[...] the itinerary of claims we make about the world and its contractions

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


our contract with Allah

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

...drafts that describe an outer domain of signification

contaminative and communicative

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

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

what kind of grid the fire produces?

beyond cannot be tested, it tests you***

testability? we want everyone and everything tested

after testing the fire...

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

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


the temporality we associate with informtion technology is originated with fire

what ciruits are installed by this?

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

what reality has stood its ground since Siyavash trial?

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

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

interpretation <--?--> experience

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


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

[Serres]

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

(ice and fire) is only relatively cold

fire, and transcendental subject

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


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

whe[...]

[...]lacking in their material lives.
[very interesting point regarding the language of mysticism, Attar and others.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Metaphysics of translation

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

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

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

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

in Kafka, great wall = mosaic law ?

Only if men could use language without perusing meaning to the forbidden edge of the absolute.

Alpha & Aleph

...is certain to encompass ‘some terrible meaning’ in one of its secret languages

‘a poetic vocabulary of concepts’
‘connections or affinities’
pursuit of an inter-lingua for philosophic discourse

not to contemplate a mechanical transcription of the original

history, the mother of truth.
To define history not as an inquiry into reality, but as it's origin.
Menard, William James

translator's ‘mysterious duty’

if needed, i am anyone

language mysticism studies

...primitive seek expression through ‘imaginative universals’, this rapidly acquired a ‘infinite particularity’

it is only by means of essentially poetic recreation or translation of a given language-world that the new science of myth and history can hope to retrace [...]

[...]y a) physiological response
[*]wonder: recognition of the singularity and significance of the thing encountered

‘thing =/= knower’ (in a context + from a particular point of view) ==trigger==> wonder

telegram bestiary --> capacity to be shocked by the singularity of the event (==Sina==> search for significance ~/= cause, explanation)


scholarship on (early modern age of) wonder
1- enthusiasm for wonders = *expropriative & appropriative* (ضبط و سلب) --> *orientalism: projection of self or construction of “other” as self --> the rape of the New World seems implicit in wonder at it
(early modern europe) impulse to *collect & explore*:
◦collection of narwal horns and jewels, deformed fetuses and human captives (made by rulers, missionaries, and naturalist)
◦origins of museums in the wunderkammer (wonder cabinet)
◦voyages to the New World with their attendant goals of *conquering & missionizing* (=/= Sinbad)
◦use of inquisitors and questionnaires by government to assemble information for juridical *processings & taxation*
◦Columbus's “desire to know the secrets of the world” (glossed with) Jode de Acosta's praise of proselytizing curiosity
2- Aristotle's Metaphysics: “wonder = ignorance and doubt” { desire to seek causes (it did not understand) ==arose==> wonder (admiratio) ==> replacement by knowledge (scientia or philosophia) }--> miracula (marvel: natural effects we fail to understand) =/= mirabilia (unusual and difficult events [produced by God])
3- Descartes’ wonder: (first of all passions) a sudden surprise of the soul ==> tend to consider attentively those objects (which seem to it rare and extraordinary)
◦*begining of the tendency to reduce emotion to physiology*
◦Charles Le Brun's drawings of the passions
◦Darwin's wonder: a reaction ==> making the animal see and breathe better in crisis ==> increased its chances of survival (...raised eyebrows, opened and protruding lips, a hand held up, palm out with fingers open)
◦early modern physiology --> wonder: (~ startled response,) paradigmatic emotion
4- (the horrible) philosophical understanding of wonder: ignorance rationalized or erased by knowledge
a wondering desire that collects and appropriates what it endeavors to know or project its self onto an imagined other --> a passion that reduces to a startle response at the unfamiliar

}=/= historian (and teacher [and performance-lecturer]) vacation (or responsibility) --> (we must aspire to) imagine the kind of nonappropriative perspectival *intensely cognitive* response

middle ages (how they characterize their difference:)
1. theological-philosophical understanding of wonder <== university intellectuals {
◦admiratio =/= scientia ==> knowledge
◦admiratio ~= diversitas (diversity) =/= solitum (the usual, the gener[...]

[...]on of open cultures involves the projection of what is closed onto others, and hence the concealment of what is closed and contained ‘at home’” (Ahmed ♥) {ouvrir le fermé, fermé le ouvert}
•alert citizens, amre be ma'ruf va nahye az monkar امر به معروف و نهی از منک --> meta-ontology of tosiye توصیه
•suspicious others
•saving women from religious fundamentalism
•negativity of latent (could-be-ness ==> opens up the power to detain, police pishgiri پلیس پیشگیری)


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

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

[...]technological optimism; *the technological question is cruicial to questions of power and knowledge*
-library science tends to position library as power-neutral spaces
-(Foucault: resistence to power is always present)
“freedom to” is always disciplinary (because there is always a particular subject enjoying that) [citizen of liberal democracy who exercises the freedom of representative government, so much as a consumer who exercises freedom of choice of commodities]
patrons as constituent مولفه (==> new knowledge + themselves as knowers) =/= seamless information consumer discursively produced as an unmarked singular independent self-contained stable universal white male heteronormative technophilic subject [<-- this donesn't realy exisit as a person, rather as discoursive productions]
(now) our electronic recreation is work: our every click is surveilled, generating data about our desires and curiosities that feeds back into our formation as techno-capital subjects (@Sven's enthusiasm with social media--how can Sven has a real chance of producing resistance knowledge?) --> this is not freedom! (-an account of freedom for one entails reciprocal unfreedom for others) --> mixtures of work and play in this new economy, (Calvert > Bateson) the meta-communicative nature of *play[= strict rules with genuine freedom, the dual essence of play: curiosity and relationality];
(Calvert arguing for) “knowledge-makers” who engages in creation of situated knowledges by activity adapting, processing and sharing knowledge within the ecology of library ~= *bibliographic apparatus*
(Calvert's heuristic device to imagine what library practices might emerge:) imperfectly literate constituent seekers

-a double consciousness of play, where cognitive sensation amid multiple affectivities are continually teased between assertion and rejection
-a doubled unconscious connoisseurship of realist conventions pressured at new horizons
[Katie King]

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

(women's) mini-encounters with god --> kind of materiality of god that don't fit any of the available categories


now-but-not-then quality of continuities


Haraway's deep commitment to the ties of science and competence, pleasure, empowerment, ([*]science:) this craft where you did this incredibly fragile, important, hard work of asking questions of the world in such a way that you might have half a chance of knowing if you are wrong***


you get it “there” ==> (you have a chance of) figuring out something else*


(sustainable life ways that involve) breeds =/= factory farming

Haraway's problem with veganism's moral, wholistic, complex claim that they make on us (also a necessary kind of contemporary witness): that people's practices with animals as food and fiber and work animals, turning into nothing but museum piece[...]

[...]imeric Pragmatism in Animal-Filled Media
Zolmat and the Black Box as Media Beyond
Primordial House and Suffering Landscape
Changing Inside”, a multi-media performance and intervention with Mia Habib and Jassem Hindi
Four Oriental Cartography of the East
About Dense Properties

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

shift in our idea of nature not any more a source of *fecundity: how we relate abundance in nature to the way we live ourselves

we have to fight to keep things democratic (itself a privileged idea) and not autocratic when it comes to climate change

in Frozen II animated movie, Elsa build her way out of climate (magic = technology)

to make a debate point =/= trying to answer your question

(Hegel) negative values are much more clearer than affirmative values


the dangerous and dominant belief that whatever problems we face in this society the misfits (particular exceptional individual) can change it all

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

(from being an artist to artist researcher)
to articulate and demonstrate with brilliance ‘what you know’ --to--> to be able to exquisitely explain ‘how you know what you know’ [--?--> *metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking = reflection (thinking about
what we know) + self-regulation (managing how we go about learning)]
-metacognitives kills: to get good at recognizing flaws or gaps in one's own thinking + articulate thought processes + revise efforts
*classroom = mirror* (process of stepping back to see what you are doing)

(useful for artists) sciences of understanding:
•anthropology
•psychology



my whole work is about two things now:
•to think cumulatively (=/= epistemic breaks) --> more you know more your are interested in
•to think by layering (=/= singleness of partisan meaning) --> what you do is based on previous work



my research in storytelling:(from premodern) *describe the world* [bestiaries] --to--> (modern necessity to) *calculate the world* [recognizing a calculated world --how--> *secularization of interest* (in monsters, religious iconography, etc.)



adventure time tv series
educational model for children how to become post industrial liberal subjects --> adventure of imperialist mentality
the choreography of flexibility and solidity
Finn is the body from nowhere by example, he goes to dimensions of fire, ice, dream, etc. and his ontology of knowledge and identity remains intact (he grows up like a good old cowboy) =/= you look at the land from the ice and you don't see the same reality if you look at it from the fire realm. ice/gas/water, you are always looking at it from somewhere. Harraway named it “situated knowledges”. and it seems these locations [...]

