[...]and in indefinet places, with pockets, where vortices are born in pseudo returns. Clocks appear with these objects [=/= the universal absolute time standing outside contingency of everything else], spiraling, shifting clocks which from their moment of birth begin to mark the time of death. The Lucretian world is globally entropic, but negatively entropic in certain swirling pockets. Conjunction is negative entropy; the complex thus formed counts the quantity of information set adrift. The event which barely occurs and almost immediately disintegrates minimally resists the irreversible flow, carrying little information. Newtonian time, which is reversible, marks resistance to the irrevocable. It is absent from these sorts of physics, and that is why our forefathers were unable to imagine that Lucretian physics ever existed, with the possible exception of Bergson, who thrived on it. Irreversible time is the master here : the physics of things resists it in spots, but in the flow of the drift; history follows, barely a ripple in the flow. History flows around physics.” (Serres - Hermes p.116)
...events are all of the socio-political order
(if science or physics or episteme classifies things, what classifies physics?)
what classifies what?
Question of epidemiology
slave: material object
master: spatial object
Serres: Lucretius: dichotomies are symptoms of better-connected material things
•history symptom of nature
•time symptom of symptoms
“Mars is only an accident of stable Venus, a temporary relief outside the assembled convention. Mars passes, badly connected.”
Mars is only in transit
a penis captive
(like Lucretius, do I need to distinguish, in ajayeb) the conjunctional, contractual, stable links, (and projections of the constitution of political order?)
what are ajayeb's unstable historical contracts? --> historical contingencies --?-- “there would be nothing without the existence of the former, which quickly disappears around them”
that which disappears from definition, reappears metaphorically
the small amount of linkage between events
(with translation we might ask: with/by what are you translating? --> input and output of the translation cannot be known in advance)
ataraxia: the absence of trouble, peace of the garden (=/= soul made of atoms, unstable) a moral state ==> a physical state
(=/= aporia)
•not perturbed,
•the term was also used to describe the ideal mental state for soldiers entering battle. [-->? the image of the ideal soldier: Keanu Reeves kind of coolness in The Matrix film, (the machines are made in the image of the emotional ones.) at the end of the first film, we have an aesthetics (of indifferent and silent:) transcendence + perfect warrior], [another theory is that the freedom from emotional [...]
(1)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51[...]br />
--------[how can we ask without question mark?]
*Lili: through acts/gestures, by creating relationality, and by using reiterational processes
*Esta: my body knows the answer of what i ask, other states of body, what is mark? --> culture/context specific
*Seba: finding the best questions in beauty is about learning pronunciation, the issue of pronunciation instead of questioning (or their merge?), (statement/question) --> doubt --> postponing an immediate answer (“but before you answer...”) --> death of question
*Esteban: not to do: impose an answer, not triggering in the other, expecting an idea of an answer
*Arianna: deep truth involved, process, point of passage (the axis of child traverses your axis) what you say to the other is a container
*Joke: question --to--> invitation, creating the invitation
*Pierre: posting a problem is not about general sentences, it is about finding new relations in the existing fabric of the world, problematizing our intuitions into problems, therefore it is important to have the “?”
*Sina: remembering beyond history
--------[how can we enter something and not enter it at the same time?]
*Thiago: nonpresence <--> thinking, without body?!
*Aela: is about the question of distance and inside/outside, by practicing openness, it is about when something enters ‘you’
*Sana: physical-presence =/= imagination (mental activity ~= dream) {She needs to see Miyazaki}
*Roger: we do it all the time, for him it is more about active engagement, role of feelings, moments that you are pushed out by the entity
*Maarten: no! enter =/= not-enter, research depends on definitions
*Juan: layers of realities are involved, it is about expanding the consciousness by charming it into 90% presences, theater gives a yes/no quality to the question of entering, actors, stage as Dystopie of presence
*Xiri: yes! this is often the case, we are between 2nd-chances and being-torn-apart
--------[who told the first joke?]
*Gerald: objects =/= actual life (absurdity and absoluteness of objects) (contemplating about object ==> inner smile)
*Nicolas: father (by not getting it right), not mother (she is not the teller type), the tickler is about lunching possibilities
*Vladimir: God, Vladimir thinks this is theological and therefore axiomatic (that means self-evident or unquestionable)
*Lise: Monty Python, specifically the philosopher soccer video, in the way that makes you laugh
*Elke: God, God said “this is reality” (but we didn't get his joke)
*Steven: some funny kid in the street when he was 5 or 6, and it wasn't really a joke more a story
...................................
i like to set up a synonym-finder machine
(looking at mutations of ...)
--> the same way that in Attar's birds, one birds trying to convince another birds, is livin[...]
(2)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0[...], not triggering in the other, expecting an idea of an answer
*Arianna: deep truth involved, process, point of passage (the axis of child traverses your axis) what you say to the other is a container
*Joke: question --to--> invitation, creating the invitation
*Pierre: posting a problem is not about general sentences, it is about finding new relations in the existing fabric of the world, problematizing our intuitions into problems, therefore it is important to have the “?”
*Sina: remembering beyond history
--------[how can we enter something and not enter it at the same time?]
*Thiago: nonpresence <--> thinking, without body?!
*Aela: is about the question of distance and inside/outside, by practicing openness, it is about when something enters ‘you’
*Sana: physical-presence =/= imagination (mental activity ~= dream) {She needs to see Miyazaki}
*Roger: we do it all the time, for him it is more about active engagement, role of feelings, moments that you are pushed out by the entity
*Maarten: no! enter =/= not-enter, research depends on definitions
*Juan: layers of realities are involved, it is about expanding the consciousness by charming it into 90% presences, theater gives a yes/no quality to the question of entering, actors, stage as Dystopie of presence
*Xiri: yes! this is often the case, we are between 2nd-chances and being-torn-apart
--------[who told the first joke?]
*Gerald: objects =/= actual life (absurdity and absoluteness of objects) (contemplating about object ==> inner smile)
*Nicolas: father (by not getting it right), not mother (she is not the teller type), the tickler is about lunching possibilities
*Vladimir: God, Vladimir thinks this is theological and therefore axiomatic (that means self-evident or unquestionable)
*Lise: Monty Python, specifically the philosopher soccer video, in the way that makes you laugh
*Elke: God, God said “this is reality” (but we didn't get his joke)
*Steven: some funny kid in the street when he was 5 or 6, and it wasn't really a joke more a story
...................................
i like to set up a synonym-finder machine
(looking at mutations of ...)
--> the same way that in Attar's birds, one birds trying to convince another birds, is living by a roaming assemblage of assertions, and not really an argument--i am also not having any argument in that sense
the words locked to certain meanings----lock is another word for lure, a key and lock seducing each other, we can check its mechanics
three interesting objects from apass’ environment:
-opposite
-omen
-alarm
in the beginning there was the ... rather than the word ‘or’
(or is about joke, alternatives, and maybes)
a mouthful: as much as a mouth[...]
(3)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.1[...]n, clay formation, material animal facial properties
...................................
seeing a car crashing, is seeing a causation, seeing a reasoning, is that logos? is it logos when we see a physical experimentation?
...................................
[Haraway]
the established (dis)order is NOT necessary!
grips of necessity
(the real does/did not have to be or happen that way. the ‘real’ is the result of contingencies and it can be undone by working the contingencies, with skill.)
laboring bodies, playing bodies, sensuous bodies
(feminism:) you can't get freedom outside of mortality
-theology, the negative way of knowing, the necessary discipline of positive affirmation in order to know what is not knowable, is a very helpful tradition
when it comes to language we, humans, will always win over the animals.
we will always be the ones who control the law, the database.
(all is bad news both for the charismatic endangered Bangali tiger and the individual chicken in the food industry.)
fight the divisions and differences
we are in a very bad place for animals and woman
can we do without instrumentalization?
categories of killable--the question of how we kill
the question of one's-own-old-hat
regarding what you are against: we might find ourselves properly addressing a particular issue but having no ability to make political connection, to think beyond the categories
*thinking: a materialist practice with other thinkers--done best as storytelling
for me politics is that to be able to locate ways of life that deserves work, that which deserve opposition, that which deserve our curiosity
disembodiment is a technologically produced effect--many people are very skillful in creating that effect --> effects that are also affect/affectional
(Haraway on writing the cyborg manifesto) SK
the physiological state of neutrality is an affective state
(the notion that violent and passion counts as affect and neutrality is without affect is chemically bizarre) -- neuro-chemistry of a certain kind of self-collection
refusing the division between material and immaterial
to call information-world immaterial is wrong
(this is the base of my work related to Haraway)
in the case of vision: the material and the semiotic always implode [the apparatus and the flesh] --> the effect of *disembodiment is a technologically produced effect* (that is also always affectional) (we have to get good at producing it)
[...so she was among (1983 Marxist) feminists (and the figure of cyborg is already in circulation for her--about the questions of reproduction technologies related to the situation of women) without biological education--not only that, many of her feminist allies thought of biology as the enemy [-[...]
(4)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.4[...]l pragmatic language craft tradition, advocating the *exceedingly agential* world ~= there is always ‘a whole lot is going on']
the iterative and fractal quality of sentences
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy
analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part and vice versa
(Haraway on feminism)
feminist theory is especially good in getting at in particular ways doctrines of nature's work to enforce ways of life on women, on people of color, on the enslaved, on those who do not possess the qualities of mind and self-possession, on those who are on the marked categories to the unmarked. the feminist have been particularly good at getting how genre works. gender, in this regard. [...] --> that female by nature is committed to the species and the male by nature committed to transcendence.
[our inherited binaries -->] formulations of nature: executive/non-executive organs, immanence/transcendence, maintenance/novelty, catabolic(foru-sakht فرو ساخت, sukht سوخت)/anabolic(tarkib-saz ترکیب ساز) functions, ,,
-in Darwin's writing, non-theological account of diversity on earth, we find both interrupters and continuers of these particular notions of nature
the question of model, what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
****how do we do comparative thinking? comparative thinking depends on similarity judgment and difference judgment, and depends on good-enough models, and depends on a certain kind of rhetorical work of *crafting tropes*
--> figures of similarity/difference:
by similarity, or
by contiguity, or
by part-whole, or
...
(this is ‘building’ *among* us)
(how do i decide to compare two things? Shirin and Ophelia, etc)
models are built rhetorics
history of models
the power of models is that they are not the ‘same as’
circuits of meaning and power that flow through (materials and bodies)
mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ (instead of global)
by situated she means the ‘knot’ which always means some place and somewhere, but that someplace/somewhere could be in materiality a distributed digital network. the situated is always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.
epidemic friendly
the flow of disease are major international research matter
eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, [...]
(6)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.5[...] power that flow through (materials and bodies)
mondial ~? situated knowledge
the idiom ‘situated’ makes people think ‘local’ (instead of global)
by situated she means the ‘knot’ which always means some place and somewhere, but that someplace/somewhere could be in materiality a distributed digital network. the situated is always open. the point is that it is not nowhere and no place.
epidemic friendly
the flow of disease are major international research matter
eco-feminism, veganism is for Haraway is genocidal position, a position that advocates violence, a position dedicated to the destruction of ways of life and living beings including animals, [a position that] *concise all working animals to being nothing but evidence of the destructive and violating imposition of human will on natural stuff*, and “that domestic animals of all kinds are victims and demonstrations of human hubris گستاخى, and they have been made into tools” ~= an extreme developemnt of liberal theory --> the (work) animals are not self-defining subjects, are violations and victims, and should not exisit, except as:
•heritage-animals
•rescue-animals
•wards of guardianship
(my work on ajayeb and question of heritage has been exactly against that position)
the radical anti-food-industry position is a radical liberal theory turns all working animals into (at best) *heritage-animals* ~= animal to be preserved as much as possible separate from human use --> “all human use is bad”
(--✕--> we know that the question of use and instrumentalism cannot for mortal finite beings rid out of liberation theory and practice)
[for example the disposition of the film How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, where at the end dragons are better off their human partners ~ kabutar ba kabutar baz ba baz کبوتر با کبوتر باز با باز]
**killing is not something mortal beings can avoid** (us or them)
*the human beings have regularly and in complex ways produced other living entities as killable*
[category of killable: a killing that doesn't quite count as killing]
killing your pet when she is too sick = a judgment in responsive relationship that is not equal
to say that “meat culture everywhere and always are acts of violation” is wrong
“post-”, the notion of ‘surpassing’ that is inevitability built into the “post-”, is in our way politically
the project of critique : finding that point of violation where you can say “got you!”, ‘I nailed you’ --> the practice of critique = to define what we are against }==> develop political movement that are fairly self-certain about what we are against ==> you will find yourself (perhaps) property addressing a particular issue but having no ability *to make political connection* (~= to think beyond the category) --> you find y[...]
(7)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.6[...] mistake --(@Setareh; Goda wants to avoid mistakes?)
(learning from Foucault:) power = actual arrangement of the world (and not something ‘out there’)
(learning from Derrida:) responsibility is about the excess of it all (and not the irony of it all [*irony: incongruity of expectation and occurrence])
(learning from biology about:) differences organize themselves by ecologies (and not by binaries) --> ecologies have many scales (of temporality and physicality)***
scientific research + artistic research + contemporary philosophical critical inquiry ==> *topographies of difference* [--> important for Goda's use of the term “privilege” flattening differences]
(“+” are exchange zones, i am learning their differences of idioms)
[apass = partners locked into mimesis]
(my problem with the idea of) privilege: a special right, advantage, or immunity granted to a particular group or individual --assume--> the only way for a particular demographic to advance is at the expense of another
•communism which was a form of collectivism (defined itself against privileges) wiped out large populations
•it is easier to politicize gender and sexuality --to--> demand change
@Leo: the question of (should this be the way of) ‘how do we inhabit our situation and to make connection with each other’ --> (?can i suggest to Leo) to drop the stance of comprehensive theoretical political position [without giving up the labor-intensive work of theory]
(to talk about...) as an abstraction of seriousness
*if one is really serious about the kinds of interupted and entangled abstractions it is no longer good enough to do it from the Greeks-on*
(not scolding post-colonial but actually) not to let philosophy or science or any other rest of it any longer be that unmarked set of categories
*situated ground: that we know something*
(not to let:) ‘not to know something’ (about living and arriving at the time of human-induced mass-extermination and mass-genocide) as the only way of being a serious person ~ extinguish abstractions in order to act
[learning from Haraway + Latour:] ‘to take something seriousness’ is not to run off and explain it by something else, is to be at risk to it's ‘thisness,’ to be available to it, to be undone and redone at encounter ~-> specualtive thought
(always asking) what other abstractions are to think with?
[my interest in the past -->] your head screwed backward, not so much looking for relevant novelty [and not in search for meaning] (not so of past but also) not quite so enamored of the new and of the creative
-extinctions are happening at extraordinary rate that are difficult to deal with the perceptual apparatuses of the bipedal hominid [for example sayinig ‘everything is collapsing’ is one of those categories, collapsology takes world's doom as a priori]
•k[...]
(9)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.7[...] of script?); identity =/=? avidity, hers;]
interplay of scales
the scale of intimacy, (of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings)
data and surveillance and seduction
intimacy: still an unpredictable force?
intimacy: the biological spring from which affect drinks?
how Esta's proposal is capable of traversing from the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks?
[and when i say “abolish,” i am using a word that is about rendering something obsolete, mansukh, canceling, making reading to get rid of it, and this is not the same as destroying.]
@Arianna, ‘cleaning agents,’ to toxicity? how can we learn to live with “toxic animacy”(Chen)? dirt: “consequences overwhelming their cause” (Latour)
-narratives about urgent necessity: that we need to understand more in order to cure, prevent, construct, excel, survive.
*afterlife toxicities (?)
@Lili: cycle of planets instead of heartbeat of a planet. tuning in the soup of planets, instead of getting the pulse of a singular planet. the nebulous milk way of liquid bodies, instead of rigid mass of individual blood--Pluto.
@Varinia: (in her dog video, regarding her engagement with the law and the question of comparative thinking:) what is the model for what, what is similar to what?
-is her model based on the idea that beings exist as individual? (is this a ‘difference’ that her work produces?)
@Agnes: you are a response to the bed, making the bed and being made by its caress and embrace. it is not that you want all the audience in the world to identify with a general question or present this as a universal expression, but what could go beyond localization is precisely this concept that you, like me, transitioning body in your environment (bed or whatever) are outstretches of homeliness and forces that distribute across space and discourse, territories and sensing zones, you are an exchange between self and environment. this is pragmatism. like the variety of bed sheets, we are proposed with answers that vary, before posing any question.
to reformulate the question that was posed to you: how your proposal is capable of traversing from the bed to the wild?
pre-historic personhood
my work is concerned with connections, mediation and passages.
what you take for granted, is in another words, what that you can't not know.
(my proposal:)
the past is not absolute!
the idea is that the mythical became the mythological --> Things could be treasured for their beauty as opposed to
their utility or their numinousness.
(Martha Kenney's) “wild facts”
facts that won't hold still
fables
fables of ajayeb, creatures of imaginations, (im)possible worlds
...................................
your institutional [...]
(10)[...notes/midday review.txt]%0.9[...]xical imperative) “imitate me in order to be what you are”
wolf in sheep's clothing (Aesop's “A Case of Mistaken Identity”)
a wolf thought that by disguising himself he could get plenty to eat. Putting on a sheep skin to trick the shepherd, he joined the flock at grass without being discovered. At nightfall the shepherd shut him with the sheep in the fold and made fast all round by blocking the entrance. Then, feeling hungry, he picked up his knife and slaughtered an animal for his supper. It happened to be the wolf.
--> a character that does not belong to one can involve one in serious trouble
[*]fable: (name of the) *literary thing* that aime to *teach responsibility* --Keenan--> self-understanding of the free subject (<--fable--we are exposed to something in language that troubles the possibility of that understanding)
[in my lecture performances with] fable [I aim to] offer an allegory-of unreading, of reading without limits and without guarantees --> freedom
governmental concepts:
•subject
•agency
•will
•choice
•freedom
•rights
}--deconstruction--> limitation of ethico-political responsibilities
for Keenan: **question of responsibility = question of freedom**
the free community of rational beings cannot simply be (regulatively) invoked
calculable & programmable law
responsibility: (names the predicament in which) *coincide the necessity/inevitability of action & the failure of law*
•politics (and ethics) --name--> the urgency and necessity of a response
•responsibility (and freedom) --name--> the impossibility of response with guarantee
ethical =/= actual
| |
impossibility =/= totality of what is
***impossible =/= not-possible***
--Derrida--> the impossible occurs at every moment (that belong to the effort of reading)
“have we not acquired the right to say everything?” (Sade)
who reads, and how, a text addressed to no one?
what status does it have?
[Lode Lauwaert]
for Blanchot Sade (libertine aristocrat novelist) was the writer par excellence
we should think about Sade in explicitly revolutionary terms [Sade's work ~= Robespierre's Reign of Terror]
•Sade's ideal of society is a reactive reality (it takes form specifically in reaction to something external) --> undertaken endlessly efforts against modes of social organization that are based on an stable internal point of reference
in Sade:
1. selfishness has an ontological (not a moral) meaning : ‘the essence of man = negation of the value of the other's existence’ (+ a destruction of the positive meaning other people have in normal life) =/= being-for-the-other
2. charact[...]
(11)[...notes/midday review.txt]%2.8[...] insist on the rhetorical nature of truth.} --> Haraway calls this ‘The imagery of force fields’ (also an imagery of high-tech military fields and of automated academic battlefields) {will to power} (for Luiza)
epistemological electroshock therapy
(feminists protecting their) sense of collective historical subjectivity and agency and our “embodied” accounts of the truth --> these are just excuse not to learn
(2)Humanistic Marxism (structuring theory about the domination of nature in the self-construction of man) ([young Marx, influenced by Feuerbach =/= Hegelian idealism, saying that:] man's essential nature is that of a free producer, freely reproducing their own conditions of life [--however--> under capitalism individuals are alienated from their productive activity, etc.])
--> “chance for life”
science: Global System, universal knowledge --> translation, convertibility, mobility
of meanings, and universality
money in capitalism ~= reductionism in science
...when we are talking about genes, social classes, elementary particles, genders, races, or texts
*vision: a sensory system that has been used leap out of the marked body ==> a gaze from nowhere
-“Vision is always a question of the power to see--and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices”
-also, the visual metaphor allows one to go beyond fixed appearances, which are only the end products. The metaphor invites us to investigate the varied apparatuses of visual production (including: the prosthetic technologies interfaced with our biological eyes and brains.)
unmarked body: the power to see and not be seen
objectivity in scientific and technological, late-industrial, militarized, racist, and male-dominant societies
(she asks for:)
“So, I think my problem, and “our” problem, is how to have simultaneously an account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world, one that can be partially shared and that is friendly to earthwide projects of finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness.”
Haraway asks for an embodied objectivity that is able of accommodating *paradoxes* --> ‘situated knowledges’
-what does she mean when she says “All components of the desire are paradoxical and dangerous, and their combination is both contradictory and necessary.”
(instruments of visualization in multinationalist, postmodernist culture:) disembodiment : to distance to know
the visualizing technologies (--> my amazon project)
a perverse vision that has produced ‘techno-monsters’ (what does she mean by that?)
--> second birthing? transcendence[...]
(13)[...notes/midday review.txt]%3.3[...]eing a news agency
...................................
[negativity?]--> your bad feelings --> غر ghor complaint --(turn it into)--> critique --(start doing)--> research --(get)--> diploma --(turn it into)--> phd --(make your)--> department of studies --(into)--> craft tradition
[you don't have to start with negativity!]
[you don't need to end in your own myth tradition!]
...................................
@Anouk (@her “breathing archive”): (Lev Manovich's) relationship between ‘interface’ and ‘database,’ ‘perceptable’ to ‘information’. [Database as Symbolic Form: http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i290-1/s04/readings/manovich_database.pdf]
what is for Anouk ‘information’? and what is for her the relationship between information, knowledge, interface, and perceptable?
for her what is the relationship between ‘information’ and ‘infinite’? (infinite as the universe of all possible images)
...................................
*Pierre's ‘rights of nerves’ --> “talking to everybody”
[rights of nerves: you are promted to do what you do out of disgust, outrage, fear, or driven by anxiety, you don't know why, you are compelled towards an object or project or thing or unthing]
*Seba: for him “narrative =/= complex” (the question of “complexity's situatedness”) for him: “multiple perspectives ==> coherency (=/= bi-rabt بی ربط, na-ham-dusti ناهمدوستی ?)” (is his idea of “coherency” leads to ‘friendship’? is for Seba ‘amity’ [ravabet-e hasane روابط حسنه] at stake? )
Seba's epistemological object(?): ‘evidence’ (=/?=>! cordial dispositions)
(complexity is the name of our game. Haraway)
...................................
my current work and interest involves the investigation of individualized subject formation (tajarode nafs تجرد نفس ?); interrogating the production of language; and tracing the divisible distinguishing limits between categories of human, animal, and monstrous.
#subjects of interest: The translator, language, the sublime, animals/animality, technicity/mechanicity, the divine/sacred,
...................................
the myth of Poros, Penia, and Eros for Aela:
(in Plato's Symposium;) Penia, the “child of poverty,” decides to forcefully impregnate herself with the inebriated Poros, “the personification of plenty,” who is always in opposition with aporia, (~ snafu before aporia,) “puzzlement, which breaks with the logic of identity,” and thus defining aporia. The result of this union is Eros...
poverty + {plenitude × aporia} ==> eros : {agency of passivity + resourcefulness}
1-metaphysical inquiry begins from ‘aporia’
2-rationalist inquiry begins from ‘a priori’
3-empiricist inquiry begins from ‘tabula rasa’ (hakim's beginning)
/
/
4-mystical inquiry begins from ‘affective a posteriori’ (effect, wonder, heyrat, tahayor)
[...]
(14)[...notes/midday review.txt]%4.8[...]hiftegi:
[narcissistic personality disorder]
(exaggerated feeling of) self-importance, self-absorbed, self-perception of being unique, situated within self-presentation, sense of entitlement حق به جانب and self-centeredness schema
adult neurotic's sense of omnipotence --> relic of the old megalomania of infancy (~ all paranoic disorders) (~-> hurt with denial)
(Freud's) primal state: {id ~= ego ~= external world}--(not differentiated)
one could not lay hold of oneself as other ==> narcissism expires
(Lacan's) ego = another }==> the specular ego (in the mirror stage) =/= narcissistic
(‘=/=’ : erotic attraction or aggressive tension)
Nietzsche: the utterance “I am ugly” created “the beautiful”
[does this mean: “I am beautiful” created “the ugly” (in the other and world)?]
sublimation is passion transformed
or, object displacement, transformation of instincts,
a desuxualization (from primary to secondary narcissism) (--> what is Aela's “thirst for knowledge”?)~~--> unfolding into (differentiated elements of a oneness of) instinctual-spiritual experience. (Aela's) ‘oneness’ [an original unity + one hidden and defended against] stays alive as connection? --> the question of desire for Aela is about this hidden linkage.
[transitional objects, play, modifications of the pleasure principle, genital function,]
,
(noted by Christian Hubert: for Loewald:) *eroticism is genuine sublimation* : a reconciliation in the area of ego development and of internalization. (@Aela)
-desublimation (of reason?)
objective of sexuality conceptual transformation into Eros --> (asking Aela with Marcuse:) what is the non-repressive sublimation of the resexualized body? (=/= neurotic reactivation of narcissistic libido)
why Eros is so powerful? what kind of sublimation is the culture-building power of Eros?
in Derrida, narcissism is the passage to the Other, and not necessarily merely a collapse into oneself.
auto-erotic solipsism
باطل کردن طلسم ضمیر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)
auto-erotic economy
the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation
“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)
{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)
[for Jua[...]
(15)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.2[...]ر the ego appears [displaced elsewhere in the world as an effect] as the result of primary narcissism?
(batel kardan-e telesm-e zamir) dispulsion of ego
*ego forms in the world* (Lippit)
auto-erotic economy
the ego in the island, finding footprints of the others
(Freudian protocols of existence:) there is no world, there is only islands. --> multiplicity of isolations ~-> individuation
“In narcissism the ego disappears from the world and reappears in the imaginary realm of invisible interiority.” (Lippit)
{the erotic attachment to outside objects}<--pervert =/= narcissist-->{withdraw, calls it “instinct for self preservation"} (a shortcut: my way of undering my own narcissistic tendencies has been through perversity.)
[for Juan:] (artistic) narcissism =/=? fossilization (~->? mimesis)
*mimesis* is not about form
in order to represent the character of the supposed ‘word’ of another
mimesis + techne ~= copy (@Juan)
diegesis =/=? mimesis
(telling) -- (showing)
(recounted) -- (enacted)
}--> poiesis _////(actually a useful and necessary difference, synthesized by the Greeks--Plato and Aristotle)
(...and what about the question of the medium?)
*Juan's relationship with the (in)dependency of the individuated self of the artist--in this case himself--by means of mimetic techne is to overcome the visual artist's narcissism?
(Pierre:) being alone --> mimesis --> through mimetic intra-acting with the other
(Sina: there is no “being alone” only ‘feeling lonely’ which is itself a form of intra-acting : internalizing an external phenomena. “loneliness” is a belief that one has.)
...................................
narcissism as a mimetic and performative mode
transindividual narcissism --Maitra--> movement of the subject beyond ethnicity (ethnic formations that the bio-political processes of interpellation demand of the subject)
remediation of ethnic narcissism
[Maitra's queer diasporic reading practice of] (in diaspora media theory) performing an identity (that is “Iranian” for example)
*intermedia* (=/= multimedia: fuse disparate media)
frictions between different media
conceptual interplay between media
space of alchemical transformation
(at the level of) conflict of interpretations
radical understanding of interdisciplinarity
diaspora: no longer having a clear answer to “where are you from?”
what might we learn from narcissism (from mimesis)?
mediate and fracture the writing of the self
wound: disconnected event
not adding up to a comprehensive narrative of the ethnic self
*ego-under-construction*
Freud's primary narcissism, we love ourselves before loving others
(for the child) narcissism = interm[...]
(16)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.3[...]eration (behbud بهبود, ramagh رمق)
•present: wilderness --> ongoingness (thickened with creatures)
[in (my reading?) ajayeb's temporality] things come from the past and the future simultaneously
what i respond to = what i inherit
science (in the way that is presented) is outside history, and becomes simply that which is “the case” of the world
**everything that one does is inside time, but that which is acquired (becomes a view onto a scene) and is outside of time**
***(dangerous) ways of being outside of the time of the thick present*** (Haraway)
‘-scene’: a thick presence of now, has many durations in it
(my work on ajayeb's past tense trans-species affair) is about those with whom one must get on together, in the enacting of responsibility for those who came before. how not to exit time? (= “staying with the trouble”)
trans-species affair then and now
(in our) multi-dimensional inhabiting of space with critters (you can't only talk about capital, land, labor without having a multispecies affair)
Badiou's points on accelerate:
•unifying us around negativity
•future of western world
•question of private property --> key of soical organization
...................................
#work on video series (with? Christian, Esta,)
messy short videos (for youtube or other places)
1. critique of magic in cinema
2. representation of knowledge in cinema
3.
to perform past and present alarmingly simultaneously, to intermix the directions of causation and influence, they cannot be linear and progressive, against a production of present [presentism]
#create identity research center for/with my work
1. harem (حرم)
2. ajayeb (عجایب)
3. wortsalad
4. erklammern (with Foad)
5. san'at-e mojarad-sazi (صنعت مجردسازی with Foad)
6. garden (باغ)
7.
#what am i learning from Hiwa's Chicago Boys project?
history, recent region departures, study group, music, jam, more and more people together with their voices and stories, faces, sing, play, discomfort in instrument, tour, collectivity, sojourn in stage, conviviality, cover song,
-when i look at the videos of the project i feel like i want to do or be part of something like that, i want those qualities, i want the way people are looking and feeling like there.
#i am learning from Kohn that the survival is complicated, from Haraway that world works by excess and therefore filled with hope, with Sennett and Delanda a better account of socio-material history, from Ahmed a different understanding of psychoanalysis, from Barad poetry and argumentation, from Scher the effort needed to become interested, from Kenney that there is no need [...]
(17)[...notes/midday review.txt]%5.8[...]reflection, findings, etc.
ok, again, the ‘skill’ question:
•1--> what are the set of skills needed for my work?
•2--> which problematics these skills equip me to address?
•3--> can i (or should i) not know these problematics in advance?
the bow and arrow --|)-> ♥ in my apass endweek (as sound object) was a relic of our shared physical energetic space, the nondiscursive --> how to keep it inarticulate?
•a way to record space, which is always social =/= silenced with no agency of the recorder (the “quiet recorder”)
•also a playful respective reading of La Guin, (something that may seem a misunderstanding of her carrier bag theory)
•carving out a practice agility area
...................................
the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’
...................................
i am following the movement of certain words here
spam =/= internet
spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have
...................................
[title]
“it's your turn now to play”
...................................
(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence
material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad
(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, h[...]
(18)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]
...................................
the question ‘what does X mean?’ is always ‘what does X mean for you?’
...................................
i am following the movement of certain words here
spam =/= internet
spam operates on/with patterns of literacy or an existing (in)sufficiencies in known categories of cognitive biases that people have
...................................
[title]
“it's your turn now to play”
...................................
(@Luisa on space,) (question of:) producing (your) presence
material-discursive --> semiotic-psychosis --> her Wortsalad
(Bocola > Kohut > Mondrian's bipolar structure:)
creation of universal beauty / aesthetic expression of oneself
(=?=> transcend the framework of artistic production)
exhibitionist pole of the self / idealized pole of the self
the grandiose self / the idealized structures
worldviews / self-images
what is the (diametric, dialectical) internal drama of her thinking and work?
(what are?) Luisa's overarching, idealized conception that lays claim to the validity of her values and standards as applied not only to herself and environment but to the entire universe: (question of structure)
•(pre-babylonian) universal abstractionism --> embodied knowledge
•fluid equilibrium --> movement of Being
[is this a romantic structural attitude?]
-and how is she confronted with cosmos prior to her inscriptions? (question of realism)
-what is (the mystery of) a ‘being through interpretation’ for her? (question of performativity)
[realistic:] to take possession of essential aspects of the external reality (~-> recreate them in the imagination) [--> empirical?]
[structural:] to experience the external reality as parts of an interconnected and comprehensive whole
[idealistic/symbolist:] to connect the (inner) particular to the general
[romantic:] to make (inner) invisible visible
sublimated gratification of instincts, ambitions and ideals, (homogeneous) gestalt and expression of the self, narcissistic equilibrium, test its viability, haptic art,
“invisible reality and the aesthetics of universality” or a mean by which universal is recognized*
timelessness, wholesomeness, indivisibility, aesthetic standards
-pictorial thinking, movement thinking, affectual thinking, {--> all issued by the notion of “pure” and “purity”? tendency toward idealization? utopian?}
movement (the act) =/= mobility (the possibility)
(is Luisa interested in?) the immanent laws and essential unity of all being
...step to complete nonobjectivity
...objects with their expression of plasticity
-what is the symbolic term in her work?
she said: “space is literal.” --> the wholesome is proclaimed in the artistic a[...]
(19)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.3[...]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 impulse is perceived but misconstructed, and which becomes attached to another idea. [can i say that my work in ajayeb, which i named it as ‘organizing my memory, and also, that which comes to mind’ is all about this reconstruction of cognizeds and percepts? is that why i am having less and less unconsciousness in my daily life?!])
-cognizant agah آگاه
-in Freud's model of unconsciousness, the affect itself is not repressed, rather, what is repressed is the idea to which the affect was attached --> displacement
(Lacan's) subject: proper scene of absence and loss*
a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles --> constitution of the subject as “settlement”
([what is?] Eszter's right and will to keep looking for signs of difference. --when she was talking about idiosyncrasies of her countries)
*[with Eszter's “the nation has suffered enough!"] --Lezra--> politics in a sense is precisely concerned with what is or is not *enough*
“it's enough!” --> #demand something or before which I make a claim. it is practical (even technical) or is dealing with being practical
the haunting modifier of “enough”
the *amount* of something (-of suffering in this case) <-- “That's enough coffee”
-we are dealing with mater[...]
(22)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.5[...]mben still thinks of structure in Euclidian terms, pre-chaos theory and fractal geometry of (non)equilibrium. thermal chaos and dynamic system theory has changed the ways we think about global/local stabilities, discontinuities and noise. sympoiesis is another one.]
-with ‘apparatus’ what is at stake: flow of energy, order, waste, transformation,
Vladimir's tether on disambiguity
Elen, adding her own wheels to the flow(s)
and putting a stick/spoke in a rolling wheel (of others?) [her saboteur trends, چوب لای چرخ (=/=? kharab-kari خراب کاری), what is chub lay-e charkh for her? vandalizing the discourse of others]
-the famous vandal of wikipedia with the recursive name “-on wheels” (Willy on Wheels, adding “on wheels” to the title of every single page, using the move function of Wikipedia: renaming the existing title ==> moved to another namespace, without changing the base title)
-like myself, her saboteurs are critically not symbolic nor ontic, rather sometimes epistemic, or better, ontologic: they don't vandalize the “thing” itself, but the “nature of the properties” that constructs that thing for us
-rocket sculture (what does it mean for her?)
...................................
[the question of inevitability of anthropical view]
there is no final answer to a kind of question but a lot of answers
through inhabiting a figure you are crafting you find yourself addressing a set of problems
agency: liveliness of artifacts (?). there is some kind of liveliness that is both human and nonhuman
the kind of sociality that joins two categorically separate mode of agencies, is a sociality that constitutes both --> the interaction of humans and machines produced both =/= unilateral action
(my whole point or joke, with the bow and arrow was that the arrow of index finger does not move in one way.)
[=/= another mode that comes to mind is when your intimacy making leads always to yourself, getting laid, literally. that is when your concern becomes only you and someone, sexually interested --> economically, and you don't concern the sociality of your people with each other. #techno-capital singular subjectivity @--> this is super relevant for Sven, maybe: how one becomes interested, invested, and skillful in provoking interesting socialities for friends and peers--and not only for oneself? creating, inciting zones of connectivity]
-[it was not accidental that the rhetoric of drugs came up with Lilia when I suggested the attention to anthropos --> what figures human and otherwise was for her the subject of drug-induced rhetoric of mind-alteration; (this is the anthropos of the Enlightenment Europeans and classical Greece talking:) “in order to get rid of me you must take drugs!” #fable/_ --> being sober(?!), anthropos becoming, human nature, common sense, empiricism and interpretation are at stake here]
-[another thing was [...]
(23)[...notes/midday review.txt]%6.9[...]w to make her interested in metaphysics? in queer studies and practices
physics is the river of phenomena
meta: above, among, beyond
ontological commitment to:
sense of wonder
sense of sadness
sense of madness
what (else) literature can be if not elegy?
sonic level of sign-making and significance in her act
soft-spoken adjectives
“sigh”: poetry's start-up engine, aaaahh
somewhere between lament and mourning
proper address of the mother
which ‘scene of modern or classical language’ you are opening?
‘sigh’ is important, sigh initiates (many including german and iranian) literature
iranian historical comfort zones
where literature starts with sigh
when and how did you learn to sigh?
sigh is from the family of the specialized languages of complaining?
temporal climate of your remembrance (as mourning) --> related to the past?
mourning and memory are sojourn for her
incorporating the object of (her) loss
(holding onto) the unhappy objects of difference
anger, pain, misery, ...
which (good or bad) feelings saturates her poem?
question of saturation
which feelings modified by which poetics sutures which wounds? زخمبندی
or to be more psychoanalytically correct: where is the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’
historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings” ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception
her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)
ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecsta[...]
