[...]r />
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, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading -[...]

[...]> 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, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense


politics of difficulty

...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground

(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical su[...]

[...](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, responsibility =/= when the path is given]--> Germany is moving towards the removing of aporia [<-- a general panic popular in sci-fi]
(the very condition of possibility of) *responsibility*: a certain experience of the possibility of the impossible ~ aporia }==> the impossible invention --> *responsibility must be an invention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense


politics of difficulty

...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground

(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable [...]

[...]vention*
[-Germany's notion of law: like any idea of law, are not by themselves motivators for morality or immorality, it is really upon (human) culture to do that.]


fable ==> possibility of another kind of reading --> exposure to something that breaks with the regimes of meaning and sense


politics of difficulty

...to fall back on the conceptual priority of the subject, agency, or identity as the grounds --✕--> we have politics because we have no ground

(Keenan suggests) “deconstruction” is not offered here as an antiauthoritarian discourse, an attack on grounds, but as an attempt to think about this removal as the condition of any (political) action }~= democracy


(according to fables) responsibility begins in the bad example (--> the concept of conflict ~=> the ethics and politics of responsibility)

the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*


...the rhetorical event of a comparison

#[the theater of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted wi[...]

[...]the classical subject --(the passage through the bad example)--> installed in its stance of responsibility and the safety of identity

“What is at stake in the fable is, more than anything else, the interpretation and practice of responsibility-our exposure to calls, others, and the names with which we are constituted and which put us in question.” (Keenan)

...practical effectivity of literature


•(for Annabel Patterson:) fable accomplishes a speculative Aufhebung : “[...]the role of metaphor is to mediate between human consciousness and human survival, [and here] the mind recognizes rock bottom, the irreducibly material, by rejoining the animals, one of whom is the human body”
•(for Louis Marin:) fable: uncertain model of praxis
•(for Hegel: Aesop was a “misshapen humpbacked slave” and his) fable = witty, witzig =/= spirit, depth, insight, vision, poetry, philosophy
•(for Lacoue-Labarthe:) fable: a name for the mutual implication and asymmetrical interference of literature with philosophy --> the suspension of the self-evidence of the categories “literature” and “philosophy” in order to use each to put the identity of the other into question. [to think the world as fable. Is it possible?]
•(for Keenan:) fable superimposes the relation of an address to the other in its singularity and in its anonymity (responsibility for the other) onto the traditional predicament of an articulation between the order of knowledge or cognition and that of action, ethico-political or otherwise --> *responsibility in Western philosophical tradition: an address to an other*


...the rhetorical event of a comparison

#[the theater of example]

the threat of example's excess

fables of responsibility ==securing==> *the morality of the subject who means* (who can they finally be submitted to the logic of an *evaluative destination*)

(Derrida's) mode of enunciation and the literary vehicle entrusted with its exemplification :
*[...]it is sufficient to introduce, into the fold of speech acts, a few wolves of the type (“undecidability” or “unconscious”) for the shepherd to lose track of his sheep: one is no longer certain where to find the identity of the “speaker” or the “hearer,” ... where to find the identity of an intention.*
--?--> wolf in sheep's clothing [--> also the problem/fantasy of the “integration” project (as the space of ethics and politics)~~>(“Appearances are deceptive” ==> exclusion of the parasite + identification of subjects as the task of responsibility); -what would mean for the German shepherd to lose track of his sheeps? (to go from) the fable of *the oriented sheepfold* --to--> the fable of *losing count*]
-the vexed relation between sheep and wolf, slave and master


(my work is all about: can we please look at) some *other* “interior of the system"[...]

[...]why fables are important? <-- others and their traces are always working within us already, in a space and time that cannot be reduced to that of consciousness (or self-presence)
•profound linguistic or rhetorical complexity of the call and response

the raven resounds (it does not just start talking) <-- it starts with the others: eagle, wether, shepherd

Lacoue­ Labarthe --> identification (the self-becoming of the Self) has always been thought as a matter of examples (+ their appropriation) --raven--> (paradoxical impera­tive) “imitate me in order to be what you are”

wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep­ skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
-->  a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble



[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan-->  self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)

[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom

governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction-->  limitation of ethico-political responsibilities

for Keenan: **question of respon­sibility = question of freedom**

the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked

calculable & programmable law

responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*

•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee

           ethical =/= actual
                |                   |
impossibility =/=  totality of what is

***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)

“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)

who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?


