[...]understanding’ or being clear about the text
•(i understand now that) it is not up to me to tell you how to read
•what makes you write or scratch a text?
(aaaakh... our alphabetico-logical cultures...!)
•if everything is not fundamentally unreadable (snafu) we wouldn't be reading
•it is about to situate the place of a (un)learning
•throwing access to each other (not only in terms of transferential intensity #sss)
•which appetites and tastes are required to fulfill the *ethics and erotics of curiosity* (that I am cultivating and depending on)? flourishing (of my ajayeb) depends on a reading that is more like “mutual partial digestion” (Katie King, Haraway) [=/= “eating well"] the text
•“every time i read X, something new shows up”

my practice of ‘rhetorical reading’ (=/= ‘close reading’; or more like close reading and letting go. “close” is itself a metaphor, a rhetoric of reading;) doesn't work with the idea that there is something ‘in’ the text per se (coded or encoded meaning or some sort of knowledge made and installed by an author), or that the writer wants to say something to the reader, or that the text is symptomatic with meaning and that its intentions needs to be listened to. rather, in a post-Lacanian critique, i work the text like a pattern of language, an organization of space, text as word-sequencer. it is like looking at an image, still starting from top-left to bottom-right of the page, a process of highlighting or embodied attention that produces non-zero clusters of salient words that come to glow different than others. but the way they become highlighted is not due to some idea of significance of the text but because of my--the reader's--interests, past readings and educated meaning-associations. this mode of reading is not at all suggested to newbies in literature, sorry but this requres some degree of advancement in one's abilities and skills of writingreading, that means the reader already enjoys an ongoing well-articulated interest before coming to a particular sitting with a piece of writing, and this means the rhetorical reader's encounter with the text is highly situated and is not a blind date. in this case reading is a radical meaning-making practice full of adventures and preparations, drawings and graphs, diffractions and detours, connections and risks of (mis)understanding in certain ways. this ‘reading’ looks very much ‘writing’ alike.
-the reading becomes *rereading past writing*, re(past)ed(writ)ing, a reading that has writen itself in palimpsestic lines. in a Derridean sense: (one is equiped with the question) “what is writing itself (in this text)”?
-two speculative spheres meet in rhetorical reading: one of the text and one of the reader, but they have to ‘stick’ to one another, the stickiness of your reading matters in consequential ways. this is against the idea that we read and each understand personally whatever.
-[...]

[...]ities that are simultaneously salient and incapable of being squashed into isomorphic slots or cumulative lists. --> The knowing self is partial in all its guises, never finished, never whole, stitched together imperfectly [that is what she means by ‘split'] ==>  join with another (without claiming to ‘be’ another) {if i am allowed i can map Haraway's “partiality” onto Deleuze's “schizophrenia” --> Greek for “split brain”  (Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, p.38) According to Beuler, “The selectivity which normal attention exercises among the sensory impressions can be reduced to zero, so that almost anything is recorded that reaches the senses.” One reason for the admiration which Deleuze and Guattari professed for the schizophrenic must lie in this complete lack of inhibition (khod-dari خودداری).} (a confusion of voice and sight, rather than clear and distinct ideas) ([to discriminate message types:] *to confuse literal and metaphorical*, the schizophrenic either does not know his responses are metaphorical or cannot say so --> the breakdown of his metacommunicative system : does not know what kind of message a message is --> the schizophrenic looks for hidden meanings everywhere (assuming everything is metaphorical) or tend to accept every message as literal) (Lacan: schizophrenia: breakdown in the signifying chain of language ==> experience of pure material signifiers [<-- personal identity is the effect of the temporal unification of past and future with one's present, and that such an active temporal unification is itself a function of language.])

subjectivity is multidimensional ==> vision is multidimensional

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

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

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

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

how to see?
the science question in military
the science question in colonialism
the science question in capitalism
the science question in feminism
...

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


she suggests to be accountable for (the intricac[...]

[...]fied by the death of his teacher and mentor Socrates by civility.])
rhetoric --> contigent --> epistemic: individuals make meaning through language and determine what constitutes truth


*ontology is death-dealing <--** terrible violence is directed to the non-existing, the never having existed
---> go to the root of exist --> which modes of existence deserve our curiosity?

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

(i found a word for it,) my register of @Lili's scream: i see it as ‘nonlaughter’(?)
(*proposal: there is a number when we dial we can listen to her scream on the phone.) (--> stream, technology, tele-, telephone, called,)
(for her) thinking =? knowing (sending =/= receiving)
(an SF scenario:) imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing.’
**scream ==makes==> witnesses**
(fighting ==makes==> coordination)

از طلبکار به طلبه (az talabkar be talabe)
> ///the (symbolic?) structuration of ‘demand’ in Lili's presentation:
the ‘sujet supposé savoir’ #sss [~= Pir, (پیر always a paternal metaphor?) that Other whom you ‘call’ who holds (your) deepest truth ---> go to the metaphorology of “depth” =/= “skimming the surface"] (installed by Lacan) is a subject who is in a functional position and one presumes that this subject knows or retains or holds the knowledge (even vital and secret knowledge [this is knowledge-talabkar طلبکار]) that you want. this subject is functionally established. one of the laws of our encounter is that puts the speaker/writer/analyst/text/etc in the (even architectural) center: the subject-supposed-to-know in Lacan the analyst who sits there as a tower of knowledge that mostly withholds what s/he knows --> transferencial energy directed towards him/her --> drama of identification (--> break-out of narcissism for Freud)
-it is one of the (negative?) binding transferential contracts in relation to “n to “the one who speaks”
[*anthropology of exchange* --> Transference: (for Lacan) Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner, there is, in the true sense, transference, symbolic transference--something which takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: L[...]

[...] takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present. Later Lacan articulates the transference in sujet supposé savoir: transference is the attribution of knowledge to the Other, the supposition that the Other is a subject who knows. “As soon as the subject who is supposed to know exists *somewhere* ... there is transference.” (Seminar II, p. 232)] [keep in mind that the (post?-)Lacanian theory is about the *constitutive function of the signifier in relation to the subject.* ... for Lacan, What constitutes the person and its identity can now be read as a text, and the author is not the subject, but the trajectory of the signifiers that represent the desire of those who occupy the place of the Other for the subject.]
[about demand: Lacan argues that “demand constitutes the Other as already possessing the ‘privilege’ of satisfying needs,” and that indeed the child's biological needs are themselves altered by “the condition that is imposed on him by the existence of the discourse, to make his need pass through the defiles of the signifier.” ... The subject has never done anything other than demand (since infancy!)] *{question =/= demand}*--> Nancy
[the use of ‘transference’ is a way to account for the relationship between readers and texts. the emphasis in Lacan is on the ‘supposed’ and not on the ‘know’. reader assume that the text ‘knows’. --> What Lacan's understanding of the transference points to is the fact that we must see the meaning of any given text not within the text itself but as a reconstruction between reader and text.] [in other words, transference is ‘a representation of the past’ (childhood and etc.) to the present ]
a pedagogical problem: rapid transferencial turn-over: going from one subject-supposed-to-know to the other (=/= reading)
#the kind of ‘reading’ [encountering a text, artwork, speech, ourselves, etc.] that i am talking about is not about this transferencial energy directed towards the sujet supposé savoir. this practice of reading is about to read together and to read ourselves reading, to an atentiveness to the way we are reading or not-reading or aberating from something and be attentive to that disjunctive movement. what is noncomprehension? what is the experience of nonunderstanding? and so on.
*so, the sujet supposé savoir is the one who is structurally is in a place of knowledge which doesn't mean that subject is filled with or capable of offering power and knowledge but that is projected onto that functional space* --> sujet supposé savoir is merely a spatial determination? (is this related to my interventive lectures in outdoor spaces in order to sabotage ‘what is meant to signify’ of the spatial subject-supposed-to-know?)
*sss is one of the effects of subjectivity -- a scenography of transferential intensity : we credit that being with having knowledge to transmit, and then we might also resist it.
---let's get out of this space!!?
--%--in the c[...]

[...]n that subject is filled with or capable of offering power and knowledge but that is projected onto that functional space* --> sujet supposé savoir is merely a spatial determination? (is this related to my interventive lectures in outdoor spaces in order to sabotage ‘what is meant to signify’ of the spatial subject-supposed-to-know?)
*sss is one of the effects of subjectivity -- a scenography of transferential intensity : we credit that being with having knowledge to transmit, and then we might also resist it.
---let's get out of this space!!?
--%--in the context of pedagogy, students regards their teachers as sujet supposé savoir, that they should know something. “it is the students’ supposition of an art teacher who knows, who have something more than they have in themselves, that initiates the teaching and learning process rather than the art knowledge actually possessed by the teacher” (Hetrick). (is it the architectural gesture--the center--that produces the recognition of the teacher situated as “teacher”?) *“the spell of transference.” / at some point some gesture is taken by the student as a sign of hidden knowledge and intention ==> transference establishing itself; (how education [and love?] without transference looks like? --> Julia Scher, ‘post-Lacanian’ means that you don't ‘transfer’ to the art-work nor artist?) #harem
parent --> teacher }==> what the student may desire to become (be recognized as)

according to Lacan there is no Pir (~ [often iconoclast] leader, guide, mentor, expert, knowing-hero, enlightener, rescuer knowing more, knowledgeable pedagogue/leader “helping students find themselves,” [--> my failed transference with Saeed])

-->? Discourse of the University* : (systematic) “knowledge” replaces the nonsensical master signifier in the dominant commanding position; in this case the sujet supposé savoir dependent upon the related knowledge of the Other, or the source of “the field” (journals, textbooks, etc.) ==> (arbiter of) truth --> *to transmit knowledge that is already given*
[account of knowledge as a symbolic and social network, master signifier, subject positions,]

in placing the ‘text’ in the position of a knowing expert who has the answers Lili (unconsciously) idealizes her texts, and of course when her ‘texts’ fail to satisfy that desire she demands ‘knowing’ from them in terms of cynicism: the feeling or state of being annoyed and irritated by them. this is a structural space of ‘demand’ in her. for me what is at stake is the complex nature of encounter between Lili and text which takes place in an artificial space--a symbolic space--that is at the same time the place of real investments of her desires.