[...]ions
answers don't show your level of knowledge, but the questions you have does
•generative nature of melancholia [*melancholia ==> teaching*]
•(artist's) writing with pearls of wisdom =/= referential writing


three problematic loci in artistic research:
•garden
•archive
•map

*is every garden zoological? --?--> training for future (imperialism)
good gardener ~= good (feeling, caring) imperialist
-enlightenment approach to captivity --> new sense of civilization (what is proper)
-removing any visible explicit means of captivity (animals appear move freeling, as if they wish to be there) <-- affective engagement
animal ~= border figure allowing institution to move between human world and animal world

science for empire --> mobilization of wonder (human capacity for curiosity that makes us human are mobilized in the service of questionable political goals)




[*]democracy: ‘farmandahi (commanding) = farmanbari (obeying)’

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

...thoughts expire on contact with words as quickly as words expire on contact with thoughts
(Pavic's Khazars)



two examples of metamarketing
1. Pleasantville (1998)
2. The Devil Wears Prada (2006)



(my flourishing in the scholl was always highly) teacher-dependent --?--> being social [=/= genius]

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

government (counting heads) =/= complexity (how to make mixity work)



morality --> ‘good =/= bad’ (incarnated in different things) [--> philosophical =/= value system ترجیحات --> sociological]
ethics --> assemblages

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

#cat's cradle

nature = figures + stories + images (~= topos, commonplace)

paying attention to nature like a child <-- Haraway

[*]trope: a verse interpolated into a liturgical text عبادات to embellish or amplify its meaning

language --> material-semiotic flesh

liturgical possibilities of nature
•Christian liturgical year
•Zaratusztrian nowruz
•star wars --?--> practice of turning tropes into worlds [--> war of imagess]
•war of words
•

(agonistic fields:)
military combat
sexual domination
security maintenance
market strategy


technical environmental design )<-- does all sorts of boundary crossing)

culturally specific apparatuses of bodily production (--> clean and dirt --> forms of embodiment)

writing: to create metaphors [= reconstitue what counts as knowledge] --> materially implode (~ art, this is what we were practicing in my fable workshop)

technology: a form of life
language: a form of l[...]

[...]value” in ajayeb?
(sun, photosynthetic, micro-organisms, etc.)
fermentation, photosynthesis, respiration

ajayeb is the (shared, individual, or experienced) “memory” of which organizational layer or process of which communities of practice?


rethinking “invisible hand”
(dynamic between supply and demand. “planning system”?)

... against ... the dualisms that have been transmitted to us in the history of philosophy (matter vs. meaning, micro vs. macro, inorganic vs. organic vs. social, realism vs. social constructivism, etcetera.) and argue in favor of a new ontology according to which “mechanisms are largely causal, but they do not necessarily involve linear causality”



Neo-Materialism =/= Creationism: matter is an inert receptacle for forms that come from the outside imposed by an exterior psychic agency: “Let there be light!”

--> matter has morphogenetic capacities of its own and does not need to be commanded into generating form.

one of the idealisms that have been generated by postmodernism: that we know already how all past discourses have been generated, that we have the secret of all past conceptual systems, and that we can therefore engage in meta-theorizing based on that knowledge



Delanda: I am not convinced that avoiding dualities is the key to a new way of thinking (particularly if one simply adds new ones: modernism-postmodernism, rhizome-tree, power-resistance).

reified generalities that do not really exist: The Market, The State, and The People.

The duality emerges when one ignores the zone of overlap and reifies the averages.

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

[in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه...] to map the morphogenetic changes of the real



... bewildering heterogeneity of registers in ajayebnameh عجایب نامه

... treating entities trafficking in the futures

active capacities of description

this is not a project of repopulating the social sciences with nonhuman beings

the symbolic function of language is about detecting salient features of the world that can be organized in contrastive sets
(can we think not in contrasts?)

this is not about trying to think like X, that would be transposition of a relational experience at another scale

(non-religious semiotic model)
bodily disposition ==(produces)==> perspective ==(produces)==> self

the beings in ajayeb (عجایب‌) are ‘alive’ because of their ability to ‘do things’ in the ways they come to represent and interpret through me

recruiting scores of new actants so as to render the theater of worldly interactions more complex and interesting


what is the sociocultural world we cons[...]

[...]m sorry; I am just entangled in the topologically impossible pardeh, as an interfacial space where the body and instrument of music meet. I am touching with my fingers the ‘first three’ pardehs of Setar ستار, and thinking about to jack into the vague differences between another two magical canvases / magnetic disks: Plane of Destiny (lohe mahfuz لوح محفوظ) and Plane of Memory (lohe hafez لوح حافظ), while listening to the virtual narratives of Ghahveh-Khane theater. Which creatures have you encountered, in your travels, that bypass human installations (of memory)?

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Avital]

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


i am “drifting” without anxiety into a new territory (in the philosophical work of ajayebnameh,) drifting involves randomization, fuzziness, and interference. there is no coherent programming nor concerted demand for rigor
(Avital: The origin of the demand for rigor, which has conditioned 20th century Anglo philosophy, “is the positivist's requirement that theories be testable. At the very least, a respectable philosophical theory should be stated with sufficient precision that one can tell what it says about something and whether its predictions about that subject matter are borne out” ---- to be capable of being articulated in the formalism of logic)

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

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

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

what is being guaranteed if not the ability itself to guarantee

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

[...]s) **subject: a self-conscious “responsible” agent whose actions can be explained by his or her beliefs and thoughts.** subject formation defines the limits of each individual; values, desires, and preferences. ---- in a way that I realize that a ‘hailing’ was addressed at me, thinking ‘that means me,’ and the answer is what transforms me into a subject : a “mis-recognition” [--> we can open a dossier on prophet and ‘answering’ the call]; [~-> what Tarof hails?] ---- for Althusser being aware of the other is a form of ideology. (how to recognize ourselves outside of ideology?)} (Foucauldian/Althusserian: passively defined by identity ==> mobilizing around these identities --?--> potential for resistance)
(Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
/> (Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??

***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)

stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”

*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)

what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?

origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master

the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies
>
which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being

(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions

what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

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

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

“All stages of the life histories of evolving anima[...]

[...] /> (Althusser's) police officer [محتسب mohtaseb?] --hails--> concrete subject
(Foucault's) expert discourses --hails--> sexuality
(Adorno's) mass media --hails--> passive consumer
(Gauntlett's) uncritical consumption --hails--> assumption --> bad worlding
(Mulvey's) cinema --hails--> male protagonist
(Butler's) boy/girl --hails--> gender identity
(Sina's) تعارف Tarof --hails--> divnity ??

***(crafted faithfully?) more potent the tropes, the truer the story***
(without being distracted by scandals and meta-stories?!)

stories traffic in tropes, figures of speech
(the dogmatic and bizzar idea of) “trope-free communication”

*metaplasm, remodeling, remolding,,, inverting meanings, transposing the body of communication,
(in my graphs, or rigs, what a substitution in a string might change the meaning?)

what is the “troping that makes a fleshly difference”?
/>
origin story (~=> establishing origin) ~=> sober scientific report ~=> scales of intelligence ~=> human as master

the “mere” village dog:
-canine Eves surviving in their mitochondrial DNA
-canine Adam through his Y-chromosome legacies

which metaplasmic, remodeled versions of ‘name’ could give ajayeb's being

(in apass I have been against the “what do I want as an artist?” question:)
pay attention to significant otherness =/= reflection of one's intentions

what is the name of the game? complexity, flexibility, opportunism, (finite worlds called:) domestic, wild, feral,
[who is naming the world what?
•accelerationism: “game-over”
•capitalism: “resource”
•technophobia: “obsolescence”
•technophilia: “information”
•monotheism: “transition”
•science: “taxa”
•multinationalism: “system”
•modernism: “globe"]

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

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

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


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


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


scientifically informed, empirically grounded practice

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

“who is at home?” --[...]

