[...]. 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) bette[...]

[...]em of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.


lemon grass plant, marigold

Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92

newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)

mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)

The shock of new media is as old as the hills

Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.

(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only fo[...]

[...] multiplicities of) unlinked morphologies

(fire text)
to practice dichotomy (and its connected paths) one must know that its clefts follow and overlap the ancient mythical narrative (in which worlds are torn ...)


when geometry is born myth falls silent

(the ancient journey) from islands to catastrophes, from passage to fault, from bridge to well, from relay to labyrinth

the original function

the “new space” is always universal

the space of reason is universal, within it there are no more encounters

one can walk on two or four or three legs ----> how the earth is measured
(before entering the Ajayeb website asking that question?)

(a dangerous) flock of chaotic morphologies
(is this subdued or maintained in Ajayeb?)

(i am also more interested in) the aged Europe asleep beneath the mantle of reason and measure

(Leibniz said that one should listen to) old wives’ tales***

The Old Wives’ Tales

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

recapitulation
appropriation
=/= fabrication
creation

what are the ‘forces in motion’ in Ajayeb? What are:
Instruments of leverage,
machines,
producers of forces,
for packing,
for transporting,
as source,
as origine,


the applied geometry of our relation to the world

tools are dominated by form

virtual velocities
objective world
geometric reasoning

industrial revolution, a revolution operating on matter
one takes force or produces it

matter transformed by fire
Turner saw  the introduction of fiery matter into culture

an axis of (roaring) fire

matter is no longer left in the prison of diagram, fire desolves it, makes it vibrant, tremble, oscillate, makes it explode into clouds.

New matter ==> new world

fire delivers one from the ice***

steam engine triumphs over forced immobility, inertia

the cut of the reference

product of furnace, the cold product of fusion

old-style riddle

navigate between two pronouns

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

properly formed cluster (of letters) = standardization

standard compromises the non-essential, or inessential, those without meaning

what is a logician interested in?
Form --> pathology

misguided sciences

if static is accidental, background noise is essential to communication

pathology
spocken: stammering, mispronounciation, regiomil accents, dysphonia, cacophony
technical: background noise, jamming, static, cut-off, hyteresis, various interrupt[...]

[...]l envelope that saves a heart full of “list of specifications”...)
the visit will be to the ‘European Committee for Standardization’ (CEN, French: Comité Européen de Normalization), one of the EU fostered nonprofit public institutions of the cutting-edge development regarding ambitious notion of ‘data,’ ‘systematic knowledge,’ and ‘specifications’. the excursion will be oriented towards a meeting between the participants of advanced performance and scenography studies and the representatives of CEN, and encourages a run between the ontological demands of international economy and contemporary art, their disastrous split, and where their formations meet and intersect.

KEYWORDS: cosmology, experimentation, existence, specification, future, knowledge, irrationality, permanence and substance, technological acts--of naming, a path of becoming--on the grid of technological dominion, suspicious partnership of “advanced democracies” and “high technology"--what allows their mutuality?, standard-testing--which sectors of existence it is traversing?, pre-technological traces of cognitive normalization, the very little difference between specification and “the real thing,” THE origin of the demand for rigorous specification, migration of questions out of the areas of instrumental fitness, human relation to the surrounding world, impoverished zoologies--under techno-epistemo-anthropocentric values, squeezing prehistoric modes of weakening subjectival normativity--a field that today gets heavily technologized,

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

to bring our needs and lures towards each other
bring my lure to the table (that thing which i can't stop following)

who/what are you pregnant with?

(that is what you are proposing)

(that is to play with the ‘histories of body and mind’ [Haraway] you inherit --> for me is to play with the pre-subjective singularities)
[inheritance is of great importance for our research. it is about the passing of obligations from something ghost-like. i am sure we have other modes of response available to us other than how Hamlet takes in what is inherited to him, other ways of responding to the ghostly beings that talk to us from death. (inheritance ~= inhabiting spirit [they cannot be possess as a piece of property], reading inflaming flashes of remote spirits [--> is this hear from one another looks like? is technology placed at the source of this reflection?--technology itself answers the call--(Avital)]) could we work with Ophelia's kind of #Wortsalad instead? (Salad-e Kalame, khoresht-e kalame; same thing happens to Shirin of in Khosro Shirin, but unlike Shakespeare, Nezami allows another poetic drift;) Heidegger's “die Sprache spricht” : language is monologue --?--> schizophrenia and schizophrenic discourse --?--> structure of speaking]
[speaking asserts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* s[...]

[...]rts a certain temporal priority which we must undermine]
-listening *before* speaking
-“We hear language speaking” (Heidegger); a non-organic speaking; language is not equipped with organs of speech? (Avital)


serious joking / joking seriousness [Haraway]
joke/jest/gesture
a space of play --> where ideas come in to being
(story of ‘or’. is it where the original joker came? using or instead of and)
(there is no ‘or’ in nature!? what are the earlier forms of or that we can trace in cave paintings or tool makings?)

**if you don't take my idea seriously i will be utterly incomprehensible**

crafts-person for the building of lures of propositions --> ‘abstractions’
(abstraction is fragile and can hold worlds together)


where Europe comes from? (woher kommst du? i am born in, i am born in, ...)


what animates us rather than what civilizes us

/>

(to Shabnam:) to ‘mourn with’ rather than ‘mourn about’
(-about =/= -with)
(structure of mourning)


to break in the philosophical and biological headquarters (and steal their stories, their abstractions, etc.)
exchanging and sharing instruments and languages



this is about building something that is ‘good enough’ to get you through...

these practices doesn't necessarily produce ‘separate entities’ (indivis)
am i fantasizing creating a monolithic structure of ideas?


critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing
(like an octopus in a lure)

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

stories that can interrupt death (of our time, anthropocene, etc.)
(example of biology-story into culture-story: (1) ladder of evolution --> progress (2) sperm/egg story --> gender performance)

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

to make mistakes as fast as possible


... move across earth space and narrative space


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Haraway]

the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necess[...]

[...]doors, ?, talk, model, puppet
*using stop-motion animation, clay formation, material animal facial properties

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

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

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

[Haraway]

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


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

can we do without instrumentalization?

categories of killable--the question of how we kill

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

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

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


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

(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not[...]

[...]always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.


epidemic friendly

the flow of disease are major international research matter

eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship
(my work on ajayeb and question of heritage has been exactly against that position)

the radical anti-food-industry position is a radical liberal theory turns all working animals into (at best) *heritage-animals* ~= animal to be preserved as much as possible separate from human use --> “all human use is bad”
(--✕--> we know that the question of use and instrumentalism cannot for mortal finite beings rid out of liberation theory and practice)
[for example the disposition of the film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, where at the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]

**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)

*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]

killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equalr />
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong

“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find yourself crippled

posthumanist think of themselves as “better than”, more in possession of a “real” understanding of the nature of contemporary world, beyond the critique of technology

the politics of it all...

[we have never been -->] human : being on the side of the one who developed technology to rea[...]

[...]g to communicate the ‘importance’ of her contents.) (trauma-story almost always silences other stories. -- she is compelled by her own storytelling --> baring witness to the injustice therefore resisting it.) --when the victimized personal veils the larger context of evil, the illusion of the true perpetrators - which is around you. (she stated the danger which is all around us.)
-the issue of immediacy for Xiri
-‘you can only heal what you have wounded’ (Wagner's Parsifal “only the weapon that made it will ever cure the wound.”)--what does this mean for our caring activities? @Sina: is this what you mean by western modern rationalization, and that is why you are thinking within the western/eastern philosophies, is the modern tools the antidote to themselves? (this is too soon for me to say and understand this question.)

what is my ‘will to’?
Xiri wants to abolish injustice?
Thiago, abolish selfishness?
Maarten, abolish weakness?
Aela, abolish entropy?
Sana,
Seba, abolish enmity?
Lili, abolish feelings?
Varinia, abolish obedience? [--what shortens our leash?]
Sina, abolish selfhood?
Vladimir, abolish non-disambiguity?

@Esta, her enunciated need for “framework” [~->? instruments of economization], could she be needing “pathway”: path instead of frame, and way instead of work. [frame =/=? overflowing (--> my method of script?); identity =/=? avidity, hers;]
interplay of scales
the scale of intimacy, (of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings)
data and surveillance and seduction
intimacy: still an unpredictable force?
intimacy: the biological spring from which affect drinks?
how Esta's proposal is capable of traversing from the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks?

[and when i say “abolish,” i am using a word that is about rendering something obsolete, mansukh, canceling, making reading to get rid of it, and this is not the same as destroying.]

@Arianna, ‘cleaning agents,’ to toxicity? how can we learn to live with “toxic animacy”(Chen)? dirt: “consequences overwhelming their cause” (Latour)
-narratives about urgent necessity: that we need to understand more in order to cure, prevent, construct, excel, survive.
*afterlife toxicities (?)

@Lili: cycle of planets instead of heartbeat of a planet. tuning in the soup of planets, instead of getting the pulse of a singular planet. the nebulous milk way of liquid bodies, instead of rigid mass of individual blood--Pluto.

@Varinia: (in her dog video, regarding her engagement with the law and the question of comparative thinking:) what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
-is her model based on the idea that beings exist as individual? (is this a ‘difference’ that her work produces?)

@Agnes: you are a response to the[...]

[...]~= institution)
•negation =/= affirmation

Sade's three different forms of inconvenience:
1. cruel tableaux vivants --> emotional inconvenience
2. contradictory unreasonableness (for example “religion should be abolished  ==> a republican man to be a good husband and father” + “family should be destroyed, all women belong to all men”) --> intellectual inconvenience
3. (grotesque goal of) Sade aims at describing the whole of reality (seeking to say the last word about reality, *to say everything*) --Blanchot--> *the fury of writing* or *the revolt of writing* (Sade = abundant prolific excessive writer, *writing in an exuberant way* [while in prison for 32 years]) --> anesthetic inconvenience

Blanchot's Sade = ideal writer
•we should not understand Sade's oeuvre in an intellectual way (there is no message or insight)
◦disappearance of meaning in the materiality of language -->{death of content ==Saussure==> ‘the signifier'}--> reading Sade = accessing the rough meaningless materiality of language itself
•we should not understood Sade's content as a reflection of an authentic self (un moi profond) --> Sade as a person disappears into the background
◦we should not understood his writing as an instrument he uses to express content --> ‘language = an independent reality’ (=/= Sade as a master of language)

(Hegel and) Sartre --> literary works must be engaged and should express the author's involvement with reality
(for Sartre:) writer: someone who thinks about the
current course of the world and who wants to change the world with his literature
--> “language = a loaded gun” (literature should be understood by reference to the message)
=/= Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Ricardou, Eugène Ionesco
=/= Sade > Blanchot: writing need to bring the reader in touchwith the materiality and the autonomy of language


we never read just once

logos: the word that names and relates properly --> great truths are told in the light of day and discourse

Sade --Blanchot--> search of a new lucidity (pursued by clear assured decisive aifrma­tiom =/= interrogatory mode)

xxxxxxxx

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

[D+G]

the intersection of concrete forms ==> abstract figure
[bringing objects close to each other produces story*]

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

my engagement with other apass participants, a form of critique as part of an ‘ecology of practice’ (Stengers)
-what are the questions (i could ask) that make you the most articulate?
-to feel what questions, passions, modes of attention animate one another
-to find yourself moved by their concerns
-what we articulate with our bodies? --> what do our gestures mean?
-what do they activate? ----> they don't always enact a precise language --(ra[...]

