[...].


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

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

[*]art: risk of something new

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

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

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

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

-Viveiros de Castro's dichotomous argument leaves out other modes of knowing, those that i care and haunt for (and i am claimed by them) in specific mystic muslim theology and eastern bestiary (---> go to Marks)

Amerindian “people” : spiritual unity and a corporeal diversity

possessing a soul ==> having a point of view ==> being a subject

==> event = action
(action =/= expression of intentional states)

[*]object: incompletely interpreted subject

“a muddy waterhole is seen by tapirs as a great ceremonial house”

(objectivist epistemology's) ‘to know' = to desubjectify, to make explicit the subject's partial presence in the object =/= (Amerindian shamanism epistemology's) ‘to know' = to personify, something that is always a someone

-the problem is that only the shaman and some rogue artists know how to personify. i want to personify Viveiros de Castro!)
-his rendition of objectification is insufficient and not specified (in which discipline by who and when how ---> go to Barad)
-[in contemporary performance art: “becoming animal” --> a modality of narcissistic ego-formation]

“perspectives should be kept separate. Only shamans, who are so to speak species-androgynous, can make perspectives communicate, and then only under special, controlled conditions.”

perspectivism: something is a fish only by virtue of someone else whose fish it is

(any) exchange: exchange of perspectives ==> 100 percent relational universe ==> everything is primary fact (-then how would Viveiros de Castro explain deceive and lie? ---> go to Kohn)

multiculturalism --> relativism --> diversity of subjective and partial representations, each striving to grasp an external and unified nature

(different specificity of) b[...]

[...]
an iranian default position


داستانِ dastan-e


according to Heidegger:
thinking <---> thanking
complaining <---> explaining
(to explain =/=? to thank)
(to complain =/=? to think)
[explain : from Latin explain? ?(“I flatten, spread out, make plain or clear, explain”), from ex- ?(“out”) + plan? ?(“I flatten, make level”), from planus ?(“level, plain”); see plain and plane.]


afformations

sexual arousal, and its presence in freindship,
normalcy codes, and institutionalizations of friendship (--> friendship insures the modeling of all sorts of vital ethical and political dispositions)
(#harem)

pro-ject, intro-ject, and ob-ject
the things we introject,

fb

good example, bad example, etc.

if you “understand” someone you are off friendship
understanding presuposses distance and difference
friendship must include disidentification
empathy replacing understanding? (do we really want an “empathic non-understanding”? to enfold the spectator with..)
[empathic non-understanding: a relationship that gives up the self's need for constant affirmation (Laura Marks) --> pulls us instead into a “meterial understanding” of our connection with other animals] ==> challenging the ontological primacy of centers (in general and not only human center stage)
“you are thrown off by this narcisistic extension that the other appropriated by your identification has become” (Avital)
-disproportion is always present and operating



i am not sure if there is an iranian pop song we can agree to like (or to hit ‘like’)



symbolic language
attaching sounds to things/animals/species when they were not visible
(“Never ignore a sound!”)


The jungle is a social space. {biological real, disciplinary boundary making stories}


Children at age six are typically anthropomorphic

...youth “hanging out” in age-specific gangs they are “growing themselves up,” often in a milieu of violence and power

deprivation of (avuncular and) grandparental care =?=> lifelong hostility to one's parents

elderly functions have been lost in disintegration

.

ok. let's put the whip down. the point is just to mention the word whip, and since you are all well trained, it does its job. we are all trained animals, gathered here, calm and curious, want to investigate what or who is training us, whipping our asses, associating our senses with signals he or she or it sends to our bodies, being petted or molested by it...
•strong strangle-holds and deadlines


Tintin and Milou companionship (Milou is the name of Hergé's first girlfriend)
Milou's his int[...]

[...] one pattern of exchange.

