[...]rdi, and others)
(Breton's subjectivity is still hopelessly European)

=?=> to recuperate our physical force (old good Tasavof-?)


‘ideas’ --> to “animate” humans ~= erotically lure the human soul**
(Plato knew this)
to lure us into relevant metamorphic attention*

(Deleuze and Guattari:) my existence is my very participation in assemblages
in order to determine what is “really” responsible for what [= agency?].
-an agency that doesn't belong to us (who is ‘us’ in Stengers?)

the efficacy of assemblages (in ajayeb)
(assemblage --> landscape [in farsi: چشم انداز cheshm-andaz, is related not to the land but to the eyes, literally meaning the projection of gaze])

(the point is) to play a referential game that puts one at risk (instead of protecting via quote)

(let's immediately turn off that) monotonous little critical or reflexive voice whispering that (the only defense we have against fanaticism and the rule of illusions is that) we should not accept being mystified



commenting =/= touching
(lams kardan لمس کردن =/= ezhare nazar kardan اظهار نظر کردن) --> an issue in art criticism in Iran ایران


[@Foad]
**our senses are not for detached cognition but for participation**(David Abram)
-“The ways the senses themselves have, of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense directly, with the hidden or invisible aspects of the sensible.”
-“suggestions offered by the sensible itself.”
-we never step outside the “flux of participation.”


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

[Thomas Keenan]

reading: that which happens when we cannot apply the rules --> experience of responsibility =/= moment of security or cognitive certainty

rhetorical reading

who speaks, writes, and reads? not simply humans

“how can we have any chance of finding a way to say what we don't know how to say if we don't pay attention to the silence of the other inside us?”

literature, is then understood as the experience of risk, chance, the undecidable =/= pathos of resolution


(in Western ethical, political, and literary traditions:) responsibility: a matter of articulating what is known with what is done =/= (Keenan:) *responsibility*: an asymmetry or an interruption between the orders of cognition and action

fable --> an exemplary *allegory of decision* (~~> installing or restoring subjectivity)
fables open abyssal aporias:
•to teach ‘singularity’ it offers ‘comparison’
•to underline ‘independence’ it resorts to ‘necessity’

[(the experience of) aporia =?=> morality, politics, respons[...]

[...] of Sade's world)--> **radical negation**

each individual negation involves affirmation (of the other, humanity, God, nature) --Blanchot--> (Sade's oeuvre =) a movement of radical negation that is nothing but its *negative power* (it never affirms something)

Sade = permanent resistance + radical negation (of the other)

“nothing resembles the virtue as a great crime.”
(Blanchot > Sade)

Blanchot's interpretation of the Terror + French Revolution (<== Hegel)
revolution --> freedom (formerly situated in a divine sphere) operates from a purely immanent perspective
the idea of efficacy of the freedom --> destroys what is given radically --✕--> old regimes
--(understood absolutely)--> Saint-Just and Robespierre demanded that the new French citizens lived out their pure freedom in a radical way

break free from:
•(highly personal) pleasures
•(highly personal) affairs
•
/>
Blanchot + Sade --> *one cannot use one's freedom to establish a new political order*
freedom not contaminated by a particular creation --> Reign of Terror = (a horrible state of) “between” the overthrow of the old & the establishment of the new regime
(~~> contemporary Iran's political state's endless resistance)
•endless resistance =/= enduring constitution (~= 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* (Sng* (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
[...]

[...]y, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,

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

the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)


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

sci-fi is imagining the elsewhere inside mortality. (==> feminism stakes in SF)




*make a series of studio photos with white clear backs, two different genders iranians having a physical/verbal fight or some sort of aggressive encounter

*the idea is to write a script for a movie or short series, combining the historical 14th century Iran with the 14th century imaginal beast fables from the ajayeb. the camera creats a non-exotic continuation between the two

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

[with Kenney]

-how to let emerge a seriousness as collective matters of care?
-how to stimulate pragmatic questions about how to craft relevant knowledge?

speculation is all about pragmatism


capitalist speculation : “one must speculate to accumulate” =/= relating & narrating

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

[...]about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)

diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)

*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?

(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)

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

narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism

[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)

*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between different media
conceptual interplay between media
space of alchemical transformation
(at the level of) conflict of interpretations
radical understanding of interdisciplinarity

diaspora: no longer having a clear answer to “where are you from?”

what might we learn from narcissism (from mimesis)?
mediate and fracture the writing of the self

wound: disconnected event
not adding up to a comprehensive narrative of the ethnic self

*ego-under-construction*
Freud's primary narcissism, we love ourselves before loving others
(for the child) narcissism = intermediate
(secondary) narcissism: the processes by which the distinction between the ego and external object is lost
(Lacan) loss of distinction between the ego and its reflection in the mirror
--> narcissism helps the infant in trying to distinguish himself from the mother/other

narcissism beyond infantile sexuality -->
narcissism: structure (=/= state) <== when the burden of desire on the subject becomes intolerable

(?what are new structures of) artistic narcissism
*an occasion to erotisize your own body*
to erotically emphasize a particular memory
stitching together of the naked ethnic body

hupersexuality
...those who are undersexed

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

%note on Alice's workshop:
how the idea of mimesis came when we were not sure what she meant by “make note.” the s[...]

[...]ocene image] also, a sharp change in the graph/diagram [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Extinction_intensity.svg]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to

(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)

the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Hal[...]

[...]ence--because it is the scale of the model.”* Tsing

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

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

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


(why am i cultivating the) *non-inventive imagination* (and its antimetabole [or chiasmus, chiastic patterns of antithesis]: non-imaginitive invention)
often we find ourselves inventing everything (in political animation) =/= to figure out what are we attached to

(inheriting something =/=? being heir to something)

the scientist inside me begs me to narrow my temporal scale, choose an epoch, let's say middle ages, choose a century let's say 15th, choose a year, choose a day, a moment, a micro-second slice of the cake of the milieu that you are interested in, the instance in the bazar with Halaj in the sun and so on.

(my old school) obligatory knowledge <-- salon of scietific entertainment
}-> (is about creating) proper witness***

the tropes i am building in my current research, do they help build a better Iran? and how?
interms of:
•an ongoingness
•a commitment to a recent future thinking

‘homo-’: stuff of the soil, that figures of bright and sunny image of the same

#rigs and syms*
•games
•technological designs
•plots
•mechanisms
•sfs
•jokes
•jests
•

[title]
critical bestiaries
critique-bestiary

belonging = achievement (dastavard دستاورد) + violence (khoshunat خشونت)

...the ways we renounce the world through the use of the word “real” and “really”

(Stengers:) weaving: not secular nor religious, not traditional nor modern, is sensuous


#[nodes and notes]

the emptyland, terrestrial life, ‘per-’ instead of ‘her’ or ‘his’
-the way i started with Haraway was through the way i read her notion of ‘critter,’ juju (جوجو) in Farsi, jako junevar (جک جونور), little life animators often easy and ok to kill, a term in farsi for kids that worlds for them in particular ways
bio (“qualified life”) =/= zoe, juju, “bare life” (Agamben): that which is killable --?!--> that which must be transformed
[stories of originary exclusion and composition of body]

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

the form and function are having too tight fit. no no no!
(cities) being inclusive but not integrative

(setar different technique of vibrato and measure for instance in Saba and Ghavami, which part of the finger or body, one works in certain way for one and not for the other musician --> the exp[...]

[...]s movement of feelings) }==offers==> a theory of emotion as economy***
-by economy, Ahmed means, like capital (is about the movement of commodities and money*), an effect of its circulation (--> Luisa)
-the subject is one nodal point in the economy =/= subject as its origin and destination

**the movement between signs converts into affect
feeling <--> fetish commodity

in Freudian model, the movement between objects is intrapsychic --> trace of how histories remain alive in the present*** [regarding ajayeb's histories, histories that “stick” and which does not need to be declared, #fohshe heyuan/heyvan فحش حیوان/حیوون sideways movements...]
-(ajayeb's) past histories of naming

objects, the author of emotions



(how) emotions align subjects

_“surfacing” of individual_

(Ahmed suggests that) emotions are not simply “within” nor “without” but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds.

narrative = production of the ordinary


•(which crimes against persons become crimes against place? -‘us’-)
•“body of the nation”
•scene of “our injury” (--> also in Iran: “our” historical injury)
•(the fucking) right to defense --> ‘home’ itself becomes to be mobilized as a defense against terror, becomes transformed into the symbolic space of the nation #[example of when the approach (to/by objects) itself becomes a fetish object*] --> “staying at home”: a form of mobilization [---> go to three little pigs] ---- “the constitution of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)


origins of bad feeling
threat to violate the pure bodies [vulnerable and damaged bodies of the white woman and child]

*affect is economic* --> it circulates between signifiers in relationships of difference and displacement --> they align subjects --> effect of collective --> (in Ahemd's economical model of emotions) they work to bind subjects together : the nonresidence of emotions is what makes them “binding” --> her notion of economy =/= {inside/outside model --> positive residence of emotions: “I have an emotion” or “something makes me feel a certain way"}--> “fear does not come from within the subject, nor does it reside in its object”
-([@Hoda's take on witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulatio[...]

[...]fear’
fear does not leat to containment but an expansion --> his/her embrace of the world
•being sealed into a body that takes up less space!
**fear works to restrict some bodies through the movement or expansion of others** (interesting for Mona's work)
[structural possibility:] proximity of fear-object --is--> possibility of future injury

impressions of coherence, “sticking together”
(that is perhaps why dictionaries and bestiaries are interesting: because their elements do not “stick together” in the sense of an affective economy [of inquiry and narrative] #lists)


ontology of insecurity --> (naratives of) crisis ==> “return” (to values) --> fetish
-production of crisis is crucial for insecurity
-declaration/announcement of *crisis* reads the fact/figure/event and transforms is into a fetish object that then acquires a life of its own
-it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure (again)-->(the word “again” in the rhetoric of safty becomes itself the fetish object with its own life)
[security is bound up with “the not (me/us)"]

being invaded by inappropriate others [in histories of Iranian modes of intersubjectivity: ‘being invaded by the appropriate other’ ~=? being of Tasavof, #slave manifesto, let me know if you want me to kill your master.]