[...]ernalized and lived as a potent sign

(Bechwith:) rendered performance of religious materials both practically impossible and conceptually unthinkable
+ exercises their discipline of the senses and the imagination
*undisciplined loss of control in enthusiasm and in this extravagant example*


(stories of) a small group of powerful and vocal actors
***to attend to the local practices of inclusion and exclusion through which some speak and others are spoken for, some act and others are acted upon***
(#ontology)

gentlemanly practices --> (ask) what that legitimacy consisted in and how far it extended?
(wellborn connoisseurs of the new science)


leave the work tacit, and it fades into the wallpaper


•(Leigh Star's) ethnography of infrastructure
•(Bowker's) infra-structural inversion
•(Katie King's) ecology of writing technologies: massive, large-scale infrastructure in dynamic motion, bits changing at differential rates across time, made up of layered sub-systems complexity interconnected and animated by distributed agencies, including people, skills, devices and social powers.
the translation between ([my] deliberately) presentist (meta-)language (of cybernetic systems) and various local languages helps *to rescale particular objects of study*
(my research: “social studies of”) studying animal subjectivity --(changes the way)--> studying infrastructures --requires--> one to think (explicitly) about scale and range --> boundaries/connections between one system and another --(what counts as)--> working sub-systems and various essential forms of “black-boxing” (that describe and use these infrastructures)
-Katie King's accounts of black-boxing (that might matter in conversations about) 17th century writing technologies:
◦reification: strategic metonymic reduction, kenaye کنایه
◦enthusiasm: essentializing identities or ideas
◦members (of Royal Society): naturalizing ranges of inclusion and exclusion
◦*witnessing* rescales the infrastructure. the “work of witnessing” asserts that rhetoic as an element of witnessing is not a thing, not even a performance, but already itself a complex set of infrastructural systems with animating practices and agencies
...readers might submit to the illusion of having effectively witnessed an experiment themselves
*virtual witnessing realized an “enactment” in words*


black-boxing is totally neccessary to use/study infrastructures, they produce the “artifactual richness” [= a kind of archaeological layering of artifacts acquired in bits and pieces over time--(Lucy Suchman)] of systems
*black-boxing makes elegant some elements of the system/s differentially*
each author does it:
•Shapin black-boxing his range of systems to its complexity and elegance
•Harawa[...]

[...]◾

three technologies for fact-making (that Shapin and Schaffer name):
1. material
2. literary
3. social

Adrian Johns in The Nature of The Book: particular booksellers could indeed use their *stewardship* of such heterogeneous spaces to further political ideals and interests. behind the scenes and up the stairs, an interested London bookseller became a significant actor in cultural events.

nominal agency
actual person
principle architect


systems move in space, time, and process
some archaeological structures (that one uncover) are stable, some in motion, some evolving, some decaying --> *“there is no way of ever getting access to the past except through classification systems of one sort or another”* (at best) the past could be reordered to better reflect multiple constituencies now and then. (Bowker + Leigh Star)


(my ajayeb research: “epistemic virtues” [or powers] of the 12th century encyclopedic wonder-books,) “epistemological decorum” --> (to capture) “truth-making practices in action” (Shapin)
==> (my commitment to ajayeb:) engendering reflection on the nature of and function of categorization itself

a wonderful bit of meta-language


The Exhausted Receiver


Margaret Cavendish description of a new world, called the Blazing World, her own brand of natural philosophy under the guise of a romance... science for ladies{
1- enthusiasm ==> new science
2- study of natural philosophy ==> cardinal virtues of ladies, modesty and religious reverence
3- leisure activity, appropriate pasttime
*she participated in discussions central to her life and times* (am i participating in discussions central to my life and times?!)
Cavendish self-consciously produced herself as a fantastic and singular... (--> is that what i wish to produce?)
-Cavendish strangely shared with Quaker women an experimental life of proliferating genders, of dress, of personhood, og agency, of writing, of personae, but not of this *enabling collectivity*

hermaphroditical view of things: partly artificial, partly natural

status of clothing as a signifier of identity [<-- not always]
crossdressing (#my sticker period)


[modest witness] (--> Haraway's literal and figurative queering of categories)
the rhetoric of the modest witness --> the naked way of writing, undorned, factual, compelling: “naked writing” [crafted in the context of being virtually present at a demonstration, the ‘practice of credible witnessing’ (==> “truth”) in technoscience] was a proper reference point for feminist examination of objectivity and its relationship to a science founded in exclusion of women. the new man of science had to be chaste, modest, heterosexual man who desires yet eschews a sexually dangerous yet [...]

[...]words is a kind of description attuned to what does not completely unfold but instead melds together with other unnamed but palpable things collected like a field of mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts.”

things throwing together in words ==> expressivity
ajayeb: collected (unnamed but palpable) things like mineable resources and shiny afterthoughts

پس انديشه

______________


[*]perspective: (an attending, enduring presence, a compositional node,) perspectival agency in which things jump into relation but remain unglued*** (Stewart)

...across a field of subjects-objects-bodies-trajectories-affects


realm of killed off things


new figures i am learning from Stewart's
•“throwing together”
•“manner of”
•


(in ajayeb) the whale: throwing together of the phenomena of fish and water, sailing, mood, atmosphere, and sensory charge

*ajayeb's descriptive apparauses: a mutating realism of a certain vision of light meeting movement

[*]ajayeb: things that were once named, perhaps written down, (differently than now,) through some kind of trickery (called citation,) and then metastasized (spread throughout a body) into circulation (readings, translations, etc.) are raised, incised, made singular and charged
•ajayeb's stories/reports ~= forms of co-recognition, something witnessed that gets cooked down into something saucy***
•ajayeb's writing: a more-than-representational method of writing attuned to the qualities of phenomena
•ajayeb's fabulations (appear as:)
◦(atmospheric) traces
◦(momentary) might-have-beens

ajayeb = people + matter + real --> *point of figuring compositional reals*


fast-forwarded throught great arcs of *history-in-itelf* or *place-in-itself* in The Time Machine (2002 film)


what are the river and field doing now?


[*]theory: drawn through writing into the ways that people and things venture out into [*]reals:
•a recursive haeccity (Deleuze and Guattari)
•transversal arrays of qualities or activities which, like musical refrains, give order to materials and situations, human bodies and brains included, as actions undertaken act-back to shape muscles and bone senses (Anderson + Harrison)
•a mattering that is about the (contingent and temporary) becoming-determinate (and becoming-indeterminate) of matter and meaning (Barad)
•built out of difference and repetition (Deleuze)
•composed of potentiality and loss (Berlant)
•lean toward that which exists singularly as event, or as a gap, without ground or against the background of nothing (Dewsbury)

[*]reality: a rhythmic alteration between objects, events, and words---an uncreated world---{reverb bet[...]

[...]tra-active model of explanation]
==> (rhetoric of) *dialectical conception of the relations between the organism and the environment* --instances such as “suited/adapted organism” and “favorable environment” [=/=? affordance theory]
Comte seeking a guarantee of his dialectical connection in the Newtonian principal of action and reaction:
organism --> variable
environment --> function
theory of the environment in Comte: (strictly mechanistic meaning of the word...) world --to--> man

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

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


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

[...]ing description* of belonging to a broad political community defined by opposition
•“the revolution” --> affectively consumed the pursuit of truth
•an identity-marker (based on a political orientation) --> an inward-looking signifier to mark who one is + what political community they belong to [--> a politics of what one had wanted =/= describe what one observes]
•(revolution:) personified and humanised as a well-meaning political agent (that sometimes strays from its goals by committing errors)
•motivating people to get involved in activism
•

(Said's Orientalism -->) subaltern others (are typically considered) living within a constant state of violence <-- much older Western regime of representation perceived them as culturally close to violence

(Ghazzi > Badiou >) some events are felt as historic as they galvanise the energies of political actors who imagine themselves as ‘mounting the stage of history’ --Koselleck--> acts of information dissemination are engulfed by the event and are aimed at bridging the temporal distance between the desired and experienced ==> “journalism ~= activism”

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

collective memory --> historical victimhood --> consolidating power
(meta-history -->) a view of history as a series of junctures where good fought evil ==Ghazzi==> historical victimhood

global rise of populist politics ==> tropes of self-victimisation
•revolutionary
•resistance
•nationalism
•populism
•neo-fascism
}--> operationalize victimhood (by whom / against whom)

one is wronged, targeted, injured (by the elite, the media, external enemies)
•self = true underdog --> victim
•opponents = inauthentic adversary --> oppressor
= homogeneous + antagonistic
--Laclau--> chain of equivalence: (from) corruptions =/= origins --to--> traitors =/= patriots --to--> intruders =/= natives --to--> faithless =/= faithful --to--> *submission  =/= heroism* and ...
}= *populism* (political dialectic)

(storytelling)
•the question of *what* a society remembers -->{highly formulaic plot structures --for--> narrating the past}
•the question of *how* a society remembers -->{powerful actors push for particular kinds of story forms that shape the ways they tell all stories}

zigzag structures of a rise and fall and/or fall and rise of the nation
--> future dramatically takes one of two routes: (in the direction of) either a golden age or the dark ages
}--Ghazzi--> forked historical consciousness : (an understanding & speaking of) “history = a series of junctures scattered across time”


(the problem is) ***historical consciousness*** --> orientational
“bestows upon actuality a temporal direction, an orientation that can guide action intentionally by the agency of histo[...]