(another interference:)
*In Pinocchio we have the excellent cooperation between the cat and the fox, who are forming a cunning and successful participatory alliance to trick Pinocchio: the hybrid-robot who doesn't understand his own potentialities and wants to be so-called human, the animal-betrayer. the fact that he can be tricked by the cat/fox is what making him human.
•and Geppetto, oh my god, (he is Yunnos/Jonah?) working on a project inside the fish, colloquial activity and asceticism registered with the fish interiority. Geppetto-pop is refound or saved? by the non-truth seeking robot! --> breaking his self-surveillance as a characterization of pictorial objectivism, a form of moral self-control of natural-philosophical style.
•i rather go with the animal style, the con of Gorb-e nar-e & Rubah-e makar گربه نره و روباه مکار they are opaque and transparent at the same time
•the signifying animal, machine, and human in Pinocchio story is ridiculous!
•towards responding to “opacity” (opacity is complicated philosophical ethical issue regarding animality and humanity) --> refraction. with opacity what is at stake is our “material understanding of our connection with other animals” (Marks, touch 39)


(we are talking about) Fables of Animal Subjectivity [Kenney]

apparatuses of subject formation

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

THE prey and THE visible (both are categories of forest life survival stories. also have high stakes in iranian culture, thought, and philosophy)
--> what is important for a living self?

(bab-e) hekayat-e dusti-e kabutar o zagh o mush o bakhe o aahu o ...
بابِ / حکایت دوستی کبوتر و زاغ و موش و باخه و آهو و ...
[everyone?]
[the story of the friendship of these animals; the quality, properties, and pitfalls of relation]
•what is (re)activating the *imaginary friend*? (is it really fully on shut-down?) ---> trap to abstract thought? ---> this ‘abstract thought’ is dangerous for “sadness” to get lost in it, but it is amazing for “joy”
•how much we need sadness?

why jackal is so persistent and play-full (full of “plays”) in Kelile o Demne's bestiary?


bird people
,
fox people

,


arbab-e اربابِ --> dar bab-e در بابِ
(let's do this conversion, we are not “arbab”/master of the story nor ethics or anything else, we like to create “dar bab-e”: doors/openings into different possible path ways)
(it is about teller not fully understanding the story)



‘shekar’ [شکار prey] and ‘ashkar’ [آشکار visible], two entities in play, like the game of stone-paper-scissors, a link in our shared literature that relates the perceptible to the subject of hunt. in a discourse o[...]

[...]t Ali does, tattooing me, every time he tells me one of his stories of trauma)
like i said before, “who” wants to remember?

(masculinity is written all over this anxiety-ridden remembrance --> re+member, bringing back the symbolically lost phallus: “member” means “the male organ of copulation” in English)

trauma makes available, brings back lost objects to the consciousness, in a psychoanalytical sense. is then the digital archive an absolute oblivion?

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

///////// newer notes, saved in 11 September 2016 /////////

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

[as Holderlin announces that the “remains” for which poets are responsible.]---> memory (don't let engineers build you archives! let the poet be responsible for whatever has “remained.”) [this would be Holderlinian advice]
-inappropriable remainder(s)

memory/remember is sojourn


the importance of archive is today perhaps not in creating one but in reading them.
--how many archive we still need to read and probe and consider, with concepts or para-concepts that we thought we had a hold on.

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

being enfolded is often a strategy for survival (?, Marks)
(Akira Mizuta Lippit:) things are not saved by being archived (Borgesian nightmare)
histories for which the present is not ready --> what are those sites where histories slip into latency?

(how not?) ***to enter a culture from outside*** (problem of the prophet, both Moses and Freud) --> *everything depends on the ways we ‘bring’ things* [bringing monotheism, destruction, etc.] ~-> (social and material) milieu thinking (--> to think about Baten in Baten)

(art's will and the judgment of value that informs it...) Kunstwollen's desire to grow and travel

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

[Ariella Azoulay]

() the opposition between keeping and putting away, preservation and cancelation.

archive: the home of the dialectic of preservation and cancellation

...when fully lit and relatively flat

Derrida: (archive) “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”

archive's Foucauldian “space of appearance”

constructed as ex-territorial and as a receptacle (makhzan) for the past

archive is not a fortress external to our world, with us as its pilgrims

(the ontological performance of filling a document)

(a constellation, aimed at distancing and disturbing us)

collecting --> grouping
extracting --> sharing
cataloguing --> indexing and tagging

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

(for Freud:) trauma <~=> memory
(for Nietzsche:) “Man could never do without blood, tor[...]