@Lili; is she (like the rest of us humans) looking for an active, predatory art?--> if non-communicative non-predatory non-kinetic [a common issue with the students of choreography and dance in general] art exists on th[...]

[...]ding to Marxian protocol: one is drugged and disabled [Date-rape-drug as an incapacitating agent] and neutralized by state apparatus, drugs are administrated and spend in all sorts of insidious ways.)
on the discourse of stupidity: Marx (in writing to Engels says that he) believed that proletariat are stupid. Marx's insight to replace the other drugs that have put so many into a stupor. people with Religion are not around, they are praying somewhere to some hallucination [this is Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, and others in 20th century] --> ideological stuporous drugs, ‘everyone is stoned on something’ =/= alert and lucid. [highly problematic!]
-this is about a body recognizing its ‘enemy’ (the figure of enemy for every and each of us and the way we “recognize” it, as historical bodies and minds inheriting the boys of 20th century.) ---- the state of the struggle depends on certain metaphorologies on ‘clean’ that are problematic and phantasmatic and on the loose. --> [the issue is that there is no “clean body”.] how to do dirty work? (--> for ‘morality’ and ‘clean’ go to Freud on the origin on morality: morality began as we stopped sniffing our asses and stood erect, nose in the air, away from the dirt [that we are] --> morality's phobic appropriations and designations, [Lacan: from the genital order to the sublime; az kun be fayakon از کون به فیکون %--> #ouroboros #serpent], [so when we stood up, stood erect, our genitals became center, exposing ourselves to the other, sexually centered exposure], [], [],)
-Marxian: language/tool/art as a virus that infiltrates ideological structures
-Lacoue-Labarthe: in 20th century there are three fundamental modalities of “dealing-with,” three modes of relatedness to our concerns, our anxieties, our worries, our work, our projects [three major motifs for the thinkers that continue to provoke our thoughts]: (1) *struggle* that would be the Marxian motor, the modality in terms of concern for social justice. [Delanda on Marx --> a model of synthesis: a conflict of opposites] (2) *mission* as introduced and lunched by Heidegger, who was on a mission: we have a mission, we have a mission of transmission, we have a mission to inscribe things--not from God but from what has happened to us and been left to us after the death of God (as Nietzsche has announced.) {yes, without a proper address, a state of epistemic alert, and so on} and (3) *task* associated with Benjamin. the Aufgabe is that which inscribes in itself ‘giving up,’ the Aufgabe, it means it is impossible, we take it on as a kind of ethical, political obligation, but in the word Aufgabe is also ‘Gabe’ meaning ‘gift’ in German, it is gift and giving-up. [Derrida beautifully asks to negotiate endlessly with the ‘given,’ even if the Gift that is given is poisonous.] -->{ we can see how operate but also how they contaminate (and leak into each other.) we might have a sense of three of them}
-ontology of “struggling” a way o[...]

[...]> manufacturing tools capable of intervention (=/=? disruption; the Sun Ra, character in the movie The Place is The Space, disrupts when he enters the youth club.)

@Ale --her--> predatory features/futures : (a space for researching[?] dimensions of) anticipatory designs, projects of emulation, manipulation, parasitism, interpellation into a bright corporate tomorrow <== faces smiling at screens (-->? a bitter joke)
-in her criticism of “eurocentrism” how are afrofuturism and arabfuturism located? (curatorial) let's invite them as her allies in Hansaring Studio.

countermemorial mediated practices

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

خودشیفتگی khodshiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)

(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)

Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]


sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?

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

auto-erotic solipsism

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

[...]cissism 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 signifier of “note” defined itself in a collective mimetic semi-conscious way.
(=/=? my work on how signifiers transmit and transform --> parasitism, rumorology, etc. ... weaker neighborhoods of thought)

Alice's notions:
•explosion <--> dance
•the “generative” notion in her discourse (--> notion of “active,” and “conscious intentionality” [--> a property of human agency and agential exceptionality. (the metric of) her work/workshop distinguishes the self-aware active entity from non-communicative receptive entity, ***intransitive =/= transitive-->{her privileged object}, and that distinction is not useful for me right now])
•the authority of the trope “practice” for Alice
(what would be a nonmimetic understanding of eachother? @Juan)
•the workshop was not her ‘thinking’ or ‘making’ in process or an open question or a not-knowing, rather the wor[...]

[...]n witness] alignment of the individual with the collective:) the accumulation of affective value shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds; affect generates the surfaces of collective bodies (<==allows== not to locate affect in a subject or object) ~~--> [to initiate with Hoda an examination of the) *mobility of bodies of subjects* (in the West or her regions =/= question of the mediatization of her emotional experiences}

*emotions ‘involve’ subjects and objects*

what constructs emotions as positive or negative residence?

[*]psychoanalysis: a theory of the subject as lacking positive residence
(this ‘lack’ is commonly articulated as the “unconscious”: in Freudian terms, where an affective impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i say that my work in ajayeb, which i named it as ‘organizing my memory, and also, that which comes to mind’ is all about this reconstruction of cognizeds and percepts? is that why i am having less and less unconsciousness in my daily life?!])
-cognizant agah آگاه
-in Freud's model of unconsciousness, the affect itself is not repressed, rather, what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached --> displacement

(Lacan's) subject: proper scene of absence and loss*
a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles --> constitution of the subject as “settlement”

([what is?] Eszter's right and will to keep looking for signs of difference. --when she was talking about idiosyncrasies of her countries)
*[with Eszter's “the nation has suffered enough!"] --Lezra--> politics in a sense is precisely concerned with what is or is not *enough*
“it's enough!” --> #demand something or before which I make a claim. it is practical (even technical) or is dealing with being practical
the haunting modifier of “enough”
the *amount* of something (-of suffering in this case) <-- “That's enough coffee”
-we are dealing with materiality and measure
{has that anything to do with the enough of Ekaterina's “good-enough mothers”?}--> true enough-ness for an effect to be achieved

model of emotion ==> materialization of bodies

(emotions construct) bodies as ‘enveloped’

in standard psychological model, fear ‘has’ an object
*(Ahmed's) fear: “passing by” (=/= arriving) of the object, impossibility of containment of object

anxiety is an approach to objects =/= fear is an object's approach

in Freud: self is made by the fear of father


Ahmed's model of ‘impact of 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)
[s[...]

[...]metonymies that are to justify war

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

“there is something quite special about the recently discovered entities such as climate. these entities cause us to reflect on our very place on Earth and in the cosmos” ==> hyperobjects (“seem to force something on us”) --> i say every object does that, and it is not recent: ajayeb al makhlughat is about the description of that force

hyperobjects Morton
-an object that is “hyper” in relation to some other entity
-they are viscous: they “stick” to beings that are involved with them
-they are “nonlocal” : local manifestation of hyperobject =/= hyperobject
-they exhibit their effects interobjectively : they can be detected in a space that consists of interrelationships between aesthetic properties of objects\
=/= apocalyptic environmentalism
=/= the possibility of transcendental leaps “outside” physical reality
=/= that we are “embedded” in a “lifeworld”


high-dimrnsional phase space
invisible to humans for stretches of time

[*]hypocrisy <== the conditions of the impossibility of a [*]metalanguage= account for things while remaining uncontaminated by them, (~= an “outside”)
--> (Lacanian truth:) “there is no metalanguage” =/= postmodernism's “everything is a metaphor” =/= some metaphors are better than others ~= *there is nowhere to stand outside of things*
the time of hyperobjects is a time of hypocrisy =/= cynicism

[*]weakness <== the gap between phenomenon and thing

[*]lameness <== the fact that all entities are fragile

imagination as:
•Hume: a bundling of associations
•Kant: the possibility for synthetic judgments a priori
•object-oriented ontology: immanence of thinking to the physical, radically displacing the human by insisting that my being is not everything it is cracked up to be--the being of a paper cup is as profound as mine


which hyperobject you are caught in?

image of writing --> shy, retiring octopuses that squirt out a dissembling (mask, cloak, vortäuschen) ink as they withdraw into the ontological shadow


figure of *mill* (the characters and technologies and ideas of the ages mill around in a state of a mild, semiblissful confusion) =/= Eszter's vortex

my intimate impressions “personal" = footprints of hyperobjects, distorted as they always must be by the entity in which they make their mark

situatedness is now a very uncanny place to be, like being the protagonist of a Wordsworth poem of a character in Blade Runner


*cool impersonality of the scientific language* (now is deprived of its ideological status)


the concept of the ‘world’ is no longer operational
can we think environmentally without the idea of ‘the end of t[...]

[...]ral 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 popular audiences]
•deductive reasoning: X ==> Y (is valid or invalid) --> کل به جزء (applying reductively general rules that hold over a closed domain of discourse)
•[artist's most used process of reasoning:] صغرى کبرى syllogistic reasoning (قیاس): X =/= Y ==> Z (or: some A are B, some B are C ==> some A are C [which is often wrong], nesbat dadan chizi az yek nafar be deigari نسبت دادن چیزی به دیگری) --> premise's pattern of distribution is the key (~ case)
•abductive conclusions: finding the simplest or most likely explanation for the observations [--> many forms of conclusions are due to the lack of time in the process of reasoning. when we give feedback (‘fast diagnosis’ [--> is that why Lacan is useful?]) in apass we have initially 2 minutes to make conclusions from observations, which later is deepened in the duration of block --> کلی گویی = making sense of what is going here in order to guess what is going on elsewhere]
•

(?am i learning about and moving my art into) formal sciences: language tools concerned with characterizing abstract structures described by sign systems ==> providing information/knowledge about the structures used to describe the world
-a formal logical system with its content targeted at the real things
-all their statements are analytic
=/= synthetic statements (propositions are true by how their meaning relates to the world)

‘natural sciences’ using tools from formal sciences and validated by ‘peer review' = refereeing = *the process of subjecting somebody else's work*

issues with artistic feedback that i have directly encountered:
•our abilities for observation are questionable (--> apprehend what you notice)
•our abilities for induction are questionable (--> movement from observation)
•our abilities for inference are questionable (--> connecting with something other and elsewhere)
•our abilities for questioning are questionable (--> risking what you know + constructing interest)
}--> feedbacks are performative, perspectival, descriptive, discoursive, affective, fabulous, rhetorical, allegorical, experimental, speculative, agonistic, antagonist, sadistic, funny, rude, brute, masochistic, direct, sympathetic,


[two (organic?) ways of learning:]
**learing through networked syntax: meaning[...]