[...]y (?) material objective agent (evolving?)

Hayula--the first principle of everything material

bi-surat بی صورت

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

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

every apparition demands a recipient

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

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

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

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



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


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

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

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

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

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



[...]

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

(Delanda)

we are taking “real history” as starting-point

-to capture the dynamics of human historical processes, we must allow the nonhuman physics to infiltrate the human society---complex materials that form human culture. --> (for example) water in its several distinct states (solid, liquid, gas) in phase transition (intensity of temperature)---that which human society “see” as material-change

example of spontaneous structural generations are coherent waves:
*solitons* - forming in many different types of materials, from tsunamis (ocean waves) to lasers. --> *attractors* {stable states, which can sustain coherent cycles activity {periodic / chaotic}}
*monsoon* - a wind c[...]

[...]on and artistic creation --Severi--> synesthetic

(my lecture-performances? ~ chimeric image of chiefs’ talk [khotbe خطبه fluent at combining different aesthetic resources] -->) linguistic + extralinguistic media in ritual performance (working/producing visual + mental images)
--> combining of indexical signs in communication acts ==> poetry of identities-in-motion (capable of projecting complex images of a nonvisual kind)
[*]image: an abstract portrait of identity fashioned out of cumulating patterns of congruence across all manner of indexical signs--including visual ones--that addressees and audiences can imaginatively experience, like a hologram
(Silverstein > Guerreiro)
~~--> ***relation between poetics and the production of identities***

chimerical representation: an art of ambiguity

(Strauss's Amazonian ethnology -->) dualism in perpetual disequilibrium: centripetal forces of centralization + centrifugal forces of dispersion

@apass ==> “societies against the state”
complex relations between hierarchy and counterhierarchy
(--> Renan's notion of monologue)


[Clastres's model rooted in Western language ideology looking at Amerindian language:]
metahistorical bond between *power & speech* cannot be conceived of separately
•state societies --> the word is a ‘right’ to power (that may be used to command)
•societies against the state --> the word is a ‘duty’ of the chief (an indigenous leader must be capable of offering society the words that it ‘demands’)
◾Amerindian chief: a voice preaching in the wilderness (literally says nothing, a repetition of “edifying discourse”) <-- his speech is not spoken in order to be listened to (~ ritualized act [=/= act of communication]) ==> chief's speech is transformed into pure value (~= poet's speech for whom words are values before they are signs) --> (for Clastres) language =/= violence: a facet of coercive power

denotative قوه تفکيک ()
predicative (Dickensian aspect)
referential (the efficacy of its context and meaning depends on something else)
enunciation (pragmatic) ==> effects on the enunciator + audience ~~Silverstein--> [*]politics: the dynamic arrangement and rearrangement of people as subjects within structures of actual and potential action of all sort --comprises--> poetics <== everything experienced as effective practice is formed semiotically (~ through sign)
*political oratory [=/= informing the content of a message] uses poetical resources that allow interlocutors to have their identities mutually constructed by means of indexical signs* (that connect the message's form to extralinguistic contextual facts) --> *message ascribes to me [=/= message describes my reality]*

Ali's use of political oratory in the context of ordinary interactions with me --> i forgot that the symbo[...]

[...]forms a field of knowledge --of-->{intersubjective & polemical relationship}

first, sacred is located elsewhere, placed outside the world, then Nature is born objectively --> in the new contract, the exact word can be spoken
...but a new crisis make it start over again
-the sacred is formed by (this) catastrophic and repetitive dynamic

ruse (kalak کلک, che kalake khubi چه کلک خوبی): the “laws” of nature a projection of a (usually political) constitution on the world; to give a status of a natural necessity to arbitrary power
ruse ~ reason---the dominance of the here and now

no one is better endowed by nature for trickery than a Greek. These masters invented dichotomy, separation, and partition. ... They invented the theory of the specificity of various realms (~ cosmology?)

their divisions and clarifications ==> “we today have the weak and awkward fancy to read the world as polysemic and out of sync”, polytomy {from Greek: πολυ-, poly-, “many” and σῆμα, sêma, “sign” ==> multiple semes or sememes and thus multiple senses. ---(soft/hard) polysemous ontologies---(polytomy =/= homonymy اشتراک لفظی ,یک لفظ =/= synonymy یک معنی‌)}  ~--> the awareness of any metabasis to another genre, “discrete” (--> 3D apps today)

(Greek) mathematic =/= illusionist
“if there is a separate field in which no one can keep cards up their sleeves without being resoundingly defeated, it is definitely mathematics.” (Serres)

Greeks theory of segments in the representation of distinct worlds *** (when one uses greek technologies today, which worlds are rendered distinct?)
mathematics, myth, medicine, theory of exchange, ...

Serres's field trip

(Lucretius and our answer to the) what is a living thing?
•! a thing in equilibrium and disequilibrium, a flow, a vortex, heat, etc
•atomist physics

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

what ‘abundance’ means for Juan?
For me? for Sa'di in golestan...?
abundance is when it seems the artist hasn't put limitations on the flow of signs and meanings.
#my basic methods(?): abundancies, adjacencies,
~-/?--> simplest complex, simplex (concern of comparative topology) ~= the stable network of compositions

my ajayeb hypertext, what is there the specific ‘law of putting together letters’ ([and atoms?] to produce a text)? That means the question of Greekness and syntax technology, and my reworking articulated
•alphabetical proto cloud (Serres) --?--> without law, random
•what are the laws of ‘good combination’ that i am reworking or resisting or acquiring or answering to, in my ajayeb hypertext? (how composition is reproduced?)
--> (the law enunciates [تلفظ کردن ,مژده دادن] the federated,) * the law repeats the fact =/= the ‘things’ of ajayeb are [...]

[...]-- a scary difference***!!
*the visual, the auditory, the spiritual, the philosophical are still fulminating currencies of animation in the context (in the East --> that is why most art theory and conceptions don't apply to everywhere at the same time. values of European contemporary art scene don't fully dig the notion of art in middle east)


Mohaghegh asking: how can the sentence, picture, musical note, poetic, stanza, ideological or theological concoction, genrate so much energy in certain atmospheres, unleashing irregular storms while reviving millennia-old ones? [--> Stewart's affect theory and atmospheric attunement could be helpful]

a fable of difference (between W&E):
a tension between an agoraphobic West (with its endless barricades, shelters, and technocracies of dilution رقيق سازى raghigh-sazi) & an overexhilarated East (with its endless throngs, zealotries, dogmatic caresses, and emergencies)


dysmorphic labor

emetic estefraghi استفراغ اور


[*]insurgent = revolutionary of the unreal (=/= [Nasser's kind of] the traditional freedom-fighter who picks up a weapon and takes to the mountains, singing anthems of liberation or reveling in the simple metanarrative of some diorama شهر فرنگ of good and evil)
the insurgent does not fall victim to:
•collective mythologies of nation, language, and culture
•elusive rhetoric of ethics and justice ==> provide power with a convincing smokescreen
the third world insurgents are anarchists of a higher order of *aneurysmal consciousness and affect*
(gaze of the aneurysmal:) an uncompromising gaze that sees what power tries so hard to mask--that there is nothing there to see


*practice of irregular warfare ==> irregular subject of war*

(weeds of) modernity:
•as ideology --> power
•as institutional mechanism --> society
•as phenomenology --> perception
•as ontology --> being/death
•as cultural emergence --> spectacle
•as temporal orchestration --> time
•as configuration --> body/space
•as political economy --> capital
•as epistemological framework --> knowledge
•as discursive apparatus --> language/meaning
•as epoch --> history

immediacy =/=? alienation
brutal =/=? idealistic
retrograde =/=? futuristic
esoteric =/=? banal
technological =/=? carnal
genesis =/=? apocalypse
system =/=? chaos

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

iran: transition from a semi-colonial to postcolonial space --> anticolonial islamic front

the self-other construct

***islamic revolutionary thought borrows heavily from Marxist theory (at the same time equating them with colonial mastery)
}==> forge a specific revolutionary mind-set out of i[...]