(24)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.6[...]s the wound?
my own affirmative exposure of the unhappy effects of her poetry
what is the image of the ‘better life’ in her poetry?
somehow in the literary habitus she is moving, the origin of descriptive/inscriptive saying is made by an initial violation
Hoda's poem, which energies does it unleash in her?
sokhan-e ranj سخن رنج
شعر غنایی Lyric poetry, a formal type of poetry which is defined by or dedicated to expressing so-called personal emotions or feelings.
the Lyre, a string instrument in Greek classical antiquity, is tuning the technicality of this ‘form’
historical contingencies of “personal feelings”
?what is more singular than your “personal” highs, trips, crashes, “feelings” ==> a text telling about itself (its ownmost experience of something that is radically singular)
-rhetoric of singularity
-(my point is that the expression of your) innermost experience (is often signed by someone else)
--> “distributed biographies,” thinking about sociality of perception
her poem is her textual body (<--> sexual body)
ecstasy
is subjectivity (permanently for Hoda) ecstatic?
this is the question of ‘where is the subject’? according to different practices with ecstasy we are outside ourselves. (in religion that is precisely where the ‘inside’ is located)
-permanent or structural ecstasy is clearly political
-ecstasy is disruptive
how much should I be invested or interested as a friend for your happiness and wellbeing?
•fellow-feeling
•sympathy (is expressed by:) returning feeling with like feeling
Sina: if a thinking makes you sad, that thinking is probably wrong?
within the rhetoric of integration a usual terrifying point is in which the duty of the migrant is to attach to a different, happier object
the future of reattachment --> Hoda
-in this integrative narrative, I have to be careful with assumptions that good feelings are open and bad feelings are closed
bad feelings are seen as orientated toward the past =/= my work on past
she said “here is the English-one” meaning the English translation of her poem
--> in the last five years i have been rifting between the difficult space between “here the Farsi-one” and “here the English-one”
...................................
#semester, seminar study the “scene of writing”
keywords: deconstruction, fabrication, articulation, plasticity
[week 1,2,3] encounters between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, writing, concepts of language:
•Derrida --> Freud / “Freud & the Scene of Writing” (43 pages)
•Fleming --> Derrida / “Cultural Graphology Writing After Derrida” (first chapter: The Psychopathology of Writing, 29 pages)
•the schema[...]
(25)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.7[...]ttari / “A Thousand Plateaus” (chapter 3: Double Articulation, 32 pages)
[week 6] feminist and women studies, scene of writing:
•aesthetic tentacularity: Lindsay Kelley & Eva Hayward / “Carnal Light”
[week 7] digital media:
•Flusser on hypertext / “Does Writing Have a Future” (chapter: Supertext, 6 pages)
•Bolter / “Writing Space” (chapter 3 Writing as Technology, 13 pages)
...................................
#workshop little fables of practice, second day storytelling
(proposed initially to Lili:) #imagine and describe an alien world where its populace don't practice ‘knowing’
with this practice we get into questions of (--without directly addressing/announcing them we will provoke a better understanding of what we might think of them:)
•knowing --> (the inseparability of) knowing, being, and doing
•the ‘suppos’ of the supposed to know
•rhetorics, and intrinsicality ("on the inside”)
•response --> (‘knowing’ =) differential accountability =/= differential responsiveness
•environment
•description (discursive significance)
•world, and sense-making
•geometry (and -metry)
•(intelligibility and) materiality enacted --> question of discourse
•epistemology
•conceptions of space and time
•reflection (as a pervasive trope of knowing) [mirroring, imitation, reflection, tropes of “sameness"]
•material discursive evolving
•mattering; matter and intelligibility, episteme and techne, macro and micro,
•
the workshop is in a way about the trope of knowing, ontology of knowing
(ways of) knowing entangled with mode of being
(with which creature?) matter's dynamism is intrinsic to its biodynamic way of being (--Barad--> for brittlestar everything is intrinsic)
(creatures that) constantly changing its geometry and its topology --> ongoing reworking of bodily boundaries
(our, and an alien critter's “it”’s) discoursive practices: boundary-drawing practices by which it differentiates between “itself” and the “environment” ==> making sense of its world [--> that is why i am interested in the (better?) articulation of “differences” (= boundary-making practices, our “differential productions”) that we are making, as a way of getting into eachother discourses ~~and--> (its) ongoing materialization --> *differential materialization* (is discursive; Barad)]
•patterns of difference
•I am against the ‘frictionless narrative space’ (in the absence of the dominant story) where “everything” (therefore nothing) is possible
(the workshop engages in thinking) intertwined practices of knowing and being
[this practice of storytelling might be relevant for those invested in questions of: knowledge production, speculative theory, situated bodies critique, situated knowledges critique, being ‘of’ t[...]
(26)[...notes/midday review.txt]%7.8[...]ensate and tactile and opens onto asthetic)
(some do this all the time [unknown shock of anxiety in the morning]:) morning --> mourning --> sudden dread and start scanning () () [], (trauma as an) everyday walking path
traumatic realism: a figuring that, like traumatic memory, fails to represent the inflicting force as an object in a symbolic order and therefore feels compelled to literally re-present it over and over, *miming the original haunting impact.* (Stewart > Hal Foster)
-the subject surging to bear an affect, surging toward an actualization, passionate connection of the subject who goes with the flow in an intoxicated moment (=/= sober distance)
(Hoda's impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) wr[...]
(27)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9[...]impact of) shocked subjectivity (--> the real understood as traumatic) --> conjure up memories of death --?--> communal grieving
{referential vs. simulacral readings @Hoda, Marialena (‘referential object for’ / ‘empathetic object in’ /or ‘criticality of’ [<-- i don't agree with these clear cuts of ”/"]; what is “the reality of suffering and death” (or “reality and suffering of death”) for Hoda? (Xiri's interest in her) object's “total integration” into the political economy}
(Stewart's) signs of the senses
satisfaction in the making of sign-shrine
(question of satisfaction at Hoda:) satisfaction as a force, and end, in itself spoken through the bright, blunt, sensate aesthetics of the sign
-something slashes [= a wound made by cutting] at itself and spits at the world (/ politics of slashing --> poetics of slashing / the young girls who “cut” themselves so they can feel alive or, literally “come to their senses”) -- dramas of surge and arrest --> They do not ask for interpretation or construct the subject who would assign them a meaning, [they refuse] reference to “underlying systems” of signification that make them readable as texts
-something refuses to disappear
-(Hoda's land is) the land of sheer circulations --> (the question of) equilibriums --> how can she with her audience (let's say “we”) enter the unnatural calm of another form of arrest? to feel the scene resist synaesthesia
a state of the senses making contact with pen and paper (and matches)
(my enduring love of watching images, my) optical eye
“[...] young embodiments of a modern middle-ground-in-the-making came face-to-face with an otherness that compelled a closer look” --> violently affective contact
surged toward the scene of their confident excitement
impact ==> the social
#storytelling, compelled to repeat the event as the sentience of it still reverberated in their senses
a grounded writing, that sends people bouncing, takes place as a threshold, hits the senses as a set of provocations, or presents as *a problematic sensed in circuits of reaction already set in motion* @apass
(working with Stewart) writing affect #workshop
a practice of writing ourselves into our worlds as *emergent and disparate ensembles* --> we need the speculative concept of worlding (a term that wins philosophy, criticism, digital studies, and cultural study) in Tehran urgently
-the workshop offers a process of sharing, hearing, questioning, and proposing--for oneself and for the sake of others ==> to start to think through a project or concept by working with words
-we will learning how to read closely and to give feedback that is most useful for the authors
-working with questions:
•How do forms of writing change cultural theory?
•What questions do forms of writing raise about s[...]
(28)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.1[...] give to them*
...................................
on Kate Rich work
feral --> before or without a political state --?--> state of nature [a lot of moral political philosophers of the state asking “What was life like before civil society?"]--> in feral there are only freedoms ==> contracts (}--> what cultural anthropology has to say about that?)
she is in the Rousseauian tradition of *how to establish a ‘political community’ in the face of the problems of ‘commercial society’* (---> go to Rousseau's The Social Contract & Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men)
fighting the system --> feral tropes --> arsenal of the Enlightenment (Kant's motto: “Dare to think for yourself!” ~= “I don't follow orders!”), application of Reason in the public sphere of human affairs
with her work we are in the Age of Enlightenment, Age of Reason, resourcing authority and legitimacy, ideals of individual liberty and progress --> Kate's thinking founded on philosophical fictions of the 18th century (--Foucault--> problematic legacy of the Enlightenment)
•the legecy of 20th century: (Kate's dialectical negativity) to define and work in negative way, an ‘exit,’ a ‘way out’ --> transcendental [---> go to Singh, Khan,]
•question of contemporary reality --> Kate does a totalizing elevation (like many other artists)
•the realm of obedience --> artists’ childish attitude of never accepting someone else's authority (#fighting the system; should we fight the system systematically? @Nicolas)
...................................
basically everything i do is related to the question of reading --> make us better readers
my excessive use of footnote --> the most decisive indication of the concerns of a text are to be found in its margins & no ‘proper’ starting/ending point for reading
each of my performances/projects reflect on their own status as examples of reading/misreading =/= achieving correct reading
literature: the problem of misreading (=/= the language it uses)
[with De Man]
i have become sensitive to the systematic avoidance of the problem of reading, of the interpretative or hermeneutic moment, in literary analysis and art
all language-use is tropological (~ rhetorical)
catachresis (the misuse of a word) <--fluid--> metaphor (the non-literal application of a word) <--fluid--> metonymy (in which the name of one thing is put for that of another related to it)
readability: the possibility of producing an essential/definitive reading --> closure =/= further interpretation
a language which would perfectly fit my multiple identity--persian consciousness
emboding (belonging to) two bordering cultures: western university and persian tradition of subjectivity
•mixture of English and Farsi
•spontaneous shift of style
-[...]
(29)[...notes/midday review.txt]%9.6[...] months) ==> dependency, needing stimulant
in Balkan: insufficiently fed ==> طلبکار و ناراضی talabkar narazi dissatisfied and manipulative (in need of oral stimulant for example sarcasm) [*narazi <~~--> tavagho’ توقع*]
(--> early experiences of love bound up with various kinds of suffering, and later in adulthood one will look for familiar forms of suffering)
•oral fixation: everything related to pleasure + pain + security + sex are all bound together and located in the mouth
**anal fixation [bowel and bladder control --> focus of the libido: conflict of to pass or withhold]--> also a time person's relationship with authority is made. role of super-ego (parents) in toilet training. everything depends on what super-ego says about what you accomplish in the toilet (at the ages of 1 to 3) ==> creativity / khesasat:
•anal-retentive: to hold back ==> tidy, khasis (~ careful with money), and respectful to authority
•anal-expulsive: relieved whenever in inappropriate times ==> sharing personality, give things away,
subjectivity is porous, flow of thoughts without a thinker, self is unnecessary
‘self’ is such an unnecessary metaphor for the process of awareness and knowing
the question of “who/what am I?” is utterly boring
[title]
might suffer
Freud's penis
ignoria
aghsa اقصا
far, farther, to send far, everywhere places, earth
(+ aknaf) [virtual locality]
--?--> maghsad مقصد (when aghsa overlapse the here and now)
tamrin تمرین üben/training (bazi-e khatarnak) =/=
tajrobe تجربه Erfahrung/experience (experience in accident =/=> getting better at driving; or
failure =/=> science)
--> zehniate shakhshi mobtani bar bardashthaye mobtani bar tajribe ذهنیت شخصی مبتنی بر برداشتهای مبتنی بر تجربه experiential subjectivity
•experience ==> personal perception
•train ==> skill
taghirat va tahavolat-e donya ra az birun ba az bala negah kardan (<-- we need more. [by “we” i mean iranians])
Lili's use of preposition or a conjunction “and” “or” ==> discourse marker
regarding the system, to resist is much more interesting than to complain
i am worried (as adult) about X's death, because earlier (as child) i have wished X's death
neurotic anxiety <== controlling the child (bokon nakon بکن نکن) ~~> fear of punishment
neurotic anxiety: unconscious fear that the *libidinal impulses of the id* will take control (at an inopportune inappropriate time)
شخصیت واقع بین shakhsiat vaghe bin: objectivity montabegh bar subjectivity ==> truth (in science) + commitment based on (accepted) reality [ta'ahod cann[...]
(31)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10[...]ion --sold--> critical
•zamineye konjkavi کنجکاوی curiosity --sold--> knowledge
•zamineye majarajuyi ماجراجویی adventure --sold--> wonder
(a [not always wanted?] form of relatedness in interpersonal relationships)
mentor ~= rahnama راهنما
(when someone is) angry = anxiety + depressed + obsessive–compulsive vasvasi + pessimist bad-bin + negative + offender motejavez
direct speech رک صریح بی پرده rok sarih bi-parde harf zadan = saying the real and truth in the right place that is necessary and almost an obligation =/= parde-dari provocation
...................................
note on the workshop of anarchive in Zsenne apass summer 2018
(my issues with Manning's presentation of) process philosophy --> a system-builder mode of thinking --> *saying something (right) about every single thing at once*
-process philosophy puts forward the will and desire for “change,” therefore it developes a resistant to change (?)
-it tend to be a metaphysics without physics [?!] (when a metaphysics provoke less interest for ‘-physics’ and more for the ‘meta-’ /and why is that a problem?) [==> Barad is much more useful for me now]
-the real question of the workshop remained “how to define what i like (such as ‘anarchive’) that it remains open at all time to the ‘more’ and ‘multi’?” <-- and they provide an elusive non-definition of the term, impossible to pin down. because accourding to Manning when you pin down an idea/practice by its definition it becomes “fixed,” and fixity is categorically bad at all times <-- there is a desire to create a hygienic concept immune to corruption and hierarchy. Manning is alert to certain hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for e[...]
(32)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.7[...]hierarchies ==> not acknowledging other hierarchies that precisely emerge out of that (--> preserve the ‘health’ of the idea of anarchive. [<-- maybe we need to let concepts rot? --> decompose])
Manning's elusiveness: (i have become hyper-conscious about qualities that endow infinite freedom of thought to human subjects...)
•elusive thought طفره (=/= volatile فرار) --> Spiderman's mode of freedom (-you can never catch him + infinite flexibility + ) (the effect of Spiderman on himself is that his moves are “amazing”)
•elusive thought ~->? mystical
•elusive thought =/= modest thought limited by curiosity
•
“hierarchy as the bad object” ==>
•to escape thinking about your own agency (for example what your name and reputation does? what are the precise responsible consequences of your particular position? your position involves not only the book you write or the argument you make, it involves also your name and reputation, the currency of your gender, your mode of charisma and authority, your affective techniques, your network enacted, and so on.)
•to escape naming the engineering talents and skills that are necessary to assemble (for example the senseLab website)
•to escape epistemological commitment (the question of: **how is my vocabulary crafted for whom?**)
•
it is not clear (but i can maybe guess about it, Manning's commitments are):
•(learning from Haraway:) what they have witnessed [hierarchies? ==commit==> anti-archive]
•(learning from Despret:) which bodies they care for [the autists? ==commit==> elusive creativity]
•(learning from Kenney:) where are their alliances پیوستگیها [with multiculturalism? ==commit==> democracy's logos of difference]
•(learning from Verran:) how their equipments are crafted [by processual metaphysics? ==commit==> infinity]
•(learning from Stewart:) how their rigor is built [by conceptual description? ==commit==> non-habituality]
(because of her immense intelligence she cannot be normal, but that doesn't mean she can prescribe normativity, and issue a command [in terms of the “de-” or “anti-“] or order a claim of reality [in terms of “an-” or “ab-“])
-Manning's “philosophy of event” (=/= multispecies ethnography, i prefer working with the animal idea, because there is no way you can make philosophy out of animal, they always relentlessly contingent and historically materially specific)
-Manning's notion of impersonality ==> ‘people are exchangble’ + ‘the work is what is important and not “you”’ [--> *techniques of impersonality* has being used in sufism and iranian mysticism. i have seen how the special effects of impersonality is used in political projects, making of soldiers, master-disciple relationship, and so on
-look at the cool impersonality of the scientific language (depriving them of their own ideological status)
-earl[...]
(33)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.8[...]concepts’ and not ‘philosophy’:
*philosophy (as practiced by M&M and Alex): claiming the nature of reality
*concept: a figure you make in order to do a limited situated work
“conceptualization = fortification” استحکامات
(to fortify one's own work with concepts ==> settlement)
Manning's affinity with infinitly, more, and multi --> what is their rigor is doing for them? commits them to the nonhabitual. (resisting to name their habits, depriving them of thier habitual labors) [=/= my work on descriptive practices]
-i want to know about their empirical tools that make translation-work visible (==> decomposition), not their conceptual descriptions [=/= textured description with thick details <== i really think the devil is in the details!! }--> art of noticing things]
-i want to know how Manning is compromised into desiring what she is doing. [compromise: being exposed or made liable to danger, suspicion, or disrepute. --the way she told the story of her practice had a difficult sense of success in it, of being cool and correct at every turn, uncompromised. (<-- why is this a turn-off for me?)]
for aesthetic, political, ethical reasons i want Manning to address in their work:
•the question of apparatus --> working within an apparatus of thinking in order to get somewhere in a sustained way. i want them to name their apparatus of literary production. how they engage with the interface, data-set, grammar, and literacy of their reservoir.
•the question of infrastructure --> how they balance the possible and the acceptable, the balance of action, tools, and the built environment
•the question of technology --> how they take apart the tool from its context of involvements and referentialities
•the question of political orientation --> how they have accepted the democratization of knowledge and multiculturalism (the idea of “knowledge for everyone” [--> there is a very thin line between the impulse to democratize and commodify knowledge]; --could multiculturalism be radical capitalism in action?! ...faking diversity to build more diverse companies <-- “lip service”: to just say something but not actually do it)
[--> the hegemony and horror of “different experience” of the so-called different cultures (a form of racism?)]
[multiculturalism =/= trans-species]
[multiculturalism =/= eurasia]
[--> the hegemony and horror of “the completely different” (==>? deskilled society)]
Manning: “in senseLab we work with the people who don't use language, don't write, etc.” (<-- what does that legitimates, conceals, or smuggles? what sorts of hierarchies and ideologies of status emerge out of that?)
-as the philosopher of nonintentionality how did she responded (paranoically?) to our intents when questions where asked?
-as the philosopher of discord how did she responded to disagreement?
[...]
(34)[...notes/midday review.txt]%10.9[...]/>
eurocentric =/= european
•i actually love “european.” i learn from it all the time. how does the world looks like from here.
•but eurocentrism is horrible. they assume an origin and displace it to any place/time --> it happens when a philosopher tries to be anti-western but assuming the same origins of thinking for everybody else and not taking the time to become interested in the (non)thinking forms of noneuropeans
...................................
#workshop on 3D animation all on Nude Descending a Staircase
inspired by minute 16 of “Pink Slime Caesar Shift” (2018)
“there is much more to you that meet the eye.” the motto of transformation in secular capitalism, sang by Jane Fonda and Transformer Optimus Prime
...................................
researcher's questions
in your obscure (elaborate and awkward) meditations, (?can we ask:) what is sacrificed, what is recooked, canibalized, chewed over, and eventually buried? in which economy of pleasure and pain is this mobilized? which harmful (or hedonistic) sensualism is deployed? which hallucinating enfant is writing? which raw material is being transformed into the gold of humanity?
-the question of will: which world is murdered and repopulated by the act of (your) will alone?
a research method of starting a conversation, for apass
*take me to you reader* --> bring me to the subject who you think is reading you, receiving your work in some sort,
...................................
few things (that i hate hysterically) that i think i urgently need (and any artist) to have a very good grasp of (within modern capital economy):
•marketing (--> integrated storytelling)
•fashion (--> manipulative regimes of time and place)
•journalism (explanatory technologies of news and opinion, vox, kurzgesagt, corporate media, immersive journalism, forensic aesthetics)
•politics (=/= political science): achieving and exercising positions of governance that have control over communities
•hollywood/comics (*corporate-produced fiction* --> business-decisions connecting cross-overs; ideas of: customer and merchandise)
i can't shake off the idea that behind every marketing strategy there i a predatory behaviour concealed
***there is nothing quite so humiliating and disempowering as trying to prove the truth***
‘trying to prove the truth’ is the worst position you can find yourself in and it means you are fucked. because you are doing it to empower yourself in the face of a biger power that lies and claims you. the conditions that had let that happen are the question, not the truth of the matter --> that is why i find journalism most of the time useless
impossibility of having an interview with iranians (myself included): [<==? chaotic subject[...]
(38)[...notes/midday review.txt]%11.2[...]thesis with what they call a “double articulation”: first, the raw materials that will make up a new entity must be selected and pre-processed; second, they must be consolidated into a whole with properties of its own. A rock like limestone or sandstone, for example, is first articulated though a process of sedimentation (the slow gathering and sorting of the pebbles that are the component parts of the rock). Then it is articulated a second time as the accumulated sediment is glued together by a process of cementation. They use Hjemslev's terms “content” and “expression” as the names for the two articulations, but this is not meant to suggest that the articulations are in any way linguistic in origin. On the contrary: the sounds, words, and grammatical patterns of a language are materials that accumulate or sediment historically, then they are consolidated by another process, like the standardization of a dialect by a Royal Academy and its official dictionaries, grammars, and rules of pronunciation.
(synthetic =/=? analytic; [a problematic distinction!] the logical particle “un-” in “no unmarried man is married”) (analytic =/=? contingent)
(Kantian?!) ‘a priori and synthetic’ ==> ‘a posteriori analytic’
[singular entities:]
The question of the “individuation of trajectories” is about mathematical models (which to me are the secret of the success of science) but you are correct that it goes beyond that. All entities synthesized historically are individual entities: individual plants and animals; individual species and ecosystems; individual mountains, planets, solar systems, et cetera. Here “individual” means simply “singular or unique,” that is, not a particular member of a general category, but a unique entity that may compose larger individual entities through a relation of part-to-whole, like individual pebbles composing a larger individual rock. A materialist ontology of individual entities is implicit in Deleuze and Guattari and Braudel, so we must give them credit for that, then move on and invent the rest.
..rethinking of the disciplinary boundaries (without using labels such as interdisciplinarity, etc.)
we must take in mind that materialism is good to be enriched, but, materialism is not an ‘a priori’!
in my research in apass on ajayeb عجایب, can be theoretical yet anti-methodological?
...Marx is his interest in the oppressed, that is, his anti-Aristotlianism that allows us to conceptualize the self-organizing power of “matter” without the “meaning” that should overcode it.
Delanda: The political economy of Marx is entirely a priori.
[--Laclau--> essentialist conception of both society and social agency in Marxism <== holistic approache : a “founding totality” (expressed at the surface of social life) which presents itself as an intelligible object of ‘knowledge’ (in Ma[...]
(39)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%12.9[...] history of the anthropologist's gaze
[*]value: what one is ready to die for / what makes life not worth living if one is deprived of it
european history tied to the elaboration of:
•science as value (--✕--> apodictic truth, social construction, etc.)
•law as value (--✕--> power, rhetoric, etc.)
•politics as value (--✕--> [*]social: the name of what is assembled--associated)
•
•
scientific ties
legal ties
political ties
=/= social associates
so difficult to enunciate something religiously because of *the ease with which it is accounted for by other types of explanation* (especially social explanation)
in apass we need to practice saying: “I don't want to take that or this contrast into account any more” (because you want to do something else for a moment)
--> you return to a project --and--> i have been fighting so that (myself and) you **don't become modernist again** (~ that means you engage in the conflict of values that has characterized modernist history)
(with work on ajayeb) i am engaged in the project of ***disentangling the entire set of values that constitutes my rightful inheritance***
(the question of) “what treasure have we inherited? how can we claim it?” --> it is so dangerous to answer those questions alone, without each other ==> selfish identities and origins
(eurocentrism, or the former ‘others’ answering it for everyone, without you)
ecologizing
ecological consciousness =? your entire way of life must be modified or else you will disappear as a civilization
(not being the heir of) emancipatory tradition
(if) modernism is Promethean, then green bio economy and clean technology is Promethean even more
(the bad idea of and hype of) technological solution to ecological crises
*renewing everything here and now* is first of all a religious passion
?@Leo
-what modernism did to science is worse than what it did to religion
it deprived it of its energy, restricting it, to *mere furniture of the soul* [--> Iron Man's idea of technology-human relation]
modernism's politicization of science
speaking of science scientifically ==> a scientific ‘worldview’ is deployed
speaking of religion religiously ==> a vague assemblage of pious moral vacuities is taken as an ‘alternative worldview’
}--> they both accept an* unscientific science* and an *irreligious religion*
Latour (quickly dissolving nonsense that accrues as one opposes ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’):
•science = reference chain (what allow access to the far away) [nothing is out of the reach of reference chain]
•religion = presence (what allow access to the near)
[...]
(40)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.6[...]watch maker* : a blind cause acting from behind and reaching the optimum haphazardly
(has substituted the ‘mere transportation of indisputable necessities’ for *the risks taken by individual organisms to perpetuate, sustain, and reproduce themselves*)
&
*the widespread ideology of the *intelligent designer* :an intelligence dragging organisms towards the optimum by some predefined plans
}--> both are grounded in the *ideology of making and mechanism* ==>
•organisms are erased as individual actors
•organisms are transformed into the carriers if indisputable necessities
--> both tried to save individual organims from their apparent meaninglessness by adding to them an overarching narrative recited by an otherworldly divinity
(‘necessities’ are often imported)
(Assmans's) *mosaic division*
(=/= a sort of relaxed attitude towards truth)
divisions ahad never beed asked before whether or not they were the “true” ones. they could be added to one another, translated into one another, piled on top of one another for additional safety --✕--> *contesting the claims to existence of all divinities but one*
==> a connection between the question (irrelevant until then) of worship and a question of an absolute (=/= relative) difference between true and false
[*]iconoclast: “if they are made, then they cannot be real”
monotheism ==allowed==> humans to escape from a too close adhesion چسبنده to the natural world
Moses's project ==> we have exctracted ourselves from the world
(Assmans:) without the transcendence of monotheism we would be left with the mere immanence of the natural world *** [--> the problem of transcendence/immanence as only options of relatedness]
(a bad story:) secular narratives that: the stark immanence of the natural world will save us from an escapist adherence to the transcendent world of beyond [--✕--> my Zolmat text is was about the problematization of that view (transcendent world of beyond) in Islamicated ecological consciousness in ajayeb]
****to move from ideology to recognition**** (of the many different contrasts we have lived by without granting them enough room)
the drab and entirly mythical drama of light overcoming darkness
religious traditio operates by its abilities of two transformation:
1. a radical transformation of the far away into the close and the proximate [#Zolmat] (dead is alive)
2. a positive view of all artificial transformations (=/= tendencyo conserve what it is)
**what happens if religion is allowed to weave its highly specific form of transcendence (salvation?) into the fabric of the other two modes of existence: reproduction and reference?
Leo's dream (and also deep sin): the urge radically to transform *that which is given* into *tha[...]
(41)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%13.8[...]s plus their colonies of persistent symbionts”
(Gilbert, Sapp, and Tauber 326; cited by Kenney)
(thinking with holobionts) the immune system is re-cast not as “defensive weaponry” but as a “socializing and unifying force” [via Kenney] --> “to obey the immune system is to become a citizen of the holobiont”
[this new developement of biological individuality (entangled identities at the heart of life mechanisms) in biological sciences of 21st century requires a new imaginative framework and new forms of curiosity equally relevant to natural sciences and artists]
(ajayeb-e gaz) عجایب گاز
co-existence of gasses
planet =/= terrestrial planet
(ajayeb-e graphs) psychotic tree-structure of giant databases, in trans-ing and lines of trans-affecting
-my ajayeb art is going to be the kind that depend on the machine----competent digital
-exploring the iterative and fractal quality of sentences in my digital graph-makings
-attending to the interruptions of syntactical commitments
partial connections (of distinct entities) ~= analogy [analogy allows one part contaminate systematically another part, and vice versa]
-coerced belief
the question of binaries: how we are who we are in relentless relationalities with other entities. in shaping and being shaped by objects, and subject/object is only convenient partial-good-enough for the moment --> **sorting operations** (kPRA0W1kECg), but they are not good descriptions beyond that.
#on Companion Manifesto
(Haraway's) *cyborg*: the “lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints.” --to--> a much bigger queer family of *companion species* : becoming-with --> the co-constitutive interpenetration of humans and their others (machines, animals, and the environment).
-Haraway is going from ‘rage’ to ‘love’
“historically challenged people” (Schimpfwort? فحش)
half-trained arguments
embodied cross-species sociality
I am trying to inhabit ajayeb critically; neither in celebration nor condemnation (like my sister asked)
what is my context? isis, tech-sci, art, world-wars, stories, terror,
the figures of ajayeb that i am cultivating, do they “more fruitfully inform livable politics and ontologies in current life worlds”?
ajayeb's species bring together human and nonhuman, organic and technological, history and myth, freedom and structure, state and subject, ...
*concrete:
◦a concrescence (growth by assimilation, nemov moshtarek نمو مشترک) of prehensions (seizing, perception but not necessarily cognition) of prehensions (graspings, chang zadan چنگ زدن)
◦an actual occasion
=> be[...]
(42)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%15.3[...]hile حیله, makr مکر, neyrang نیرنگ) --> my tool in work on ajayeb? -//-[مکر زنان ,گربه نره و روباه مکار, minorities associated with this accent: women, animals, machines,] [ruse in Kelile Demne کلیله و دمنه]
ruse: a set of small, mostly unconscious tactics by which workers resist capitalist systems (writing love letters on company's time, factory workers who takes a scrap of fabric home for his children to play with, etc.)
-“[h]ow to subvert the laws of the “scientific factory” through gift-giving, solidarity, and free exchange even when bosses and colleagues will not turn a blind eye” (de Certeau)
(how to?) collectively crafting critiques, commitments, stories, and actions (in the density and composition of ajayeb's atmospheres)
-feeling out their “rhythms, valences, moods, sensations, tempos” (Stewart)
-“real and virtual worlds, future and past worlds, fictional and theoretical worlds, always happening and happening and happening” (Kenney)
talking is also thinking
speculative valences (zarfiat ظرفیت) of wonder --> (through wonder, which) response-abilities are activated (?)
ajayeb is crafted responsive stories about life --> question of responsibility --> what kind of responsibilities are activated in the SF worlding (including reading it now) of ajayeb?
(work on ajayeb is about a practice of [writing] history as) *worlding the past*, to take the alterity of the past seriously and to be moved by textual encounter
-how can we not be subsumed by the sameness of the here-and-now? (collapsing of difference into sameness)
(my work on ajayeb is about) learning to tell better stories about the past*
*writing ~= (wonder:) a careful attention to differences in the practice of worlding the past. (demanding like a cat walking on our keyboard, interrupting you [Kenney])
(digital reading practices of) data mining =/= reading for the reactions of an implicit reader --> what the scholar of ajayeb (in the medieval) might have felt?
ajayebnameh is grounded in the history and materiality of scientific practices:
“Nature is neither knowable ...nor unknowable ...Nature is that about which ‘relevant knowledge’ may be produced. If we pay due attention to it, we can learn, discern relations, and multiply entities and ratios.” (Stengers 2011)
eliminativism: the belief that one story or one set of practices (usually called rational or scientific) can explain nature.
a materialist understanding of ajayeb demands an interpretive adventure of how, with matter (in Stengersian way), we get sensitivity, life, memory, consciousness, passions and thought... =/= inert or mechanistic notion of matter
which metaphors stage nature as “witty agent and actor”?
speculative commitment --> learn ho[...]
(43)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%16.4[...]/>
mother who is magnanimous (großmütig) toward the little one
(-subject-[-) wonder {-]-desire-(-} world )
(for Descartes:) object <== alchemy of the subject's passion
places in brain that are (soft and) tender ---> not yet hardened by past impressions
***[for me the] (appearance of something or someone) new modifies the movement (of spirits in an unexpected manner) --> when we are faithful to the perpetual newness of the self, the other, the world --> faithful to becoming ***
Irigaray: *wonder* = passion of encounter (between the most material and the most metaphysical)
wonder:
•passion (of already born) --✕--> reenveloped in love
•touched and moves toward and within the attraction --✕--> nostalgia for the first dwelling
•passion of first encounter --✕--> repetition
[Haraway reading Derrida: on killing,]
(Derrida understood that this structure, this) logic of sacrifice and this exclusive possession of the capacity for response, is what produces the Animal
the death-defying arrogance of ascribing such wondrous positivities to the Human
(Derrida)"The question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what ‘respond’ means. And how to distinguish a response from a reaction.”
the mistake of forgetting the ecologies of all mortal beings, who live in and through the use of one another's bodies
[this is against ] The naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism.
multispecies contingency
In the idiom of labor, animals are working subjects, not just worked objects.
the capacity to respond and to recognize response
We can never do without technique, without calculation, without reasons, but these practices will never take us into that kind of open where multispecies responsibility is at stake.
Engage them [the dogs] as mindful bodies, in relationships of response?
the practical labor of nonmimetic sharing(?)
[we make ‘knowing’. knowing is always a practice of making, and always embodied. the idea that thinking involves disembodiment of the knowing organ is just insane.]
“articulating bodies to other bodies” ----> disarticulating bodies to rearticulate other bodies
entangled assemblages of relatings knotted at many scales and times with other assemblages, organic and not
...................................
ajayeb is system imagination
...................................
[Naveeda Khan]
Perhaps the question could be posed as, how do we come to grips with the universal, the supra-historical, or even the cosmos within our global [...]
(44)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.2[...]ionate crafts. ajayeb's compelling mystery demands (from me) an unorthodox and omnivorous approach (hame-chiz-khar همه چیز خوار).
اما راویان اخبار و ناقلان آثار و طوطیان شکرشکن شیرین گفتار و خوشه چینان خرمن سخن دانی و صرافان سر بازار معانی و چابک سواران میدان دانش توسن خوش خرام سخن را بدینگونه به جولان در آورده اند که ...
•Mirabile dictu... (miraculous to say...)
towards Despret's talking parrots
parrots (shekar-shekan) (and philosophers) really like to control the exchange, to keep control of a conversation : their refusal to let another individual choose the topic of conversation
***(parrots have) a pragmatic rather than a referential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control
*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)
“as if” has to do with misunderstanding
“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)
(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act
keep your end up
[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it
how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?
[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making th[...]
(45)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.9[...]eferential conception of language
[am i also referential (=/= pragmatic) in my conception of language?]--> to teach a being to speak presupposes not only a tolerance of but also *a profound interest in misunderstanding* (this ‘profound interest in misunderstanding’ is precisely both cognitive and political aspect of what I am trying to bring forth) ~-> (how language-learning with animals can help us learn) restating and inverting the question of control
*exchange can only be achieved when there is “a continous reprisal of translations and betrayals of meaning”* ==> understanding itself is compromised
[*]ajayeb: a non-stop betrayal of translations (of perspectives) and continuous redressal of meanings (of things)
“as if” has to do with misunderstanding
“meanings are constructed in a constant movement of ‘attunement,’ which makes them emerge.”
(Despret, animal breeding practices)
(my work on ajayeb is also much about) *language-learning* [...]in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act
keep your end up
[*]type: identifying language use with modes of existence [Wittgenstein's mistake] (maybe useful to reanimate the question of ‘becoming’ for Marialena)
the mode of existence of lions is subordinated to that of an essence “lioness,” guaranteed by the identity of the species and the stability of its repertoire of behaviour ==> a burdensome conception of the naturalness of animals
***the question is not what ‘is’ a lion, but “how does one become a lion,” not only in lion community and species, but also in the work of scientists, constructing what it is to be a lion.
--> this is about becoming: of that of which the animal is rendered capable by the apparatuses that interrogate it
how can what I say about lions or baboons (or oceans or jinns) be authorized by them?
[*]we: constituted by the assemblage of different (animal-, nonhuman-, machine-, human-)beings equipped with an apparatus aimed at making them talk well --{by taking an interest in what constitutes the appropriateness of a material apparatus that transforms those it interrogates}--> fully agreeing to situate oneself in a regime of transformations and accomplishments =={that mingle with and give form to}==> *desires*
-researcher's desire is one the modes of their efficacity
-“our” problems are not a priori
a “we”:
+ “know full well”
+ “are different”
+ “who work”
rhetorics of pronouns, acts of crude generalizations: something is being specified and something generalized. [@Xiri's “I am the one who... your...” the specificity and generality of “I” and of “you” in her text. how the difference of “you” and “I” was envisaged in her poem?-->{I, the effected by =/= you, the haver} how can this I/you impose itself not a[...]