[...]> -also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)

unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies

(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”

Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”

(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)

a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence?
[the frankenstein's techno-monsters, is modeled after who? and who is modeled after it? wondrously, murderously walking around...]
(‘second-birthing’: one of the deadly stories of killing: in the first-birthing we have merely birth to the earthly soil from the woman, and then the achievement of the tragically self-realized purpose of tragic consiousness, concretized and distilled by ed by Sartre) “dire myths of self-birthing”... --> we must resist the stories of guilt laden knowledge and consciousness

unrestricted vision
presented as utterly transparent

***particularity and embodiment (of all vision) [not necessarily organic]
usable and not innocent

“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name.”

‘partial perspective’ (what does she mean?)
==> become answerable for what we learn how to see. (Helen Verran: accountability; Isabelle Stengers: milieu thinking; Latour: ground;)
(partial way of organizing world)
unlocatable =? irresponsible (knowledge claims)
partial --> possibility of webs of connections: solidarity in politics and shared conversation[...]

[...]ia” --> Greek for “split brain”  (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])

subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional

(an instruments of vision:) optics : politics of positioning --> one example of optical illusion: rationality (projected from nowhere comprehensivel)

(some perspective are more guilty : master point of view)
No one ever accused the God of monotheism of objectivity, only of indifference. The god trick is self-identical, and we have mistaken that for creativity and knowledge, omniscience even. (self-identical [having self identity] =/=! creativity/knowledge)

Technology: skilled practices. (How to see? Where to see from? and so on.)

@Sana, ‘observation’ and ‘technologies of positioning’

how to see?
the science question in military<br /> the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...

master theory =/= webbed accounts
(what does she mean when she dichotomises theory and account?)
instead of (creating and mastering) ‘theory’ she proposes webbing ‘accounts’***
-‘webs’ can have the property of being systematic
systematic: deep filaments and tenacious tendrils into time, space, and consciousness. systems are dimensions of world history.


she suggests to be accountable for (the intricacies of) visualization technologies in which we are embedded that we will find metaphors and means for understanding
and intervening in the *patterns of objectification* in the world.
--> politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating
partiality =/= universality
*partiality: view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, *structuring, and st[...]

[...]re capital ==> big epistemic/financial pay-offs or costly dead ends [=/= (Stengers's notion of speculative) *being at risk with ones claims* =/= received notions of authority or rationality]

(an abstract challenge:) to bring specificity and imaginative traction

*speculation is a more feral practice
(wild) speculation [always improper] =/= proper science : rational production of univerasal knowledge
-speculation is not about what there is but what there might be
-speculation is on the side of the possible =/= probable (--> Stengers)

speculative operations (quietly) insist that *another world is here* (--> my ajayeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres

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

the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)

what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?

[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror

(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)

“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”

a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century

the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters [...]

[...]yeb) =/= the smooth operation of business-as-usual (,, interrupting it)

for my ajayeb, how can i carve out a space to nurture my idea? --> nest-building --position/place--> digging out a bit of earth

*speculative empiricism : scientific + narrative
working with ajayeb so that it might stimulate a specualtive empiricism for composing more livable worlds --> ajayeb's storied biospheres

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

the notion of ‘magic’ in popular TV series, such as ‘Harry Potter’ franchise and ‘The Magicians’ among many others, and instrumentalization. magic as information technology that is completely instrumentalized. the capitalist ideology of ‘tool’ and ‘usefulness’ are insinuated heavily in the hipster figures of ‘The Magicians’ in the way that they interupt history and knowledge-burdened living. “stop the history lessen! tell me how do we kill the beast with it?” (the stupidity of the hipster hero moving through the matrix of merely teleological phenomena, stripping pleasure off thinking...)
(utopian?)

what a magic spell is good for if it is not a leverage?

[title]
The Magicians and The Absolute Freedom and Terror

(‘The Magicians’:) magic: instrumentalizing the logos
knowledge is literal --> magic spells are literal {the result of magic spell is predetermined}. in this case, the magic is both an instrument of power and renunciation of knowledge
(Heideggerian) techne of the Western project is an instrumentality that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)

“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”

a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century<br />
the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)

‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> [...]

[...] that takes over, arrests, or enframes what it desires to manipulate or contain. (Christian Hubert's notes)
=/= poiesis, a bringing-forth (in Heidegger: blooming of the blossom) (also Greek)

“[(for the techno-monster-magicians) everything is] code to be cracked”

a kind of fantasies that Don Ihde calls techno-fantasy, which have been part of the transhumanism since 19th century

the toxic distinction between techne from episteme (since Homer). ‘The Magician’ suggests magic as a technology or tool apart from its context of involvements and referentialities : a hermeneutic or alterity relation =/= (Heidegger:) the tool is an embodiment relation
(one of the characters even states that humans without magic invented computers as replacement)

‘The Magician’ dismisses the generation of knowledge in the praxis of tool-use. science/magic is pragmatic relation of equipment or tools as ready-to-hand. the ideology of a knowledge relation: magic (as tool) is present-at-hand --> ontological relationship to the world (----the characters want to go and have an icecream when they are finished with all the magical fights.)
this notion of magic as tool (=/= epistemological object) in use achieves (what Don Ihde calls) *instrumental transparency* --> It “withdraws” when in use, but becomes conspicuous again when broken or missing [--> this is precisely the standard account of technology in high-techno-scientific capitalist sunny societies] --> the idea that magicians can “forget” (or “lose”) their magic suggests a guarantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)

(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)

(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental 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 compl[...]

[...]arantor of instrumental transparency of magic (or knowledge).
-the popular vision of magic hinges around the desire for total transparency**
-this instrumental rationality is the heart of the modernizing project (which characterizes capitalism) --> the value-free calculable efficiency of administrative processes (--> a project of domination and denial of dependence) (=?=> Auschwitz)

(how to make The Magician's bounded utilitarian individualism unthinkable?)

(Frankfurt School:) technology ~= instrumental 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” : 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-f[...]

[...]iting of space with critters (you can't only talk about capital, land, labor without having a multispecies affair)


Badiou's points on accelerate:
•unifying us around negativity
•future of western world
•question of private property --> key of soical organization


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

#work on video series (with? Christian, Esta,)
messy short videos (for youtube or other places)
1. critique of magic in cinema
2. representation of knowledge in cinema
3.
to perform past and present alarmingly simultaneously, to intermix the directions of causation and influence, they cannot be linear and progressive, against a production of present [presentism]



#create identity research center for/with my work
1. harem (حرم)
2. ajayeb (عجایب)
3. wortsalad
4. erklammern (with Foad)
5. san'at-e mojarad-sazi (صنعت مجردسازی with Foad)
6. garden (باغ)
7.


#what am i learning from Hiwa's Chicago Boys project?
history, recent region departures, study group, music, jam, more and more people together with their voices and stories, faces, sing, play, discomfort in instrument, tour, collectivity, sojourn in stage, conviviality, cover song,
-when i look at the videos of the project i feel like i want to do or be part of something like that, i want those qualities, i want the way people are looking and feeling like there.

#i am learning from Kohn that the survival is complicated, from Haraway that world works by excess and therefore filled with hope, with Sennett and Delanda a better account of socio-material history, from Ahmed a different understanding of psychoanalysis, from Barad poetry and argumentation, from Scher the effort needed to become interested, from Kenney that there is no need for a “standard language” to describe your interventions or to produce a terventions or to produce a body of knowledge about your matters of concern,

(this is one place that i am recognizing and foregrounding a binary structure:)
•women in my life: Avital, Haraway, Ahmed, Scher, Barad, Despret, teaching me science and art, attentive modes of differential reading and writing, practices of care and concern
•men in my life: Serres, Sennett, Delanda, Levinas, Anand, teaching me a non-guilt-driven knowledge of history and past, a different mode of remembrance which provokes a different mode of response and responsibility


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

alive --[]--> dead --[]--> ancestor

what provokes storytelling?

(Harawayian) inhabiting ==> responsibility --> alignment

(a split-self at home with) contradictions ==> dealing with situated knowledge }--> this is about ‘ongoing’

note to self: not to throw away the contaminated concept that we have, (f[...]

[...]ort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?

sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?

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

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

anger, pain, misery, ...

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

my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry

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

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

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

sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


she said “here [...]

[...]t's biograpphy, is a world, is a compositional node
matter-form worlding landscape and event --> the saint is is sent into a spin
a perspectival agency --> things jump into relation + unglued
Tazkirat al-Awliya: energies distribute across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects

accrual and loss

...realm of killed off things

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

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

Stewart: theory (drawn through writing) = compositional attunement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


Aristotle ==> totality of causal explanation of the event
his theory of four causes [material, efficient, formal, final] is limited by the eternal relation between the subject (the creator) and the object (t[...]

[...] perverted causality


[Deleuze:] when the causality relation one of the two elements (cause or effect) differs in nature from the other (one is corporeal, physical and the other is incorporeal) --> [they foster a relationship of] quasi-causality =/= relationship of expression

‘necessity’ belongs to an official order called *destiny: a sort of teleology of the system of causes*, a unity of the correspondent quasi-causality (=/= relation between cause and effect)
--> independence is installed in the presence of necessity


[Leibniz:] *causality = con-possibility*
the event is in a monadic world were everything is signs (analogies significant at several levels) --> a fish pond in which each fish is itself a fish pond
Leibniz's world is created and destroyed by harmonic or discordant correlations


“anxiety as cause”

[Holakouee's manner of interpreting reality -->] best therapy or remedy for anxieties:
•causality
•system: a group of necessary laws and rules
}--> no victim, no bully [~= opening the field of knowledge ~=>? erasing the sense of responsibility]
{Despret}--✕--> our experiences sometimes require us (to go farther that Holakouee's instrumentalism) ****to discover a place where disorder may be reestablished in the movement and contradiction**** [that i believe is urgently needed in Iran today =/= enlightening]


a space regulated by laws of stoic causality is the space where multiplicity can be reestablished --> *notional quasi-causality* [notional: gedanklich, تصور، انديشه]

[an stoic anecdote:]
“When, each evening, the guru sat down to proceed with the evening prayer the ashram's cat was in the way and distracted the monks so, he ordered that the cat should be attached during the evening prayers. A long time after the guru's death the cat continued to be attached during the evening prayer. Then, when the cat finished by dying, another cat was brought to the ashram so that it could be duly attached during the evening prayers. Centuries later the guru's disciples wrote wise treatises on the essential role of the cat in the good order of all prayers.” (DeMerlo)

--(in practice)--> the anecdote becomes the essential element in a chain of expressive causalities. it is the intersection point between several stories united for a time: *familial/familiar time & therapeutic time*


...you retreat behind a rampart which protects you
...the exterior scrutiny and criticism makes your failures heavier
...you refuse *scholastic integration* [you choose a complete rejection of the values suggested by the school, rules, or demands for success] ==> you increase the attention paid to you by the institution concerned with your sort of malfunctioning
...consultation dramatizes the contradition and rigidity of your r[...]

[...]chnology-human relation]

modernism's politicization of science


speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*


Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)

science ~/= concrete, worldly, matter-of-fact, present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)


what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project


the transcendence and transubstantiation of science

when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]

‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative

(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established


contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*

(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence

immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities

geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles

(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])

[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)

(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)


([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known

the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects


metaphysical consequences o[...]