(in the 1999 film Matrix we see the image of the ‘strengthening the will’ of the human community in the face of the nunhuman machine others: Matrix ==> “us”)
(Matrix's) narative logic of an internal strength being posited as responsible for recovery, survival, and moving forward of the human race. (@Maarten, displacements of weakness and strength)

values that garantee survival
technologies that garantee survival
--> they become moral


those who____
speak (against) the “truth” of the world, cause the “ruin” of the world

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

say your name before talking
it's a Q and A, a lecture
--> it is a violent day
asking for your name is intrusive enough, even before asking where you come from [--> #estizah]


(learning from Heidegger:) abbreviation is already an effect of technology
case of Germany specially
and persian san'at (صنعت techniques and technologies) of subject-making
•‘is’ --> information system
•‘ich’ --> intangible cultural heritage


[#contract, concerning modalities of being-with:] anxiety, Sorge, (~ care?) is *disclosive*, for Heidegger, is an ontologically fundamental mood that opens you up to the possibility of understanding, anxiety is the leading mood that allows understanding
(in Heidegger) anxiety ==> understanding
(in Farsi) negarani نگرانی --> vision بینندگی --> bas[...]

[...]br /> •devilish perception
•queer non-perception
•having a taste for iranian stuff perception
•
--> polyskilled web of friends



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

three childhood memories, stories, from elementary school:
•the mime of “you think (too much)”
•the weird pro hit on the coming ball
•peeping into the toilet
•

my childhood recognizing:
•filaments (hypha, hyphae, تار) of spider webs
•patterns of ants
•motion color blurings --> that present is “physical if the eye is quick enough” (Stevens)
•

the ways i was engaged as a child in scope-apparatus, micro-macro scales


what other stories, remembrances of the past are possible?
-different apparatuses of attention, reconstruction, and storytelling, that are equipped to hold diffractive patterns of ‘that which comes to mind’


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

can we care for “iranians” without “for iran”?
(i can't care less about Iran)

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

perhaps artistic research is all about playing cat's cradle (=/= autism) : (you have all sorts of limbs, even phantom limbs) you must learn sustaining the rhythm of accepting and giving, (collaborative) patterning (that requires passion and action) [this is one skill that matters a lot, what i have been trying to teach myself above anything else in the last years] [i am playing that game with Haraway, joining her (and others) in thick, collaborative patterning; generous knottings; thickening the knots, relaying a mutated and resituated pattern for the next play]
•getting the knot, proposing another
•you must learn how to hold still
◦(more and more) in different material and conceptual grains of detail and resolution
•the most important thing in research practices is this patterning, networks reenacted (Katie King)
(Lili's kiss project was about that, blocked intersubjectivity, a matter of “learning to be affected”; can i say that Lili's issue is with the lack of [psychological, or psychic] dialogue? a language that no longer carries metaphor displaces the metaphorical drive: acting out the soul's metaphor in direct [nonverbal] action. the breath in Lili's work, is the same in her suffocated kiss and scream performance, once hold in and one unleashed, lack of a “breather,” of a “converser,” of a partner in cat's cradle.)--[i like to propose a repatterning: in research environments we play a lot “catch me if you can”: to catching you in action, to capture your ‘knowing’ in action, to capture eros or logos in act, --> #beauty is interested in action]
•it is about “understanding livi[...]

[...]ing it to the name of women. that means as soon as you name what you mean by ‘women,’ you have told some kind of really impossible lie.
(how my muslim trained sensibilities are working and mattering in my ajayeb research? ways to respond to *the deadliness and the irreplaceable liveliness of religion* [کشندگی و سرزندگی یکتای مذهب], a semiotics with implosion of sign and flesh)--> (i am so happy that) i cannot not know what it is like to be in a believing community (a faith-based community)***


...out of your own particular little historical traditions


*because my research is about ajayeb it can never only be about ajayeb*


you can't do feminist theory without paying attention to the details of women lives
your mode of attention to women in the world ==(shapes)==> your mode of attention to:
•the way databases get set up
•the ways interdisciplinarities get crafted
◾how you think about tools and genomics


my main point of my project has been about getting better at how to inherit your histories without trashing them*** (even figuring out how to inherit a history that you don't want to inherit)
(Islam, shyness, kindness, ajayeb, Iran, stuttering, being all too ready to find complexities, )
•to become relaxed about predigested version of ‘this is what ajayeb is about’ (or Tasavof, etc.) --> ‘what is going on there’ (in ajayeb) is so built-in to ideologies of many kinds (of progress, deep ecology, of history, and so on)
•to build a little taxonomy (in apass)
•working to give up the series of self-certainties around secularism ==> giving ways to talk to the religious ones : getting to grasp what the world looks like in faith-based communities (=/= check-list of dogma)
•category thinking: get into differential liveliness (with all sorts of inequalities:) *who gets parsed how* [#archive, #articulation, #storytelling] (and thinking about what it means to take up these relationships in cultures saturated with science and technology)


Xiri was doing her research with categories of victim and opressor, and now they suddenly disappeared from her work. that category change or vocabulary change was suspiciously effortless


*remembering is an extremely creative practice (-note to Hoda-)
memories are like ecotone کناربوم (transition area between two adjacent ecosystems)


#(very important concept partly shaped by practices of Darwin into our lives:) “collect” --> lies (necessary?)
the frenzy of the 1700 of surveying nature and collecting speciment ==> bioinfomatic
‘collect’ promises nontransformation
--> metaphors of archive, information-intense ways of thinking about life on earth

*“demonstration” coined by science

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

(with Scout Cal[...]

[...]asis on the result
ad- (“in addition”) plus cumulare, “heap up”, from cumulus, “heap”

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

[we need] ability to move from ‘close attention’ to ‘gestures’ and actions on the material world, all the way to an assortment of ‘artifacts’ able to enhance cognition, sensitivity, and sociality

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

Stewart

surge of signs + capital + sensoriums of public culture --> matter & image

images, when circulating things, suddenly enter the senses --> literally make sense ==> look and smell of an incipient vitality --> immanent intensity or force ~ affect

#my coin: two-sidedness of things, virtual meeting actual, seeping edge of potentiality

common sensate affect --> shock --> “continuous trembling that haunts the stable gaze” --> images and sensibilities that constantly exceed (reason, order, and common sense) #telegram

Affect, is about something is happening, something capable of impact
•sometging half noted out of the corner of the eye
•something in the commonsense world
•
(that which escapes/exceeds enclosure) --> it can be put into words[?] --> to become a figure of vitality and even freedom[?]*** @Iranians

[i welcome the reprieve (rokhsat, رخصت, a temporary relief) from] symbolic gridlock

“affect gathers its force to make image touch matter” --> image's power is the power of synaesthesia =/= collection of named “feelings” (invented in discourses of morals, ideals, and known subjectivities)

(let's study how [in Iran] raw materials are formed and exceeded -- sudden and lingering intensity of things) (which darvaze/دروازه/gate we can't and which سوراخ سوزن / surakh-e suzan / hole of needle we pass through)
[i am having always multiple books open, at least two, is that how connection occur for me? #simultaneity]


(Stewart) “I remember childhood as a collection of arresting images”
that hinge on sensory details and open onto luminous scenes of affect [--> Feherlofia/Fehérlófia 1981, Son of the White Horse film. (we must resist calling this film “psychedelic”)

“[...]family as a viscerality through screen images of”

...sudden, repetitive eruption of images of alcoholism, accidents, violence, cancers

*technologies of family, church, law, and nation* (lay confident claim to affect as a capturable content of known and expected “feelings,” but affect itself--that which surges into view along the jumpy border of the actual and the virtual--is their raw material and their only renewable resource. Stewart)

(a sidestep? what) brings an uncanny, alien presence into the field of vision

*an object insists on being seen* (through the tricks of trauma, through the seductions of compulsive beauty,, , ) ~~--> ae[...]

[...]/> -the link between shock and a cushioned recluse is direct, seductive, and mimetic

“When affect makes its jump between the visible thing, the idea, and the social sensibility, it can leave in its wake uncanny connections between otherwise disparate states of arrest, like shock and recluse گوشه نشينی” (Stewart)


@Hoda: affect jumps into view as the shock of an unassimilated trauma

cocoon room
holing up in your living room ==> “out there” ==> search for the arresting presence

spectrality and concrete substance

(?when am i) “relaxing” the jumpy move of affect

*Stewart's “jump of affect”
tactile image --(satisfies)--> move of affect --(actualizes)--> something tempting/haunting
-affecting presence at rest
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself


تأثر ta'asor, نتیجه‌ی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmaightmare image of) soical entropy

the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in

in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march


(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date

the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams


the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(t[...]

[...]est
-[in glamour magazines] models frozen in time and space stare back at you in a scene that stages the jump from fantasy to actual body/image and back
-jump from ideal to matter to ideal

-what to wear as the magic of affect itself

copy ~= contact

movies, ads, malls, car phones, daydreams,

modernity's mimetic machine


(“middle class” [or what people thinking as “Iranians"] is not just a “norm” it is a) *womblike space of affect* (where sentimentality and interiority becomes tactile, where ideals and materiality grow to excess,) (imploding under the weight of its own literal embodiment,,,)
-(it is an affective space) where the hegemonic claim *to channel trauma into beauty* is actualized:
•sensible, solid accumulation, family values, colorful decor, techno-gadgets, daily lottery,
•constant stimulation of the senses (--> synaesthetic images, sounds, touches, and smells)
•circuitry of circulation itself


تأثر ta'asor, نتیجه‌ی عواطف natije-y avatef
affect (~= vitality/hope) ~/= (nightmare image of) soical entropy

the big, beautiful, basic, intensely sensate commodity-to-live-in

in Iran:
•(the ‘public space’ or) “outside” ==> a “wilding” scene of crime, chaos, drug-addled monsters, danger, disease, and decay
•“inside” --overflowing-with--> scenes of aesthetic connection
}--> anxiety is the ground over which they (both) march


(modernist) image-affect of the new and clean and up-to-date

the feeling of being in the middle of something big and inevitable, watching it unfold
#my dreams


the labor of looking

“Movies made for women imagine a picture--perfect scene of an Inside--a Home filled with tangible objects that Mean or a Self filled with the intricate dramas of dreams launched, wounded, and finally satisfied or left behind. Affect itself is laid out on the carpet like a beautiful fetish that it is okay to love.”