(46)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%17.9[...]am understanding it using Barad's words) =/= the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real
-a contestation of the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies
-questions of correspondence between description and reality --> questions of ontology, materiality, and agency. (the things i am busy with in apass)
-(discursive dimensions include) questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power
% Austin's speech acts, relationships between saying and doing --> Derrida's poststructuralist amendments --> Butler (with Foucault's understanding of the productive effects of regulatory power) in theorizing the notion of identity performativity {@Xiri, we understand gender not as a thing or a set of free-floating attributes, not as an essence--but rather as a “doing”: “gender is itself a kind of becoming or activity ... gender ought not to be conceived as a noun or a substantial thing or a static cultural marker, but rather as an incessant and repeated action of some sort” --> with this regard what questions should Xiri ask her subjects?}
{ practice of representation =/= represented entity }--> this “=/=” is ontological ==> question of accuracy (of representation) --> scientific knowledge objectivity
focus on the nature & production of scientific knowledge (--> mediates our access to the material world) --(science-studies)--> dynamics of the actual practice of science }--> ongoing patterns of situated activity
-*origins of “appearance”*-
...with Democritus's atomic theory emerges the possibility of a gap between representation and presented. (the idea that something “appears”)
-Democritus:
•atomism (-->? cornerstone of modern science)
•democracy (-->? cornerstone of modern politics)
}--> the idea that the world is composed of individuals with separately attributable properties**** (==> Newtonian physics of independent objects, @Heike)
*Newtonian framework --> meaphysics of individualism
1- that the world is composed of individual objects with individually determinate boundaries and properties whose well-defined values can be represented by abstract universal concepts that have determinate meanings independent of the specifices of practice (--this is exactly what Marialena should be carefull about: abstract univerality of ‘language,’ and the independency of her ‘recorder’)
2- that measurement involves continuous determinable interactions such as the values of the properties obtained can properly be assigned to the premeasurement properties of objects separate from the agencies of observation
(*)concept: specific material arrangements, concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement
(is Luisa's “wholesomeness” also about a feeling for inseparability?)
[...]
(47)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.4[...]rance of (originating) consciousness of a unified subject
(*)discursive practices: specific material (re)configurings of the world ==> local determinations of boundaries, properties, and meanings are differentially enacted
(*)meaning: ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility (=/= a property of individual/groups of words)
**local causal structures --> one component {effect} is marked by another component {cause} (in their ‘differential articulation’ [~= intelligibility]) }--> in science this is called “measurement”
(question at Juan's work on clay:) (what could challenge?) the representationalism's construal of matter as a passive blank site awaiting the active inscription of culture (<~=> the relationship between materiality and discourse positioned as one absolute exteriority) ~~--> Butler's incomplete reworking of “causality” ==> her (anthropocentric, ensan ashrafe makhlughat انسان اشرف مخلوقات) theory of materiality is limited to an account of the materialization of human body --> the construction of the contours of the human body
(Butler: performativity understood as iterative citationality)
(intelligibility is not always a human-based affair)
(question of ‘agency’ and ‘causality’ at Sana and Hoda:) what possibilities exist (for agency) for intervening in the world of becoming?
@Hoda: there is no geometrical relation of absolute exteriority between (nor an idealistic collapse of) a “causal apparatus” and a “body effected” ----> ****an ongoing topological dynamics that enfolds the spacetime manifold upon itself**** <== apparatuses of bodily production are also part of the phenomena they produce
}--> **future is radically open at every turn** (Barad) [@Hoda --> her notion of overdetermination (جبر jabr?) --> what if she use “constraint” instead of “determinist”? esrar/ezterar ]--> enactment of a causal structure : particular possibilities for acting existssibilities for acting exist at every moment
-a term for Hoda: “causally deterministic power structures”
(*)agency: changes in the apparatuses of bodily production***
enactment of iterative changes to particular practices through the dynamics of intra-activity
(*)objectivity: being accountable to marks on bodies (=/= exteriority)
agential separability ==> objectivity
(Barad, Haraway, Kirby, Rouse, Bohr:) there is no such (“knower”) exterior observational point
@Laleh: we are not observers outside the world, not simply located at particular places ‘in’ the world (--> positionality)
(question at Aela:) the geometry of absolute interiority --> reduction of effect to its cause, nature ontologically distinct from culture
(that there is no preexistent nature)
(Aela's interest in?) spatiality: (characteristics of enclosures <-- concerned with shapes and sizes) ‘geometry’ =/= ‘topology’ (investigates [...]
(48)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%18.6[...]ransformations
•storytelling: mobilizing different kinds of mental resources and literacies
•performance: what it would be to know together
•sociality: that which joins categorically separate mode of agencies
•
#my findings/questions, so far:
•animal subjectivity ~=? human imagination
•bestiary ~=? affect + episteme
•medieval bestiaries: world ~= phenomena
•definition ~=? ontological choreography ==> worlds are created
•metaphores of self ~-> body image ~=? image of world
•list ~=? reason
•
I found myself oriented towards a kind of ‘multispecies ethnography’: a new way of writing and mode of research in which creatures previously appearing on the margins of interest--as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols (for mystic projects)--have been pressed into the foreground of interest.
(what are my) symbolic + symbiotic attachments
what/who is coughing, counting, working, communicating sited between divine and bestial in ajayeb?
-is my ajayeb a (dead/alive) multispecies art project? studying Indo-Arab-Iranian illuminated manuscripts as to be reading a paper in ecology or molecular biology or art.
unlike Alex Arteaga's question of “inevitable altruism” {started from “conscious human subjects” and ended there} (in his talk 30.05.2017 apass,) I would insist on giving an account of the metaphors of ‘self’ in the history of body and mind (that matters to ‘you’) [my findings of self: maginc lantern, iceberg's tip (==> unconsciousness), wasteland/wilderness, greedy beast within, ... {--> these are all (classical) basis for “higher” cognitive capacities}] [also I am against Alex's notion of “destablizing stabilities as the task of artistic research.” I choose to refuse to put what is in flux against what is stable or attempting to stabilize. (I am in alignment with Katie King sharpening for me that) we constantly share our stage, settings, performances, sensoria, reenactments among agencies and species, creating varying stabilities, some fragile, some robust]
*account--synonymous with: description, information, list, reason, record, statement, story, sum, tale
-a contractual relationship
-giving an itemized account of recent transactions and resulting balance (of your metaphors = material-discursive apparatuses that are materializing your found empirical objects)
-accountability is always also about remaking those relations that produced your objects
-detailed explanation of money held in trust, to count, enumerate* -->{telling =? enumerating}
counting your senses
*accountability is about your ‘import’ functions (like in a programming language when you import a library of functions)
--> count: an agent of sorting that separates units or groups of a collection --> list, listed --> to have importance and worth ~-> country ---{? unexpected countries}<[...]
(49)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%19.5[...]full of angles** (--> is that why i am becoming increasingly pedagogic?)
(by distinguishing between “did/how it work for you” and “did/how it work for the artist” -->) *internal communication =/= external communication* [what goes on inside the text on the level of fictional mediation is not to be confused with the non-fictional realm inhabited by the reader nor by the author]
(we are facing the right way -->) *aligned =/= alienated* (<-- we are out of line with an affective economy)
***(then how to) share an orientation [, also refuse to share an orientation toward certain things]
[an aesthetic question which is moral. how two of my teachers, Julia and Phil, did this?]
to get along =? to share direction
politics of good feelings
(slide between) affective and moral economies
*how feelings participate in making things (good) <--✕--> germanicity
how bodies turn toward things
[*]affect-->{
•messiness of the experiential
•unfolding of bodies into the worlds
•drama of contingency
“hap” -->{
•happening --> chance
•happiness --> stickiness
}--> contingency of what happens as something good --> *worldy question of happenings*
=/= (21st century) hard work, Aufgabe, happiness as an effect of what you do
happiness is
•intentional: directed toward objects --> phenomenological sense
•affective: contanct with objects
happiness puts us into intimate contact with things, [...] even if that something does not present itself as an object of consciousness (Ahmed) --> *coming and going of objects*
“to be affected by something is to evaluate that thing”
#my Rigs? simulate a course of action of description
•near the object?
•near sphere (<== happiness)
•core sphere
•orientation
--> pr--> practical action
•course of action
we come to have our likes, which might even establish what we are like. the bodily horizon could be redescribed as a horizon of likes. to have our likes means *certain things are gathered around us*
[what about “beyond”? =/= near-sphere Zolmat]
[*]orientation: registers the proximity of objects as well as shape what is proximate to the body
(Robin:) happiness does not have an object
(Freud:) anxiety does not have an object
=/= (Ahmed:) correspondence between objects and feelings is not any simple ~~--> proximity, “unattributed happiness”
[...] <-- ( us )"subject” --> ( ♥ )"object”
things --move--> us --make--> things ~~> ...
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)
what it means for happ[...]
(50)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.5[...] />
@Arjang, how happiness is displaced by the how of its arrival
(happiness can often recede or become anxious, when the feeling becomes an object of thought)
what it means for happiness to be thought in these terms (as an end for its own sake)
what it means for apparatus to be thought in these terms (of Agamben)
what it means for ocean to be thought in these terms (of Marialena)
in Islam, how does the good life get imagined through the proximity of objects?
[*]taste: “manifest preferences”: “practical affirmation of an inevitable difference” (Bourdieu)
history becomes second-nature ==> affects become literal ==> (we assume we experience delight because) “it” is delightful
(often with animals) the affective differentiation ==(basis of)==> (an essentially) moral economy
cheerfulness is the most communicative of emotions (♥ Ahmed)
(Ahmed's take on) loving (happily): knowing the peculiarity of a loved other's likes and dislikes, an intimacy with what the other likes and is given --> on conditions that such likes do not take us outside a *shared horizon*
***who/what introduces what feelings to whom?***
‘question of power' = do you go along with it?
sometimes the Iranian orientation is toward maximal comfort of the others
(maintaining) ‘comfort' = (your or some) bodies “go along with it”
bond-->{ affect ==> we search for an object }
...certain objects already circulate as socila goods before we “happen” upon them --> we do not just find happy objects anywhere (--> how happy objects are found in Tasavof? located, lost, transported, sold, advertised, criticized, etc.) *happy objects point us somewhere, a “where” from which we expect so much (--> happy objects of Tasavof [or HOT] {Qur'an, khezr, woman, poetry, .../ قرآن / خضر / زن / شعر}-->their sense of values, practice, styles, and aspirations; where do they point Iranians? beyond, Zolmat, animal, shadow, everyday objects, etc. what are the feelings involving the “points” of alignment wuth these objects?) ~~--> relocation of expectations:
•from beyond to earth
•from global to local
•from future to now
•
in situations where feelings are shared or are in common (which is usually the case in the environments that I am involved with,) how do I usually play a role? ==> (re)location of responsibility
self-exclusion
to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”
(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.
idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance
Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom ([...]
(51)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.6[...]/>
self-exclusion
to make Iran or India or Germany happy “in bed”
(@Sina) *what ever there is in the hear and now, it does not mean you do not have to rebel or not get into trouble.
idiosyncratic likes (or dislikes) =/= jouissance
Ahmed reading many narratives of freedom, in which an indifference is “directed” as the apparent gift of freedom (, father becomes indifferent to what her daughter does as long as it makes her happy) --> the unhappy objects of difference
fantasies of proximity (in sense8 TV series) --> if only we could be closer, we would be as one
the happiness of the characters of sense8 is the promise of “the one”
...................................
how to learn to read the discursive practices of being of ajayeb? the ways each being proposes its own (or another's) changing geometry and topology, their boundary-drawing practices, their differential productions, and how each being makes sense of its world
-(the authors and beings of ajayeb,) what are their capacity to discern the reality of their (relational) nature?
-how their determinate position (in their relational nature) is or may be (usefully) (con)figured as *specific connectivity*? [the question of specific connectivites of ajayeb]--> this requires from me poetics: diffractive descriptive acts
-what are the ajayeb's beings and mine intertwined practices of knowing and being?
the agential cut of the brittlestar is a survival kit: the arm is “cut” and becomes part of the other (predator)
Barad is reading the brittlestar to rework (challenge conventional conceptions of) her discipline's ontologies and boundaries =/= scientist's usual frame of application and amusement of “discovery” that feeds technological advancement, “the excitement and romantic overtones that inevitably accompany the story of the scientist as explorer breaking into new frontiers” (Barad)
(embodiment-->) *bodies are not situated in the world. They are ‘of’ the world (in its dynamic specificity)* (Barad) (@Femke)
[*]objectivity
=/= occupying a determinate position in a given environment
=/= occupying a particular coordinates in space and time, in culture, and in history
=/= seeing from somewhere [=/= “objectivism” (view from nowhere) or “everywhere” (relativism)]
=/=
(like Barad's brittlestars) which ajayeb's being's bodily dynamism resists (or constructs) the familiar notion that space is preexisting container:
•space: a stage on which actors take their place
•time: the mere uniform ticking of clock
(how ajayeb's worlding is similar or different than the familiar notion of Shakespeare's “world is a stage...”?)
[Barad, poet of matter, time and space:] “Matter does not move in space and time. Matter materializes and dynamically enfolds dif[...]
(52)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%20.7[...] as a theoretical discourse on the nature of reality =/= an interesting interpretation of it)--> to take seriously the indigenous metaphysics of multinaturalism [or ajayeb] as a philosophical intervention : to trace out its effects on [our] concepts
multiculturalism: a single objective universe and many cultural interpretations of it
multinaturalism: multiple universes and a single mode of interpretation (Viveiros de Castro)
==> perspective =/= a different “point of view” on (the same way of knowing or seeing) qualitatively different worlds }-->* situated knowledges, #elephant parable
no: no --> de-historicizing effects of imposing psycho-cognitive shamanic models of art
no --> purely cognitive significance (of...)
*miniature: a ritual activity, a grave offering, a sympathetic magic, a capture of the power of the original
--> common stories about how miniatures can be interpreted in archaeology
(ontological research approach)_
scale is utterly important because “careful attention to alternative ontologies of scale introduces new interoretive possibilities for...” (Alberti)
*ontology: the sense of a real, solid world
for example the question of “the substance of the world”, everyone has answered that already (reiterating that which makes sense) ==> concept of real --(invent)--> *cosmology (<-- this is not a relativizing gesture) ==(force)==> production of new concepts and materialities
@Eszter: importance of asking the right questions: unless we do, the answers make no difference (Grosz)
scopes and scales ()--> “dimensionally manifold weave of knowledge worlds” (Haraway + Katie) are at stake in:
•science display
•TV series
•ajayeb
•pet video
•emergent transdisciplinary scholarship
•transmedia commercial apparatuses
•
*with reading/enacting ajayeb what is at stake is the “effectivities in realizing knowledge stories” --> epistemological affects
[*]scale
•operates through intensity and not size
•emergent and performative (Jones), (juxtapositions of) scales ==> “interesting psychological and phenomenological effects”
•a flat approach to scale does not separate the social and material, or the micro from the macro ==> [*]size: (emerges as a possibility, as) one means of enacting the potential of another scale; accidental effect of intensity: materialization of intensity and excess ==> humanity***
•is about intensity and excess --> potential for visibility/invisibility and proximity to the original condition of undifferentiated, intensive difference (~=? hayula; perfect formless form)***; intensive different “h” of hayula هیولا...
◦ه
◦ه
◦ه
◦ه
Alberti argues for a form of ontological symmetry b[...]
(53)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%22.4[...]] --> a theoretical bomb =/= analogies based on ethnographic content
spirits experienced as diminutive yet brilliantly decorated or huge and grotesque
the more intense ==> the more body it is
(the promise of thinking through) [*]thing: a nonspecified ontological category that can be “filled” through ethnographic observation that is designed to allow ontological alterity to inform its content
recursive anthropology --> alterity: a function of the divergence between ethnographic materials and the assumptions the analyst brings to them
(if) ontology: what is ==> alterity: part of what others say ‘what is’ that does not make sense to us
(the danger of) a new metaontological orthodoxy becoming a immutable metaphysic
archeological alterity: things that do not make sense ontologically (escape traditional frameworks)
archeology's new kind of reflexivity
◾openness
•wonder: an intentional naivete, naive empiricism (==> sustain altering + enabling meaning, to be besieged & committed to ---> go to Cinderella =/= moving beyond)
•emphasis on descriptive =/= theoretical
•attentiveness to our embodied responses
(a question of critical ontology in archeology -->) how are we to mobilize & manifest (describe & transform) the new past from things? [<-- my question in my research on ajayeb]
•how i am subjectively involved in the past we investigate
•how i am objectively part of those pasts
the all encompassing (nonlinear) descriptive writings of ancient and antiquarian travelers --> what is encountered imposes itself ==force==> a choice ==> description
kinetic activity + the experience of being in the field
aesthetic attentiveness of bestiaries
pragmatic use of the word ontology in archeology --signal--> the potential world-shifting nature of what is being studied
to be ontological = entirety of the analytical apparatus and what is being studied should be included in the analysis
(caught up in the process:) the object of study + analytical scaffolding + method + analyst
the degree to which an approach is willing to do ontology to itself (investigate its own ontological assumptions)
metaphysical archeology + ontological anthropology --> perspective on reality
(assign things to preexisting conceptual structures =/=) looking for ways things can have an impact on your thinking, concepts, ontology ==> unlocking what is most “of the past” about things
...................................
Alberti
Ingold
correspondence: (a pre-conceptual practice -->) epistemological intimacy in the practices of art, science, and anthropology
•a way to understand one's own research pr[...]
(54)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.3[...]*]craft: slow and intimate knowledgeable work (of how we get along with the world; that cultivates in oneself the skill for discerning the *meanings that are already there*) --> ontological paring of conceptual language & physical condition
==> meaning and concepts are drawn out of objects (not given to them)
•Haraway --> companion species = biologist + creatures
•Barad --> concepts are literally embodied by the differing physical apparatuses
•
(we need more) art: careful accumulation of skills
21st century historiographic trends in art
artists increasingly *deploy simulacra of archeological practices and motifs* in their work
art practiced as craft (but not all the time) ==allow==> knowledge grow from the insight of being in the folding of life [of infantile grandious fantasy, as well] ~=? anthropology
producing contemporary ruins to draw attention to *the work of the present in the production of the past*
*artists take archeology as muse*
(through borrowing from archeology artists)
•create a kind of intellectual framing
•incorporate archival research
•themes of memory and entropy
•question of absence
•
prosaic nature of archeological research
production of the finds
the way Dion distorts archeological work (allegorizing archeological practice) --Alberti-->
•consequence of sleight of hand
•he is dibbling at, performing being an archeologist
•‘play at’ archeology
=/= Simon Callery
Alberti > Russell
transform archeology from metaphor to allegory --play--> archeology-as-aesthetics through performance [--> risk of undermining and reinforcing art as a subjective practice concerned with only aesthetics and affective]
craft: a model for careful practices and knowing the world =/= artwork: a model for how to break out of disciplinary frames and how to think of the ontology of archeological things [--> what Sennett calls epistemic breaking]
questions for the art:
•what effect is produced?
•how does this effect wrench from its materiality what has not been perceived or sensed before?
--> for archeology same question, from the material that remain from the past in the present
(the traditional task of art:)
•defamiliarization: to estrange our common consciousness and sensations of the world
•place of immanence: to project the coming of something materially new that is latent in our current reality. to *treat facts as events* that are about to come into being
•art is non-conceptual : impacting the nervous system without conceptual mediation --> sensations are monumentalized in the artwork for the future
•
...to treat the material of the pas[...]
(55)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.5[...] materialism
(culture: modern name for Spirit)
integration =/= *interspecific metamorphosis fact of nature* that understands bodies as inherent transformabilities, bodies as the great differentiators
integration cosmology --presume--> singular distinctiveness of minds ==> solipsism[= potentially absolute singularity of minds ==> fear that we will not recognize ourselves in our “own kind”; solipsism: ‘natural similarity of bodies =/=> a real community of spirit'] --multiculturalism--> spiritual: the locus of difference ==> theme of spiritual conversion
=/= bodily metamorphosis
(a traditional problem in the West:)
*how to connect and universalize*
individual substances are given, while relations have to be made
=/=
(Amerindian problem, and problem of ajayeb:)
*how to separate and particularize*
relations are given, while substances must be defined
transformation ==> nature <=/= creation
transference ==> culture <=/= invention
*culture = acculturation*
*exchange = transformation of a prior exchange event*
*to act = to response*
poiesis (creation/production/invention model of action ==> objectification: question of ‘documentation’ in art) =/= praxis (transformation/exchange/transfer model of action ==> subjectification: question of ‘what is/has changed?’)
story of “we had to steal fire from a divine father”
(god forbid the origin of our abilities be animal or queer)
mythology: a discourse on the given, the innate
myth: that which must be taken for granted
affinity and alliance --> exchange (amerindian)
parenthood --> creation/production (modern western)
-the “exchange” (=/= “parenthood”) that Viveiros de Castro talks about fits seamlessly with capitalism's free exchange of knowledge
warrior/shaman/artist --> conductors of perspectives
relative
relational
enmity: full-blown social relationship, extreme exchange
schema of difference
(Amazonian cosmology:) generic attributive proposition = cannibal proposition
==> self: gift of the other (=/= hylomorphism: an active usually exclusively human subject confronts an inert and naturalized object)
**cosmology (~ the hyphen between nature and society is social) =/= naturalism (~ relations between society and nature are natural)**
we are body-objects in ecological interaction with other body-forces
-question for Viveiros de Castro: what would be then the “exchange” between Amerindian perspectivism and Western naturalism? (not only that “we” should learn from Amerindian perspectivism but) what they can learn from us?
European ontology: unextended thought and extended matter (--> Iron Man)
[...]
(56)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%23.8[...]ir action [”?!” --> i am very conscious (and suspicious) about that which i feel that i don't understand --> what kind of nununderstander is at work here?]
Newton imported “milieu” into biology
action of an environment
[material racism -->?] (a fluid) strictly defined by its physical properties
•(Lamarck [taking from Newton the *physico-mathematical model of explanation*]:) environment/milieu: set of actions exerted on the living being from outside, “influencing circumstances”
physico-mathematical model of explanation (of living/dead beings) =/=? psycho-material model of explanation
(what would Machiavelli think of mileu?)
animal ethology, habits of animals describable as distinctive and specific characteristics
epistemology: **historical psychology of knowledge**
[*]historicity: should the fact that two or several leading ideas are combined at a given moment in a single theory be interpreted as the sign that (although they may seem to be quite different when subject of analysis) they ultimately have a common origin whose meaning and often even existence are forgotten when they are considered separately?
(Canguilhem beautifully brings the question of epistemology into his terms)
the *origin* ==commands==> the *meaning* ==commands==> the *use*
Comte's general biological theory of the environment
Comte employing a neologism --> “the fluid in which a body is immersed” (--confirming--> the mechanical origin of the notion,) “the total set of external circumstances necessary for the existence of every organism” [=/= Barad's intra-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
[...]
(58)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%25.7[...]abolism through photosynthesis
assumptions of human constancy --> autocratic military ideology =/= historically webbed interspecies dependence -=> a different cultural research trajectory
(to understand more about) domestication: web of entanglements
=/= neoliberal hard-line [human =/= wild] understanding of “domestication = human control” (ignoring that such relations might change humans too, ignoring the complex relations of interdependency) <== ideological commitment to human mastery (--> Sana's political commitment to liberalism) }==> (fantasies of) *the wild species self-making* =/= fantasies of control
==> life imprisonment and genetic standardization of domestic animals, wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multispecies landscape are destroyed
i want Sana to become a researcher able to know something more about the cultural construction of gender, species, and binds--rather than “freeing” women from their gender, dogs from humans, slaves from masters--which will lead only to the constitution of autocratic liberalism made in the image of human free will and guardianship, another master program...
!?how can i say “let's stay in the prison and study” ...well, maybe i can't
#harem, the question of women confinement (usually at the center of a beautiful dream of order and plenty)
-how can i start and cultivate affection and appreciation for interspecies relations in Tehran today? (--> ways and methods)
-how with my chaotic and extremist iranian freedom-fighter friends we could become allies? (--> network)
-what is my evidences, examples, samples of the lived experience in Tehran? (--> data, stories that stick)
a dichotomy of analysis:
•species found inside human body --> discourse of cohabitation and interdependency
•species found outside human body --> discourse of human impact, management, and control
Engels's just-so story of private property: origin of property was in herds ==> male control of reproduction in human families
cereal domesticated human
in the near east a shift towards gathering multiple small-grain grasses is associated with the 10000 years before domestication
focus on landscape --to--> focus on crops
across Eurasia the rise of state (and their specialised civilization) is associated with the spread of intensive cereal agriculture
(Tsing > Connor)
a political configuration:
states encouraged sedentary, stable farms, family-based households, and guaranteed the forms of family property and inheritance (that drew lines within and between families) ==> both women and grain confined and managed to maximise fertility
--Engels--> interspecies love affair
it was in the 19th century that standardization became itself the “modern standard”
[*]plantation: orde[...]
(59)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.4[...]of the internal world* --> who is busy with this? (this will define the fate of animal subjectivity)
*view from nowhere*: that their particular viewpoint is not part of the common reality (--✕--> sociology of science)
X is Y
“is”: converge, a technique of modeling (~~> sync)
X, Y: two referential paths
we know how X is supposed to be true
people are no told at an early age that *all matter is really energy* (--> capitalist physicalism. then what you say abnout ‘energy’ is saying something about the nature of reality)
physicalism: the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event
someone with instinct metamorphosis
(my feedbacks in apass does not only apply to intentional mental events of each other)
(Nagel asking for:) to devise a method of expressing in objective terms much more than we can at present [but he is stuck in the idea of] “a phenomenology that is objective*
...................................
with Jassem and Mia
Norway ~= (a breakable) illusion --> that somebody is living it
green competition and technopositivist hubris
question of topology (in dream)
(topology: those qualities that remain invariant after transformation --> persistent forms)
fantastic peasant
a piece of hanging cloth that suggests horrors to receptacle receiving eyes
•landscape --> sounds
•poems
•divisions in Norway (<== second world war)
•sami cultural disappearance
◦domestic violence
◦racism
◦refugee geopolitics
•seagull, fish, salmon farming
•interviews
•doom --> delirium, murder, hallucination, whispering,
•ruin (of signs)
•entropy (=/=? emergence)
•
*affliction landscapes* --> Leid: existence thriving in the wound --> anticipation of oblivion
doom, ruin, entropy --> udyr (in norwegian u-: non- or bad, dyr: animal) bad or corrupted animal, nonanimal, monster, (rootless existence)
udyr (gate keepers creepers) <--?--> div (defeated)
--performance--
rotating styles of: folkloric ballads, existential meditation, doomsday rant, elegiac oration, children lullabies --into--> a singular blast of an account of a devastated space --mobilizing--> legend, omen, song, myth, fairy tale, mutated war cry
[these potent signs are sneaking in the work “stranger within,” it is not just a historical dreamscape]
-the masked actors on stage have taken a venom (becoming faceless engravers) to cross into the next level of temporal experience --> ???
-muted rage and ecstasy indeterminacy positioned as creeping towards the midnight of moving & no longer moving... (as human? --> conflicting[...]
(60)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%26.9[...]upposing a discontinuity that must be overcome in order to define a trajectory)
(Jassem and Mia are capable of being) bodies fully engaged in perspectival communication and battles of will, provided with affect and capacities, capable of knowing different things, types of relations they entered into =/=? poltergeist
--research--
trap <--> omen
lava <--> ice
•unstable space
•process ~= performance ~= meeting -->{
◦dinner --> *transaction* (what did you learn from the dinner that you bring?)
◦invite (exchange???)
◦respect & resist
now:
•something need to be named
•something need to be staged
•(something need to be styled)
Jassem's model:
you go through 5 minutes of hell then you arrive and unleash all your powers (--> talk about questions, art, history, self, etc.) then go there and perform together
contract of misunderstanding the “dance” (proposed by Jassem and Mia)
--?!--> categorically dance is misunderstood, dinner is understood
the rawness and minimalism of the performance <--?!--> richness and density of the research
(“<--?!-->” : question of reference?)
(not to make the performance mimetic)?
(but make it mnemonic --> designed to aid the memory)?
(but not anticipatory ==> omen)
for Jassem and Mia:
•what is the sign of danger?
•what is the sign of death?
•what is the sign of transformation of perspective (=/= change of perspective)?
•
chronically unstable bodies (--> mesopotamian)
anthropomorphism manifest in distorted corporeal forms and appendages ضميمه
a world conceived of inherently volatile (bodies?) --> site of subjectivity
intentional activation (?) --> affective capacities ities (in...?)
trap --> operate along scale
...................................
entropy <--> atrophy
•entropy: energy no longer available for doing mechanical work (--> random ~=? violence)
•atrophy: the material, sensory labor of attending to loss, ***labor of looking at damage***
wasting away; withering; decrease in size caused by disuse
the feeling of being in the middle of something dirty, inevitable, watching it unfold
[deculturation: making a culture ‘previous']
(~ the imapct of capitalism/colonialism on indigenous)--> [nightmare image of social entropy] destablizing effects of non-meaning (~ nonanimal Udyr monster) --> (representing as) existential-cultural atrophy
[Cinderella doesn't experience atrophy after insult upon insult =/= Bambi's memory]
transculturalism ~ “seeing oneself in the other”
*language and materiality interact within an unstable locus of historicity* (sp[...]
(61)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27[...]rt” (*moving forward together* --> #sci-fi series of transnational crew on a spaceship) ...powerful ways of knowing the world [<==?== renaissance] (--my ajayeb project is about those ways of knowing, stories of what sets the world on motion, such as universalism & cultural relativism)
--> *building communal agenda* ~ (dream of) transculturalism [~ blend communal identities] (<== Jassem and Mia's Norway: humans get richer, more efficient, and more make the natural world work for them), is given to us by “men” (that we don't have to follow)
[*]progress: anthropogentic landscapes haunted by imagined futures
--or--> (you might) leave your home and run into a vast new problem
stability is a privilege
[what is?] the future of your dreams
[what are?] the nunhumans worth noticing
species that signal “i am available”
[capitalist accumulations + insult upon insult upon insult ==>] diversity
diversity: (in Germany, considered archaic and chaotic) collateral damage of improvement, necessory victim of progress
fire, herding, farming,
--> creating niches for hunting and forging
--> messing with (nature)
-the question of how much (of human, neighbor, etc.) disturbance we can live with
-what is to consider other's (species, peasant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense o[...]
(62)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...]uture of your dreams
[what are?] the nunhumans worth noticing
species that signal “i am available”
[capitalist accumulations + insult upon insult upon insult ==>] diversity
diversity: (in Germany, considered archaic and chaotic) collateral damage of improvement, necessory victim of progress
fire, herding, farming,
--> creating niches for hunting and forging
--> messing with (nature)
-the question of how much (of human, neighbor, etc.) disturbance we can live with
-what is to consider other's (species, peasant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense of place --> displacement
•the ways we experience livability through places
(has to do with my own broken/corrupt/fubar link with ancestry <-- only “your people” can show you how to imagine it, the center/home)
transportation --{traumatic & distruptive}--> transformation
time of surprise ==> nonanimal (udyr)
-nature-culture patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...
(for you there is also) ***many[...]
(64)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...]asant, etc.) ways of life-making trajectories along ours? [==> world-making (requires this)]
the question of niche-making
-niches interact with one another
[*]alienation: the ability to stand alone (--> Nietzschean ethics =/= niche-making entanglement *always imperfect and continent*)
==> (people, things, and species become) [*]assets: mobiles that can be moved from their lifeworlds to be exchanged elsewhere--everything else is waste (=/= eating others)
}--> progress: search for assets =/= art: unalienated critical work, ***reciprocal capture*** ~~> tumble [=/= transcend one another, or bow down, question of integration]
*niche: adjusted timing & quality, small stories, convexe,
=/= house --> has foundation
=/= your monument
=/= building
...................................
[title]
ecologies of nothingness***
premise of my lecture:
•*all places are polluted and difficult*
•‘abuse of language’ is every time you open your mouth
•the social always always includes nonhuman
•there is no encounter without the contractual
..and i can't tell grave from garden
-perhaps i have been unconsciously working on the question of “why are we here?” or “am i here?”
-cartographies of thinking--&--how i am inscribed in them
(itineraries i am stuck with)
going to a place =/= embrace it as a site
--> always i have a resistance to where i am:
•the ways we lose a sense of place --> displacement
•the ways we experience livability through places
(has to do with my own broken/corrupt/fubar link with ancestry <-- only “your people” can show you how to imagine it, the center/home)
transportation --{traumatic & distruptive}--> transformation
time of surprise ==> nonanimal (udyr)
-nature-culture patchworks
-perspectival and performative
-contaminative and communicative
*fantastic and real vision*
-things that don't fit together, yet, there *are* together --> sym (=/= bifurcation) --> awkward relations & interrupting categories
•(necrophobia)
•schizophrenic relations to...
•deconstruction of presence...
(for you there is also) ***many fantastically large set of contexts within which to say “yes”***
(Tsing's) *contaminated diversity* (complicated, ugly, humbling) [=/= ‘endangered species’ and cultures (innocent victims of human progress)]
-implicates survivors in histories of greed, damage, and destruction --> cacophony of troubled stories --might--> help to learn something about the cultural and natural histories at stake
-difficult to love and relate
joint organs {part plant, part fungus} interspecies phisiology ==> *mushroom*
*tumble: falll down as if collapsing (from upright positio[...]
(65)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.3[...]eliness of an event that robs it of the structure of causality within which it could be more properly interpreted), a form of neurosis =/= Morris's reading of Southeast Asia ghosts
•recognition does not stave off fear
•anxiety does not stave off trauma
reflective interpretation
narrativized interpretation
abstract interpretation
dissociation (in spirit possession) ==> (allows other individuals to witness) the loss of consciousness ==> memory traces of history become legible
(change the focus in trauma studies, a reorientation of perspective:)
missed encounter (~ wound) --to--> poorly anticipated encounter (~ accident)
(Caruth's argument:) **[*]trauma: a discourse that opens up ethical possibilities with its demand for a recognition of the need for historicization (of the relationship between destruction and survival)**
****(Morris as an anthropologist call for analysis of the accidental -->) to better comprehend *how history exceeds individual intentions* + how particular conceptions of history may enable more consequential action on the part of historical agents****
==> (to move from) affective symptoms of an overwhelming experience [@Hoda] --to--> the question of effectivity beyond representation
--> to construe an ethical relation to history--in terms of open relation to futurity [=/= an (impossible) mastery of the past]
every artist researcher should investigate:
•how anxiety is informing you
•how trauma is informing you
the question of the political understood as: (@Femke, OSP)
•the question of contingent factors
•the question of unexpected exposures
•the question of (relatively) unconscious processes
(and not of control)
neoliberal economic logics --> image of massness (=/= consciousness of one's collective interests) ==> condition the possibility of social action (movements characterized by a schema in which exposure to events leads to politicization) <-- an older genre of politicization narrative [~ individuals describe their encounter with social injustice, extreme poverty, or excessive violence and then recount a growing consciousness of the structures that produced them, #Robin Hood]
inadvertent and even accidental convergences ==?==> political movements in Southeast Asia (throughout the late 1980s and 1990s) --> (students who participated in antigovernment protests in Rangoon/Yangon in the late 1980) described their entry into the political sphere (less exposed to the object of social injustice, not in terms of an originally shared project, not a shared analysis, but rather) as the result of a situational convergence (from which an ideological project had yet to be fabricated)
(to understand) your relationship to the political as *subjection to force* (and hence) ~=> *the violation of subjecti[...]
(66)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%27.9[...]ces of the capitalism could be articulated
•more ethical conception of democracy
(rethinking the conditions of) posibility for political organization (and political forms)
-(let's not) programmatic politics --reverting--> to a parodic reinstantiation of older oligarchic forms
-(let's not) reduction of accidental to trauma [~= incapacity to speak]
crowd: a context in which one can become subject to powers that exceed one --> for which spirit possession offers a normative form
the crowd lends people an instrument by which they can become audible (to the extend that they lose their own particular voice) ~= the medium lends a body to the spirit who can speaks in a voice from elsewhere
[*]crowd: a mode of the (political) sublime : one dies as a subject to be recognized as a citizen(= one who has a voice)
*sorcery: the translation of one fact into the form of another*
>
an antecedent rendered as cause
when we say something needs retrospection, it means narration (that allows the accidental to appear as that which will recur, not an anxious anticipation, but *a resolute commitment to an ethics of the event) =/= retrospection structured only by the question of origin (--> an approach to *curing trauma*)
(sustainable forms of) social good and distributive justice
ghosts ~= signs of reason's failure
•failure =/= absence of rational faculties
•[*]reason: that which arises to transcend a kind of being that would live only in the mode of the accidental
Morris's ‘giving up ghosts’ --> ***an acknowledgment of the accidental ground on which reason enacts the enabling violence of its regulative ideals***
-*enabling violence* --{trauma =/= accident}--> accidental events (such as the convergence of a crowd in a street in Bangkok) can precisely be rendered as the “ground” of socially transformative politics and institutional interventions (without original motivations)
(?what is at stake in elaborating the relationship between [Derrida's]:)
•grounding --> gesture of rational calculation and decision making
•running ground --> moment of accident when the boat touches bottom and is immobilized
(we can never) guarantee its own effectivity
(cannot know that if it is effect or cause)
([can we ever?] resist) melancholy eschatology
(?) the gesture of politicization must be made repeatedly---often in situations that arise as though accidentally
...how the experience of the political as accidental (in popular mobilization during the 1990s) was also (at least partly) written into the interior of another discourse about the impossibility of change [~ neoliberalism's triumph and the end of history]
binarism of the war on terror resignifies older more disparate conf[...]