[...]developing recently a philosphpical-genealogical antagonism. (in Iran we are used to philosophy naturally inhabiting the otherness of Europe, among others, we never see them as anthropological objects, but they see us as such. *we don't think ethnographically about Others*)
}--> my aim is to mix this while i am “here” --> i say life (also power and ethics) comes to attention simultaneously anthropologically and philosophically from elsewhere and here [--> to reed something from the outside ~= reterritorialization (of concepts, interests, affects, percepts,)]--> when concepts are reterritorialized they illuminate the world differently


*we need better construction of past for building truly decolonial community* <-- is my antagonism needed for this?


anthropology: a mode of heightened attentiveness to life
(Singh)

Foucault, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze --> a loss of anthropologically generated theory

(more than once in a single day i find myself paused to wonder at) how thought moves

(long-standing philosophical between) dialectical and nondialectical genealogies of thought
-to be drawn to nondialectical is not the negation of dialectical, it is a way of thinking about the “meta"-physics (Singh)

philosophy reconciders this: ‘concepts come more explicitly to the surface as impressions grow into thoughts’ --> no! no!

how philosophy relates to and draws on nonphilosophy (is usually geographical*)

more differences:
•geographical: western/non-western
•naional: indian/french
•subdisciplinary: analytic/continental

(trajectories of Derrica, a tradition of) negative transcendence: différance, an absence that transcends “a” and “not a” [=/= (trajectories of Deleuze, a tradition of) affirmative immanence, the self-differentiating intensities of “a”, compresence of “a"]

some Deleuzian terms:
•assemblages
•deterritorization
•becoming
•multiplicities
•excess
•schizophrenia (~ nondialectical thought, a nondialectical expression of different polarities held together. use ‘split’ to create a philosophy, [the ‘split’ metaphore is] an argument for the dynamism and temporality of the structure =/= dialectical historism and the Freudian unconscious) -- schizophrenia marks an unresolved, nondialectical tension
}--> giving me a range of concepts with which to inhabit a plenitude of life --> we need to create/borrow/steal/appropriate a range of concepts with which to inhabit the plenitude of life (in Tehran) that exceeds all the time. (that which the political consciousness of contemporary Tehran fails to grasp.) ***between moments of (my) departure and return (to Iran) lay a whole world, full of life (and hope)***

Deleuze's hostility to dialectics
“we will misunderstand the whole of Nietzsche's[...]

[...]>
*content variance* in ajayeb.net
(how did i or didn't perform/stage setting user expectations in my apass representations of ajayeb.net)
--> (question of) *objects that grow*, identifier assignment policy, content moves away (varies) from its original state
(any) content change ==triggers==> generation of new object identifier

finite, indefinite, lifetime, subinfinite

content in the presence of versions
(Calvert's defining “content” without using the term “meaning”:)
[*]content: abstract substance, found in such strings as writing, speech, images, and music, (=/= form, =/= style)
content that includes an actionalbe id string:
•extraversuioned, offering no direct actionalbe access
•introversioned, version is opaque, shyness?, good for longevity, bad for inferring provenance منشاء


found in the wild

found in ajayeb.net:
•constructed content reference
•scholarly web
•standardized query strings
•the question of landing page --with--> typed links navigable by software

how ajayeb.net performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
how ajayeb.net translates its politics into metadata[~= machine-readable persistence statements]?
which “well-intentioned but untested” set of terms are used and addressed in ajayeb.not?

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

[(gendered, racialized, politicized, colonial,,,) narratives of innovation]

(i tended to this field with ajayeb [عجایب المخلوقات: a context of pedagogy and librarianship] -->) library and information science : technologically intensive profession (<-- also many other professions)
علوم بايگانی <--> علوم  کتابداری
(my performance and literary interest:) *librarianship and teaching are both professions that resist commodification because they rely on embodied labor and personal interaction*

*people-centric work* (like library science and education)

quantitative =/= qualitative
measurable =/= descriptive
(objective concepts)
--> (Calvert reading) the ostensibly qualitative, measurable, and hence objective concepts of competition and competitiveness stand in contrast with qualitative, descriptive concepts of both “culture and collaboration”


to open up some of the ‘literature of’


(Calvert working on) the implicit notion that competition and innovation are a natural fit --> the “measure, controlm and automatic” rationality of US-style economic competition

difficult to commodify
difficult to describe

not taking apparent differences (between men and women, human and animal,,) to be timeless, necessary, or inevitable --> descriptive =/= prescriptive (descriptions n[...]

[...]g and nonliving entities)

*score of recognizable historical era*

using:
•filmic techniques (animation, montage, time lapse)
•affective techniques (sarcasm, intimacy)


how can we address aspects of apass's exceptionalism?
(with its things: characters, colors, doings, values)
*historical/cultural specificities of apass*


enlightenment inheritances:
•quest for universality
•


apparent seamlessness and universality with the veneer روکش of helpfulness ==> purity, deny multivocality, hide the residuum produced, and exclude hybridity
--> (pulling the carpet of familiarity out from under users:)
to replace ‘familiar generic conventions’ (~ universal) --replace-with--> a “universal of local application” (~= residuum)

(we rely on) [*]words: value-laden components of language that also serve as categories and moor لنگر us in the symbolic, to effect the transformations of the collections

labels ~-/==> power and oppression epistemologies <== *organizing logics* (that remain invisible when when we change the words or subsitute new sets of categories)--> that is why i am reluctant with only changing the metadata @Pierre: using metadata to manipulate the organizing apparatus ==> versions of residuality (?)

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

[working on apass milieu data model, summer2018]

c.r.i. (“collective research interface”)
--?--> a pathological collage

discrete object (of problem [who, when, how,]) interface
--> refering to something outside c.r.i. (outside the digital model)

face (slider) --> object monster

(?what is lost at) linking the symbolic space of data-model to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]

s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)

discourse =/= valorizing information

Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”

*Apologue*

research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual


internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’

(slider: marking everything)

semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers


feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data


#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during [...]

[...]el to the qualities of the researches of participants [which are relational, procedural, and emotional]

s.s.s. (scroller, slider, still-life)

discourse =/= valorizing information

Pierre's fables:
•“nonviolent way”
•“not by chance ...”

*Apologue*

research --> data flow
sieve --> nodes in/of residual


internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•(vulgar)
•
}==> topology:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal quality, JSON, hierarchical tree, ‘comments’
skew: verb act, streching, ‘2D field picker’

(slider: marking everything)

semantic in flux + persistence
object repository + identifiers


feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data


#workshop in apass 2018 Summer
...a series of data models that was produced during a three days work session in a.pass May 2018.
The aim was to create a “filter" for the artistic research projects of each participants, in order to train in making meta-linguistic abstractions (on a given computer hardware) to construct a “thing” that enables describing the problem of Building Abstractions with Data, to increase/enhance the expressive/descriptive power of the languages we use. It addresses the question of machine/human readability in the digital imperative of computational world we are inhabiting, with the particular case of a.pass artistic research environments for advanced performance studies.
•interested in computational literacy (including data-collection, librarianship) as part of our *diversity-work* and our *articulation-work*
•interested in different languages (english, computer, non-sign languages, etc.) refers to different value systems and to different lived experience
•interested in the *labor of knowledge-work* (in collective digital flesh life)
•interested in shifts in topology (the ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed i[...]

[...]es of each of our research practices)
•


TERMINOLOGY:

*articulation-work: the labor necessary to make technologies fit together seamlessly

*diversity-work: a kind of work in which we learn about the damage we cause, and of how “causes” are understood as “damage”

*librarianship: a work that hooks up people with their technologies

*data abstraction: a *technique of isolating* (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of your mini-language that deal with) how data/info objects are ‘used’ (---> i addressed this in my fable workshop in a totally different epistemology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list

*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements

*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)

*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.


PRACTICAL:

we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants

we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers

(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)

i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
•repetition
•vulgar

(i will describe them later)

and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of[...]

[...]ology)

*model: your object decomposed into *computational compound objects* (each with their own time-varying local state variables)

(representation of data and control over data:)
*modular: localized part of the system that are produced by the perception of the system
*objective: viewing a large system as a collection of distinct objects. concerned with how a computational object can change and yet maintain its identity
*streamous: information that flow in the system. its evaluation is delayed. infinite list

*metadata: machine-readable persistence statements

*digital interface: discrete object of your “research problem” that refers to something outside the cri (outside the digital model)

*topology: a (proposed) body-plan to investigate questions of *connectivity* and *boundaries*, in order to find out what remains invariant as a result of transformation. this will direct us to propose (well-intended but not tested) *transversal objects*.
to be able to propose: in the culture of each pad+participant+research what connects and joins, what delinks and disconnects.


PRACTICAL:

we want to find out how cri's “filter” translates its politics into metadata
and
what happens in linking the symbolic space of data-model to the (relational, procedural, emotional) qualities of the researches of participants

we will work on the block's opening week feedbacks and process them in this diagram:
feedback --> quasi object --> structured knower --> data
(or technically:)
semantic in flux --> persistence statements --> object repository --> identifiers

(Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are spent on the creation of “quasi objects”)

i propose some (well-intended but not tested) internal categories:
•stickiness
•zoom
•cheat
•persistence
- repetition
•vulgar

(i will describe them later)

and these categories produce three topologies:
1. ramp
2. nest
3. skew

(this is a maneuver to replace the question of ‘strategy’ to ‘topology’, the first act of making quasi-objects)

ramp: sequential, one dimensional, ‘sliders’
nest: fractal, serializable, arborescent, ‘comments’
skew: verb-active, streching, ‘2D field color picker pointer’

each is “queryable” in different ways and propose different difficulties
each of them addapted from an existing technologies (range sliders, commenting, color pickers)
each embeds one of: colors, doings, values

slider: marking everything with decimals
comments: hypertextualizing
field picker: spreading
}--> they are all milieu-makers

ramp --> arc of necessity
nest --> mosaic divisions
skew --> chromatic/lumi[...]