[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms[...]

[...]-> (paradoxical impera­tive) “imitate me in order to be what you are”

wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep­ skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
-->  a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble



[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan-->  self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)

[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom

governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction-->  limitation of ethico-political responsibilities

for Keenan: **question of respon­sibility = question of freedom**

the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked

calculable & programmable law

responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*

•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee

           ethical =/= actual
                |                   |
impossibility =/=  totality of what is

***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)

“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)

who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?


[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-oth[...]

[...] Karin's gifts)
-so the shells are passive objects, women are/were (traditionally), classically regarded as objects in a similar way and were given the names of shells


***how to think about vocabulary:***
-i cannot start using economics of the market to describe what i am talking about
-in the vocabulary of gift exchange (Strathern) may be able to find the vocabulary of analysis (like an artist choosing the color)
-Strathern choice: the vocabulary of gift exchange might give her the vocabulary by which to start describing, is an *artificial choice*. the vocabulary of the gift economy gives her a lot of terms in which to understand. but those terms are only useful for the purposes of understanding that particular set of data, and if i then leave that data, and if i follow these objects as they move out of the highlands, and if they became, if they came into an art market, then absolutely what we would be dealing with is commodities[...] --> situated knowledges [#SK], #import function

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

*literature = the question of reading* (=/= matter of novels and poems)

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

what is the language of war?
(Keenan > Weizman:) we need to understand war as discourse --> *war = a threatened discourse*
-The language component of war exists in the gap between the level of destruction which is “possible” and the level of destruction which is “actually applied” in every given situation.

when war is no longer a means but an end in itself(?) -->? Hezbollah

deterrence: a means of controlling a person's behavior through negative motivational influences

“We are law-abiding, and we go wild.”


violence stripped of semiotics

The logic, the reason, of conflict is thus political ... for Clausewitz, politics is essentially logic, logos, discourse, people reasoning with one another, thinking and speaking, exchanging


@Luis, why conflict could be my concern? because it marks the breakdown of politics, when we can no longer have a conversation, engage in the game, where there is no possibility of further exchange, there is fighting

failure ==> use of force

Saskia Sassen called the attacks of September 11 “A Message From the Global South”
she wrote that the attacks bore witness to a failure in communication or to a “translation problem”
for her the language of September 11 attacks was clear
Sassen's dangerous and depraved rationalization of September 11: south is speaking in a language that needs no translation



the word ‘conflict’ (is coined as a discoursive necessity and) bears with itself an analysis of politics which sees it as a rational enterprise, a structured confrontation or conversation aimed at comprom[...]

[...]@Mona @Ali ]



(the very strange claim [made by political leaders] that) force is a kind of language, and not just any language. It is one which solves the problem that seems endemic to all things linguistic, namely: failure, indirection, misunderstanding, drift. [...]that the language of force actively and successfully delivers its message --> a fable: “everybody understands the language of force” (unlike ordinary, diplomatic, political language) --> the readability or communicative power of the utterance, violence is seen as continuous with discourse --@Mona
[*]violence: “speaking the (only) language of the other” --> (very strange fable:) that violence is noninterpretive direct(~ umediated) and nonanalytic, that it is unmisunderstandable, that it takes hold and transforms its listener [--> fantasy of affective communication], hermeneutic and cognitive of the language is effaced and what is left is only *delivery* itself [@Ali's way of talking has a hint of this (a self-erasing speech,) he “delivers” his (political) message to me #tattooing me }--> the silencing/elimination of his interlocutor, **the little annihilatory gestures** of my friends], that it [violence] aspires to a *pure present*

•this is a translational problem? Keenan
•how do we know when things cannot get any worse?
•when/where the translation should stop? @Ali @Sina --> this is about the ethical risks (we are making all the time) in mistaking an annihilatory gesture for a discursive or political one


there is no language which needs no translation (not even violence)

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


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



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

[...]listener [--> fantasy of affective communication], hermeneutic and cognitive of the language is effaced and what is left is only *delivery* itself [@Ali's way of talking has a hint of this (a self-erasing speech,) he “delivers” his (political) message to me #tattooing me }--> the silencing/elimination of his interlocutor, **the little annihilatory gestures** of my friends], that it [violence] aspires to a *pure present*