[...]ful river waters, eroding, accreting, village politics, dynamics of individual lives,]


fret ترش کردن

مزروعى arable lands


thinking rivers:
to consider water as a ‘total social fact’, to think holistically about water [Caton & Orlove] =/= [Naveeda's] climate thinking --> that there is specificity that needs attending: rivers are major conduits هادى of ‘connectivity’ --> domain of localized interactions
-to take the river to convey local, embodied knowledge within the longer temporalities and emergent horizons (associated with climate change,) (new global urgencies produced by climate thinking)

a sufficient sense of the river

(Cavell < Naveeda's) there-ness of the river: “the rivers are a distinctive and significant locale at which human beings, though not only human beings, find their dwelling place.” Cavell responds thus, “The river poetizes the human being because, in providing *the unity of locality and journeying* it conceals and reveals Dasein's being and becoming ‘homely,’ homelike, I might say, homebound.”


in an analytical approach to examine separately [that is ‘to model']: narative actions and [-ian] images


Marks’ understanding of film as conveying the corporeality of objects


[*]milieu
a powerful concept with genealogy across a range of disciplines [physics, biology, geography, literature --> orienting our use of it]
•18th century: the fluid or ether in which physical bodies are immersed ==(that enable their)==> inter-dependence (#shena, shenavar?) --> milieu becomes universal
•19th century: as producing circumstances that changes needs [Lamarck] --> for Darwin milieu only produced change (at the level of the organism's phenotype)
•milieu rendered as complexes of elements whose actions mutually limit each other and in which the effects of causes become causes in turn, modifying the causes that gave rise to them. (Canguilhem)

umwelt: organisms privilege certain stimuli and response, thus, suggesting to Canguilhem that it isn't merely ‘need’ mediating between organism and milieu (as in Lamarck's formulation) but a prior sense of values that evaluates certain signals as worthy of response over others
--> *the animal finds it simpler to do what it privileges* (Canguilhem 2008)

[*]sense: (from the biological and psychological point of view:) an appreciation of values in relation to a [*]need: (for the one who experuences and lives it:) an irreducible ==(thereby)==> absolute, system of reference


Naveeda's notion of river's point of view:
“...” while the inorganic, such as a river, lacks the building blocks of life in being produced through the action of geological forces, it too has norms and values that take statistical form or are found (in both sense of the word: [...]

[...]he abyss in order to disclose a way of living opposed to the luminous one of the human being.

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

analogy of the cave


man with the x-ray vision

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

nowhere prosperous
ruinous prosperous

accidental intellects (subjects, qualities, quantities,)

light, self, presence, knowledge


One night darkness had settled in sky and a darkness that and held the hand of the brother of non-existence had been catered around the lower world.

After sleep came upon me, disappointment resulted.

I was holding a candle.

has two doors, one to the city and the other one to the desert. I went and closed the door

tailors of divine words

I then saw an eleven-layered pot thrown into the desert with some water in it and in the water were some pebbles around which here were a few animals.

The heavenly spheres were absolutely round and a straight line could not have been [drawn] between them. Those eleven levels were colorless and due to their extreme fineness, what was in them could not be veiled.

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

{Laura Marks}--[her method of description, “affective analysis”: act of describing, what is going on in your body, prior to the body, and prior to perception--i have to describe well and simply. (sometimes even doesn't go back to the object we are describing) --> to tribute imagination to people]

muslim majority countries (! instead of ‘muslim countries’)
occasional and atomist fabulation --> agency of God
(Occasionalism: God as the cause of things)
Islam's atomism it is not coming from Greek atomism

Mullah Sadra --> Process philosophy: Whitehead, Deleuze, etc.
تشخص tashakhos --> Gilbert Simondon theory of individuation

...so perception does not give complete access to the world (this is Foucauldian)
=> perception seems to have a more protective role (from unnecessary stimuli--in order to safe guard our survival) --Bergson: “it is grass in general that interests the herbivore” --> ‘sensory-motor schema’ is an agent of abstraction (Deleuze)
[@Varinia's “could/should/would”; ‘line of flight’ --> becoming; disturbing the virtual, in her work how is actual/virtual (made impossible to?) distinguished?]

sensory-motor schema:
Within constructivist theories, the sensorimotor schema is held to be the principal unit of knowledge in use during infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which[...]