(the #telegram is littered with image-written signs of personal/public disaster)
the surge of affect toward the scene of abjection --> abjection itself is felt as a contagion --> Navid's comments turned into stickers
-fascination of catastrophe
-something pleads to be touched
-the act of looking at the telegram's forward: my desire is your desire and we are all together in the mass desire
-images on telegram offer affects to mime, lines of vitality to follow, intimate secrets to plumb, tips to imbibe for safety or good health or the search for things new and vibrant with collective envy
-browsing telegram, we're trudging the rough terrain of bodies, sensuous accumulation, impact


“Sometimes when you hear someone scream it goes in one ear and out the other. Sometime[...]

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


(amal bar asase:) sonat: gozashte, diruz, anja, anha
گذشته
دیروز


phd: طرح مساله tarh-e masale --> everything depends on the ways you pattern a niche, a site of strings that you and your collieges are cought long enough

•using texture, form, color
•using embodiments
•using optics (in knowing) --> some sort of distance, disembodied seeing --> abstraction, figure,




carnal intellectuality
(intellectual carnality)

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

locating ‘shur’ شور del-shur دل شوره (also shuridegi شوریدگی) to the place of the unkown other
so when one has fearful fantacies about others in foreign lands they are in ‘shur’ for them



(psychologically tethered phantasy of the “independent person”:)

**oral fixation [everything depends on the duration of breast-feeding during the development of libido]:
in Iranians: over-fed (more than 12 months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth

**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,


subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring


[title]

might suffer

Freud's penis


ignoria


aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)[...]

[...]ر از اجتماع

paying attention to others doesn't mean that you are understanding them (in the case of lonliness)

[title]
thousend and one questions

dark answers

why aesthetics of cooking and feeding new in art doesn't work in iran?



negah dogane نگاه دوگانه
[duality] dual perspective: if it is not X then it is Y (=/= X)

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

savad سواد = list, siahe, سیاهه, marginal note

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

being ambivalent (disinterest): (masking anxiety and insecuruty,) gaurding oneself against disapointment, defensive alufeness

ethos of “resistence” --> moral authority --> moral supeiority movement

narcissism (of the artist) as part of a process (of building something creative)
•interiorizing things [is part of narcissism]
•thinking about things and self's problems --> writer's memoir
low self esteem ==> building up

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

“nothing is more important in the world than the old ones” [?!]


liberation =/= freedom
•when it comes to liberation (those liberating actions that someone does, ex: women scarf in Iran, etc.), as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else, you just support it
liberation has to do a lot with style, or changing of style
•freesom is totally another thing, much more complicated, sometimes is in the opposite direction of liberation
(i think i might be committed to the freedom of Iranians, not their liberation...)



takhlie ehsas (feelings) =/= takhlie hayajan (emotions ~-> behaiviour)


تعميم
generalization ta'mim --> sign of depression
or --Borges--> a way of abstracttion by forgeting (certain) differences = thinking


the fable of “alem-e bi amal = zanbur-e bi asal” عالم بی عمل، زنبور بی‌عسل
-this kind of علم ‘knowing’ or knowledge refer to a more personal or subjective understanding of a given problem برداشت
-has nothing to do with scientific knowledge


rubah-palangi-e falak روبه پلنگی فلک
trick-rage of nature
farib (فریب deep in the view of Nezami regarding nature and his own work)
hendu (هندو most used insult word in Nezami)

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

•*neurotic: makes a house, doesn't show it to anyone, lives in it alone happy [--> disability to adapt to reality; (neurosis is a descriptive term for ‘hidden psychological mechanisms’ =/= behavior); a form of dissociation: anxiety, hysteria, phobia, repetition, fantasizing, negativity, cynicism, perfectionism,]
◦compulsive need =/= genuine interest in the world
◦neurotic caretaker ==> child develops basic anxiety ==> (imagined) idealized self[...]

[...]esponds to the world with the full depth of his or her spontaneous feelings

•old world of patience [<== lack of knowledge, sabr konim bebinim chi mishe]
•new [industrial capital] world of opportunity --> proactive (even before action; causing something to happen; world, you set it out;)




my problem with celebrity is problem with the victorious cause, when an other has hardened into an iconic position, and has become inauthentic with oneself


IHOTcgKYWXg 21:25
hoghe bazi حقه بازی babel
eye = pit of babel چاه بابل, because Harut and Marut, two great magicians where thrown down in a pit under the tower of babel, and the eye have the two in them --> the capacity to bewitch you if you look into them too long


vafa وفا = mardi مردی
three things doesn't do vafa (loyal): horse, sword, women
asb, shamshir, zan (اسب، شمشیر، زن)

death:
جان jan --> father (aflak افلاک)
کالبد تیره kalbod tire corpse --> mother (like earth, every hand can make her fruit, and bi-vafa بی‌وفا, liabl)


put into words: have I been destroyed?


#workshop on Iranian elementary and post-elementary school books with adult artists


parde پرده ~= tasvir تصویر

damagh-sh دماغش
dar akhar -sh

حکمت مبتنی بر امور بین‌الذهانی
(hekmat mobtani bar omur-e) beyn-ol-azhajni = common sense


[title]
ajayeb:
کاتب وحی kateb-e vahy
کاتب وحش kateb-e vahsh

کتاب وحی
کتاب وحش


pragmatism --> مصلحت maslahat (chi bayad goft) ==> alternative truth
less concerned with “reality” or good and bad


#project: an experiential field inquirinquiry on how people think about randomness in Tehran.
what was the last little thing or a historical epoch-shaping event that they concider as random?

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

(in apass we use constantly) ghias قیاس, and not esteghra استقرا (inductive reasoning)
•استقرا inductive reasoning: X ~=> Y (can be strong or weak) --> epistemic uncertainty (generalizing or extrapolating from specific cases to general rules) [this is related to ‘hypothesis formation' = use of specific observations to make generalizations --(?being replaced by)--> discovery-based sciences, in which ‘hypothesis formation' = data-mining, analysis of (large volumes of) experimental data with the goal of finding new patterns or correlations, and further: machine learning and automated theorem proving }--replacing--> (ajayeb's kind of) “natural history” emerged in 16th century (<== describing and classifying plants, animals, minerals) which is becoming more about [...]

[...]he mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> they have to ‘fuck’ them
-accourding to Zizek: there is only one drive: death drive, which is such sexualized

Freud: “civilization = a reaction formation” (an effort to counter death drive)

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

pedagogies of affect and/or feeling --> @Hoda
understanding, curating, and fomenting public feelings
political/aesthetic imaginaries


bache
بچه: (in Rumi) object sexy-erfani ابژه سکسی عرفانی



(iranians?) mix =/= tangle (?noniranians)



motley
miscellaneous
lecture consisting of haphazard patchwork of sections
a jester is usually dressed in motley
mexican garden: a model of motley and devotion, of rapt attention to the birds it draws

what was the imaginary homeland (=/= remembered homeland) for Iranians?

“here, forms and shapes revel themselves through patient inquiry and the luxury of enough carried water to let you trace them.”



to think about X = to change X
we change the subject
we get some info: there are 5 people in the room. but when we bring that information into thought (because of how we feel and of our believes ==>) we start to bend the 5 to 6 or to 50 --> a try to change the reality =/= thinking in calm condition using science, information, conversation

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

bipolar --> mood disorder --> relationship of the self with emotions
borderline --> personality disorder --> relationship of the self with the world (of subjects)
narcissist --> personality disorder --> relationship of the ego with the world

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

people who grew up in iran and former soviet countries --> tajrobeye doganegi تجربه دوگانگی (they lived through contradictory experience) =/=> settle down or grounded subejctivity ثبات sabat
“I like to travel” [~= escape from one's self گریز از خود goriz az khod : need to be everywhere but here]
•zamineye sargardani بیقراری restlessness (~=> escape) --sold--> nomadic
•zamineye narezayati نارضایتی dissatisfaction --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder

(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما


(when someon[...]

[...]ther (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 role assignments
...if an intervenor approaches your problem, you play your idiot role
}--> a *merry-go-round of circular causality* --> t[...]

[...] isthmus between the sensible world and the divine that was brought into our discussion, was proposed in my last letter those marvelous creatures living in the logic of precariousness, those who live in another temporality that is eyewitnessed in distanced pasts.
...
We are here on this site in a landscape of memory, in a progressive user-friendliness and a technology that signals our arrival in an Alam-e Barzakh (عالم برزخ), an ontological intermediate realm of images and forms, the creatures that populate this world have the incorporeality of “images,” 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 pos[...]

[...]l masters. As this happens, another human type is disadvantaged more and more and finally made impossible; (Nietzsche)

flora and fauna

this is not the scientist obsessed with an idée fixe--but one capable of uprooting and going

...invites ambivalence
...dreaming of immense edifices and the permanence promised by contracts written in stone

register(s) of understanding


A new fold in metaphysics, testing--that is, the types of relatedness that fall under this term--asserts another logic of truth.

A kind of questioning, a structure of incessant research, perhaps a modality of being, testing scans the walls of experience, measuring, probing, determining the “what is” of the lived world.

i marvel at...


wonders of...
marvels of...
unheards of...
mazhar ol-ajayeb مظهر العجایب
Motehayeran-e متحیران, Tahayor تحیر ~=? to wonder
dar ahval-e... در احوال
dar khavas-e... در خواص
navader-e... نوادر
sefat-e... صفات


ta'ajob تعجب =/=? heyrat حیرت
the mode of attention in ajayebnameh is tuned by ta'ajob (wonder) away from Iranian mystic preferences over transfixation and rapture (heyrat)
which literary or (not)knowing positions are installed in these two (observational?) stations?
the subject of ta'ajob is moved otherwise
تعجب در باب امر قدسی‌ ta'ajob dar bab-e amr-e ghodsi, wonder in the matters of divine

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

Heidegger: die Wissenschaft denkt nicht
Derrida: links science to mourning and memory
Lacan: science is always there, ready to erupt, amaze or blow you away.


Husserl was perhaps the one most freaked out by the historical split (between science and philosophy--and art?)


...a matter of technological selfunderstanding,

...nor do I insist on sustaining the pathos that propels the images...

ethical and political issues are increasingly seem to have more to do with testing than questioning, hesitation, certainty

There is a test ... it claims and so it stands. There is the other test that crashes against walls, collapses certitudes, and lives by failure-lives by dying or, at least destroying.