[...]tial choice.
being immoral (destroying men's lives) while being truly ethical (faithfull to her chosen path)
(Nietzsche, the philosopher of) *immoral ethics* (=/= unethical morality)

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

[*]death drive (inerested in fucking, cannot being-with): *to lead organic life back into the inanimate state*, to return to an inorganic state (-we are talking symbolically not biologically) [=/= eros (interested in love, life, sex, and being-with, the world is very vivid to eros)]
-->{image of the eskimo piercing through the ice and snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> 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 consistin[...]

[...]d snow}--> *Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being* (for the subject for whom the world is prosaic matter-of-fact =/= vivid)
-(we live in a society that we are no longer interpellated -->) does death drive and archive drive have to do with one another? destruction and archiving...
-girl with the red dancing shoes, undeadness of Laurent, wanting to see himself in the image of that which cannot be destroyed (!!), his unbearable *nostalgia for a lost harmony* [followed by Hoda and Arjang] (-is that why they negate love? because they cannot love but still want to be alive: [the drive] to remain alive after they are dead)
(their relation to the city night:) they drive, Trieb, [in a Lacanian sense: all drives are partial to the death drive (because:)
1- every drive pursues its own extinction
2- every drive involves the subject in repetition
3- every drive is an attempt to go beyond the pleasure principle, to the realm of excess *jouissance*(: enjoyment experienced as suffering @Sana)]
(death drive =/= dying)*
with death drive we are at the dimension of the undead (spectral undeadness is the domain of the drive) --> “horrible fate of being caught in the endless repetitive cycle of wandering around in guilt and pain”
(Lacan:) deep inside they desire to return to the preoedipal fusion with the mother's breast (--?--> to ‘touch’ without love, ‘will’ without desire)
‘death drive’ belongs to the suicidal tendency of (symbolic order of) narcissism : (turning ‘libido’ into a) representation of indestructible life
(in the neurotic's fantasy of the subject with death drive) there is no connection with object <== object is defined as the Other's demand --> 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)

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

<br /> 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 informat[...]

[...]old 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.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
[...]

[...]ophy--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.

testing ~=/?==><--> the real
(elliptical circuit established between test & real)


Freud was working on to tests which are lost now: Aktualitätsprüfung to distinguish between reality and immediacy

Lacan has linked testing to the subject's creation of a first “outside"----a space that is no longer the same as “reality”

the way the state takes possession of the body presumptively on drugs.
-in this way, drugs are seen as eccentric: what is outside, or moves outside the center, can center it, they are animated by an outside already inside
-how drugs are isolating or how they establish community (of those who are somehow together or with nonpresence.) anything that refigures individuality or collectivity that brings you together with the other and absolutly keeps you apart from the other
drug: Dionysian frenzy, aspirin, religion, dirty language,
-I am sorry I have no drugs to offer you today!
-not everyone in civic societies has the privilege of getting high and mind-altering (that which supposedly suggests vulnerability,) running arround drunk staggering and out-of-it, they will be beaten the hell out of it, they have to be sober, on alert and self-protective

your pee belongs to the state----new civic readability

{four bodies don't belong to themselves: children, addicts, outlaws, and ghosts, are all busted by the state or certain legislated majority}


destructive (and artistic) modes of production.

test, does it have an essence? Is it pure relationality?



Avital's “speculative telephonics”

Heidegger: sign = cutting edge, Zeichen --Holderlin--> “we're cutting out” =/= (Avital:) schizo knows how to disconnect, how to depart, how to cut the shit

the place where a call can break into a body[=? orifici[...]

[...] 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
--> meaningful narrative sequences,
and, recaptured memory : a rhetorical product

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

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




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

1st: send super-ego away and cleared out --> no judgment
2nd[...]

[...] technological ecologies (which are inevitably products of new social movements, new research agendas, new publics of interest, and new contests for historical meaning)

with ajayeb this became immediately my concern: *infrastructures of historical representation*

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

(what are the) stickiness of ajayeb's being (?) or, in which affective economy they are ‘passed around’? [social goods, accumulating affects, contagious مسرى? it tends to pick up whatever comes near, or gives us a certain kind of angle on what comes near*]
•wonder
•cause ==> ?
•
}--> social bond is always rather sensational*

(Ahmed suggests) thinking through affect as “sticky”: affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects
{ affects as contagious =/= (inside/outside) “outside in” model of emotions (for axample, when we say: atmosphere “getting into the individual”)-->[part of the intellectual history of (crowd) psychology and the sociology of emotions] }--> affect becomes an object only given the contingency of how we are affected
“what we will receive as an impression will depend on our affective situation” --> Julia's post-Lacanian feedback: bodies never arrive neutral
*everything depends on the angle of our arrival* (<-- my point in lecture-performances) ~-> **pedagogic encounter is full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]

(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]

to get along =? to share direction


politics of good feelings

(slide between) affective and moral economies

*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things

[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency

“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what you do

happiness is
•intentional: directed toward objects --> phenomenological sense
•affective: conta[...]

[...]terest (not that ‘you want to know’ --> historically crafted and naturalized modalities of “knowing more”)
•contingent (~ lure, abstraction, fragile [--> they create interested bodies]) =/=? analytical [--> they create disembodied subjects]

[poem can do all of these:]
/proposition --> right/wrong declaratives
/exposition --> systematic explanation
/disposition --> affective orientation ~~> attitude ==> perspectives ==> selves

poet [=/= archivist] can be responsible for the ‘remainders’ --> good at greeting =/= traumatic realism


(1) traumatic realism
(real understood as traumatic:) “shock ==> subject”
a way of figuring that fails to bring the inflicting force (of real) into the symbolic order ==> mime, miming: you bring it into the present literally over and over (re-present)
|
(2) atmospheric attunement
a way of being in the noise
labor-intensive process that stretches across imaginaries [such as travel, house, haunt] --> responding to ” “
actual affects of modes of living brought into being
intimacy with a world [visiting families in Alta]
|
(3) phantom arm
“social = present-absent” (=/= Star Trek's interculturalism) (=/= Lacan's subject: proper sense of absence and loss)
connectivity does not require physical contiguity
-force of piled-up phantom limps
-hum of the palce, dormant noise --> worlding of a place [<-- material and sensory labor of attending to it]
-hauntology =/= Archimedean certainty of presence --> a knowing consciousnes
-so, that lost arm/limb (original part of you) could have a chance of becoming companion species, and not a discarded phantom limb forever haunting the amputated you
|
(4) troubled stories
=/= clear-cut good stories about troubles
stories difficult to like:
•dirty, guilty, survivalist udyr? the evil horse? (we need more description of the evil horse)
Cinderella --> (not) the master of your house, of your name, of you
-sometimes it is not you who makes you


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

--Morris--> ghost problem --✕--> possbility of a politcal form
contingent politicization and the accidental in the Southeast Asia

theatrical acts of civil disobedience
democracy protestors
conjure the spirits of those who have been killed
political vengeance

(wherever there is) violence in Southeast Asia (even if this violence is merely the
force that possesses machinery) ==> ghosts
~=
(wherever there is) force that would oppose life (even and perhaps especially by resembling it) ==> ghosts

[the doxa of] {(no preparation) premature death / banished by disbelief ==> unhappy ghost, vindictive melancholy}[= *effect of context*]--in-->
•pulp novels
•secular humanist elite litera[...]

[...]hich 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: everything belongs to law --> make law about anything (--> Plato's political theology: thought is founded on something; - @Varinia, “management of justice”)

national aestheticism

over-educated ~=? brainwashed

[in my lectures i am trying to teach something (Heidegger, Sa'di, etc.) in ‘a certain way,’ and that ‘certain way’ touches me and i hope touches my audience, even if one don't understand much of it at the time of lecture. i am trying to think b[...]

[...] /> [Tehran's need of] speculative fabulation: stories that whets our appetite for possibilites, that open imagination =/= idyllic story of a golden age

(Despret, Porcher, Haraway) work: locus of unexpected encounter, the possibility of our communication

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

eternal turtle

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

new zoonotic infectious diseases ==> new human-animal relationship
vast silent reservoir in aquatic birds
confinement, deprivation, stress
global biodiversity crisis --> there is no monopoly on animal cruelty
mass-production of animal suffering
unsanitary practices
(we make) mad cow disease: herbivores --into--> carnivores --into--> cannibals

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

*discussion across ideologies*
partisan mindset [--> social belonging]: ideology provides an ostensive set of tools (sometimes unconsciously) for analyzing a complex social world = orientation
•partisan operative mentality یک نوع ذهن عملی
•normal is ontologically privileged over abnormalities (or vice versa)
•left-wing identity politics: reductive us-versus-them mentality + moral panic
i am influenced by the demand of the other [= (Lacanian) socio-psychic projection of a Big Other that stands in for the presence of the ontologically non-existent group narrative] ==> moral grounds for living
(?) reverting back to your material status (as private individuals) =/= looking after ideological stability and economy
thins that don't work with when talking to partisan mentality:
•factual argumentation
•punching them
•Kantian argument for the intrinsic value of all human lives
(what generally don't work:) reminding one's political rivals of facts --✕--> (Levinasian) the trace of the other


(?why i need or not need) intellectual adversarie [=/= caricatures for shooting practice]
(the banal and continuous hyper-polarized political partisanship of) right-wing populism =/= Social justice activism
(our agreement on) moral and methodological priority of the individual

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

https://merionwest.com/2018/07/31/purity-politics-is-ruining-progressivism/
prison: mechanism available to remove people from society

[my problem with: political philosophy (of) authentic radical politics -->] (academic or artistic) critical scholarship [critical race theory, post-colonial theory, gender studies, etc. -->{busy with **systemic grievances** (white supremacy, colonialism, racism, etc,)} + left-wing identity politics --> *leftist purity politics*] universalizing a kind of moral complicity ==> a reductionist social ontology of guilt and victimization -->{
•bad idea of the whole (liberalism) is historically associated with, for example, colonialism ==> all of its parts (people, ideas, etc.) are equ[...]