[...]this is Foucauldian)
=> perception seems to have a more protective role (from unnecessary stimuli--in order to safe guard our survival) --Bergson: “it is grass in general that interests the herbivore” --> ‘sensory-motor schema’ is an agent of abstraction (Deleuze)
[@Varinia's “could/should/would”; ‘line of flight’ --> becoming; disturbing the virtual, in her work how is actual/virtual (made impossible to?) distinguished?]

sensory-motor schema:
Within constructivist theories, the sensorimotor schema is held to be the principal unit of knowledge in use during infancy. A sensorimotor schema is a psychological construct which gathers together the perceptions and associated actions involved in the performance of one of the habitual behaviors in the infant's repertoire. The schema represents knowledge generalized from all the experiences of that behavior. It includes knowledge about the context in which the behavior was performed as well as expectations about the effects. Sensorimotor schemas are central to Jean Piaget's explanation of infant development.
[http://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F978-1-4419-1428-6_463]


(motions, gestures:)
purposeful =/=? communicative



(Marks on) Invisibility, Legibility (khanayi خوانایی), and Aniconism (that the artist should or must avoid depictions of human beings or icons; an art that refuses to unfold its code, asserting that relationships need not be interpreted--a view developed in the conservative Sunni thought of the later Abbasid caliphate)

(عقل سرخ aghl-e sorkh --> Ulf Langheinrich's works)
the ways ambiguity stimulates imagination
“rubied mind-body”

(...ruined main body)


sense-perceptibles: images, etc. --> matter that is processed by information --> in new media (as Gilbert Simondon put it,) ‘form’ arises almost symptomatically from a ground modulated by information processes

a new level of invisibility--though not immateriality: information

cognitive attention as information to be processed =/=? sensuous material to be experienced --> is this a shift (predicted by Deleuze) from visual to information culture? (--> Trevor Paglen's works characterizes arts of the information age in general---image is the trace, effect, or document.)

the perceptible =/= the legible

aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”

enfold & unfold


(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a va[...]

[...]redicted by Deleuze) from visual to information culture? (--> Trevor Paglen's works characterizes arts of the information age in general---image is the trace, effect, or document.)

the perceptible =/= the legible

aniconic: what we do not see is more significant than what we do --> that the temporal and social are more important than the visible***
“Islamic aniconism emphasizes the word--as written, read, and recited--and the social spaces of worship.”

enfold & unfold


(Deleuze's) Leibniz's monad: smallest unit of matter is the ‘fold’ (and not the point.) Each fold, being connected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes


you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...

(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*

wood grain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)

(what is thought's powerlessness at the heart of digital new media?)

calligraphy --(interface)--> Qur'an --(interface)--> the divine

(Gregory Bateson:) information = "the difference that makes a difference”
(@Anouk)

“in Islamic art and new media art, we have two triadic models in which the infinite is mediated to perception by some kind of information.”

worship !~/=>? transcendence
(Who can say what people are really experiencing when, in the course of worship, they gaze at a dome, kneel on a carpet, or let an allegorical painting dazzle their senses? -Marks)


(Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that) “every body of thought has its own plane of immanence, an unthought against which it struggles to give rise to new concepts”, still, they dismiss Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic “philosophy” as prephilosophical(!)
intellectual struggle ~= jahd جهد, ejtehad اجتهاد (Averroes) ==> to bring new concepts into the world

yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}

mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter[...]

[...]nected to the entire plane, has a point of view on the whole ----> ‘plane of immanence’ : a vast surface composed of an infinite number of folds; enfolded --> unfolds ==> actualizes


you might work on a concept, on a percept, on an affect, or on...