[...] present-at-hand, domain of knowledge (<-- political activism has to work with that kind of knowledge)


what use is it to save your soul, if you forfeit the world? --> sci-fi's real frontier & Noah's project


the transcendence and transubstantiation of science

when nature enters, religion has to leave. in two equally fatal exit strategies:
•to limit itself to the inner sanctum of the soul
•to flee into the supernatural --> that religion will try in vain to imitate scientific instruments (<-- The Magicians TV series) + misinterpreted science [==> taking Bible as if it were geology book (<-- look at the rising Hollywood films that scientifize the events of Bible) -- projects of connecting religion to the world]

‘exit religion’: it will have lost any pretence of influencing the course of events, its impact will only be decorative

(Descola:) ‘naturalism’ is only one of four ways in which connections between humans and nonhumans can be established


contrasts:
*reference chain*
*reproduction*

(Latour use of the term) *contrast* = mode of existence

immutable mobiles: to reach something far away through long arrays of instruments, you need to make sure that *necessities and constants are transported* with as little transformation as possible ==> to “reach” those entities

geometry, mathematical entities, inscriptions of all sorts ==> carry heavy-duty immutable mobiles

(Hoda's immutable mobiles are: [?])

[*]matter = highly elaborated, historically dated, and anthropologically situated hybrids***
(=/= ‘transportation of indisputable necessities through chains of cause and effect’ <-- a category mistake)

(for physicist:) “the ways we know the world = the ways in which the world behaves”
(less for chemist)
(not at all for engineer)


([in a way my work has been about investigating vectors and] *directions*) from knower to what is to be known

the beings of ajayeb face lots of causes and lots of effects


metaphysical consequences of evolutionary theory


***(Latour's positive veiw on) to be a Darwinian: you have to abandon the notion that all of those ‘organisms’ rest in ‘nature’ --> [*]organim: a hybrid production of representation & reference


*the widespread ideology of the *blind watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounde[...]

[...]es,” much like the cyberspace we are born into and populate.
...
Not to remediate Barzakh (برزخ) but to propose a media theory, sketch it, and archive it for later. And there will be things that have to remain impossible to verify by us and in those records, the general-purpose language of the technologies that we choose to archive ourselves with, on the side of forgetting, the site of externalized memories, will not verify histories of presence tattooed under the ear of the elephant of our story, as you whispered somewhere in the dark.
[...]
Yes, vocal works that informed and influenced Qahveh-Khanehe (قهوه خانه) still can be found in some places of tea or cafe houses in Iran. They are called pardeh-Khani (پرده خوانی), here someone who is a pardeh-Dar پرده‌در (“-Dar” meaning that who tears apart the pardeh پرده, and pardeh meaning screen or veil--the concept of pardeh always contains “a perpetually hidden message”), ‘Khandan’ (خواندن) meaning in Farsi ‘to read’ or to sing-off a plain of signifiers, is also the verb ‘Darridan,’ (دریدن) [#Derridean acting] meaning to rip apart.
...
I am sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?

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

a Zoroastrian data: pre-existential ~ azali ازلی, sabegh-ol-vojud سابق الوجود

atefiate mahsus [عاطفیت محسوس] (queer? a queerness not familiar with mysticism?)
queer is about ‘marahele johare atefi’ (مراحل جوهر عاطفی), mohabat محبت (kindness or love,) without leading to ‘faghre erfani’ (فقر عرفانی)

[i have problem with] (escaping) the ‘pit of nature’ (chahe tabiat چاه طبیعت) in Sohrevardi's thought
-(he inverses the earth from positive to negative geology, sphere becomes pit)
-the project of post-Babylonian autopoietic-self, a self that is defined by the ‘meta-fall’ into the “pit of nature.”

‘andam-shenasi peikare latif’ (اندام‌شناسی‌ پیکر لطیف)

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

[Avital]

what are the ways in which ajayebnameh relates to itself as its own future, its own labor and announced commitments?
(our reading of ajayeb is not a time quiz involving applicability and whether or not one “buys it.”)


i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory ([...]

[...]rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)

Testability furnishes the uninterrogated core of rigor. --> linked to a notion of computational realizability?

how “rigor” enables the displacement of truth by testability----as if the test could provide an unquestionably solid ground for overtaking reflection and other philosophically triggered interferences.

What kind of rigor is “a certain kind of rigor”?

what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee

Everything rests on the *promise* of a certain kind of rigor.

the metaphysical fantasy of completion.

colonization of discourse with rigor

The discipline of programming leads to a shift in perspective on traditional issues. It invites--or rather requires--one to adopt what [Daniel] Dennett (1968) calls the design stance toward the mind

{ instrumental epistemology of how something works =/=? discovery }--> how can we suspend this “=/=”

trials and tryouts

[Avital's] phantasm of testing(‘s groundedness and unquestioned solidity)

...time-zone paradox of freezing the future in order to plan, in another register, the time for working through computations.

what are the conditions for thinking ‘through a problem’?

[Avital:] ****“To offset the competitive quality of the research that is being clocked, more philosophy must be allowed to drift in, if only to demystify those ideologies of acceleration that relentlessly run down the slower-paced thinking and an ethics of hesitation.”****

[origin] ==> temporal hysteria ==> [effect]

what tensional drama is occurs in the noncoincidence of planning...?
(planning = modeling, testing, constructing prototypes, development)
regardless of whether the future is foreseeable or not, something has to be maintained as a stable factor
test ~=> stability
***If the test cannot originate knowledge, it at least confirms that there is knowledge. (confirming that cognition occurs)

...tests have to be taken over and over again, if only to fill the **fictional time of the absolute present**

knowledge and test : it is not clear even that something is known until there is a test for it.

(test) is a certain type of metaphysically secured knowledge that needs only to ‘find’ itself

The normatively secured test does not originate knowledge but confirms what already exists as “knowable.”

...generous[...]

[...]ild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

immune systems (in natureculture) determine where organisms, including people, can live and with whom.

“There is no time or place at which genetics ends and environment begins” [...]
(Haraway > Gilbert)

“All stages of the life histories of evolving animals had to adapt to eager bacteria colonizing them inside and out.”
To be animal is to become-with bacteria


to inhabit an inter-subjective world, to love is about meeting the other in all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship (to wit, first, somehow to learn what this other needs and desires)---permanent search for knowledge of the intimate other, with inevitable comic and tragic mistakes in that quest


thinking about animals as “other worlds” in a science fictional sense


scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice

theory ...still a limited discourse and a rough instrument

“who is at home?” --> ask in respect for all of time who and what are emerging in relationship --> (the obligation to ask) who are present and who are emergent? ***

(what are our) categorical labor
labor of training --> somehow all the participants of training are remodeled by it
labor of scale-making
(these are world-making practices, storytellings)

significant otherness-in-connection =/= intention-ascribing idioms of literalist anthropomorphism that sees furry humans in animal bodies and measures their worth in scales of similarity to the rights-bearing, humanist subjects of Western philosophy and political theory ==> assign privileges or guardianship (in place of ownership) in a modernist great chain of being

*action: beautiful, hard, specific, personal;
=/= abstract scales

differential sensibility =?=> situated emergence =?=> more livable worlds ~ ontological choreography

category of “rights” don't just exist (preformed to be uncovered,) rather we enter into a rights relationship with an other (animal or human)--> Hearne's “reciprocal possession”
-morality is a species-specific capacity
~ if i have X, my X has a human (which is me)


off-leash and cliff-enclosed @Varinia


(Haraway:) time-space scales co-constituted by human, animal, and inanimate agencies
1. evolutionary time (at the level of the planet earth) --> naturalcultural species
2. face-to-face time (at the scale of individual lifetimes) --> mortal bodies
3. historical time (at the scale of decades, populations[...]

[...]...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)

eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.

a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter

which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?

speculative commitment --> learn how to relate differently ~-> (help us) name what we are doing in new and useful ways**** (Verran)
the egg from outside it doesn't seem to be doing anything --> to give the egg the power to challenge (our) well-defined categories
-how can we relate to the egg without breaking it? (ontological + ethical) --> *pragmatism*: an art of consequences, an art of paying attention =/= the logic of the omelet justifying cracked eggs


ajayeb is all about the ***staging of nature***
{Latour:} reductionism offer an enormously ‘useful’ handle to allow scientists to insert their instrumentarium, their paradigms and produce a long series of practical effects.
(efficient handles =/= staging of nature)

we must learn to tell trickster stories {a speculative sense that activates possibilities for thinking, feeling, and knowing within coyote nature =/= a closed conception of “reality itself"} OR ELSE we will end up settling for a rather vague version of what physics claim to be reality [~= a generalized (==> irrelevant?) version of a specific form of authoritative knowledge --> that which “simplifies away our world in terms of idealist judgments about what would ultimately matter and what does not” (, Stengers)] ----> (who has ?) the power to explain, (who/what decides what kind is ?) relevant knowledge


[Stengers] (wonder has everything to do with stories,) wonder incites storytelling
1 --> importance of narratives in our knowledge-making practices
2 --> politically robust narratives (that world us differently)


can the ontological be addressed without the ethical?
(feminism's answer is ‘no’) --> a materialism that is immediately ontological, epistemological, and ethical (=/=? Delanda's materialism)

ajayeb (+ my work on it ?) is a pragmatic project to fabricate a different kind of knowledge assemblage (Stengers > Kenney > Sina)
=/= (21st century) logics of capitalism
=/= toxic categories of modernity


i need (to learn) an inviting rhetoric


(Roughgarden)
([focus narrowly on] sexual selection =/=) social selection : “...selection for, and in the context of, the social infrastructure of a specie[...]

[...]nducing) wonder + (connection with) divine
-rich ornamentation --> honor something with our time, care, and attention
-‘encoding’ a writing requires time and attention, decryption ==> value and meaning
mystery of the undecipherable ==> occult knowledge {in a book that enrolls and transforms religious motifs, the experience of reading (or rather not reading) ...evokes the power of occult knowledge, the power of that which is hidden. (Kenney)}

occult knowledge <--> mystery <--> enchantment <--> ornamentation <--> illumination (=/= elucidate, tozihe shafaf توضیح شفاف) <--> wonder


***bibliographic aesthetics are arts of enchantment, vectors for the transmission of value and meaning***

why think and write with the aesthetic?

book as an object? writing as a practice? reading as world-making?***

(to feel) the effect of (our own) language

art: “ontological theater” (=/=? ‘linguistic turn’ {--> Marialena's remark on The Pillow Book, that the film don't care about what is being written. she is a child of the linguistic turn?})
(=/= “return to reality” : “the ontological turn”)
(=/= language as “a necessary evil,” aesthetics characterized as the main instrument of ideological mystification)
~ learn to trust objects figured in unfamiliar ways* (, my bow and arrow?)
[both Haraway (“material-semiotic”) and Barad (“material-discursive”) are working against this kind of split between language and reality, both in the level of analysis (of one's object) and composition (of one's book)]


**where do our power come from if not from evidence?** (@Seba)
--> the *specter of deception* (it happened when i used aesthetics in my questions in my excursion at Vladimir's block, my peers thinking “what if we are beguiled?” --> the suspicious refrains of “trust no one”) =/= “attentive wondering care” (Bynum)

***> *** to tell enchanted stories --> <== we must struggle against the fear of being tricked ***
-this fear of being tricked ==> Descartes’ beast-machine hypothesis (against nonhuman agency) : the clockwork animal and gods; a site where animality and technicity were collapsed and both were rendered as deceptive.
-Descartes’ beast-machine anxieties are still with us. (being duped by the) trickster agencies of animal-like automata--animals, spirits, and technologies have dubious agencies.