The one register of testing offers results-certitudes-by which to calculate and count on the *other.*

the culture of Versuch, test or trial
(farhange kushesh, ghasd, sue ghasd, va emtehan)

(measuring and) testing that support, among so many others, political, religious, and educational institutions

testing has everything to do with the way the policing of political sites and bodies takes place, in modernity and with our experience of reality in general.
[...]

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

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




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

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

(the word) wonder, it worlds.

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


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

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

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

gaps in cultural space that epistemology has not filled

hermeneutics =/=? epistemology

history of truth


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


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

[...]hically superior to nature. Rather, the boundaries that separate stones, animals, humans and gods are porous as well as being non-hierarchical--making possible a “lateral” moral aspiration, where birds and stones can be moral exemplars for humans.

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

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

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


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

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

“undiminished contact with the creatural, even with its petrified, inanimate, lowliest stratum, that of the stone… (Hannsen 2000, 150)”. The righteous man's justice consists of his attentiveness to nature, of his giving a hearing to all created things, of understanding the language of even of inert, petrified stones. But the righteous man, in Benjamin's imagination, remains a man. What would he make of Patthar Baba, the stone turned to saint? (Anand)

(our sense of) our own ecological peril and fragility--our shared fate with our neighbors.

[The ajayeb's beings and their neighbors]

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

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

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

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

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

[Martha Kenney]

(how not) render ‘wonder’ a strictly historical object(?)
[as basis for building a contemporary ethics]
(wonder is ajib عجیب)


just-so story
in science and philosophy, a just-so story, also called an ad hoc fallacy,[...]

[...]ries that narrate different beings and different doings, none of which can claim final ontological authority, but that each to different (ontic) work” (hopefully!)
-worlding: a choreography that generates ontologies (Thompson) --&--> there is no self without a world (Carson)
-not as a voyeur or anthropologist, but breathe in the density and composition of their atmospheres
(people = worlds)

ontic (hasti mojud-shenakhti هستی‌ موجود شناختی‌): “factual” existence as =/= metaphysical ontologic existence)

[ontological interferences in ontic--{regular existence, difference in little beings} for example, ontic is when we ask what time it is, and the answer is on the clock. (snafu is ontic, aporia ontological*) when the ontic is disrupted ==> you have a “day off,” all sort of things can invade and open up, demons come out, there is a suspension of ontic time, a (Heideggerian) holiday]

(Verran) [number are] “always ready to actively re-exist when we do the right actions and say the right words.” (can i do that with ajayeb's objects? how?)
“The moon rose above the river” (en) <--> “upward behind the onstreaming it mooned” (Tlon, a language by Borges with no nouns, only verbs)

(in old Iran, there is a measurement of time based on sa'd سعد and nahs نحس, the time of benevolent spirits and so on. the sensuous time, measurement is affect)


knowledge industry or “scientific factory”

how academic labor was implicated in capitalist systems and contemporary forms of knowledge/power

“ruse” (hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)

(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)


talking is also thinking


speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)

ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of[...]

[...](that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*)

***it is the very existence of ‘finitude’ that gets defined as ‘matter’

narcissistic bedtime stories... (positioning of materiality as either a given or a mere effect of human agency)

(*)matter: substance in its intra-active becoming
(*)performativity: iterative intra-activity

“I'm trying to complicate the locatability of human identity as a here and now, as an enclosed and finished product[/project]” ~ “perspective essentialism”
...nature performs itself differently
(Kirby)


[Barad:] **onto-epistem-ology**: the study of practices of knowing in being
“epistemology =/= ontology” is a reverberation of a metaphysics that assumes (inherent differences:) “human =/= nonhuman,” “subject =/= object,” “mind =/= body,” “matter =/= discourse”...

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

what kind of alphabetico-numerical forefinger can i build that can press a schizophrenic partial systematizing of ajayeb?

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

so much (in Iran's literature) still awaits reflection and comprehension (-without comprehensiveness please!)

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

...archeology of dying in our civilization
(archeology of our dying civilization)

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

Aristotle's narrative: catharsis of emotions --> first arousing pity and fear and then clearing them away

theories of narrative:
•formalist theories (Russian)
•dialogical theories (Bakhtinian)
•New Critical theories
•Chicago school, or neo-Aristotlian theories
•psychoanalytic theories (Freud, Kenneth Burke, Lacan, N. Abraham)
•hermeneutic and phenomenological theories
◾structuralist, semiotic, and tropological theories
•Marxist and sociological theories
•reader-response theories
•poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories (Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man)
•feminist theories (Martha Kenney, Haraway, Stengers, Hayward)
•
•

structuralist: that there are typical formal elements or “deep structures” to narratives --> complex performative dimension between the telling of stories and what is told in them

(Paul de Man:) “The paradigm for all texts consists of a figure (or a system of figures) and its deconstruction. But since this model cannot be closed off by a final reading, it engenders, in its turn, a supplementary figural superposition which narrates the unreadability of the prior narration.”

the analytic experience has a narrative character? psychoanalytic dialogue ‘uncovers’ a certain kind of narrative discontinuity maintained in the analysand's efforts[...]

[...]ling, modeling, figuring out fields of practices
•ontology: circumscribe, address, or deal with the processes of ontological transformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•

#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•

I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.

unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
 --> count: an agent of sort[...]

[...]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 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 [...]

[...]happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)

what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)


in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?

[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)

history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful

(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

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


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


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

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

self-exclusion

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

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

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it make[...]

[...]mals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy


cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)

(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*


***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***

‘question of power' = do you go along with it?

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


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


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

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

self-exclusion

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

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

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

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

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

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

how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their rela[...]

[...]it?

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


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


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

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

self-exclusion

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

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

idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance

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

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



>


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

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

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

[...]an entangled state do not have separate identities

there is no epmirical evidence of such a disjunction ontologies at a particular scale, “micro-world” and “macro-world”

who insists on “quarantining quantum queerness”?
quarantining scale and time
quarantining Sadra to “his” time, or ajayeb to an older another temporality, and therefore irrelevant for us “today”

[*]scale: intra-actively (re)configured in the ongoing intra-active becoming on space-time-mattering

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

Khezr and San'an, the most repeated points of reference in tasavof
like you, Hafez, full of struggle, sensation, love,

our resistance and breakdance

(Mehran Rad:) Hafez preferences on Farsi over Arabic:
Deir دیر / Some'e صومعه
Pir پیر / Sheikh شیخ
Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

my project is about learning the ‘how’ of cultivating the ability to fruitfully approach texts from different cultures and pasts
-(to study) the radical poetic force of the Persian texts--in ajayeb
-to become enhanced and enchanted in skills of reading wider ranges of linguistic registers
-to open up an approach to a dauntingly complex region of islamicated thought (not [...]

[...] Parsa پارسا / Zahed زاهد
Parishan پریشان / Tafraghe تفرقه


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]ross a vast atmospheric field

sediments of ajayeb:
•obvious
•much remarked
•cryptic --> favored
•situationally precise

how ajayeb is an improvisatory conceptuality?
does ajayeb-writing takes place in singularity? (because every worlding is singular and precise ==> the pleasure of its recognition)

#my project in apass has been a practice of writing that is an experiment in attuning to ajayeb's tune

ajayeb reports of:
•affect that has become native***, attaching to bodies and socialities, to an ethos***

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

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

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

______________


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

*a something both animated and inhabitable

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

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

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


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

exert palpable pressures

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


(according to Stewart) ordinary affects are more directly compelling than ideologies, as well as more fractious, multiplicitous, and unpredictable than symbolic meaning*** ([...]

[...]is gregarious دسته اى or solitary ==(such practices ensure that)==> **individuals act and see in the same ways as their kin** }--> is this what mother does? (has to do with the ability or threat of transformation? -->) *#practices of care and نگرانی negarani are the production of a distinctly human body ~ naturally human ~=> different bodily constitutions of the subject ==> different worlds

a process that crucially entailed inconstancy: a continuous creative response to the exigencies of somatic uncertainty and ontological risk =/= intentional image into a realized product (a bad story of technology)

let's resist:
•the vessel metaphor
•the body's dual character as biological and cultural

archaeologists’ understanding of what bodies and artefacts are ==> a model (based on analogy) ==> “pot =/= body”


****sex and aging, defined as the real “physical characteristics” of the body that underpin human experiences --> usually remains unaltered
(for instance check the TV series Six Feet Under, how David's gay-ness is an intrinsic absolute fact of his body that underpins all his experiences)


we “wear”:
•sex
•aging
•personal feelings
•Iranian, or German, (basically being anything)
•


(basically in all Hollywood imaginings and standard archaeology) artefacts are only assigned secondary agency --> animacy is not considered as inherent attribute of the artefactual *** (Gell)
--✕--> pots as living organisms subject to processes of growth


(Ingold's) ecology of materials is characteristic of work that focuses on the inherent vitality of things (Barad)

*production: an ongoing process that produces both maker and object


(Alberti proposes) a change in focus: (from) *stopped up objects* --(to)--> *leaky things*


in his writing Alberti finishes 3 or 4 times his paragraphs with the same characterization of his field: “chronic instability of a world constantly at risk of transformation”


“if everything can be human, then nothing is human in a clear and distinct way.”
Viveiros de Castro


[*]subjectivity: a condition and outcome of all affective relations =/= a capacity that can be awakened in a seemingly inert thing
=/=?! transference, (is transference an object-oriented account?)


the active nature of materials refers to their recognized capacity to escape form : their untrustworthiness


(a paradime for creative arts:) artifactual production --> animal creativity

(in Amazonia, and) in ajayeb, no distinction is made between thoughts, feelings, body and mind --> thoughts and actions happen in the same ontological space
(Alberti > Viveiros de Castro)



<[...]