(Deleuze's) real = virtual + actual
•actual: exists; a thing, event, concept
•virtual: potential to exist or to pass, all that cannot presently be thought --> *most materiality is virtual*

wood grain (longitudinal arrangement of wood fibers) that guides the artisan to invent --> “thought's powerlessness at the heart of wood” (Marks)

(what is thought's powerlessness at the heart of digital new media?)

calligraphy --(interface)--> Qur'an --(interface)--> the divine

(Gregory Bateson:) information = "the difference that makes a difference”
(@Anouk)

“in Islamic art and new media art, we have two triadic models in which the infinite is mediated to perception by some kind of information.”

worship !~/=>? transcendence
(Who can say what people are really experiencing when, in the course of worship, they gaze at a dome, kneel on a carpet, or let an allegorical painting dazzle their senses? -Marks)


(Deleuze and Guattari acknowledge that) “every body of thought has its own plane of immanence, an unthought against which it struggles to give rise to new concepts”, still, they dismiss Chinese, Hindu, Jewish, and Islamic “philosophy” as prephilosophical(!)
intellectual struggle ~= jahd جهد, ejtehad اجتهاد (Averroes) ==> to bring new concepts into the world

yes, Islam assumes an epistemological endpoint, yet this endpoint is never achieved and inspires endless intellectual struggle (Sufi mystics, تفکر اسماعیلی Isma'ili thought) --> engaging with the *divine plane of immanence* {perceptual and contemplative venture into the infinite}

mediation between the divine and the world ~=> a certain manner of unfolding (--> for Sohrevardi: emanation--in terms of a philosophy of light --> universe is a cascade of unfoldings [veil?])
-Farabi: God contained the forms or models of things ==> the spirits of the spheres, active reason, soul, form, and matter
-Avicenna: all existence is contingent; God = 'the uncaused’
(Avicenna's conception of) the nonentity (or antimatter) as the virtual double of every existent ~= (Deleuze and Guattari's) concepts of the virtual and the actual
(Avicenna:) God ==> existence/nonexistence
(Deleuze:) existence <==> nonexistence; (mirror each other?)


virtual (حق hagh ~ truth) <--> actual (حقیقت haghighat ~ reality)

hierarchy of nonexistent things


not everything is cognitive, sometimes it is sensuous material to be experienced
(@Seba, flows of information that “deman[...]

[...]
(@Seba, flows of information that “demand” cognitive attention)


-what interfaces Zaher ظاهر and Baten باطن?
{plane of immanence, plane of infinite information, (gender neutral) pregnancy, ventral} Baten <--> Zaher {plane of image information, dorsal, hard and complete} ==> vulnerability of the virtual protected by a fold

فنا fana: an stimulating awareness of the nonexistent side of every existent ~->? (Deleuzian) creativity; [...the schizo/darvish/ درویش (creative processes)]
(Rumi as a child sees people in their house, grinding mill talking to him, his mill speaking with him; condition of schizophrenogenic hearing --> gheib غیب, alame gheib عالم غیب)

yes yes, in transcendentalism universe suffers in a state of nonreality (or illusion) --> sublimely inventive cosmologies

the current information culture with its lame digital infinity (reiterating paths of vast networks and archives with terrible, clicked, controlling sameness, and only quantitatively new) ==> “dividuals”

ابن عربی Ibn Arabi's locus of divine: pulsation: movement towards God and away from Him

*transcendence is a symptom of immanence, and not the other way around (Marks)
(El Khachhab:) transcendence is not in the world nor out of it. It simply has no location. It functions as an energy, coextensive of matter and does not belong to a separate stratum.


[logical death]


(@Seba) “logical depth”: the amount of (useful) labor enfolded in a message. (Charles Bennett) --> forgotten but constitutive history of *contemporary information culture*
([aspects of] ‘enfoldment’ instead of ‘narrative’ @Seba)
(relying on the thoughts and calculations of many thinkers:) ‘deeply enfolded’ instead of ‘complexity’ (~=? ‘the obscured social world’ @Seba)

.finding the direction of Mecca in a complex network of signifiers --> the local value of the work of science or narratology / Islamic culture of astrological experimentation ----> logical depth and enfoldedness index Baten باطن
-(living in a time of animosity,) is Seba wanting to democratize Baten?

descriptive encounters with objects
narrative encounters with objects
--> unfold what is enfolded (and enfold what is unfolded?)

how to commit to (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?

my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know what is lost
**chaotic loss --> to process through a host of errors and phantasms
what is the carrier bag theory of infinite?
عجایب --> (a[...]