[...]e for linking new and unknown tales to a web of tradition the audience shares*

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

*~._

all the familiar landmarks of your thoughts that you find in somebody else's


عجایب نامه ajayeb (doing it here in europe): the exotic charm of another system of thought (~= its limitation)

[*]zoo: terrible grounds that the child [= us] enjoys = primal scene of conquest (of nation building, of state power) --carceral--> scene of sadistic pleasure, where bodies become “flesh” [<-- telegram is all of this]
(Hayward + Borges)

[*]child: a primal scene = the promise of the social, the human, and the future --> ***child is necessary for the ongoingness of colonialism*** [---> go to the children in The 100 TV series <-- *white child: an explorer of terrible grounds*]
•conscripted labor
•enslavement
•necropolitical economy
•
--elaborating-proliferating--> productive engines of empire

}--Hayward--> how might the effects of colonialism always find children enjoying terrible places?


the subtending (entgegensetzend) logic of the zoo

sadism: the trouble of enjoying terribleness

(Lacanian) imaginary --desires--> coherence (=/= fragmentation) ==generates==> a compromise : an idealization of the self as whole, between the unbearability of interiority and exteriority
*imaginary is unavoidable, the obligatory state of existence (for speaking subjects) ==constitutes==> real effects

•Borges --> imaginary --> a world in pieces (monstrous fragmentation), impossible world of ‘that’
•Lacan --> imaginary --> tentatively precariously constitutes a sense of self through alienation

(Hayward > Borgesian) ****zoo --constitutes--> a primal scene of colonial violence though which fantasy and imagination, dragons and unicorns, are articulated, organized, rendered as “elsewhere” =/=? ajayeb premodern


zoo
one of the most ancient institutions
transformed by the event horizon of modernity

(Fanon dramatizing) colonialization is animated by zoonomia as phantasy: “when the settler seeks to describe the native fully in exact terms he constantly refers to the bestiary”

*we = sadism's children*

how imaginary beings and *fantastic zoology* always carry a colonial logic

biological essentialism : a dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic

...racial and colonial violence of slavery

prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)

[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incohere[...]

[...]ived and the representational spaces to the lived. Affirming the “unnaturalness” of the image makes it a transposition of universal means of communication--the language--that would like to provide a direct, unmediated, and accurate representation of the jungle.
The performance is an engagement with the notion of companion species elaborated by Donna Haraway, in an experience of walking in a tropical jungle with a computer in one hand and in the other hand the hand of the human child. The work deals with questions of the other-space that is mentally filled with projections and projects. The recording of the walking in the rain forest --as spatial and sensual experience-- is thus dematerialized and has acquired a digital character. The dense and hot environment of the Amazon is replaced by an abstract graphic structure, thus bringing a new understanding of the locality of the walk. The noise and the randomness of the technical coloring the surface of the jungle provoke an aesthetic fascination, and an appropriation of the imposible image of the forest.



Traveling to the Amazon to experience its radical Otherness is a European tradition. It unintentional affirms the ideology of a “state of nature” that is prior to culture.


Lacan: i am led to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

This developement is experienced as temporal dialectic that decisively projects the function of the individual into history. the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that i shall call orthhopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.

Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949

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

Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)


the project investigates the way in which Seifee as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for [...]

[...]the imposible image of the forest.



Traveling to the Amazon to experience its radical Otherness is a European tradition. It unintentional affirms the ideology of a “state of nature” that is prior to culture.


Lacan: i am led to regard the function of the mirror stage as a particular case of the function of the imago, which is to establish a relation between the organism and its reality - or, as they say, between the Innenwelt and the Umwelt.

This developement is experienced as temporal dialectic that decisively projects the function of the individual into history. the mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body image to a form of its totality that i shall call orthhopaedic - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. thus, to break out of the circle of the Innenwelt into the Umwelt generates the inexhaustible quadrature of the ego's verifications.

Electronic Reserve Text: from Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, New York: W. W. Norton, 1977.
The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience

Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949

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

Flusser, Gestures - beyond machines (reading)


the project investigates the way in which Seifee as an artist engages tactics of fieldwork, embodiment and materiality (in a manner that reveals or instigates processes of knowing).
(In this moment of increasing standardization and specialization regarding how people learn, art is a space for innovative thinking and experimentation outside given frameworks.)


...our ability to share the experience of the habits of the world that we discover. (Kohn)

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

Campbell on Harman's philosophy
(problem of) object-oriented ontology as social theory [insights of object-orientation mechanically applied to the social by Harman, “immaterialism"]
•innovative adaptation of phenomenology
•critique of how objects have been failed by philosophy
•insistence upon an aesthetic attitude of investigation
--but-->
•object-oriented social theory lacks the rigor and imaginative potential to envision the ontology of the social
•the way object-oriented ontology is stuck in a no-man's-land of not-quite-nonhuman-not-quite-human
•as ooo enters social theory it commits a performative fallacy --> missing the fundamental starting point of social theory: ***objects come into the social world as expressions of (negot[...]

[...]ion illusion: cognitive bias of the origins of one's own state]
•fantasy
•denial
•reaction formation: responses to internal threats and anxieties, anxiety is mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. phobia is always reaction formation: the person wants what he fears. [solicitude (may be a reaction formation) against cruelty, pacifism against sadism, etc.] when *instincts (and their derivatives) are arranged as pairs of opposites* (life/death, construction/destruction, action/passivity, dominance/submission); techniques: exaggeration, compulsiveness, inflexibility: “reactive love protests too much.” “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do)
◦intellectualization {memory of event --> intellectualization ==> conscious analysis of non-anxiety provoking information about an event}
◦dissociation
◦displacement: means of dream-distortion, ego relocates anxiety somewhere else, transference of emotions/wishes
◾sublimation والایش [a form of displacement]: long-term conversion of the initial (negative) impulse, (alchymical in Jung) transformation of shit into gold. [in Freud: ‘sublimation = plasticity of the sexual instincts’ ~/= in Lacan: ‘sublimation = (usually cosmic?) process of creation in ex nihilo style’ : an object (manufactured or not) defined in relation to the emptiness of Das Ding (empty canvas) --> sublimation ~ dismissal/Verwerfung: obsessional relational behaviour attributed to the avoidance of the primordial emptiness (of Das Ding) ==>? religion/art...
**penis sublimates into seriousness**, adolescence into poetry, emotions into mystical art into dominance,,,]
◦repression/suppression: subduing in the unconscious (under the influence of the superego?)
•withdrawal
•regression: a way of relating to the world that was formerly effective (to recapture some childhood satisfaction)r /> •

•pathological defense mechanism: delusional projection, denial, distortion, extreme projection, splitting
•immature defense mechanism: acting out, fantasy, idealization, passive-aggression, projection, projective identification, somatization
•neurotic defense mechanism: displacement, dissociation, hypochondriasis, isolation, rationalization, reaction formation, regression, repression, undoing
•mature defense mechanism: altruism, anticipation, humour, identification, intellectualization, introjection, sublimation, suppression
•other defensive mechanisms: compartmentalization, defensive pessimism, exaggeration, minimisation, postponement of affect

*it is job of defense mechanism to distort, transform, or falsify the perceived reality* --> to help deal with the id or superego, reducing anxiety


ego: part of our psyche that is reality based



[title]
methinks[...]

[...] travel is traumatic, disruptive, and unpleasant; so they both demand another kind of trans-portation system)

This essence of technology, however, has nothing to do with technology. [this is Heideggerian] --> technology is a means of revealing the truth

[it is not the machines that we are at the age of technology]

technology is always sent to us
in the story we are shifting to ‘send’, this doesn't mean that there is a sovereign subject or some sort of powerful ‘self’ responsible or at the origin of the productive behavior (or accomplishment) of San'an.

(Heidegger collects:)
destiny, destination, schicken, Schicksal, etc.
[ungeschickt =? destinal failure, existential clumsiness]
[~= technical error in destiny. what is the future of error?]
•according to Heidegger, nobody (that also means everybody) can take at the wheel and make certain determinations and destinations
[this is his notion of ‘techne']
•Tarsaa's technical intervention in San'an's destiny

that is another kind of relatedness
you can no longer talk about the subject or object
is one in full possession of oneself? one doesn't belong to oneself or anybody else---that would be a post-Lacanian critique, which is the self-sabotage of the mystic is not necessarily attached to a inevitable devouring authority, “I don't belong to myself or anybody else.” nor God, nor teacher, etc. ==> the self is not necessarily devourable. [what are the certain components of the self of San'an that will remain unavailable, those that underlay a pervasive sense of not-belonging?---> longing (‘vermissen’) the girl/Tarsaa, ‘to-be-longing']
(why) am I including in my speech a rhetoric of faltering, self-sabotage, and hesitation?
should I edit it out? edit out the “I am not sure,” those self-canceling moments from my expression?
(my) thoughts deserve elegant expressions***


translation of this is very unstable


(according to Hölderlin)
we arrive at the truth / the moment that the truth or Das Wahre emerges / the moment it closing in on us, is when we have to say goodbye



(these are rather ‘stances,’ than ‘questions’)
how the poet-Attar serves or is served-up and devastated by language?



blast has a sense of destruction to it, and destruction is good and necessary, it clears away what is already dead and hanging around burdening your being. blast is not a devastation, devastation promises no futurity

-who are you destroyed by?

whom am I addressing here? but more importantly, who or what is addressing me here (in a non-present way)?

San'an/girl/pig assemblage
(what is girl in San'an story? what is animal in San'an story?)

San'an story, as a scenography of sexual difference, and i[...]