[...], constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensative to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies اقتضا, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command; Latour)
‘industrial model of distributed production’ <--> ‘a version of the responsibilities and pleasures of professional and intellectual autonomy’
-TV shows are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as “us”: we are the viewers mentally enacting [~ playing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for] various understandings of the so-called past***
melodramas of reenactment and experimentation ==> professional knowledges are elevated, while their bondaries threatend

in the production of an ‘object’ things (and meanings) get lost, they might be registered in “interference”


*anachronism, anachronistic --> #sleep-walking
“slippages in time” within the past as well as between “us” and the past
desire for tales of progress, with some particular “us” on top ~ chronology as essential origin {what we see often in technology tales such as Lucy (2014) or X-Men opening scenes}=/= to mix up who counts as “us” {what i have been trying to do, mixing up with Iran, Germany, etc.} to offer different timescales
•local details that animate generalizations
•archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy
•transparency of the material limitations of selection


spectacle of production

critique of the living-history ethos

giving science war pep talks... [TED]
(don't!)


[*]witnessing: “root of the experimental life”

[*]science: important and witnessable

freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and create scales of importance

commenting and making alliances across space-time with other figures


_[audience and markets]_
audience polyphony
audience and markets shift and converge in [flexible knowledges] complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological “markets”
(**the story of the ‘interactive’:) “rich contradictory nestings permit an require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals”


to call oneself in and out of allience and its classifications, that *momentary universalism* shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation (*)

[...] --> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental

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

conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it

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

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

[...]--> [ ? ] --> salience --> tangible --> literal --> experimental

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

conceptualize the intensities of form and force
affect studies has made me feel less alone because before it

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

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

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

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

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

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


[...]

[...]s a partial rendering of the world

[dog's nose reading] ...a universe of scents--historical, multifaceted--presents itself to the canine “reader”

(Doty) ...deer cannot see red or orange, a biologist writes, but apparently can see blue much better that we can. who can even imagine what that would mean, for blue to be--well, more? ♥

“All accounts, it seems, are partial; thus all perception might be said to be tentative (versuchsweise), an opportunity for interpretation, a guessing game.”

Doty putting it into a single sentence in order to suggest, as Proust did, the simultaneity of perception. he [Proust] wanted to dilate the sentence toward its outer limit, so that one would feel the blu of space and time that the unit of syntax held all at once

*finding the words* --> the nature of my attention, the signature of my selfhood

...terms commensurate with the clamoring world

(recognize your acts of naming --> for example naming the sonic outruch of a bird “singing”) --> what birds are actually up to when they sing isn't clear **

Whitman describing the sea itself as a “fierce old mother” whose constant iteration is the whispered word death


(in Iran we have) the problem of speechlessness (~->? Mehdi and Kourosh's talkativeness) ~= a state without agency --> unable to push back at things that impress upon them

***life not having been realy lived until it is narrated (@Ehsan)
(we need) to experience the satisfaction of matching words to the world --> **to feel, at least for a moment, language clicking into place, into a relation with the world that feels seamless and inevitable** -- when language seems to match experience, a kind of fusion between the word and the world : some tift is healed --> “the silken skilled *transremembrance* of a song” -[trans- : exchange of parts, one being fusing with another] --> “floating instant"--a part of the other, grown indistinguishable

the pleasure of recognizing a described world [****] --> work on ajayeb


festidious sense of accuracy


(Doty on) Elizabeth Bishop's poem “The Fish” (concerned with the experience of observing, aiming to track the pathways of scrutiny, *carefully rendered model of an engaged mind ar work*, looking into the fish's shifting eyes that can't be comfortably anthropomorphized. we can only guess if the poet is concerned with defeat, vitory, or survival) =/= Ferdosi's Rostam, or Div
Bishop's examination of the fish happening in the composition of the poem =/= straightforward record of perception

a tradition of seeking, in the vast book of difference (tha American continent offers)

(the poem) interprets a wordless, creaturely presence

baroque: attempt to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose (Sa'di's baroque tendenci[...]

[...] duality


‘and’ --> the signature element of a place, of a landscape, the conjoined body : the animate and the inorganic as one thing


*the project of being alive* (is little understood)

([my project is perhaps] to become) a person whom the ancient world is remarkably vivid*** ♥
to have gossiped about figures of ancient Persia

to believe that the *world is queer* (=/= Mobed, Foad, Reza)
(we need -->) a window of doupt through which all creative possbility comes into being

(Forster:) “[...] standing absolutly motionless at a sight angle to the universe”

(queer =?) an oblique مورب position in relation to the real (=/= buisiness as usual)
queer to be interested in what can't be packaged or sold in the marketplace
queer to enjoy the fundamentally useless, contemplative pleasure of (poetry, ajayeb, etc.)


description --> *providing the particular evidence of specificity*
not everything can/need to be described --> **the choice of what to evoke**, to make any scene seem ‘real’ vagheyi. look at USA film industry and all the efforts put in scenic description of the WWII, vampire stories, teenage life, nation; or in iran in Iran-Iraq war (Iranq)


lush, sensuous, flowering

parallel text to the creature


“you are gorgeous and i am coming” ♥

an approximation, unstoppable as an approachoig sound of approaching organism


testing and smelling
insight and sound --> Lili


an aphrodisiac and a chastening reminder: getting sidetracked by grief


“my portion this time”

*art is a house that tries to be haunted* ♥ (Doty > Dickinson)

قافیه به تنگ آمد ghafie tang, (when a choice is) driven more by sonic than by logic


what kind of game is the sea? @Marialena
lap and drag. crag and gleam
(monosyllables --> are we reading nouns or verbs? tough, playful ocean)

syntactical ambiguity disorients


(Khayam's) desire to die into the world (~ to surrender into the life of things)

[title]
*describer's art*


autumn
a kind of logarithn of decay and rekindling


to describe description
a work of advocacy
to go description-hunting in ajayeb
evocation of sense perception (--> a technique that Adventure Times TV series uses)

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

Foucault [_bestiary of the imagination]
...precisely because it puts them into categories of their own, the Chinese encyclopedia localizes their [fantastic entities, fabulous animals, polymorphous and demoniacal faces, creatures breathing fire,,] powers of contagion

encycl[...]

[...]t 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 men's) satisfaction of commodity desire --entails--> absence from home

woman's work in technology and textile manufacturing and in 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 forms of giving and reciprocation that demand generosity but that are also likely to provoke avarice --emerge--> witchcraft: a relentless question about appearances and the problem of knowing what the[...]

[...]or Marialena
(for Marialena) ocean [~=? fluid women] (an unstratificated, non-coded flow, sex organs sprout everywhere, no organ is constant as regards either function or position) =/= (male fantasies of) armored body

(Deleuze and Guattari suggest) dismantling of the organism (~ molar organic body) ==>
•hypochondriac body (suffering from imaginary symptoms)
•paranoid body
•schizo body
•drugged body
•masochist body <-- my favourite
•
}--> these are all about the body from the point of view of its *potential* [=/=? method]
}--> we are at (an anthropological / psychoanalytic discourse of) excess and transgression --Artaud-->{ organs: functional articulations forced on the body }==> separation, determination, representation

body without organ =/= body image http://ajayeb.net/?q=body+image

-what feminist theory has to say about that? --Irigaray--> is not the body without organs women's own historical condition?
...the machinic, the inorganic, as well as the notions of loss of self, dispersion, and fluidity are all too familiar to women
(and to non-western subjects, i would say. Tasavof has been advocating body without organ within the context of mysticism in Iran)

are Deleuze and Guattari “cyberpunks, constructing fictions of terminal identity in the nearly familiar language of a techno-surrealism”? ~-> (to dissolve the body ==>) will to regain the world <~~--> [death of the auratic object ==> subject: a condemned and useless vestige alongside the simulacra that precede and envelope it]

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

(?we need) political metamorphosis

the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)

Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical

science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran [...]

[...]we need) political metamorphosis

the tensions between:
[*]artist's “special task” (to oppose intellectual divisions) {(art of) forming, inventing, fabricating concepts (<== Deleuze and Guattari), (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of immanence (or consistency) ~= self-referential (=/= referential) --> syntagmatic (word associations)}
and: [*]the increasing difficulty to ask questions (as a result of the constant increase in the specialization of the knowledges --> science) {propositions in discursive systems, (a “task” that) proceeds with a plane of reference --> paradigmatic (a worldview) ==>? to *confront chaos* ~= to provide chaos with reference points [<-- artists need to learn this]}****

(my work in lecture-performance: to provide chaos with reference points)

Barad, Stengers, <== stable foundations of physics had broken up and it is time for science to become philosophical

science becomes philosophical philosophy becomes artistic art becomes anthropological anthropology becomes poetic poetry becomes biological biology becomes archaeological archaeology becomes speculative speculation becomes scientific science becomes aesthetic aesthetics becomes adventurous adventure becomes rigorous rigor becomes Iranian Iran becomes German Germany becomes Arabic Arab becomes Egyptian Egypt becomes animalistic animal becomes fabulous fable becomes political politics becomes...

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

(Baxstrom + Meyers highlight a productive gap between intent & outcome in) Christensen making a case of witchcraft (in his pioneering, bizarre, and lavish project of Häxan):
•misidentified nervous disease
•incompatibility of superstition and religious fanaticism with modernity and science
•bringing “errors of belief” in the 15th and 16th centuries into our view

living cinematic tableau, Häxan's excess =/= socially constrained thinking, discursive mode of analysis

Christensen's thesis concerned/gripped with abnormalities, events, and causes ==provide==> diagnosis
(like Favret-Saada) he was an un-witcher at once caught & catching

witch =? epiphenomenon

(to bring the ajayeb to life “objectively” is nonsense)

[Häxan = spectacle + argument ==> *to make nature speak*] drove efforts to locate & combat witches, and it served to shape similar aporias between *sense & distance* imbricated in:
•the invention of modern hysteria in the 19th century
•the “discovery” of the “native's point of view” by anthropologists in the early 20th century

for Christensen: “witchcraft = unrecognized manifestations of clinical hysteria and psychosis”

excessiveness of Häxan's reenactment --> construct the witch's material, invisible, mobile force
(Häxan's objectivity) had no expectation that the real will simply “speak for its[...]