[...] (history's) complexity's *dissipation*? and not to discover roots?

my work (now i have the feeling that) a little bit includes working on this bulldozed sites of difference/similarity between Islamic and European cultures
-I behave as if there is (a historical) continuity =/= the idea that things get lost tragically (Benjaminian?)
-we do not know what is lost
**chaotic loss --> to process through a host of errors and phantasms
what is the carrier bag theory of infinite?
عجایب --> (ajayeb's) inexplicable historical objects that suddenly turn up and refuse to be accounted for “fossils” (--> rupture =/= fold: history is deeply enfolded)
[which histories objects of ajayeb enfold and unfold?]

the origin is always complex

(how to) invert the judgment of value that informs us

piecemeal fabrication from alien forms =/= essential secret in history

positivism (esbat-gara اثبات گرا) =/= speculation

transhistorical claims about Islamic art--its ahistorical approach to Islam can contribute to Orientalism, (Nasr's spirituality) =/= to situate Islamic art within the history of ideas of its period, portrayal of a cultural worldview when they succeed (Marks)

Interpreting a cultural artifact for what it might have meant for the people of a past time is always an imposition--(to give preference to certain meanings at the expense of others)

(Marks’) existential phenomenology : one's own experience, sensory and mental, is used as a basis for analysis (to investigate), but does not assume this experience can be generalized.


code: a writing that is executable : a writing whose very nature is to carry out an action

“We are at a point where the Islamic heritage latent in Western modernism can usefully inform efforts to make information culture meaningful and responsive” -Marks


(Marks notion of) “Islamic art” --> unity (tohid توحید) of sorts -->  unity of the code ==> multiplicity or infinity --> unfolding: {directional (vector) & performative} --[D+G]--> (aesthetics of aniconism:) ‘abstract line’ & ‘haptic space’ ==> embodied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity


“networks are the haptic space of our age”



qualities of latency

(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality


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

*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nati[...]

[...]odied perception ~=>? permeable, phenomenological, “nomadic,” contemplative subjectivity


“networks are the haptic space of our age”



qualities of latency

(in secular contexts) calligraphy, letters and words start to look like bodies
(Shii's favorite:) image latent in text --> foliated Kufic, shekaste nasta'ligh (شکسته نستعلیق), etc.
--> relationships are hidden, latent, and interpretable [--> veil]
•figures arise from text-based, nonfigurative works
•textuality and figurality


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

*relevance is hylomorphic, it imposes meaning from the outside
•to represent the nation / to critique the nation
•to self-orientalize / to critique orientalism
•to tell stories that everyone can relate to
•to be expressive / to be conceptual
•

hylomorphic nature
in which ‘matter’ and ‘form’ meld physically in myriad ways yet remain distinct linguistic categories


anamorphic: pertaining to a kind of distorting optical system, anamorphic lense, anamorphic gaze
(تغيير شکل دهنده) a notion of knowledge inquiry

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

Marks’ take on Sadra's triadic ontology of sensible, imaginal عالم خیال, and intelligible realms
+cognitive trinity of:
•mental intuition
•bodily knowledge
•spiritual knowledge
------> different human faculties perceive each real:
•sense perception --> external particulars: the sensible world of matter
•imagination --> internal particulars: the imaginal
•intellect --> universals: the intelligible
}--> with Avital i am learning technically (in language) to stay in a state of contamination (and their rewiring) of these faculties --> not to disavow the eching lines of my inherited tradition (“-->” + “~~>”)
◦sense perception ~~> universals
◦imagination ~~> external particulars
◦intellect ~~> internal particulars
◦...


*the islamic imaginal realm is (an audiovisual intangible) supra-individual and more real than matter*

Sadra argues that the imaginal realm subsists in the soul, mediating between the senses and the intelligence; it explains how extrapersonal, supra-sensory realities present themselves to imaginative perception --> نجم‌الدین کبری Najmuddin Kubra expert on visual metaphysics
تجربه شهودی
خيال و شهود
مراتب تجلّی

[*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism
[...]