(71)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%28.3[...] attempt to heighten the fiery terror of the scene by billowing smoke ==> عام generic explanation)
...a palpable sexual dimension crepting into Christensen's thesis <-- images of women “sneaking away” to attend Sabbats
Häxan visually grounds itself in citable evidence from the start
•cinema: (as an instrument for “recording reality”) a vehicle for “telling the truth” about the world [in early 1920s]
when documentary was not yet documentary -- fiction wasn't fiction yet either --Chanan-->{
moving pictures = visual tidbits لقمه چرب ونرم
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}
(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?
[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real
--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies
}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan'[...]
(72)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]br />
made no demands on literacy (==> spread easily)
whe world on the screen remained anecdotal (and predominantly iconic)
practically inarticulate (in terms of public discourse)}
(1900) visual meaning-making machines that demanded not only attention but belief (by staging as real reenactments) --> mutated the desire to see far-off contemporary events
•--> Attack on a China Mission Station (1900), Hunting Big Game in Africa (1907), and With Captain Scott, R.N., the South Pole (1912), The Battle of the Somme (1916) and With Our Heroes at the Somme (Bei unseren Helden an der Somme, 1917)
(Baxstrom + Meyers) question of mimesis
-what is the relation between a fragmentary visual artifact drawn “from life” and the truth value of any such fragments?
-what sorts of filmmaking practices can felicitously mimic life as such?
[for example in Curtis's In the Land of the War Canoes] status of reenactment ==> prevailing standards of expressing the real
--later --> crypto-structuralist origin myth that falsely represented what “documentary” meant to pre-Griersonian filmmakers ==> “realist” Lumiere =/= the “fanciful” Melies
}--> *gap between witnessing and the real* in Europe (this question of evidence occupied inquisitors and theologians long before the invention of cinema)
preparing viewers for the “diegetic absorption”
(telling of a story by a narrator) diegesis =/= mimesis
the strategy of “reimaging” is methodological and intentional (in the opening minutes of the film Häxan) --> (in European terms, for a very long time:) “knowledge = recitations of the known”
+ creation of new images --> constituting its own evidence for what is at stake
(Christensen designating) **techniques of presentation rather than simple content**
****the “truth” gained by the reproduction of archival images**** <==through== their mobility in the context of their new use
--> (similar to Farocki) Christensen empties out such visual artifacts, expressing through their preestablished frame a meaning that was hidden and resisted
(Baxstrom + Meyers carefully treating the) methodological element of Christensen's image-making practices --in--> Häxan's depiction of the violent moral disorder of the Wild Ride of the witches to their Sabbats
(16th century) Wild Ride: a standard element of both demonological and popular literary accounts of the activities of witches, folding:
•older legends of wild hunters
•restless travels of the dead at night
•tales of the Furious Horde (a super natural band that was not originally associated with witchcraft)
•twisted chaos of the deep forest
Canon Episcopi regarding the power of demonic illusion to deceive women into imagining that they could travel great distances at night, often in [...]
(73)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%29.8[...]
Häxan's demonstration of the power of the witch =/= paranoid delusions of witch- crazed villagers
widely held set of beliefs regarding the “nature” or “essence” of women
Christina Larner's assertion that witch trials were gender-related (but not by definition gender-specific)
--Baxstrom--> *women often came under suspicion of being witches because they were understood to be particularly susceptible to lust, avarice, and jealousy by their very nature [~ 16th century: **women “naturally” susceptible to witchcraft*** + women were presumed to possess elements of the nature more than men] =/= Federici's understanding of witch-hunt as straight-forward instance of misogyny*
--Roper--> *one cannot approach witchcraft or possession from a vantage point in the present without granting some legitimate status to the ways in which the Devil and witches were not only asserted to be real but were experienced as such*
(debates over) politics and evil
satan's malefic presence (in Dreyer's Leaves)
*a density of parallelisms*
Dreyer figures Satan as a problem of the present
“Bolsheviks violently engaged in revolutionary struggle = manifestation of a transcendental demonic power”
question of theodicy --> God's seeming absence from the world
sleep-walking --> enticing a nude female somnambulist out of her home into the forest, where she eventually kneels before a demon who embraces her
proving sexual relations with the devil ==> empirical evidence for satan's existence
(Benjamin > Christensen's art sets out) to conquer meaning
...so it is no stretch to suggest that...
subject and subtext
dreamtime of the 16h century
dreamtime of the witch
•Durer, Baldung, Cranach, artists at the dawn of the Reformation sought to represent the void as a figure
•strategies by which Expressionist painting sought to externalize states of mind
(Baxstrom + Meyers emphasizing) how Häxan *corresponds with a variety of traditions* without seeking to assimilate the film fully within one over another
stillness and fixity of tableau-like shot composition (Dreyer, Murnau, Christensen) ==> (the affect of) suffocating organization
Deleuze summary of Expressionism: play of light and darkness, with the mixture of the two producing an effect that suggests either falling into the black hole or ascending towards the light <-- *face* makes this affective power mobile
•(in Murnau) tableau --> frees the viewer for introspection regarding nature in a kind of emotional, spiritual release =/= close-up (disruptive pathos)
•(in Häxan) tableau --> grounds the uncontrollable forces at work on the faces of those confronted by the power of the witch (constituting a shot [...]
(74)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.1[...]witch in europe)
•witch was understood as an agent of satan
•responsibility of civil and religious authorities to protect pious christians (from a power that would overwhelm the faithful regardless of their individual acts, intentions, or beliefs)
inchoate suspicion (of the fearful, the resentful, the spiteful) --> reporting --> inquisitors (positioned as experts) --> take this suspicion forward administratively --> *impersonal sociological sense* (<-- an example of Weberian rationalization)
to suspect someone of maleficium was not new --✕--> (in witch accusations) authorities were now eager to act on suspicions in dependently
unresolved sexual desires + such passion would be redirected in pathological, perverse manner ==Häxan==> witch accusations
the film emphasizes the crucial role sex played in discerning what constituted witchcraft and its status as a knowable category of (malefic) human practice
>
a great deal of demonological thinking was devoted to justifying the fact that civil and Church officials, despite their fears, by and large were not bewitched
following satan's idiom...
Häxan's tortured relation to “the truth”
the question of empirical certainty and reenactment haunts the status of the film as evidence
*acting the ideal type breathes life into the emptied, cliched figure* :
•Christensenrelying on the fact that the truth of the witch will take its most visible form by acting her out mimetically (~= Christensen chooses to “play” satan using his idiom to breathe life into his witch)
•Flaherty knew that the visceral force of Nanook of the North depended on the felicity of his Inuit interlocutors reenacting themselves
Christensen seems to be offering a cure for the *secularized christian blindness* at the heart of *positivist human science* --> his audie audience is pulled in “through a lens of science =/= as misguided inquisitors”
working with *figurative givens of witches and demons* --formulate--> visual thesis (about uncanny, mobile power)
etchings into a material
carving outlines into the image of figures that have been hiding in plain sight
beautifully composed tableau of the torture chamber
static plane of the tableau =/= sense depth signify an open or free space
totality of (depicted) violence <--> composed alterity of the scene's stylistic correspondence between accused and inquisitor
(Christensen's method of) oscillating rhythm between tableau and face
-suppressing perspective and depth of field in favor of a continuous affective movement as expressed in the face
--Baxstrom--> Häxan is not grounded in a setting here; it is grounded in the forms of life present in the shot
sense of corporeal a[...]
(75)[...notes/Ajayeb notes.txt]%30.4[...]/= reciprocity, mo'amele be mesl معامله به مثل)
(things to vandalize:)
•capital claims
•mystical foundations of authorship
•legally protected stores of knowledge
•desire for legitimacy
•control freak of the possibilities of comprehension
•narcissistic comfort of secured sense
•geometrical optics of reflection
(Burroughs:) “steal everything in sight.” (most authors transvaluate theft back into property --> ideologies of “influence”)
narcissistic reappropriation of/as friendship : operate a reduction of the friend to the same or to the friend as other
mystified oneness of the Volk (Germanic trope)
the desired erasure of difference
...................................
friendship in Qur'an:
[44:41] The day on which a friend shall not avail (his) friend aught, nor shall they be helped, (apocalypse is defined when friendship ends)
[42:9] Or have they chosen protecting friends besides Him? But Allah, He (alone) is the Protecting Friend. He quickeneth the dead, and He is Able to do all things. (God is jealous of friends)
[70:10]
And no familiar friend will ask a question of his friend
And friend shall not ask of friend
[32:4] ... Ye have not, beside Him, a protecting friend or mediator.
[29:22] & [42:31] Ye cannot escape in the earth, for beside Allah ye have no protecting friend nor any helper. (God has no friends. You only friends with him.)
[22:13] ...evil friend (friendship with the evil)
[57:15] ...your abode is the fire; it is your friend and evil is the resort.
[19:45] “O my father! I fear lest a Penalty afflict thee from (Allah) Most Gracious, so that thou become to Satan a friend.”
(evil and friend coming adjoint more than once)
[25:28] Alas for me! Ah, would that I had never taken such an one for friend!
...................................
(mode-identifying signs falsified)--(unconsciously?)
manipulative simulation of friendliness
\\
(in Germany) we need ‘detours’ and taking detours =/= having end-goals
we are not built to handle peace --> existence is perhaps ok, but coexistence is a real problem
coexistence includes all sorts of aggressions
burdened with a bird name
(birds of Attar)
20 minutes to propose some itineraries
all the different ways we come to life. (some even through violation, being shaken awake, libidinal surge, thrill, etc.) --> the delusion to desiring nonviolence (whenever there is desire there is violence)
wanting, desire <--> violence
(نیاز niaz <--> azar آزار)
which organs of peacefulness are we resisting?
{punishment, wanting to be punished}
de[...]
(76)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%33[...]because their fathers belonged and so forth + what they give away, the (gift) shells, can be regarded as female : items that have come into men's possessions (=/= Karin's gifts)
-so the shells are passive objects, women are/were (traditionally), classically regarded as objects in a similar way and were given the names of shells
***how to think about vocabulary:***
-i cannot start using economics of the market to describe what i am talking about
-in the vocabulary of gift exchange (Strathern) may be able to find the vocabulary of analysis (like an artist choosing the color)
-Strathern choice: the vocabulary of gift exchange might give her the vocabulary by which to start describing, is an *artificial choice*. the vocabulary of the gift economy gives her a lot of terms in which to understand. but those terms are only useful for the purposes of understanding that particular set of data, and if i then leave that data, and if i follow these objects as they move out of the highlands, and if they became, if they came into an art market, then absolutely what we would be dealing with is commodities[...] --> situated knowledges [#SK], #import function
...................................
*literature = the question of reading* (=/= matter of novels and poems)
...................................
what is the language of war?
(Keenan > Weizman:) we need to understand war as discourse --> *war = a threatened discourse*
-The language component of war exists in the gap between the level of destruction which is “possible” and the level of destruction which is “actually applied” in every given situation.
when war is no longer a means but an end in itself(?) -->? Hezbollah
deterrence: a means of controlling a person's behavior through negative motivational influences
“We are law-abiding, and we go wild.”
violence stripped of semiotics
The logic, the reason, of conflict is thus political ... for Clausewitz, politics is essentially logic, logos, discourse, people reasoning with one another, thinking and speaking, exchanging
@Luis, why conflict could be my concern? because it marks the breakdown of politics, when we can no longer have a conversation, engage in the game, where there is no possibility of further exchange, there is fighting
failure ==> use of force
Saskia Sassen called the attacks of September 11 “A Message From the Global South”
she wrote that the attacks bore witness to a failure in communication or to a “translation problem”
for her the language of September 11 attacks was clear
Sassen's dangerous and depraved rationalization of September 11: south is speaking in a language that needs no translation
the word ‘conflict’ (is coined as a discoursive[...]
(77)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.1[...]uch knowledg)
[*]responsibility: (when) one has to act in a way for which the knowledge doesn't provide a full alibi ~ one's action is in some important way disconnected, or not entirely saturated by one's knowledge
every event (take September 11) is rich in translation, a moment when an enormous number of competing narrative frames were already available for understanding or processing or
reading what is at stake --> there is no unequivocal act
*witness: (in the fantasy of the act) the witness for whom no translation is necessary* --Levinas-Blanchot-Keenan--> hostage (for example images of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, the media, the public event takes us hostage): a position of extreme passivity that is equally the most intense experience of responsibility
-what is the political effect of revelation? @Ali
beyond the immediate shock effect of the images --> they are testament to the ways in which many different political actors make use of them (over a long period of time) --> with interestingly different outcomes
...intermediate space between a traditional secret (susceptible to revelation and exposure and delegitimization) and a kind of increasing public acceptance (that the question of torture could be openly discussed: “it's not an absolute, there are moments when, there are individuals for whom...”) --✕--> public discussion
the too high threshold for entry into political discussion (or resetting political agendas) --> the mythic completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event =/= low-threshold ideas (look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized)
@Pierre, apass: placing something into the political sphere --> pure innovation (the mythic alternative = completely innovative inaugural agenda-setting event) ==> the too high threshold for entry into political discussion =/= low-threshold ideas (might look like *reactive* ==constitute==> proposition about a very different way that the future should be organized):
•slight shift in emphasis
•slight shift in interpretation
•a little re-definition
•a reactive mimicry
•
expendable people targeted for discrimination, injury and death, in a continuing wave of violent economic, psychic, social, political, medical and juridical assaults
Keenan on the possibility that justice might not be simply possible
deconstruction's ethico-political pertinence:
•reference to its thematic or referential considerations of issues (ethics, race, feminism, etc.)
•its formal homologies with political interventions --> deconstruction of authority as liberating ideology-critique
•ruin the categories on which political discourse and reliable knowledge found itself
}==> axiom: ethics a[...]
(78)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.4[...]s of the other]) =/= *excess* [--> in my lectures i usually don't respect/regard the expectations of the other]-->? that which separates me from the Homeric hero
(these are all about the regulation of the world)--> in a way also that which Mona demands
Mona need to analyse her question of (caused) violence and calamity:
•disposal the Promethean technai [τέχναι] (when she asks “who gave them the tool to kill?”)
•the logos [λόγος] of the arts and discursivity (when she demands conscience and justice [~ dike, another greek tool])
for Aristotle: aidos ==> clean ethics: pathos (an affection that involves the body)
*the form of fear proper to free men* --> properties proper to truth
from aidos [linked to the Latin videre (to see)], to vergüenza [linked to the Greek horan (to see)], we remain in the space of the *gaze*
...................................
Veena on *how knowledge is secreted in relation to catastrophic events*
‘inordinate knowledge’ --> beyond the act of merely knowing
=/= pale intellectualized distracted archived knowledge --> it is the subject who has
to discover which aspects of knowledge matter to her and where her attachments lie
--Veena--> (with pale or excessive, it is not the form of knowledge, rather) it is the way in which knowledge enters the realms of the social
those who have to endure what they cannot ignore
pale --> bare --> dark --> filled with plenitude
different modes of knowing as means of navigating the catastrophic (=/= simply knowledge about an object)
*reality does not have that frontal character*, (it is rather) like atmosphere, deeply embedded within context
[*]context: the weaver's loom that is discerned within the cloth it weaves
Donatelli --destruction--> small, recurring, repetitive crises that define eve[...]
(79)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%34.6[...]are part of the same world as humans
2. domestication --> slavery
3. pastoralism --> contractual forms of the feudal type
4. industrial societies --> relationships based on means of production and capitalist relationships
Tapper (and Castelluci) raise the possibility that animals may indeed work, they also close these relationships up in a *single schema* of ownership and exploitation
to inherit: (not merely receptive,) implies a task, a pragmatic act = appropriation
**one's heritage is something constructed, and it is constantly transforming itself retroactively** بازگشتی --> it makes us capable of responding and that we in fact respond to our heritage =/= simply carrying on a tradition
***things are inherited, but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***
(Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]
how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals
*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*
ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals
when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]
Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviours appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place o[...]
(80)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...], but we become ourselves in carrying out the gesture of inheriting***
(Harawayian) re-member: enact the past, collect and compose ~/= (Despretian) to inherit: giving oneself an account of a certain task, which is more than just remembering
[storymaking] *to make a story = to reconstruct, to fabulate, to offer other presents and futures to the past* [~/= Sina: to fabulate = to give other pasts to the present and future]
how to ask the question of work properly?
you have to consider animals as other than victims, natural and cultural idiots that *need to be liberated* despite themselves --> ‘liberating the world of animals' = 'freeing the human world of the presence of animals’ [---> go to fabulation of animal human in the movie How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World]
=/= telegram's animals
*humans and animals must (not just considered together but) always be imagined together*
ceasing to consider “animal = victim” ==> (?how in telegram media) animals involve themselves (since they are not natural and cultural idiots), just as human (breeders) are not “exploiting,” but giving, receiving, exchanging, raising, and growing with, their animals
when Despret is putting the question of “do animals work?” to breeders, it is a real experiment : to explore the researcher's propositions with the breeders --> to make them hesitate (~ is about *what does it mean to speculate in such a way?*) [=/= means of knowing through information (to gather data or opinions) : “what do breeders think of X?"]
Despret’ amazing rigour --> the only place that the question (considering whether animals do work) can be brought forward is the place where only the meaning associated with exploitation can matter (in places where both humans and animals are greatly mistreated)
-place where the evidence of such work is found, are places where animals are industrially “produced” --> their behaviours appear very definitely as belonging to a work relationship
director of animal resources --> (in such frame) animal: occupy the place of an obscure underclass, malleable, serviceable, and disposable in the end
moder feeder operations --Porcher--> animals sometimes wanted to help
asking the breeders: could you help us learn how to ask our question so that it has a chance of making sense to other people? ==> they also could explore the *manner in which we were obligated to formulate our questions*
(Harawayiean) responsibility: a relationship crafted into intra-action through which entities, subjects, and objects, come into being
lead cow (the one who trusts the breeder, and one the herd trusts, usually is in the front) =/= dominant cow (in the hierarchy of the herd, is found in the middle of the herd)
a theme in animal technicians
paying attention to [...]
(81)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36[...]ed visually from abstract to baroque while working on the heritage of zoology. #Cinderella: which part of me animals give new powers and meanings? that part is of other beings}
-{Grandin actively transforms mindless animals into meaningful geniuses ==> gives them new powers ==> changes her}--> *animals (or your ghosts, your subjects) are invited to other modes of being, other relationships, new ways to inhabit the human world + to force human beings to address them differently : **disclosing unexpected affinities ==create==> new identities** (=/= empathy: tourism of the soul) --> identities do not pre-exist identification : *****previous construction of affinities ==> identity (is the outcome, the achievement)*****
(Grandin:) *marginal essence --transform--> partial perspective ==> affinities: (Haraway's) just-barely-connections*
}=/= romanticism: the belief that “feeling for another” belongs to some sort of naive state of nature
(#feedback: ways of showing the artists how they actively create the perspective that allows them to “see” --> ‘giving artistic feedback = being an anthropologist on Mars’)
Despret anticipate finding some references to the body (beyond simple “presence”) in the work of scientists --> the question of meaning + (its corollary) the question of perspective
tick's perception = world
(we know from Uexküll) one may indeed construct a perspective without involving the body - the perspective may be drawn partially from a mental process
•*animals only perceive things that have meaning for them*
•*animals construe meanings in acting*
Umwelt theory: a scientist may make an inventory of what makes the animal act and react --> collecting ‘meanings’ the scientist rebuilds the world as each animal perceives it + seeks for which meaning all these things take for it (=/= adopt the perspective of animal)
the scientist aims not just to understand what something merely ‘means’ for another being, but also how something ‘matters’ for it (~ the most meaningful)
language of perspective --Daston--> what does it mean to understand other minds
*sympathetic projection* [--> **perspective: apotheosis of subjectivity as the essence of mind] <-- a cultural shift:
•habit of interior observation cultivated by certain forms of piety
•increasingly refined language of individual subjectivity (developed in the 18th and 19th century novel)
•equation drawn between ‘sensory experience = self’ by sensationalist psychology
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy
perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective[...]
(82)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.6[...]ogy
•economic (and political) individualism
•cult of sympathy
perspective ~= sympathy (with science + animals) --> an inappropriate form of subjectivity
1. adopting animal's perspective involves a dangerous flirtation with [*]anthropomorphism: one putting himself in the animal's shoe ~=? one actually put the animal in human shoes
2. perspective ==imperil==> necessary distance (or ‘sanitary cordon’ between the observer and the observed)
}==>
•anthropomorphism =/= science
•anecdote =/= legitimate date
•nonhuman =/= beliefs (--> you can't attribute belief to animals)
(old dualism of) “Science =/= non-science” ~= “imaginative (autobiographical, emotional) =/= factual (neutral)” ~= “body =/= mind”
(reconstruction of)
what is most meaningful for animal
what is the perspective of animal
*most meaningful: affected perspective* (Despret) =/= (Uexküll) semiological perspective (of the tick)
(looking for or) focus on affected perspective ==Despret==> (reveals) scientists’ bodies in their practice --> what having a body means (for scientists)
+
(Haraway ==>) *bodies are “made” by scientific practices [<-- that is why the question of science is important for whoever dealing or working with the body]
+
(Annemarie ==>) bobies (that are made) are enacted multiples (in medical practice)
+
(Despret -->) how bodies are undoing and redoing themselves through different scientific practices with animals? = *how are bodies growing multiples in diverse practices?* + (its corollary) *how do each of these practices (+ animals they are addressing) enact each of these bodies?*
Mowat's *modest embodiment* ==Despret==> partial affinities [=/= seeing like a wolf or mouse] ==> feeling or being like a wolf or mouse = ****to be taken in a radically non-psychological sense**** (--> Cinderella's non-psychological relation to her birds and mice =/= contemporary western psychological subjects)
---> go to wildboyz, Cinderella under a mouse regimen
-using his body as an experimental tool --> eating a wolf's diet (=/= empathy, romantic dream of being a wolf)
submit his own body to mouse diet
one uses one's own body to meet the needs of another
Mowat used his own body as a means of generating scientific proof, and turned it into an apparatus for validity [--> how do we apply or misapply our body in artistic environment for generating truth and validity? to be careful with the context of generalization]
([artist's and] scientist's) body: a technical device, the witness
(companion story -->) ***to embody the way other beings solve their survival problems***
“the business of curling up to start with, and spinning around after each nap” (was vital to success with a dozing wolf) --> Cinderella's choreography of th[...]
(84)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%36.7[...]hing with*
...................................
Baxstrom --> anthropology of the anthropologist
Despret --> ethology of the ethologist
اشعیا Isaiah provides a vivid imaginary of multispecies bonds and flourishing: the wold will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them
*nonhuman animals are as much subjects of history as humans are*
-why do we listen to prohpets?
quasi-theological and anthropocentric notions such as that of the great chain of being
(the importance of) changing ourselves as humans ==> change animals
•how changing human habits also gives other animals a chance to change theirs?
[*]ethology: a practice of habits involving distance, knowing activity, politeness, milieu, alliance
(i am interested in women) not because of gender [= identity politics, political correctness], but because of *their practice and the question they pursue*
what parrots talk about
talking birds and primates as subjective interlocutors who can become persons in the exchanges allowed by language
*they never posed the question of knowing what a raven could, through this somewhat maniacal behavior, teach them about what interested it*
-(curious) being always teach you what that being is interested in
very bottom of the ladder of choices...
for Tehran:
1. memory studies
2. kalagh shenasi (raven studies) کلاغ شناسی
ravens, evidently, do not want to obey any of the rules that make research possible: the incivility that excommunicated them from the laboratoies of the behaviorists having already been stigmatized from the time of the Flood (in Noah's ark)
ravens are by all account unreliable <-- calling into question the intelligence of their researchers, the pertinence of their models, and the solidity of their dispositives
---> go to Kelile Demne
*the ravens literally recruit their researcher*
to [*]recruit: they will reveal to him the resolution of an enigma the difficulty and the interest of which would be in accord with what makes them impossible to study
(from) season --to--> season
(from) enigma --to--> findings
(from) hypothesis --to--> tests
suspense and sudden turns ==> transform all that we know about ravens
the ravens present a behavior that has no sense from the point of view of evolution
the “guilty” of the story are given from the beginning
---> go to [Daston's] historian of science (always knew how the story ended): imagine you are the kind of a person who cheats when reading mystery novels, and you read the last page first to know who did it, and then when you read the rest of mystery story, [...]
(85)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.1[...]sis upon which to build a politic
...racial and colonial violence of slavery
prison: anti-trans necropolitical institution
+ its abolition: a critique of anti-black legal/sovereign violence and for the radical potentiality of social tranformation
(=/= prison in Orange Is the New Black TV series)
[*]trans: an effect of white supremacist thinking that needs incoherent genders to make gender matter at all****
--Hayward--> when trans becomes ‘this’ (an effect of gender) then it can only serve regimes of power
[Hayward's (expected and a bit cliche)] transfigurations: (cascading provocations) suggesting questions without answering them, to break from an interpretive paradigm that demands solution-making over and against problem-generating
native
a zoological term
Derrida's blackness (skin color): unsovereign and stateless, criminal and beast
(promise of love -->) relinquishing the body to [*]flesh: pre-discoursive material, a zone of non-personhood, a state of anjection (<-- according to Hayward)
anatomo-political)
soma-politics of the body (of the racial-colonial category of the human)
carno-political question of flesh (under the regime of racial capitalism) --> human/animal divide
•animals in the afterlife of slavery are rendered as flesh (under the regime carno-political regimes of racial capitalist valuation) [<-- Hayward's misrecognition of contemporary society as “regime"]
genre of animal
Gossett + Hayward's argument --> the psychic life of zoophobia and zoophilia are tied up with negrophobia and negrophilia ~= species divides (human/animal) are technologies of race (human/black)
maroon: escaped cattle
typography: domain of style, of appearance, of aesthetic
glyph “*”
asterisk
a diminutive star
limb-y reach
a grasping
erring on the side of over-population, over-use, excessiveness
“*” can denote a database search or censorship
designate multiplication
a disclaimer
mark genetic identity
pseudonyms that have been changed
* --> *the star of life*
xenogenesis --> proliferating difference (genesis) built through pessimism (xeno)
Sun Ra (in Space is the Place ~= earth is “nowhere,” no longer a place [+ Octavia, Delany]) signaled the failed projects of planetary humanist and earthly liberalism, inviting blacks living in Oakland to leave the gratuitous violence of the world
afro-futurism is about the impossible, the unbearable, the failure of the world <--> afro-pessimism (blackness as loss, as nothingness)
(mode of imagination:) “anti-black racism ==> radical politics of abolition”
==> “being (white) is made possible thourgh and with black bodies cannibalized [...]
(86)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%37.9[...]ing for ==> the experimenters tried most often to camouflage the real questions guiding their research
-the assumption that the subjects do not do what they do because the experimenter asked then to do so, but for more abstract and more general reasons ==> “ecological validity”
-*the subjects most of the time not only predict what the experimenter expects of them but they comform to it*
-[they responded to] the way in which they interpreted that which was expected of them (<-- just because they are nice people.) “when the subjects were asked why they did all this [absurd tedious repetitive] work without objecting and without posing other questions, they responded that they had thought that is was a test of endurance. and they obeyed because a scientist asked then to”
difference between hypnotized subjects and “normal” experimental subjects
*the lure utilized to mask the expectations* (in psychology, far from resolving the problem)
>
organization of the research --> scientist distributes expertise in a very asymmetrical manner
what a maze can mean? --Despret--> **translating what happens to rats in terms of meaning**
(drawing on Uexküll's theory of Umwelt) --> open up for the animal the question of point of view
a concrete or lived Umwelt ==> the animal endowed with sensory organs different from our own, cannot perceive the same world as we do
{**perception: an act of creation =/= a form of reception**}--> the animal **fills its environment with perceptual objects**, it constructs its environment by *peopling* it with perceptual objects (=/= perceive passively)
*the activity of perception = an activity that confers meaning* = only that which has meaning is perceived, only that which can be perceived (~= is important of the organism) is *accorded a meaning* (~= accordance)
•butterfly lives in a world of luminous intensities and of odors
•tick lives in a world of butyric acid released by the sebaceous follicles of mammals
•spider lives in a world of...
•rat lives in a world of...
•
for a spider?
for a rat?
time, space, place, path, way, house, odor, enemy,,, --> each event (in the perceived world) “signified” which is not perceived except in that it signifies ==> ***animal = subject = a “lender” of meaning***
[*]subject: that which accords meaning
the object is constituted in action (the animal never enters into a relation with an object as such) --> meaning does not emerge from the object = objects are not alone in having meaning accorded to them
Umwelt: an environment of relations
no animal can be neutral of another (in the environment) <--if-- it can be seen to be accorded a meaning
***strange lures ==make=possible==> types of research***
Cinderella to the mice : all[...]
(87)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.3[...]perimental dispositive thought up by a human
[dispositif: referring to machines and devices. as philosophical concept that has been drawn upon by Deleuze, Foucault, Althusser, Agamben, and many others, has been rendered as “apparatus”, social apparatus]
maze --> what this particular experimental dispositive can mean for a rat? how can this *traversing* come to be, from the point of view of the rat (Uexküll calls “familiar path”)? how rats in pretending to respond to the questions of the behaviorists respond in fact to another question?
-behaviorist's question: what is the abstract relation of a being, whatever it may be (that which the behaviorists call an organism) to a natural object?
why do rats always touch the walls as they go along them? --Cinderella-->
•they are haptophiles, they like to touch
•they inscribe the course of their route in their bodies in the form of lines, curves, and turns, or even roughness, textures, sensations of cold or humidity
•letting itself be marked by the space
--Despret--> what do we know about what the body of a rat can sense?
***(from) the why of caused --to--> entering into the regime of meanings***
the rat does not respond to the question of learning, he responds to the question of *an architecture that constitute the world for him*
(how?) the “animal's own world” can (with difficulty) include the human observer as an observer
...the maze can authorize neither the question of the “familiar path” nor that of the meaning of the wall
artifactual: the situation where the being who is interrogated responds to a different question than the one the scientist poses to her
hypothesis of the existence of an artifact ==> the possibility of taking into account the fact that the animal would have a point of view on the situation
(to take measure of) what one's anxiety prompts (in the course of research):
•expanding the imagination
•paralyzing the imagination ==> injection of more control
sciences that mobilize the beings that respond to it
each experiment indicates not only the manner in which the animals generally experience the procedures --but--> the way in which each of the animals lives them as a function of the perception that it has of them, as a function of what it expects
(Despret affirming that) there is no *artifact* unless there is *generalization*
*the time of the experimental dispositive* is not the same since it is set within a provisional and short time (five days if testing, corresponding to the work week) while *the time of the farm* is a time of accumulated memories and experience
-the memory of the food eaten before
#Cinderella
it expects something else <== what one gives it is not the sole cause invo[...]
(88)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.4[...] not judge an *abstract situation*, but a situation offered to them *as it is offered* to them
(Cinderella's) reciprocal habituation --> animal itself actively takes the questions and the presence of the researcher into consideration
to negate the condition of research --> exchange judgment and opinions (+ mutually affect one another)
why is ‘interest’ a bad motive, in this frame?
-because the animal must be interested in other things besides the human being, it must continue to live its life as a goat or a sheep --✕--> “the good animal: the animal responds to her observer”
...................................
Singh + Dave --> ordinary affects of killing (animal) --> anthropology of ethics =/= Agamben's killablity (linked with sovereignty): routinized emotionally indifferent production of bare life (capacity to decide which bodies can be killed, without the killing counting either as homicide or as a sacrifice)
normative moral claims
(Laidlaw, Foucault) ethical life: reflexive practice of freedom --humanistic-->
•traditions of virtuous conduct
•changing practices of self-fashioning
•affective dispositions: compassion, devotion
•(altruistic question of) how ought to one live?
=/=
what is the mode of a killing?
what is the mood accompanying that killing?
+ ethical repercussions (if any) there of, even of they are not prescribed or proscribed in state or in customary law
*to write nonmorally about [*]ethics: a mode of relatedness, even if the relation is as ephemeral as a mood that may escape measure or description, lying somewhere between mourning and indifference
[=/= to have an a priori moral code based on which we might justify (or predict ahead) our emotional responses to particular killing ~= what constitutes a good life or death]
(mourning =/= indifference)r />
concept + reality of animals + anthropology of India
everyday affects (while witnessing or executing the death of animals)
doubts and pleasures
cruelties and indifferences
chicken shops
decimated forests of central India
moods:
•ambivalence
•cruelty and pleasure
•senses of devastation
modes and moods of specific commercial and ritual occurrences (in Tehran)
--> ***how does (and does not) killability shade into vitality?***
what does it mean for animals to be alive in a severely depleted habitat?
(what it means to be alive in contemporary Tehran?)
profane: a routine, ritual, process that does not in itself invoke a sacred purpose or value
-how would we measure the distance between the poles of the profane and sacred in terms of the mood and intention surrounding the ritual of killing?[...]
(91)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.6[...]n of the mode of violence from the sphere of the ethical --> we must make space for the consideration of:
◦cruelty
◦differential vulnerability
3. certain forms of companionable noncruilty may also breed accompanying forms of cruelty
4. within conditions of death and cruelty *it is not always clear what noncruilty might be*
a bird cursing (presently taking root that will someday come to fruition) a human who is stubbornly injuring when need not, or تو نیکی میکن و در دجله انداز
(myth) asks us to think about cycles of violence
how an act never exists in isolation
chaos theory, the effect might come later
informal epic subplots narrated in improvised forms
which ritual laments are available for massive ecological shifts
...the death of others
...scene of loss (~/= milieu)
}<--Singh-- virtue, piety, self-fashioning do not help to work through this (@apass)
devastation ==> cohabitation (of species that were apart before)
Kelile and Demne --> agonistics can be comic (even if repercussions of tragic) --> mood of violence
“everything has to die”
question of routinized ritual or commercial production of killable bodies and of things ceasing to matter
animals don't die in villages, they could only be killed
anthropology of ethics
what is to kill?
what is to kill well?
what is to ber killed?
what is to be killable?
can we speak of a quality of death?
(Veena, Cavell, Harraway's) ‘companion’ is not a resolution to ethical quandaries of human-animal relations
culpability of homicide <--> veneration of sacrifice
life =/= zoo =/= bios
...................................
retro: (a postmodern sensibility firmly rooted in the present) appropriating [use + exploit, pick + mix] the aesthetics (aspects) of the past while not longing for its return =/= nostalgia: a mode of resistance against the present
retro: a mode of reading, an attitude towards the past without emotional attachment
ironic consumption...
... =/= how adults might perceive the political context
dissident discourse
(audience looking for) counter regime messages
*nostalgia + nationalism within a postcolonial Europe*
Europe's repressed imperial history --> longing for the divided Europe of the Cold War --> postsocialist nostalgia (in television [--> cultural memory])
past: retro comedy
comedy: retrospective representation
(comedy does not?) antagonize its audience ~= build a memory conflict
[*]comedy: strive for reconciliation (by focusing on the everyday life of its col[...]
(92)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%38.8[...]ews --(contextualized within)--> unequal power relations (==> journalistic roles & modes ofrepresentaiton)
user-generated-content
political economy of global war reporting
living with violence
journalism <--?---> affect
affective proximity
==shape==> the boundaries of journ0alism and activism
--> captures the feeling of being close to violence:
•fear for one's life and that of others
•having to deal emotionally logistically with deaths of loved ones (escape, exile) [--> that is why we need an *anthropology of the exile*]
}--> living-in-violence =/= encounter, exposure
(Ghazzi is too fast in favoring “affective proximity =/= western rationalism”, as an iranian I am more exposed to an *affective jurnalism* [~= activism: politically motivated and highly emotive role] =/= journalism as a modernist and rationalist institution)
“activism ~= jurnalism” ~=> they need to:
1. project authenticity and emotion onto news narratives
2. act as objective witnesses able to produce truthful accounts
(more and more i feel the iranians need for ‘activism =/= jurnalism’ --> what one wants to happen =/= understanding what is happening)--> epistemology [the question of how one makes sense of one's practices --> in the case of Syria (also Iran): *affective proximity to violence* ==> sense]
...negotiating the distance of mediation when viewers and producers in the Global North are witnessing the suffering of others
(in Iran) activism + art = the human body as tool, medium, symbol, metaphor
[*]affect: circulation + stickiness of emotion (onto and between bodies, texts, objects, experiences) (Ahmed)
journalism = represent + narrate
(the ‘trick’ of) relying on the *outsourcing of emotional labour* to non-journalists (by:)
•having them express their emotions
•having the journalist describe them
(Ghazzi conceptualising the emotional field in journalism -->) ***unequal power relations ==> emotioal labor***
proximity (--> what i heard so much when i went back to iran: to ke inja insti nemiduni تو که اینجا نیستی نمیدونی)
*aesthetic of authenticity* in news reports (<-- mobile phones)
political economy of foreign reporting
politics of hope (with an ambition to inspire all Syrians to rebel)
...emotional attachment to political goals
*revolution: the event that changes people's lives and in relation to which they locate themselves politically
•conflict in Syria began as an uprising, it ended up an international war, which in 2020 appears to have mostly concluded in the favour of the regime =/= revolution
•the word “revolution” means something else to activists in Syria (how the meanings projected on the term changed in accordance to c[...]