[...]contextual confusion*** (<-- requres transcontextual gifts one may or may not have...) @apass #feedback: urgent appropriate response
--Bateson--> double bind patterning = intense:
•contradictory (two order of messages each of which denies the other)
•unvoiced (making explicit checks of context impossible, inappropriate, meaningless)

“(there is nothing to determine) whether a give individual shall become a clown, a poet, a schizophrenic, or a combination of these” --> we deal with a genus of syndromes (most of which are not conventionally regarded as pathological) [~= art work]#feedback
•those life is enriched by transcontextual gifts (--> Elen)
•those who are impoverished by transcontextual confusions (--> Ali)
}--> for both there is a “double take”
a falling leaf or the greeting of a friend is not “just that and nothing more”


(taking from Bateson, Katie -->) play with this range of terror and possibility --(with + through)--> (individual & biosocial) *consciousness: reflection + recursion* (at the edge of apprehension) = environments of being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*


[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)
<[...]

[...]f being : context, pattern, layers of abstraction, storytelling all have material effects and provide *materials for agency*


[*]play: metacommunicative media*, a double consciousness (in which the player is well aware of the artificiality of the play situation) [=/= immersive fallacy: the idea that games get better and better as they become whatever that thing “more real” is ==> implications for the meaning of: rigor, representation, evidence, method, assessment]
(animal and children learn to play --learn-->) there are some ways *play self =/= everyday self* & [they learn] to perform this separation in interactive cognitive and social communication *forms of not* : they amuse themselves by performing the communication “this is not it”:
•the puppy nips, but not hard enough to injure --> violence? not. --> the nip actually hurts a bit
•the teen kisses in spin the bottle, but not the person they like the most --> sex? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)

playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]

-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)


(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions

tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition

*wording: a pra[...]

[...]x? not. --> the kissing blush and stammer
•my body is reacting as if i am in danger, but really i am in front of a computer --> reality? not.
•
}--> double consciousness
(Katie > Bateson) *play creates its own commentary in itself about itself as an intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism* = metacommunication: communicative + neurological + hormonal

***good signaling skills make nonabusive play on the edge of double bind possible***

(skills of) transcontextual movement without falling apart
finding out:
•which bits are active
•which bits are context
•which bits can be made explicit
•which rules are perceptible
•which distributed embodiments, cognitions, and infrastructures are in play
(these are the skills needed for the kind of game we play in apass)

playing/gaming (now covers): gambling, economic game theory, game art, design, learning, role playing, system theory --> *playing with our distributed being* [Katie's accounting for digital]

-what the hell are my hormonal plays? (not always including another person)


(for Haraway [*]wording:) game of cat's cradle (across a range of transmedia) pictured, described, metacommunicated, performed, extended, *relayed*
(my image assemblages: writing:) techno-organic polyglot polymorphic wiring diagrams
to pattern
to relay (passing something along, relaying =/= sharing)
to perceive multiform
rewarded by dopamine
triggered by pleasure, anticipation, yawning fields for memory [--> my ajayeb study], learning and unlearning, tenacious addictive repetitions

tools: drawing, role playing, gaming, writing, critiquing, reviewing, costuming, songwriting, singing, webby community building, techy arts, fans advocating their interests in films
--> shaping environments and contexts for imagination and cognition

*wording: a practice of displaying + crafting worlds, of sharing + enjoying expertise, of noticing tiny details of connection and similarity amid the tweaks and frissons of alternative shadings across many intertextualities of association, history, genre, care*

in interface
what was obvious to one was mystery to another
what was trivial to one was a barrier to another
how do you reply in terms that are alien to you?

@apass
*actual materialities of distributed thinking* <--among-- infrastructures of:
•publication
•media
•conferences
•scholarly communication
•research results and processes
•

elegant parsimonies of explanation
clever bodies at the edge of apprehension (Despret's Clever Hans Effect)

an interative agency (Katie calls) *learning to be affected* =/= “mearly the effect of...” ...ولی اون فقط داره
[...]

[...]jects
**(my project in apass:) to be curious and value how claims to epistemological authority operate and how comparative relativism can be accountable + can i irritatingly passionately disagree with


democratization of oppression (?)

reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption
...the economic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry

#telegram iran (commercial world of entertainment)
material examples of *stacked realities* cascading over various media and technological platforms with differing degrees of interoperability and standardization --Katie--> *transmedia stories* (inevitably commercialized)



integrationism
revolutionary action
supermacism
separatism
anarchism
political defense
redefinition of the human
to intervene in and democratically refocus social and psychic powers --> place-based ecological activism: self-consciously identifying and producing invigorating political and cultural planetary geographies

ethically augmented and affected cognitive sensorium

variable and sensitized tactics and ethics of “democratics” --Sandoval--> meta-ideologizing: functions both within and against ideology
@Leo?


(my work on ajayeb is aimed at:) old and new media collide ==Jenkins==> *convergence culture* --inhabited-by--> those who learn how to play with media, information, visualization, and who live among and produce hypertexted or relational and relative materialities

preemptive
proleptic
prophetic

(the way i am using the term) queer: to learn to be affected by the political economies of knowledge worlds


(my art in lecture and performances:) *to play with our own consciousness* --Katie--> to curiosly work at the edge of “this is not it”, [bits that are] some activated and activating across the tacit and the explicit

(no to) idealization
(no to) disillusionment

(Katie asks) *****which “we” gathers, locating inside of worlding processes, as elements in reorganizations that “we” matter in, but do not control?*****

(the game we play in artistic research:) *transcontextual movement witout falling apart*
[in apass people do] sensitized transmedia knowledge practices

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

origin of computing goes back to 19th century insurance industry: modern elimination of risks
social theory of data science
1820s (Babbage’s) difference engine
right at the industrial revolution: division of labor (for Babbage was the highest human achievement)
==> welfare state
the state protects and promotes the economic and social well-being of the citizens
we are living by the rationality of insurance i[...]

[...]dustries, and technologies reordering in infrastructural assemblages are also sensuous refrains
•some becomings and assemblages might refuse these refrains and *demand ontological primacy*

Leigh Star
for some kinds of tasks we (humans) are highly distributed --> remembering: ***much of our memories are in other people*** (libraries and homes)

part of our selves extend beyond the skin in every imaginable way <--phantom limb

--Katie--> embodiments (and beings) are distributed among memories, capacities, corporealities

demon dematerialization --> body dissolve (vanquish) --> relinquish --> networking materializing forces --> this text

the state of cut in manga series Attack on Titan
•affective wounds
•affective formations that break the skin
•restructuring
•chaotic and unpredictable nature
•your avatar (your monster): sensuously augmented elements of self
/> •territory registers
•materially real scales of involvement
•

play = double consciousness --> being in both states (is & is not, assertion & rejection) --creates--> its own commentary in itself about itself <-- intense and pleasurable interactive dynamism <-- meta communications performed by embodied selves at multiple levels (of organic and social systems)

commercial entertainment drawing on understandings of mammalian-affective structure : transmedia + mammalian animalities + AI agents (~= rigging)

Disney = interactive dramas of mammalian behavior of psychological bonding

3D application: interactive microworld of augmented assemblage of objects and beings and tools and zoons, visualization of mulistable cognition
= a form of globally restructuring knowledge work + embodied learning + economies

exosome explosive demons, as significant other?

we love to create worlds (thds (that is why we make and watch soap operas)

careful negotiation of meaning and tools (in apass, not careful always)

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

(Katie -->) [*]web: a material example of a then counter-intuitive convergence and recombination, one across forms of inscription and meaning making devices[...]in that fictional everywhere of “everyone's” lives

emerging posthumanities: humans are only some of the agencies self-organizing in altering systems of things + people + worldly processes --Katie--> being inside and moved around literally by the very material and conceptual structures you are analyzing and writing about -->
•transdisciplinary consciousness: telescoping out to engage infrastructures in their layered accretions رشد
•witing (saying what counts) [has to] diverge perpendicularly across the normative --> performative = demonstration + simulation
•knowledge workings --embed--> withi[...]

