSA LVADORMA THEWS - suppressing FIRE AND MEMORY: ENVIRONMENTALDE GRADATIONAN D POLITICALRE STORATION INT HES IERRAJ UAREZO F OAXACA, 1887-2001

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

Jinn older and Man

ecology of the Jinn


(Qur'an)
raging fire
scorched by burning fire
striking sparks of fire
and roasting at hell-fire
the fire of Allah, kindled
...



bringing together of two homogeneous blocks of material in a given, already-inhabited space

as if we knew what space and time mean



“the desert bighorn is an animal shaped by ice. [...] the design of wild sheep is very much an expression of arctic cold.” (Meloy)
(what the design of fire is as expression of? what shaped fire? ice?)
(we are shaped also by fire)

how you go from lizard to bird?
it must have been through the behavior of lizard that ‘birdness’ has come to be possible. a certain trait of behavior have allowed the lizard find itself in the air.


ice age
story of fire, story of grass, ...

after the establishment of a land-based flora (Middle Ordovician period, 470 million years ago) and permitting the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere it permitted the possibility of wildfire.

Fire also became more abundant when grasses radiated and became the domin[...]

[...] incompatible with that of the paper. paper burns fire off! the combustion emerging elements energized by their contact fuels a sudden blow of increase in their excited entropy. flame. action is the breeze that death digs. foam knows no halt. the focus is noised and seeds location. place penetrates in shattery nozzles originating from thousands of nowheres. inferno's insurance is about aggression of hot.

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

A) Accident, Action, Adrenaline, Aggressive, Aid, Aircraft, Alarm, Alert, Ambulance, Apprehension, Arson, Ash, Assess, Assist
B) Bad, Barricades, Battle, Blacken, Blame, Blanket, Blast, Blaze, Blister, Blow out, Breeze, Burning, Burns, Bystander
C) Car, Careless, Catastrophe, Caution, Challenge, Char, Chimney, Choice, Claim, Conflagration, Consume, Consumption, Contain, Control, Coordination, Crackle, Crash
D) Damage, Death, Destruction, Detect, Dig, Direction, Dirty, Dispatch, Drama
E) Electrical, Embers, Emergency, EMT, Engulf, Experience, Explode, Extinguish
F) Facts, Failure, Fared, Fascination, Fell, Fierce, Fire-break, Firefighter, Fireplace, Flames, Flammable, Flash, Foam, Focus, Fright, Fuel
G)
H) Halt, Happening, Holocaust, Home, Hose, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone



(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them[...]

[...]e, Hot, Hot spot, House, Hydrant
I) Inaccessible, Inferno, Injury, Insurance, Interfere, Investigation
J) Judgment, Jurisdiction
K) Kindle, Knowledge
L) Laboring, Life-threatening, Lightening strike, Limitations, Lives, Location, Losses, Luck
M) Malfunction, Matches, Mechanical, Medical attention, Memory, Mesmerize, Misery
N) Needs, Nine-one-one, Noise, Nozzle
O) Observe, Odor, Ordeal, Origin
P) Paramedic, Penetration, Place, Police, Potency, Potential, Prevention, Progress, Prone, Pumps
Q) Quench, Quick
R) Reaction, Repellent, Requirement, Residue, Risk
S) Safety, Scenario, Set, Shatter, Shelter, Siren fire truck, Situation, Smell, Smoke, Smoke jumper, Smokey the Bear, Smoldering, Smother, Sprinkler system, Statement, Stop, Strategy, Strength, Stressful, Stretcher, Suffering, Susceptible, Swath
T) Tactic, Target, Terror, Thick, Threaten, Trailer, Training, Trees, Trench
U) Uncontrolled, Urgent
> V) Victim, Vigilant, Volunteers
W) Watch, Water, Weakness, Weather, Wilderness, Wind, Worse
X) X-ray
Y) Yelling
Z) Zone



(Ajayeb)
Know! That I saw in fire many benefits, insomuch benefits that ‘he’ set in fire, the intellects of India and Greece erred and prostrated this fire-thing and this betrayal stayed in magus [Zoroastrians] and they became fire-worshiper until it became certain that the God's guidance offers and just with reason alone work cannot be done fully and if they worship fire of its benefits then in mud there is more benefits than that and in water more benefits than there is in fire and if The Creator wants to make wanderers of a folk he infects them with a substance as he infected the Indians with worshiping cow and Christians with worshiping the hoof of Christ's donkey and the pagans with worshiping idol and matter
and we shall mention the attributes of fire and its properties:
Know! That firat fire has taken the whole world of universe and no stone and no wood is not uncharged with fire. If a fool takes 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

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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 it[...]

[...]e of “participation,” a calculative and organizational relatoin of the individual within the group? (and perceiving the so-called “inanimate” entities) --- shaped by the game -- a participant amidst other participants oriented by the action
(David Abraham: Perception is Participation, in an animistic logic)

mind, memory, --> cognition and communication --> reference --> imitating the animal's calls ==> stylized performances ==> (a repertoire of) symbolized references (sign language?) ==> accumulation of synonims (--> we are already consuming symbolic ambition) --> early metaphores --> narratives get out of hand (--> “concrete” is invented) --> [...] (--> narration of past is invented which is always about the future) --> codification of world without tense or causality in language ----> tense & causality ----> pervasive truths
-this diagram is about the future for the subject whom is using the signs, telling the others where the game animal is and will be. in this text i am trying to pantomime a mimicked reference (of where the [game] animal is), sharing the idea of a thing that is syntaxically there, so we can run it. every utterance is about where i have last seen the “animal,” and how fat or far it is. [running had “magical ends” - Peter Nabokov, ‘Indian Running’ (Santa Barbara: Capra, 1981)]

symbolism --> man traveling within himself --> need to travel outside an infinitely larger reality ==> beyond --- different brand(s) of infinity

secular hunting --- the hunt becomes monstrous. i am calling for an old sacred hunt [sustained in myth and ceremony?] of concepts?
-hunt is gestalt(en)

(with our) hopes and tropes

boundary creatures and matters -- fire's function/act was peripheral, was in the threshold world of human passages(?) [then it made an entrance]

humans’ mimetic participation with fire

infinitely complex affinities



to be noted the nuanced differences between talking and telling (harf-zadan/goftan)
*talking* can not be accompanied by a direct object (the talked) and *telling* might not be accompanied by a direct subject (you are told without a direct teller.) so talking is about the talker and telling is about the told, the ear.
(you *ask fire questions, but you *listen to stone what it is telling. [what fire suggesting, offering to the sense? (i am thinking Ajayeb)] with fire you can debate but this debate is bulshit since you are under its spectacularity and authority, superior to the (inflammable) world, became the domminent contemplated object, administrating conditions of existence, you can never touch the fire, you can never become ‘bodies’ with fire, it is immune from human activity, endusing one-way communication (auto-governed gusture of comminution), garanteeing an abstract condition of hierarchical power. but stone ‘is’ for touching and bodying, sensuous t[...]