[...]of mourning)
body remains vibrant matter <== communication remains possible

taking care of events through their affects

(Despret asks) what do we know about what the body continues to feel and causes the person to feel once it has stopped breathing?


death midwives
share the conviction that death is not a matter of all or nothing
[people] can still talk to those who remain through memories or thoughts that arise in their presence
signs --> remain open to the possibility of being understood differently

death affects the face muscles in such a way that it produces a post-mortem smile (لبخند شهید) --> *smile (that comforts) ==> ‘deceased: a particularly robust being’ that unifies two ways of being:
1. he becomes an expressive relational being
2. his body becomes matter for expressions

midwife ==> a possibility in the sense of “or else, also” (=/= “either or"), in the valuable grammatical register of conjuctions: and, and, and...


these expressive modes that require *only recipients*, [=/= explanation: to give the phenomenon its scientific imprimatur] they just call for one to take into account
-this is tricky if you are in Iran's shia martyrdom culture or in the presense of Western authoritative sensual teacher. can there be a deliberate coexistence [an additive epistemological engagement --> *affirmation of the possibility that multiple and contradictory versions coexist*] of (the current enchanted version:) لبخند شهید and (the comming disenchanted version:) secular imprimatur in present iran?]

the dead body is both *biological & sacred*, object & subject, disenchanted & enchanted

disjunctive and controversial (یا “or else”) --(replaced by)--> “and” that challenge medical epistemology (each version “adds” to the current versoin rather than erase it)
•the fact that a smile can be a “natural” phenomenon does not prevent him from having wanted to comfort his family
•the “and” introduces a non-polemical challenge (an *open challenge* that opens up to other narratives) in terms of “there is always something else" = a commitment (that transforms ways of thinking and ways of feeling) [=/= Holakouee's روشنگری enlightened secularism]

the deceased:
•they invite themselves into dreams
•****they make presence of presence felt**** --> through stratagem (ruse of genre, skill in devising plans or schemes)
•they play on coincidences --> (as far as they are connected) anything can be used to make a sign <== **they are opportunists of enigma**
•they thwart all attempts to give meaning to the action
•they do have regularity ==> (it is possible to constitute) *a science of the deceased* [that fits them, one that describe them, that can interpret in the sense of guiding a reply to what they want o[...]

[...] adjacency) --- delicate trajectories of greeting
-how do we greet a dog. the submission necessary in greeting. we submit to it when we greet the dog. hi dog. what would a practical Tarof with dog look like? do we have Tarof with animals? The Tarof's affection itself cannot be separated from a desire to dominate.

Levinas narrates a greeting, when he was in a concentration camp in germany, they call them dog. then a stray dog shows up and they call him Bobi. when they came back from the dehumanizing labor of the camp, Bobi would run to them every day and greet them. and that was what rehumanize them.

tarof and complaint
(is tarof capable of forming a protest?)

using tropes of traffic in different cultures with relation to tropes of technology, mobility and constitution of freedom. in Germany talking about ‘rail’ and ‘track’, changing tracks, shifting tracks and so on, meaning there is a predefined trajectory systematically mobilizing the individual in plain of possibilities. in US people more use cars and car can go anywhere, park or decide when and in which speed to move on, including complete autonomy on the direction and velocity of movement, accompanying the North-American notion of freedom and relation to destiny. in Iran the movement is also based on personal cars but everyone is stuck in traffic, so there is a freedom of choice implied and is initially available but then on the plain of possibilities there are all sorts of technologically situated block-roads that traffic in and hinder motility. this is also a condition of Tarof. “shoma befarmayid!” (after you!)

*Tarof might be as well a mode of resistance in order not to enter the economy of the other (--> at the mercy of the other), when they say “it's on me.”


•رودربایستی <--> ? a [در رودربایستی گیر کردن] (a --?--> حیا)


shah: one who sits while others stand --> tarof as king's behavior (tarof is adab-e salatin?) ~~--> tasavof's tarof: takalof (=/= javan-mardi: ‘self = guest’)
Khhv0M9n5_g

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

every call to speak involves some violation and over-joy, putting oneself in a persecutory way on the line, what Sa'di calls in “Dar Favaede Khamushi” in 4th chapter of his Golestan ‘on the disadvantages of speaking’ or “On the Advantages of Silence” (Written in 1258 CE)



literate or obliterate



infinitely less violent --> that there is never absolutely nonviolent, a value infinitely small but never zero; infinidecimals
degree of violence = 1/x {while “true”: x+1}


(Augustine:)
(Because of the arbitrariness of being:) “to love" = "I want you to be”
[we need to be witnessed:]
because “we have not made ourselves,” we “stand in need of confirmation. We are strangers; we stand in need of being welcomed”
[...]

[...]h foreign-policy


[Arendt:] (in 20th century) shifts in the terms in which we locate the ethics and values of responsibility
citizen --> refugee
[demand for clear ethical responsiveness]
*citizen: an entity assumed to occupy the secured interior zones of polity (who generates the affect and discourse of care, concern, responsibility, and rights;)
*refugee: foreign and shifting body with no home base--has become the exemplary locus for any possible cosmopolitan ethics

you feel like a foreign body until you finally get a job, love, being greeted,
(you may remain foreign until the other claims your body: the police, the lover, the employer, some microorganism that make you sick, and so on.)


(Nietzsche's view of) the friend as the future***
Holderlin asking “Wo aber sind die Freunde?” (a central complaint of ethical proportions and political consequence), (that they have not come to the place from which the poet is greeting) scattered or not yet in existence --> nature of future friendship. (is he keeping the friend necessarily remote? out of political reach? Avital's asking, accusing Holderlin of singularization)
-Graeco-Roman model of friendship
-(is there a specific Iranian model of friendship? --?--> Tarof)
-political model of friendship (based on reciprocity)

Greco-Roman --> Mediterranean World
-the “swimming-pool and spa” of the Greeks and Romans?
-wherein the cultural preferences, ideas and sensitivities of these peoples were dominant
-their urbanites and cosmopolitan elites
-mutual knowledge

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


finite essence of friendship

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



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

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

the national geography documentary crew and the editors fabulating a nature story which comes to hang around in my family's lunch table culture. the iranian mother and eating your children story of the lions. the multi species contingencies. my family culturenaturally hanged on the story of the wild nature, wildness. what does it mean for my family in their specific temporal location in tehran history? t[...]

[...]


our verbal velocities could reach no one in a way that would truly mark or unhinge the brutal protocols of lived reality... ?

...who took no prisoners (...who can truly say that?)

(I also? take pleasure in) the injurious effects of language : words are bodies that can be hurled at the other, they can land in psyche or soma --> manifesto

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

(as a reader) friend is a partner in crime

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

Sa'di's scene of writing, saying goodbye:
ای ساربان آهسته رو کآرام جانم می‌رود وآن دل که با خود داشتم با دلستانم می‌رود
سرو سیمینا به صحرا می‌روی نیک بدعهدی که بی ما می‌روی
بگذار تا بگرییم چون ابر در بهاران کز سنگ ناله خیزد روز وداع یاران
(iranian culture and its relationship to farewell and khoda-hafezi, expanding it. why we find it so difficult to say goodbye, or even can't say goodbye. --- resume work with Mona?)

Holderlin's intervention/question: we arrive at the truth, Das Wahre emerges, the moment closing in on us, when we have to say goodby

in an Iranian modality the farewell is the loci of truth, (locus: a place or metaphysical locality collecting the center of activity)

(the so-called) poet's radical exposures



is violence in farsi: ‘azar’ آزار? (how would that change instead of ‘khoshunat’ خشونت?)
kam-azari کم آزاری, bi-azari بی‌ آزاری (possible?)

eshgh عشق ~= bi-niazi بی‌ نیازی

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

demography of violence and nonviolence

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

(Freud <--) *liability* (--> Levinas)
not yet guilty, an almost predisposition, an almost inclination toward being guilty, an openness to being guilty (-->? Seba's notion of ‘Schuld’ [~= debt, the obligation to pay or do something]) ~-> super-egoic formation (~=? that which we call “raising awareness”)
Trauma is structuring***
(to be noted that the concern of super-egoic formation rests on the structuring of ‘demand,’ which is not the being of ‘question’ that it wants to be. question is risky and consequential of new articulation)

[disposition: vaz’ وضع, halat حالت, mezaj مزاج, seresht سرشت, khu خو, khim خیم, saz ساز,]
[predisposition: este'dad استعداد, amadegi آمادگی, meyl-e ghabli میل قبلی; a liability or tendency to suffer from a particular condition]

super-ego [that part of you that exercises authority, “I am gonna make you swallow this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)

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

([...]

[...] this” --> jouissance] ~=? Div-mardom دیو مردم (paternal correctional voice, “don't drink!” --> Nezami) =/= Div (says “benush!” بنوش)

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

(with Haraway;) the relation between what counts as nature and what counts as culture (in Tehran)--judging whether a behavior is the stuff of genes or rearing
the domestic animal is the epoch-changing tool --> (free) wolf/dog (servant) ==> civilization

what are the things we hate in the name of Wilderness (~=> “fall” into culture)

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

[lecture at apass, 10.03.2017]

i follow the scribbles of jamming and jam session

welcome to this metaphysical place

like you, i am also sometimes in heaven, sometimes in hell, in no-land, nowhere, elsewhere, in Belgium; also interested deeply in what signals my and our arrival in the metaphysical entity of Belgium. like Christian, as i am fantasizing his excursion that i missed, we went out and walked back into the city, studying what really signals our arrival, when and how and where on the body we feel that we are there. and my guess is that it is always technological. but in an another universe your arrival might be registered by greeting. and in an Iranian sense...

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

my lecturing, when it is about going after a term or a metaphor or a subphenomena or a paraconcept, {to arrive at its essential qualities or range, its meaning and historical rootedness, how does it hold things together, what holds it together (in related but different speculative milieu,) its intractable necessity, its ghostly effectiveness, its phenomenological maintenance, in which framework they maneuver, and so on} is a tentative intervention that i reside in the weaker neighborhoods of thought, even vandalizing (authoritative knowledge-)claims of legitimacy and abandoning the controlling of possibilities of comprehension.
-(purposeful?) anarchy of questioning, unfolding my thoughts anarchically

*not to work on X in order to get the point across that one remains susceptible (mosta'ed مستعد, dar khatar در خطر, dar ma'raz در معرض) to and in need of X : what X almost was, or is still about to be
(the character of X, and? the X-ian character)
-rather, ask, in what way X allows an approach?