[...]are

“you see me from the outside, as a pleasant young man in years, but on the murderous interior i am a tyrant.”

the scene of Eastern opulence and decadence corresponds to a 17th century (or even 21st century) Westerner's conception of an Oriental court

oriental stage

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

صورت الأرض  surate al-arz (face of earth)

اصطخری Istakhri, 10th century, translated into German by Mordtmann
he met another celebrated traveler, Ibn Haukul ابن حوقل

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

Verran: *innovating to effect the discipline of deductive proof in ancient Greek*

(i found out--Pierre also noted--that in my work i tend to) inspire a baroque style of empirical analysis

[*]baroque
--> now you see it, now you don't
--> (a thread of innovation in) mixing words and visuals
--> wonder-filled difference
--> sensibility concerned with collective way finding through complexity
*baroque sensibility* loves unlikely juxtaposition
*baroque form lives with passionate intensity*

****forms of non-explanation [=/= to reflect of ‘what is’ from a meta position****]:
•juxtaposition
•stories
•framing
•reframing
•folds --> working within the ‘folds’
•working on the edge
-
--> *pushing and pulling at the interfaces we feel ourselves enmeshed in* [<-- that is exactly the description of what i do. #amazon project]


to recognize stories of entrepreneurship as stories of working relations between people, technology, and nature
@Setareh


acknowledge our “understanding of”(s)


(taking diagrams as involved only in) epistemic practices linking the mess of the actual and the ideal of the future =/= (account of diagrams that focuses on their unique) contribution in rhetoric --> *collective way-finding* (that #Olearius works agains for iranians and german, and Sa'di's version)
[diagrams:]
•(graphs, images, visuals that fill the) two-dimensional physical spaces
•screened images that cover the surfaces of a *tapestry*
•visuals performing in a graphic register in *tension* with linguistic registers (Verran) --> figurations designed to work with text --> open up a space for imagining their capacities as *agential devices* --> (how) diagrams intervene in the organization and governance of institutions --> *diagrams as objects of governance and organization* embeding working imaginaries (such as in the imperial enterprise of the Duke Frederick that Olearius worked for) --and--> diagramatic devices of technoscience ==> enforcing *non-equivocation* and *non-contradiction* : the standard rhetoric of Western scientific thought and argument - - --> ***devices enacting norm***
[...]

[...]erve as a spiritual haven, or is it invoked as an identitarian response to the ravages of a globalized world?” (Toor)


(unpack we must)

***to unpack different islams (for different actors who deploy it)
‘islam’ certainly cannot be unproblematically deployed as the explanatory ‘variable’

Toor in her example cases showing that the ‘islam connection,’ when it is there, is varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory (=/= mainstream discourse on Islam)

(i want Hoda to make her categorical labor harder, i want her to make historically and socially contextual analysis, not just take shortcuts towards generalization predetermined by a priori categories (of Iran, Islam, women), rather to begin with the empirical reality)

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

a new legible object of analysis (in writing culture): qualities, trajectories, aesthetics ==> writing became tactile and compositional, an attunement, a response, “a vigilant protection of a worlding” (Stewart)
*writing = a way of thinking*

[*]precarity: register of the singularity of emergent phenomena, the way that they accrete, accrue and wear out
(=/= recognizing self-identical objects, metaculturally marked)

forms of perceiving (seeing, thinking) are themselves emergent

a writing that hones attention to the way that a thing (like precarity, etc.) starts to take form as:
•a composition
•a recognition
•a sensibility
•some collection of:
•materialities
•laws
•movements

obvious: totalizing dramatizations of the thing in itself

precarity can take the form of:
•fraility (living in it and through it)
•a sea change
•a darkening atmosphere
•a hard fall
•the barely perceptible sense of a reprieve
•

ordinary things (=/= melodrama) they matter because they shimmer precariously

...seasons magnetized to tones of voice and a quality of light

place (=/= immpasive corporeality) : affective charges:
•a mantel of redemption
•a glacier of impatience
•a high desert of anxiety dissected by fault lines of rage
}--performed--> in **little scenes of recognition** (--> “visceral complicity of those laying claim to a composed tactility[...]” =/= naturalized order per se)

(Tehran's?) drawn curtains: physical shadow of a state of hardening, a rotting from the inside out
(...curtained people, they suck the) *gestural sensory attachments of seeing and being seen* (into a world in which things are dark)

precarity ==?==> intimacy (of people in place)

(in winter with T-shirt and sandals) the townie body unfazed by the cold, endearing, a little heroic

an imaginary --> a logic of some sort -[...]

[...]mplifies climate change --> logic of outsideness : ‘climate change = an enemy that is fought against’, (drawing from) emergency logic ==urge==> single-shot unified geotechnical solutions
•crisis frame --> emotional framing --leverage--> temporal logic : a climax point (peak oil, peak carbon, etc.) points to the narrowing window of opportunity to act -->
•catastrophic framing --> (using emotional language) locates the frame in the aftermath of a climate changed [<-- a popular public framing of the problem]
•super wicked problem --> temporal logic of time running out --pointing-->
◦irrational future disounting
◦lack of a central organizing authority
◦
•anthropocene --> temporal logic + pervasive spatiality ==> situating the category in deep time + planetary scale [<-- a frame used by organizations]


[*]problem: analytical techniques that lend themselves to core framing tasks of “what, who, why, when, where" of a particular issue (<-- ‘research problem’ is a foundation of this technique)

define boundaries of climate change --to-->
•focus on who is responsible
•ask why is it happening
•identify when is it happening
•locate where

(Campbell's) meta-observation ==> more each field discovers about climate change ==> category expansion (the more it seems to grow in scale)

*what Campbell finds in the discursive evolution of climate change*: a manifestation of (what the philosophical movement known as speculative realism criticizes as) [*]correlationism: we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking & being, a means to temper the real, to constrain it such that is becomes thinkable to human categories (yoke thinking & being together : we cannot think the unthought without relating it to existing correlates) }--Meillassoux--> never able to get out of the relation being thought and being to distinguish between an object & properties belonging to the subjective access to the object --> bad idea of epistemology ==> recuperates climate change within categories that make it seam manageable =/= (Campbell claiming) *climage change : ontological world* ==> it is everywhere and nowhere, present at all levels and yet absent as a distinct “thing” we can point to


Meillassoux --> how difficult it is to think anything without in some way introducing a qualification that one cannot know it without rendering it “for-us” though our framing = *it cannot be known absolutely*

(problem of access:) anti-realism within continental tradition of philosophy ==> the idea that reality is inaccessible in-itself =/= Meillassoux's attempt to ***fuse reality with speculation in a logical manner***

to deploy speculative leap to defuse the problem of access --> *weird realism* to avoid the paths of analytic thought, positivism, scientism (~?!=> religion, faith, conspiracy [...]

[...]ay]
proto-atavism --argument--> that multiple paradigms of life exist on the peripheries of humanist life ==Campbell==> (how) *human life: a cacophony of co-existing interacting states of past present future existences with no recourse to a single reassuring origin* (=/= singular progression)


(like animal rumors in old bestiaries ajayeb in a story-starated world) found telegram videos and internet pic used in my image assemblages --> (found images which make it difficult to trace their lineage) in an image-starated world ==construct==> ambivalent visual representations that do not have a signifier in an external “real” world (Baudrillard's rhetoric simulacrum: an object that is a copy of something which does not “exist”)
==Toffoletti==> potentiality: exceeding the bounds of description


(we are living in an) age of **technosubjectivity**
(Margulis theorizes) the symbolic basis of eukaryotic cells
(Dawkins posits) the existence of selfish genes and the extended phenotype
*system theory: human life subsumed radically into an all-encompassing concept of system, of which the human is merely a psychic system, where the only important unit of analysis is systems (human, cell, society, law)
(Sagan's) metametazoa: a multiple creature afloat in the omnisexuality of bacterial exchange
(Octavia Butler's) xenogenesis: polysexual interspecies reproduction
(Haraway's) differential artifactualism: (~= SF, science fiction) a diffractive interruptive mutative anti-reflective monstrous logic (to a humanist eyes) --> generation of novel forms which need not be imagined in the stodgy bipolar terms of hominids ==make==> ontological room for naturecultures
-mixotricha paradoxa: “a mixed up, paradoxical, microscopic bit of hair [...]they are nested in each other's tissues in a myriad of ways that make words like competition and cooperation, or individual and collective, fall into the trash heap of pallid metaphors and bad ontology”
(Thacker speaks for) extrinsic life: the kinds of life that cannot be contained inside itself (such as: the epidemic) ~ lifelike death ==> depict the strangeness of life in a technological era

(diffraction ==>) myopic: eyesight abnormality resulting from the eye's faulty refractive ability --> posthuman: an essentially ethical precondition of life in high-technology

background of posthuman theory:
•metamorphing --> premised on the liberatory potential of flow : processes objects and living systems are thought to be in a constant state of becoming =/= Campbell: flow is not always a liberatory metaphor -->{ (a politics or logic of) *inertia* =/= contemporary politics of flow }
•primal technology --> technology is not always s progressive civilizing inanimate force, rather it is a destructive-constructive rich-poor lively-inanimate force in the world
•proto-atavism --> modes of livi[...]