(my work on ajayeb hopefully,) is about cultivating wild facts, to be at risk with our craft, creating beautiful objects that give charismatic form to their matters of care


i don't know in advance, how stories and words will flow through us --> i have to learn pragmatic experimentation with magic, words and ideas: [#ppp]
•poetry --> to do with the art of language
•poiesis --> process of creation
•poetics --> questions of[...]

[...]ts, inherit attribute of independently existing objects]---> go to critique of ‘positionality’)
“position” only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (for example a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the laboratory ==> establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying “position.”) --> any measurement of “position” using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing “object” but rather is a property of the ‘phenomenon’ : ***the inseparability of “observed object” and “agencies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)

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

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

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

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

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

(*)discourse: that which constrains and enables what can be said, practices that define what counts as meaningful (statement)***
(learning from Foucault, discursive practices are the local sociohistorical [=/= transcendental, phenomenological, ideational] [...]

[...]encies of observation”***
--> simultaneous indeterminacy of “position” and “momentum” [*momentum*: material arrangement involving movable parts] [--> deconstructing the material exclusion of “position” and “momentum"]

(*)phenomena: primary epistemological unit, the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting “components” (Barad); ontologically primitive relations; relations without preexisting ‘relata’(~= mutual ontological dependencies =/= independent entities)
•(specific) intra-action ==> relata-within-phenomena
•(specific) agential intra-action ==> boundaries and properties of components of phenomena become determinate }~= phenomena
(*)apparatus = phenomena [=/= inscription devices, scientific instruments set in place before the action, machines that mediate the dialectic of resistance and accommodation, neutral probes of natural world, structures that deterministically impose some particular outcome,]
-apparatus: “dynamic (re)configurings of the world, specific agential practices/intra-actions/performances through which specific exclusionary boundaries are enacted”
(perpetually) open to:
•rearrangements
•rearticulations
•(and other) reworkings (--> [in my amazon project:] getting the instrumentation to work in a particular way for a particular purpose)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of [...]

[...]> the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product

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

-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Origin’ [Ursprung] when we tell nature story, when we call in nature
-the dominance of the narrative ‘The Zoom’ when we tell nature story, (‘The Reveal’ story)
-




ok, it is 06.03.2017, i need to set up a track of commentary, a monogamous relation with ajayeb
and unload the myth that i am going to do something new:

1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd: call the unengaged secretary to just write
3rd: throw some sort of sequencing on the page
4th: call the clean-up agent
5th: at some point super-ego comes and checks it out
6th: negotiation with the super-ego

(Avital,) start modest and small, listening to my passion, collects some texts or passages that hold this or that motif that i like or am concerned with, go in there and do a rhetorical reading, see what is going on in the language, allow myself be instructed and taught.

7th: wrap around the work, something of an *infomercial,* there i can get a little ego in there, bring myself to the table and situate myself in the world of art/scholarship/thinking/creativity/etc. and say where i am, what question do i bring to the table, what would be my question mark, i am at the table taking my place and this is my question mark, situate myself (=/= autistic, dar-khod-mandegi در خود ماندگی; i can't spin out as kind of rouge and solitary satellite that no one can connect with. i have to make the connections, in a world that is having debates and discursive encounters around my themes. i am *in conversation* --> responding, quoting, tuning,) standing up for myself and my text, “fake it till you make it,” yes i need to renarcissize and build up, at this phase towards the end i need to perform being assertive and show what i have brought to the table, and if i don't know that then i ask someone to tell me what have i done? where does it belong? how can i situate myself?

8th: sleep-walk, don't look down, don't wake myself up, don't ask why i am doing this

9th: (problematically Deleuzian:) *becoming woman*! (for Deleuze) all writing involves you (no matter how you are gendered or constructed or what you think you are) in becoming woman, which is to say the experience of a powerful submission and the ability to carry off the disappearance of agency or ego kick, subjecting oneself (to the other) before becoming subject.
[(Hayward) woman: vibratory being: sensation <~~(creative-response)~~> environment]

زن شو

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

wunderkammer,[...]

[...]s a salient attribute of the pot's character as a pot”

when zoomorphic figures are present...

ajayeb's zoomorphic figures with their salient attributes are not “purposed” necessarily being to encode their belief-system onto objects that we may read today--like story-board--but rather to make interventions into the world of human-nonhuman relations. to either assist or resist such transformations
[terms sharpened with Alberti + Katie King]


museum studies


(Hayward:) freedom --> initiative in shaping a narrative, a visible body, where one is able to engage and resist [@Xiri] --> contradicts itself because one is really not free from the policing of the physical body --> coming into a [...] body (==> reality and disillusion in public spaces) -->{ narrative, flesh, is filled with memory, emotions, and complexity [@Hoda]
*crafting a space for existence may involve:
•unfolding history
•mapping normative processes
•immersing a “body” in vulnerability (*)


deploy =/= unveiling
sort out =/= debunking هدايت


glocalizing


Katie King reading Hayward: [...] assembling apparatuses for enfolding visions of instrumental, subjective and cognitive technologies among ciliated (مودار, ریشه‌دار) bodies

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

technologies of the literal

grain of analysis, timescale, noting/creating hybrid objects of study
[comparing the incomparable --> lumping --then--> splitting]

***starting off a research project which eventually hopes to have something to say about that hybrid “thing”*** ...with some despised members of a particular time period (--> switching those who count as major or minor characters), promises to make it possible to build in *a range of genders (not just two), a range of writing technologies, a range of self-effacing acts, and a range of publics*, while working from a particular place and time

***there are many different interests creating the pasts***, the possible worlds...


(Leigh Star > Katie King > Sina) “comparing the incomparable”

here i am trying an outline of my interrelated research practices in a preliminary character, the intersection of which I am just at the beginning to understand


ajayeb: writing technologies of the 12th century Iran

plain style

soing naked as a sign

dress and address

ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning

myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's[...]

[...]ecology of writing technologies


(Katie King:) writing technologies: ideologies layered in time and space * under which writing has been divided [also cannot be divided] from other generations of cultural meaning

myriad hybrid forms, commingling in material and ideological proliferations
(with Katie King's interest in women's writing technologies)

“presentist”: a practice of classification and categorization to access pasts

continuities and local discontinuities --> is ‘continuity’ (always) a universal abstraction?**


relative universalization

prescrptions for speech and silence


what is gained and what is lost when “tidying up the archive”? (a german problem)

prescriptions for speech and silence

“politeness phenomena”

‘plain speech’ for Quakers: rejection of ‘idle’ speech. preaching was another version of sacrificing seld-will, and was appropriate speech.
public preaching in particular was also a challenge to social relations and interaction --> a challenge to gender, speaking public was a cultural humiliation for individual women --> the Quaker women practiced preaching as a personal humiliation instrumental to their own salvation [! in a weird way i also did this to my self] #becoming woman-->{a liquefying aspect: “womanhood” was used metaphorically to identify those who could not preach, the surrender of (male) authority to God by men was “female”
•inhibiting woman's prophetic agencies
•“lack of discipline” becomes discipline --!--> forms of discipline that appear “undisciplined” or out of control

(Katie King > Mack:) “Quakers not only bathed in a sea of polymorphous sipritual nature and eroticism; they occasionally wrote as if they had succeeded in floating above gender altogether”

“going naked as a sign” (and Quaker's “plain style”) --> Tasavof, ajayeb, and communication strategies of the so-called new science of the same time (of Quakers)
‘nakedness’ was simultaneously literally his own, a figure of the world, an example of many others, the abstract principle, and the essential truth of the one addressed
-simplicity, economy, and plainness; to reject all the amplifications, digressions, and swellings of style


preferring language of artisans, countrymen, merchants, of wits and scholars


How sin is strengthened 1657
Milk for babes 1661
A message from the spirit of truth 1658


realized eschatology

انا الحق, an-al-hagh
(Damrosch:) the performance of the sign thus entailed a doubly negative aspect: in the person exhibiting it, a conviction of fulfilling a divine mandate in opposition to personal self-interest; and in those who witnessed it, an offense to ordinary social standards that actually served t[...]

[...]ad of the curve
being in history
being in a predicament مخمصه
being ready for something--anything


a life's trajectories traverse the materializations of scenes or pulsations
@Foad

atmospheres have:
•gradients
•valences
•moods
•sensations
•tempos
•lifespans
•

an atmospheric fill resonates the edge between the material and the potential

[my recording symptom in 2009 was an atmospheric (not symptomatic) attunement; constant recording; take on the texture and density of a background hum; to produce a felt; barely felt sense of something happening in the house;]
-my father disappearing into violent, abandoning drinking


every person is a nexus of compositional moments
a worlding taking place in difference


!♥ Stewart talking about her stepson becoming a homeless
“People like to simplify the situation of homelessness as if it is a self-evident process of abject poverty without a safety net or as if it's just a matter of personal blame or failure. But it is also an attunement to a singular world's texture and shine. The body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world's compositions.” [@Luisa, Sven, Foad]

(i lack certain learnings in sensory labor of attuning as a zerang زرنگ person)


(do i also have) the habit of a worlding

trying to find the rhythm of a new bodily life

find lines of attachment

***to become describable as a body (by learning how to affect and to be affected in this world such as it is)***

(in my work on ajayeb i am becoming more and more committed to learn ways of) having stories meant to pull me into the sentience of the world i am in --> give it density, texture*


Stewart (2010) is writing an ajayebnameh of her mother in cancer, stepson becoming a homeless, and her hometown

______________


[*]regionality دهاتی ,داهاتی
-an event that jumps from landscape to bodies and back (Stewart)
--"here"-->{the blue law, the seasons, the color red, place names اسم خیابان [*the past snaps into the present with the recognition of the street names], bodily resonances, materialities bundled together like a sac of leaves, sharp-edged collectivities like race, ethnicity, class, gender, generation and religion, }--> “one ventures from home”
-a thing hollowed out by its labyrinth of edges; incessant interlinking
-a contact aesthetics
-a virtual mapping of things in a state of potential (Thrift)
-a sheer recognition of a sheer recognition: “we are from around here"-->{as *active survivors of the unexpected encounter and knowing readers of emergent situations*} (Roazan)
-turns spaces into animate[...]

[...]onceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it

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

There are [always] other epic and epochal forces in our midst.

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

evil eye --> دیو چشم زخم --> غش --> اغشی

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

باغ plethora of old and new humanities, selves - with Sardar: There are plants that provide various colors of foliage, or hedges and borders, or climb up fences, or play architectural roles (=/= presumption that we must have a identity & supposition that we discover our identity & the Socratic “know thyself” as a fundamental human urge) we exist with multiple identities invoked differently in different context. subscribed to an imagined “heritage” ready to kill and be killed to save some “essence” (=/= San'an)
sake of the difference, scum and finest of men
(for example “black”: to be confused: once excluded, now technically empowered, a dominant group in the rainbow, but still practically marginalised by the history that created and continues to operate practical exclusion.)
@Iranians: how much of the Other is actually located within me?
“a perfectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}

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

[body politics]

Greeks --> body politics --> elabor[...]