(93)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.4[...]hey 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 historical memory” (Rüsen)
1. make specific references to historic events (compare them to the present [==guide==> political action])
2. *making references to “history” at large*
[*]zigzag memory structure: deploy mnemonic spins to reframe historic events
•establish equivalent between the present and the past [--!--> (fundamentally despotic?) technique that i also use in lecture performances]
authoritarian populism
(Hegelian) [*]action: pursue one aspect of history + breaking away from away from another
1. (modern) revolutionary: telling a new story, (--populist--> focus on) *exclusionary politics*, once the leader is in power the objective is to prolong the idea of historic juncture --justify--> continued exclusion
populist --Laclau--> (invocation of)
•people = empty sig[...]
(94)[...notes/Mona rat race.txt]%39.5[...]hat connects us with mesopotamia
immediate unanalyzed total reactions (?)
false meanings jar, stop, and lead no further
older elements (seemingly unchanged) come to mean something quite different, have been interpreted to fit into a new system of meanings
religious metaphors:
•spiritual core in phenomena
•rulers
•parents
[and then later] dark age closed down on mesopotamia
many divine wills to the willful whim of a single despot
*major gods became natural gods* (identified with narrow national political aspirations)
--> barbarization of the idea of divinity
...................................
(how to take seriously) water's materiality --> how to think with water (or *how water means*):
•water can bring human conceptual life along with it from local to global concerns
•[can help us to] go beyond qualities that express some timeless properties
(my point: the experience of fire is as inseparable from that of stone)
[Alberti suggests] *to think in terms of the properties of the phenomenon ‘rock/water’ as engendered by specific, embodied practices in this place* (=/= grappling with the question of the agentive capacities or properties of the rock or water)
***there are many waters (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows), not only many meanings of water (fires, jinns, divs, stones, shadows)***
}--> Alberti's brilliant response to Strang's bad idea of universal notions of properties (which is a very common tendency towards relationality among artists --> Strang: “common material properties of things, and the shared cognitive and phenomenological processes through which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)
to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•social
--> describing relations (human and nonhuman) established through water
*what water can do: flow*
agentive or affective capacities of materials --> (bad philosophy of flux) flow as a overgeneralized model for materiality =/= expanding relations water engenders through its properties in particular locations or rivers
*humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity*
(Alberti asking within archaeology:) how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?
now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {qu[...]
(96)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.1[...]ugh which people interact with them, generate recurrent ideas and patterns of engagement in diverse cultural and historical contexts”)
to bear on the form and content of an argument about water as:
•material
•social
--> describing relations (human and nonhuman) established through water
*what water can do: flow*
agentive or affective capacities of materials --> (bad philosophy of flux) flow as a overgeneralized model for materiality =/= expanding relations water engenders through its properties in particular locations or rivers
*humans are able to shift conceptual scales through reflexivity*
(Alberti asking within archaeology:) how to reconcile materials and meaning without introducing a representationalist logic where meaning is applied to matter by a thinking subject? how to show their co-existence without resorting to determinism?
now everyone is busy and talking about *relationality* than about *meaning* (=/= my work has alwayes been about both, how to take risks in meaning, my lecture-performances = adventures of meaning)
-we cannot mearly talk about relationality {quasi-universal experience of properties ==> commonalities of meanings across time and culture}, the question of meaning remains --Alberti--> how are we to think about non-arbitrary categories, meanings and values without recourse to universal properties? how different meanings can adhere to the same substances?
materials (water, parasite, etc.) lend themselves to conceptual innovation
often things are willed away (not by a more agentive segment of the population [<-- paranoiac understanding], but) due to the attraction of other kinds of work elsewhere
(how not to) think of the entire phenomenon as one in which properties become determinate (~ scheme transfer) --✕--> properties are imminent in embodied human engagement with that world [~ Baradian: there is no such thing as a property that belongs to an independent object]
•body may be the first tool
•properties (or potentials [ajayeb style?]) cannot be listed
X as agent presents us, as shadow shows...
...................................
winds
روح ruh, spirit =/= wind: thermal expansion of air ~ air’s tendency to rarefy and expand under the influence of heat
(recognition of) thermal expansion of air ==> motor of global atmospheric circulation
explaining winds --Borrelli-->
•how rational thought could grasp
•how divine power descended to earth
pneumatic machines
gears, weights, levers, pulleys
****premodern natural phenomena
--more--> exploring and classifying *varieties* of things =/=
--less--> common *causes* of things
varieties =/= causes
cause ==>? highly complex phenomena
|[...]
(97)[...notes/fire notes.txt]%42.2[...]ement of time makes things present by making them now. What is the relation of this “making present” to the world? Is the movement of time ultimately to be traced to that of the world? On such a view, we take the successive nows that constitute time’s movement as a function of the world. Their origin is the successive impressions we receive from its objects. We, thus, come to affirm that nowness is the world’s presence to us in the impressions it leaves. Augustine gives the classic expression of this position when he writes: “It is in you, O my mind, that I measure time. ... What I measure is the impress produced in you by the things as they pass and [the impressions] abiding in you when they have passed."2 The impress is registered as the present now. We register the abiding impression left in the mind as the remembered now. If, however, we break the tie between presence and the world, we have to say that the impress is the result of our own activity. The impression that results in the now comes, in other words, not from the world, but from ourselves. It is a result of our affecting ourselves. In Derrida’s words, its origin is “the auto-affection” of consciousness.
--> ‘consciousness’ Since it involves the self-awareness that demands self-presence, the question of language expands once again. In answering it, we must inquire into the nature of consciousness.
--> ‘veil’ unveiled. a sign of difference, a kind of timidity? is shyness same as veil? is it a sheer projection? are we (am i) subdued?
--> ‘exhibitionist ambitions’ and idealized structures. the exhibitionist ambitions of these artists forswear all objective orientation. Their own uniqueness and grandiosity is taken for granted. it is not open to debate and need not be founded in a structured manner that is accessible and comprehensible to one's powers of appraisal and judgment. the representatives of postmodernism adopt the stylistic forms, themes and visual material of their art from the boundless treasure trove of art history so readily accessible today. dependence on what has already been formulated. the underlying tone of this art serves to flaunt an unparalleled sense of superiority and grandiose self-confidence. seen in many performance in this time too. (in my painting i have a rational point of view.) i don't want to orient myself towards ambitions, injected by libidinal energy, of my grandiose self-artist. of those, whose prime concern is to show their uniqueness find themselves faced with the question: “what is to be done?”. I too, choose to refuse to pander to the demands of innovation, style and integrity, but at the same time not to work myself up to grandiose self-image of artistic omnipotence.
look at the theory of intelligence for language and other kind of ‘enjoying’ the nature, art or other structures.
how is the philosophy of the sublime (quality of greatness) related to the format of my talks?[...]
(98)[...notes/notes Personen.txt]%44.9[...]asurement, measurement by sighting
greek:
vision is tactile without contact
Descartes knew this better than anyone
inaccessible (is at times) accessible to vision
the ruler (the mode notion of module) has been placed accurately on the thing
the eye is a witness of covering-over
to measure is to relate
but, the ‘relation’ implies a transporting, of the ruler
(we are with this) at the realm of the accessible (=/= metaphysics?)
in the realm of inaccessible, vision must take care of displacement
The goal is either civil or astronomical
civil =/=? astronomical
to ask the object in motion to provide a constant flow of information about the object at rest.
Thales stops time to measure space
time freeze in order to perceive
eternity of mathematical figure
how geometry came to the Greeks?
•a practical genesis: build a reduced model, have a notion of module, bring the distant to the immediate.
•a senatorial genesis: organize a visual representation of that which defies physical contact.
•a civil or epistemological genesis: take astronomy as a starting point, reverse the question of the gnomon.
•a genesis that is either conceptual or esthetic: erase time in order to measure and master space.
exchange of the stable and the variant
in a culture with oral tradition, story takes the place of schema, and theater equates intuition.
In Thales story, the schema is the invariant of the tale instead of the tale being the origin of the schema. To teach the theorem is to tell the pseudo-myth of the origin =/= mythical tales being the dramatization of content
Thales theorem is itself anecdotal in relation to the invariable concept that it expresses its own genre: that of similarity***
from a practice he gets another practice
which messages, and how, answers and questions was covered over the centuries by the scenography of shadow-light opposition?
Descartes story: perspectival geometry, theory of shadows.
Plato's story: the sun of the same, the other and empirical object, cast shadow on shaded surface, similarity, the cave of representation.
The tales of origin? --> origin of a technology? Of an optics? Of a geometry?
The ruse of applied mathematics
cultural settings of an architect and an expert builder...
Descartes followed by Descartes
archaic forms of pre-mathematics that run through history
(thinking with geometry must be careful because of its roots in engineering and ruse)
Plato's cave: even flat wall bright, light creates a shaded area; my knowledge is limited to these two shadows. And it is only a shadow of knowledge.
Conclusion of the story[...]
(99)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.4[...]ynonymy 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 (still) in the process of being formed (--> the morality of reading that i am working on)
(in the facts of the law there is no space between things and language is reduced to zero)
-language and things are born together with the very same process (Serres - Hermes.) --> stable gathering of elements
•ajayeb's version of the network of primordial elements in communication with each other
my interest in the devil is in the details of my makings (and others)
--> to touch details that establishes a direct contact
...................................
“Venus states the foedus, the contract, as an ego contiugo vos, Venus assembles the atoms, like the compounds. She is not transcendental like the other gods, but immanent in this world, the being of relation. Venus is identical to relation.”
Aphrodite governs
guarantee of repetition
parallel paths
pseudo returns
“Time itself would be nothing without objects situated in space [...] the clock that Lucretius placed right in the middle of nature cannot mark Newtonian time; as the clock is the totality of things, between their birth and death, it marks a Bergsonian, that is, th[...]
(100)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%50.9[...]n front of the) well-founded “conjoined world”
system statue
that which can be touched and tested
constant general random invariabilities in primordial path of matter
(**Serres:) morality = physics
(--> the image of physical collision and causality simulation --> morality)
--> what is then the image of the CG artist in the world? The wise man in and of the world, friend of the world, extended to the global universe:
*this is an important moment in Greek Wisdom, man is not an stranger but at home in world, (a disturbance a vortex in turbulent nature,) in contract with Venus =/= (breaking the contract,) man is stranger, fallen from sky, he hates things and fight against them, environment is an enemy --> martial neurosis from Plato to Descartes to Bacon to us
***hatred of objects at the root of knowledge***
messages exchanged:
•I, you, he, we, they,
•this, here, ecce,
•here is the thing itself
man: the one who subordinates every object to relations among subjects.
(the origin of) theater is submerged in animality : “politics and theater are merely mammalian”
-in comedy and tragedy there is only a question of human relations and there is never an object as such
(Hobbes:) “man is wolf to other men" = man is a subject to objects
*the discovery of the object*
(that there is such a thing as) object is an old original political relation tale
-a scientific invention? -->{always ask, what are the objects and subjects of [(pre)historic] science?}
*** “Aphrodite-pleasure is born of the world and the waters. Mars is in the forum and in the armed crowd. Reduce your relations to a minimum and bring your objects to the fore. Reduce the intersubjective to a minimum and the objective to the maximum. With your back turned on politics, study physics. [...] Forget the sacred, that means: forget the violence that founds it and forget the religious which links men to each other. Consider the object, objects, nature.”
Serres*
...nevertheless the plague returns and there is violence
sacred --> division of space --> temple --> inside & outside --> a dichotomized space --> a boolean geometry, a two-valued ontology --> inside : religious , outside : profane --> inside : matter , outside : void -->? Atom
...................................
Origin of geometry, construction of geometric idealities, establishment of the first proofs, a Greek (or Egyptian priest) miracle
--Serres--> this is the same as asking: how one passed from one language to another, from one type of writing to another?
**we are always dealing with many languages**
one of my contracts: agreement on what is noise.
I never truly made an agreement with my audience on what we mig[...]
(101)[...notes/notes Hermes.txt]%51.2[...]he one who cannot be tricked]
[rend: the paragon of indifference; an iconoclast; an informal trickster; prone to drunkenness, sin, and heresy; he is forever scorned but *shows no sign of injury*(?!); he is without shame or conformism; he is vivid, energetic, guiltless]
and the question of technology?
how technology breaks up and breaks into all sorts of metaphysical premises
San'an is at a primal scene of aggression?
provoking hostility
there is no sweet device that should supposed to suspend hostility, there is no magic flute in San'an story
why am I taking so many detours? whether this is describable at all
discursive formations
the teacher vs. trainer
the teacher that asks for your interiority**** (love?) any kind of transfers of emotional funds. or other economies of approval
Attar, the great and complicated poet
also my own attachments to certain formations
what kinds of poetic bodies Attar sacrifices?
what cognitive back-up system he uses?
and so on
(the students) cannot cognize (San'an's program)
forecloser, foreclosing you
توقيف
distribution of value, action, and non-action in San'an
to discover San'an where it dwells, what kinds of figures and disfigurations it is responsible for, and what else does it mask culturally?
we also add on cultural anthropological tracks to see which cultures or groups-psychologies practice San'an's teachings and in the service of what--what kind of will to power. because rarely something is practiced and it is not in service of some sort of buffing off a self or something.
(does San'an practice the will to obedience and to listening?)
what (the hell) does he want (from Tarsaa, from her Being)?!!!
to let the other go
I am talking ab[...]
(102)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%53.2[...]udies for performing ecotone
desfpe
artistic research center for material epitom studies
arcfmes
(art)mes
eccentric center of/for material and performance studies
(eco)maps
dionysian epitom for material and performance studies
demaps
eccentric center of/for epitomized material studies
ecfem
cologne center for social research
ccsr
ecotone
epitom
parc
performance and research center
cream
center for research in epistemology and matter
...................................
***sharjah project***
[general approach of the project:]
this proposal gathers literary forces from the speculative insights of Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh (on ‘radical modes of resistance’) and Edouard Glissant (on ‘modest modes of resistance’) in order to perform a ‘slider’ between hostile and relaxed patterns of “contact” and “nothingness” that has been rotating throughout the past century in the Middle East. the performance of a knowledge-zoom in the hypnotic effects, nondialogue, nonnarrative, and radical exile spaces that have emerged in eastern postmodernism to reverse and supersede the question of modernity.
by traversing the domains of revolutionary ideology, avant-garde literature, new-wave cinema, extremist thought, and protests from the limitless imaginative reservoir of their political, poetic, spiritual, and aesthetic predecessors--this projects examines a Middle Eastern navigation of identity (via the concept of the ‘mask’) and its particular modest/hostile modes of resistance (via the concept of the ‘text’). visiting sites such as: subversive epitomes of charismatic authority undertaking a poetic articulation, when chaotic imagination makes contact with nothingness, the will to chaos, and inscription of fatality in literature-as-moral-transaction.
[pressure points:]
mobile within a speculative/suggestive milieu, this project is interested in examining literary sites such as Kelile-o Demne's communal forms of fragile human cohabitation (11th century political/bestial fable), Rumi's simulation of nonexistence (13th century production of schizo-darvish), Hafez's engineering metaphor-factory (14th century imaginal faculty of extreme presence), Hedayat's Buf Koor the Shelley's Frankenstein's monster favorate book (20th century forms of renunciation), Amir Naderi and Forough Farrokhzad films (20th century strategies of withdrawal), Jala Al Ahmad and Ali Shariati writings (20th century fatal concepts of the outside), [list to be modified]
[background:]
this form of half-digestive omnivorous work is situated in a larger trajectory of creative investigations, which i have been busy with under “storytelling,” are dealing with the questions of conditions in which non-antago[...]
(103)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%55.2[...]ist rhetoric of universalism and in the wrong hands could even potentially serve as an underhanded discursive alibi for globalization, but must arise from the emergence of a supra-planetary subject within the third world that refuses to recognize the very existence of that which calls itself modernity”
--> insurgent: is an elitist --> he pushes difference to its extremity (<-- i do that!)
*the postcolonial arguments continue ti operate within a domain of critical theory that is always articulated from the space of dorment self* ==>
1- absolute annihilation of the other (<=~ my kind of paranoia?)
2- acceptance/internalization of the other --> being for-itself to behold the existence of the other but “not to make use of it”
“a freedom fighter traces his name in fire, and in the frozen throats
He dies”
(-Adonis)
Mohaghegh's methodological suggestion for how masks are forged:
a man or woman sits kneeling in a bare nondescript room, at which point various concepts are then intermittently released through the ventilation shafts and into the room's atmosphere, one after another, in slow vaporous bombardments that compel their own transfigurations for whoever breathes them. The question of what happens for the immediate circulation/navigation of the self at the center of that room, the imprint or reverberation that a lone concept holds on this hanging form, the way it inscribes and inflects an inescapable existential spasm (like a serum), is of the highest order for our project.
*on Levinas
Levinas's concept of otherness --> its theoretical production is articulated from the ditch of the historical self in modernity (part of the Western philosophical tradition) [...] entrenched within an enlightenment discourse that cannot conceive of a self without mediation through a formulated other =/= *otherless subjectivity*
-Levinas's principle goal is to repair the totalitarian self and not to explore the otherworldly powers of the other --proving--> ***something that might fix the master***
==> self is to be redeemed by otherness, made well by otherness, made sane by otherness ==Mohaghegh==> the other is never entitled to just walk away and seek its own external dominion
the other possesses (the talent of) infinity ==> ther other's responsibility is to dispense that infinity ==> ethics (not permitting the other leaving the situation)
***why is the other never allowed the right to isolation, solitude, hermeticism, anticommunalism, or misanthropy?***
it has become frustrating for me to chase these sublime phantoms (of the impossible, the unthinkable, the unknowable) drifting into incessant negative theologies... --?--> self always sees itself as that which it is not =/= (ontological differential of) the earthly dehumanized Eastern subject, the one with a staunch existential verifiabilit[...]
(104)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%56.1[...]/>
([why?] many artists do that) ***to make oneself unrecognizable***
consciousness: only a host of many someones
Nietzsche's transvaluation of historical limitations --> experience would no longer find itself entrapped by apparitions of objectivity and cohesion and could theretofore invite chance, risk, and endless experimentation
will to power --> a premediated calculable claim to mastery
Nietzsche: art as an active competitive exchange =/= Schopenhauer's mystical retreat: art to lure aside from the great road of suffering of humanity those who are wretched, exhausted, and sick, and to offer them a brief lustful moment--a little intoxication and madness (--> a view that many artists today hold)
Nietzsche + Hedayat + Aslani + Hoda's immediate acknowledgement of the world-as-unreal =/= obstacle of historicity =/= Sina: I am following a very different critique of historicity in ajayeb
بادیه نشین فلسفی Nietzsche + Hedayat (elicit repercussions for) subordination of history to a kind of literary-philosophical piracy or bedouinism =/= citadel (of geography, civilization, culture)--> many fabricatoins of art happens in citadels in Europe
Pierre has always been busy with the question of synthesis
entitlement: way of intrusion in homogenous axes of existence
xxxxx 164
...................................
xxxxx 213
most of Mohaghegh's attacks are rhetorical
the (sacred?) boundaries of mysticism
(the boundaries of cities became mystic/sacred)
mystical channels
presenting worlds immersed in a kind of constructed a priori (arising from an amorphous collection of sound and image. @Hoda)
Mohaghegh working to isolate the rare technical and conceptual arsenal behind an ethnographically immagined space
initiatives toward the horizons of a mystical inquest
...................................
sect's threat
breakaway modality of a sectarian consciousness
hermeneutic arsenals
organic theoretical apparatuses
(its own) effective radars and tactics of attunement, detection, and narration
Adonis, Samih al-Qasim, Ghada Samman, Nazim Hikmat, Ahmad Shamlu, Farrokhzad --> all tempted to (antihumanist) convert the text into a closed circle
forbidden power
moral ambiguity
collective destiny
will to extremity
shadow nears and targets
itself presumed source of all tension and unhappiness
while also spreading its influence over others
many are susceptible to its whisperings
thus he develops a perpetual alertness to its approach
schemes are everywhere
it seeks
to slip into (the sectarian's own) camp under dis[...]
(105)[...notes/sanaan full text.txt]%57.9[...]che)
3- the idea of positivity as a theoretical and practical product of negation itself
•Hegelian: a determinate negation, followed by a “higher” synthesis
•Badiou 2000, Jameson 2009, Zizek 200k, a counterwave of contemporary dialecticians
dialectics: a habit of thought--variably expressed in anthropology and philosophy and critical theory
postcolonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies <--(descendants of)-- negative dialectics =/= affirmative nondialectics
to notice (over time) in Tehran:
•relations involving intergenerational servitude and nonnegotiable indebtedness
•expressed relations of power
•other modes of spiritual and material relatedness (that would be lost if i were to tell a story that was only a variant of a master-slave dialectic)*
•ascetic qualities
•activist qualities
•*ways in which state power is implicated (behampichidan به هم پیچیدن) in the lives*
how do we piece together a world?
ajayeb.net =/= catalogue of ethnographic curiosities (<-- be very carefull with this kind, #wunderkammer)
encroachment tajavoz تجاوز
super important questions for Iranians:
•(the question of) *how we conceive of the state* and the hopes and disappointments that issue from those conceptions
•are there other ways to conceive sovereignty? [other than the Agambenian conception: the sovereign power exerts a near totalizing force over an abyss of “bare life" = state. (Agamben's) decisionist totalizing authority <-- (Schmitt's) secularized theological concepts <-- (Hobbes’) theological assumption of an omnipotence god] (--✕--> Singh's very nice criticism:) “Agamben's transcendentally negative dialectical concept of sovereingnty entails a totalizing elevation of Varuna (the terrible) in such a way as to wholly eliminate the potentialities, threats, and possibilities of Mitra --> in its contemporary political philosophy most iranians tend this way (in everyday life and forms)
•how might we imagine a political theology that enfolds more ambivalent potentialities? ****
•
(Agamben swinging between the heightened extremes of redemption and catastrophe [@Lenna] =/= ) Singh's bipolar concept, reconceptualization (of Dumezil arguing, *force* and *contract* together constitute sovereignty):
[*]Romulus (& Varuna) --> warrior ambitions --> terrible and violent aspect of sovereignty; Varuna (--Foucault-->) as punitive power and force morph into a range of disciplinary mechanisms [*in a way Foucault's entire carrier can be understood as a way of engaging Varuna in different forms]
[*]Numa (& Mitra) --> peaceful elder --> embody contract, the friendlier, pact-making aspect of sovereignty (==> rule of law), producer of welfare and health and productive economy
khoshunat + refah خشونت و رفاه<[...]
(106)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%62.7[...] forces flow and way and wane
Deleuze + Guattari + Nietzsche --> an ethical imperative to examine the kinds of life forces we affirm. negation is not expelled --(Singh reading D+G+N's ethnographic intuition)--> what ‘is’ may be richer than any ideal ‘ought’ ==> anthropology and philosophy, then, are two distinct but related ways in which life may be examined
to think affirmativelt ==> our negations become sharper
my recent knee-jerk reaction (for example to Olearius) would be to invoke Eurocentrism
(resist: “west” and “non-west”, built on entirely negative images of Europe, from which perspective postcolonial settings appear with double negativity from which they can never recover)
thoughtful moments among friends but scholastic and conversational traditions (--> Greek) =/= “sage”, part of a larger conversational contest culture (not always between “friends” but is an agon -->? Kelile-o Demne)
-other conceptual-conversational traditions (in Iran,,,?) [for example “taking an author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous”, producing an anthropologically oriented Deleuze, a reading of ___ that produces a ___ically oriented ___]
*** it is not a question of negating dialectices but of setting out a different style of thought and examining the ethnographic and political consequences that follow ***
“when you asked him the question about deities, you began a type of conversation called gyan-charcha --> knowledge-talk technique (<-- my favorite mode of reading of literature, and basically everything, is like that)
?which concept(s) you use to think through these things:
•bonded and legitimate labor
•power relations
•marriage
•sacrifice
•kinship
•intimacy
•buying
•selling
•
}--> the fabric of human relatedness depends on it<br />
*[lunar enlightenment]*
(Singh's beautiful lunar reterritorialization of “enlighting”:) what kind of light do we assume as our image of plenitude?
عجایب ماه #moon's inflow-ence, waxing and waning intensities, fluctuating thresholds, the rise and fall of gods, tutelage of moon, a lunar rather than a solar sense of enlightenment, blemished and inconstant, the moon is nondialectical, *neighbors lunacy*
Derridean moment of negative transcendence
waxing and waning plenitude of that flux
Singh:
•varying thresholds and intensities
•logics of a/not-a
•ethics and energetics @Sana
•
•
*** a shift of even a degree (say, a different mode of contract or force) could be the difference between social life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)
دروغ بد[...]
(107)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.2[...]ial life and death, happiness and despair, or exploitation and freedom ***
(Singh teaching me to think about Tehranians)
دروغ بد را با دروغ بهتر جایگزین کنیم نه با حقیقت
Nietzsche's double affirmation, yes yes
Deleuze, “the ass does not know how to say no because he says yes to everything with is no” --> to affirm is “to release, to set free what lives”
--> the idea of “challage your presuppositions” --> this is a dialectical habit of thought: the idea that the signature moment of thinking is a determinate negation (of State, Islam, Europe, etc.) Singh asks: how did this particular mode of reflexivity come to stand in for “true” anthropological thought?
would it have been better to leave things more “fluid” and “complex and contradictory”? @Eszter
ethnographic labor:
1- a form of hunting and gathering impressions
2- sifting الک کردن and cultivating expressions
(my work in apass:) our relation to concepts becomes more explicit, as we turn impressions into considered thoughts
...................................
thinking postcolonial urbanism with Anand Taneja
(this is the question of the limitations of imagination:)
how (for a generation of scholars [or artists]) rural (india) [or syria, Iran, or South Korea] has become simply a space of disasters, statistics, and deaths --✕--> Anand's work is a counter-example [i am learning from him to be attentive to my own imagination's stopping-points. to resist stories that render life in those milieus unthinkable] --> that those spaces are not only of abjection but also of imagination and curiosity --> to think about alternative (conceptual) vocabularies to think about those abjected places, religion, and ajayeb [that does not only negate those milieus]
-to think about religion is super usefull and relevant, because it is also about what secularism is
how people (in rural areas) conceive of vitality and advancement?
*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in a world like Tehran; #proposal to research on ‘the image of growth’ رشد roshd, slow growth, [roshd-e bi-raviye رشد بی رویه of toxins and species, and so on] in the context of contemporary Tehran)
-imitations of forms
(i am activating a rhizomatic mode of perception [learning from Anand learning from Deleuze and Guattari])--> how one aspect of life leads to another =/= paritioning of the milieu
anthropology of the state : how one engages the state in an every day level
*historically one crucial exit point from the system of ruler-relation was to become ascetic (زهد): disregard for sovereign authority (حاکم hakem, hakemiat) --> a different form of power that one let's to l[...]
(108)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.3[...]r />
incorporation of the liminal undead (preta) with ritually incorporated ancestors (pitri) [job of the mourner]
(crucial task of the) ritual: conveying the dead from the threshold of liminality into an ancestral flow of life
emphasis on the system is (always?) at the cost of the event
(eternal investment of the artists in foregrounding of the event rather than the structure --> rapture with structure as caste, tradition, state, norm, system, etc. at the cost of missing the practical kinship transcribed into the social contract, leadership, and laws of encounter)
***modernity is composed (neither by continuities nor rupture then, but) by transfigurations***
(Singh + Veena)
critical event
critical structure
[*]event: institute a new modality of historical action which is not inscribed in the inventory of that situation
(for Furet: French revolution is an event par excellence) --Veena--> event: moments when new modes of action come into being which which redefines traditional categories (such as: codes of purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)
foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan
not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)
there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)
event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)
event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place
in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims
in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure
(**modernity is an event**)
pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order
Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering
the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is prec[...]
(109)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.5[...] purity and honor, the meaning of martyrdom, construction of a heroic life, etc.)
foregrounding the event as analytic category (without disappearing the question of structure):
-sati of Roop Kanvar
-Sikh militancy
-collective violence during the partition of India and Pakistan
not only the state (tries to institutionalize collective memory), but also minor communities (in the process of their emergence) try to control and fix memory in much the same manner [not total of course] (--> something i am learning in north of Norway with the sami)
there is always *ambiguity* in the way even the most passionate public presentations of militant nationalist discourse is framed (--> there is ***noise in reference to violence*** @Mona)
event ==> shift the configuration of analysis (and not annulling the structure's analytical possibilities)
event: (a new set of) circumstances for which rules are not set in place
in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims
in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure
(**modernity is an event**)
pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order
Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering
the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)
Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***
toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)
poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)
...distance that arises out of forms of proximity
Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition[...]
(110)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.5[...]for which rules are not set in place
in the case of Bhopal intoxication --> gradual creation of an expert discourse which sought to dissolve the concrete and existential reality of suffering victims
in the case of such-large suffering event coordinations gradually come to be defined around it --> question of structure
(**modernity is an event**)
pain and suffering are not simply individual experiences ... they may also be experiences which are created and distributed by the social order
Veena's *anthropology of pain*
how institutions (in the domain of religion, and modern: bureaucracy, law, medicine) maintain and signal their legitimacy in the face of massive human suffering?
-manufacture of pain
-theology of suffering
the discovery of the event, as a question for anthropology, is precisely that: *event exceeds structure*
(exess ==> reimagining the networks that compose our lives)
Veena --> Bhopal industrial disaster: neither social relations nor locally available knowledge were sufficient to apprehend the event. it is at this point that people had to actively search for new knowledge, for new kinds of social actors that might help them address the question of what was happening to their bodies --> they had to reconstruct social relations to include the existence of international legal systems and governmental bureaucracies in their image of society***
toxic potency (==> difference, collective violence [such as the partition of India and Pakistan =/=], stable violence [such as a village caste dispute],,,)
poles of life and death that separates different kinds of collective violence --> the sexual and reproductive violence witnessed in the Partition connot be understood by taking social relations as model
(Veena)
...distance that arises out of forms of proximity
Veena 3 books:
•Structure and Cognition --> illuminates certain recurring patterns
•Critical Event --> paints a kind of national lanscape
•Life and Words --> turn to an art of an anthropological portraiture
...healing properties of the everyday
...everyday life generates its own forms of toxicity
(Singh's) art of portraiture
of individuals, of milieu,
*singularity (of a portraiture) may express something both local and global*
Veena --> how would we conceptualize the moments of potentially violent uncertainty?
-Benjamin: invocations of the uncanny
-Derrida: the spectral
-Veena: eventedness of the everyday (--> skepticism)
Cavell (on Hollywood cinema and other sites where the drama of separation and union is played out) --> how philosophers have typically focused on skepticism [longstanding western philosophical question and doubt about existence] with respect to mater[...]
(111)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.6[...]factors (race, etc.)
-recourse اعاده
(we can always do aggressive) counter reading --> counter forensic: the technical rhetorical work making evidence speek : “voice + image = task of persuasion” --claiming--> public truth and rights
•(Thrall and Keenan:) alternative modes other than using images (visual evidence, fundamentally a peaceful way of wanting ‘change’): using force(?)
•forensic ~ advocacy ~= configuration of claims and evidence --> claiming is always claiming rights [=/= commitments]}
Keenan: rights are something we claim (=/= something we have) --through-->
1. advocacy
2. forensics
(Spivak's question: can the subaltern speak?) --> (Veena suggests forms of attentiveness to) myriad fluctuations between yes and no (=/= Derrida's notion of absence of voice)
we come to recognize the expressiveness of our interlocutor (in its different and difficult forms)
[...working for the expressivity of others, and not yours]
(Veena research in Sultanpuri:) *theatrical performances of violence created a subjectivity that would not be carried forward in time*
-to what extent subjects posses the knowledge they enact? (~ do we know what we do?) --?--> question of structure and cognition (~ the extent to which we know the structures that we are part of, and what vulnerabilities and events this leaves us open to)
(let's stop throwing easy) political and moral posturing about neoliberalism
...there are only particular regions of the past that we potentially or actually have access to. we do not know in advance which regions of the past life might lead us to, or express through us --Veena--> we are not necessarily *cognizant of the structure*, but may still express *fragments of myth* --> ***nonagentive invocation of politics*** @Hoda (Veena example: right after Sultanpuri carnage, women were sitting in front of their burnt houses in a position of stillness letting their body grow dirty, sorrowfully embodying pollution and dirt, like Draupadi in Mahabharata proclaiming her violation through public expression of her pollution. but the women did not device a strategy to carry a tactic of everyday life into the realm of the political. it was as if the past has turned this face towards them--not that they had translated this past story into a present tactic of resistance --> living fragments of a myth)
more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument
two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract
[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?
the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state<[...]
(112)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.8[...] />
more like a conceptual signpost =/= extended argument
two signature issues of politics:
•sovereignty --> the state
•associational life --> the social contract
[the state is supposed to be a proxy for people to appropriate power (of death?!), rather than laying absolute claim over it]
-how such claim is contested or reformulated in iran?
the figure of the abducted and rescued woman --> sign of authority --> sign of state
having a politics =/=? do politics ~ political act
*agonistic impulse of politics* (often, if not prophetic, a heroic mode of action in terms of escaping the ordinary rather than descend into it [--> Marx]. such as: Antigone's spectacular defiant voice celebrated in philosophical and political thought, stable locus of redemption. usually a rebellion in some sort, craving a socially progressive agonistics --> French Revolution)
--or--> (=/= possibility of an ethnographic) integrity: *attempt to attain a proximity to the vagaries of life* ~~> ordinary works of repair in a life, such as Asha
--or--> *reparative impulse of politics* (=/= agonistic), Shahrzad's non-agonistic socially progressive politics of working under “terror” animated by the question of how we might continue to live together, how the social fabric holds together
--or-->
(it is our/my imperative today) ***to give each other a more open-ended picture of [our] bad objects (caste, capital, state, modernity, etc.)***
exchange, resettlement, fission, mythological replacement (~ friction and movement within the system) ==> repartitioning of categories ==> rearrangement of hierarchies ==> opposing and heretical sects and religions
-art's (ethnographic?) proximity to life
-political postures and stands
(nobody has, neither state nor communities) monopoly on ethical pronouncement [~ declaration of good and evil]
(political) postures are not unimportant, they allow us to take a stand --> perspective
--or--> evocatively ambiguous formulation on... =/= [*]politic: spirit of resentment on behalf of the victim (Setareh, Hoda, Ali ; also @Sina not to deny the possibility of victimhood) --> *how possibilities of life close down and where other possibilities open up under the weight of patriarchal norms*
question at Hoda:
-how dose she involve a relocation of her protagonists (the sorrowful women) within the domestic, even if the domestic shifts?
-how an understanding of power after Foucault (that power does not come from above, that power is not something that has to be identified) influences her mode of thinking about the condition of her women? [the boundaries of patriarchy are not clear]
sometimes recovery from violence does not come from national imaginary and public rituals of mourning and reparation, Veena shows how a certain[...]
(113)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%63.9[...] of shadows for an understanding of sensory experience, aesthetics, and divine order
(Naveeda asks for an) alternative approach to the islamic tradition besides the trope of light --Anand--> imagining a lived islam from the perspective of shadows
shadows as the (relational and individual) self
*ruin: draw visitors by making itself the inner rendered as the outer --> a traversal of one's inner self, otherwise hidden to oneself
perspective from the shadow --allows--> to think about tradition paradoxically (about *affective inheritances* in the constitution, transmission, and transformations of the islamic tradition)
Anand --> ****islam as identity =/= islam as inheritance****
islam as inheritance --Spadola--> like a river (#meander)
Anand --> *how older forms of knowing and being coexist and are constantly in conversation and contestation with more modern form*
...to reimagine the very definition and coherence of “discourse”
*(Foucauldian) archaeological work*: full of ruptures, disagreements, and reworkings ranging across an array of texts and conversations from contemporary to colonial records to hadith to eighteenth-century poetry
question of coherence = question of finding a grammar
difficult intellectual commitment to both contingency and coherence
(you can witnessed in Tehran a lot of anti-patriarchal, anti-hierarchical, and anti-identitarian)
[our challenge:] *to make ourselves literate* able to read what is currently illegible to us
Kant's notion of hospitality = translation of the sanskrit upanishads into persian by the mughal prince and philosopher Dara Shukoh (1615-1659)
--Ganeri--> hospitality towards texts and ideas?
*for an intellectual tradition to have the ability to show hospitality to an intellectual stranger*
-Shakry
what does it mean to think through psychoanalysis and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge
گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof
economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life
•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homoge[...]
(114)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.1[...]s and islam together, not as a “problem,” but as a creative encounter of ethical engagement?
-how arabic intellectual world showed profound hospitality to Freudian thought
-how iranians showed profound hospitality to western philosophies --witness--> self-confident and enriching ethical encounter with a foreign system of knowledge
گورکانی pre-colonial mughal empire, inheritor of long and unbroken traditions of islamic and indic thought, (from a place of power, privilege, integration) welcomed the upanishads into dialogue with the conceptual world of tasavof
economic, military, and discursive powers of European imperialism ==> epistemological and ontological havoc they wreak on muslim forms of life
•to move back and forth between al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Freud (1856-1939) <-- without any sense of swimming against the *gushing streams of empty homogeneous time*
•bringing the upanishads, from several hundred years BCE, into conversation with the Quran <-- unconstrained by the *teleology of linear historical time*
--> (my lecture-performances: being) inhabited a world of multiple temporalities {=/= teleology ==> linear time of progress, moving ever forward--teleology of time is central to modernity & question of the self}
many post-colonial projects shares that sense of a break from the past, which must now be recovered --✕--> sense of rupture and alienation was not (and is not) the only way in which the colonized responded to the colonizer
Shakry --> *plenitude of time and the persistence of traditions* + productive conceptual dialogue (~= ajayeb studies)
•to engage with the ethico-philosophical questions
intellectual and religious elite across the colonial Middle East and South Asia lived within a plenitude of time in which Freud and Ibn Arabi, separated by centuries, could productively speak to each other unconstrained by the borders of “tradition” and “modernity,” “religious” and “secular”
(Shakry > Anand)
...................................