•this is a translational problem? Keenan
•how do we know when things cannot get any worse?
•when/where the translation should stop? @Ali @Sina --> this is about the ethical risks (we are making all the time) in mistaking an annihilatory gesture for a discursive or political one


there is no language which needs no translation (not even violence)

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


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



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


conflicted peace and peaceful conflict
competitive military buildup

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

Keenan on working with images politically --> *politics of exposure (or revelation ~-> forensic)*
(increasingly important dimension of political) *image-making*:
--more--> the event takes place in order to be photographed and reproduced and rebroadcast, transmitted and distributed, copied and viewed --> dissolution of the obvious political spaces =/=
--less--> making visible something that is otherwise hard to see (~= converting observation or visualization into knowledge in hopes that some kind of action will come about, based on the rational, reasonable, deliberate interpretation of those images) (<--[...]

[...] reference, misunderstanding, active deconstruction, etc. my ‘personal responsibility’ to insist on space of difficult translation])


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



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


conflicted peace and peaceful conflict
competitive military buildup

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

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

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

the way performative dimension involves a kind of action that doesn't pass through the same cognitive circuits or the same process of knowing (in images)

•living by the image
•vulnerable to the exposure of the distortion or falseness of the image

to get a rich sense of the political context in which you operate (knowing about the h[...]

[...]ecisions ==> actions”
=/= (a more properly) political moment of: inscribe images --within--> a narrative or a persuasive project --within--> a campaign that actually narrates them (captions them, makes them more available for some kind of political action) and doesn't just take for granted that their meaning follows automatically

the way performative dimension involves a kind of action that doesn't pass through the same cognitive circuits or the same process of knowing (in images)

•living by the image
•vulnerable to the exposure of the distortion or falseness of the image

to get a rich sense of the political context in which you operate (knowing about the history, knowing what the local forces are, who the actors are, and so on) =/=  ethically-self-confident political movement reassured by the quality of their own good intentions ==> skip over a lot of local analysis, research, or interaction

...is it a humanitarian catastrophe (a crisis of suffering) or genocide (a crisis of an
ideological sort)
quasi-raw material of images --> recoding, contextualization, narration,

the bad stories and failures (in our lifetime) that do need to be excavated and thought about

Keenan --> *the fantasy of being able to move so directly from knowledge to action that one almost skips the moment of knowledge altogether* --example-->{ Barthes in his woodcutter: a woodcutter in cutting the tree manages to avoid language (something that needs no translation, the woodcutter in unilateral relation to the tree), in which “language” is representation, knowledge as representation, “act the things” --> Barthes skips over all the opacities and paradoxes and difficulties of representation and just goes after the tree directly

*there are demands which are placed on you that won't wait for the knowledge that is necessary* (or situations in which you might feel as though you've been overwhelmed by too much knowledg)

[*]responsibility: (when) one has to act in a way for which the knowledge doesn't provide a full alibi ~ one's action is in some important way disconnected, or not entirely saturated by one's knowledge

every event (take September 11) is rich in translation, a moment when an enormous number of competing narrative frames were already available for understanding or processing or
reading what is at stake --> there is no unequivocal act


*witness: (in the fantasy of the act) the witness for whom no translation is necessary* --Levinas-Blanchot-Keenan--> hostage (for example images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the media, the public event takes us hostage): a position of extreme passivity that is equally the most intense experience of responsibility

-what is the political effect of revelation? @Ali

beyond the immediate shock effect of the images --> they are te[...]

[...]ctly from knowledge to action that one almost skips the moment of knowledge altogether* --example-->{ Barthes in his woodcutter: a woodcutter in cutting the tree manages to avoid language (something that needs no translation, the woodcutter in unilateral relation to the tree), in which “language” is representation, knowledge as representation, “act the things” --> Barthes skips over all the opacities and paradoxes and difficulties of representation and just goes after the tree directly

*there are demands which are placed on you that won't wait for the knowledge that is necessary* (or situations in which you might feel as though you've been overwhelmed by too much knowledg)

[*]responsibility: (when) one has to act in a way for which the knowledge doesn't provide a full alibi ~ one's action is in some important way disconnected, or not entirely saturated by one's knowledge

every event (take September 11) is rich in translation, a moment when an enormous number of competing narrative frames were already available for understanding or processing or
reading what is at stake --> there is no unequivocal act