[...]ectly permissible aspiration” --into--> “an instrument of war” (Maalouf)
British identity is based on an assumption of authority that makes the world a familiar place, a proper theatre in which to continue being British. #Olearius
exclude the (unsavoury) foreigners <==> romanticised history and frozen tradition
*history as a deliberate human creation ==> acknowledgement of a common past ==> (a difference called) identity [= “our” similarity against “their” difference,] (submerging, barbarising and differentiating itself from another identity) [for example ancient Greece + Rome + Christianity = Europe] ==> monolith ==> conflict and death
•my (jub جوب) gutter photos =/= Tehran's Americanization of the high street.
•my photos of Rima =/= her selfie's merchandised model of individualism
a deep desire for association
various and diverse traditions ==> identity: “the means to synthesise similarity through difference and to see difference as discrete means of expressing basic similarity” (Sardar)
“balance of similarities and differences as a way of locating what it is that makes life worth living and what connects us with the rest of the changing world”
*...continuation of the Enlightenment project of progress through instrumental science. One source of Truth, and one Civilization, continues in its trajectory
garden =/= {North America's arrogance in cosmological proportion as worlded in Hollywood, and science seeing itself as the only manifestation of reality, The Platonic idea that truth is same for everyone}

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

[body politics]

Greeks --> body politics --> elaborated images for human society ==> citizen, city

(Haraway on) the junction of natural forces and economic progress in the formative years of capitalist industrialism

(Haraway's emphasize and telling stories about the) union of the political and the physiological

ancient and modern justifications --> differences (seen as natural, given, inescapable ==>) as *moral*

the ‘content’ as well as the soicla function of science --> renderd utopian: (that means) we leave this central, legitimating body of skill and knowledge to undermine our efforts
[we must fight with all our power against utopian(~= dystopian) stories of science ~-> accepting that there are natural objects (bodies) separate from social relations] --> (we must refuse) the damaging distinction between pure and applied science & double ideology of firm scientific objectivity and mere personal subjectivity

we have granted science the role of a *fetish*: an object human beings make only to forget their role in creating it

...agreeing that “nature” is our enemy and that we must control our “natural” bodies (by techniques given us by biomedical science) at all costs to enter the hallowed kin[...]

[...]echanical origin of the notion,) “the total set of external circumstances necessary for the existence of every organism” [=/= Barad's intra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man

Comte --> Lamarck: “milieu = circumstances = surrounding environment” ==suggest==> intuition of a *centered or focused formation* --> circle, sphere
***circumstances and surroundings still preserve a symbolic value, but milieu forgoes reference to any other relation other than that of a position forever denied by exteriority --?-->
چو پرگار می‌شدم...
چو نقطه...
گرد...
now refers to befor, here to its beyond, and so on without cease***
(in iranian poetry) environment: a pure system of relations without supports

*}==> environment: a universal instrument for dissolving *individualized organic synthesis* in the anonymity of universal elements and movements
(for example) metamerism of fish: “fish do not lead their lives themselves, the river has made them lead it, they are *persons without personality* (<== strictly mechanistic use of the notion of environment [<-- Descartes beast machine])
Lamarck: the environment dominates and control the evolution of living beings through the intermediary of *need*(= a subjective notion entailing reference to a positive pole of vital values)
(for Lamarck:) life and environment (which is unaware of it ~(Lamarckian *vitalism*:) ‘there is an originality of life of which the environment takes no account’) are two series of asynchronous events ==>
[*]adaptation: life's renewed effort to “stick” to an indifferent environment
[*]being: the effect of an effort [--?--> striving]
(--> this asynchronicity ==> “us” and “place”)
==> environment does nothing for life --Bichat--> “life: set of functions that resist death” (~-> tales of survival in America sci-fi TV series)
life resists solely by changing its shape in order to survive


Darwin explaining the ‘appearance of new forms’ conjunction of two mechanisms:
1- mechanism of the production of differences ~ variation
2- mechanism of the reduction and criticism of these produced differences ~ vital competition and natural selection
(for Darwin the fundamental biological relationship:) the relationship of the living being to other living beings --> precedence over environment conceived as a set of physical forces
-competition of forces
[...]

[...]thless ambition & [modernity's time:] metronomic synchrony 🕓)
•animating feral and partial connections
•remind us of an *impossible present* (that we live in)
* (embodied) contingency, asymmetry, indeterminacy *
•hauntings (are not immaterial!) : presumptive absence (presumed in the absence)

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

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


•i shouldn't be talking, opening this
|
•remembrance --> Bambi's mother studies {what if remembering is something totally different than “lost member"}
|
•fox story --> animal trap:
◦perception {rhetorical perception, evil perception, etc.}
◦lure 🌀 can't stop following, trap: nearby-ness, becoming bodily, engaged in perspectival game and will ==> fox's relation to the forest [he is suspicious and rend =/= *lured into desiring & trusting* : we bring our lures and needs towards each other, (sometimes it is) critique is an art that tangles with what you are proposing, like fox in a lure (octopus is much better with lures than fox)]
◾propositions
◾abstractions --> (i love) ideas: to animate humans, erotic lure for soul ==> *metamorphic attention*
|
•omen --> potent sign of alarm
|
•evil {category crossing monsters [~= ajayeb's context of evil], force of liberation, beauty, complexity}
|
•Ursula's sea (from little mermaid):
◦the way she says “yes” {multisensorial call “yes” and “more"}
◦her laughter {develish perception, perceptual joke, joy of corrupting her morality [~ her heroism: who the hero is and how to live[...]

[...]ernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)

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

they were just there (summoned to events the nature of which they did not know in advance) --> *ephemeral mobilization*:
•by anonymous calls (precipitated objectless gatherings by cell phone messaging, an anonymous call of an ideologically vacant sort)
•ephemeral rumors
•without ideological commitment
•by curiosity (gathered only to find out why others were gathered)
•attraction to spectacle
•to consume, pornographically, the visceral images of police and military violence
•
--> the idea of participation loses its meaning

formation of a crowd
materialization of the state's force

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

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

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

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

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

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


the so-called nocturnal sudden death syndrome

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

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

(mostly[...]

[...] causal logics rooted in the idea of interest and expressed as a faith in the liberatory capacity of knowledge

bearers of popular political agency

mediatized neoliberalizing world

(identification with middle classness [its universal interests] -->) aspiring to classlessness

spirit mediums dressing themselves in the costumes of ancient priests

inadvertent and accidental politicization ~=> an awkward form --> opening to the liberation of the political from historical determination and its various teleologies

the fall of Soviet socialism ==>
•disorientation of structures within which opposition to the injustices of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy


(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)

-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]

crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form

the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere

[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)

*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*

an antecedent rendered as cause

when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)

(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice

ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental

Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)

(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of acc[...]

[...]rwise 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):
•witchcraft does not explain the world
•witchcraft is not an alternative mode of reasoning
•witchcraft does not permit anyone to control the forces (that assault and wound human being)
•witchcraft provides neither certitude nor escape from the anxieties that death bears for the living

(the interiority of the other is unknown and unknowable ==>)
[*]witchcraft ==provides==>
•an idiom in which the world's very immunity to explanation is affirmed (often with violent and terrifying consequence)
•figures and narrative forms in which to address (also reproduce) the opacity and ambivalence of sociality

[context:]
the other (like the empty seashell) is unknowable, though we must engage others and seek recognition from them to escape solitude and death [...] in for[...]

[...]role in this drama, but they do not explain it. @OSP & Femke)

-women's understanding of improper English of Zuma's speech: a communicational fail that (from their perspective) is associated with illegality, corruption, and violence

(not to embrace) the kind of logocentric historiography that imagines literacy to constitute a secondary mediation of a primal and autoaffective orality

witches: *technicians of a speech* in which the identity between word and world reaches its maximal extent, when the mere utterance of a spell (even when that utterance is nonverbal) is thought to cause things to happen

zamazama's literacy: the means for communication across difference ==> the mastery of mediation and thus its effacement (=/= signify the secondary mediation of a primary orality)

...a society that is being reconstituted around a commitment to constitutional multilingualism and democratic proceduralism

rituals of governmentality
delay and deferral

fantasy of immediacy -->
•messianic movements
•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)

*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)

(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space

transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority

slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]

the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment

(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circui[...]

[...]•direct-action politics
•various kinds of violence
•
}==> language
•hollowed out of ambiguity
•pried away from subjectivity
•instrumentalized in slogans and catchphrases (from obsolescent ideological programs)

*violent drive to immediacy* (~= direct-action politics)

(more than) the leakage of affect into a ritually rationalist space

transmission and identification needs and secures the appearance of their exteriority

slogan --> traverse the gap between word and deed, convert the difficult tasks of education and redistribution into the clarion call ~-> pop songs (anyone can utter these words and in so doing find themselves enthralled by the strange sensation of speaking someone else's words and simultaneously experiencing them as one's own)
*slogan: a deeply reified speech (at once vacuous and overfull) at the point were the boundary between language and thing threatens to dissolve -->
•(its communicative function:) *solicitation of identity among speakers*
•(its primary signification:) the fact of *collective utterance* (=/= dialogism)
[*]slogan: literalist response to the mundane crises of mediation (in a political rally) [reduced to the most instrumental dimension]

the awkward trace of dubious literacy (in miners message inscribed on the placard) --> resistance into the communicative process
who/what speaks?
(case of EFF:)
•pidgin, minimal and unambiguous message borders on telegraphic code (men miners)
•typographically standardized form, graphical form of a chant (women demo) --> vocalization of a slogan that anyone can speak ==> resignification and redeployment

(public sphere avowes) necessity of mediation but also of its effacement =/= short circuiting to which the slogan aspires with language that is stripped of ambiguity


messianism: the drive to transcend mediation altogether

(Jassem's mode of) explaining what had happened with all the art of a storyteller and truly Spartican authority
-[Spartan athlete: marked by simplicity, frugality, or avoidance of luxury and comfort]


(leftist activist:) those who claim better representational capacities (because the representative function has been confused with a governing function) + aspiration for something beyond this representation

performance of moral righteousness

exclusion at the threshold of liberation

unconscious mythopoetic structures

insistence on being clandestine = claim of importance

offering oneself in the role of “leader” in the pursuit of immediacy

strike as an ecstatic experience of collectivity and self-presencing =/= self-representation, mediation


Marx's view of the role of the individual in history, in his Eightee[...]

[...]◾exorcists building on the techniques of inquisitors and witch hunters --> possession acts as the bridge across this chasm
•neurologists and psychologists construct the same
--✕--> (Malinowski's) anthropologists: fieldworkers as truth-tellers returning from the dark corners of the real (the witches are no longer explicitly the target of the inquiry)

Häxan's real object: the specter of sheer nonsense

hunt (even in objective scientific mastery) --> fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it

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

(?every time we have to) show how *the word (that we are using) relates to meaning*

Christensen makes every effort to craft a witch that is real to us : ontological fluidity of a cinematic image ==> “Häxan = word + image + thing”

metoposcopy: the expression of reasoning was to be found on the face, (dating back to Girolamo Cardano and the Renaissance) the operation of reason as the weaving together of images in the mind --> a proto-cinematic theory of the relation between image and thought if ever there was one

•respectable scholar indexes himself through his sources
•authoritarian first-person tenor --> instrumentally impersonal tenor
•establishing the X as a chapter within a much longer constellation of practices, discourses, traditions, and institutions

Kieckhefer --> how the long history of practical natural magic was enfolded into the specificity of European witchcraft in the late Middle Ages

Christ in Limbo --> Christensen's parallel editing ==> moving representation of a terra-centered universe <~~ elaborate wonders found in baroque wunderkammer (meticulously assembled by the German elite)


Renaissance Hermeticism:
writings of Hermes Trimesgistus ~=> foundation for:
•Ficino's relatively mild natural magic
•Pico della Mirandola's Christian Cabalist
•Agrippa's Christian magus
•Tommaso Campanella's (1568–1639) utopian City of the Sun
•Bruno's full-blown Hermetic–Cabalist (through the power of astrology and magic to bypass the Church altogether)
•

...rippling effects of the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition -->
•scrupulously mathematical astrology of Girolamo Cardano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”


(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to [...]