{Avital on} **authority, violent shores of human governance

what happened to authority after the demotion (tanazol-e rotbe تنزل رتبه) of the “big Other” (death of God, State, Pir, and other mostly masculinist idols)?
a primal impulse in the cuing of group formation; pre-givenness of our way of handling private and public spheres of encounter, domestic and foreign affairs;
-disappearance of authority functions as a figure for democracy in crisis; loss of authority and the loss of the enemy opens up abysses in boundari[...]

[...]e new refugees coming. integration, a bad response to the problems of living with difference]


(Robert Putnam:) people who live in homogeneous local communities appear more sociably inclined towards and curious about others in the larger world : first- hand experience does not weaken stereotypes
-the case of Brussels: withdraw from neighbours who differ --> to hibernate

attitudes
actual behavior

[*]cooperation: an exchange in which the participants benefit from the encounter
can be informal as well as formal: experience of mutual pleasure in a bar exchange gossip
difficult kind of cooperation: join people who:
•have separate or conflicting interests
•do not feel good about each other
•are unequal
•do not understand one another
•(different faith communities)
}==> responsiveness as an ethical disposition

rituals of civility
as small as ‘please’ and ‘thank you,’ put abstract notions of mutual respect into practice

in the spirit of generosity, let's not write off the banker (or the Mullah) as a human being --> instead of “fuck you” how do we respond to our differences in a difficult social environment such as contemporary Iran --> what skills are needed for this hard cooperation? --Sennett--> dialogic

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

what remains from christianity after its self-deconstruction? (Nancy)

(what theology doesn't know about itself?) recovered from the repressive power of religion

Nancy's “shattered love” is the stuff of Hafez

#love (and greeting?) doesn't belong to the realm of giveable things
Lacan's definition of love consists in giving what one does not have, (filling emptiness with emptiness) --> to give something i ‘would’ have? --> (giving that which is not a property, not even one's self,) to give behind or beyond any subject, any self? --> *the giving of the fact that i cannot possess myself* ==> ‘to give' = 'to give up’
***love: to share the impossibility of being a self***
----> (Nancy's) ‘body’ (of political thought): not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being-in-common (=/= ontologize the community, after the death of God, Rousseau: community of mankind as the foundation of politics --> “man” comes from the “contract” and not reverse)
----> “giving” the (Derridean) ‘gift’ cannot succeed if the giver knows about his/her gift; *unpresentable*
--✕--> politics and the political always implies fulfillment, law, closed space, *closure*

(Pir's) heaven of value

(Bergson's) supplementary soul

there is a nihilistic way in which we destroy

“everything is political” =/= everything is directly ontologically political ==> totalitarianism: [...]

[...]abits of the owners of the cows and sheep... [---> go to Tsing's coalescence]

***amazing interspecific recruitment***


Sina --telegram--> visual animal --inventing--> hallucinating --spoiled--> dissociated
Goda --Boicic--> wounded dog --saving--> mothering --> traumatized (left alone)


wolf observers
Heinrish's colleagues who study wolves in Yellowstone Natural Park
the peaceful cohabitation between the wolves and ravens
in Yellowstone when the ravens are in the presence of wolves, do not demonstrate any timidity and do not hesitate a second before eating --> the wolves allow ravens to conquer their fear --> wolves changed the constrains that hold sway over the habits of the ravens
the ravens of much more alert and vigilant than the wolves (the birds serve the wolves as extra eyes and ears)


the prophecy translated in terms of recruitment --Despret--> who could have thought, if not no doubt a descendant of La Fontaine, that it is the ravens who protect the wolves and permit then to eat with their eyes closed? ♥

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

[title]
the old taghalob (تقلب cheat)
history of enumeration in the Iran (measurement, weight, scale)
the history of our non-mathematical practices

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

time travel (in TV series or literature) --> (regardless if they are dystopian or not) essential for creating sensations of historical continuity

Marzolph on premodern middle eastern narrative culture
seafaring merchant...
sailor's yarns

tales documented in persian literature of the muslim period appear to be offshoots of earlier versions in either indian or arabic literature --> arabic as the lingua franca of the day

Kitab ajayeb al Hind, wonders of india, 10th century by iranian captain Bozorg ibn Sahriyar of Ramhormoz

(Marzolph holisitic assessment [=/= Beyzai's parochial claims of iranianness] of) middle-eastern narrative traditions = arabic + persian + otaman turkish + jewish + christian (+ several other) narrative traditions related to each other and none of which may claim an exclusive position

city of Brass
the Golden City is a legendary city built in africa by Tawil, the brother of the giant Ug, both of whom were born from the incestuous relation between Cain and his sister Anaq. having been deserted for more than a thousand years, the Golden City was later conquered by Egyptians and became the source of their fabulous wealth.

agahi آگاهی knowledge
na javan mard ناجوانمرد impudent one
farz فرض rite
sonat سنت manner
mardi مردی manly combat

[Sina, Ehsan -->] in the manner of *narrative men* --> typical for the thousand and one nights--whose protag[...]

[...] there is another being. a baby hayula (non-formity)... what other beings Div hunts for meat? (list, bestiary) “he would think about the next hunt X and get excited about the kabab of X...”  “immediately asked for more”

dungeons and dragons --> a non-cartographic space, there are no maps and one only learns by dying many times
dungeon has nothing to do with the medieval prison, it is a deterritorialized habitat, defined precisely by not having a map (or guide) --> are we in a dungeon?

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

journalism: professional discursive pursuit (of truth, of propaganda, etc.)
=/= journalism: proximity to the event + the risks that that entails

(Ghazzi's notion of) *affective proximity* : (a mode of consideration, a way) to make sense of local media practitioners’ reporting and witnessing of suffering in their country
--> a media practitioner =/= the event they are representing and participating in
/> affective proximity : what locals navigate to reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country =/= discursive

*emotional labour* of media practices of local reporters and witnesses

what the word “revolution” mediates (in Syria, Iran, etc.) [~/?= civil war]
1. an indication of commitment to a desired goal
2. an identity marker based on a past-oriented lament over what was sought but not achieved

study of affect and emotion in global news --(contextualized within)--> unequal power relations (==> journalistic roles & modes ofrepresentaiton)

user-generated-content
political economy of global war reporting
living with violence

journalism <--?---> affect

affective proximity
==shape==> the boundaries of journ0alism and activism
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
s
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure

(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts

(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]

...negotiating th[...]

[...] modes ofrepresentaiton)

user-generated-content
political economy of global war reporting
living with violence

journalism <--?---> affect

affective proximity
==shape==> the boundaries of journ0alism and activism
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure

(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts

(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]

...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others

(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor

[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)

journalism = represent + narrate

(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them

(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***

proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)

*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals


*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to circumstances)
◦(most of the time, artists and activists) ****use a[...]

[...] *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 tropes of mutuality, nurturing, and femininity. -- it is about making permeable bodies (+and landscapes throug[...]

[...]hat complicates?) the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions

the expansive fields of immanence and trancendence we can read in fire fossil


our contract with Allah

with fire we are at a testing site, at least of the the God of the Old Testament who showed a will to perpetual pursuit, perpetual rupture, fire is a testing device for subsidiary admission policy. this function or figure is precisly that which permeats modern existance

...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification

contaminative and communicative

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

in talking about our agreements with fire, i like to read how our rapport to the beyond has mutated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,

[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?

how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


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

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous
[...]

[...]tated (--undergone considerable mutations--) by means of our adherence to the imperatives of... trial by fire(?), test of the beyond. ==> our relation to (explanatory and descriptive) language, truth, process, and identity. (---> go to Ferdosi's poetic site)

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

monitor time according to the pulse of German/Iranian Idealism/Metaphorism,

[God] singular infinity (~= beyondness) --> [death of God] unlimited finiteness


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

how the mediality of talking fire designs an actual real materially enabled?

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

what form of trial discovers, exposes, establishes, or perhaps even invents the ground (on which Sudabeh has no standing)?

how my threading between black-box, darkness, and beyond helps us to spot those figures that makes claims of absoluteness?
(energizing the creative imagination in Iranian Islamicate phiosophy?)

interpretation <--?--> experience

fire-tech conscience translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience?
-transvaluation


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

[Serres]

technologies concerning heat--thermodynamics--shocked the traditional world and shaped the one we are working in now.
...theories concerning processes of transformation
...stages of alchemical initiations; archaic figure of fire

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

[my body lives still in that space that the society of sudabeh-fire-siyavash has formed, with fixities and social variieties. it is not an euclidian house.]


siyavosh/sohrab is one of the descendants of disseminated spaces, of catastrophic separation of the continuous

when Rostam recognizes the mark of his son, Ferdosi giving a version of recognition scene, connects --> Oedipus
the son, the mother
-we can recognize a typological space: the same and the other: the separated
-the space of the world is described requiring connection
-family tree
-parts are to be joined
-Rostam and Sohrab, Siyavosh and Sudabeh, cannot be composed to form a single homogeneous space. (Rostam and Siyavosh do that)


transsubstantiation

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

the “call” comes from me and from beyond and over me.

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

against the curtain of fire trial stands a stack of iranian proverbs about stone tri[...]

[...] these forms? What are the operations that connect the form-embedded self to the others?

4 billion years ago, the gravitational force of a mass of hydrogen atoms accumulated into a dense point of critical state. As a result of this formation new fusions released many sip-offs of different energies and materials which we perceive today in our bodies and in the light that reaches our eyeballs from the time immemorial of that hydrogen cloud. This fossil of materiality implies the existence of traces of an ancient reality before the existence of the familiar--the terrestrial life. While these traces are gauged in theoretical experiments in which radioactive ratios of nuclides inform us of such ancestral events, in Amerindian cosmogonies not so differently steered hypothesis are explored. Yawanawa, the origin myth of the people of Pano from the western Amazon, imagines the anterior of the world where nothing existed, yet there only people existed--everything was made of people. Before the diversification and classification of kinds there was a primordial human, as the only substance of which everything eventually fabricated.

Like Yawanawa, Hayula (Persian: هیولا) literally in today's usage with the meaning of unformed monster, is a technical term in Iranian-Islamic cosmology indicating the first principle of everything material of which all other constitutive layers of beings are molded--minerals, plants, animals, etc. Hayula in one hand locates the lowest of the lowest, the bottom of the scalar existence where God resides at the very top, and on the other hand possesses a great anatomical plasticity, a persistent pre-cosmological being that undermines the second law of thermodynamic. First were the object then came the subject--to give away to the results of the stabilization of the infinite potential for transformation contained in Hayula, as universal substance, a matter out of which the world could have come to be formed.