[...]from objective systemic violence : media = instrument of bourgeois valuation

Shariati: existentialism + leftism + islamism
[islamic anticolonialism + neomarxist critical theory (of Frankfurt School)]
(presumed) deterioration of global consciousness + industrialization onto the stage of world history
-homogenized mass --> emergence of automation : an objectified and self-activating process wherein the subject becomes an instrument
“impersonation of the machine” <--Adorno--{totalitarian seizure of consciousness + devastating effects of instrumental reason}
Shariati's writing:
•the third world subject embraces the false consciousness
•self-inflicted cultural betrayal
•predatory-parasitic operation of the colonized imagination }-->
*defilement of the “what once was”
*the elevation of the indigenous as representative of an authentic return
==> ***past as antithesis to the present*** <-- transcendental signified of a precolonial subjectivity [<-- how not to do that while visiting heritage sites such as ajayeb?]
Shariati's defense of the non-western world --> manufacturing an exaggerated imagery of its *now lost grandeur* ==> (its former) essential identity-status
-->{what would Lacan's mirror stage say about this? [--> ‘sudden realization of a complete (specular) image of self =/= infant's primordial sense of her fragmented body’ before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other
[*]subjectivity: spatial relations (--> self-other construct)
[*]the imaginary: the space in which the relation between the ego and its images is developed]
(Mohaghegh:) [eastern] undo the moment of assimilation into a repressive [western] ‘symbolic order'[= the way the subject is organized & how the psyche becomes accessible]
[*]The Real: what cannot be symbolized – what loses it's “reality” once it is symbolized (made conscious) through language ==> the real is traumatic (& sublime?, =/=? media,,) @Hoda}

*cultural extinction*

urgency is (always?) neurotic

(?who and when sends) neurotic demand for an unmediated cognitive intimation


(Khomeini's) omat امت diesenfranchised populace

عناصر گول خورده perceptual perversion


•Khomeini <-- Marcuse (one-dimensional society, that promote a false consciousness which is immune against its falsehood)
•Khomeini <-- Chomsky (how superficial happiness can function as a detraction from the adverse effects of an alienated condition) [<-- Marxist tradition of the “serious” (=/= unreflective state) @Foad, “let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems --> *consumption becomes ritualized*]
•Shariati <-- Jameson (theory of the “ever-new but always-the-same” within the theatrical operation of politic[...]

[...]r special effects (--> launches what?):
*unreality of the emergent world* (+ production of emergent illusion)
•hazing of self and world
•curved mirroring
•shape-shifting
•aerial, apparitional,
•فرّار evasive and amorphous
-=> seamless apparition
--> ***eradicated storytelling*** + “I” as a spectral outcast of consciousness
*Hoda works on the unsaid (--> the imperceptible)
*Sina works on the incomprehensible (-->? the incidental)

Hoda's insurgent imagination in her cinematic techniques (part of the intellectual-aesthetic facet of middle eastern subjectivity):
•into a terrain of necessary ambiguity
•demanding an interpretive participation of a disturbed audience
--> (Benjaminian) “public is an examiner but an absent-minded one”

(how can Hoda in her medium of film create points of departure from insurgent imagination? she constantly reconsitutes the insurgent imagination *یاغی yaghi* --> one of the most important postmodern masks of iranian contemporary art)


(Elen? no longer convinced of her own entitlement to a reality principle)
the imaginary and symbolic functions of the penis --> Elen has to study ‘phallus’
Lacan's phallus is a (privileged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)

infantile sexuality

jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure


*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizo[...]

[...]ged) signifier of lack and sexual difference --> both of them are initiator for Elen's performance in the first week of apass 2018
phallus anchors the chain of signification (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) for her
is it about an Oedipus complex? in all her work she is identify with the imaginary phallus. (her staged “flaw” in doing so is camouflaging an Oedipus complex?)
==>? Elen: will to possession
who possesses a penis? --> masturbatory jouissance
*the one who possesses the phallus = the one desired* [~ phallus = desire ‘of’ the other =/= desiring the other]. phallus is the signifier of jouissance within Elen's performance
Elen's retribution of the boy who symbolically ‘have’ the phallus --> (we are back to) castration
**Elen's true woman-power lies with giving up her phallic identification. (the image of innovation in her work: she is still busy with ‘inovative creativity,’ inherently a phallic function). this is a hope, the symbolic phallus ins her work (and in anyone's work) is often in the place of *the lack of the signifier in the Other* (that can never be filled?)

infantile sexuality

jouissance: enjoyment from indirect pleasure (for example enjoyment of organizing pleasure)
Lacan --> pleasure makes us guilty + without guilt there is no pleasure


*chaotic topology of imagination*( --> more like a pile of sugar =/= Freudian topology of consciousness/unconsciousness)--> erasing the boundary between interiority and exteriority
--> (once-unitary) subject ==> an oblique network }--> that is us, iranians
--> schizoid view of nomadological thought

separate methodologies of blurring and fragmentation:
1- shadow
2- mirror image

Hedayat's shadow (his palpable aesthetic-existential operation--in The Blind Owl) [=/= Kafka's metamorphoses]: skeletal transfiguration of a conceivably human form into a *shadow collectivity* [=/= camouflage]


anticipation of oblivion
Hoda, Foad,

(maybe interesting for Hoda:) bitching ~= concerted methodology of confrontation and provocation


to write on chaos
to write as chaos
to write chaos***


[an iranian topology of imagination:]
subjectivity --> deception
literature --> rage
chaos --> annihilation



deserter

textual encounter --> the method by which a chaotic imaginary is uncovered and set loose:
1. lure consciousness into desertion
2. perceive textual artifacts as forces of immanent contagion
3. identify the text as a carrier of shadow-becoming
4. text conceive the setting of inhuman

deserter (position) --> unearthing --> chaotic imagination

...a fractal exteriority that alters and generates vivid, intensified hierarchies of i[...]

[...] century progress, which has been be increasingly hard to refute:
place of West in the avant-garde of progress <== manifold achievements of technology, constitutional government, secular state and modern administration <== (a separate and
distinct ‘nation-state’ <==) American and French revolutions
}--> unable to assess by Muslims? ~~?--> the tale of the bewildered Asian:
•dast-e gheyb دست غیب divinely ordained dispensation
•dast-e taghdir دست تقدیر mysterious workings of fate
•charkh-e ruzegar چرخ روزگار cyclical rise and fall of political fortune
•uncreative dynastic rulers
(=/= organized human energy and action)

cultural arrogance

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

paranoia (=/= schizophrenia), an instinct (for the original hostility of the world, name of the world is ‘conflict’ =/= instinctual needs for acceptance and for the assignment of a place)
> para + nous (~ out of mind, beside the mind) --> part of the everyday life : when you think you are “somebody” or you have “agency” you are on a small dose of paranoid delusion. {do we always need some dose of paranoia to form critical relations with our current condition?
according to Lacan: *Knowledge (connaissance) itself is paranoiac* --> psychoanalytic treatment = inducing controlled paranoia into the human subject***
*preconditions of all human knowledge is the “paranoiac alienation of the ego”* (ego: a [paranoiac] construction formed by identification with the specular image in the mirror stage)}
==> high thoughts and abstract thinkers, especially when they believe “nobody understands them”
==> also promotes you to go to forbidden zones, attack sacrosanctities, breaking taboos, take the side of the miserable and the marginalized, that there is something wrong about The World
==> always dissatisfied with the ‘current situation,’ impulse to correct thect the current situation (... our condition, our situation), and assuming a defensive stance, (in worse case) with a sense of mission, with deep feelings of powerlessness (and depression, sometimes victimization)
}<==> their own psychological security (~ defense against failure and loss; a fact of relevance for obligation)

it is all about ['having’ or owning a] *perception of reality* (==> belief)
to recognize the intentional in the accidental/coincidental
(a paranoid response to intentionality?)
==> imaginary friend or imaginary enemy
#complain

sisyphus phenomena --> the idea that one is condemned (by the “system”) to do senseless absurd meaningless labor

(Maze Runner film opening sign:) “we are running out of time. you have seen what is happening out there.” ==> insurgent

four types of paranoia:
1. erotic شهوانى (--> what the opposite sex wants from them)
2. persecutory[...]

[...]*overperception of causal linking: paranoid perceiver has to interpret others’ action in a disproportional self-referential way ==> they are the target of others’ thoughts and actions
*conspiracy: paranoid perceiver has to overattribute social coherence and coordination to others’ actions

from dysphoric to euphoric self-consciousness

the direct link(?) between socioeconomic status and development of paranoia
(physically:) high blood pressure & hardening of the arterial walls (& drug abuse) ==> decline in brain circulation ==> paranoid reaction


still paranoia has a better prognosis (تشخيص قبلى) than schizophrenia
(paranoia is a limited schizophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)

state of deafness --> paranoia

•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose: break between the ego and its object, a bond of identity
•Otto Rank: myth of the birth of the hero --> world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia

(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship rela[...]

[...]izophrenia --> we should open up our paranoiac relating onto the schizophrenic, which is much more interesting)

state of deafness --> paranoia

•in Freud: paranoia --> patient's infantile relation to his father
•for Cameron: one cannot take the role assigned to him by the society ==> hypothetical relationships with other --> paranoia
•Bose: break between the ego and its object, a bond of identity
•Otto Rank: myth of the birth of the hero --> world appears as a whole, or womb (a cosmological projection)
•Lacan: foreclosure, Verwerfung (=/= repression [==> neurosis]): the exclusion of the father, (the fundamental signifier of the Name-of-the-Father is the object of foreclosure) ==> a hole in the symbolic order --but--> sooner or later foreclosed Name-of-the-Father reappears in the real and the subject is unable to assimilate it : *collision with the inassimilable signifier* ==> entry into psychosis ~=> delusion ~-> paranoia

(Heidegger + Manning + Alex's register of good thinking: “doing philosophy is better than knowing philosophy” ...)
[*]'to do philosophy’ --> imaginary register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowlednowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defen[...]