[...]rdano
•the rigorously empirical studies of the natural world demanded by Bruno's attempts to operate as a magus
}==> (paved the way for) science of Newton and Copernicus --> a new metaphysics to emerge

attacks on Renaissance magic and the Hermetic–Cabalist tradition (that authorized witch) ==> anti-witch treatises

(case of Giordano Bruno's execution --> Hermetic magic and Cabalism) how in the 16th century: “superstition = crime”


(Christensen attributing) --> Hortus deliciarum, a largely cohesive image of hell to a period when the nature of hell's location and “topography” was a subject of fierce theological debate
-he strategically ignores debates and alternate conceptions of damnation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries in Europe

[that which you choose] works to amplify affect more than further analysis (--> such as Christensen's attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)



...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats

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

when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically 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 view[...]

[...] later Middle Ages) practices such as persecuting witchcraft to meditating on Christ = techniques (of sorting operation) to draw distinctions among visual phenomena, differentiating, say, physical objects from fantasies, dreams, and diabolical or artful deceptions
<--artist-- image-makers specialized in manipulating one thing (their materials) in order that a viewer should see something else ~ *to make something invisible visible* [<-- this is always ideological, and is very common in art]
(#testing) the objective knowledge possessed by the uncanny (in witch's pathological language of diabolic proofs) ==> witch must be experienced in her own milieu, a satanic biome, her state in nature

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

typical in 17th century: tacit mutuality of word & image
-artists habitually gave their paintings titles, mottoes, tags and quotations, and their works abound in literary allusions
-explicit interleaving of the verbal and visual

/>
cat feces and dove hearts boiled in the moonlight

stereotype of a debased and corrupted priest
object of the customer's affections


Protestant discourse against the Catholic Church in the 16th century --> artists of the period extended the instrumentalization of slander through the production of proto-pornographic images of bishops, priests, and the pope engaged in myriad obscene acts --depicting--> the emotional states and desires of the clergy

magical salves (considered particularly powerful and troubling by demonologists)

Häxan self-positioning as a scientific investigation + constantly pull back from the dramatic outcomes of what Häxan depicts

Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers


widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials wials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*


(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of[...]

[...]ry of nonsense
= ***a deep appreciation of (that might seem misguided to us):
•cause-and-effect relations
•forces at work in the natural world
(=/= indifference to the truth, retreat into superstition)
~
[these] cases suggestive of and empirically linked to general laws. the case said something about the world, and once a case was established, it would spread like a contagion (=/= proof of misogy or genocide as Federici asserts)



Flaherty ==> a certain truth regarding the total social environment : force of Nanook's life not only provides empirical evidence as to his mode of living but also allows for a refl ection on “nature”, “humanness”, “modernity” rooted in the haptic qualities of Flaherty's images

maleficium (of the witch --> palpable: destructive weather magic, assault of farm animals, sickness, unexplained death, etc.)

saturn's mythological violence <--> satan
the idea that saturn serves as patron to social outliers: the poor, elderly, disabled, criminals, jews, cannibals, magicians, witches

(early modern period -->) **satan = the principal authority of the natural world**, “master of the knowledge of natural properties and the techniques of their instrumentalization” =/= techniques of the healer =/= empirical instruments

(de Certeau observed that) every exercise of trained judgment is authorized through the [*]dark: ratifying force of theology
**dark forces --ratify--> all forms of natural expertise**

mastery of nonsense --driving--> confirming the suspicion of witchcraft = a form of non-knowledge ==opens==> a gap in knowing (specifically, ‘who’)


line of accusation that was quite common in the early modern period --> “the desperate search for the cause of what was other wise an unexplained illness or misfortune was frequently the catalyst for specific witchcraft accusations between friends, acquaintances, and often between family members themselves”
16th century --> this violence now bore the sanction of both secular and religious institutions (<== peasant complaints of maleficium زيان <== human beings have been suffering misfortune, illness, and death long before the power of the witch was felt during this time)

Dominican order --> aggressively promoting the cult of the virgin, to the status of the “perfect” woman {elevating the status of sexual neurosis to a virtue} =/= lustful credulous nature of common women (who were often associated with the temptations of Eve)


*conflicted status of women*
•in Häxan --through--> sternly patrilineal visual motifs (condescension + bemusement --> frail + hysterical)
•in ajayeb bestiary -->


(Häxan's) witch hunters act in accordance with their own procedures for investigating truth and falsehood and not simply out of malice, fear, or stup[...]

[...]cted) 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 be witnessed


in Häxan
-the power of cinema to witness exceeds that of the witch hunter
-what it does is “worse” than rigging the truth --> it aligns itself (not with a concept of truth or the real but) with the power of the witch


(Häxan and many criminal story films) works through instruments of knowing rooted in the *dynamics of the confession*
#ajayeb storytelling

...clumsily rendered, the wriggling demons reflect an interesting set of variations to the witch stereotype, both ontologically and visually
(Maria giving birth to demon children)


Thomas Aquinas's theorization of the *virtual bodies* (of angels)
-angels do not need bodies for their sake but for ours --> unnatural couplings could produce children, but that the bodily essence of devils would rule out the possibility that these children would themselves be demons


16th century author primarily concern with Satan's ability to manipulate and pervert language (including erotic language)


wild flowing hair of the women --> a common visual metaphor for sexual promiscuity and disorder


images of cannibalistic night witches were explicitly a demonological variation on long-standing popular conceptions

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

xxxxxx



persistence of witchcraft
how witchcraft might still exist as more than just one of many choices available on a personal empowerment “menu”
-how rituals pertaining to magic came to be understood as a problem of knowledge

*magic binds forces that would otherwise overflow life*
a great subterranean need to “bind” forces that would otherwise exert themselves with impunity and without any greater explanation or meaning
--> enacting a dehistorification of a form of life that would otherwise be overwhelmed by the brutal timeliness of historical being
Baxs[...]

[...]e denied the possibility of a field researcher's being able to assume the *point of view* of the native in the bold manner that Malinowski declared was not only possible but actually the highest aspiration for anthropology [--> also the aspiration for critical feedback?]


(counterepistemological) Levy-Bruhl =/= Malinowski --> ([*]feedback: an art of engagement informed by critical relatedness and) **anthropological expertise grounded in the careful cultivation of a *sympathetic knowledge of the other* as a way of empirically knowing that other** : *method of sympathetic association*

in apass --> the laboratory of the times located in the person of the researcher himself

grounded Levy-Bruhl's science in the real <== he rejected a focus on a knowable singular subject in favor of a science based on the ability to detect and interpret the invisible forces that worked to produce a particular “mentality” [of the artist in the case of bad feedback]
(Levy-Bruhl's mistake:) systematic interrogation and illumination of mobile invisible forces that produced beings wholly unlike us =/={ method of sympathetic association --> participant observation: the felicity of evidence produced through the qualitative experiential methodological instruments [--> comes to define the modes of critical relatedness in apass]


(since 15th century) investigators ==> staking one's claim to the real on the mastery of those forces that relentlessly elude a plain direct visibility or sensibility ~~--> human sciences


*we still hunt ghosts, fueled by a desire operationalized in a method of being close enough to something to sense it, because our form of mastery demands a closeness to things unseen, unprovable, indeed ‘nonsensical,’ yet unquestionably ‘there’* -Baxstrom

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

Despret on Derrida's animal
the act of being seen by an animal ==> Derrida groups together on the end hand “scientists and philosophers =/= prophets and poets”
{ Bateson, Goodall, Bekoff, Smuts, and many others have met the gaze of the living diverse animals and in response undone an redone themselves & their sciences =/= Derrida }--Haraway--> why did Derrida leave unexamined the practices of communication outside the writing technologies he did know how talk about? ==> philosopher (speak in the absence of animal) =/= theoreticians (speak face to face with the animal) =/= scientists
•Derrida's original positioning: to speak (starting) from [~ a partir de] a real animal and not about animality [being animal] : to speak in the animal's presence and not in its absence --> this [this way of talking about animal is against his philosophical tradition] is not particularly original, it is part of the very game of philosophy: *to fight with ancestors and contemporaries [~=? recalcitrance تمرد tamarod] about great and noble ide[...]

[...]erference]
•[*]diffraction: mapping of interference ==Haraway==> where the *effects of* differences appear =/= differences appear

meaning + matter + action (always live together)

telegram animal carousel: nonhuman-animal-machine

my room/bedroom (~-> Cinderella's attic, architecture of containment)
overlapping perceptual worlds
synaesthetic force of perceiving and feeling, processing and mattering --> transposing of senses
immersion
kinesthesia
numerous haptic registers
we are transsensual

[*]sensation: the vibratory force in all organisms that seduces, sexulizes, entices, and mesmerizes the body

vibrate
oscillate
wave

aquarium ==> new sensations: deep-sea drifting and shimmering for upright opaque hominids --> that are sent further adrift through experience in yet unknown expressions


[*]ecology: ambivalent powerful elusive ways of composing through histories of interation, relationality, interconnection, and materiality

relational matter =/= matter of who has agency

Hayward's [and my] attention and sensuous reach are solicited by the ctenophores in the display, a display that instrumentalizes the jellies diffracting cilia and solicits my senses

-jellies participation in worldhood (further becomings)?
immersed in deep marine technoscience worlds...

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

Marx: human begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence ==> they produce their actual material life
--Haraway--> Marx understood relational sensuousness, and he thought deeply about the metabolism between human beings and the rest of the world enacted in living labor --> the humanist teleology of that labor: making of man himself

horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons

Despret > Ridout

(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor

what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?

mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your s[...]

[...]f

horses
oxen
police dogs
rescue dogs
messenger pigeons

Despret > Ridout

(theological critical roots of theater:) before tragedy is its infancy [infans: the condition of those who are without language]
the division of labor, the death of god, the establishment of human dominion over the animals, the birth of tragedy may all be seen as simultaneous(?)
--> animals off stage in western theatre, to hide its origins in these moments of *inaugural violence* + the institution of division of labor

what was the animal doing on stage before the birth of tragedy?

mythical origin ==create==> stories (fabulous, fabulating): [storytelling: seeking for] means of making a vanished experience available again in the contemporary world (~ storytelling) ~/= *storymaking: creation of memories, the construction of a history that renders the present and the future richer in possibilities* [not just for your self and your kind, as Hollywood or the brands do it: personalize experiences at scale]

animals do not appear to work, in the referential framework that emerges from the division of labor / exclusion from labor [the idea of animals have been transformed into “potential instruments of satisfaction"] --> it is held that what animals do, they do it “naturally” : as if answering our needs is the same thing as *acting according to nature* [---> go to cooking manga anime Shokugeki no Soma, the nature of serving]
--Despret--> division of labor: a matter of dividing: those who explicitly really work =/= those who are only following a bent in their nature (a necessity of a biological rather than a historical sort)


Baratay --> possibility of writing a history from the animal's point of view
+ epistemic, conceptual, ideological obstacles

when the animals start paying attention to what humans are offering ir demanding, and then either accept, play for time, resist, refuse... stories in which they exhibit unusual skills or behaviors = acculturation: acceptance from the animal (not just humans imposing their will), dialogue between the two, influence of the animal upon the human


(thinking about animals that we raise in order to kill and eat them)
asking breeders: could one in any way way that their animals collaborate with them and work with them?
•the immediate general response is: no --✕--> yet you hear many stories about animals who did in fact participate in the work of those who were raising them : they acted in deliberate ways of their own volition

-do animals work?
the answer to this question will change something --> (Despret's pragmatism) *pragmatic position = involving a question whose answer turns out to have consequences*


(Porcher > Tapper:) relationships between human and nonhuman animals (judging that this rela[...]