[...] [*]imaginal realm: a radically pro-image concept
=/= Platonic denunciation of images (as misleading and false)
=/= Byzantine iconoclasm
=/= islamic aniconism
=/= 20th century culture of media critique
=/= iconoclasm of contemporary religious fanatics
=/= fantasies
=/= surrealism


suprasensory imaginal realm of sufism


history of imagination

world philosophy abounds with theories of the imagination

ancient Greek idea of how the imagination can make contact with a supra-individual reality --{followed & developed}--> Neoplatonist (understading of the imagination as) receptive of divine images
=/= memory images
=/= fantasmatic images --> phantasia --{i am wotking against the idea of “fantastic beast” ~-> phantasmata: post-sensory images combined in mind, independently of sense impressions ==> memory, dreams, and sensory illusion}
=/= imaginal images

هیولا hayula: the base, corporeal world

sensory-imaginal-intelligible

•a bottom-up theory of the imagination --> active intellect in the human
•a top-down theory of imagination --> pre-existing divine mind

i disagree with Marks that the (islamicated) imagination was a means to connect to a divine reality, higher truth. in ajayeb we encounter and abundance of descriptive environmental materialities.

Avital studies the interferences of:
1- the lower, sensory imagination
2- the higher, intellective imagination (that receives inspiration from above; #prophets)

ajayeb: synthesized Greek philosophy + Qur'anic thought + popular material body belief

( material body [ X ) immaterial intellect ]
“X” : imaginal مثل: (audio-visual glimpses of divine reality)
•accounts of afterlife --> gardens
•accounts of apocalypse --> sounds
•saints biographies --> performances
•


christian tradition started to view the intellect as internal to the soul ==> regard imagination as psychological: an inspiration, invention, recombination from within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject

so persian subject wanted the  so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image


sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words


attachment to the world <--...(intelligi[...]

[...]om within (and not from without) (Elen finds herself in this tradition?) ==> concept of an autonomous psychological subject

so persian subject wanted the  so much to be there, when there was no flower, that the went to a zone of beyond, picked some schizo-flowers and came back {this is Sa'di}--> iranian metaphysics
-i am more interested in the blooming of flowers, also metaphorical understanding of their morphogenesis. this tag line can be a subject of a phd study. for the last thousand years the iranian literature has been busy with this, how to describe flowers
*iranians believe in image


sufis, iranian philosophers, ... --> so poluted concepts and words


attachment to the world <--...(intelligible, barzakh)...--> presence of God
(who knows what the ‘presence of God’ means. let's not assume we know.)

Sohrevardi argues that the imagination effectively the indipendent real of images

> فتوحات fotuhat --?--> illuminations

the imagination realm exercises its ruling property over every thing and non-thing. it gives form to absolute nonexistence , to the impossible, to the necessary, and to possibility. it makes existence nonexistence existent. (Ibn Arabi < Marks)


majmu al bahrain مجموع البحرین, confluence of two oceans, to set two oceans in motion that flow side by side together, with a barzakh between
--> #my بحرین theory, wave surface theory of language
(to be careful with the figure of) wave --> questioning the textual case while then morphing into the unreadablity of its own answer


Giovanni Pico de Mirandola: phantasy can strive to draw the senses to things celestial ... but if, yeslding to the senses, phantasy shall decline to apply itself to the business of virtue, so great is its power that it afflicts the body and beclouds the mind, and finally brings it about that man d man divests himself of humanity
(@Aela?)

imagination according to:
Kant + Hume combining and synthesizing agent
-what new materialism has to say about the imaginal?
Jungian archetype --> extra-individual, suprasensory world
Frankfurt school + Althusser saw collective unconscious as fascistic


*(my) material practices of unlearning:
•pretending i don't know --> enactment / acting
•(to try) forgetting --> clearance / erasure
•sleep-walking --> closing the eyes of certain perceptive stories, and become available to another
•the “let's not assume...” --> “in advance” of a the assumption
•


contemporary Western thought, tired of the sovereign subject, is trying to conceive of an extra-subjective reality that binds individuals ethically to others and to history --> this is totally apass :)
-contemporary Western thought (evident in Butler, Foucault, and[...]