(Mufti > Weber:) inescapability of calculation and instrumental rationality in a capitalist society ==> fundamental transformation of religious belief and practice in the transition to the modern social order
•“steel-hard shell” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), “iron cage” --provides--> range of possibilities for social action and social imagination
***modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism*** [in contemporary art within Europe --> #fables of: novelty, innovation, departure]
redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science --> craving spheres of the irrational (spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched) are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens
}= a method of emancipation from intellectualism
intensive social transformation in the postcolonial world
con[...]
(116)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.2[...]y not water? would not this be enough to infuse life into the whole continent? why should noy vegetation flourish on its plains, fish in its seas, animals in its forests, and man in every one of its zones that were capable of sustaining life? to these interesting questions, what a satisfaction it would be to be able to answer positively one wat or another! for thousands of difficult problems a mere glimpse at this hemisphere would be enough to furnish a satisfactory reply. how glorious it would be to contemplate a real, on which the eye of man has never yet rested!” (Jules Verne, All Around the Moon)
the side of the moon facing earth is being gradually eroded by earth’s gravitation
Pythagoreans <-- one of the first recorded visions of an inhabitable moon on which animas and plants flourish, larger and more beautiful than on earth <== *it makes to sense to create a planet that is uninhabited*
“[...] for she would then appear to have come into existence vainly and to no purpose, neither brining forth fruit nor providing fir men of some kind an origin, an abode, and a means of life, the purpose for which this earth of ours came into being” (Plutarch, On the Face of the Moon)
metaphors for the silence of the space --> perennial question of humankind
the black sea sparkle with lustrous fires, like the ceiling of a vast hall of ebony encrusted with flashing diamonds
with what a soft sweet light every star glowed
no matter what its magnitude, the stream that flowed from it looked calm and holy
not twinkling
no scintillation
no nictitation
disturbed their pure and lambent gleam
...................................
night dreams (after WIELS's exhibition)
starting with the story of the jinn studying origin of species --> bestiaries
mix of reports from Hedayat'neyrangestan + Shamlu's ketab kuche + Marzolph's topology of persian folklore iranian stories + ajayeb stories --to--> ?
...................................
jin lamp
tree
scared face
book Skala:
royal fairy tales
baba jaga kostliva noha / bony legs
the first worm
death skeleton afraid of itself, of its own image
self-reflective
you are following, while being followed, and the one who follows you is being followed...
pop-up book
•endless doors (on top of each other)
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VTo8s/
•rotation: https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vp8Yb/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4Vw7qk/
•https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VttgH/
•moon https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMR4VV2CC/
•Philippines --> aesthetics of poverty [culture of material poverty --> poverty as scenic design and working philosophy] (==> the imperative to eliminate nonessentials =/= my philosophy)
•[...]
(117)[...notes/note jinn.txt]%64.5[...]ve for modern imagery and media (from museum to archive)
archive performs a strange dialectics
to see the archive as a technological rational question, and engineering assignment, is to naively avoid the thinking about your own activity as a constructive activity
depriving yourself of any tools to act
is archive a tool to act?
the agency of an archive..
“other ways” of composing?
marking its territory? how to make a map without giving way to the territory as an extension of the map?
["Angels Without Wings” A conversation between Bruno Latour and Anselm Franke]
the mechanical extension, Res extensa, the (descartian) extended thing, the visualizing technologies, technical drawings, has been so strong that the temptation so say “well, that's what the world is really like” is very great, especially when your foreground is all of the engineering talents and engineering skills that are necessary to assemble.
to attribute strangeness...
what ‘will’ you inherit?
you have little idea of what will you inherit
(other way of not thinking about your activity now)
*the question of future
[Ronell]
false remembrance, displaced memory, that actually repeatedly represses and disturbs ‘giving’
any remembrance involves forgetting
an official call for design an archive from khm also invoked that the institution is ready to forget, announces institutional forgetting, and disavows remembrance
remember includes the lost-member, bringing my member, the phalus (in English ‘member’ also means the male organ of copulation)
[Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. “Das Gedächtnis.” ‘Enzyklopädie Der Philosophischen Wissenschaften Im Grundrisse’ 1817. Web.]
Hegel makes a distinction of two modalities of memory:
(1) ‘Erinnerung’ (internalized memory, which is situated in the heart), (it could also be hallucinatory, might dependent on an interiority that isn't there!);
(2 and this one concerns archive) ‘Gedechnis’ (technological memory, a supplement or prosthetic device that reminds you. ==> it's mechanical, it's on the side of death and forgetting, a kind of memory that needs to be prompted) (to choose the technology of writing/archive the subject of memory is so screwed.)
***everything depends on the ways we remember!
[footnote on German memory]
[blackwellreference.com, entry: “memory, recollection and imagination"]
Plato's doctrine that all learning is the recollection (anamnésis) of things previously known but later forgotten casts a shadow over the idealists’ uses of Erinnerung.
...................................
is any act of remembrance also a traumatic experience? [...]
(118)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.2[...]is sojourn
the importance of archive is today perhaps not in creating one but in reading them.
--how many archive we still need to read and probe and consider, with concepts or para-concepts that we thought we had a hold on.
...................................
being enfolded is often a strategy for survival (?, Marks)
(Akira Mizuta Lippit:) things are not saved by being archived (Borgesian nightmare)
histories for which the present is not ready --> what are those sites where histories slip into latency?
(how not?) ***to enter a culture from outside*** (problem of the prophet, both Moses and Freud) --> *everything depends on the ways we ‘bring’ things* [bringing monotheism, destruction, etc.] ~-> (social and material) milieu thinking (--> to think about Baten in Baten)
(art's will and the judgment of value that informs it...) Kunstwollen's desire to grow and travel
...................................
[Ariella Azoulay]
() the opposition between keeping and putting away, preservation and cancelation.
archive: the home of the dialectic of preservation and cancellation
...when fully lit and relatively flat
Derrida: (archive) “is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow.”
archive's Foucauldian “space of appearance”
constructed as ex-territorial and as a receptacle (makhzan) for the past
archive is not a fortress external to our world, with us as its pilgrims
(the ontological performance of filling a document)
(a constellation, aimed at distancing and disturbing us)
collecting --> grouping
extracting --> sharing
cataloguing --> indexing and tagging
...................................
(for Freud:) trauma <~=> memory
(for Nietzsche:) “Man could never do without blood, torture, and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself.” ----> ‘ritual’ may be seen as a way to keep memory alive without the experience of pain?
(Bataille after Nietzsche:) ‘sacredness’: the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being
within the political art domain the “I feel your pain” has sympathetic currency. one is punished by drawing public attention to their pleasures
(I feel your pleasures =/=) “sense of pain” [an asset of the artist] ==establishes==> awareness of the existence of the body
processing is largely parallel, while, attention is largely serial
disciplines of the modern subject
(in artistic work the unsolved issue remians:) technniques for/of the external control
...................................
[*] which spaciotemporal vectors are embeded in the archive, as a modern feeling of arr[...]
(119)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%66.4[...]ement. (Weinberger)
individual expertise is (many argue) being replaced by the wisdom of crowds: noisy and endlessly contentious, but also rich, diverse, and multi-skilled [=/= fantasies of Black Mirror TV series]
wikis of all sorts
(?is my ajayeb.net a) citizen science
vigor and growing utility
“distance matters”
(Olson)
commodification of data : the presentation of datasets as complete, interchangeable products in readily exchanged formats
data-driven science
problem of evaluation
--> ***Do we know things if we cannot explain why they are true?*** (Anderson)
hierachically organized forms of credentialing
in Julia's seminar we were trying to examine: commodified data analysis tools and widely available software skills ==> (larger number of participants to) analyze data and run models
(*a problem with university students:) [students who do appear] more motivated by the university as a *rite of passage* (گذار از بلوغ) and a *lifestyle*
=/= learning
*professors are no longer seen as infallible experts, but as resources whose facts can be checked in real time
(question of) standard / ontology --> (desire for) universality / (need for) change
knowledge of past climates
@apass
(through my love and study for ajayeb --> infrastructure -->) questions for apass:
-what new forms of organization and community are emerging? what power relations do they rely on, create, or destroy? who wins and who loses as knowledge infrastructure change? (questions proposed by a knowledge infrastructure workshop 2012)
-(ways to) encode and reinforce existing interests and relations of power
-(we need) a design community versed in these literatures:
•different social worlds
•conflicting conceptual frameworks
•sociology of science and technology
•sociology of standards (--> standardizing data has proven to be a crucial activity in *scaling up* the sciences) #lens
•boundary objects
•trading zones
•actor networks
•how sharing works in practice
•agreements on shared norms, practices, and technical systems (problematized by Femke, she focuses my attention on how software developers are too quick to construct “ontologies”)
•
==> to scale up the generally lower-level focus of design thinking [--> how my ajayeb.net addresses this?]
--> to co-design new infrastructures
--> to look beyond the scale of a field and timeframe of a career
(we need) meaningful access to digital media (not an exciting add-on investment)
--> new forms of knowledge infrastructure may disadvantage and devalue older forms of knowledge production:
•new sensor network replacing ecological fiel[...]
(122)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%67.9[...] />
}--> they all have typically conservative, slow-changing forms* -- because when they change, authority, influence, and power are redistributed; (changes takes decades rather than years) --> a long-time-scale, historically informed framework to situate our thinking --> sustainable, accumulative, and shareable qualitative databases
internet-supported citizen science
the 19th century's Darwin favored ‘genetic form’ --> massive and global shift in modes of classification
standard --> *preserving the meaning of data is a human affair, requiring continuous curation
#knowledge zoom lens --> “the long now” (Bowker)
(it took 200 years for printed book's) *intellectual armature* (that now we consider intuitive:)
(in ajayeb.net i am responding and working all of them)
•index
•table of contents
•bibliography
•footnotes
•generally agreed rules on plagiarism
•page numbers (--> =^77988.1.6$shathiat)
***qualitative science*** : detailed, indepth, and meaning-oriented investigations --> analysis, statistical (for example the social network analysis strengths of scope and summation in Braudel's study)
(question of my “writing”:) how to nourish mechanisms for large-scale, long-term research?
-we need to go beyond one-off projects to develope systems and standards for collecting, curating (my knowledge, ajayeb's knowledge) while simultaneously protecting subject's identities and interests /***
=/= short-term, project-by-project work
-(constantvzw is doing this:) build collaborative sciences
sociotechnical phenomena do not rest within the domain of a single discipline
-comparative analysis techniques
comparison across cases (--> how Kobe in his case-based work produces a critically comparative data?)
creation of compatable data [: properly documented --> facilitate sharing] (--> how for my ajayeb?)
(in your work and research -->) encouraging the identification of crucial similarities and differences
-sustainable and sharable data archives, collected over multiple investigative projects --> ajayeb.net = knowledge/thoughts/notes of multiple projects (--> is this my “data”?)
cyberscholarship
#lens, to scale up qualitative social science <--> deploy data storage, visualization, hypertext, and collective-creation possibilities of the web and social media, *new tools for textual analysis*
...................................
[which] cultures (or stories) permit a graceful listening forth to our seeing[?]
(metaphorical economy of) *mnemonic deep*:
•past is a thing that you escape at all costs, our past explains who we are,
•as palimpsest, The infinite faces of the past can be read off the present face ==[...]
(123)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.1[...] humanity tale]
(Bowker > Babbage:) until the invention of printing, “the mass of mankind were in many respects almost the creatures of instict” --> “flood of light over the darkened intellects of their thankless countrymen”
(the spirit of 19th century embodied in Babbage) making the ***act of making information*** such a key variable:
(print rational/archival memory ==>) new space and time ==> (need for) regular working of the machines of nature and the world : *regularization of time and the distribution of tasks* [--> a mythological operation]<== infrastructural work:
•developement of computing (+ machineries)
•division of labor
Buckland + Babbage ==> complete knowability of the Book of Nature
information and database theory (in genomics --> a core science of our time)
archive ==(is central to ‘thinking about’ & ‘writing down’ of)==> objects being studied
information explosion of the early 19th century + new ways of describing the past
“locality of each geologist will be the terrestrial globe” (--> locality of Olearius)
heroic age --> everyone constructed complete systems (that are thrown up and down in cataclysmic succession [!]) [--> question of artistic research]
...relics of the animate creation of former ages [--> science special effects, museum of continuity,]
[title]
indifinite space as filled with worlds...
colossi
earthquakes
floods
storms
tranquil variations
“second nature”:
•(from) past
•analytical constructs of extended present
[title]
***an irregular past and a totalizing memory***
(‘chaos’ characterized of/for archive ==> human nature)
moral duty as humans [!!**] --> to recognize stasis at the heart of disorder **** (--> an ancient fable, archetype) *apperceive[~ perceive in terms of a past experience, accumulative perception] synchrony in the midst of diachrony[~ look for historical changes/roots in languages]* + to sync ([*]synchronization: to bring social and natural time into a unified form <--through-- production and storage of records)
@Marialena
the metronomic story
the mnemonic story
***spatializing time***
(for humanity) going out in space, to India, to the Orient, or within France to Brittany or the Pyrennees, was going backward in time (~ mapping technique ==> position of “humanity” out there nowhere --> anomalous, moral, short term [--> “impact” of Star Trek crew(~ a cult of people who have unlocked the secret of life and the universe) on the worlds they visit])
==> faceless scientist working in a vast and effective machine (--> Haraway talks about the same)
new memory practices
•***lie[...]
(124)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%68.9[...]er hesitate to jump to a conclusion about its meaning *** [i used a farsi word in english: zolmat, pir, tarof,]
nothing is permanent --> we call some things/objects/identifiers naively nuanced “persistent” or “not persistant”
(important -->) ** of course, it is not a thing that resists change, it is the provider of a thing that resists or, more precisely, controls change **
“reproducible science needs citations” <-- what is my ajayeb relation to this?
(i am modifying some of Calvert's term:)
[*]identifier: an (always breakable) association
[*]actionable identifier: an identifier that can be acted upon by widely available interpretive systems --?--> [*]queryable: effectively leading to a story
[*]content: abstract substance ‘usually’ found in strings
[*]history: a list of (not always all the) versions, (a human-readable document that describes the change?)
(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux
*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 proven[...]
(125)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]t describes the change?)
(ajayeb.net must always help users) guage the persistence commitments and abilities of repositories and archives <-- element names, values, and precise semantics are in flux
*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 profe 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 commodif[...]
(126)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.2[...]to the local variables of the model objects
--✕--> (how?) model a time function
stream: delayed (infinite) list
stream programming:
•different abstractions such as: map, filter, accumulate,
•transformations of lists
•sequence manipulations without incurring the costs of manipulating sequences as lists
•tadriji incremental computation
random: statistical properties of uniform distribution
object-orientation: polymorphic abstract data types =/= relational data model
Building Abstractions with Data
how to use:
•primitive data (numbers)
•primitive operations (arithmetic operations)
building abstractions by combining data objects to form compound data <==> *to increase the modularity* of (our) designs ==> to increase/enhance the expressive power of our language
data abstraction:
*technique of isolating* (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘represented’ from (the parts of a program that deal with) how data objects are ‘used’
versioning
garbage collection
...................................
the question of “what [✕] can learn from [Y]?”
Calvert on Mestiza consciousness
library and information scientists
consciousness of the borderlands [~ in between categories, creative/annihilating forces a person living borderlands must struggle against]
***contradictory impulse for *hording* & *sharing*
categorizing, naming, describing --> power-laden practices we cannot do without
each *schema* reveals its priorities, legitimizes/delegitimizes, renders visible/invisible the knowledge it contains/excludes
(Foucault:) library: (places that preserve) discourses that one wishes to remember and keep in circulation [--✕--> Anand's jinn temporality and genealogy of human memory]
mestiza --> hybrid way of knowing/acting/living, as “none of the above”
what is hybrid and impure may be monstrous (in the epistemologies of power) and may experience *hightened visibility* (~= scrutiny, study, problematization, pity)
“orphans of infrastructure” (Leigh Star)
locked in a duel with the oppressor
lived experiences of marked classes
(in each duality pair, one is called “the consitutive outside” [subject/object, male/female, etc.]) --?--> switching polarity ==> valorizing feminine over masculine, black over white, nurture over nature, emotion over reason
crossing of cultures
*which collectivity does the daughter of the darkskinned mother listen to?*
(while i was in apass i had a shift of attention to) the *labor of knowledge work* (in collective digital flesh life)
media ~= knwoledge for[...]
(127)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%69.7[...]"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 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
[...]
(128)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70[...] 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/luminous effect (of mixture)
and also:
•to address (in a longer term) how apass performs analysis and prioritization of its own service definition?
•to address (in a longer term) historical/cultural specificities of apass
•to address aspects of apass's exceptionalism (its characters, colors, doings, values)
REPORT:
Geert
zoom / biger picture
perform a zoom
Geert and Michael knowledge zoom-level
Geert's strech-work
which cheats
vulgar: direct, =/= suffisticated, =/= nice(in a classical sense), =/= institutional code [--> a cheat], everyday, good taste, context?!!
suggested topology: skew --changed--> nest (tow branches answering yes and no to: “is he cheating?”)
Leo
stickiness ~ residual (left overs of impression), we couldn't find little objects, litte stickies
[...]
(129)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.1[...] slow processes (soil, geology, plant form)
•fast processes (plant seasonal behavior, weather, human responses to all of these things)
*drawing as structured wondering/wandering*
use of the *dramatic* as method --> to entertain multiple worldviews
to maintain irreducible complexity and to recenter historical processes as central to understanding contemporary politics
(history and drama)
-facts as enacted and performed before audiences (--> tradition in science and technology)
**knowledge is always performed, staged, and enacted** <== my work on ajayeb
how to tell the dramatic stories
...................................
notes from Sofia's seminar on documentation
the questions i brought home with Kobe:
the ontological relationships between law and art, who protects who? what protects protection? --> which material discursive practices make the ontological boundaries of “protection”? (specially today investigating this term is more urgent in a world saturated with toxic vocabularies of security.) the figure of protection transforms the subjects of knowledge and knowability --> look at how the judge was talking about art
(question of) the production of subjectivity (of the judge himself as an active knowing agent and the dead-master as the phantasmatic place-holder of meaning)
this is related to: (question of) responsibility and individuality --> influences and efforts of the work. two interesting moments of genesis occurred:
1- in the court “his work” (Beuys) was mysteriously created
2- also when Olga got a phone call from the ministry of culture, “her work” was mysteriously created
--> both the court and the phone call are mystic producers of the subjectivity of the artist dead or alive [#this needs more investigation]
(question of) the production of significance and difference
look at the speech-acts of the judge in the case of Beuys. which nuances of difference are generated, estated, established, and propagated? we can study every syllable of the judge's speech-act. the judge goes from one fable to another: fables of significance, fables of influence, fables of impression, etc.
boundary-making practices in our shared struggling world
the idea that art “starts” and “stops” somewhere
zeroing the artworks ecosystem
when is the moment (or how the moment can be marked) that the judge becomes able to say “OK, I don't know.” or “I am opinionated about this art. Let's bring an expert.”
and beyond that, I am wondering, like that judge, when myself standing in front of an artwork (or any work) how i am able to say “I have an opinion, or, I don't know”, “i need expertise in order to look at this”?
questions of: essence (in art), subjectivity production, protection,
[...]
(130)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.3[...]ion,
with Vincent
(?what was the) notion of “everything is kept here” in his work
(?why and how) his storytelling was all about design --> his stories of responsibility and factuality
how and why in our artistic practices, production of responsibility and factuality is hold in the terms and services of design and designer that is busy with building enhanced and efficient communication networks historically rooted in the geometries of modernist project?
(?what is the artist's) busy-ness with design --> related to the fathers of correction (?) and proper address
who (and why) wants to look at which past with lenses and geometries of the violent grids of the forefathers of modernist design?
--> ontology of document: an artifact with a specific layout and design
design has to do with the proper address (?) which is (always) about the proper witness (?)
(in the case of Vincent) do you agree with the amerindian know-how that “a good designer is a dead designer”?
(?what was the) proper affect of history (that his work was creating)
through the aesthetic of old and antique video projectors his colonialism belonged properly to the past --> (question of) the production of the proper witness
the architecture and flag of BOZAR plus his notion of design, are they interesting and necessary ways of forming kinship and properly distanced history?
Vincent “knew” his distance to the past (--> do you smell a problem?)
in which clock he is looking at time? which time machine he is handed to or placed in? who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?
with Olga
regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports
for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)
what is the feeling of the document?
*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?
putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names
-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers
(question of) m[...]
(133)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.4[...] who/what is making his time model?
also, which segment of your practice is temporalized? this means also which part of your practice stands out of time?
with Olga
regards of the question “what are an artwork's boundaries?” and it's intersections with documents, lists, and reports
for Olga:
document = evidence
research = mourning
(mourning as the passionate and demonstrative activity of expressing the state of loss or deprivation of a certain object for a certain subject, and demand for its revival or memorialization)
what is the feeling of the document?
*document is a story that (usually) silences other stories*
where our powers to provoke care (could/should) come from (if not from document/evidence)?
is document (in its form and feeling) the best way we have at our disposal to provoke the care of the generations? ...to mark each other with the mark of the care?
putting the narrative into proper sleep
casting the names
-artist has turned herself into a mnemonic device --> suggesting “amnesia” as her context
-artist has become a reminder and (therefore) her audiences have become memorizers
(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers
indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled
how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of techn[...]
(134)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.5[...]/>
(question of) memory and remembering --> the idea of ‘literal remembrance’ in her performance, re-membering, literally bringing back the “members” of the Kurt Jooss company into the present of her audiences
-the problem with her remembrance is that “there is something that is important to remember” regardless of the person/subject who remembers
indisputability of the Green Table for Olga
the artist has chosen to protect The Green Table's meaning and message (due to her political and ethical commitments [for world peace?]) in a sense her subject of research remains unresearched, her values unevaluated, her moral settlements settled
how can she become interested in decomposing her research-bodies of The Green Table?
can we remain critically ethically responsible in thinking about the “meaning and message” of our subject of study and still be able to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading<br />
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning
placement, world, Dasein, fall
in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and f[...]
(135)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.5[...]le to decompose it in interesting serious ways? (yes yes)
questions of: thinking, reminding, remaining,
Sofia's documentation
she asks “what is document today?”
-what was document yesterday (that is not anymore today)?
-how the agency and meaning of docu is (or is not) mutating in time?*
-what is beyond the question of documentation and preservation? --> *durational aesthetics*
-is document a limited way of asking questions about what we do and our relationship with time and duration? [you never know what the present brings into the future.]
what art cannot say that document can? “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning
placement, world, Dasein, fall
in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game<[...]
(136)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...] “truth”?
when truth was invented where was document standing?
is document today a mere effect of technologies of inscribing?
why we are not talking about “file”?
(---> go to the ontology of evidence and files in X-Files TV series)
is ‘file’ the bedrock of reading today?
document assumes, constructs and promises its own labor of reading
? document is that which reads as referent, truthful, evident, economic value, , ,
Femke, with multiple understanders of the blended, blending world
the question of the metaphors of the body
manuality
manual understanders
for her “the point of origin” is at stake? --> the “ground” is at once desired and disarticulated for the sake of an idea of situatedness --> politics of positioning
placement, world, Dasein, fall
in CG bodies are articulated in differential vectors, not “grounds” --> does she want to ground the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness
...................................
to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual
the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)
vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)
the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is i[...]
(137)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]round the body?
she was mobilizing the metaphors of: body, ground, falling
how is she falling? in which historically contingent practices of grounding is she grounded, building her discourse?
ontology of the variable --> (question of the) figure of variation
her work with the partners of crime, getting in the front line and frontiers of CG working and practical metaphors
...................................
Sofia's textual machine, switching between binary values of faire contract --> staying with the polar syntax of ‘you’ and ‘them’
-how the rotating axis of her machine is able of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness
...................................
to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual
the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)
vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)
the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney
...................................
Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)
...................................
*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and[...]
(138)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]of creating breaks in the syntax of the contract?
-(for her machine: “understanding = an act of application”) --> how new forms of *understanding* could change the ways we might achieve fair societies? and not merely changing the order of sentence to visualize and objectification of unfairness and precariousness of the employment economy, in the exegesis of the writen contract. what would it mean to install an understander (taking a risk), for Sofia, and not a reversal syntaxer (making aware)?
-employer and the employee as different “species” with their different “natural” tendencies to fuck with one another? --> zero-sum game
-the question of symbiotic relatedness (--> psychoanalysis) =/=? contractual relatedness
...................................
to emphasis on the contingent and the contextual
the process of becoming researcher (of science and technology studies : inquiry into the politics and practices of knowledge-making)
vignette (sketch, a brief literary description, narrate scenes from familiar activities)
the question is not ‘how can we care more?’ (as predetermined set of affective practices) rather: **what happens to our work when we pay attention to moments where the question of ‘how to care?’ is insistent but not easily answerable** (‘care’ as an analytic or provocation)
-Kenney
...................................
Manoto TV station program “sher yadet nare” شعر یادت نره respond to the questions of translation (from the UK produced program “Don't Forget the Lyrics” into an Iranian contemporary popular media culture) and memory practices (archival memory act performance pop quiz show mixed with consumer culture TV broadcasting)
...................................
*cognitive companions* (--> coordinating multiple agencies characteristically)
-tiny clay token sheep were enclosed in clay envelopes with markings indicating what was inside (*molding and inscribing clay* was the favored sensory technology for making in Mesopotamia 5000 years ago)
•maybe your makings involves “true writing” that companions preferentially with language
•maybe your makings involves spinning plant and animal fiber and feeling, tying, and untying knots
•processual affirmative re-writings
•systeming meditations
•context-sensitive pushback
•operational closure (of a system)
•fluctuation, entrainment, blocked synchrony
•
[Katie King use of a term, how she shifts it from mechanism to affect:] [*]stigmergy: feeling of being in among and as the self-organizing bits that are system-ing (=/= a method of communication in emergent systems, mechanically defined as “indirect coordination” self-organizing termites and ants or flash mobs or political action)
@apass: how do you provide different *undisciplined ways of [...]
(139)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%70.6[...]human perception: assemblage of measuring that is irreducible to human agency or human agency alone ==> “non-conscious phenomena”
-this is Barad pointing the way to an epistemology put in terms of measuring that affects as it renders effects
(i need to work on such specific epistemology for ajayeb)
(ajayeb's speculative reals --> speculative grasp of what exists outside human knowing =/=) correlationism: impossibility of a world without human knowing
(one of our obligation today is) [nonapocalyptic] ***recognizing a world without us*** (<-- this is what we must imagine and not “our future” @Pierre)
[by] making use of poetic, affective, rhythmic processes of resonance (--> Sarah's fermentation concert, Sina's popup book)
}==rethink==> *media technologies = technologies of measure*
sensual mathematics
rethink the digital in terms of the “numerical dimension of the virtual”
the potential for mutation immanent to the numerical code itself
(indeterminacies understood in terms of) new processes of quantification that recognize the “full densely packed zones of information that are the intensive surrounds of zero and ones
Clough - Goodman - Parisi
*question of knowing = a politics of capacities* (that crosses every scale of matter/energy)
=/= interpellation and determination of the subject
=/= identity politics (politics of difference)
control society = collection of dynamic quasi-subjects (constituted by a grear number of variables) =/= collection of subjects of right (constituted by the partial alienation of their natural rights to the sovereign)
[*]population only reveals probabilistic regularities once considered at the mass level (=/= collection of controlable subjects)
(in both terms of capital and governance) *modulation and mutation are operative in relations of power* (---> go to Campbell)
[*]publics: addresses of communicated affective states (=/= subjects of discourse about and argumentation over narrative knowledge with truth claims)****
--> matters of vitalizing information
*digital technologies have been fundamental to the deterritorialization of the relationship between individual and collectivity* --Terranova--> (digital technologies through provisional capture and dissemination of affect ==>) constitution of publics
[*]biopolitics: a matter of distributing affective capacities unevenly across population (--> is volatile)
***distribution of affect reshapes society*** --requires--> to restore discursive argumentation (over narrative and its truth claims --> *narrative = a form of truth claim*)
(#telegram with Rai, we need more analysis of... in terms) *ecologies of sensation*: media assemblages with emergent properties that impel new tendencies, new forms of attention, new forms of intention, new f[...]
(140)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.5[...]lux, at times and usually in the interests of narrow class segments, in innovative and “game-changing” ways
ecologies of workaround practices
...subaltern and autonomous sensibility imprisoned and controlled by forms of monopoly and habituation
...nodes of algorithmic capital
traverse and exceed
islamophobic co-branding of Israel and India
marketing and hacking of digital cultures
social practice / hacking
pragmatic, ad hoc, networked approach (to an obstacle)
sufficient reason proceeding through intuition as much as probability
**what workaround repurposes our relation to technology and technique itself? <--Rai-- collective experiment in pragmatizing in mobile ecologies
heterodox political economy of contemporary digital capitalist control + its parasitical and autonomous pirate kingdoms (Sundaram > Rai)
Foucault --> ****knowledge was not made for understanding, it was made for cutting****
entrepreneurial capture of digital cultures and their hacking (in India)
-what is the force, sense, and value of the habituation (of CG hacking, of pragmatic experimentation habits)? --Sina--> (question of) passage between affective states
-(how can we?) better diagram through connecting relations and functions of force, value, and sense in (pirated & corporate) contemporary digital media infrastructures
(how to understand effectively the knots of) ***technoperceptual*** (becoming, relations, assemblages, habituation)
negotiating the digital (irreducible to capitalist strategies of value capture ~ resistance form)
the ecology of sense and sensation that jugaad events [technical animation CG] operate through (and happen in) *requires specific pirate infrastructures*
Rai's jugaad --affirm--> becoming through a counteractualization of the infrastructures of postdigital cultures
strategic narratives of acts of consumption --> sources of new productivity
(Ris's notion of) ecological: process-oriented historical materialism
interpretation by thinking --through--> assemblages of action --through--> assemblages of thought
collective practices of habituation
([Rai's] methodology of) *affect-as-capacity* --shift--> the focus of attention away from language (discourse and representation) toward habituated and emergent sensations in historically specific media assemblages
transformation of telecommunications in colonial and postcolonial South Asia
(Guattari's) assemblage: a prepersonal practice, a kind of style, a creative mutation that binds an individual or a group consciously or unconsciously
...................................
*traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds*
[...]
(141)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%71.7[...]n Wonderland
*=/= Cinderella [--> harem girl, hallucinating with animals, not becoming a psycho (angry), arrested]
*=/= William James: inquiry is about **the way some people cultivate an expertise**, **how they hesitate**, **how they think**, **how they complicate a problem** [#feedback] (for example)
◦*religious experience: to address his questions to the ones who know, the ones whose expertise could help him learn something new and often unexpected --> passionate, even if problematic, experience of living in a world where God matters*
◦*emotional experience: with theater actors, who know about creating, discriminating, disclosing, and sharing emotional experiences*
***from whom should we inherit our practices, and how?***
learning from Despret's *anachronism* (her field philosophy)
اشتباه در ترتیب حقیقی وقایع
(heritage of Socrates) form of epistemic and ethical bifurcation ==> search for hidden causes (underlying the conduct of actors)
Socrates's “you think you know, but actually, you don't know and you don't think” ==created==> ***[1]a device that inhabits thinking and produced only mental paralysis***
--✕--> (Despret:) investigators rarely ask the question of how the people they interview might be interested in the questions addressed to them
*relevance = adventure*
there are many examples of how a piece of abstract knowledge that looked like devoid of any imaginable consequences came to matter (acquired an importance nobody would contest)
-relevance may be lost in translation
*ecology of dynamic and fragile patterns of relevance, of modes of mattering for oneself and for others (Savransky)
[*]relevance: a sense that there is value beyond ourselves (something that is not ourselves, matters) --Stengers--> (daring to connect the) speculative + ethical + practical
(risk of) to renounce *knowledge as a right* + embrace *knowledge's achievement as an event*
[title]
(ego engineering)
***[2]device of anonymity (“to protect people”) ==> distributes expertise, and builds induces performs an asymmetry of roles
•the imperative of deontology
•(can be) a regime of insult
“you, the refugees” --> an anonymous mass marked with **an identity that they had not chosen, and from which they cannot invent themselves**
risk of disclosing
risk of separating
risk of isolating
risk of making people talk while silencing
risk of stealing the words
risk of of drawing the words out from the speaker
risk of retying the secret to its etymology [secretus: to separate, to isolate]
(what we like to think about in apass) to reflect on what anonymity can produce in other research situations
[instead of asking “what the body does/produces?” =/= w[...]
(142)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.2[...]imagination of the living]
what can i learn from Tehran's bestiary, from my mother, from unusual old iranian fables, from telegram animals?
•let myself be instructed by the events that my inquiry creates
•let myself be called by the enigma that will guide me inmy understanding of events
*to be instructed ~= honouring the problem ~= following it up & letting oneself be led by it --> Alice Wonderland chasing rabbits
****questions do not call for explanation or elucidation, questions call for creation**** ~= [*]riddles: the beginnings of stories ==> set those who are summoned by the enigma to work in a particular way: “what manner of living will make it possible to understand these riddless?”
riddle: key + guide
(speaking trope saying senses -->) tropisms =/= meanings
trope = affects that magnetize you
forces that pass through you and steer you
what should i do with ajayeb? = what kind of meaning is requested of me? ****what is my obligation to the meaning i am seeking?**** [=/= Mette's work]
...................................
to bring to BOZAR project with Goda into my interest in geo-feminism
the question of naming, of taxonomy --> a way of being into connectedness
[*]ajayeb studies = **how to inherit natural history otherwise**, how to think about natural history, embracing other (than western) heritages of natural history that enlarges the world for us and the ones we are living with
plantation system:
1. radical simplification, elimination of whole categories of players (in systemic encounters)
2. radical substitution, whole domains (plant life, animal life, human labor system in interaction with animals and plants and microbs) are substituted
==> radical break of connection to place
==> release of numbers : value added processes based on the management of numbers
to look at the planetary shape of some of our problems
-scene = condition of...
scenography --> ‘scene’ is a visual spatial way of thinking about what makes the ‘condition’ of something
...................................
(Calvert on The Nature of Difference book @Quinsy)
rise of population genomics
•efforts like Human Genome project --> refusing to afford a genetic basis for race categories
•tools to identify “deep ancestry” (indicating a geographic origin in prehistory)
postracial politics
recreational genomics --mutating--> “race” out of 19th century concept of “blood quantum” that imperfectly signals complex tribal relatedness and membership
(purchasers of) **genome = book of life** ==> racialized and medicalized subjects
*mutated racial discourses*
renaissance of race catego[...]
(143)[...notes/khmarchive.txt]%73.5[...]ned with the changing needs of conscious activity, including attention. in contrast to the custodial Freudian interpretation, many 19th century psychologists saw the unconscious as “actively generating the processes which are integral to memory, perception, and behaviour. its contents are inaccessible not, as in psychoanalytic theory, because they are held in strenuously preventive detention but, more interestingly, because the effective implementation of cognition and conduct does not actually require comprehensive awareness.
Darwin: a certain kind of reactive attention was believed to be an essential part of human biology, systematic response to novel stimuli (visual, olfactory, or auditory)
-an attentive observer might appear motionless
-an ideo-motor network of forces --> that which immobilizes
(the structural psychology of) associationism (theories of knowledge)
institutional discourse
techniques of the subject
attention (~= will) ~/= consciousness
(noncoincidence of attention with consciousness)
<-- modern shift to semantic and semiotic frameworks of analysis
(from epistemology --to--> hermeneutics : Mallarme, Nietzsche, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Heidegger --> the question of how a subject is provisionally constructed through language and other systems of social meaning and value --> termination of various analysis of consciousness --> epistemological crisis
observer (once understood in terms of the essential subjectivity of vision) ==> attention became constitutive (and destabilizing) component of perception
unmediated givenness of sense data --✕--> cognition
community of interpretation : a shifting and intervening space of socially articulated psychological functions, institutional imperative, and a wide range of techniques, practices, and discourses relating to the perceptual experience of a subject in time --> forms of exteriority in modernity's account of perception
eschatological dream of 19th century : “to make this knowledge of man exist so that man could be liberated by it from his alienation, liberated from all the determinations of which he was not the master” --> one made of man an object of knowledge so that man could become subject of his own liberty and of his own existence
-Foucault
exercise of a sovereign and attentive will [we see this in Olearius] --> claiming subject's self-possession --> conscious organizer of that perceptible world --> master
(Nietzsche:) “i am free” ==> “he must obey” }--> the inward certainty that obedience will be rendered -->{ *exclusively: (the unconditional evaluation that) ‘this and nothing else is necessary now’
co-presence of the world (can never be guaranteed [by scientific psychology])
<== attentiveness is continuous with distraction, reverie, dissocia[...]