*witness: (in the fantasy of the act) the witness for whom no translation is necessary* --Levinas-Blanchot-Keenan--> hostage (for example images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the media, the public event takes us hostage): a position of extreme passivity that is equally the most intense experience of responsibility

-what is the political effect of revelation? @Ali

beyond the immediate shock effect of the images --> they are testament to the ways in which many different political actors make use of them (over a long period of time) --> with interestingly different outcomes

...intermediate space between a traditional secret (susceptible to revelation and exposure and delegitimization) and a kind of increasing public acceptance (that the question of torture could be openly discussed: “it's not an absolute, there are moments when, there are individuals for whom...”) --✕--> public discussion


the too high threshold for entry into political discussion (or resetting political agendas) --> the mythic completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event =/= low-threshold ideas (look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized)

@Pierre, apass: placing something into the political sphere --> pure innovation (the mythic alternative = completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event) ==> the too high threshold for entry into political discussion =/= low-threshold ideas (might look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized):
•slight shift in emphasis
•slight shift in interpretation
•a little re-definition
•a reactive mimicry
•


[...]

[...]legitimization) and a kind of increasing public acceptance (that the question of torture could be openly discussed: “it's not an absolute, there are moments when, there are individuals for whom...”) --✕--> public discussion


the too high threshold for entry into political discussion (or resetting political agendas) --> the mythic completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event =/= low-threshold ideas (look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized)

@Pierre, apass: placing something into the political sphere --> pure innovation (the mythic alternative = completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event) ==> the too high threshold for entry into political discussion =/= low-threshold ideas (might look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized):
•slight shift in emphasis
•slight shift in interpretation
•a little re-definition
•a reactive mimicry
•




expendable people targeted for discrimination, injury and death, in a continuing wave of violent economic, psychic, social, political, medical and juridical assaults


Keenan on the possibility that justice might not be simply possible

deconstruction's ethico-political pertinence:
•reference to its thematic or referential considerations of issues (ethics, race, feminism, etc.)
•its formal homologies with political interventions --> deconstruction of authority as liberating ideology-critique
•ruin the categories on which political discourse and reliable knowledge found itself
}==> axiom: ethics and politics are matters of choice : determinations and acts of a subject with an identity (whether strong or weak) held to be [*]free: capable of understanding and integrating that knowledge with a response to the demand to act
[*]subject: name of the time and place in which knowledge can be articulated, *the right to the passage from knowing to doing*

undecidability --> Derrida
unreadability --> de Man

-what is more radically unsettling than criticism? (...reading)
@Sina

“the subject who reads is the subject who choose” ==> responsibility

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

Eichmann --> faced a legal forum
Mengele's skull --> faced a scientific forum
}--Keenan--> (two different discursive operations) each *inaugurates* a fundamental concept and practice within the politics and epistemology of war crimes investigations

*cultural turn towards testimony* --> the speech of the witness

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

dramatic and emotional
trial: form of historical and political pedagogy
not merely to convi[...]

[...]cal and juridical assaults


Keenan on the possibility that justice might not be simply possible

deconstruction's ethico-political pertinence:
•reference to its thematic or referential considerations of issues (ethics, race, feminism, etc.)
•its formal homologies with political interventions --> deconstruction of authority as liberating ideology-critique
•ruin the categories on which political discourse and reliable knowledge found itself
}==> axiom: ethics and politics are matters of choice : determinations and acts of a subject with an identity (whether strong or weak) held to be [*]free: capable of understanding and integrating that knowledge with a response to the demand to act
[*]subject: name of the time and place in which knowledge can be articulated, *the right to the passage from knowing to doing*

undecidability --> Derrida
unreadability --> de Man

-what is more radically unsettling than criticism? (...reading)
@Sina

“the subject who reads is the subject who choose” ==> responsibility

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

Eichmann --> faced a legal forum
Mengele's skull --> faced a scientific forum
}--Keenan--> (two different discursive operations) each *inaugurates* a fundamental concept and practice within the politics and epistemology of war crimes investigations

*cultural turn towards testimony* --> the speech of the witness

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

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

political agency of witnesses (survivors)

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

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

exhumation
examination

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

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

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

one must take the path in exactly the opposi[...]