[...]y register --> knowledge of the ego*
[*]'to know philosophy’ --> symbolic register --> knowledge of the subject*
(in Lacan) connaissance (Knowledge) belongs to the imaginary register =/= savoir (knowing) belongs to the symbolic register (--> you can track down the egocentrism of the philosopher:)
[*]connaissance (Knowledge)-->{self-knowledge of the subject in the imaginary order. based on misrecognition, a fantasy of self-mastery and unity, constitutive of the ego. it has the same structure as paranoia (involving the delusion of absolute knowledge and mastery)}
=/=
[*]savoir (knowing)-->{articulation of signifiers in the subject's symbolic universe, the signifying chain}

i use (sometimes associative) speech in collective research life as a progressive revelation of symbolic knowledge to the subject, where knowledge is the jouissance of the Other =/= “absolute knowledge”

[what ever we say about the symbolic is utterly important: because from the anthropological work of Strauss on the exchange of gifts that regulate kinship relations, emergence of symbolic structures was conceptualized as an essential feature of the human transition from nature to culture, to Saussure's theory of the sign: exchanges of signifiers, to Lacanian psychoanalysis: the impose of symbolic structures on sexuality]


defense: reaction of the ego to certain interior stimuli (and not the external) <-- Freud
(in Lacan:) *defense: permanent symbolic structures of subjectivity =/= *resistance: transitory imaginary responses to intrusions of the symbolic (on the side of the object)

the neurotic and the pervert defend themselves in their *desire* =/= psychotic defends himself in their *projection*

“to desire” is a defense mechanism (against going beyond a certain limit in jouissance?)

(>this is all about) the psychotic relation to reality and the relation of the subject to his speech


*unreal is transparent (for the paranoid)*
-hermeneutics of suspicion (<-- Nietzsche's perspectivism: all texts are but autobiographic memoirs)


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

[Searles]

schizophrenic individual is struggling with the question, not so much of ‘how to relate,’ but ‘whether to relate’ to others

(Searles's interpersonal ideal:) connection = relatedness without merging

spontaneous involvement of the therapist in terms of countertransference (pygmalionesque love?)

psychological illness = a disturbance of natural tendency to heal others (patient's unconscious therapeutic initiative)

“all patients have the ability to ‘read the unconscious’ of the therapist” (Searles)

*acknowledging what the patient's transference materializes*

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

apass's aetiology: the philosophical study of causation of[...]

[...] /> (<-- this is super ok as long as that force field is not curated by wannabe spiritual philosopher human)

bestiary: paranormal excluded by religion

agricultural societies monopolized charisma (--> king) --> logistical functioning of the world of agriculture ==> global warming

neolithic privatization of enchantment ==> monotheism

Holocene --> strategy of survival at any cost

(Morton echoing the cliche of artists wanna do magic:) “art is demonic”: it emanates (not designed) from beyond sense that the artist is not in charge of, dangerous causative flicker
~ ‘art = charisma’ [= cause & effect]
--Morton--> (bad idea of) art ==> charismatic causality

force-like animal magnetism

magic = causality + illusion

appearance and essence are two different sides of Mobius strip

(pre-neolithic -->) *we live in a world of tricksters* (raindrops are tricksters,,,)

incomprehensible charisma of kitsch

(the objects in my room contain a palpable enjoyment that is without me, found objects that spray charismatic causality [without devotion or trust])

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

(Zizek's) Lacan four discourses via porn actress facial stages:
1- ecstatic state --> overwhelmed
2- serious --> hard work, instrumental control
3- boredom --> ignorance, indifference
4- mocking --> is this all you can do, smile


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

body...
how to feed it
when to fast
how to soothe
moisturize
let go
heal
you can't grasp your body once and for all --> one can only bear witness and offer testimony (<--Avital-- this is why writing is so often bound up with illness, “writer = invalid”)

cultural phantasms of bodily mutation

the body never stays put long enough to form self-identity --(this is why)--> our ancestors used to fast-forward and just lose it [transcending the body]


in Dostoevsky
body is variously insulted and humiliated --> subjected to injury (an injury capable of language and disclosure)
--> idiocy offered a delicate conflagration of soma + psyche

illness: the stealth master (the teacher whose lesson is unremittingly opaque yet purposeful)

(when you get hurt -->) body: “Honey, I’m home, I am your home.”

your body fighting for you
healing without cure

illness --Avital--> essentially related to the experience of injustice ~= your Geworfenheit
• illness visits you at will and does what it wants to your body (stinging surfaces you didn’t know you had)
•illness gives access to the devotional mode of surrender (abandoning to itself something other than the self)
•illness brings with it an alte[...]

[...] the observer (that had occurred by the middle of 19th century)

my Olearius video figuratively repositions the observing subject outside of the term of which system of vision?
world present to the subject in relations of reflection?

...three observers by the virtue of their unmediated, unobstructed self-presence

=/= *romanticism: (maintained) resistance to externality*
[compare Manet's balcony with Goya's painting Majas on a Balcony]

(Manet's palette corresponding to) the luminous wavelengths of a new technological lifeworld...

Manet dramatizing (but not lamenting) the evaporation of a cohesive world...
(finely assembled) architecture of solitude and separation [...] in a space of a newly modern individual autonomy


modernization of urban space --> (crucial component of the) regime of perceptual adaptability


diagram = optical system --?--> ocular [~ *rationalizable spatial account of vision*] --> vision as reflexive : property of a subject figured as a geometric point (=/= ambiguity and disorganization of intersubjective relations)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)


*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*

uncertain content of the interior

(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)


Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)

Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence


fastening together and grounding narrative content


[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis

achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” things, ***to ward of experiences of disintegration***
(the reality-effect is processed and achieved differently in Iran. how? how iranian artists differ from the perceptual logic of modernity?)

([Elmira and Foad's] engagement with the) ambiguities of visual attentiveness

perceptual logic[...]

[...]re, the signifying tension between picture plane and orthogonal recession, etc.) --> in the case of Raphael: theology becomes a commentary on painting : pictorial structure (directly semiotic and not mimetic) = meaning

(always?) *faithfuls need their originals*


in Helmholtz's 1856 comprehensive account of human vision, the eye emerges *empathically embedded in the thinness and opacity of the body*
eye (=/= a marvelous apparatus) : an apparatus with built-in aberrations, proneness to error, and inconsistencies in is processing of visual information --> entoptical phenomenon --James--> subjective optical sensation: example of selective attention excludes from consciousness sensations that are *nonreferential* (= irrelevant to the knowledge about the world)
(~= Ernst Mach's sight phantasms)

arborescent vocabulary of the scientific literature on the eye in the 1880s

*new diagram of the eye: photoreceptors in the human eye are placed at the back of retina, behind the blood vessels (that literally intervene seeing) --Seurat--> inseparable mix of an abstract mathematically constructed & a physiological perception more subjectivity determined, “domain of vision has been integrated Iin the field of desire” (Lacan), “phantasmatic events that occur on the surface of the bodies” (Crary)
=/= older diagram of the eye: the ideal unobstructed functioning of camera obscura --> ‘scene of representation’

‘dream of immediacy’ --to--> (Seurat's refusal of scenography ==> nondisclosure ~) fantasy of a theatre without representation

Rousseau's affirmation of *political self-sovereignty* in the ‘festival’: a stage which presents nothing to the sight --Derrida--> a place where the spectator, presenting himself as spectacle, will no longer be seer or voyeur *** (<-- what i learned from Phill) ==> presence will be full as the intimacy of a self-presence, as the sentiment of self-proximity, of self-sameness


Lyotard: theatrically fold --> a box closed upon itself --> only those to appear on the stage which come from what will be known as the ‘exterior’

*zero: the sign of the empty center, the place where everything is supposed to be visible and intelligible : the place of knowledge --> god, organized body, society, capital, the ego, platonic forms, etc.

Grosz: construction of embodied subjectivity --> mobius strip (a 19th century invention), inflection of mind and body to one another through a kind of twisting or inversion --> rethinking relations of the inside and the outside of the subject psychical interior and corporeal exterior)
-sides of the mobius strip are not fundamental identities, the drift from one to the other side is uncontrollable

currents
and surfaces of this body
is coalescence of energy into phantasms
deceptive semblance
of a theater of repres[...]

[...]garments were literally devised to slip back into the legacies of shame that had heretofore defined the origin of sexual difference and the litany of unequal gender relations that followed.”

() the artist and his muse (typically gendered image of the fashion designer and his model) --> based on the classical notion of an unhampered and naturally feminine ground of conception =/= masculine drive to be “creative” : (old notion that) “woman is the origin ==> it is up to man (Gernreich) to be original” --> to refashion feminine mater-iality into more meaningful forms

easily inscribed and veiled shame of nudity

*hyper-exposure* and *self-consciousness* (aimed at the shame ‘we,’ who live within ‘the cultures of the textile,’ are possessed by)

...deep-seated knowledge that the textile leaves us continually and hopelessly exposed


*our need to be forever wrapped-up in the text/ile* : endlessly bound by the perpendicular, criss-crossing of one another's desires and the ‘significances’ we ascribe to such satisfying predictability


textile screens

textile’s discursive usefulness: its ability to support and exploit the image of our “alternative” identities

(Lacan's) objet petit a : prediscursive, meaningless thing’


textiles (and the clothing shaped from them) are not “convenient things” that help curtail or discipline our desires (by properly veiling them), rather, they are the very object cause of our desire

capturing and suspending our desires in fabricated flights of fancy =/= a sieve (alak) to pass through onto places unknown/unknowable



embodied politics of impropriety

rethinking how ‘the body’ is typically interpolated, along temporal lines

the medium of the textile (--> fashion's main medium --> thread of sexual difference running through this fabric)

...styles that are not pre- or over-determined by a dualistic form of sexual difference

sartorial scheme

abstracting the concept of ‘the body’

attire

(more) body's social ranges of movement
(more) flexible corporeal aesthetics and articulations


{Edie's odd,protracted sleeves of her dress in Warhol's ICA exhibition 1965} the surreal transformation of a woman's arm into a pachyderm's long, wily, and authority-defying appendage...


the conventional and deeply gendered notion that fashion is “[ephemeral], frivolous, relegated to the domain of the feminine and the body, as opposed to art, which [is] deemed [eternal,] masculine and placed in the sphere of the mind and psyche” (Archer > Geczy and Karaminas)

and--> intertwining of fashion and art has long been regarded as absolutely key to the production of the modern social fabric--intended (l[...]