(144)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%75.2[...]ons)
diagram --?--> coherence
(vison, it is not a coin with double sides, it is rather a labyrinth --Lacan--> desiring subject =/= point-to-point optical system)
*palpable immediacy of a modernized presence* (--> to grasp and inhabit it, then dissolution into self-absorption)
(?Sven plays with that) *nebulous obscurity of presence*
uncertain content of the interior
(in Manet:) attentive: fluctuating membrane, delicate pattern of folding and unfolding on to the world
--> rhythm of opening and closing (this “social dispersion of modernity” [--> impassive autosufficiency of the individual observer] has become part of European subjectivity, it is good[?!], and i miss it in middle east postmodernism)
Manet tentative splitting of:
•figural representational facts
•facts of autonomous pictorial substance
(--> now a European tradition)
(a movement towards “formlessness” very different than eastern chaotic imagination)
Manet's confident inattention to the object and its coherence
fastening together and grounding narrative content
[Manet (and many other 1880 painters) -->] problem of [*]realism: a question of tenuous relation between perceptual synthesis and dissociation
=/= question of mimesis
achieving a *reality-effect* ~= to hold something together, to “contain” things, ***to ward of experiences of disintegration***
(the reality-effect is processed and achieved differently in Iran. how? how iranian artists differ from the perceptual logic of modernity?)
([Elmira and Foad's] engagement with the) ambiguities of visual attentiveness
perceptual logic of modernity (: two powerful tendencies at work):
•*binding together of vision* {an obsessive holding together of perception to maintain the viability of a functional real world}--> sealed
•*dynamic of (psychic/economic) exchange* {dynamic of flux/dispersal}--> barely contained
(Manet's) faciality (a site of pictorial effect): casual amorphousness, a surface that no longer discloses interiority or self-reflection
(within 19th + 20th century modernity) face: (par excellence) the substance of expression of the signifier --(D+G)--> **capitalist faciality** (exists to serve a signifying formula): the means by which the signifier takes control, the ways it organizes a certain mode of individuated subjectification and collective madness of a *machine without any content* (Crary > Guattari)
-who returns to the more tightly bound order of faciality? when and why?
--> articulated hierarchy of socialized body
...relative integrity of the face --> a larger mode of conformity to a dominant reality
@Geert
(Deleuze and Guattari:) when head ceases to be coded by the body ==> ‘face’ () --> ‘body (+ [...]
(145)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76[...]omment or be continuous with the (emerging) world of consumer culture? #make a fashion magazine with Ali and Janina: excursion into the stultifying and emancipatory effects of the fashion commodity. discussion on: jewellery, decoration, women's bodies, show, travel, glitter, ----> kaleidoscopic decomposition and displacement of the glitter object
-Mallarme's La Derniere Mode
==> luminosity of a single object is lost amidst its indefinite reflections on the multiplied and fractured surfaces adjacent to it
*insubstantial world (of mode) aligned with (its own) sublime disavowal of the immediate* (, an emptiness and anxiety at the heart of this impossible presence --> “to be out of style = death”)
•its titular concept
•internal movement of its text
artisanal craft
(repetitive forms of:)
primal intuition of absence
transcendental signifier of religion
sacramental authenticity of antiquity
(for Nietsche:) decadence: perpetual adaptability of spectacular culture ~= (one loses one's power of) resistance against stimuli [--> this is Ali ]
=/= existing capacities for action and living
(obsolescence, not the business of the poet. Mallarme)
(the question of resistance is weak. we must ask what are the emergent forms of life caused by that? --> might be interesting for Hoda)
(apass's own hoped-for ritual civic theater of the future)*
attention sustained and enhanced by the regular introduction of novelty [...] means of simulating experiences of singularity and identity in the face of the processes of exchangeablity and equivalence
-Guy Debord
for the hysteric: objects are too present --> excess of presence make representation impossible
(for Deleuze history of painting has been about warding off hysteria*)
organization of perceptual binding and synthesis (taking place while Monet was working)
determined by
different libidinal setup
other category of perceptual dispersion
potential site of fixation
Freud (+ Klinger) --> inseparability of attention from dream process & aesthetic production
(Freud is testing) psychical energy = mobile attention
***observer = a kinetic seeing body set in movement*** (to glide along undeterminated social and durational trajectories)
place: that ordinary anxiety, the expectancy, the sublimated precariousness of a modernizing urban world in which the individual is adrift on a smoothed-out surface devoid of any markers
*origins of aesthetic sentiments*
of skating --> movement of the body pleasurable to self and associated with the consciousness of gracefulnes, as in skating: movement of a kind that bring many muscles into harmonious action and strain none
(Spencer, Princip[...]
(147)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.4[...]equally reasonable statements
the antinomic character (of my conceptual schema: rigidity and banality, attention and disintegration,,, ==> *an object outside its logical control*
-charged with antagonistic forces, like Seurat, my lectures (since now 2018) negate a possibility of an attentive closure, even as it fervently attempts to generate its own internal formula for perceptual presence and unity. like Seurat's Parade de Cirque, it operates in a ceaseless play of disclosure and concealment. [is it time to change?])
Seurat preoccupation with nonspecific temporalities
(estrangement from) a dream of instinctual wholeness
harmonious sensory utopia
-my lecture-performances constitute a provisional realm of freedom for an individual observer [~ myself: a psychic, social, imaginary position called being an Iranian--] of a prismatic past, coinciding with a proliferation of discourse [~= shifting plurality of ‘centers']
--> dream of subjective freedom + effects of power
perhaps my work is inseparable from (the consequences of the emergence of) *models of subjective vision*
-use of optical mixture in my work.
how important is the retina (for any artist)? -->(the question of) the seeing body in all of its physiological density + ambiguous position of that body within conceptions of visuality
•chromatic or luminous effects on the body
physiological regime of visuality (beginning with Thomas Young and Goethe, developed by Johannes Müller, Helmholtz and others) =/= renaissance-based pictorial order
collapse of *camera obscura* model of vision --> emergence of *psychological optics*
1890s
construction of various nonreferential models of perception
+
pragmatic functions of an observing subject
--> status of vision and mind
--> nature and value of sensation
--> representation of social facts
central to many developments in the visual culture in the West in late 19th century: *questions of perceptual and cognitive synthesis*
Gestalt theory ==> essential primacy and ethical value of the ‘whole’ ~=> an observer who perceives organized structures, who is marked by innate form-giving and form-apprehending capacities --> an effort to endow human perception with an inherent meaningfulness, coherence, and even orderliness (amid its perceptual decomposition within 20th century spectacular culture) ~~-->[preparing for the perceptual logic of high capitalism:] it was not the attentive subject who identified form from a larger background, but rather the reverse, that “good” form had the capacity to produce attentiveness in a subject
(Gestalt theory was a dream of:)
the reciprocal affirmation of the unity of the individual subject & the unified object of perception
[--> bisect[...]
(148)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.7[...]ponse to external stimulation
dynamogenesis (~ every state of consciousness tends to realize itself in an appropriate muscular movement)
vision reformed in 19th century: nonoptical modal of attentive subject, not the one who sees, rather, the subject is the one who is susceptible to psychomotor induction
(what was once figured as visual representation are now) the abstract and quantified reactions of the body as a composite set of physical systems
--Fere--> instrumental relocation of vision (from a disembodied and punctual system of images) to an interplay of forces and motor reactions (in which representation is irrelevant)
[this is inseparable from the larger project of scientific amelioration of collective emotional hygiene of the 19th century]
--> *sensation: part of a sequence of events (in which the end point is not an inner state, such as: knowledge, cognition, perception, rather:) it is that which culminates in movement
some of the 1850s rationalizing ambitions (of widespread philosophical and scientific conceptualization of a fundamental relation between sensation and motor behaviour) indirectly informs Seurat's work --proposing-->{ sensory stimuli ==> motor expression (in the perceiver) }--> (the question of) **human response based on bypassing of conscious thought altogether**
(very important for iranian artists: the question of the *rational mind of an observer* and intellectual construction directed to that --> status of a conscious observer)
-producing effects involuntary in the observer
-(Foad and Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination
Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
attention --> Nietzsche's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim
(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation[...]
(149)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.9[...]Sina engaging with an) exclusively optical consciousness of the individual human subject [--> can we go beyond that? to which philosophical sensual ethics of bodily awareness Foad and Sina are optically bind to? which anti-optical aesthetic positions are available to us?]
•Foad's neoimpressionist: implication of total organic resonance ==>{ from organic activity of perception --to--> transforming physical existence }
•Sina's Einfuhlung: mode of intense perceptual absorption in which lines and forms are experienced as catalysts for vitalization of the imagination
Seurat --> dream of a fully unalienated instinctual aesthetic gratification --through--> quantifiable and manageable economy of excitation (within an organized and controllable body)
biological romanticism
anxiety of overstimulation --> power of suggestion
attention --> Nietzsche's reality of drives --> Freud's libidinal body (=/= physiological body) --> *drives (=/= instincts) not tied to specific conditions of satisfaction, are subsumed to an open-ended ‘plasticity’ (susceptible to substitution)
drive constantly misses its aim
(for Seurat, Fere, Nietzsche:)
art = physics (=/= semiology) : the question of meaning in art was not about representation but a relation of forces --> for Seurat color was not something accessible as a sign to a sovereign gaze but was an interpretation made by the body
(both Seurat [in his painting] and Nietzsche [in will to power] have felt that there was) an extreme calm in certain *sensations of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!
a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)
putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)
}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and re[...]
(151)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%76.9[...]ons of rapture* ~ extra retardation of the feeling of time and space --> the classical style is essentially a representation of this calm, simplification, abbreviation, concentration }--> (?Sina's paintings) logical and geometrical simplification <== enhancement of strength*!
a lot of artists are still busy with:
stimulus-response mechanisms
**techniques for the external management of aesthetic response** --> quantifiable emotional engineering
@Eszter directly
(the origins of this discourse lies in 19th century automatic behaviour and nervous response, nature of mass subjectivity and desire for social integration, and since Seurat in visual art)
[*]spectator: a being that is acted apon
(does the artist want the spectator “obey” a predetermined program of effects? specially in theater... even if we say this subject [hypothetical individual observer] is a creative inventive affirmative body --still--> presupposing **a subject that is a unity with a conscious will to be overcome** ~-> method)
putting a little onlooker at the bottom of my paintings -->? potential objects of techniques for the control and management of perception and attention
(what are Foad's such objects?)
}--> the question of *how a sensory world is dismantled, synthesized, and represented (~ my paintings) is inseparable from the problem of how a world of objects, individuals, and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*
what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations
(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”
in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations
Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become apprehensible
my paintings
•(unstatistical) distribution of isolated and categorized units <== additive principle [...]
(152)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77[...] and social relations (~ my performances) organizes itself*
what concerns Seurat (in different terms of color image or human figures) is a ***tension between cohesion and disintegration*** (--> that has been also my constant aesthetic concern)
--this is evident in my work:
[*my paintings busy with] questions of how diverse stimuli become tentatively “bound” into a coherent constellation
[*my performances busy with] questions of how contents referring to a social world are fused or integrated into a network of relations
(in my work) experimenting with:
•the unity of subjective experience (myself performing under influence, mad lectures, excessive synthesis, pathological and disruptive storytelling)
•integrity of social institution and processes (the loci and conditions of us coming together, space of art)
=/= social tranquility --> economic productivity
=/= social fantasy of “solidarity” --> health and functional unity, individuals transformed into “social beings”
in a way most of us artists unconsciously in some way in an utopian projection of a sensory wholeness and fulfillment
(dream of) fabricators of powerful imaginary social figurations
Durkheim and Seurat's question of social & sensory: from what viewpoints significant manifestation of organization become apprehensible
my paintings
•(unstatistical) distribution of isolated and categorized units <== additive principle of formal adjacency <-- (my belief:) depleted atomic relations [should] predominate beneath the spurious appearance of social concord [in my world: Iran]
}-->? holistic mode of association (=/= my performances) -->? desire for (modern forms of) cohesion (in the absence of inflexible forms [~ disintegration of the mechanical solidarity of tradition, religion, myth, consanguinity]) -->? wanting an *original solidarity* (---> go to the image of the ‘harmonious vision of industrial society’ in my early paintings, self-regulating landscapes of feedback loops --> *state of equilibrium* that i wanted to achieve in the painting not symbolically)
(i prefer *pseudo solidarity*)
emergence of aggregates
manifestations of complexities
(this is happening in)
late 19th century is also the age of attempting to validate a relatively stable and domesticated image of the dynamism and destructiveness of capital
modernity --> state of harmonious equilibrium --> interaction in relation of agreement and mutuality --> new set of moral imperative --> *solidarity*: the duty to become a “social being” (~ to become socialized in relation to a wide range of institutions)
anomie: breakdown of an organized set of connections and adjacencies, deranges a normally regulated flow of communication and feedback (=/= solidarity) }--> thermodynamic framework
ano[...]
(153)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77[...]ime with its mobile and embodied observer
the evocation of a scenographic setup in Seurat (Parade de cirque) is a veil over the desiccated, nonhomogenous, and additive construction of the work
frontality and unity of framing (of “primitive” cinema...)
[?do we need to] (in an illusionist mode) satisfy the principle of unitary organization of the scenic space
(how should you be concerned with [public record] of your intellectual and aesthetic formations?)
Seurat's Parade de cirque =/= Leonardo's Last Supper
(Seurat broke free from Leonardo, and i should from Seurat)
both of these paintings are concerned with the revelation of a mystery:
•Leonardo: the mystery of Christian sacrifice as it coincides with a lucid apprehension of infinite extension
•Seurat: the “mystery” of the disenchanted and quantitative order of capitalist exchange (and its overturning of homogeneity and legibility of space)
witness to:
-holy communion -Leonardo
-rituals intrinsic to modernity -Seurat
in terms of orthogonal illustrated in Leonardo is precisely what Seurat dismantles in Parade de Cirque
the question of value
movement of abstract quantities
(transactional dimensions of Seurat's work)
lost transparency:
how the use of money within modernity transformed the social character of exchange ***from something interpersonal to an anonymous transaction*** at the distance (--> Reza's hold-up of values, the dream of interpersonal transaction and resistance of anonymity and distance)
[the problem that all artists have with money --Simmel-->] *a priori equivalence of price (for all commodities) ==> eliminate:
•deliberations and examinations of the buyer
•effects and elucidations of the seller
==> quick and indifferent economic transaction
“selling tickets”: accumulated social experience of separation = *depersonalized exchange* (--> that which many artists are dealing with as a problem)
--Gouz--> [*]capitalism: *disaffection of value* (the libidinal, the intersubjective, the semantic are completely divorced from the economic relation ==> economic sector =/= semantic affective investment)
Seurat's meditation on the emptiness of a modern relation of display and consumption
cost of admission at two different rates:
-Leonardo: head of Jesus at the vanishing point of the window opening onto infinite celestial space (--> regime of signs that possess intrinsic value =/=)
-Seurat: price tag, grid space (--> regime of signs that are symbols of value)
[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer
ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle
‘price [...]
(154)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.3[...]
[*]scenic: determined by the position of an (depicted) observer
ubiquity of the subjective experience of “shopping” & its construction as spectacle
‘price tag’: (one of the vanishing points of modernity,) the draining away of the illusion of reference or stability
Poe's stranger itinerary, a paradigmatic articulation of modern loneliness
“at no moment did he see that i watched him. he entered shop after shop, priced nothing, spoke no word, and look at the object with a vacant stare.”
process of circulation and convertibility
simulation inherent in the literal spectacle inseparable from the “semblance”(~ price tag)
(Marx:) ‘price tag’: the symbol of itself
“only fleeting, a reality destined constantly to disappear, to be suspended, not to be count as a definitive realization but always only as an intermediate, mediating realization. [...] it exists, therefore, in so far as it remains in this constant movement [...] its reality is not that it is the price but that it represents it, is its representative--the materially present representative of the price, this of itself, and as such, of the exchange value of commodities.”
(we should ask the question of “symbolism” at each age again and differently)
(Brian Rotman:) an isomorphism (emerged in renaissance) between:
•vanishing point in visual representation
•use of zero in computation
•abstract money in economic exchange
[*]vanishing point: a figure of the coincidence of the transcendent & the empirical
[Panofsky: perspective as symbolic form: perspective in transforming the ‘ousia’ (reality) into ‘phainomenon’ (appearance), seams to reduce the divine to a mere subject matter for human consciousness; but for that very reason, conversely, it'd expands human consciousness into a vessel for the divine]
--> an infinity not only prefigured in god, but indeed actually embodied in empirical reality --> ****in Last Supper the miraculous becomes the direct experience of the beholder, in that the supernatural events in a sense erupt into his own, apparently natural visual space****
effects of vanishing point
(in all my image assemblages there is a system of fluid relations in which subjectivity is imagined [not in terms of coincidence with a quantifiable point of view])--> in every image and diagram subjectivity (~ identity and reference) is imagined in a system of relations @Eszter's binding order
zero
primal image of nothingness
•kabbalah
•the egg
•oroboros
•
my issue with contemporary ritual practices in the arts is that they are based the symbolic privileging of the معنوی noumenal =/= phenomenal
(rituals that artists practice today, Leonardo's Last Supper:) symbolic opening to a noumenal world [...]
(155)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%77.4[...]inciting of dynamogenic bodily sensation
&
cinema later would radically displace survivals of premodern forms like the circus [--> look at Hollywood today 2018]
different modes of regression and fantasy
***late 19th century shift from “viewing machine” to “vertigo machine”
19th century's interrelations between:
•photography
•hypnosis (both medically and mythically)
•cinema
•psychoanalysis
*strong epistemological configurations* ==> a new place of subject (in western culture) linked to formation of certain images of:
•time
•past
•memory
(for Brown Sequard) collective effect of acts of inhibition and dynamogeny ==> hypnotism ==(Charles Henry)==> demonstrating that perception is fundamentally unconscious (consisting of involuntary responses to stimuli) ==Seurat==> *indistinction between the automatism of a hypnotized subject and the perceptual experience of a so-called normal subject* --Foad--> [reading people in a contemporary social phenomena of suggestion and somnambulism (~ sleep-walking):] a bypassing of intellectual process (such as reason and judgement) in an attentive spectator
-{my discussion with Foad was perhaps about the question of social justice (= sufferings and causes are constant and self-evident, singularized principle of value [social injury] located in a particular product [political processes leading to social injustice]) and/against thinking with assemblages (= contextual relational uncertain concept of the social of things and people as system of objects, in which nothing merely rules itself or others, emphasizing heterogeneity and process)... finally saying that Tehran is a relational heterogeneous uncertain system [Sina] and not a destined coerced programmed doom-object [Foad]. question: can we oppose the ideas of suffering and injustice and their expressions as essential qualities in the context of Tehran? what conceptual hybrids or precarious collectives are ethically available or necessary to think with? can injustice and suffering as target of analysis be investigated not as concrete evident necessities [stable essences, as something to defend or fight against] but as distributed changing and changeable always in process, in the contemporary Tehran (specially if you are the one who is suffering)?
-my family dining table: space of arrangement of practices of objects of...
-this discussion for me was about the categories and classifications that we rely on to investigate the world.}
--> Bergson: “in the processes of art we shall find, in a weakened form, a refined and in some measures spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce the state of hypnosis [...] an effect of the same kind by the fixity which they suddenly impose upon life, and which a physical contagion carries over to the attention of the spectator.”
18[...]
(156)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.1[...] (possibly of pure perception, presence, etc. in 1890s) --> recreation of attentive presence amid the impact of new conceptualizations and organizations of motion, memory, temporality (+ emerging technological arrangements)
[one of many sites in the late 19th century where a crisis in perception is diagnosed:]
Cezanne + Husserl: attempt to bypass the accumulated cultural and commonsense assumptions about the world as it appears in consciousness (heritage of phenomenology --> Sina, Foad... ~~> and fable of the artist:)
•Cezanne --> forgetting everything and make an image of what you see *beneath the imposed order of humanity* (19th century preoccupation with “innocent vision” <== to be completely estranged from the world <-- Schopenhauer) ==> access to things-in-themselves
•Husserl --> pure form of consciousness *stripped of all accretions of habit and socialization* ==> “seeing essences”
--> their work challenged (sought to exceed) features of perception that apparatuses (of production and consumption) regulated and standardized
Husserl
attempt of description of objectivists in a certain atemporal fixedness =/={attention: heightened awareness of a narrowed or focused range of perception, operation of selection, question of existence of content in consciousness, empathic function which belongs in the sense of intuitional experience ~= psychophysical, associationist, sensationalist, atomistic accounts of perception and cognition ==> how reliable and consistent the knowledge about the world is possible + (classical model of vision:) privileged point of view of a perceiving subject from which the objectivity of the world could be apprehended}
issue of cognitive and perceptual synthesis
•to resecure an unconditional basis for logic and science
•to escape from refined habitual patterns of perception inherent in various aspects of rationalization and compassion of experience in 1890s and 1900s (--> dynamic, kinetic, distracted texture of modern sensory life ==> attention: malleable entropic force susceptible to fatigue, distraction, and external management)
•to quest for the logic of meaning ==> primordial oneness of consciousness
----> (for Husserl) attention appears and appertains in the possibility of an *impersonal, preindividual, transcendental sphere free of anything empirical, of anything spatiotemporal* ==> attention: intentional act with an absolute structure, quasi-machine searchlight for an unwavering mode of looking at the act of looking
--Crary--> amid the dynamic dissolution of modernization (a world in which previously stable meanings, signs, social relations were being uprooted, made exchangeable, and put into circulation) Husserl proposes [in a hopeless quest] a monolithe technique of attention (to discern a halo of absolute authenticity around every object or relation) to determine the universal structure of (the authenticity of) subj[...]
(157)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.7[...]ntinuous composition of visual field (to its “concentric” format)
19th century scientific research ==>
•comprehensive account of human perception
•disjointed nature of the visual field
•central area of retina: photoreceptor cells
◦peripheral area of retina: sensitive to movement
•subjective visual field <== complex aggregate processes of the eye movement (“short fast jumps” =/= instantaneous intake of an image) --> a new psychological model of the human subject
acuity did not correspond strictly to localized anatomy but rather was the product of a dynamic relation of fovea and periphery as well as external luminous factors
hearing: aggregate perpetual process
Wundt's optical model (polarity between:)
•Blickfeld: field of consciousness
•Blickpunkt: focus of consciousness (where apperception occur) ~= attention
=/=
Locke, Descartes, Leibniz
consciousness = camera obscura
apperception: focalization of some content in consciousness ==> structure experience
--Crary--> what is at stake (with Wundt) is a cognitive modality part of a larger ***modern process of decentering***
(+ James -->) a question of the primacy of ‘transitive’ states in which the shifting fringes of perception were constitutive features of psychic “reality”
modernization of perception
center =/= periphery
dispersed functioning of sensory response
(how in 19th century capacities of human eye was made into:)
1. architectural model of *panorama* = permanent activation of optical periphery + no stable center of focused attentiveness
2. *stereoscope* = decisive exclusion of the periphery + 3D image hypertangiblity (<-- our model of visual consumption)
}==> loss of *consistent and coherent relations of distance between image and observer* [<-- this lost consistency is now in 2020 what everyone in art is busy with or to reactivate]
...having the fixed eye many disconnected areas of the visual field at once = continual beginning at a new center = Cezanne ~= *radical rethinking the nature of [*]synthesis: rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements*
...a subjective immobilization
seeking to enter into the world's ceaseless movement of destabilization (=/= holding together the content) ==> a more intensive recreation of a subjective interface with the world (=/= reverie, disassociation)
}-->
•every object's identity is swallowed up in difference
•*vision: veritable theater of metamorphosis and permutations*
(Cezanne reexamining the composition of the visual world ==>)
fanatical attentiveness to the data of sense ==> dissolution of unity, destabilization of objects onto flux, dispersion, displaced the body [...]
(158)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%78.9[...]bjects in some accessable state available for objective comparison and evaluation
fixation sets the world in motion
visual field begin vibration and oscillating
chromatic instability
the physiological apparatus (our bodies) incapable of stability =/= the aim of stabilizing the world to look at it analytically
perceptualism: the idea that (artists, cultures, etc.) expressions in varying degrees involves the transcription of the world “as it appears” to them
Cezanne ==> understanding of the world (as processes of becoming) that doesn't possess a *premade integrity* (--> world of ajayeb is full of premade integrities)
reckon & calculate
--✕--> (Nietzsche's) formless unformulable world of the chaos of sensation
--✕--> (Cezanne's) continual emergence and disintegration of constellations (of relationships + self)
production (of other kinds) of fixed vision (amid the increasing awareness of the transitive and unstable nature of perception):
•modern psychology (late 19th century): how to incorporate the vagaries and unpredictability of subjectivity into a set of constants --> quantify subjective perceptual experience [<-- question of artistic feedback: how to perceptually isolate stimuli? how to temporally control one's exposure?]
•tachistoscope (mid 1880s--search for elemental unit of attentive behavior): the idea of instantaneous perception, mechanically producted “presence” --Crary--> fantasy of a descrete quantifiable perception detached from the lives dynamics of the body + the idea that pure nonsense reveals specific aspects of attention that hermeneutics could not conceive {based on naive realism (ignoring the existence of transient iconic memory) presupposing:
1- the subject's visual experience directly mirrors the stimulus pattern
2- the subject's visual experience begins when the pattern is first exposed and terminates when it is turned off
•Muybridge's machine ==> reconstruct appearances through the production of consecutive images
•
tachistoscope (nonconsecutive visual stimuli) --> how within the context of technological modernization, faster mechanical speeds are reciprocally related to new bodily forms of stasis (---> go to Virilio)
•chronometric device: measurement of relation time
}--> the break or interrupting of vision becomes the primary element within perceptual experience, rather than a visual continuum that maintains the cohesiveness of the world
}==> *possibility of pure sensation without perception*
“mental test”
detailed psychometrics of individual performance and behavior --preoccupied--> features of a generalized consciousness
20th century behaviorism --> abandonment of interest in any internal or introspective experience (in favor o[...]
(159)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79[...] />
•flickering screen of sky and trees
•one stone lies nested or wedged within the embrace of another element
--> (logic of the [phantom]) limbs
eroticized enclosure (seek to grasp and be grasped) --becomes--> diagram of perception (seek to envelope and be enveloped)
Cezanne's discovery: any attempt to stabilize perception ==> disintegration and transformation
•Cezanne --> dispersed perceptual processes
•Freud --> dispersed psychic processes {perception = interface of the nervous system with the world <=~ interface between consciousness and the stored stimuli of wishes, memories, anticipations}
(mid 1890s) Bergson + Freud ==> sustained and original consideration of the anti-optical functioning of subjectivity perceptual experience as a nondirectional, acentric, multitemporal event
--> empathic decentering of the observer
+ (widespread) practical and discursive remaking of the observer as subject, vision is no longer a distinct and isolable phenomenon
Freud --> psyche = a perpetually available innocence + infinite reserve of traces
*perception arouse interest on the account of their possible connection with the object wished for* : ‘perception = question of internal excitation’
Cezanne --(in Pineapple and Rocks)--> coexistence (continuity) of:
•an attentiveness that is bound (cathected) onto established (facilitated) patterns [= one's own history + its fixation]
•a perception of animality and novelty [= relaxation of grip, musical, (Deleuze and Guattari's) *antimemory* =/= atemporal forgetting]
vertigo: auto-movement of chaos
“Cezanne's work = model of a nonhuman perception” : (reading of Cezanne as) austere project of formal rigor, performed on some remote plane of aesthetic production; an enterprise tragically detached from an engagement with the social contradiction of his time =/= (Crary's reading of) Cezanne coinciding historically with new perceptual technologies --> new metaphoric possibilities
accumulated experience --basis--> radical depersonalization --intuit--> creative forces of chaos (in your own provence)
**Cezanne's imaginative refiguration of himself as machine = translate automatically** ==> release from grounded condition of human perception : to become an apparatus = implacability apprehend a world outside of the terms (that the artist wants out) ==> novelty (~= to overcome the gravity of one's own interiority) --Cezanne--> primordial image (of irreducible formlessness, of ***world in process without horizon***, without position, of slowly vibrating colors...) [<-- *apparatus becoming* is now the cliche of contemporary artist]
glow of a geological dawn
archaic + inert
Precambrian
deterritorializing processes of capitalism (+ its imperatives of perpetual renovation) [...]
(160)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.5[...]lative distance
Cezanne =/= perceptual autonomy
Cezanne = nervous system interfacing with (a continually transforming) external environment
Cezanne = an example of a contemporary conceptualization of reality (as a dynamic aggregate of sensations)
--> emerging industries of spectacle
(fundamentally distinct) machinic visual technologies --Deleuze--> cinema =/= previous historical forms of simulation (some continuous western mode of representation, with its origins in Renaissance), represent the world
cinema --constitutes--> *an autonomous world* made up of breaks and disproportions, deprived of all centers, addressing itself as such to viewers who are in themselves no longer the center of their own perception
percipiens
percipi
nonselectivity of cinema eye =/= texture of human attentiveness
cinema = fusion = dream of the functional integrity of the world
film = validation of the authenticity of the perceptual disorientation
}--✕--> Crary's analysis of Edison's train robbery scene : serial reconfiguration of a kinesthetic constellation of moving forces (+ additional system of movements and forces: bodies, bullets, explosion) =/= question of mobile point of view
Cezanne <--> cinema camera --Dziga-->
i am a mechanical eye
i, a machine, show you the world as only i can see it
now and forever, i free myself from human immobility
i am in constant motion, i draw near, then far away objects, i crawl under, i climb onto them... i plug and soar together with plunging and soaring bodies
now, i, a camera, fling myself along their resultant maneuvering in the chaos of movement, recording movement, starting with movement of the most complex combinations
Sherrington --> stimuli in the external world are selected and fashioned by the organism
=/= Pavlov: stimuli = ali = alien shocks encountered and responded to
=/= Cartesian res extensa, res cogitans
“the great physical process of attention”
inhibition: an active process
anticipatory behavior
exploratory locomotor behavior
“integrative function” of nervous system ==> binding
(integrative: incorporation of the exterior world)
“human perception = possibility of motor activity”
...................................
Cezanne sitting in nature and studying motif, tilting his head ~-> intensity unfolding chromatically before him (a mode of physical being) --> *time of the body* [<-- this is typical of today art in european] = indefinite scalar time + intensity is experienced outside representation
•river stands for his engagement with a more primal flux
•sustained condition of vibrating instability
•apprehension of multiplicity
•world = turn of a kaleidoscope (prismatic)
•(when you look at a) landscape has i[...]
(161)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%79.6[...]ng the royal science:) “reproducing implies the performance of a fixed point of view that is external to what is reproduced” (--no--> it is about saying what you say attached to a temporary fixed point [for example an identity], in order to be able to be proven wrong)
categorical apodictic apparatus
[category = intrinsic concepts]
content is (not?) always conformist (<-- Julia was never)
Alex: imperium of true thinking --> capture, seizure, binding, constituting the efficacy of a foundation (= myth) ==> [*]logos: sanction of a ground
modern state: *realized reason*, the rational and reasonable organization of a community
-what are the exchanges that take place between the State and reason
modern state reason --> “the more you obey, the more you will be master” (for you will be only obeying pure reason) --> philosophy assigned itself the role of ground
common sense: the unity of all faculties at center
(in the archaic model imperial State:) poet = image trainer =/= (toady's) artist: (Deleuzian) *private thinker* (making counterthought, destroy images) =/= public professor
-problem with private thinker is that it exaggerates interiority when it is a question of outside thought --> the question of how **to place the thought in an immediate relation with the outside, with the forces of the outside** (to make thought a war machine?)
(Alex in search of) maxim =/= aphorism (always awaits its meaning from a new external force, a final force that utilizes it) <-- my interest
(?which) image inspired by State apparatus
[*]method: the striated space of the cogitatio universalis ==> path (=/= bridge)
thought ~= vampire (has no image)
(in the smooth space of Zen) the arrow does not go from one point to another but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute with the archer and the target (#my bow and arrow --> it takes no aim but hopes the arrow will stick somewhere)
-whenever a “thinker” shoots an arrow, there is a man of the State, a shadow or an image of a man of the State, that counsels and admonishes him, and wants to assign him a target or aim (#my bow and arrow joke @apass)
pathetic texts: thought becomes pathos (=/= logos =/= mythos)
(a lot of poetry today is like this:)
(an antidialogue between brother and sister:) one *speaks before knowing* while the other *relays before having understood*
--> the necessity of not having control over language ~ (Chloe:) the necessity of being a foreigner in one's own tongue
--> “bring something incomprehensible into the world” --> in the form of exteriority
--> the becoming woman of the thinker ~ the becoming thought of the woman
--> (Chloe =) the Gemüt [feeling, heart, soul, mind] that refuses to be controll[...]
(162)[...notes/pigs notes new.txt]%80.3[...]ple might come to know themselves and fulfill their potential. Barash maintains that biology is the most powerful tool in the humanist project to know and achieve the self.”
phallic language
sociobiologica reasoning (<-- so dominant)
Star Trek --> sociobiology promises more than knowledge of the self; it also promises, like all humanisms, human unity, a real togetherness of nature beneath the merely verbal icing of culture
in the (rhetoric of persuasion by) patriline [/ patrilineal naming] of sociobiology --> [the “ultimate message” of sociobiology in] (Planet of The Apes, Terminator,) Star Trek:
•a doctrine of necessary biological determinism of all the chief forms of domination which are especially driven by the motors of ruthless competition and dominance
•(the identification of) the proper expert
•cracking the code of nature's secret voice
•*knowing how to read the word, how to access the value of the coin ==gives==> the power of determination to those who use those tools*
***(?how and which objects of knowledge become/are) a tool in the search for the self --> ending regularly in the discovery of the totalitarian object: nature, gene, word
@Nicolas {(the question of) sulf-fulfillment made possible by revealing the common coin, the medium of exchange, the equivalent that defines reality, the generator of meaning}
skin-encapsulated egos
(epidermis)
code-gene-coin-word
(in Barash's evolutionary biology:) parental investment <--> cost-benefit analysis
(capillarity of power relations)
the import of the questions
****
the rhetoric of expert --> the expert touching the elephant -->{"the experts, then, were assembled to mediate and interpret the marital squabble between scince and humanism and to show their higher unity. and they spoke--individually, authoratively, joined in debate by the power of editors and panel moderators--in the rhetoric to which we have his version of the history of science adopted, so that the legitimate lineage could be established.”
logic of __[domination, determinism, , ,] embeded in (fashioning) the tool of __[word, , ,]
red-baiting: those who oppose the truth of a selfish world are self-deceiving MArxists
setting the original terms of discourse <-- dont't!
rhetorical inheritance (<-- my research)
somatize our oppression. @Hoda
“what we must begin to give voice to as scientists and feminists is that there is no such thing, or place, as underneath it all.” (Leigh Star)
(@apass) locus for research: us who speak to each other is the changing, moving, complex web of our interactions, in light of the language, power structures, natural environments (internal and external), and beliefs that[...]
(164)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.2[...]theory laden --> theories are value laden --> values are history laden *
•animal model research is full of illogical shoddy evidence and special pleading (Lila Leibowitz & Ruth Bleier)
•relations of aggression and gender (Freda Salzman)
•similarities in sociobiology and biosociology (Marian Lowe & Ruth Habbard)
•lateralization in neurophysiology (Leigh Star)
•medicalization of moral-political issues through transsexual surgery (Janice Raymond)
•**everything is a cultural institution** (animal studies applied to humans, science is a cultural institution)
•upright stance and times of divergence between ape and hominid lines have been arenas of mortal combat in evolutionary theory more than once
how science becomes official
“evidence becomes a hero of mine”
the heavy hero's burden of telling the hard truth --> a story sold well in iran's intellectualism
(i have become interested instead in extended bibliographies, *to see our alternatives*)
خیس خیس
language plays a major role in generating reality --> what plays major role in generating reality and legitimator of new realities in iran?
research question of storytelling:
***what are the rules of interpretation that make any story unequivocally readable?
(Haraway shows) the epistemological and political problems of humanism and realism latent (or patent) in feminism
two things i am teaching myself (since 3 or 4 years):
1- how to hold someone else's speech --> دیگری چه گفت؟
2- how to sustain a discussion --> چطور بحث را عوض نکردن؟
...................................
*bad geography: insult, tohin, similar to trauma, they don't have an concret external object (yet they create them), it is a register of an event, affectual implosion of a percept
insult dones't exist out there, (tohin kardan vojud khareji nadarad), it is in the inside --> is that why tasavof works and labors with insult?
...................................
(also in apass, dancers and choreographers, are the children of modernism art of De Kooning) reaching inward to find within the body that sublime thing (Deleuze calls) the *figural* [=/= (iranian miniature's) sublimity of the infinite (<-- Aela testing this, under ‘mysticism'~-> state of constant openness ==> transformative relation between self and other)]
we can trace the (seductive power of) fana فنا in contemporary media art (Hoda's sublime digital-rhythmic embodiments? --> transcendental desires remain questionable)
doctrine of the minimal: smallest unit is the atom or point =/=
doctrine of Zaher/Baten: smallest unit is the fold*** ==> zoomorphic writing, infinitesimal
(mysticism:) a system of measurement [...]