[...]
Whitehead's concept of transformative togetherness
ontological vitalism: exist ==> consciousness


reality precedes abstraction -->
for Sadra “point of view” is a distraction (for vojud وجود)
•perspectives
•names
•quiddity
--> because the positing of names and description is in correspondence to concepts and universal meanings, not in correspondence to existential identities and external/concrete forms (Sadra)
=/= Avital and Kohn --> but they do in amazonian forest semiotics
--> my point of departure with Sadra. i am tracing transfigurative signs of the flesh in practices of storytelling --(or not)--> Sadra emphasizes that imagination is better able to grasp Being: concepts are too static to capture/grasp the act of being (--> are they?! we have to deal with them anyway: wild facts, fables of practice, images are concepts, etc.)

ماهيت quiddity --> that which is understood (=/= being --> that which is experienced)
quiddity in Sadra is like the habits that Peirce and Bergson grudgingly accept as necessary for thought, though they need to be swept away for creativity to emerge. hence the importance of intuition for Bergson and Sadra, and of induction for Peirce. (Marks)
}--> (my departure:) a point of research branch for me: “to swept away quiddity”, is another story possible?


images have the power to multiply --> and other “sticky” things?

(like Sadra and Marks) i also prefer images that do not simply confirm general categories of what can be thought but undermine them with singularities that stimulate the imagination (=/= The Black Mirror tv series)


(destructive delusions, ideological images,) true visions and hallucinations --> the disappointment in hearing the deja vu
-deja vu is the dream of remembering


the divine outside
an immanentized imaginal real treal to be the source of truthful visions


to read Qur'an (or any text) as if it has been revealed to you


the visions of the imaginal are nonstatice images of things in their act of becoming


-is my ajayeb a modern interpreter of the islamic imaginal realm?
the ajayeb is about the lesser elite stances of the islamicated imagination --> the imaginal ecological consciousness
[title]


*imagination in rational thought [logocentrism]:
myth, symbol, and metaphors used as part of rational dialogue
--✕--> other ways of bringing the unthought [beyond] into the thinkable }--> tasavof
--✕--> other ways of bringing the far into the wondrous (~ the active imaginal) ==> as a basis for practical concepts }--> ajayeb
}--> beyond the official discourse


a time-specific (contingent) truth that intensifies as more people engage with it
[like all t[...]

[...] are in paradise


traveling
post travel

Paradise Roads

Gesicht
Globe of Gottorf and Golestan of Sa'di


foreign affairs

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

Planthroposcene, the age of gardens

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

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

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

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

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

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

When we read or hear any language statement from the past, we translate.

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

the ways Olearius remains non-Iranian all the way

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

Conley's notion of “Haptic Eye” (in line with Marks)

dilate the way (here?), we can't elsewhere

the lines that Olearius draws have their origin in their process, in the line, and in the support that line receives,
the drawing that causes the line

the hand that sees
a hand that perceives

the reciprocity between seeing and drawing is that which metabolizes Olearius --(the interchangeability of the visual and verbal)--> “simultaneous process of subjectivation and objectivation” (of sensation)

study of the Persian object

gradually discovering what is in the image
to the image
(already knowing what it is)
how the screen/surfaceface inflicting things far and near

(an) art of viewing

how the eye and the object of my vision constitute each other

optical visuality

erotically charged moment
--> the distanced is sensed


*world laid bare
lay: to place down in a position of rest, or in a horizontal position
bare: naked, open


a political aesthetic: a seeing hand relates to prehension (Greifen) of the world at large, the world at its imagined totality, *a world in which any ocular grasp is utopian* (and is always politically invested)


celestial sphere
|
terrestrial sphere
|
the insular eye

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

[a map] it tells a story, an itinerary [...] it whets the imagination. It propels narrative but also, dividing our attention, prompts reverie and causes our eyes to look both inward, at our own geographies, and outward, [...]