[...]on or collapsed selves =/= interpenetration

border crossing: forces and excitations of location, of neighborhood

sensation: a composite of affects and percepts

personal =/= individual

Hayward's story is shaped by repression : a wish to be seen as she wants to be seen =/= Sina

story: act of violence and deception

medicalized legacy of transsexual's self-narrativizing --> synchronous field of wrong body-ness ==> account

accurate accounting =/= describe transitional sensations

described: formalistically detailed transpositional

post-animal: the afterward of the animal is meat


bumptious coherence of bodies

(neighborhoods) designed to make some vulnerable while others safe
percussed by bullets or by traffic
*threat as invitation*

جراحی زیبایی who alter themselves through surgeries and hormonoes *to feel themselves differently*
(shia in iran is islam after a cosmetic surgery to feel their religion differently)

*changing sex is about changing senses and species* @Foad


depending on my needs, i pretend not to understand

instrumentalization of animal life
surgically changing body


technique of eschew اجتناب
eschewing a nature or culture distinction


sex in pieces
spheres of imagination


[my work:] transhistorical diagnosis: reading in pieces neighborhoods of imagination (opposed to what is available)
#sleep-walking


web-building beasts (spiders) [webbing =/=? weaving: a feminine trope?] }--> expression of the body
my fleshy referent 🕷
over-reaching subjects
*spider's web ==propose==> home and territory are of and with the body*
spiders are scenes of arachnophobia and revultion
extending bodily substance through sexual transition
(arrangment of) sensorial milieu of the self + profusion of the world
(trope for fear as emancipation)
an urban designer
weaver of cityscapes
[*]web: skeletalization of the surface, extension of the surface affects of the spider, dynamic threshold of sensibility --Hayward--> (the body is strengthed) react through a spatial and temporal generativity --> body: inter- and intra-threadings of many sensuous vectors that relay like the spider in its web ~= cities, web-builders
*center of her web = her touch world*
-moves quickly, even uncannily, there/then not, sill/in motion, unsettling/reassuring (seems to trap only dust)
*lived-web = optic skin, a resounding connective tissue
(spider's capacities to) create, syncopate, improvise
(spider and me in the appartment) we resonate in relation to our different movements and processes

[*]tra[...]

[...] woman, a gendered neighbor, a historical subject


(being under the influence of the moon:) enfleshing elements of your (celestial) environment within yourself and expressing parts of yourself back into the (terrestrial social) environment


identification: “i am like you = i know you” ==> resolve the divide of difference

(let's not make that kind of garden again -->) inclusion in Adam's nameable Eden of belonging (=/= Cinderella's transbestiary)

cross-species rejoiners
mended spiderwebs


error is (still a kind of) expression


human: composites of zoo-intensities, animated movements, bio-differentials


(i always felt like this) my perceptions are refracted through psychic forces
anxious
uncertain
paranoid
“is everyone staring at the morphing ‘it’ that is me”


(understanding of art in contemporary european performance -->) art = intensifying bodily substance, to resonate otherwise, to feel different corpo(realities) through zones of transition and intervention, provocation = responses to our *capacities to resonate*


...medicalization, recognition, subjectification, instrumentalization, and responsiveness being with animals

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

what does the maze mean for the rat?
what a maze can mean?

experimental psychology --> subjects conform most often to the expectations of their experimenters [--Despret--> they are *artifactual*]
-*the scientists think that the subject respond to the question that is posed to them, but the subject in fact respond to another question* -->{question that is addressed to them = protocol to which they are submitted}--> they can take a position in relation to what is proposed to them in scientific research [=/= Cinderella's mice subject]

the idea that (the assumption that) their subjects could be influenced by what the scientist was looking for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”

difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects

[...]

[...]ne pray ‘to’ elements?

amenity (of stone) (=/= enmity of fire)



*trial by fire, fire as judge
(test, respond to whether or not something is true or false)
iranian frost, is not the same as ice---ice was still the object of fascination. transforming fire into mosque---atash masjed shod. ‘dudeman’ coming from ‘dud,’ smoke as your ancestery. a telling-smoke was your inheritence, your grandpa. same in Latin: ‘focus’ means both fire-place and ancestral
ether --> azar --> atash
fire = (institutional?)-order ~ justice = law =/= nondialectic
the order of fire =/= agonism [positivly channeled disagreement]
the order of fire is a materialist conception of history, that fire eventually purifies and leave no reason but the reason of harmonious ~= consensus, the ubiquitous Übereinstimmung of fire
athletisism of Shahnameh and fire-trial (contest oriented toward victory of defeat; transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the contest;) is exactly the cancelation of an agonistic notion of defeat (in Shahnameh: dishonor = defeat --> the defeated = the monster, the ‘Div’)
‘agon’ in Latin literaly means arena of competition, the scene of contest--meydan? what would be (the instrumental) relation to the mode of destruction in Shahnameh's kind of fire?


Indo-Iranian register of fire worship (around 1500 BC)
-fire burns (ever) upwards
(Sadeh festival, Shahnameh, Iran)
-Sadeh: fire-related festivals celebrated throughout Greater Iran and date back to when Zoroastrianism was still the predominant religion of the region. (Wikipedia)


Lindsey Collins [on intersection of illness and landscape]
wilderness therapy (in cancer activism)
a feminist and still-growing therapeutic model, slow wilderness, in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity
-recovery climbers actively make permeable bodies ==> ecologies

“recovery climbs = embodied practices of resilience + interrelation” =/= survivorship narrative

(for Woolf) illness: emergence of new landscape (you discover “wastes and deserts” and “obdurate oaks,” more so than a mere subtraction from or attenuation of life)



fire's dictatorship in Siyavash story, a fire's aspect as instituted social order

*trial by fire
trial by mountain [~= rock] (slow wilderness) -- suffering and healing in difficult landscapes (Lindsey Collins - phd) -->{climbing mountain peaks and summits figures as a journey similar to a struggle with disease --- wilderness therapy creates what she calls a **slow wilderness,** in which risk is made manageable and contained, and fast and risky aesthetics, coded as masculine, are traded for ecofeminist trope[...]

[...]he mountain or ocean?” An old form of preying. He introduces an intimate perspective into the geological time-continuum. The thousands-years-old div as geological phenomena (in Ferdowsi + Mu'in diagram:) structure and morphology of a landscape made by bacteria, [“...pay attention to your ‘place’ in] the bedrock I am carrying you on.”

The div Akvan, coming from Akoman and Aka Manah, in Avestan relates more or less to “noxious thinking.” Divs are old and skillful ancient biotic entities with disagreeable characteristics. Their definition is yet open and subject to interpretation. But always disobedient to the sovereign’s project and abyssal in nature, divs promoted another kind of order, other than the old Gods. Their project was always to disillusionize the ideas of divine nondestruction and nontechnological purity. They are on the side of destruction, technology and death. When Rostam captures the great White-Div, Div-e Sepid,[25] a nasty metamorphosical sentient master in “unsympathetic magic” and an expert in the crafts of necromancy [ارتباط با مردگان —> he works with form, apparition and spirit, “dead bodies,” his knowledge-cosmos includes textures of mineral assemblage and recrystallization,[26]] his blood is eventually instrumentalized in bringing back the lost eye-sights and unearthing the captured ones.

The athleticism of Shahnameh doesn’t allow Ferdowsi to have another take on the order of div. The poem will not permit chaos.[27] In Shahnameh, divs are the defeated ones. Ferdowsi’s contest-oriented poetic site is towards the defeat of victory of defeat. For him, transcendence, truth, and growth are generated from the outcome of the scene of contest.[28] He locks “dishonor” indefinitely to “defeat.” The defeated-ones become inescapably monsters, divs. So, upon a Ferdowsian landscape of heroism and agon, the way I am trying to archaeologically (re)locate the being of div on Earth and put him in relationality to the lithic techniques of geo-poiesis, is a way for me to ask: how Ferdowsi is disarticulating div’s bodies to rearticulate other bodies? The humanoid Middle-Ages Persian body, the stoned, the fleshy mineral, the decaying ones, the creaturely, and so on. How can we reversely remetaphorize his tropes? How can we arrive at the stone? How can we unfinish the (death)sentence div is uttered with, and pre-epically recompose him in order to syntactically arrive at his kinship? OK. We are testing questions of nonhuman alterity at Ferdowsi.

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

“the mind needs wild animals”
Meloy

more often, there are places where mammal should be but is no longer, *and in this emptiness, too, there is fieldwork to be done*

[*]euphemism: roads that are too civilized

Jesuit padre-historian
Je suis padre (wanna-be-father) historians
(18th century) calling the deserts o[...]

[...]reath if life + *used by demonic spirits as a means to produce material effects*)

*spirit: celestial origin to the “innate heat” (calidum innatum) of living creatures

effects of solar heat on air : act of vitalization

pneuma of the stoics + astral body of Neoplatonic philosophy + medical spirits of Galenic medicine }==>
•Renaissance
•(christian notion of) Holy Ghost
•the idea of close connection between wind and divine power (in Bible)

(in alchemical view) spirits were somehow connected ti air <== quintessences were often separated from raw substances in the form of vapours


ajayebnameh ~= natural magic
*kinds of natural motions*
1. avoidance of avacum: from the form of a portion of air, when it does not want to be either expanded further or separated (from other matter). horror vacui --kinetic--> motion was regarded as due to a property of a specific part of the machine
2. resistance to excessive compression: the form of basic matter should not become less that what is right for it
3. the tendency of heavy things to descend and of light things to rise

air = vital spirit that joins things together, resounding spirit if the world instrument

Paraceksian theory of aerial niter
(an active principle) aerial version of earthly gunpowder - responsible for life, combustion, thunder, lightning, (some) illnesses
--> connecting the activity of air + life + weather phenomena

wind: (***in its irreducible qualitative variety***) expression of cosmic spirit + محرک باعث a motive force to be accurately estimated

منجنیق ~= geometry هندسه *pneumatic engineering* : distinction between moving and moved components ==evoke==> motive forces
elaborated pneumatic machines
mechanical clocks
tension of strings

*wind ==> celestial influences*
(Cardano regarded) expansion and contraction of air as symmetrical phenomena, both consisting a source of motive forces
-in the universe the element air had the function of receiving and conveying fiery celestial influences on earth providing health and wellbeing fir living creatures

Telesion (1509-1588)
soul and spirit identified with each other as a very subtle material substance pervading all bodies and making them capable of sensing and reacting to rach other with pleasure or pain
*(man’s) immortal soul did not play any role in determining natural phenomena*

innate heat of living bodies

wind: humid vapours flowing through the air
thinness of wind vapours


16th century
expiration and inspiration of the lungs
Holy Spirit is expressed in the nature of winds
interest in wind and weather was kindled by reports reaching Europe from the East and West Indies ab[...]

[...]problems: (1) the void's dimensions will mix with the matter's dimension. (2) void is infinite, therefore movement is impossible, since there is part of the universe that is not void therefore there can't be void in the universe since it has to be infinite.