(165)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.3[...]l command --> call for man to decide and to commit politically (--> atheism + political humanisms + old metaphysical commitment)
atheist political theology
Kojeve, Bataille, Sartre, Koyre, Heidegger, Adorno
mysticism of progress, self-perfection, and history
their anti-utopian and antiprogressivist claims and that found expression in: Blanchot (The Most High), Bataille (Summa Atheologica), Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus), Beckett (Endgame)
figuration of finitude
critique of dreams of transparency
replace transcendence with excess or escape (<-- mystical background...)
=/= un-self-conscious humanist mysticism
secular interwar Europe's raising the human subject to all-powerful status ==> techno-scientific apocalypse --> waste of hope in the self and in the rhetoric of equality and humanism
(2)
philosophical antihumanism
human in suspension and deny that it owns or controls his own specificity and particularity
--> negative theology
denial to man of positive knowledge of divine nature
withdrawal from the possibility of first defining what is specifically human
=/= world deemed anthropocentric and subjectivist
•*reformulates the question of man, locating him in conceptual systems led by notions, such as Being, reality, society, or language* (--> to define him “negatively”)
•problematization of human subjectivity
--> modern determinations of “the human”
(Diderot in Encyclopedie:) “man: a sensing, reflecting, thinking being, which freely traverses the surface of the earth, which appears at the head of all other animals over which it reigns, which lives in society, which has invented the sciences and the arts, which has its own notions of good and evil, which gives itself masters, which makes its own laws, etc.”
•anthropocentrism of modern thought (Diderot --> “why do we not introduce man into our work the way he is placed in the universe? why do we not make him a common center?”)
•(18th and 19th century) offering a hierarchy and linking the human to a privileged one among them--to reason, understanding, sensation, the passions, consciousness, the intellect
he can no longer claim to be capable of scientifically understanding the entire world
(Kant in Logic, @apass, three core questions guiding his critical project:)
•what do i know?
•what may i hope for?
•what ought i do?
•what is man?
}--> [*]humanism: mobilization of a foundationalist concept of man
=/= tradition of identifying man with a certain feature, aspect, or property that embodies or expresses his nature
=/= the Platonic-christian idea that man possesses an eternal soul
=/= Feuerbachian-Marxist approach that sees Man as his own goal
=/= the idea of a human nature that is given, foundational, si[...]
(166)[...notes/sohrevardi notes.txt]%84.7[...]ycles), knowledge of repeated patterns of environmental phenomena
from stonehenge [= stabilizer of perception, #stone telling the movement of heavens;] to chip (, devices to record cycles) --> the technoscience has changed (phenomenologically merely) in scale
[*] science is always science-mediated-through-instrument [--> regarding ajayeb: #model is the principal instrument of (modern) science.]---> am I in which model-shift? (how? and why?):
•idealized models [~-> my “art"] (<--)to--> heuristic models [~-> my lectures] ?
•computational models [~-> my CG period] (<--)to--> phenomenological models [~-> my ajayeb] ?
•fantasy models [~-> my ?] (<--)to--> theoretical models ?
•representational models [~= my images?] (<--)to--> epistemological models ?
[*]
...................................
like the blind man's cane or probe, means through which the environment is perceived and acted on, how is the 3D computer simulations an embodiment relation? what are the (dis)embodied habituations of the hacker? ==> philosophy of action : how 3D work as an (dis)embodied artifact change our relation to the world? or, which world is experienced as perceived through embodied artifact of the 3D?
•representations of the location
•question of orientation
--> epistemological studies of scientific instrumentation
(Feenberg, passivity missing in Ihde)
(my own interest in shyness and the) passive dimensions of body--lived experience of being the object of action***
Feenberg (reflecting on medical situations forward:) we live our body not only as actors in the world, but also as beings who invite action on our bodies by others
dependent body --> highly technologized experience
instrumentalized status of modernism, in which the ‘dependent body’ belongs to childhood
purified “humans” : the subject distinguished from its instrumentalities
sex: construction of the dependent subjectivized bodies
(Sartre & Merleau-Ponty:) person becomes a thing in the world of the other
lived-body =/= body [--> also the concern of Irigaray and Butler]
(this is Husserl's Körper and Leib)
~ machine-infused neuro-physical body
◦kinaesthetic sensations
◦presentational sensations
◦“internal” perception
◦“subject” -body
◦organ of perception / organ of action /
--> (identity of the ego -->) the (existentialist visualist and strange) idea of: “I am my body"--body in terms of “I can” ==> self-movement
(intra-action =/= that sensations are freestanding complexes and internally differentiated entities that can be identified and studied “before” the action)
*perception (is an act:) “animating” the data of sensation (?)
the extended body signifies itself through [=/= acts through] the technical mediation
the impersonal and atomizi[...]
(167)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.2[...],)
•
the well-equipped invalid (--> embodiment, Virilio)
(Foucault's radical exploration of:) body = (subject to the effects of) rhetoric of technical reason
techniques of punishment (, a “political technology”) : “an art of unbearable sensations” --to--> “an economy of suspended rights”
Deleuze and Guattari: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body...” (what are the affects of the CG bodies?)
-for them the “body” is a discontinuous and non-totalized series of processes, organs, flows, energies, corporeal substances and incorporeal events, intensities and durations, a surface of intensities: *pure simulacra without originals*
erotogenic zones, sexuality, Freud, auto-erotic internalization, clinamen
(the formally female cyborg / techno-monster of the Ghost in the Shell:) the (masculinist) fantasy of leaving the body behind and reconstituting it as a a technical object under human control as both a desire for perfect knowledge and total power and at the same time as a way of escape... [Christian Hubert] #Haraway
•the question of the “soul” is read as the question of (certain technology of) power over bodiess
(traits of) cyborg:
1. boundary transgression
2. the recognition and re-scripting of myth
3. simulations of identity
4. coalitions of affinity
reembodiment of intelligence
Hubert > Serres: “My body (I cannot help it) is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in a projective space; it touches, caresses, and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third; and so forth, as far as one wishes to go. Euclidean space was chosen in our work-oriented cultures because it is the space of work--of the mason, the surveyor, or the architect. [...] My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group, or the collectivity have formed: the Euclidean house, the street and its network, the open and closed garden, the church or the enclosed spaces of the sacred, the school and its spatial varieties containing fixed points, and the complex ensemble of flow-charts, those of language, of the factory, of the family, of the political party, and so forth. Consequently my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or the junctions of this multiplicity.” (Hermes, pp 44-45) (@Aela)
...................................
(feminist open-source --✕-->?) I am actually coming from a masculinist closed-source culture-thing, that is to say, my background is in masculinist black-boxed concepts of being and beyond, that means i have a different relationship with interference and parasitism
-[...]
(168)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.6[...]tracings and meanings because of that: you are working with a Rig. that is to say: Rigs are definitional structures, not arguments themselves, but their conditions.
then the question would be: when do you know that it is time to dismantle a Rig? how to recognize, learn to reuse or repurpose old Rigs?
in CG the business of Rigging and Rig-making is handed to the engineering talent and point of view, it has made a pure technical problem.
skeletal, it's all about the ‘arm’
http://www.toxik.sk/img/maya2011_ya.jpg
an arm is a spaciotemporal particularity
the organisms that crafted in their bodies the subphylum vertebrata, a terrestrial technology for moving the flesh.
the images we make are made in the image of the one-with-arms
mechanical
bipedal
facial
quadrupedal
many arms and legs
spinal
surficial
hair
feather
rain Rig by محمد عبدالله
eqFUnFPcuwg
an Optimus Prime transformation Rig by Eske Yoshinob
VDrAzeNS2pk?t=28
(strictly) possible tranformational arrangements
how a being is Rigged into transformational particularities
in this sense, the question of the Rig is ontoloical, specially in a world populated by devices and techniques, interfaces and folds upon folds, constructions that do things for another constructions, Rigs that translate
kinematic equations, inverse kinematics, the math of it is called the Jacobian inverse technique
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/76/Arc-welding.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/Modele_cinematique_corps_humain.svg
“In robotics, inverse kinematics makes use of the kinematics equations to determine the joint parameters that provide a desired position for each of the robot's end-effectors. Specification of the movement of a robot so that its end-effectors achieve the desired tasks is known as motion planning.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_kinematics
{\frac {\partial p_{i}}{\partial x_{k}}}\approx {\frac {p_{i}(x_{{0,k}}+h)-p_{i}(x_{0})}{h}}
...................................
Maya's interfacial iconograhies
...................................
how do we animate quadrupeds, invertebrates, phyla, rotifera (wheel-animals), and so on; for each a mathematics must be invented in order and terms of digital computationality.
“anatomy” is always “imaginary anatomy” (in CG, comtemporary dance, medicine, love, etc.)
a skin has to deal with:
“Global Stiffness Structural Optimization”
Rig talks to mesh, telling it how to move, how to be.
how we evolved from jelly to skelletal? something tense, intensified in space, some flesh attached to it. how the concrete mineral came back to assert itself in the terms of[...]
(170)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.8[...]ter is defined, in everyday CG work
how certain kinetic skeletal rigs naturalize the relationships between volume and surface and skeleton --> which is always symbolic
...................................
notes by other participants of the workshop:
http://pad.constantvzw.org/p/possiblebodies.sina.workshop
some post-workshop notes:
questions of:
•causality: how Rig-thinking can help to have a better understanding of causal relationships between the ‘moved’ and ‘mover’?
•control: how can we have a more interesting ontology of constraints that allows more interesting articulations of control---(that one-way flow of influence between the soft and the rigid)?
•process and becoming: how the technological nature of the Rig and its relations with the image of the organism in CG can be Rigged for a different articulation of the lived-body? and to which extend the Rig can be helpfull to think about the becoming of the beings-of-the-CG (that means: hacker + 3D model)?
•identity: How within an industry such as Pixar, deeply invested in what is a feeling and affectious living characher, a whole new set of technologies and ontologies must be made and destroyed, learned and unlearned, for a different question of identity: what is a living thing? how Rig matter in a world that is made of Rigs that make Rigs for beings to articulate themselves in, through, and with them? inventing and being invented by them
•model: animation = life; asking what brings us to life, makes us alive? (what we animate and what animates us)
•reading and space of the text: the practice we did with pop-up-book making, a joint page of a book when opened wide, the meaning and influence of the reading animates itself like a Rig, coming into movement, flow and inflow as the result of the muscular skeletal gesture of a “reader” who has two hands: mechanical animacies of the act of reading set in time and space by the “writer”
•which rigs rig rigs? (with Strathernian rhetorics) ---- Rig-making practices are ontological technological choreographies that (in the case of CG) make mesh matter*-----they are involved in ‘making mesh flesh’
[14.05.2017]
...................................
rig: a higher-level description of the motion of the part (of mesh) it is influencing (--> set of “bones” may not be hierarchical or interconnected)
[a] simplified user interface allowing animators to control often complex algorithms and a huge amount of geometry --> control the deformation of the mesh data (=/= imitate real anatomy or physical processes)
modern rigging = hacking (in 3D softwares)
...................................
Disney --> body-ege: feeling good about oneself
(via) the playful mastery over anthropomorphized machines
(Rickels > Hanns Sachs:) the las[...]
(171)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%85.9[...] say what is up and what is down, The word ‘reality’ is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.” Petersen < Barad)
ajayeb's iterative processes of materialization
عجایب نامه =/= imagined and idealized human-independent reality
ajayeb's stories of historically nunhuman people
in ajayeb's descriptive intra-actions with reality, humans and language are part of the configuaration or ongoing reconfiguring of the world, that is phenomena
we cannot so easily answer where the apparatus “ends”
•(but again, how can I answer) which ontological practices are embodied (or embeded) in (the productive and constraining dimension of regulatory) apparatuses of my ajayeb? (rigs, hypertext, pop-up, etc.)
•(resisting the anti-metaphysics legacy) how can I keep insisting on accountability for the particular exclusions that are enacted in (my) ajayeb and taking up the responsibility to perpetually contest and rework the boundries (of my objectivities)?
(*)effect: marks left on the agencies of observation
enacted =/= having
(agency is the matter of enactment not something that one ‘has’)
(*)disarticulation: the question of who/what gets to be imagined (and in which way)
(Barad's sentences are long in a way for the reader to feel all those particular words in one breath)
(in medical practices) the machine becomes the interface between the objectification of the spacific body under experience (for example the fetus) and subjectivation of the technician, physicianm engineer, and scientist.
...some ontologies:
•classical realist: posit some fixed notion of being that is prior to signification
•Kantian transcendentalism: being completely inaccessible to language
•linguistic monism: being completely of language
•Baradian agential realism: phenomena are constitutive of reality
...................................
kinetic, energies expressed in variables
integrated definitions:
•movements of an isolated body
•in detachment with the rest of the world
•linear function of time
•all energy is kinetic
•value of “potential energy” is zero
...................................
metallurgy concerns matter in movement
matter-flow
what about the 3D hacker? what is in flow?
form is ever-emergent =/= pre-determined -->? default
[Alberti on northwest Argentina first millennium ceramic vessels:] potters’ bodies were shaped irrevocably by their skilled practice
objects they made were never complete ==> they were aligned with others’ concerns ==> they were drawn into potters’ social identities --> into the category of potter
*skil[...]
(172)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%86.2[...]pain”
(?how in our feedbacking instead of linguistic we can be able to) manipulating the figure of the pattern --> (in apass we are constantly busy with) a way to critically and actively resist ideology (of block curator, Vladimir's settlement's ‘order of thing,’ the institution, etc.) or to critically gesture toward and theorize the possibility of “another way”
the *genital panic* (forever lodged within the heart of discourses on sexual or gendered difference...)
(to examine) the varied ways that pattern is used to put one in one's place
Nicki Green, Yayoi Kusama, Adriana Varejao, Yinka Shonibare, Craig Calderwood
spaces that lie between the patterned (behaviors...)
[@Leo, heard so many times:] clear (but melancholic) call for the rearticulation of our desires outside capitalist logics of (re)production
using the trope of pattern to deconstruct the politics of desire
“conflict” is something that is desired(?)
queer desires might make something different of conflict(?)
...................................
phantom limb Grosz
(Nietzsche: entire evolution of) spirit = a question of the body (developement of a higher body) --> *the organic rising to yet higher levels*
body image:
(psychoanalytic conception of subjectivity -->) ‘mind’ & ‘body’ & ‘body image’
--> physical systems to the subject's access to bodily mobility
•cortical homunculus --> Freud
•imaginary anatomy --> Lacan
}--> genesis and functioning of the ego
[are my image assemblages about changing the body image?]
==> biology and neurophysiology are dependent on *physical processes* of transcription and signification
Grosz on the status of the body as a problematic and uncontainable term in biology and psychology
•(Egyptian) “ka" = soul: a copy of the human body (that is more ethereal and less dense than the physical body)
•Cartesian notion of soul (or mind): a ghostlike icon of the subject
•Aristotle's pneuma: finer or more subtle body than the coarsely material/materialistic body
•Christian notion of soul: the possibility of resurrection ==> privileged and formative link between *morphology of the soul* & *morphology of the body*
(Ambroise Pare:) mortification: ***continuity and consentiment of the dead parts with the living ones*** ==> phantasm limb
[*]body image: the absence of the knowledge of the position of limbs when the patient's eyes are closed (Weir Mitchell) --> faculty of language localized in the whole body (and not in the left hemisphere)
= *spatiotemporally structured and structuring model of the subject*, a “schema” that mediates between the subject's position and its behavior, synesthetically (visual[...]
(173)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.6[...]e phantom limb =/= perceptual reality}==> (patient's) ambivalent contradictory experience
...it is the object of sensory, tactile, optical attention
*artist = amputee avows two realities:
1. the reality of a living limb
2. the reality of its destruction
}--> these two “limbs” occupy the same space and time --> **one the ghostly double of the other's absence** [~ condition of the art] @Mohaghegh
****the phantom: expression of nostalgia for the unity and wholeness of the body (its completion)**** = a psychical delegate ==> physical + psychical wound and scar in the amputation or surgical intervension into any part of the body
[*]phantom: narcissistic reassertion of the limb's presence in the face of its manifest biological loss --> (an attempt to preserve) the subject's narcissistic sense of bodily wholeness [--Lacan--> an images developed through the mirror stage]
--> artist's dream and relation to the wound(= cumbersome narcissistic compensation for the broken unity of the biological body) @Elen
#archive: a psychical attempt to reactivate a past body image in place of the present reality [--> how can we accept the reality? @Pierre, Sina, Hoda,]
(Grosz raising the general question of:) the status of the *body image of woman*--insofar as women are considered and consider themselves to have suffered an amputation (implied by castration) more debilitating than most --> *do women have a phantom phallus?* what is the women's status of a fantasized amputation?
Grosz: “amputee's relations to the phantom limb =?! woman's mourning for what has been lost (the freedom, self-determination, autonomy accorded to the male body, etc. #harem)”
--> ***until female genitals (women's bodies) are inscribed and lived (by the subject and by others) as a positivity, there will always remain paradoxes and upsetting implication for any notion of femininity***
infant's body not yet a self-contained entity, not yet distinct and separate from the world --> child: a body and its various sensations are projected onto the world, and conversly the world and its vicissitudes are introjected into the body of the subject-to-be ==> child: slowly and gradually the body image IS constructed and invested in stages of libidinal developement:
•oral stage ==> mouth
•anal stage ==> anus
•
each stage augmenting and reorienting the preceding stages: anal take over the intensity of the oral, but the mouth remains significant even it no longer dominates the child's sensations ==> each stage participants in the production and differentiation of the body image)
libidinalization of bodily zones, organs, and functions ==builds==> body image particular form
child's body, an already sexually designated body (which culture's desires, wishes, fears, hopes are projected and internalized, mother[...]
(174)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%87.8[...]r />
•active relations =/= passive relationship
•position of subject =/= position of object
moving from a state of amorphousness to increasing differentiation and specialization
a single movement reorients the whole of the body, creating what might be called a gait or posture, an individual and cultural bodily style
appersonization: treatment of one's own body as an outside object:
+ psychical vampirism: identification with the symptoms, actions, and fantasies of othe people
--> identification, incorporation, introjection
example of aging
-body image seems resistant to the changes brought about by aging
-they seem to have aged, whereas the subject feels as if he or she has not
--> condition of continual transformation + time lag in the perception and registeration of real changes in the body image
body image: condition of the subject's access to spatiality (including built environments) = a postural schema of the body [=/= mapping a biological body onto a psychological domain, providing a kind of translation of material into conceptual terms]
-->
•radical inseparability of biological from psychical elements
•connection between the question of sexual specificity (biological sexual difference)
•connection between the question of psychical identity
...................................
Grosz realizes two human perversion in psychoanalysis literature:
•male --> fetishism (sexual gratification from the use of inanimate partial objects alone)
•feminine --> exhibitionism, kleptomania
female fetishism --> lesbianism
fetishism --> excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions
feminism --> collective psychosis (~ a political disavowal of women's social reality as oppressed)
[*]play: a form of mastery (= a conversion of passivity into activity) + a technique for the production of pleasure
Freud:
•deviation in the sexual object --> homosexuality, pedophilia, bestiality
•deviation in the sexual aim --> transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism
fetishism: sexual overvaluation of a part (of the body or an inanimate object)
[--Grosz--> ‘overvaluation’ is a characteristic of masculine forms of loving]
“perversion =/= neuroses” --> pervert expresses precisely what it is that the neurotic represses (*perversion: to avoid the repression)
sexual normality = copulative nonincestual heterosexuality
fetishist: the boy/child who is unable to resolve the oedipal conflict in its various alternatives (unable or unwilling to abandon the mother as love object)
-he cannot, like the homosexual son, accept symbolic castration in order to take on the “feminine” position and adopt a passive sexual role in relation to his father
-he is not prepared to “pa[...]
(175)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.3[...]mother or lose the penis) --> fetish: a token of triumph over the threat of castration (and a protection against it) -->{makes women tolerable as sexual objects + saves the fetishist from becoming a homosexual}
[*]fetish: (a substitute for or) *a talisman of the phallus*
(most significant one in the child's erotic life -->) mother's phallus: that which endows her with power and authority
fetish --> a way of both preserving his belief in the missing maternal phallus and at the same time accepting her castration and the possibility of his own
disavowal =/= repression (--> neurosis) =/= negation (denial) =/= repudiation (foreclosure --> psychosis)
negation: a provisional lifting of repression (not through acceptance, the repressed contents are verbally and affectively negated) --> affirmation: the process of registering or fixing a drive to an ideational content (signifying the former by the latter), both the condition of signification and of repression
...................................
Grosz on Deleuze and Guattari
problem with “becoming woman”
the process of becoming-X [marginal, woman, non-western, etc.] means nothing as a strategy if one is already X =/= question of difference, specificity
*desire
*machinic functions
*assemblages
*rhizomatics
*cartography
*intensities
*speed
*planes
appropriation (recuperation) of the positions and struggles of X ==risks==> depoliticizing aestheticizing struggles and political challenges crucial to the survival and self-definition of X
problem with becoming
(Deleuze and Guattari are invested in a) romantic elevation of models of psychosis, schizophrenia, and madness ==>
•ignore the very real pain and torment of individuals
•raise pathology to an unlivable, unviable ideal for others
our reservations and suspicions (in apass when we face each other)
Deleuzian rhizomatics & feminist theory --> reversal of Platonism: “ideal =/= real” (opposition integral to Western thought)
rhizomatics, cartography, schizoanalysis (deconstruction, grammatology) ==> clear the ground of metaphysical concepts ==> (others) may be able to devise their own knowledges
four “illusions” of representation:
•identity
•opposition
•analogy
•resemblance
}--✕--> becoming (beyond the logic and confines of being)
}--✕--> multiplicity [defined by the outside] (beyond doubling or multicentering of proliferating subjects)
Deleuzian-Foucauldian understanding of politics theorizes in a clearer and more direct form than *rival (alternative) political philosophies* (including Marxism, socialism, liberalism, and anarchism), the kinds of theoretical and political struggles in which femin[...]
(177)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%88.4[...]Heidegger-- a logic that is central to our experience of modern technology
~/=
games involve the development of techniques for interacting with them that subsist over longer periods of time within the body
•(gamer's) body <==shaped== through the creative responses generated by users in relation to the images they experience
•(game's) responses ==bring==> into being different bodily capacities and modes of attunement, which cannot be intentionally determined (by those who produce the images through the processes of design)
correct mixture of contingency and structure
...................................
prosthesis + castration complex --> “cyberspace: having your everything amputated”
prosthetic skill ~= mastery of the phantom limb
--> rigging
prosthetic --> vivid illustration of the human-technology relations in terms of the body [=/=? hyperobjects]
(set of) architectural metaphors --provide--> foundation of the university
-(in the case of rigging) mechanical metaphors --provide--> foundation of moving bodies
prosthetic technology (like the *magic lantern*)
***technology of theory***
rigging and the question of morphological correspondence (homology: systematic similarity) --> isomorphic systems of relations
•isomorphic: 1-1 mapping, structure-preserving mapping --✕--> breakable objects
homology: principle of rigging, essentially the same (parts might have different shapes and be employed for different purposes) --> geometrical similarity --> ‘abstraction: materials of organization’ [position + structure] (Geoffroy > Hubert)
~~✕--> Deleuze and Guattari's body without organs [anatomical: pure plane of immanence (~ *rig = abstract animal*)]
--> (thinkers of) *organic folding* + *comparative biological intuition* --> *science of form*
•analogue: a part or organ in one animal that has the same function as another part or organ in a different animal (--> rig is the analogue of the animal's body)
•homotypy (homotype: serially repeated parts) --> Goethe
homology: a morphological correspondence determined primarily by relative position and connection ~= rigging
--Darwin--> material ancestors (replaced metaphysical archetypes)
philosophical anatomy <~~?--> rigging
•dialectics is the search for rational laws which are active in nature
•discontent with merely empiricism
•transcendental (philosopher) ==> morphologist
rigging: (step away form ordinary perception and) building internal homologies (=/= external ressemblance)
==> comprehensible order (--> systematic animation)
~=> complexities and accidents (are also part of it)
--> rational morphology
--> mathematization of space [--> analytic geometry (not necessarily Euclidean or rigid [...]
(178)[...notes/notes on evangelist.txt]%89.1[...]sador, translator, Russian+Persian)
-Sa'di (poet, traveler, theorist of love and friendship, )
-Sana+Sina (artist, researcher, translator, )
world? what is late today? trans-late: beyond being late --> travel and arriving late
travel, trans, transportation, poetry, disruption in travel, traumatic travel, log,
traumatic travel:
poetic source/act
related to refuging
voyage
exploration
investigate poetry and travel in the 12th century and 16th century and 21st century encounter
translational worlding between German Iranian cross-cultural speculative narratives that we fabulate with artistic and research methodologies
trajectory, destined beings, translations, transportation, routs, paths, maps,
transportation system
translation system
error in destination(?) [ontology of ‘error’ in 12th, 16th, 21st]
mutation in the garden(?)
technological system of destiny -?-> Sa'di
the flow of energy and material : dejle-biaban continuity
which agential force or travel agency Sa'di or Olearius or Sana or Sina is enrolled or registered in, that it sends them off to far distances?
pure political plays?
the question of ambassadorship
ambassadorial activities of Sana and Sina
the question of diplomacy
ambassador: storytelling, acting,
comparative thinking, comparative research, comparative translational methodology : *self in world* tech., lit., dis.,
which technologies (of composing, of writing, of figuring) are installed for Sa'di in the 12th century and for Adam Olearius in the 16th century that allows them to imagine and engage in/with what we call today *mondial*?
(Sa'di + Olearius:)
chance encounter, failures, writing, making figures, loving, making friends, their acts of worlding (?), composing worlds, (de-compose?)
technicity: armillary sphere, Globe of Gottorf, Golestan, drawings, star constellations with astrological and mythological symbols, inside-outside model of the cosmos,
--> they both have concerns of *global consciousness* --> and their differences: two (or more) different world knowledges
GPS: global system position, concern of both Sa'di and Olearius
an excuse to read and investigate their worldings? translations between worlds, and sewing, tearings, and so on during the Safaviten and the Russian Tsar 16th century cosmology and models of reciprocity
(Translation is always interpretive, critical, and partial.)
intersection of multiple hierarchies:
-the Safaviten order (Isfahan architecture)
-the Duke of Holstein-Gottorp order (family architecture, court and mathematic)
-Tsar order (urban)
-literature of reciprocity***
Sana keywords: distortion, displacement, distance, alternation, collage, blur (noun), [...]
(179)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%89.8[...]y + linguistically)
articulated sets of relations
a particularly efficacious form of certainty-generating rhetoric by ancient Greek mathematicians (appropriated by thier politicians), according to Netz: meaning-making in geometry proceeds in a particular way, a way that generates deductive proof --> (Netz's notion of) oral performance origins of meaning-making with diagrammatic device =/= (Verran's) graphics embedded within flows of words --> relations graphically plotted frame the relations plotted in flows of words (and reversed): diagrams labile ناپايدار in their forms of participation in collectives***
{my research on premodern systematic investigation of strange singularities of the labile phenomena [lability: liable to err and fall, slip, glide, flow] in the middle ages --helps--> how in the absence of authoritative *source of knowledge* in artistic research environments such as apass, *styles of knowing* mime and intertwine in poetics, practice, and politics}
speaking from diagram (offering possibilities of pilotage of the emergent relations) =/= speaking to diagram (a form of presentation, a proposed ‘found’ past in an idealized future, proposing as a realistic map of a given)
@Eszter: the question of recognizing the complexity of manipulating sets of relations expressed graphically --> developing (in my self) a contrast which offers possibilities for rhetorically distinguishing between ‘speaking from’ and ‘speaking to’ ==> shifts that can effect moves in collective meaning-making
wordy texts
(Star Trek's) displaying “our” modern commonplaces out of the place they are coming from --> makes me vomit
-in US sci-fi TV series we face that we are still Aristotlian, in our regulation of speech, we live under the regime of non-contradiction and of non-equivocation (tie up our public life in it) (--> when i say this is not my story, i am talking about another tradition of speech regulation)
proto-Baroque theater
*ambiguous monarchy*
absolutism has never been a feature of Iran monarchies
(who?) put an end to the complex, emergent baroque polity
a baroque sensibility was no longer salient in the Danish monarchical context and the baldachin became war booty --> that is how Adventure Time's sensibility is now
[Verran & Winthereik briliant thinking and literature:] “baldachin was designed to perform within the tense shifting landscape of partnerships associated with an aristocracy vigorously reorganizing itself as it emerged out of the crisis of the late medieval.”
there was a shift from ‘vertical to horizontal social integration’ (Christianson) with a better-off peasantry and a surge in the urban middle classes, and secular magnate families (najibzade نجيب زاده)
the baldachin was a device that performe[...]
(181)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%92.5[...] describe the dedicatee:
◦patronage of the courts
◦the teaching circles
◦the family lineages of professions
◦the existence of “amateurs de sciences” (the private individuals interested in science)
•anecdotes (historical or legendary)
•questions and answers
•observation on the usefulness and the excellence of knowledge in general
...................................
ethnography:
•set of methods for knowing about social relations [--> storytelling] (=/=?)
•cultural-analytical scholarship [--> analysis]
ethnography: [*]ethnographic stories = generalizations that intervene (~= instruments that make intervention possible <-- a knowledge product in contemporary sci & tech studies STS)
ethnography: stories that have in them a capacity represent the world in ways that are generative for the people and practices that the stories are about + authors (+ their peers + readers)
****(from) postmodern concern about the authority of the author --to--> a concern about partiality and generative critique****
@apass #feedback
(Verran giving voice to what my concern and interest is in artistic research environment)
the question of how to re-present others (their diverse practices) on good faith? <-- moral
~~> the bad idea of “good faith =/= bad faith” ==> assume a moral high ground that we have no reason to argue in favor of
altering oneself to good faith = altering oneself to the possibility of double vision
(in ethnography) good faith: writing generalizing stories that intervene, because of the partiality of research and analysis (not despite of it)
•good faith analysis: having faith in it being possible to write stories that are generative for *some of* the practices we study + for *some of* our peers
(stories --Verran-->) two moments of generalizing:
1. *onemany* form ==enable==> abstracting
2. *whole-parts* form ==bring==> a situating moment
~={ Star Wars apocalyptic stories (single vision) + lived social bodily realities = (Harawayian) many-headed monster }--> #Tehran index
ethnographic research is always embedded in multi-stakeholder situations
the Verran is proposing
=/= writing stories that narrate what collaborators hope to hear
=/= hardening the categories of the everyday
[*]generalization: (performative) ways of making and negotiating different realities
(Hinde -->) adequate story: objects that *find* audiences ~= *pointing to* (<-- performative) ~/= *pointing for* (<--Verran-- invite them to do work to see their own ontological commitments)
@apasa, research on performativity entailles when not to be performative
ethnographic story: re-performance / re-presentation of some here-now
•description: sto[...]
(182)[...notes/note Sana.txt]%93.2[...]globalism with consumption at its core
•regions soused on the liberal democratic fantasy of salvation via harmonious, multilateral exchange
(we don't want dialogues, we need meaningful dialogues)
--Renan--> [to relocate the “struggle for exchange” in] monological circuits across the topographies of power and restitution =/= geographies of guilt and embarrassment
antagonistic knowledges (organise and rally actions and thoughts for resistance) --> changes how you are socialized
Robinson Crusoe
a miniature history of human development according to bourgeois individualism [...] changed into an encyclopedic storytelling of religious virtues
•using European technology, agriculture, economic individualism [<== spiritual autobiography], (rudimentary) political hierarchy, (civilizing effect of) Christianity [--> pursuit of meaningful spiritual engagement]
...as the inertia of the colonial world's knowledge system breaks into the streams of exploratory capital, the relay of fragments crystallizes before seeping through the colonial subject's social ground
http://www.curators-network.eu/blog-entry/lightning-studies-ctcccs-part-1-3 (Renan)
Cinderella's precarity
the question of: how can we translate contexts? (the context of which I bring my precarity differs from here in Brussels)
(the notion of *difficulty* in) Cinderella =/=? Robinson Crusoe
Crusoe's precarity (European) is something that you can overcome
•technology --> I can develop something out of my precarity and survive being struck on an island
•Crusoe's techne --> human =/= Cinderella's techne --> companion
•Crusoe ==> *rise of the ordinary individual in the nation* <== every individual values themselves high enough to consider themselves the proper subject of serious literature
◦modern individual: an ordinary & alone person is able to triumph over physical environment ~ to be able to exploit every situation
using diary format for Cinderella was inspired by respond to Crusoe's epistolary and confessional method of writing
(one of the earliest genre of) realistic fiction
written during the Enlightenment
one of the most widely published books in history
==> castaway narrative: improvise the means of survival from limited resources at hand
•progress through technology
•rebuilding of civilisation (civilisation = a form of triumph)
•unfriendliness of nature
◦he is with a dog, two cats and a parrot but he cannot talk to them =/= Cinderella
◦Crusoe starts making Bible fals (فال انجیل opening the Bible to a random page and read a verse that he believed was addressed at him)
◦he makes list (pro & cons --> debit & credit [--> mentality of business studies] --Weber--> book-keeping: distinctive technical feature of modern capitalism)
[...]
(183)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97[...]on
•contemporary media technology
•data/knowledge organization
•infrastructure
•epistemology
•Tehran techno-culture multispecies ethnography
•mini worlds
•*how people imagine a better life?* --> (to think non-unilateral and non-static) *picture of aspiration* (in the context of contemporary Tehran)
•imitations of forms
•http://ajayeb.net/?q=sensibilities+hitting+people
•start as collaborative online platform for writings/projects about Tehran emerging ecologies:
◦mice موش
◦mobile phones موبایل
◦monsters هیولا
◦heavens مثل
◦
•on Tehran trees:
◦on anthropogenic landscapes of Tehran
◦descriptive methods for the study of social relation and histories
◦learning (directly) about worldly objects of Tehran ==> take part in the kinds of creative play that are the hallmark of the research --> draws readers outside common-sense assumptions
◾(to enable a) technologically-augmented ecosystem
◾(to enable a) translocal exchange
◦{ [?not to] tokenization and verification of natural assets --> augment & utilize --?--> provoking our relation to nature, hybrid ecosystems in the technosphere }<-- question of governance
◾to explore ways for nonhumans as agents to act with the same importance of humans in/with the world via technology
◦resocializing value (less anthropocentric) --> social impact + environmental impact
◦less inalienable circulation of *cultural intelligence* (and value) among less individualized (connected networks of wider) social agents
◦critical questions + cross-pollinate
...................................
(inconsistency of) *physiological chaos* of the World War I --> how physicians and medical researchers (early 20th century medical science) responded to it? --> (a new web of concepts:) *semiotics of injuries and behaviors* (--> that became essential for thinking about integration and collapse in economics, social organization, psychoanalysis, symbolic representation, and international politic)
--> attuned to, to anticipate, to outdo, *specific conditions of the lived body in
states of extreme exertion*:
•in a conceptual-historical and anthropological fashion
•stage thought and experimentation
•to recalibrate their thinking
}--> logic of integration (a problematic systematization) ==> *registers of the individual and the social*
linked to each other:
integration در شکم چيزى جا دادن, collapse, self-preservation, crisis, catastrophe, witnessing, evidence, unknowing
early 20th century medical science ==> شکننده a body that is *brittle because integrated* & *integrated because brittle*
wartime and postwar therapeutics ==> conceptions of the body
Ger[...]
(184)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.2[...]-> conceptualizations of the whole body ==> picture of the patient:
•neoliberal in character
•(always) future tense in orientation
destiny = personalized medicine (a project to anticipate and guide the patient's destiny)
welfare state's widest possible inclusion of its citizens clashes with the realities of the marketplace
to reconcile the individual's cognitive and physical realities with the particular demands of their world
...sociological quest to understand the locus of injury
[title]
duet of integration-crisis (==> whole-body ideals)
(Geroulanos and Meyers argue that) understanding integration and crisis in medicine ==> to wrap our heads around the way later-dominant cybernetic and structuralist theories located the individual in the world
bodily metaphor [in] integrations of domestic societies
the integrated, disintegrating human body:
•a new site of meaning and care
•subject for new analogies of body biological and body politic
•object of direct experimentation
story of the human body (at once social & biological)
...................................
question of technology
--locational--> where does the technological take place?
(and when?)
Heidegger --> (latecomers were) addicted to technology
“under what conditions we could arrive at a free relation to technology?”
Heidegger problem with addicted --> *addiction is content with what is merely available* (it never surpasses this limit) =/= anxiety
Avital focus on the *chemical prosthesis*
in war, drugs become another piece of equipment --> taking the pill: technologizing oneself into the war machine
heroin comes from heroisch
technically calibrated culture
drug --> hallucinated exteriority
electronic/drug culture --> (Nancy + Blanchot's) désœuvrement: without an end or program, an unworking that nonetheless occurs
how the *prosthetic subject* is constituted
(Junger's drug, Heidegger's tech, Benjamin's hashish, de Quincey's opium, Duras's alcoholizations:) a saturated text, pushing beyond the materiality of the book though not into any ideality
the right to drugs + the supplementary interiority that they produce
there has never been a war on drugs that is not carried by another type of drug (religion, patriotism, oil, TV)
history of narcotica ~= history of culture
[*]intoxication: (names) a method of mental labor that is responsible for making phantoms appear --> mnemonic apparatus
“you have something in you that must be killed” ==> ambivalent stimulant/tranquilizer
body proper regains its corruptible organic stat[...]
(185)[...notes/clean notes.txt]%97.3