[...]> •seeing woman's fashionable transfiguration only in terms of what it properly signified within the bounds of a patriarchal civil society and a capitalist economy
•failing to appreciate the pleasures that fashionable styles offer their wearers in spite of the physical and social restrictions they impose
}--> parochial economic critique (operating in a wholly rational realm) =/= (Elizabeth Wilson:) how these ‘transforming actions’ might do violence to these orders --Archer--> **how the powerful and highly volatile work of desire unfolds within the fashion system**

***oppression =/= passivity***

Gernreich --> fashion ‘works’ not simply by way of its significant expense, but rather at *the expense of signification*

{ fashion = fantasy }==> fashion offers our desires a medium through which:
•to formally manipulate the discourse of the body
•to violently threaten the rational ordering of its meaning
•to from which to produce pleasures that exceed satisfaction or sense
•to operate on the text/ile in ways that are non-linguistic (within waking life)


Lyotard's “the dream-work does not think, but ‘manhandles’ the text and operates on the text as if it were a material” =/= Lacan's “the unconscious is structured like a language”

Lyotard on Freud's assumption and insistence that the textures of a text affect its meaning --> Lacan's failure (as analyst and philosopher) in not being able to appreciate how fantasy (~ the forms of desire ~? fashion) pits the materiality of signifiers against what they try to signify

“if desire is the mobile element (here the wind, elsewhere water) that crumples the text, can it also be the fixative which keeps certain parts of it readable? I know of only one notion which can satisfy these conflicting demands: the notion of form, of fantasy”

(my struggle with my colleagues) not to confuse fashion [or any object] for “an object that the subject imagines and aims at” instead of recognizing fashion as “a sequence in which the subject has their own part to play and in which permutations of roles and attributions are possible”
@Hoda, Pierre, Ali

(Zizek:) through fashion we learn how to desire --> how to desire our own subjugation, as well as the possibilities of our own freedom

*political potency of desire* (--> do we need to recognize and manipulate it to our advantage? @Foad)
توان سیاسی میل


[looking for?] proper names --> quickly recognized for offering some sense of sonic semblance in a sea of deconstructed phonemes in Anglo-shaped mouths

#wear my lecture


*fantastic critique* =/= parochial critique (usually rational economic)

[unpossessed persons are the ones who usually talking about magic, and transformative potentlies]

people wh[...]

[...]er of figures

Owens's medusa myth: proto-photographic
Perseus makes the medusa's relationship with her image indexical (and not simply iconic) ==> serve as the support for a long chain of discursive and figurative events... --violence--> the *specular ruse* ['medusa effect'] whereby medusa is inserted into discourse --> she becomes an object of depiction, narration, analysis (she will never get a chance to tell her side of the story)

medusa in:
•Perseus: (in Ovid) turn power into vulnerability and vulnerability into power
•Freud: (in Das Medusenhaupt) displaced representation of female genitalia, as a fetish, an emblem of castration, girl's realization of her own ‘castration’ <== “to decapitate = to castrate”
•Helene Cixous: (in The Laugh of the medusa) as apotrope: “we are going to show them [prists] our sexts”
•Haraway: (in Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene) the lady of the beasts is a potent (apotrope?) --> “dashing the twenty-first-century ships of the heroes [motherless mind children] on a living coral reef”, chthonic powers in Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds and beyond
•Owens:

Kruger as a model of artist is like Perseus in medusa myth

Lacan's imaginary order: a dual relationship (symmetric & immediate opposite) between consciousness and its other (in the play of reflection in the mirror)

ego: imaginary construct by the capture of the image (in the mirror)
see yourself ==> you are petrified ~ *arrest*
...~->? scopic drive

(Lacan on) evil eye --> arrest movement and literally kill life

(psychological concept of) sature (to join two lips of a wound): pseudo-identification of an initial moment of seeing and a terminal moment of arrest --Owens--> *medusa effect*: imaginary identification of the seer and seen (immediacy, capture, stereotype)

Lacan placing the moment of arrest prior to the moment of seeing --> what happens when we look at a picture : first an arrested gesture (a picture) then the act of seeing (completing the picture)

[*]to pose: to present onself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen (immobilized, suspended, a picture), **mimicing the immobilizing power of the gaze** --Owens--> pose forces the gaze to surrender
***to pose = to pose a threat*** ~ apotrope

artist reflects the stereotype back on its self --> to defeat an apotrope with an apotrope
is Kruger different than politically motivated artists (consciousness-raising)?
--Owens--> Kruger stages the techniques of stereotype (that interpolate her/him as subjects)
-is the viewer led or allowed to reject her work's address? ==?==> gesture of refusal --or?-- mobilization of the spectator


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

Archer (philosopher of wardrobes, patterns and textility) on [...]

[...]ssibility of “another way”

the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)

(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood



spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)

[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production

using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire

“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)

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

phantom limb Grosz

(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*

body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]

==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification

Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology

•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*


(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb

[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synesthetically (visual or tactile) organized and represented


postural schema وضعى

postural model (of the body): a three-dimensional image that both registers and organizes the information provided by the senses regarding:
•the subject's body
•the subject's location in space (~ its posture)
•the subject[...]

[...]xperience from the limb (now missing)
•the phantom
•the denial that the amputation has taken place
•process of disavowal
•

phantom limb:
•is felt to be a living, moving organic part of the body in coordination with the rest of the body
•behaves as if it were autonomous, with qualities and requirements of its own
{reality of the phantom limb =/= perceptual reality}==> (patient's) ambivalent contradictory experience

...it is the object of sensory, tactile, optical attention

*artist = amputee avows two realities:
1. the reality of a living limb
2. the reality of its destruction
}--> these two “limbs” occupy the same space and time --> **one the ghostly double of the other's absence** [~ condition of the art] @Mohaghegh


****the phantom: expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body (its completion)**** = a psychical delegate ==> physical + psychical wound and scar in the amputation or surgical intervension into any part of the body
[*]phantom: narcissistic reassertion of the limb's presence in the face of its manifest biological loss --> (an attempt to preserve) the subject's narcissistic sense of bodily wholeness [--Lacan--> an images developed through the mirror stage]
--> artist's dream and relation to the wound(= cumbersome narcissistic compensation for the broken unity of the biological body) @Elen
#archive: a psychical attempt to reactivate a past body image in place of the present reality [--> how can we accept the reality? @Pierre, Sina, Hoda,]

(Grosz raising the general question of:) the status of the *body image of woman*--insofar as women are considered and consider themselves to have suffered an amputation (implied by castration) more debilitating than most --> *do women have a phantom phallus?* what is the women's status of a fantasized amputation?

Grosz: “amputee's relations to the phantom limb =?! woman's mourning for what has been lost (the freedom, self-determination, autonomy accorded to the male body, etc. #harem)”
--> ***until female genitals (women's bodies) are inscribed and lived (by the subject and by others) as a positivity, there will always remain paradoxes and upsetting implication for any notion of femininity***



infant's body not yet a self-contained entity, not yet distinct and separate from the world --> child: a body and its various sensations are projected onto the world, and conversly the world and its vicissitudes are introjected into the body of the subject-to-be ==> child: slowly and gradually the body image IS constructed and invested in stages of libidinal developement:
•oral stage ==> mouth
•anal stage ==> anus
•
each stage augmenting and reorienting the preceding stages: anal take over the intensity of the oral, but the mouth remains sign[...]

[...]--> transformation of body image (of the meaning of the sexual zones to other organs which are not usually associated with genitality)
_*hypochondria --> transposition of libido (displacement, from one organ to another, from the genital to other parts of the body)
_*depersonalization --> withdrawal of libido from privileged zones (often from the whole body)

}==> ****تغيير پذيرى lability of meaning for bodily organs**** : any zone of the bady can (under certain circumstances) take on the meaning of any other zone
[stabil =/= labil: transient, apt to slip]

neurosis & psychosis: subject's sexual life is transposed from its socially expected locations, aims, and onjects to elsewhere

-life history of the subject: the systems of psychical meaning and the events rendered meaningful
-body: the history of the subject's explorations and practices + its various accidents and illnesses

(@Sina) breathing difficulties --> (hysterical symptoms for) significance of the public/private division ~ inside/outside division
•visible disorders --> some kind of message *to others* is being transmittes
•invisible disorders --> some kind of message *to another signifier* is being transmittes #Lacan


hypochondria + depersonalization + hysteria ==[through the mediation of body image]==> *the biological or organic body is open to psychical meanings* ~ psychic processes rely on various organic connections (it takes them as its raw material, as its model of expression)

disease (<==)transforms==> body image (<==)affects==> subject's psychological state

body image: mediating position between the organic and the psychical : it is by affecting, modifying, transforming the body image that each (organic & psychical) is able to effect transformation in the other


***Freud's prediction: man would become a prosthetic god*** [~= Iron Man]

body image = (function of) psychology + sociohistorical context + anatomy
the body image is extremely fluid and dynamic : its borders, edges, and contours are osmotic (تراوش کننده), they have the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange --> *social*

Schilder's “zones of sensitivity”: bodily orifices + its sensation experienced about one centimeter from the opening (-for example how the diseases of internal organs are not experienced in their precise anatomical locations)
*zones outside the body* --> intrusion into this bodily space is considered as much a violation as penetration of the body itself, the size and form of this surrounding space of safety is individually, sexually, racially, and culturally variable [--> #clean and dirt for my mother; my body image outside space surrounding it when i am in my room is the room itself, every corner, every niche accumulates s[...]