The narratives of the time before form, an era of pre-cosmological beings, primordial people with unlimited and unbound corporeality, is the story of the originality of Hayula's virtual potential for being. Hayula, not fully human, tasting beyond morality (destruction, anthropophagy, etc.), becomes the subjects of other interventions and morphs into spheres and features of the world--of biological aspects, celestial bodies, humanoid zones, etc.

The realm of Hayula comes to interpret, and thus permit and strain, who and how an I can be, at the same time that it provides the vessel for the continuity, the survival, of that I. Here the I is the continuity of an inhabitation of a point of view. It marks a relative position within a hierarchical logic that spans the cosmos, a hierarchy that ranges from the nonhuman to the human realm and from the demons to the realm of the formless. Following the classic joke, that one goes to a place in order to discover the directions of h[...]

[...]g no longer crowns the end of a labored process of appropriation =/= Western narratives of testing



going after the grail or attempting to reach a metaphysically-laden Castle

...cannot be properly located or possessed

the inaction hero


(?are we accustomed) to viewing the test as a way of mobilizing courage

The Sphinx marks the porous boundary between Western and Eastern domains of questioning and tells of bodies menaced by pulverization: should the riddle not be solved, either the questioner or the questioned must go. Passing the test is a matter of survival of the species for Oedipus, as it is for the interspecial dominatrix of the riddle: la Sphinx dissolves when the young man offers the correct answer.
=/= koan

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

My performance here is maybe a form of prayer or invocation[8] not simply to be read as a mere theoretical and discursive statement, and is intended to be a table of digital curses. To reopen the agency of curse in a cultural style that I have come to encounter, it might produce a different but not necessarily better speculative difficulty in discussing about the virtual. A curse[9] (according to Iranian-Islamic mixture of traditions in the milieus of promising and swearing,) is basically a networking function with both mechanical and interventionist properties that translate desire into performance—an intersubjective textual momentum that run virtually into the real world and it may (or may not) run down its target. Much like rumor, curse is contagious and reproductive but unlike the publicity of rumorous velocities, curse insists on secrecy at the same time harvesting its powers for revealing. The reality of the ‘curse’ is ‘assumed’ mostly and that is the virtual nature of this relation (with the materialities of the world that curse inscribes on) that I am interested in.


Curse systematically works with names, to be more accurate, with the notion of the “proper name”[10] invested in the idea of an automatic function that shifts ‘name’ to ‘agency’, virtual to concrete. That is if one knows the proper name, one could raise all actual agencies that act with real consequences—slogans in politics may rely on this typical power of cursing. In the Amazon I was not looking for the proper name of nature, neither theological nor analytical nor the supposed accidental. That means (looking for ways) critically not to be real.


An extended concept of cursing enters visuality in the gaze of the evil eye.[11] The malevolent glare who stamps upon by staring at an accidental moment of encounter in the evil eye, brings together the narrative of the random traveler who casts a gaze in another world of virtual and visual agency, and emphasises the randomness and hideousness of looking. The transaction between the[...]

[...]terested in this pluralist framework we are living in since the inception of recorded history.
...
It is not a formal hard-edged linguistic relegation, rather a metaphysical speculation

(making a ‘language atlas’?)
constructs of universals / transformational grammars: that have nothing of substance to say about the prodigality of language atlas

my interest in the ajayeb is due to the traces it provides into verbal literacy, a living vulgar language, rather than a dead structure such as mantegh al teir Attar (Mantiq-ut-Tayr).

..vanishing languages and people, their history and morphological structures uncharted, dim into the oblivion, each takes with it a storehouse of consciousness.

An image of man as a language animal of implausible variety and waste.

Cultures (during Attar's?) seem to expend on their vocabulary and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]

language riches seem to act as compensatory mechanisms. (having 60 different words in Shahnameh for signifying ‘horse’, doesn't necessitates the material variety of horse in the ancient Iranian culture?)
--starving bands of Amazonian Indians may lavish on their condition more verb tenses than could Plato.

Is my language, or lack of speaking certain languages, a powerful obstacle to the material and social progress of me?
--withering inward by language barriers. Linguistically atomized

interaction of physical and spiritual agencies...
The nominalist mechanism of creation: each time man spoke he re-enacted, he mimed.

(...the early forms and feelings of consciousness in human ancestral pasts)

my reading or performance includes scrutinising configuration of letters and inverting words.

Bad translations communicate too much, limited to what is non-essential in the fabric of the original, missing the bond of meaning.

If translation is a form, then the condition of translatability must be ontologically necessary to certain works.

Metaphysics of translation

translation is profoundly philosophic, ethical, and magical. It imports source of life. Alchemy, must retain a vital strangeness and ‘otherness’.

My translation, an interlinear version of the script, a virtual archetype of translation

obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language, Kafka's continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication. The impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, of writing differently.

Presence of interpreters in the building site, Kafka, literature house

in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?

Only if men could use language withou[...]

[...]y tactic, which means you are doing it in order to win something

---->[the story of writing]
within the artist world [artist as a creative being who inscribe on the world and in the world] (including apass) “writing” is internalized as the ‘bad object’
always considered secondary, excremental مدفوعى, the sign of something lacking: if you were in the real space of action, of being, you wouldn't need to write
-(for artists) writing distressed as an activity
-[the question remains] who holds the phallus? (in a converstaion and elsewhere) (=/= being open to being)
-taking dictations, an abjected position
writing is always linked to modalities of #retreat, evacuation, nonpresence
(am i associated with ecriture?) ==> being persecuted (on some level), there is something unbearable about the retreat ----> panic of the political
-let's inhabit an understander of retreat and what it involves, and, taking the responsibility of leaving your post. [we learn from what Kafka(‘s architecture of decision) surveils and marks for us > Avital --> where we are speaking/speeding from? and what is the architecture from which language emerges? is it a textual ventilator? or things are threatening to fixate?]

how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)

to tabulate

ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate



towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods

(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)

cruel hallucinations

laws criss-cross the world

...for i am a slave of science

the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)

extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being

drops of knowledge

physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
-[...]

[...]el), there is something unbearable about the retreat ----> panic of the political
-let's inhabit an understander of retreat and what it involves, and, taking the responsibility of leaving your post. [we learn from what Kafka(‘s architecture of decision) surveils and marks for us > Avital --> where we are speaking/speeding from? and what is the architecture from which language emerges? is it a textual ventilator? or things are threatening to fixate?]

how Iran named its Iran-Iraq war? Défense sacrée, the Holy Defense, دفاع مقدس, (and many other names)
how did we “have” an experience---after the war? (much less an adventure or an adventurous encounter with history pumped up with meaning and sense-making and productive futurity)

to tabulate

ok, i am refering to things that don't come up as part of the master discourse, things that don't come up as something we can assimilate (جذب) or appropriate



towards the gaze --> a theatrical gesture : to see everything serenely (in quiet contemplation) --> to be (at last) free from the Gods

(those who believe that) there is only transcendence, (that transcendence is all there is)
(this is also the common mistake in reading Iranian old mystic literature)

cruel hallucinations

laws criss-cross the world

...for i am a slave of science

the chain of orders : the new is born of the old =/= angle (interrupts the stoic chain, the chain of cause and effect)

extermination and determination
laws of identity, repetition, and information-free
death at the end of entropy --> sequence of events (from the point of view of plague narrative --> the law is the plague + the reason is the fall [--> everything falls to zero])
the same ~=?! non-being

drops of knowledge

physics of the military*
•sheets of atoms
•well-ordered arranges
•in columns
•the learned science of the teachers
•the structure of division
•Heraclitean physics of war
•chain of reason
•the knowledge of ranks
-

(in nature?) animals are born from flows
animals born from fluid mechanics

the infinite cylinder of parallel consequences, trains of reason rain down in torrent:
•contact space travel, doctor strange kick trip, lucy time travel, matrix clock scene
what is the analogy with the concrete model? In each case
what is the order of the world that is explained by visible phenomenon in each of these cinematic scenes?
The beginning of vortex
causality
perspective
body

(what are?) models in ajayeb:
concretes, quasi-concretes, laws, equations,
vortices, turbulent clouds,
random dispersions,
flows, disequilibrias,
packs, alliances[...]

[...]ch project)

graduating from ... and approaching ...
(from fairy tale ---> approach myth)


--> http://www.sinaseifee.com/DifficultForests.html
becoming Amazon as the fear of the male.
(Amazon as male hunter symbol)

(symbol for) masculine gender principle
(to disavow sexual difference)

I am not bringing the text to you, or you to the text.
as you have already guessed we have to destroy both the notion of text and you, to some extent, in order to permit a reading to constitutes itself.

is San'an a prince charming?
(let's examine)

the spiritually established death-birth (death of birth and birth of death) at the end of story

Miyazaki's faceless monster (in Spirited Away 千と千尋の神隠し), with his flexible plasticity, has an issue with appearance. he goes from loneliness, to love, to greed, and finally becomes a student body. he has great agency in the beginning and docile in the end, [اسیر صورت --?--> اسیر معنی]


San'an is determined to see it through, the whole process

the German super-ego
the German ego
to carefully inject some of German super-ego to the Iranian ego

(for Anastasia) what is the next war?
ترسا

(to the audience:) you should feel free to make notes, because I am making notes while you are talking, and these kind of lectures I am doing are the process of those note-makings.
I like to interrupt you. the performance is itself an interruption of you, like when we say in a conversation “may I interrupt you” your pace, your velocity, your speech-acts, etc.


what is being ‘interested’ in the history of illusion?


in your process in becoming woman, you might end up becoming a female robot.
(Tarsaa's part)
whose testicles are smashed here?
to the less molested .... (body of the pupil)
psycho-history


human preparedness for inter-relations with technology and technologization



***test some failures


a different brand of anxiety (?)


walking on groundlessness, literature, house of literature?

protest against “was”

give literature in its totality

initiate a program

we don't love our selves nor our neighbors

San'an, when he thinks he is getting close, he has abysses he has to clear

which language the house speaks? or which language German speaks?

house of literature, house is the site of kinship too.
if literature is like a house at all



unreadable algorithm of encounter

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

I hope we can get along famously



my[...]