[...]knowledge and the institution of university]

(Goldman's landscape of Capital -->) corporate advertising:
•visually depicts the phenomenon of globalization
•affect the cultural imaginary
•shape political sensibilities (with respect to life in high-tech globalism)

amorphous phenomena (that require high-stakes visualization):
•counter-terrorism
•climate change
•


[*]advertising: an institution that organizes meaning, a visual sign system (as powerful as other systems that organize meaning: medicine, law, education,,,) [~/= apass]
--> *a form of literacy* = can be learned + lexicon + grammer (that can be fruitfully investigated)
*advertising = capitalism + aesthetic* ==Campbell==> research in advertising one of the most important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)

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

***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***

marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture

postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life

postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity

examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism

}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*


postmodern condition:

1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)

marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)

tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”

postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of moderni[...]

[...]ost important research priorities in any discipline today (@apass)

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

***marketing = the ultimate social practice of postmodernity***

marketing practices
promotional campaigns
consumption culture

postmodernity: a phenomena specific to the cultural history of western europe and north america --impact--> globe
--Lyotard--> incredulity toward *metanarratives: unified idea systems
--Jameson--> consumer society (marked by:)
◦pastiche: an attitude of a certain detachment (on the part of the individual) where all stylistic expressions of parody, nostalgia, and other illustrated feeling lack emotional depth and commitment
◦schizophrenia: disjointedness and discontinuity of the individual's personal identity and experience in life
--Angus--> infinite delay of *modernity: improving human lives by controlling nature
--Wilson--> expression of incoherence of contemporary urban life

postmodernity =/= authority, unity, continuity, purpose, commitment
= “modernity: era of scientific ideology ==> disillusionment, disintegration, anxiety”
--> hedonism
--> tolerance (recognition) of difference
--> metanarrative = story (that people construct to tell themselves) =Foucault= regimes of truth
=/= conformity

examples of modern metanarratives:
•bourgeois (capitalist) ideology
•marxism

}--✕--> *market = new metanarrative in postmodernity*


postmodern condition:

1- [*]hyperreality: becoming real of what initially was/is a simulation/hype: simulation of imagined potential or imagined past (signifiers arbitrary linked to their original referent)

marketing: a practice that resignifies (a brand name)

tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”

postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity

postmodern critique tends to rely on experiential or sensible judgement (--valued--> trusting intuition and sensing of what is practical/pragmatic based on cultural experience) =/= analysis of material evidence

****post world war II politics --> youth movement culminated in the 1960s --> institutionalization of the generational rebellion --> postmodernism*** ==>
•postmodern cultural critique rely on intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)

hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultura[...]

[...]ame)

tendency and willingness of the customers to prefer the simulation (for example the theme areas in city centers of an imagined pasts) =/= “real”

postmodernism is a cultural critique (=/= economic, social critique) of modernity

postmodern critique tends to rely on experiential or sensible judgement (--valued--> trusting intuition and sensing of what is practical/pragmatic based on cultural experience) =/= analysis of material evidence

****post world war II politics --> youth movement culminated in the 1960s --> institutionalization of the generational rebellion --> postmodernism*** ==>
•postmodern cultural critique rely on intuition + experiential sensibilities (in seeking a better world)
•postmodern consumer feels more justified in playful enjoyment of the simulation (=/= constantly seeking the somber reminders of “reality”)

hyperreality ==> “loss of history” : historical phenomena = collage with visual excitement = journalism
*voyeuristic exposure to the spectacle = cultural pastiche of the contemporary world*
--> #integration of the hollywood films (nested: music brand names become sub-spectacle within the spectacle of the film) --> (we are immersed in) an era of *metamarketing: marketing itself is marketed (becomes a prominent spectacle ---> go to Devil wears prada movie)

blurring of genres in news programs (Vox news), soap operas (), games ()

decontextualization + spectacle

the duality of ‘appearance =/= essence’ is dead in postmodernity --> cereal strategic decision-making in marketing : ****image = positioning****

-consumer always seeks an essence (in adopting a product)
-consumer of postmodern culture play the game of “surface” (they increasingly acquire the skills of recognizing the images and the positions these images offer)

[*]marketing: institution of simulation, imaginary, hype
(forms of) persuasive communication : transformational propositions ==> simulating potential experiences (=/= true or false discourse)


2- [*]fragmentation: the consumer engages in a series of independent, separate, unconnected acts --each--> require a different product
+ fleeting moments of exciting scenes and images

(postmodern) transcendence of the (modernist) necessity to *understand connections*

***artists of all kinds are increasingly assuming the role of marketing institutions***

the consumers (of postmodernity) are encouraged to play the game of *image-switching* (caring mother, efficient manager, elegant partner, gourmet homemaker --each--> require a different style {labeled as consumer liberation}) =/= central character
[---> go to Deleuze and Guattari's schizophrenia of late capitalism]

disconnected from authentic self ==> (enormous potential for) cr[...]

[...]al cultures in order to survive have to become marketable --> touristic attractions

•marketing taking the center stage in most western institutions
•market = locus (dominant mediator) of legitimation


marketing: a cultural process representing the post-


transnational (corporation) : postmodern cultural change agent


in traditional world of commerce ‘commercial space & time =/= programming space & time’

modernist vacuum created by obsolete notions of what is good or bad (sacred or profane) --> filled by marketing (enters --into--> culture)


fragmentation ==require==> use of many different styles and forms

(ideas and movements which already have made) sensational impact --> spectacle --> commodities


(marketing helped in entrenching) artist selebrity setting new trends and values <-- a postmodern phenomena with its roots in 1960s “anti-” movements
•not challenging or endorsing or committing to any one style, but rebelling by doing “one's own thing” (Madonna's rebellion 1991 --> she will continue to find large audiences as long as she represents and combines the postmodern aspects of critique of the metanarrative and the marketable commercial sensationalism of the fragmented spectacle)

paradoxical nature of postmodern culture <-- fragmentation and discontinuity of their experience
not owning a TV (conscious rejection) + driving a car (integrated into mainstream)


merging of education and marketing
*televisual generation*
(in north america and western europe) the education is taking place mostly outside of three classroom

(modern) institutionalized education --> (postmodern) marketing system : the individual of the postmodern encounters the institutionalized education as obligation, drudgery, and the means to achieve positions

(from) a process of reading issues and questions for exploration --to--> a process of persuasively communicating the necessities of knowing (and following efficient ways of doing things) --> literacy: being able to manipulate and construct (recognize and grasp multi-layered multi-faceted multi-media images --> to impress upon all senses) }<-- marketing is best situated to educate this
[-can a true critical deconstruction of postmodernism start from literacy? ---> go to telegram bestiary text]


***the consumer is also a signifier***
(constructed in the images that are culturally signified, for example the female)
(even metaphorically) putting somebody on the pedestal (stage) ==> exposure to voyeuristic gaze ==> objectification ~=> commodification }--Baudrillard-->
•a liberation (the subject is the object which has the powers of seduction as the focus of desire --> in control)
•a loss of freedom (the[...]

[...]hat ideology lies hidden beneath the symptom [=/=! problem of artists]

Campbell mode of analysis (with sinthome) =/= a revelatory mode of critique (where our illusions arre laid bare) [<-- artists’ symptom]

advertisements offer striking evidence of *autoimmune tendecies* in contemporary market society : the body politic misrecognizes its own boundaries and attacks parts of itself
@Femke

(Joyce's Bloom) first thing that we see or feel is not in fact ourselves, but bacteria [---> go to body image] --> (his solution:) avoiding one kind of bacteria by embracing another (<-- psychoanalytically effective ***non-solution***)


(in social sciences [Ereshefsky]) *species pluralism : how various biopolitical forces use segmentation strategies in the organic world to produce competing species’ hierarchies and taxa*
thinkers in social theory --> the entities under investigation are:
•so massive --> Gaya regulatory system of planetary scope
•so dispersed --> climate change
•so ancient --Haraway--> bacterial protist Mixotricha paradoxa (“the paradoxical being with mixed-up hairs”)
•so minute جزئی --> new materials engineered through nanotechnology
•so boundless --Sagan--> metametazoa: human as a multiple afloat in the omnisexuality or bacterial exchange
•so relational --thacker--> swarm, pack, flock, epidemic [go to --> ERG website's epidemic nodes --> *the image of the relational*]
•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 bact[...]