[...]ody is not uniform:
•thinner in some places (which more readily tolerate body contact)
•thicker in some places (which are particularly psychically, socially, and culturally “privatized”)
•

-acting uses body image --> body image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the outside world and can take other parts into itself
-playing setar --> (part of the difficulty of learning how to use instruments, such as setar) the libidinal problem of how they become psychically invested (=/= simply the technical problem of how they are used)

surgeon's body image

in driving, trying to fit into a small parking spot <-- experienced in the body image of the driver (and sometimes, to their horror, in that of the passengers) [--> by inability to drive is related to a bad body image?]

body image is capable of accommodating and incorporating an extremely wide range of objects:
•clothing
•jewelry
◾other bodies
•objects
•nail polish
•jets, ships, cars
•bodily zones:
◦orifices
◦curves
◦convex spaces
◦concave spaces
•“detachable” or intermediate category of objects, midway between the inanimate and the bodily [~= Lacanian objet a, Kristeva's abject]:
◦body's excretions
◦body's waste products
◦bodily byproducts
◾urine
◾faeces
◾saliva
◾sperm
◾blood
◾vomit
◾hair
◾nails
◾skin
  }--> retain something of the cathexis and value of the body (--> keeping my chopped nails, old toys, art-works... ?! --?--> ‘detachment = your work (art, etc.) is not bound up with your body image’), they remain magically linked to the body --> narcissistic investment in the body image

}--> ****human subjects never simply have a body****
the body is always necessarily the object and subject of attif attitudes and judgments, psychically invested, never a matter of indifference
-the body never has merely instrumental or utilitarian value for the subject --Grosz--> which organs are libidinally invested and the kinds of investments that animate them are functions of the subject's psychical, interpersonal, and sociohistorical relations and are malleable and continually changing --> *always potentially open to new meanings and investments*

body image: (to a large extent) function of socially shared significance
-(for example) male and female genitals have a particular social meaning in western patriarchal cultures that the individual alone or even in groups is unable to transform (-these meanings are deeply etched into and lived as part of the body image) [=/= Frankenstein]
==> () very different self-perception and very different organic body =/= dichotomous division of sexed bodies

Grosz generally finds Schilder useful --but-->
[...]

[...] own knowledges

four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)


Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which feminists are involved

[*]body: a discontinuous, nontotalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and events, intensities, and durations --link--> organs + biological processes + material objects + social practices

[Spinoza's rare affirmative understanding of] body: (is analyzed and assessed more) in terms of *what it can do*, the things it can perform, the linkages it establishes, the transformations it undergoes, the machinic connections it forms with other bodies (=/= a locus for a conscious subject, as an organically determined object, by their genus and species, by their organs and functions)

from Plato to Lacan --> desire: negative, abyssal, a lack at the level of ontology itself (an effect of frustration) [desire is frustrated by the real]
=/= Spinoza Nietzsche Deleuze --> desire: immanent, positive and productive, ***desire is a relation of effectuation, not of satisfaction*** [desire is productive of reality] --> aleatory, bricolage

Spinoza's ethics: capacity for action and passion, increase or decrease one's capacities and strengths <-- good & bad
=/= Levinasian ethics (modeled on a subject-to-subject, self-to-other relation)

(psychoanalysis) *partial objects: organs, processes, and flows, which show no respect for the autonomy of the subject*


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

(Archer > Saint Lauren:) “fashion fades, style is eternal" = 'notions of style <--> notions of history’ ={"to have style" = to have the means of inserting oneself into history / “to lack style" = to risk oblivion}

Archer --> how critical considerations of style can offer opportunities to think across sets of subjectivities and cultural practices that are often disassociated or pitted against one another

erotic stylization of deadly force --(Archer asks)--> why is it stylish for one to be attracted to the kind of power that “the uniform” signifies?
how styles (sartorial, campy, grotesque) serve as a serious index of our collective complicity in the ongoing production of state violence?

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

Chen on animacy

animacy --> how matter that is considered insensate, immobile, deathly (or otherwise “wrong”) animates[...]

[...]]
•so
}<==motivation==
1. considering the strangeness of life forms act as a template ==to==> think differently about life by mobilizing new ***prepositions of connection*** (with, alongside, between, sym-, etc.) ==provoke==> different theoretical insights into how society might work
2. ethical political drive to promote radical inclusivity and to challenge mindsets that fixate on identity and difference (<-- Harawayian) [--> Isabel, Sara]
3. work of decentering the human as the premier valance of the universe (may in turn) ==cultivate==> an ethics that is ecological, in the sense of global and interspecies (<-- Mortonian)  [--> Sina]
4. conceiving of the ‘other’ as planetmate, messmate, natureculture, mind-body, etc. (maybe) ==lead==> new conceptions of camaraderie, community, society, friendship [--> artistic research, apass, Viveiros de Castro]


bacteria [also: mushroom, swamp] --> poster-creatures of the flat ontology movement --> challenging classification
replacing Tree of Life with DNA-based model of life (homo sapiens: a micro-ingredient of an astonishing bacterial soup of prokaryotes, archaea, eukaryotes)

*bacteria: the ground zero life forms* -->! ***nearest we can get imagining the Lacanian Real***

we are more bacteria than human

(global) bacterial biome: para-collective (=/= “merely” biological)
*our ways of reacting to bacteria are as political as they are scientific*

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

purity & pollution + their deep-seated link with social order and its transgression --Douglas--> {from the idea of poisonous vapours (miasma [unrelated to cleanliness]) --to-->} discovery of pathogenic organisms بيمارى زا ==> modern concept of bacteria

cleansing rituals before the bacteriological age functioned to ward off spirits and restore social order and control (@Elke, @Isabel, the artist as medium)

discovery of germs ==> radical re-conceptualization of dirt (--> it is difficult to think of dirt except in the context of pathogenicity)

if we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt --Douglas--> we are left with the very old definition of [*]dirt: matter out of place

**when we see dirt --> we see a system**
--Campbell--> when we see bacterial images we are seeing something else

***contamination = a violation of some mythical, symbolic, or political system =/= just a physical problem***

bacteria --> symptom of a disturbed system


symptomatic analysis (=/= feedback)
pioneered by Marxist critics, Althusser

symptomatic analysis of X = to open the possibility of there being unspoken, unacknowledged or disavowed content in X

symptomatic analysis --of--> (content of) antibacterial advertisement --laden--> with libidinal intensity or *[...]

[...]io-economic order

***new technologies to visualize the world ==produce==> new imaginateis of life itself*** [<-- my research on bestiaries]

microscope (19th century) --> microbial visuality --Latour--> new modes of interacting with and ingesting/consuming the world

bacteriology as a discipline emerged at the same time as the (so-called) transformation “from industrial capitalism --to--> market society”
•overpopulation
•bacterial proliferation
--> a trope in visualizing contemporary bacteria

bacteria live in obscene proximity to each other --> *bacterial intimacy =/= individualizing force of modernity*

the fantasy of there is some sort of “away” which can absorb what we overproduce

removal of excrement (in all its quises) --> demonstrating the urbanites class distinction --> (an apparent) desire to reorganize urban space according to a logic of repugnance مغايرت (--> this is why i am so uncomfortable with “clean” streets)
•the idea that a veritable subterranean system delivering *shit-free cleanliness* ==> citizen's physical, moral, sipritual cleanliness --with--> materila markers of the civilized society: cubicles, toilets, drains, sewers

(Lacan > Morton > Campbell >) the problem of human society : what to do with one's shit

anti-bacterial advertising --> fantasy of awayness

keeping nature at a distance ==Morton==> (act out an imagined preservation -->) dumps on the rest of the world
[sadistic admiration] putting something called nature on a pedestal and admiring it from afar (for the environment) ~= what patriarchy does for the figure of the woman

bacteria adhere to each other and to their environment --> *they make any environment cohere as itself* : without bacteria there is no environment



3. lower classes
overweigth
bad skin
bad teech
criminally deviant

griminess سياهى
slick sheen ليز
dinginess چرکى
slouch اويخته
decay

in advertisement:
bacterium suicide bomber
ear-picking homeless man: the incarnation of bacterial cross-infection

**community <--> infection**
(health of the community is theatened by undesirable members)

*bacteria ==> community can come into full self-expression*
bacteria = disruption of social order ~-=> bacteria stabilizes the social order

***bacterial threat = biological model for a political necessity***

(familiar terrain of) hand: a vast and foreign bacterial colony

in a world of microbial resistance [in which common infections and minor injuries can kill <-- real possibility for 21st century and not a apocalyptic fantasy] --> *antibacterials carve out spaces of near-perfect security*

bac[...]

[...]arin) “good germ management =/= good parenting”
(Dettol:) “good germ management = good parenting” [when a mother at home protects children from contact with the floor]

(in iran:) contact is contagion

Campbell assuming women tolerate germs more than men --> not in iran

**staging the unbacterial woman**

*body is a closed private property =/= contagion emanates from bodies that are not properly closed or private*

“community = the single biggest source of threat” (our sovereign cleanliness) --> *bacteria as other people* مجاز مرسل metonymically (not just metaphorically)
•degenerate human
•homeless man
•transvestite
•street sweeper
•

(cleanliness is always sovereign)


if ”(deep) ideology =/= (critical) thought” --then--> fantasy =/= ?

‘deviant’ mobilizes deep-seated fears and fantasies ==> images that are visually intense + build exceedingly successful brands

critical analysis can move from thinking about symptoms as indirect expressions of deep ideology (paranoia) --to--> *indirect expressinos of structurating fantasies*

(brands know that) ***fantasy =/= ideology***
•Lacan --> even when patients could articulate their symptoms it didn't seem to dissipate ==> symptom was a constitutive core of their own subjectivity
•Zizek --> ideology: fantasy structuring out social reality itself =/= an illusion masking the real state of things
•Marx, Freud, Zizek --> symptom =/= a thing behind which secret content is hidden
for Marx *the secret is in hte form of commodity itself** (<--but-- commodity as a central symptom of capitalism) --Sina--> in the form of the hair-styles in The Magicians TV series


from symptom (veil) --to--> sinthome (screen)

*sinthome* is not directly analysable --Campbell--> images of bacteria are symptoms of the Real, not the symbiotic order, because the Real unsymbolizable
sinthomes organize the subject (without them the subject would be obliterated, Zizek)

(psychoanalytic paradigm --> emerging research in marketing:)
•sustainability practices’ fetishistic disavowal of reality can serve to exacerbate ecological catastrophe
•the inherently narcissistic nature of the consumer needs others to suffer in order to derive pleasure from (consumer) objects
•reinvestigation of consumer desire as jouissance --> a perverse pleasure in the “mad destruction” of our bodies and minds
}--> examples of critical marketing pursuing emancipatory unveiling procedures
--✕--> sinthome can offer:
1. an *analytic strategy for feeling out* the contours of symptoms
2. directing us to a new *question we may ask of texts of all kinds* --> ***why do they take the form that they do?*** [=/= what ideology is beneath them --> at [...]