Hayula has no resistance to different apparitions/surat/صورت

surathaye jesmani صورتهای جسمانی

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

[...]



pandora’s complexity

purely (?) material objective agent (evolving?)

Hayula--the first principle of everything material

bi-surat بی صورت

اشکال تن ashkal-e tan***
virtual proto-humanity (to different corporalities) --> pre-organic / anthropo*morphic* --> inter-corporal predation --> (sets post-mythic relations between species) --> trans-ontological intentionalities

hayula is a state of latency or potentiality --> possibility of metamorphosis in interpersonal relations...

every apparition demands a recipient

(مولوی‌) Rumi wants to be able to read the return-state to the hayula:
تبدیل شدن به tabdil shodan:
...be arkan (ارکان instrument)
...be heyvan (حیوان animal)
...be jan (جان aliveness? liveliness of artifacts? --?--> agency)
...be hilat (حيله, tech---means & ways) [tech? #ruse]

(in Rumi:) ruse ==> قید صید gheid-e seyd
Hafez is all about farib (فریب ruse)

material agents: {//complex forms of movement //affiliation into space}

stones, a substance indigenous to every place. (those who give up or try to stop or turn back become stones.)



the meta-fall of the material (in hayula هیولا)


apparition/surat/صورت (essence/mahiyat/ماهیت)?
matter/madeh/ماده (hast/هست/being/is-there)?

 --(surat)-->--(surat)-->
animal---flora---inanimate---hayula
 <--(madeh)--<--(madeh)--

in Sohrevardi, he removes the light as projection and ray-tracing, and proposes a theory of light (of theory of being) as “Filter” (veril?, hejab حجاب). (there is no filter between the sphere of the eye and the sphere of the planet Mars.)

apparition is essential or part of the essence or itself the essence

Hayula: mojude mobham o bi-ta'ayon, joz ghove-e mahz va este'dad-e serf nist. (jesme basit)
هیولا: موجود مبهم و بی تعین, جز قوه محض و استعداد صرف نیست
(جسم بسط)



[...]

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

(Delanda)

we are taking “real history” as starting-point

-to capture the dynamics of human historical processes, we must allow the nonhuman physics to infiltrate t[...]

[...]


counterintuitive ==give==> representation its psychological salience

the experience of dreaming is full of counterintuitive representations (rapidly forgotten)

counterintuitive context of ritual communication --> successful propagation of a representation (memorable)
for example recitation of shamanistic chants --construct--> an acoustic mask =/= convey meaningful message

for religion (and marketing?) culturally successful representation : *a counterintuitive representation formulated within counterintuitive conditions of communication*

}--Severi--> we need a more expressive theory of cultural propagation (<-- my try in telegram bestiary text)


doctrinal (semantic memory) and imagistic (episodic memory) religious modes

(how to better be understand the contemporary art's drive to) *ritual communication* --> performed through both action & speech
•the context: establishment of a particular form of interaction (from a series of contradictory connotations, being two things at the same time --> symbolic transformation) ==construct==> a special identity of the participants
--> xxxx جمع گرایانه syncretistic movement @apass (used as an instrument of resistance?)


messianism = intense propagation + paradoxical identification
--> convert entire populations in a short amount of time

pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet

(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition

Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance

the old man Arnold

chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-

(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]

bleeding pearl

parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together

[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)

Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritua[...]

[...]in a short amount of time

pragmatics of communication --> appearance of a paradoxical “I” personified by the prophet

(warrior shaman messiah's) contradictory self-definition ==able==> enunciate paradoxical statements
--Severi--> to be faithful to the local tradition

Appache --> opposition to Christianity take the firm of conceptualizing Christianity as a different religion
•absorbing but not understanding the elements (of Christian religion) ~= being impressed by story {<-- i do this in my artistic work but i don't ask for devotion or trust}
--> using typical imagistic methods, ritual of dance

the old man Arnold

chant (ritual symbolism) -->
•treat illness
•accompany rite of passage
•impart magical powers
-

(amerindian) shamanism --> establishes a metaphorical link, a set of analogies ~= mystical relationships between ritual objects and living being [--> construct its own truthuniverse, supernatural dimension thought of a possible world]

bleeding pearl

parallelism : (a technique of) threading verbal images together

[Severi's early interpretation of] tradition (would need to) preserve the text + instructions to use --by--> verbalizing them (store them in the chant)

Kuna --> description of the position of the speaker (“shaman is now seated there and is saying...”) characterizes the special kind of communication (appropriate for ritual changing)

shaman: novel sort of enunciator (lending his voice to other invisible beings --> plural and contradictory identity)

acoustic mask: a reflexive means to define the ritual identity of the speaker

reflexive application of parallelism

(@Isabel, how to make community without becoming a cult?)

use snake --> capture the imagination of the followers ==> authority

imagistic (iconic mode, sequence of acid) + doctrinal (discursive mode, text, prayer) = pragmatics context of enunciation ==> messianistic religion

both paradoxical & parallelistic

new ways to be faithful...

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

exhibition-making and preventive conservation --> inspection and exposition <-- (different understandings and use of) *touch = curatorial*

professionalisation of curating
short-term education
cultural exchange

@apass feedback: (terrain of) peer engagement --> understanding each other’s practices

education, research, literacy, management, networking, custodianship, audience development

research (overdue) relationship with intelligence --✕--> **research: adventure of charismas**

...to be migratory (in thought, praxis, community)

...subjectivities without a heritage[...]

[...]n new nigf techniques. this is common in the history of technology, that a tool appears before people know how to use it. do we know how we can use computers? when we master a technique, its uses are not immediatly clear.

getting interested in the wrong answer in the four answer question.
no skill develops without a good dose of curiosity. which enables us to think about what might be, rather than what is.

There is a half-remembered discussion of Sigmund Freud I read once in a book and which I have been paraphrasing regularly ever since. It said that for Freud dreams were a way of thinking by doing. You run, you cry, you kiss, you love, you cheat, you argue, you fall, you kill, you eat, you sing, you get lost, you travel back in time, you become somebody else – but you do it all in your head. You do it in your head and so it is thinking, just not a thinking we recognize as thinking. When I am dreaming I am composing thoughts in the way an artist composes a painting or a witch a potion – an assemblage made of bodies and places and actions. An embodied thinking, that is no less eloquent or extraordinary or transformative for being so.

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

...One can chat and gossip but it is forbidden to preach, lecture or instruct.”
Claudio Magris’ Micronismi

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

(butler)

the structure of address itself

although I did not know in whose voice this person was speaking, whether the voice was his own or not, I did feel that I was being addressed.

To respond to this address seems an important obligation during these times.

It is about a mode of response that follows upon having been addressed, a comportment toward the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility.

The structure of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.

...the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...

We think of presidents as wielding speech acts in willful ways, so when the director of a university press, or the president of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, and to whom they are speaking, and with what intent.

...perhaps we should think more seriously about the relation between modes of address and moral authority. (also one of the issues in today's performance art)


narration is always judgment
affective intervention


why should i listen to you?
because i have a voice!


visual culture has different stran[...]

[...]cture of address is important for understanding how moral authority is introduced and sustained if we accept not just that we address others when we speak, but that in some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed, and something about our existence proves precarious when that address fails.

...the demand that comes from elsewhere, sometimes a nameless elsewhere,...

We think of presidents as wielding speech acts in willful ways, so when the director of a university press, or the president of a university speaks, we expect to know what they are saying, and to whom they are speaking, and with what intent.

...perhaps we should think more seriously about the relation between modes of address and moral authority. (also one of the issues in today's performance art)


narration is always judgment
affective intervention


why should i listen to you?
because i have a voice!


visual culture has different strand from lecture culture. people are able to express themselves with verbal signs long before they can draw anything, using visual sign (picture: a drawing by Hanno). verbal language because of its easy everyday usage has become mundane and instrumental to communication, visual sign due to its learning curve and skillfulness belonged to the art domain.

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

transitive verb constructions are the ones that require a direct object in order to complete the meaning and to be grammatical. Used in theater, between director and actor, by communicating with transitive verbs actors can perform the language of the director.


my work embodies and communicates a desire to read (and write) texts



[steiner]
in Greek mythology the poet and the seer are blind so that they may, by the antennae of speech, see further.

One thing is clear: every language-act has a temporal determinant. No semantic form is timeless. When using a word we wake into resonance, as it were, its entire previous history. A text is embedded in specific historical time; it has what linguists call a diachronic structure. To read fully is to restore all that one can of the immediacies of value and intent in which speech actually occurs.

The process of diachronic translation inside one’s own native tongue is so constant, we perform it so unawares, that we rarely pause either to note its formal intricacy or the decisive part it plays in the very existence of civilization. By far the greatest mass of the past as we experience it is a verbal construct. History is a speech-act, a selective use of the past tense. Even substantive remains such as buildings and historical sites must be ‘read,’ i.e. located in a context of verbal recognition and placement, before they assume real presence.

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

<[...]

[...]with metaphor and end with algebra
•a “model” is a system of objects (any kind of objects) that make all of the sentences in a theory true , where a “theory” is a list of sentences in a language.
•metaphors somehow mobilize the difference between the two domains
•arena of alienation
•Cut the Noise
•mirrors with (/without) memories
•substitutability
•optical appearances (mind ~ eye)
•Dioptrics (science of refraction), catoptrics (reflection),
•that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.


lemon grass plant, marigold

Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92

newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)

mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)

The shock of new media is as old as the hills

Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.

(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world r[...]

[...]◦that could not be spoken of or represented, because it was empty of discourse and thus of meaning.
•innocence of the eye
•Poor Unfortunate Souls
•being useful, like a prison guard
•autopoetic (complex self-referential systems)
•to take up the motives from the external world
•will-less perception, “the pure eye of genius”
•bringing from the artificial world to the art world
•object oriented programming / subject oriented
•Observer, system and environment
•a system (designed) with a purpose of itself
•magnifying or light-collecting optical device
•social selfish
•un-computational
•gray area
•self-identity is bad visual system
•Vision requires instruments of vision; an optics is a politics of positioning. Instruments of vision mediate standpoints;
•Identity, including self-identity, does not produce science; critical positioning does, that is, objectivity
•docile body
•technological visioning (vector of secret texts, books within books, ancient curses, digital dreams, and medieval cyber-art)
•empty space left by theory and philosophy
•technical visioning
•Technology is never merely “used,” never merely instrumental. It is always ” incorporated” and “lived.”
•In his last paintings, such as the Bride of 1912, Duchamp both elaborated an iconography that combined mechanical and visceral forms and began to move away from any procedures that revealed the artist's hand to create “retinal” or “anecdotal” art.


lemon grass plant, marigold

Saeed 0012063108222
Tehran Wi Fi: 88 57 27 92

newer medium may be ‘nested’ inside of an older medium (or vice versa)

mental life (memory, imagination, fantasy, dreaming, perception, cognition) is mediated and is embodied in the whole range of material media… we not only think about media, we think in them (Mitchell)

The shock of new media is as old as the hills

Franz Reuleux described this correlation: the more primitive the technology, the less attuned the parts of the machine to each other, the greater the degree of play -- the more perfected the technology, the closer the fit, the less play between the individual parts.

(For Winnicott,) play is a psychological state where the boundaries between self and the world remain labile and fluid, (a state which is important not only for the development of the child, but with significant ramifications for human life and culture in general.)

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

Henri Lefebvre distinguishes Representations of space and Representational spaces . ... Representational spaces are “directly lived” through associated images and symbols which overlay physica[...]