[...]y is revealed in the present work on several sites, as in the panic rumors that circulate and produce the picture of the other as phantasmal from whom all human subjectivity has been evacuated, or when violence in the register of literary is seen as transfiguring life into something else, call it a form of death, or of making oneself, as it were, into a ghost”

[violence ==> ghosts]

skeptical problematic --> shifting potency of words : energies that words may gather, and the ways these energies may give or deny life

speech =/= voice
==> ***silence is not necessarily life-denying or that it necessarily indicates a lack or an inability to mourn***

[victims of violence telling stories]
words imbued with spectral quality (yet animated by some other voice)

there is a deep moral energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes [...]

[...]energy in the *refusal to represent some violations of the human body* [=/= forensic architecture project's imperative of detailed representation of violation, explicit acknowledging traumatic memory]
--> ***living with poisonous knowledge*** (a different acknowledgement of traumatic memory) --> absorption exercises of remaking a world

--{on ‘forensic architecture’ (an aesthetics developed by Weizman): Keenan asks: if the excruciating citizon videos (showing police violence for instance) could not convince a jury how can forms of aesthetic critique based on research and visual evidence [= post-conceptual art] be anymore effective on the general poblic? (<== ‘evidence =/= proof’)
-age of testimony (-public truth-)
-citizon photo journalism --> “witnessing ~= action”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carri[...]

[...]ion”
-the appearance of nonhuman objects as evidence (in forums and courts) as records of imperssions [sense perception] --> object = sensor (waiting to be interpreted by justice-seekers) ~-> ***proxy for an absent victim***
[*]forensic: process of making claims of what the evidence is “saying” [--> what is made evident remains in dispute]
“forensic production of evidence (in art) ~= radical rejection of representation” --> *adjudication of information* @Ali
(Keenan:) ideological and formal continuities that run from the geometrically precise drawing of human cargo slave ships [==> public delegitimization ==> collapse of slavery], or infrared images of boats carrying humans across the mediterranean today.
(artist's claim of) “the failure to see” (or “how could they not see the injustice”) (==> “I make them see” ~ violence of slowing down brutality videos, zooming, saturating, freeze-framing, obssesing with the visual details, etc.) --✕--> what we “see” is structured by other factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}

Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics


(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)

we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]

(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*

-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)

(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism

...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women [...]

[...]me to think about Iran telegram media)
new ecology of sensation ==> patterns

perspectivalism: (history of) the dominance of representationalism in the engagement with a living multiplicity at stake

each image has:
•a certain duration
•at different scales of perception
•a non-coinciding resonant unity (a unity-in-multiplicity)
•*mutating affect =/= representation*
•potential occasions for a perceptual event (that exceed their actualization) =/= mise en abime
•pointing the capacities of perception in multiple direction
•strike you as potential events in gradients of textual vision, haptic and mutating accross senses
•excessive information that calls for another diagram of bodily capacities
•where a machinic phylum becomes sensitive to certain forces
•

an ecology of sensation meeting its cliche:
•Bollywood meets graphic novels at the back of a rickshaw
•Agra's Mughal-era oriental(ized) stone work turning topological and dimensional (less or more racist? --Rai--> to what extent is the question relevant to what it does?**)
•Ferris wheel on Juhu beach
•the weighting machine at the local station


(Rai + Keenan --> give me) new resources for imagining justice and democracy

all habits are preindividual : where the subject and population meets

photographs (photoshopped life) ==enable==> a hauntology to emerge in the viewing subject


a priori conceptualism =/= a practice of perception that is involved in the emergence of ecologies


like Rai's photos, the image assemblages that i am making are experiments in perception given the ecology of sensation that i am working through
--> attempts to produce an affect that resonants with a conceptual and bodily reasoning =/= philosophy

my telegram collection <== (Stengers) we do not know a priori the difference between what we must take into account and what we can ignore

(for you, X is deterministic, as are the questions that describe it)

[*]emergence: the appearance of the unanalyzable totality of a new entity that renders irrelevant the intelligibility of that which produced it

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

Ticineto Clough

media technological developements ==> (often and perhaps necessarily) put the transformation of being and the transformation of knowing out of sync with one another

why Hollywood concerns me:
•reconceptualization of labor from the cinematic mode of production to the affective mode
•the colossal projection of cinema as a guarantor of a culturally uniform memory

relevant for artists too (they cannot ignore this) --> to rethink the ontological grounds of knowing [and representation] (in the wake of) deprivi[...]